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Ladies and gentlemen, I have about six or seven different epic posts banging around in my head, and I can’t seem to take advantage of all the time I have this Labor Day weekend to type them up, finish them, and get them posted.

In fact, the only thing I really got achieved today was cleaning the bathroom and looking up the chords for a catchy little tune that I’d like to learn to play on the ole six string.

Naturally, I just remembered that I was going to do some work on one of the window units today.  I managed to forget between watching a couple of movies on Netflix and starting a blog about the time I saw a kidney stone after it had been culled from a urinal and preciously stored in a paper towel for what I can only guess was posterity (or prosperity, take your pick).

Anyway, none of the ramblings alluded to above have anything to do with what I’m here to discuss.

Lucky for you, as this little rant looked like it was going to get pretty boring.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what drives our behavior.

Why do we let our obsessive compulsive disorder get the better of us?

Why do we give into temptation?

Why are we so judgmental?

What pushes us to break wind as we leave a crowded elevator?

And so on…..

I’ve come to the conclusion that a majority of our behaviors are born of imprinting (parental or other parties) in our formative years.  That’s right, I don’t believe we’re born with them.

But that’s a different blog containing metaphors about modeling clay which I have no intention of writing anytime soon.

In the process of pondering these things and how such imprinting molded yours truly, it occurred to me that there exists a period lasting just under 2200 days that commenced just after I turned 9 that had a profound impact on me.  Three “things” were “introduced” to me in that time period.  Whereas parental imprinting was not the direct cause to the subsequent impacts, I would be remiss to suggest that the process wasn’t highly contributory.

So enough of this bullshit with painting the background for you.  Let’s get right into it.

First and foremost, I don’t know how I ever survived the first nine years of my life prior to the release of Star Wars in 1977.

There, I said it.

I vividly recall the day in June of that same year where Mom and Dad picked me up from baseball practice.  We then proceeded to the Rialto Theater in Casper, Wyoming to see what had been described to me as “The Wizard of Oz in space”.  The Rialto has a balcony that was rumored as a good place for bumpin’ uglies, but we sat on the main floor about three quarters of the way up from the screen just stage right of center.  I had a white box of Hot Tamales clutched in my fist when the 20th Century Fox fanfare announced that the rest of my life was just moments away.

To this day, if I eat Hot Tamales I think of Star Wars.  If I watch the very first Star Wars movie, I think of and crave Hot Tamales.  I even smuggled some in this last year when the latest episode arrived in theaters.

I remember a trip to Denver a month or two later.  We used to go to Denver on a regular basis because all of the best shopping was in the malls there.  Just to keep my then 7 year old brother and me out of their hair, Mom and Dad deposited us at a movie theater one afternoon to watch the movie two times through.

That’s right people.  There was a time when a 9 year old and 7 year old could be dropped off at a movie theater by parents who had better things to do with their lives than to helicopter over a couple of boys who didn’t want to go participate in vast shopping opportunities that a city that wasn’t home had to offer.

Yeah neglect!

Later on that year when Halloween was approaching, I remember sitting in the parking lot of Albertsons with Mom and Dad.  The little brother had been dispatched into the grocery store to get something.  I don’t remember what.  Just note that a 7 year old was sent into the grocery story by himself, even though either one of his parents were available to join him.  While we waited in the car, I began waxing rhapsodic about the only thing that consumed my days for the last few months.  I began talking about how if I got a hold of one of those nifty new toy light sabers (basically a flashlight with an tubular shaped Socker Bopper on it)that I could do Halloween as Obi Kenobi (my 9 year old mind hadn’t quite put the correct name together yet, even though I had already seen the movie 5 or 6 times.  All the while, Mom kept looking back at me from the front seat in a manner that was generally consistent with “Shut your pie hole.”  Having no idea what in tarnation she was doing, I continued to outline my plans.

At that point, Dad had had just about enough of the ramblings of his oldest son.  “Why do you have to keep talking about Star Wars?” he demanded in an elevated tone.  Dad proceeded to rant for the next few minutes, however I failed to remember the salient points he proceeded to make because of a few reasons.

Reason one.  I wasn’t quite sure what the word ‘salient’ meant.  In fact, I just looked it up to make sure I was using it in the right context there.

Reason two.  To that point, I had yet to encounter anyone who didn’t want to talk about Star Wars.  I just couldn’t process what was going on here.

Dad then capped off his soliloquy with a statement that would take me literally years to fully understand.  “I don’t like Star Wars.”

So here’s the deal.

Why am I such a big Star Wars fan?

If you think about it, that’s a pretty easy question to answer.

When that movie came out, I was in the key demographic that would funnel fistfuls and fistfuls of cash into the pocket of George Lucas.  Be it through trips to see it on the big screen, participating in the merchandising, or buying the VHS, DVD, and digital copies years later, that movie was made with the goal to liberate vast sums of cash from people my age.

It worked.

Star Wars should probably come as no surprise to you as an impactful event on my life.  Counting this post, I’ve mentioned it a total of 23 (aka:  a Jordan) times here on your favorite website on this side of the web.

Sadly, I haven’t dedicated as much web space to the next two items as I have to Star Wars.

And gosh darnnit, I really should have.

The arrival of Bloom County into my life was not accompanied by the 20th Century Fox fanfare.  Instead, it arrived via print media.  For those of you millennials who happened to visit, the print media I’m referring to is a newspaper.  I used to read the Casper Star Tribune on a daily basis much in the same way I read about current events on the news aggregator app I use on my iPhone today.  I would generally read all of the headlines, and make it a point to read specific articles which caught my interest.  I read the comics page religiously.  At one point, I used to save the Sunday Funnies in a neat stack on the floor in my closet.

The initial reason for keeping them was to use the paper as book covers for my school books.  The reason for keeping the funnies would evolve into one of collectability.  I never had intention of selling them to make a wad a cash to go spend on Star Wars, or anything like that.  I can remember many a time just plopping down on the floor in front of that stack and reading through the last few weeks of stuff.

But I digress.

I’ve got to think it was sometime in my early teen years that Berke Breathed, the creator and curator of Bloom County, sunk his MS Comic Sans writin’ claws into my malleable skull and inspired me to think outside of the box when it comes to expressing creativity.  He gave me terms like “snugglebunnies”, “snorklewacker”, and “turnip-twaddler”.  I think you’ll agree that any sentence adorned with any of those words (whatever they hell they mean) can be followed up with the phrase “That’s what she said.”

For what it’s worth, I know what each one of those words means, and the answer is yes.  That’s what she said.

Breathed didn’t necessarily convey to me that it’s okay to mock conventional wisdom, but he gave me the tools to do so.

Here’s a little tidbit that not a whole lot of people know.

Right smack dab in the middle of the 80’s, Berke Breathed crashed an ultralight plane and broke his back.  His strip went on hiatus while he languished in the hospital dining on pre-twaddled turnips while warding off giant purple snorklewackers born of the anxieties such an incident must have caused in his head.  If memory serves, the timing was pretty bad because Bloom County was in the midst of a story line at the time involving an amnesic penguin (I think).  The strip really wasn’t in a place to take a break.   Fans hadn’t been left hanging like that since J.R. got shot.

I sent Berke Breathed a get well card.

It obviously worked, because he managed to get his ass back to work.  In doing so, he wrote a story paralleling his broken back.  In the strips, it wasn’t an ultralight that broke Steve Dallas’ back.  Instead it was Sean Penn.

Over the years, I’ve collected plenty of books, t-shirts, posters, videos and DVDs featuring the work of Berke Breathed.  In fact, my very first website was a tribute site to Bloom County.

But wait, there’s more.

I have a stuffed animal collection featuring one Bill the Cat, and several Opus dolls.  It sits on the top shelf of my closet right next to my Opus phone.

In the garage, I have an old stuffed Garfield in an apple cider jug that used to be a lamp.  Several years ago, I pulled the cat out of there and shoved a stuffed Opus doll wearing a graduation cap into the jug.

I never finished it.

I really should.

It should be stated here and now that the jug lamp in question resides on my workbench about 10 feet away from the Opus Xing sign hanging on the wall out there.  I liberated that bad boy (with permission) from a bookstore in the mall years ago.

Among all of the t-shirts I’ve obtained, my latest purchase was procured just this last May.  I used to have one when I was 18, and wore it the first time I ever voted.  The original shirt is in a storage bin somewhere in my garage and nowhere near fitting anymore.  It’s faded and tattered, and would best be used as a working rag if I didn’t consider the act on one of my precious Bloom County shirts to be a heresy eligible to be nailed on a door somewhere.

The design recently became available for purchase again through an advertisement I ran across while scrolling through Facebook sometime this last spring.  I ordered it immediately.

When I wore it to concerts in Austin at the end of July and in the middle of August (see The 2016 TharpSter Concert Series blog somewhere on this site for more details, but understand I haven’t written it yet, I only have ideas),  I received plenty of positive feedback for the mere fact that it featured Bill and Opus, and the fact that this election year is in such a torrential case of hilgedy-pilgedy (another Breathed term).

Just last week I capped off the collection with the latest book.  Last year, Breathed returned Bloom County to our lives by way of the internet.  This time, he doesn’t have to worry about editors and other decency police to censor his work.  The book is a collection of the strips which have been posted to Facebook since Bloom County’s return.

Imagine my moan of delight when I opened that bad boy up and found that it had been autographed.

I vaguely recalled seeing that as a selling point when I ordered it back in June.  I had forgotten about that nugget up until I shucked the wrapping and found that someone had written in my new book.

By the spring of 1983, two of my long time loves were in place and a third was ripe for the picking.

Star Wars had already generated a sequel, and another one was on the way in a matter of months.

“Ack!” was in my daily vernacular and I had gotten to where I could draw most of the Bloom County characters.

It was time to rock.

At the junior high school where I attended 7th, 8th, and 9th grade, we had some portable class rooms out near the teachers’ parking lot.  One of those portables housed my 9th grade Spanish class which was taught by a French dude.  At whatever time I had class in there, the blackboard always had stuff written on it by someone other than the teacher.

It seems that one of the Hollub twins had a minor obsession.  Strange, I know.  Fourteen year-old girls don’t get obsessed over things.

Anyway, the obsessive Hollub twin in question kept writing “Def Leppard” and “Pyromania” in bubbled letters on the board.

Here’s a quick side note about the sign of the times.  Kids today probably don’t get away with writing “Pyromania” on a chalkboard anymore.  Sadly enough, the kids today are spawned from those of us who did get away with it without encountering any sort of bullshit zero-tolerance rules about weaponry and arson.

Another blog, another time.  I know.  To be honest, I’ve already written it.

“Pyromania” was the name of the album Def Leppard had released earlier that year.  I hadn’t heard of them to that point outside of what some of my associates and colleagues were talking about in class in near proximity to me.  There were two reasons I hadn’t heard of them yet.

1. Radio in Casper, Wyoming in 1983 was not playing them.
2. We didn’t have MTV in the Tharp household yet, where Def Leppard was being introduced.

One day that spring, Dad arrived home with a cable box in hand which would open our world to something beyond just the handful of channels that we were getting out of Denver.

Holy crap, I just thought of a fourth item which was introduced in that time.

Spoilers, folks.  There’s an honorable mention coming up after I espouse the virtues of using two guitars when pounding volumes of rock into the ear canals.

Shortly after the arrival of the cable box but long before we discovered we could push down two channel buttons at once to see wavy, unclear broadcasts of the soft core porn offered up by Cinemax, my brother and I arrived home one day from school and proceeded to go check out MTV.

Much like that time years before when a box of Hot Tamales and the 20th Century Fox fanfare had opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking, the same occurred when we found ourselves right in the middle of the guitar solo of the song “Photograph” by Def Leppard.

At the time, we didn’t know who they were.  Based on what I had heard at school, I had a suspicion.  The music was good.  The entire band was engaged in the performance and not just standing there.  The drummer, donned a pair of Union Jack shorts and nothing else was also working the camera as well.

Soon after, we acquired the album (vinyl y’all) and listened to it relentlessly.  Into the summer months we went with Def Leppard at our side, only pausing occasionally to check out Return of the Jedi.

The summer of 83 would actually be a milestone in the life of yours truly to think about it.  Aside from the arrival of the latest Star Wars offering and my learners permit, there were a few other moments to consider.  I was going to High School that next school year and thus getting ready to deal with some assholes who hadn’t darkened my days since the end of sixth grade.  That was the benefit of going to a different Junior High than most of the kids in my grade school.

As I think about it, that was the last summer my parents were married.  Things would change dramatically for me by the end of the year.  Deep down I knew it during that summer and just didn’t acknowledge it.  In August of that year, I attended my very first Def Leppard concert when the tour buses found themselves in some pissant town in the middle of the great plains.

Since that day, I’ve seen them eight more times.  Most recently was a few weeks ago with Wifey.  In the 33 years since I first saw them, I’ve seen them in the round twice.  I saw them for free in a Walmart parking lot.  I’ve seen them once with my son, once with my daughter, and twice with my wife.  Each of those times, it was just with that one member of my household.  During seven of those occurrences, my brother was there singing along and pumping his fists accordingly.  I’ve seen them twice in the round.  When I saw them in Dallas, the entire trip was plagued by a celebrity hottentot (another Breathed term), a sniper, and the crasher squirrel.  I’ve seen them once in Houston, three times in San Antonio, and three times over a three year period in Austin.

Editor’s note:  In the process of proofreading this latest dispatch, it was found that the author’s use of the word “Hottentot” was used in improper context.  Whereas he intended to use the word in reference to the fabulous yet seemingly vapid young ladies who attempt to curry favor with womanizing rock stars, an examination of the term revealed that it actually refers to the Khoikhoi people of Southwest Africa.  The author has been censured, and expresses his regret for leading his beloved readers astray.  He also feels he knows where Sir Mix-A-Lot got his inspiration.

Rest assured my dear reader, that as I’ve typed up this little self-serving soliloquy, the music of Def Leppard has bombarded my skull through the ear buds I insert whenever I start writing.

So boom.

There you go.

Three things that entered my life all those years ago which are still an active part of my life today fall into the category of arts and creativity.  That’s probably why I didn’t even think of item number four initially.  It was the fall of 1977 which introduced watching the Denver Broncos play every Sunday.  What do you expect when all of your TV is broadcast out of Denver?

I’ve been just as big of a fan of theirs over the years as I have been of Star Wars, Bloom County, and Def Leppard.  There’s been plenty of participation on my part in the merchandising that comes along with being a fan.  That’s easily proven by the assorted hats, t-shirts, and a customized jersey.  

During that 77 season when I started watching them, they made it to the Super Bowl and lost to the one team that I absolutely hate with a passion.  The hatred is so strong, I won’t even let their name litter this post about the things I love.

Denver frustrated me for years because they could never go the distance and win a Super Bowl.  That changed in the 98 and 99 seasons.  They’ve lost one more since then, which I believe gives them the record for most Super Bowls lost.  Redemption was obtained when they won this last year.

This last summer, I made a bidness trip up to the northern branch of TharpSter.Org to take care of a Honey Do list compiled by the manager of said branch.  In the process, I got the opportunity to visit the stadium where my beloved Broncos play.  Of course, I had been there once before back during the 77 season.  We saw them beat the Chiefs that day 21-7.  That was at a different stadium though, whose ground is just next door to the current stadium.  At the time, the land where the current stadium is housed the McNichol’s Arena.  Here’s a couple of tidbits about that arena.

Come to think of it, there was a fifth “activity” I discovered in that time that I won’t discuss a whole lot here.  Most boys find that activity at that age, especially when they have access to expanded cable services.

With that in mind, I’ll leave you with the following salient thoughts about that precious 2200 days of my life.

Go Broncos.

Rock, rock, ’till you drop.

Watch your mouth kid, or you’ll find yourself floating home.

Ack.

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TharpSter

randy@tharpster.org

http://tharpster.org

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