Oh boy, time to trot out the Clear Green Water story, huh?

I usually like to save that one for when I'm all navel-gazey and nostalgic, the feels just aren't jiveing for it at the moment. I don't know if I should just do the tl;dr version here now, or wait a few days when I'm less frazzled and can wax more poetic.

Or split the two topics up, there used to be a "What's your personal TLK story" thread in the Lion King section that's probably the better home for most of the musing anyway, I suppose it is completely tangential to the screen name question.

...eh, I'll try to keep it slim.



"Clear Green Water" itself actually pre-dates The Lion King by a little bit, and its kind of ridiculous how much of it I remember, but it was exciting stuff at the time, lol.

It was a surprisingly hot day in early summer, and my two childhood best friends and I were playing over at the one friend's house we always congregated at, and she had a pool there. Or rather, *should* have had a pool. It was never opened for the season and after much cajoling, she managed to convince her mother and uncles to take the cover off, but it was so hot and none too driven, they went back inside to the air conditioning after they did, leaving three unattended children in the 8-to-10 range and a murky, swampy pool they weren't allowed to swim in until the adults could get fussed to do the shock chemicals.

In one of those childhood memories that leaves you wondering just how many times in the course of your youth you could have died, we decided to take matters into our own hands and the three of us raided the pool supplies storage shed, opening wide a world of unlimited, unattended access to a prodigious stock of deadly chemicals. We were very sensible, though, and on a mission, so we collected various packaging with usage instructions on it and made off with it all to the alley on the side of the house between the garage and the fence where Crissy's family kept the garbage cans, (the thought being that if some grown-up came out of the house no-one would go near the garbage cans to find us, and indeed it was a pretty savy thought, for as an adult I'm no longer so fond of them myself :P) put our heads together, and started to research how to fix the pool water.

Crissy hit the jackpot, a booklet that included a troubleshooting section in the back of common water problems, and started reading through the list of assorted poolwater ailments. When Crissy read out loud the complaint heading "clear green water", the other girl Liane, easily the most precocious bossy one of us, triggered. "Clear green water? How clear can the water be if it's green??" and grabbed it away from Crissy. At which point, while Liane puzzled over the booklet, Crissy says, "It sounds like a band name! We should make a band, Clear Green Water!"

That was it. From then on that summer, we were Clear Green Water, the world-famous (???) band. Completely disregarding the fact that none of us had any musical skills, aptitudes, real aspirations, or intentions of ever really pursuing any, naturally, in that marvelous way kids have of just accepting that they're awesome enough to be exactly like Hannah Montana, or whoever it is with kids now. Crissy called glamourous lead singer, Liane took on the quintesential rockstar guitar hero position, and I claimed drummer because, you know, the drummers are always the philosophical ones :P We obsessed over what our tour bus would look like, what our album covers would be, worked on our rockstar autograph signatures and how awesome and fun we'd be with our fans, all kinds of Clear Green Water business.

The adults eventually got the pool in order, and none of us ever did take up any instruments.

But it was the biggest shared bond of childhood, together with The Lion King when it exploded. It goes without saying we latched on to the Hyenas when it did.

Much-much later when the internet became a standard pasttime in the home, I found the online TLK fandom and took it as a personal/artist/screen name. There really was (and is) nothing else it ever COULD be for me, as much as I've occassionally done wrong by it. And it's grown with me in meaning as a person as well, as much a part of my personal story now as the layers of memories that coined it.



....So much for short! So much for anonmity in all the re-tellings, too, but the repetition wore me down