Motivations, Emilio Estevez, and someone else’s pants
Sometimes we don’t know why we do what we do. Say I wake up in Philadelphia with a splitting headache, no recollection of the last three days, and someone else’s pants on. The sad truth is, I might never know why. Say it happens again two years later. I would still be at a loss.
All I’ll say about that is the 90s were a weird time for me, all right?
Sometimes, though, it just takes a little time to figure it out. Five days, say. On Saturday, I made avideo of myself dancingto “Bungle in the Jungle” while wearing a tiger mask. Inexplicable? Perhaps. But I just realized that the, um, tiger’s main dance move came from one particular scene, burned into my subconscious by repeated teenage viewings. You can find it at the 1:07 mark:
If you didn’t click through, well, hell, I’ll just tell you: I ripped off Emilio Estevez. I had no idea that was EVEN IN MY MIND. I mean, if you had said, “Remember that scene in The Breakfast Club where they get stoned and dance?” I would have paused for a few beats and responded, “Oh yeeaaah!” But it’s not like I was thinking about it when I put on that tiger mask, or even as I was dancing. Not consciously, anyway. And that’s the thing.
Isn’t it kind of fascinating? That one moment from that one scene from that one movie, wedged into my mind all those years, bobbing to the surface one Saturday morning to a completely different song in a completely different decade… Mind! You are a weaver of Eldritch Mystery!
Of course, the other possibility is that it wasn’t me in that tiger mask at all; that it was, in fact, EMILIO ESTEVEZ. That’s the thing about masks. And I’m not sayin’ it wasn’t . . .