Rabies Rock


 We were always on the lookout for strange and unusual things that we could collect, hopefully for free, and the we would exaggerate their qualities to our friends who had money to buy actual cool things so that we would then have something that they didn't. For example, my friend may have something like a G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier, actually not may have, he definitely had a one. There was absolutely no way I could buy something more cool than that, I just didn't have the money to keep up materialistically. Therefore, I would find a fossil, a sharks tooth, a scorpion, or horny toad, then all I had to do was pretend that I had just come into possession of something much-much-more-muchly cool than some silly old aircraft carrier, which I still not so subtly coveted. Subtle-bragging and off-handed dismissiveness of someone else's treasures is a venerable tradition with a beautiful and storied past, present and future. It is basically the best weapon of the second-placer and the also-rans. Anyway, my problem with this is that I was also a little money grubber that was always looking for a way to sell anything I had for a little cash money. So these two competing needs to brag and to sell came into competition more then once but most tragically over something we found and called the rabies rock. We were down walking the train tracks one day when we came upon a rock that was really hard and red and bumpy, in short awesome. We were in the habit, my brother, sister and I of breaking open any cool rock we found hoping against hope that it was a geode. We would take the rocks and put them in my dad's powerful floor vise and hit them with a sledge hammer to hopefully release all of the glitz and glamor and earning potential that is a geode. Not to spoil the suspense but we never found one. This rabies rock though was really hard and no matter how many times we hit it with the sledge it would not break, which coupled with its odd surface and color figured to be an easy and expensive sale. My sister and I made up some fliers and a poster touting it's various qualities and distributed them around the neighborhood. Then we set up a table by the road with this great centerpiece rock and several other curios, or more aptly objects de arte. We had the rabies rock modestly priced at $20 a steal of a value if I ever saw one, we had quite a few lookie-loos but no one with a serious offer on the rabies rock so we slashed the price in a special 75% off sale and finally moved the rock to a neighbor kid for five bucks which got split 60-40 because my sister told me that there was no way to split five dollars evenly, which I knew was untrue but I loved my sister and two bucks is still a lot of penny candy, sugar daddies, black cows, and slap sticks.