Thursday, March 03, 2011

*******

When I was a kid, for a while I was obsessed with S.E. Hinton's books. Her books were great, and at a time when I hated most of what I read in school, something attracted me to her work, which probably felt to me as punk rock as anything I'd ever read. There was a whole continuity she'd created, filled with inequality and smartass kids and drunk adults. It felt like a world much closer to real life than the dumb Red Badge of Courage ever presented to me.
One of her books, probably one considered to be for older kids, was That Was Then, This is Now. You might remember the movie, which had Emelio Estevez and... Craig Scheffer? Something like that. Anyway, the book revolves around these teenagers growing up and falling into drugs and love and crime or something. But in it there's a kid who is obsessed with M&Ms. He holds his face up to the open bags to look at them*.
 Less surprisingly, he falls into a bad way with drugs and eventually goes missing or something. Look, it's been over 20 years since I read that book (which is not the one I mentioned at the beginning of the main post, in case you were wondering). But ever since then I think I have a buried association in my mind connecting M&Ms and drugs. Stay in school, kids.

*Not surprisingly, he is called M&M. Whether or not this had any bearing on a young Marshall Mathers III is beyond my ken**.

**Footnote within a footnote's footnote! I can't keep up with all of this.

3 comments:

Tulsa Joe said...

Hot Dog Fingers!!

Good to read you again,

Jonathan said...

Yeah. Nice to have you back.

Anonymous said...

Rumble Fish did it for me. And I also loved 'Our Universe' dob 5/77. There were a few others, like one where the earth's inside layers were pictured/contrasted to an egg, with the yellow center "ball", insidethe while surrounding sphere, and the shell on the outside. I'll take formative S.E. Hinton and kids' science books over TV any day