Tennis Anyone?

This week's entry for my writing group. The subject is "Invasion of Privacy".

Well, I wrote a little essay or rant or something on the subject of invasion of privacy that had something to do with how a convicted felon can’t get a goddam job or an apartment cos every prospective landlord and employer just has to click a button and find out his or her criminal background. Christ, they even have my DNA. In that essay, I mentioned that it must’ve been cool to live in a time when you could rob a bank and outrun the cops and the only witnesses were scared people who could barely remember what you looked like. Nowadays, the police have helicopters and GPS and every asshole on the street records the whole experience on their iPhones.

I didn’t even think to mention Santa Claus. Fuckin A. He knows all kinds of secrets about us. Nevermind God. That fucker’s EVERYWHERE. He’s hiding in the Port-O-Potty. Watching.

Instead, I thought about this.

I recently watched an interview with Tom Araya, the frontman for one of my all-time favorite bands, Slayer. It’s a great interview. He’s being interviewed by a couple of junior highschool-aged girls. He’s old and grizzly, plus he’s fuckin Tom Araya, but he’s sweet as pie when he’s answering the little girls’ questions. At one point he reveals that he used to play the broom before he ever learned how to play bass. He asks the girls if they ever played the broom before and they look at him like they don’t know what the fuck he’s talkin about. He laughs. So do I whenever I watch that interview.

When I was 13, I could totally jam on the tennis racket. I’d be playing the opening riff of “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath like nobody’s business. Hell, I could play all the songs on the Sabbath tape that I commandeered from my big sister without her seeming to have noticed. One time when I was rockin out, my 17 year-old sister walked into my room without knocking. I froze. I looked up at her. She didn’t even bother to roll her eyes. She just looked at me like “you gotta be fuckin kidding me”, turned around and shut the door. I rigged up a way to lock my door after that so I could practice and hopefully one day become a star.

(I never post links but I will this time. If you wanna watch the interview, it's really cute and it's right here.)