My Original Club Devo Energy Dome

I saw Devo perform live on Fridays in 1980. I flipped my lid. I was only 11, so the full context of what was going on was largely lost on me, but even then I knew it was something that applied to me and whatever it was that I am. By the time I bought Freedom of Choice at the Lincoln Mall in Freeport the next year I was savvy enough to know that a lot more was going on than just "Whip It." Thirty-five years later I drove to the post office on Harrison Street to pick up an original Club Devo energy dome. There are others like it, but this one is mine. And that was the last time I will ever put it on my head. Whipped it good.

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Halloween 1974 (Tiny Drawing Poem)

I got my Halloween costume in 1974 from Ben Franklin's. It was indeed Batman. Adam West TV Batman. The font here was the hardest part because I wanted to use Batfont, which emulates the pows and biffs and sock-os from the show, but it didn't match the somber nature of the poem. We finally decided the Carbon Type typewriter font was the most appropriate.

In 1974 my family moved from Freeport, Illinois, to Byron, Illinois, and occupied an A-frame house my uncle Wesley had built on the ominously named Devil's Lane. My uncle and his family had seven children, so the house was huge. Our time there was short, but full of memories, as I was just starting to form my personality, but my most vivid memory is of Halloween, 1974. The usual rumors of razor blades in the apples circulated early, although no one on "The Terrace" was even giving out apples that year. There was an icy rain, and I remember asking my mother about the telephone wires, and she explained how all the voices of the world were transferred into signals and carried across those wires. 

I have a lot of unanswered questions about who we were as a family then, but there's no one left to ask. The poem expresses that longing to be able to talk to her again. 

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