The house I grew up in

 

 

Fifty Shades: let's bring back perversion!

  

Most of what happened to me in my childhood happened in the den.

We called it the “den”, not the “TV room” or “family room” (the inference being it can't be a family room without at least one TV), for reasons unknown, except that maybe in the ‘60s, that was what you called it.

It had a pullout sofa-bed, a black-and-white TV, an ancient ironwork-sided sewing machine, and an “imprinting machine” (my Mum did imprinting, personalizing leather goods and even pencils for my Dad’s stationery store) with drawers full of magical gold foil that I was forever tampering with.

But most of all, it had books. Seemingly thousands of them, I always thought, though I now remember just one solid wall, and another with (? Did I transpose this from my older siblings’ ever-changing university digs?) brick-and-board bookcases.

Lots of these were in German. My sister studied German in university for reasons that are now a complete mystery to me. Why? There was not even the remotest connection in any part of our family to Germany, and yet she wrote her Master’s thesis, in German, on The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

I would often hear the wailings of Lotte Lenya on the stereo when I came home from school, which was very embarrassing when I brought a friend home. But I digress. In those brick-and-board bookcases, there was Goethe, there was Schiller, and there was a feeling I was just supposed to accept this as “normal”, because my sister (13 years older than me) said it was.

To my 10-year-old delight, there were a few dirty books (hers, I assume) strewn amongst the dull novels in the den:  A Rage to Live by John O’Hara (“oh, darling, you’re in me and I’m all around you, just in time, time, tme”), Sons and Lovers (“I will always remember that evening when the peewits called”), and even Cocksure, a mildly gamey book by Mordecai Richler, which thrilled me because it had the word “bastard” in it.  All this mulled around and around in my mind. I was beginning to formulate, or even come up with a formula, for what sex meant.

It surely meant simultaneous orgasm. If you had anything else, it was dirty and even frightening, and definitely “wrong”. You were not normal. This was especially true if you were married.

It meant forbiddenness. It meant crossing barriers of class, power and station (Lady Chatterley’s Lover). This was definitely stuff I wasn’t supposed to be seeing.

Then I discovered it, nestled dustily right against the volumes and volumes of Goethe and Schiller: THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD!

Now I was off to the races.

Now I learned. I learned about penis envy. I learned about polymorphous perversity. I learned that women were inferior beings. I learned about latent homosexuality. I learned about vaginal orgasm. I learned.

I learned about stuff, then believed to be crucial to understanding human nature, that is now so dusty and obsolete that nobody even thinks about it any more, let alone talks about it. When you think about it, it is remarkable that so many people accepted without question theories that had never been proven clinically, or any other way. It was simply the truth.

The one hangover now is “anal”, which means, I don’t know, uptight or something. It did to Freud, too. An anal personality, anal retentive. Holding in your poo for some reason, though I couldn’t tell why, maybe because you were constipated or couldn’t get to the bathroom.

These were the golden days. These were the days of “perversion”. Do you remember perversion? Back then, anything that wasn’t simultaneous orgasm in the marriage bed was perversion.

Homosexuality was the result of a domineering mother and a weak father. Nobody questioned this. It was the only thing I ever heard about the matter, except for the expressions “limp-wristed” and “pansy”.

There was still a moral taint on it, the shadow of illegality that broke the spirit of Oscar Wilde. There was a sense that it was a sort of blight, that it was impossible to “correct”, and that the sufferer just had to abstain (I mean, forever) and conceal it completely to be socially acceptable.

So. Homosexuality was a mental illness or even a “perversion”. These attitudes, we now see, were groaningly wrong and must have caused immeasurable grief to thousands of people.

I didn’t know about a lot of other things, extreme things such as whips and chains.  I didn’t really know until tomorrow (oops, that’s the future, so I’d have to know in advance) when this Fifty Shades of Grey movie comes out. (Note: this was written on February 12. Confusing.)

ANY kind of inflicting of pain or punishment on another person was, in my backward day and with my den mentality, seen as sadism, and therefore “perversion”. It stood to reason, in my mind. Being turned on by experiencing pain, or (worse) inflicting pain was so twisted that I could not understand it at all. But it has changed, and drastically, in a fairly short period of time. At this point in our social evolution, it’s quite OK so long as the other person, the masochist, “gives consent”.

This happened with Jian Ghomeshi, remember? All his girl friends “gave consent”, so in an official sense, it was all OK.

Except that they didn’t. And it wasn’t.

“You can’t give consent if you are abused,” a very smart person I know (an award-winning news reporter) told me. Therefore, the woman who had been pounded to a bruised pulp and had her ribs broken by Ghomeshi hadn’t “consented”, because if someone beats the living shit out of you and breaks your bones, your abuser cannot use the legal excuse that you “gave consent”. Even if you did, it's null and void, because presumably you didn't know in advance that you would be brutally crushed.

Or maybe it's not. We’ll find out, won’t we?

The BDSM “community” insists that the receiver knows exactly what he or she is in for, wants it, and can get out of it any time, with a signal of some kind. But it seems to me that sadism is something that can be awfully hard to manage. Doesn’t it sometimes, just sometimes, go over the edge? By its very nature, I think that the possibility of loss of control might be part of the thrill.

And what of a person who “consents” but is deeply masochistic and profoundly self-hating? I’ve heard of “rough trade”, though I don’t know much about it, and I will confess that I don’t want to. Brian Epstein used to be found beaten, bloody and unconscious after such encounters. Was this  “OK” because he had given consent? Or did he, in the first place? 

(And if everybody's drunk or stoned and out of control, what does THAT add to the mix? It isn't fashionable to ask these things, but I ask them now.)

Such a person (a victim in my view), and I am only putting this out as a possibility, might WANT to be very badly hurt, even killed. Moreover, it might not be good for them to get what they want, because it’s too dangerous and they are too psychologically sick. I can hear the screams of protest right now: wait a minute, that’s impossible! It can't go too far as long as everyone's cool about the "rules". But in the wild and woolly world of human sexuality, is anything truly impossible?

Ghomeshi could argue that she wanted it, even told him it was OK. I don’t know what was going on there. If his unknown victim (the one with the bruises and broken ribs) claims it WAS consensual, then we’re really in a mess, aren’t we? Caught in a legal and sexual murkiness that we may never straighten out.

I have hardly touched on this Fifty Shades phenomenon, but I see that some women’s groups are protesting that it glorifies domestic violence. But hey! Violence is OK (or, at least, playing at violence is OK), even exciting, if you give your consent. Isn't it?  How about if you have a domineering husband who keeps threatening to leave and pull his financial support out from under you and your children? Might you be more likely to “consent” in this situation? You’d probably do anything to save your children, not to mention your life.

“It was just a sex game gone wrong.” Yes. I know this has been used before. “She wanted it, she asked for it.” What does that mean? How often do sexual and gender boundaries get blurred and confused? How about financial/power boundaries? (Christian in Fifty Shades certainly fits the rich and powerful profile.) How many ways can one human being make another human being submit, and how is this so different from slavery? (Master-slave language is very much a part of the “lifestyle”, making me wonder what black people think of it.)

I have not heard the word “perversion” in so long, I don’t know where it went. Does it even exist now, does the concept exist? I know that certain Christian fundamentalists seem to think that if people are “allowed” to be gay, it will open the floodgates to having sex with horses: an “anything goes” philosophy.

That’s horse’s-ass stuff, but I will say, I wonder where all this is taking us. Even playing at inflicting pain alarms me: why would anyone need to do it, unless they were, in some way, sexually perverted? Hurting someone is wrong. Wrong. Isn't it?

But no, now it’s stylish, and it’s certainly popular. I just found out that the original Fifty Shades trilogy started out as Twilight  “fan fiction’. With all its supposed restrictions on content, if fan fiction has become this sexually extreme, I honestly have to wonder what will come next. I wonder what will become of human boundaries, if there are any, and what will happen to the nature of something we still insist on calling “making love”.

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Haunted: the home town that lives in my head

We lived at 20 Victoria Avenue, Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Such a long handle, and a strange place.

I just had the urge to dig out some photos of the place. Plenty strange, but a beautiful old Edwardian-era house previously owned by the unmarried Terry sisters.

Since I first posted a different version of this piece a couple of years ago, a wealth of old Chatham photos has emerged from the vast wonderland of Google images. Thus fuzzy memories are brought into sharp relief, a new phenomenon that must be changing the human brain in some fundamental way (oh, THAT was what the church looked like! I thought it had windows on that side. Etc.) But nobody has noticed that yet. When I hear even the most insignificant names attached to Chatham, I get the queerest feeling, almost an ecstasy, but at the same time a longing so intense that it scares me. Oh, I want to go back, go back to when it was simpler, when milk was delivered by horse and wagon and Milky the Clown entertained us instead of Spongebob and Phineas and Ferb.



Plenty of the old houses in Chatham looked haunted, and very ugly. I used to wonder how anyone could live there. I remember sloshing along in rubber boots, walking home to have lunch (fried eggplant, if I was lucky) and watch Popeye. These were the vintage Popeyes made in the early 1930s, which I didn't see again until I found the DVD re-release a couple years ago.

It's all a pastiche or jigsaw or something. Making story means imposing order, usually, an order that really isn't there. So I won't make story today. Wait a minute. These weren't boots at all, but boot covers, something like the ubiquitous "galoshes" (talk about onomatopoeia!) that we all wore to protect our shoes. They leaked like mad, but that's what we did. Ladies wore little plastic bonnets to protect their hair, something like a shower cap.



I remember a bit of a song about pigeons with pink feet. Never mind. A capital ship for an ocean trip was the Walloping Window Blind. . .

Sugar beets. I remember the burny intense smell of sugar beets being processed into sugar. It reminded me of my Mum making something delicious called Burnt Sugar Pudding, a caramelized confection with a velvety texture. In those days, no one had to limit emissions in any way. There was the Lloyd (no kidding, it was really called Lloyd!) jute bag company. I didn't know what a jute bag even was until someone told me, "Dummy, it's a burlap sack."

And then there was Darling's, the most hideous smell in the world. This was most evident on the infamous sweatbox days of a Southwest Ontario summer, when the fumes were held down by a heavy lid of humidity. It was stomach-turning, a mixture of guts and hides and bones. They used to tell me it was a slaughterhouse, but no slaughterhouse could smell that bad. Later on my brother told me it was a rendering plant, i.e. glue factory: so maybe that's why no one told me the truth, so I wouldn't scream with horror that horses were being melted down so our postage stamps would stay on.



"Horse glue,"my husband said 200 years later. I thought about it. I was licking the boiled-down gluten of an old horse, maybe a retired racehorse with a blown tendon. It didn't bear thinking about.

What else?

A thump-thump, thump-thump. . . no, more like a "stock-stock-stock-stock", some sort of factory. God, Chatham seems now like it seethed with industry.

Plack. Plack. A neighbor, an old man named Salem Aldiss, used to take a flexible board and bend it back and let it snap on the cement. Hordes of starlings would shoosh up and blacken the sky, but soon they'd be back on the trees and powerlines, craaawwww! craaaaaaaw!craaaaaaaaaaw-ing in a vast creepy choir and leaving splats of guano that was most unpleasant to try to remove.



I think I bit my neighbor, it's so long ago. Shawne Aitken, Mr. Aldiss's granddaughter, used to come in the summer to stay with her grandparents. She lived in Sault Ste. Marie. I loved Shawne and maybe even had a mild crush on her, but when I was very very little I bit her I think. My mother was required to march me over to her house (only two houses down, not a long march) and apologize. Then Shawne, still a little weepy, gave me a sucker, and we were friends again. (Purple. The best sucker in the bag.)

I thought I was the only child who'd bitten someone in the history of the universe. That memory was squashed so far down in the "shame" bin that, like compacted paper or Jurassic mineral layers, it won't even come out properly. Maybe it's just as well.

There were two Pauls in kindergarten, Paul Sunnen and Paul Tunks. I didn't like Paul Tunks very much, he was fat and obnoxious, but I was in love with Paul Sunnen because he was thin and romantic, and a diabetic. I wasn't even sure what that was - it was called "sugar diabetes" in those days - but there were whisperings that he had to have needles. We all sat cross-legged in a circle embedded in the linoleum floors of the kindergarten room, and I always sat directly across from Paul Sunnen. We drank milk out of weird-looking little glass bottles and had to have a "milk ticket" to get it.



In kindergarten at McKeough School, we had two elderly spinster teachers, Miss McCutcheon and Miss Davy. In my memory, they are about nineteen feet high. My mother was tall as a sequoia. I remember hanging on to her apron and looking up, far up. Family legend has it that one day my mother said to me, "You don't like me." I answered, "You not bad." This sums up our entire relationship.

What else? Ann Peet, who could be nice to me or awful. They were Dutch and lived next door. They were poor in a much-mended sort of way, but clean and presentable, which my mother approved of. There were a lot of kids, Annie and Susan and Charles and Brian and. . Garnet, named after the mayor, Garnet Newkirk I think. Garnet John Cornelius Peet. When he was born, Ann went door to door to tell everyone, telling us his name was Garden John. Ann's father was in the war in Holland and told stories. Once he told her that the people were so hungry in occupied Holland that a woman ate her baby.



All this somehow made its way into Mallory, my second novel. Not sure how it evolved into such an autobiography. Anyway, Mr. Peet (Cornelius: did anyone call him Corny?) had pigeons, and I liked to climb over the (actual) white picket fence in our back yard and watch them reproduce. I had no idea what was going on and one day asked Mr. Peet what they were doing. "Dancing," he said, with a sly smile. One day I saw him bring home a live chicken in a jute bag (probably from Lloyd's). He grabbed its neck and took a knife and sliced its head off. The chicken's body flapped and convulsed all over the yard, while the beak on the severed head opened and closed.

My parents had dirty books. Under my Dad's underwear in the bureau drawer. My God, I must have had nerve. When they were both at choir practice, I would burrow around and find them. One was called Ideal Marriage and didn't say very much. Another one, much more dirty, was called ABZ and was a sort of encyclopedia of sex, originally published in Sweden or somewhere. There were whole pages that were blanked out that said, "This page has been removed by the publisher for violating obscenity laws," or something like that. They didn't just edit it out, they obliterated it. My Dad sold books and would sell Ideal Marriage to someone under the counter, but where the hell did this one come from - and, more to the point, what the hell was fellatio?



Oh, don't let's get into sex and Carmen Ferrie (she's probably still out there somewhere and is still red-haired and funny and smart and popular). She told me stuff, but I simply didn't believe it. Jesus! Even though I already knew from experience what an orgasm was, it was hard to believe that people would actually want to do that stuff.

I will leave horses aside, as I've covered them thoroughly in other posts. I will also have to leave Bondi for now, though it was a rapturous two weeks out of the year. Bondi hasn't changed a whole lot in all those years, and is still run by the same family, which somehow gives me hope.

Stamping on puddles with the little plastic boot-covers that fastened with a button and a piece of elastic. Plash.Stamp. And best of all - the spring flood, when the pitiless endless aching Ontario winter finally let go and released several tons of water all at once. It shooshed and roared. The street was like rapids. Some of the bigger sidewalk hollows still had ice over them, and it was pure ecstasy to stomp them and see and feel them shatter under your feet. Stamp. Crunch.


Around the corner, oh my god there was a little hill in the sidewalk! A little drop. It seemed like a thousand feet down. I was probably three and riding a tricycle. Is that drop still there? Back then a three-year-old was given complete freedom outside, not even watched. I couldn't ride up the hill and had to drag my tricycle up the grass, but I did it over and over again.

There was a strange church on the corner that said Jesus Saves, the kind of church we didn't go to, thank you very much. Too much singing. There was a sort of bar at the front entrance, and I'd hang off it like a sloth and pretend I was riding a horse that I called "Bet".




Oh and, the pervert in the park. When we were pre-teens, Shawne and I in those endless sweatbox summers went to Tecumseh Park because there was a swimming pool (kind of) and baseball games. I hated baseball but went with her anyway because it was something to do. There was a man, this guy. He had a funny smirky smile. He was sort of like "The Big Fat Man" of our very early childhood, a version of the Boogie Man (a rather fat elderly gentleman whom I am sure was completely harmless. When he saw me, he always said, "Hello, boy.") This guy, the funny smirky guy who looked a bit like Lee Harvey Oswald, just loitered around. He was always just out of eyeshot, and we giggled and ran away, having fun. Jesus, we could have been raped or killed. One time, just one time in the Chatham Daily News, there was a one-paragraph story about a paper boy who had been sodomized (how is this possible? But it's true) by an unknown stranger.



I retain memories of Chatham and feel a kind of bliss, which is weird because my childhood was anything but blissful. My Dad's drinking slowly and inexorably escalated until he became a staggering, booming tyrant. My older sister refused to believe any of my stories. He was a fine upstanding man, a wonderful father. But she hadn't been around him for ten years. She had gone to Europe, as far away as she could get, the other side of the world, even speaking another language that none of us knew. He sent her money. Briefly she acknowledged his alcoholism in a letter, and once told me she found him "oppressive", but she took it all back when I told her I had been sexually abused. The wagons went in a circle, and like all oppressive patriarchs, he was once again crowned with many crowns.

Dylan Thomas, you were wrong, this stuff is all shit, and jumbled as hell. I don't want to make story today. This is my life. I somehow came out of all this jumble. Branch led to branch. It's amazing I am still connected to one friend from those days, a little surreal. All this came from the rather ghastly sight of McKeough School, which I never really looked at because I was too busy marching in to military music.



Post-blog observings: I just realized, as I dug out a previous post about my old church being haunted by the notorious Russell Horsburgh, that all of Chatham-Kent and its surrounding communities is thick with apparitions. No kidding, there are ghost tours you can go on. When my friends and I walked by those old Gothic-looking brick buildings on Victoria Avenue, it would not have been much of a stretch to imagine they were haunted. But I never heard of any ghost tours. My own flirtings with the paranormal have never lead me anywhere significant - nothing has really happened, as far as I am concerned, to convince me that it's anything more than wishful thinking and/or my imagination. We all long to know what is on the "other side", and I suppose being a ghost is better than being nothing at all. Though I can see them wafting in and out of the windows of McKeough School (above), which is supposedly being renovated and used as a heritage site, I kind of hope they stay out of my house. Go back to Chatham where you belong!






Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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A great idea into my head came creeping

In this magical age of YouTube, everything comes around again. These Children's Record Guild rediscoveries are recordings I thought I'd never hear again. As a kid, they were epic tales that seemed to go on forever, so I'm surprised to see how short they are, some of them having only three or four minutes per side. Though I didn't post it here because it's in four parts, the Children's Record Guild version of Cinderella is full of the music of Prokofiev. It wasn't familiar to me then (for in spite of my classical music upbringing, the only Prokofiev I knew was Peter and the Wolf), but many years later I discovered, or rediscovered the ballet and got the strangest prickly feeling all over: yes, I had heard this music before, embedded in a story, or was the story embedded in the music? It took me a while to put the pieces together, and when I hear it now I realize how cleverly Prokofiev was adapted and spliced together with a minimalized version of one of the world's oldest fairy tales.

The Emperor's New Clothes, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, Build me a House, Grandfather's Farm, Pedro in Brazil, Slow Joe, Let's Have a Party, and. . . the immortal Travels of Babar, that one was the best of all:

"I am an elephant actor." (Trumpet fanfare)

Greek chorus: "This elephant actor is going to make believe he is the brave King Babar."

"I am an elephant actress." (Trumpet fanfare)

Greek chorus: "This elephant actress is going to make believe she is the beautiful Queen Celeste."

These weren't just records, they were things to hold on to, companions, a means to get away from the hell of school and the scorn of my so-called friends. They come around again now in this unlikely form, something I couldn't even have imagined ten or fifteen years ago, and they're different somehow - they changed somewhere along the line. The character of Puss, once beloved, is now a smart-ass con with a thick, nasal accent, perhaps working-class Boston or New Yahhk. The cleverness of the songs and the way the stories move right along (they HAD to, at 3 1/2 minutes per side) are more apparent to me. I'm now the storyteller, not the "tellee", so I know a thing or two about the craft.

(Next day.  All this seemed familiar, as if I had written about it before. And lo, when I went digging, I found this:)

There is another association with articulate animals: the Children's Record Guild recording of a very strange, adulterated version of Puss in Boots. We had a number of these recordings, which originally came through the mail as a sort of record-of-the-month subscription. But this set of maybe thirty or forty records was bequeathed to us by someone who didn't want them anymore. Obviously they hadn't been played much: there was hardly a scratch on them. We soon took care of that.

Through the wonders of the internet, I've found some of these records and listened to them again for the first time in more than (blblblpphhht) years. The Travels of Babar, Slow Joe, Build Me a House, Robin Hood, etc. I even found a bizarre version of Pinocchio with Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney which we played half to death (though my recent posting about the hellscape of Winchell-Mahoney Timeexpresses my abhorrence of that particular entertainer, who always struck me as a son-of-a-bitch).

These reborn-through-the-internet kiddie records are miraculously pristine, with no World War III going on in the background. Someone must have preserved them in a vault somewhere, or found some way to remove all the scratches. Anyway, the one I most happily happened upon was Puss in Boots, the strangest re-imagining of the story I've ever heard. Puss, a cheeky little feline in seven-league boots, adopts this person named John and somehow renders him into a Prince by wangling an audience with the King. Sort of like that. But first of all, John is totally gobsmacked by the fact that THIS CAT CAN TALK!

Here is the Ballad of Puss, which we used to sing to each other endlessly. I just listened to it again (I had to convert an unplayable MP4 file into an MP3 for this, which took some doing), and made an effort to transcribe it: for you, precious reader, the gardenia that blooms in the innermost Eden of my heart, deserve to share it with me today.

When I was just a teeny-weeny kitty
Everyone told me that I looked so pretty
They said, 'beautiful eyes'
They said, 'lovely fur'
But all I could answer was 'meoowwww' or "purrrrrr"

My coat was black, my eyes of course were yellow
People always said 'what a charming fellow'
I wanted to thank them, but I didn't know how
For all I could answer was 'purrrrrrr' or 'meow'

Then one fine day as I was lying sleeping
A great idea into my head came creeping
A pussy cat that could learn to say 'meow'
Could say just 'me', by leaving off the 'ow!'

So I said me, me, me, me, me,
Then as you plainly can see
From me to he to she to we
Was just as simple as it could be
I practiced daily for a week
And that is how I learned to speak!

Then I thought that I would try
Slipping off from me to my
From me to my to sky to why
Was just as easy as eating pie
I practiced daily for a week
And that is how I learned to speak!

Soon I was no longer a beginner,
When someone asked 'how would you like some dinner?'
If I wanted to answer, I could say 'yes sir!'
Instead of replying just, 
MeOWW-wow-wow-WOWW-wow-wow-WOWW-wow-wow-WOWW
Or purrrrrrr.
Prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

And the following: more links to CRG recordings.

http://www.matthewlind.com/CRG.html

I'm agonizingly tired, but. . .

But I just wanted to say. . . my new header photo is NOT by that Painter of Light guy, whoever he was, the one who screwed around all the time. Now that it's up there, it looks just a little TOO phantasmagorical, though I seemingly spent all day getting it to look like that.

This is the original photo, and it's the house I grew up in, the house I spent the first 16 years of my life in. I am sure I had no idea how beautiful it was. It still exists, on 20 Victoria Avenue in Chatham, but it's a doctor's office now and I am sure has been gutted. No more terrazzo floors or gorgeous russet-colored hardwood (covered by WALL-TO-WALL CARPETS, the newest thing!). No more dumbwaiter converted to laundry chute, earth-floored root-cellar in the basement, or sculptured plaster fruit at the base of the chandeliers. And two bathrooms, by God, one up and one down, almost unheard-of then.

Why is this important? Do people think I am a total idiot? Yes, at least some of the time. I picked the name of my blog, a) to advertise my work (because why the hell else have a blog?), and b) because I wanted a rather silly, Barbie's House of Dreams-type title. So many blogs have clever titles, and for the most part I hate them. So I purposely picked a silly one, though up to now I never used an actual house to illustrate it.

This house, well. It was quite a house, painted sunny yellow. We used to climb up on the roof in the summer, up the TV aerial which was a huge power-station-type thing. We had a big thing with a dial, called a "big thing with a dial"(I guess), and you set the dial and it went "wah-wah-wah-wah-wah" and the aerial turned and you could get Cleveland.

There was also something called UHF. It was on the dial of the TV. I was terrified of UHF. I thought if I ever tuned in UHF, my head would explode. One day I timidly asked my brother, "What's UHF (pronouncing it "UHFFFF")?"

He laughed his ass off and said, "It's U. H. F., stupid. It's some broadcasting frequency that we can't get. Educational or something."

I still don't like it.



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