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Black lights and breast milk were two of my biggest disappointments. Not because they weren't good (although breast milk would definitely have to be considered an acquired taste), but because they weren't what I had expected.
I grew up in mid-state Illinois, where I heard about black lights long before I actually saw one. That's pretty much how you got information in the Midwest. There would be rumblings about something new going on somewhere - anywhere other than the Midwest - long before you would actually see anything. Nothing originated in the Midwest; it was not a place that things came from. It was a place that new things eventually came to - trends, technologies, ideas - all borne on some unseen but eagerly awaited wind. In short, the Midwest functioned as a sort of cultural lint trap. Growing up there, you accepted that. You understood that things would change, that those changes would come from somewhere else, and that you just had to wait for each change to occur. There would usually be plenty of warning. Rumors, word of mouth, maybe even something on the news. That was how we heard about black lights. It was the 60's, and fluorescent colors and black lights had met each other at a love-in, and had really hit it off, particularly in any situation where the newly created "peace symbol" was involved. Suddenly it was incredibly cool to own a black light and some posters the black light would affect, which were simply called "black light posters." But I wasn't interested in the posters. My imagination was completely captured by the light itself, by its name. Black light. Without anybody explaining it to me, I understood immediately what it was. It was so simple, and so clear to me. A black light must be the opposite of a white light, right? Following this logic - the solemn, plodding logic of an eight-year old - if a white light made things light, then a black light must make things dark. It was portable darkness. If you pointed this black light at something, it would be enveloped in darkness, as if the black light functioned as some sort of light vacuum. You could literally shine a beam of darkness, obscuring any object at will. All this was clear to me the moment I heard the term "black light." So sure was I of this, so captivated by this abstract yet urgently tangible concept, that I completely tuned out any explanation of what a black light really was. When somebody who had actually seen this mythical object in a "head shop" tried to describe it to me, I quickly dismissed him, saying, "I know what a black light is." I was so sure . . .
Read the rest of the story in the February 2003 issue of Amarillo Bay, an online literary magazine containing the finest modern literature . |