New Wave Lies

Mercedes' post yesterday has sort of stuck with me, has opened a wound.

I'm pretty sure I know of what she is talking about when she states that she was forced to lie to numbers of people. It was a bad period of time for me and for a number of people I cared deeply for. For a lot of us, it was our first lesson in how most companies view their employees as names on payroll forms and nothing more, our first lesson in how there are people paid well to lie to your face.

It was a soul crushing and monstrously aggravating time. Thinking back on it, I was washed by rage that was still there under the surface, like lava from a volcano you think is dormant. I was lying in bed last night and working myself up with anger over it until I realized how dumb I was being and told myself to calm my happy ass down.

I will now go all Jesse Owens on your ass; watch this leap...

Ever since, I have been unable to get the song Lies by the Thompson Twins out of my head. When I first heard Lies, I believed that they were saying "Lice, lice, lice, yeah! They're gonna get you!" and I thought, "Why they hell would someone sing a song about lice?" The memory of Lies drills Hold Me Now by the same band into my head. When Hold Me Now became a popular song, I quickly filed it away with what I knew of “New Wave” at that point in my life; People Are People by Depeche Mode and You Spin Me 'Round (Like A Record) by Dead Or Alive.

And loaded for bear with these New Wave gems, I am reminded of an innocent summer in the early eighties, a summer before my move to California, before being corrupted by the world. I remember a 4th of July picnic in the yard of my mother's flight instructor. My brother went to school with his daughter, was in a puppet play with her that my father had videotaped as a matter of fact, and this somehow gave her minor celbrity status in my mind. I remember walking through the hangar which held the 4 person Cessna and hearing Hold Me Now on the radio and thinking, "why would he want someone to hold his car?"

But what really sticks out, what really puts a malicious little smile on my face, is the memory of having a ton of those little firecrackers that my brother and I would light and throw at each other - in full view of adult supervision.

They must have been SO drunk...