On Friday I showed up at my parents' for my dad's 82nd birthday. The house reeked of so much smoke, I had to ask: "Are you guys curing hams?" I told them I couldn't stay here as it seems they haven't opened a window since Thanksgiving, preserving the cigarette smoke in the carpet, drapes, and furniture fabric. My dad made it worse by going to the store to buy Pine-sol aerosols, Glade wall plug-ins, and Renuzit room fresheners. Gagging from the newly fluorocarbonated mountain breeze and berry splash vapor infusion that burned my eyes and made my mouth tingle, I told him no when he asked if the house smelled any better.I tried to check into the hotel behind our house on Bank Street, but it was full with the Decatur High School Class of 1980 reunion (like I want to run into any of those fuckers) and a Jehovah Witness convention (like I want to run into any of those fuckers). I went up the road to the Holiday Inn by the Keller Memorial Bridge where they had one room left. I looked around the lobby and noticed teenage kids in these goofy-ass fantasy costumes. I asked the woman at the reception: “What's with the ears and the robes.” And she said: "Japanese Anime." (For more amazing pictures, click here.)
Initially my thought was to mock these poor nerdy, pimply-faced children. How stupid they looked (although a couple of them did look pretty hot)? But as I politely asked to take their pictures to post here for world-wide web ridicule, I began to marvel at their homemade costumes, courage to dress up in public, and proudly wave their freak flag -- far from the taunts of the jocks and the popular kids. And then I remembered, I dressed as the Elephant Man in high school, as Sid Vicious at the National Honor Society induction ceremony and began to chant in the Astro-turf covered convention hall by the cloudy indoor pool: "One of us! One of us!"
