Ted Norlander: "It's a lot like that episode of Thundercats."

An excerpt from a piece that award-winning memoirist and journalist Ted Norlander wrote for the Free Press this week. Of everything that's been written on Sherman's disappearance, I find it one of the most affecting. It shows yet again why Norlander is one of the most gifted writers of his generation, and even more, that this neighborhood has some of the most talented people in the world living in it. Sherman will be proud when he returns. - Marisha

Yo Sherm, where you at?

It is it not to my liking to have you missing in action for so long. It is not not to my not-liking, at the very least. Not-liking is a powerful and weird impulse. "Dig"? That's what the hippies would say. But these ain't friendly free-love 1967 hippies, no sir; the ones I'm talking about are the furious, the be-ruffled biker denim-pantsed motherfuckers from Altamont and Charlie "Ask Me About The Swastika On My Forehead" Manson. They want blood, and they want it now. When I ask if you "dig", that's the "dig" I'm talking about. Hippie fury, broseph, and that's no metaphor.

Do you remember that episode of Thundercats when Panthro gets lost in the Ro-Bear Berbil Village, and Lion-o and Jagra and Tygra can't find him anywhere, and they fear he has been kidnapped by Mumra and the Jackalmen? But really he just tripped over a rock or a something and he is merely unconscious and being tended to by the Ro-Bears? And there's a tearful reunion at the end when Jagra finds him, and all is right on New Earth again? It reminds me a lot of that. I hope this ending is similar to that ending, because that is what I want -- roll credits, created by Tobin Wolf, copyright 1987, a Lorimar-Telepictures Production, stay tuned for M.A.S.K. And then it's Zappetites for dinner. That is the ending I want.

I used to listen to a lot of Tesla, who were if not a seminal influence on me, than at least seminal-ish. The song lyric I had written all over my Lee jean jacket walking down the ochre-hued hallways of Kendall Park Junior High School was from the excellent "Heaven's Trail (There's No Way Out)," from their equally excellent and criminally underrated Mechanical Resonance, and they went a little something like this: "You know there's nothin' like the real world / To get me down. / Nothin' like the world outside / That turns me upside down / Makes me feel like I'm headin' down a one-way, dead-end street." Ha ha, right? Wrong, bucko. Aside from being an incredibly powerful Marxist critique (or like, whatever) worthy of Roland Barthes, that spring to mind to in this situation, and it might for those who don't even know who the hell Frank Hannon is. What the hell is wrong with me that an important person is missing, and all I can think of is to quote Tesla? All I can think about is Tesla? But Tesla is what is important. Sherman is wearing a Lee jacket covered with song lyrics, too. And he's on his way to find his way out. "Dig"?





This piece has also been excerpted in the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Spin. Ted Norlander is also the author of The Shah of Iran Keeps His Cool Side Cool: Essays On the Bloated-Out Carcass of Trans-American Culture In A Period I Do Not Actually Remember Much Of, 1979-1987; They Said Simon Le Bon Was Right and I Have the Stopwatch to Prove It: Seven-and-Three-Fifths Months in the Life of the American Post-Indie Underground; Sorry About the Disco Upstairs: New Critical Essays and Restaurant Placemat Puzzles For the Youth of America, and the recently re-issued Kill Them Again: The Awesome, Screaming Death of Discourse in the U.S.A. and Twelve or Thirteen Other New Half-Truths. His first novel, Hommina Hommina Hommina, will be published by Harper-Collins in early 2008.