Matt Gets His Jukebox Smashed

 My dad is not a music guy. He hate that noise and not just since he got old he has never voluntarily listened to music, for its own sake, in my memory. Whenever we had the radio on while we worked or played or hung out and it was within his earshot he would yell at us to shut down that jukebox. That is not me exaggerating, he always told us to shut it off and almost always called any music playing device a jukebox. Because I was only indirectly involved I may be ruining this story but I will tell what I remember or what I think I remembered about Matt getting his radio smashed. We were coming up on power hour, which was when my dad required us to make no noise while he practiced his banjo and then we would read scriptures, both pretenses for him to make us do what he said because he was the dad. I think my dad may have yelled at us to shut off that particular jukebox but like in the joke about not being able to hear someone tell you the radio was too loud because the radio is too loud – we didn't hear him. I was sitting on a bed with my back to the wall that the door was in reading or something and the radio was on a shelf strait in front of the door and if I remember right Matt was next to it or near it. Then all in a bluster the door was slammed open and a purple faced disobeyed and not taking father vomited into the room startling us. He closed the three steps across the room and kicked the stereo, or jukebox if you prefer the medical term, and then pulled it off the shelf and started stomping it to splinters while he punctuated his kicks with swears and ultimatums. Matt was mad but much more composed than my dad and I remember him saying that was fine if he wanted to break his stereo he would just have to buy him another one. He was furious and yelling at us to come into the front room for family time and that we never needed the damn music so loud that we couldn't hear simple requests. Well, sure I guess that makes sense – I think the only recourse a reasonable person would have if someone didn’t hear them would be to dash the noise maker, or Jukebox if you are from the continent, to bits. As was our custom for the next few days Matt and I recreated, to humorous effect, the drama that unfolded between the radio (jukebox – for the orthodox) and my dad. We teased him quite a bit about teaching that inanimate object a lesson. He did, if I remember right, pay for a replacement.  

Mountain Biking with My Lame Bike

 My dad was more of a bike buyer than a bike rider or fixer. He would bring home bikes and throw them in the pile ride them once or never and then get mad when they were not taken care of of maintained. We had a bike shed that was a huge snarl of part bikes and broken bikes that my brother and I would occasionally sort through, tune up and diagnose - then run up to the local hardware store where my dad had a credit account and get the supplies we needed to have working bikes for a short time. When I first went into high school mountain biking was becoming a really big fad and I wanted in on it but I was unwilling to spend my money on a nice bike and my dad would not spring for one. I sifted the bike pile until I came up with an old Rock Hopper frame and then I started tarting it up with some turd polish and sow's ear to silk purse handiwork. It was an unbecoming shade of green so I stripped the paint off and made it black and then took red paint and made a cool pattern with a toothbrush all around the various joints on the bike. I got new grips for the handle bars and got new tubes and tires and break pads until it looked like to me a very fine bike indeed. There is a place in the DIYer's brain that allows for a fair amount of delusion when their handiwork is viewed in a vacuum and as long as they never have to see a real one next to their efforts the illusion can perpetuate., The real problem is that when you see a real high end pro job with suspension and shiny new chrome parts and anodized aluminum breaks it takes a lot more violent force of will to not realize that what you have is a piece of steaming crap. That is what happened to me the first time I took my new-to-me bike out for a ride with the kids who had real custom bikes they were able to shift gears and absorb shocks while my shade tree bike shopping had left my gear selection short of the standard 21 by exactly 19. It took every twitching fiber of underachieving muscles in my inadequate legs to power my bike up the hills because I was compelled to do it in either the hardest gear or one right in the middle of the pack. When we got to the top of the local mountain trail the other guys poured over the edge of the rocky decline like lemmings while I was considering how valorous I would look with a nice discretionary walk down the hill. I mounted up and rode nice and slow down the slope working around rocks which made me feel embarrassed because I was such a wussy. I did however make it down with minimal injuries having only wrecked twice. One of the fast boys had not been so lucky and had a nice broken wrist for his troubles. I never went biking with them again. I wished them well and focused on rock climbing.  

A Guy We Know Smokes A Lot of Weed

I had heard lots about drugs and liked to pretend a little knowledge about all things worldly drugs included but I had actually never seen anyone use drugs or had even seen and drugs at all. That all ended one afternoon when we went to an older kids house with my sister's boyfriend and some of his friends to buy a bike. We went down to this kid's basement lair in his mom's house and the smell of marijuana and patchouli was suffocating. I was not at all comfortable because everyone raised on the Nancy Reagan drug horror stories of the eighties knows the refer-addict is always moments away from killing or raping in a psychotic drug induced rage. After the initial shock of seeing drugs and drug paraphernalia I relaxed a little because this guy didn't seem dangerous he seemed like a goofy fun guy with a strange sense of humor. The bike was bought and payed for and the breeze was shot and then as is the case I would later learn with many other pot heads, is that when he started hankering for a little re-up on the high and as a gracious host, he offered some to all of us, if we would chip in. This is not how I had always heard that druggies get you to join in – the first one is always free. Maybe this dude didn't know how to get new recruits. I later found out that only hot girls are assured of freebies. I am not a hot girl, I didn't want any, and I didn't have any money anyway so I was able to just say no, thanks. I guess Nancy Reagan and the inside flaps of Lemon Head and Boston Baked Bean candy boxes would be sort of proud. By some crazy twist of fate this same kid, now a man, was later at my cousin-in-law's wedding outside smoking weed with the boys with a bearing and affect basically indistinguishable from 16 year before in his mom's basement. Maybe weed makes you forever young.

Boyfriends Write Poems

 Christy's boyfriend was smooth, really smooth. He knew what women wanted and he gave it to her. One day while I was helping one of my classmates with her report on something or another she joined us in the computer loft to show us what a great thing she had gotten from her boyfriend. She had a card that had a poem hand written inside about how much he was thinking about her and the regular wooing stuff and a short note that just said 'I love you, Happy Tuesday!'. You know how you get smoother than that? You don't, because it is impossible. A sweet note with tons of personal effort for no reason but that it is Tuesday and you are thinking of someone. Shut up with that Rico Suave stuff because that sets the bar way to flipping high for the rest of us schlubs. The girl that I was helping with her homework was floored with the sheer white hot power of the pure 200 proof cuteness of it. My sister and my potential love interest did a little adolescent girl squealing and I sat back trying to figure out how to rip this dude off without looking like I was ripping him off. My chance was probably missed with this girl who knew this technique already but I was storing up the data in my bag of tricks. In doing my due diligence I actually asked my sister's boyfriend where he got the poem and he said he was just reading a poetry book and thought that this poem really summed up how he felt about my sister. What? It was sincere? It wasn't a trick to get a little action? Just reading a poetry book for fun? Who was this dude, and how can I pretend I have the same type of motivations to simulate sincerity? I stole his method outright and used and reused it at least twenty times though the rest of high school and college all I would change was the day in question and the poem as needed. Pure unadulterated gold.   

We go camping and shoot part of a thumb off

Pew-Pew, ow friggin, ow ow ow ow ow.

 One weekend my sister, her boyfriend, my brother and I went on a bike ride and camping trip on along trail between the canyon behind his house and the next one over. We started out riding and going just fine after two hours we stooped at a likely place and set up camp. We had our camp set up and the fire going and we broke out the firearms to pass some time. One of the ones we were using was a little two shot Derringer pistol that was at one time part of a belt buckle arrangement for a man who needed a tiny gun right by his genitals at all times. I think most of us could more of less use something like that every day but this was a man who went from the dreaming of it to the doing of it. The belt buckle was left home but the tiny armament was brought along loose with a couple dozen shells to plink a thing of two in the wild open spaces of the great outdoors. All of us but my sister's boyfriend had a turn at the gun and had no problems but that was because it was our gun and it knew who its masters were. When the usurper took his turn he was not so lucky, not so lucky at all. He bent the gun in half to remove the spent shells and then reloaded it and took aim at a can we had set up about 25 feet away. He shot the first shot and then cocked the second hammer. There was a much louder bang than usual and there was more smoke then was typlical. When we were able to see what had happened the gun was broken open and there was a piece of meat missing out of Mr. Boyfriend's thumb and there was a pretty good sized piece of brass from the shell casing in its place. As is the case with lots of deep wounds it didn't start bleeding for a second while his blood organized its efforts to really gush out all over the place. And it gushed and gushed. I tried to wrap it for him be the chunk of metal in his thumb made it hard to compress the wound without making it worse. We decided to fish out the brass before we proceeded and luckily the concussion of the backfire had numbed his thumb so I was able to pull out the piece without too much discomfort to him. Well, too much more then he was already in. After the wound was de-metaled and wrapped tight he was still thinking that it was hurting worse then he was willing to cope with and we packed up camp to get him to some proper medical care. The riding made his heart rate go up and his hand was below his heart so it made it hurt worse so we had to stop and walk with his hand up high to keep the pressure down. It took a little over four hours to get back out walking with our bikes and it was dark by the time we got back to the truck. We headed home and dropped him off at his house and I never heard about the thumb injury again. When we got home it was about midnight and all the doors were locked so we slept on the trampoline because no one would answer the door. All in all it was not the worst camping trip I had ever been on.   

They Run Over a Dumb Girl

 There was a lot of snow outside that winter and many of the kids with cars were out playing in it in various parking lots. Power slides, drifting and the most easy and therefore most prolific technique of all – the donut. The donut is a a poetic name for driving in a circle but if you were to tell someone you went to a church parking lot and drove in a circle you are not going to impress anyone. So my sister and I were over at her boyfriends house and we decided to go drive a car around in the parking lot behind his house. There were already a couple other groups of kids out there already goofing off with their cars and there was this flamboyant girl who was kind of cute but massively stupid running around the parking lot around the cars. When one of the cars stopped she ran up and jumped on the hood holding on to the hood where there is a vent below the windshield. She told them to do some donuts with her on the hood but they were not convinced that that would be safe, but she begged so they relented. They drove around slowly for a few seconds and she was enjoying herself but then the driver changed direction quickly and she flew off the hood and right under the car. The car stopped right after the front wheel drove over her. All of us that were watching from the side ran over to see if she was okay but before we could cover the hundred feet or so to the car she had popped up like a cheerleader hands high over her head and bouncing almost singing that she was, 'Ooookaaaaay!' We were naturally all very relived that we didn't just see an idiot die. She was a lot less phased by her brush with death than she should have been. She ran through the group of us that came to check that she was alive and jumped right back on the hood of the car and begged for another go. A few years later she married one of the biggest jerks that I had ever met so maybe her judgment never improved. As for the rest of us that night we had seen enough and went back inside where we were less likely to see anyone get assassinated mid-donut.   

Christy Has a Boyfriend

 After not being in the same school with my sister for a year we were reunited but this time things were different. She had a boy friend, a really cool boyfriend. She was a lot less influential at this point in my life so I was not so very tied up in her opinions and her assessments of me. I was, however, madly in love with my sister's boyfriend's little sister so I was always up for a little doing whatever they were on the off chance that we may get to hang out with my crush. Her boyfriend was friends with all the coolest kids who had all the coolest things and did all the coolest stuff and that was not just my opinion that was an objective fact. Do cool people go to concerts? Flip yeah. Do cool people know about out of the way cool restaurants? Heck yes they do. Do cool people mountain bike across the western United States. Yes, yes they do that is what makes them cool is they do stuff no one else does and then they don't play it up like it is no big deal. They had funny inside jokes and nicknames for each other and were really nice to boot. Dang, I am still jealous of how cool they were, and as it happens, are. They were always more than willing to let me tag along and do cool stuff with them and they never treated me like I was unwanted. I think I probably ended up liking my sister's boyfriend's clique more than I liked her.  

Magnificent Math Class

 I had taken advanced math classes in junior high because I liked math and hated idiots and there were fewer of them in hard math class. What I did not know was that when we were put into the high school was that all of the good looking quantitatively illiterate senior girls would be taking the same class as advanced sophomores. Never had I enjoyed the fruits of my above average math skills in my life. The first day in we sat randomly so I sat by no one I knew but I noticed that in the class of thirty there were about 20 girls and most of them juniors and seniors. For those of you that were English majors or, god help you, liberal artists – that is a ratio of two to one in my favor. The teacher asked who knew how to solve a complex problem he was hoping to stump us all with on the board and I jumped at the chance to show off, solved the problem and made my reputation. The second class period four older girls, practically women, asked me to come and sit with them to help them if they got stuck because, as they had so astutely observed. I was smart. Maybe instead of being good at math they were exceptional judges of character, it takes all kinds I guess. I sat with them and helped them and enjoyed the times they leaned over close to see what I was doing to help someone else. There was a particularly attractive senior girl who needed to pass the class to graduate and she had the most delightful disregard for personal space. She would lean in close enough for me to feel her body pressing against my arms and back or when we were talking face to face she would get much to close like she was closing the distance for a kiss. She would talk to me outside of class and made a point of saying hi to me even if it was out of her way. All of which I took as signs she was coming on to me. Hot dang, hot dang. My 15-year-old brain, drenched in the chemicals that encouraged – nay, compelled- procreation, fueled exotic fantasies about what would happen if we spent time alone together. Then one day before a test she asked me if she could take me over to her house after school to study and then she would drive me back home afterword. I was nervous with anticipation, an older woman asking me to come over to her house with her alone to, wink-wink study. Yes, yes and hell yes. I met up with her after school and got in her car, because she had a car, because she was so old and cool. We drove the four or five miles to her house and we were there alone and we went right to her room and onto her bed and then we studied math. I felt used and betrayed, and not in a good way. She had led me to her bedroom alone on false pretenses of uninhibited debauchery and then quite against my will we studied and only studied. What a flippin' ripoff. When she had asked me to come to her house to study there was no wink-wink, I had imagined the wink-wink and I was sorely disappointed. What good is being good at math if it cannot get me a little tongue action with a fine older lady? That was not a rhetorical question, I am actively seeking a use for the advanced math that I was required to learn and to this day have not been able to find a practical application for. We stayed study partners and it never blossomed. She passed the class and graduated later that year so I guess it wasn't a total loss.    

One Degree

 There is this thing where you can link all famous people by their movies with stars who were in movies with Kevin Bacon. My number is 1. If you count his locker, and I do count his locker because that makes my number one. A young Kevin Bacon once was a protagonist in a film about bringing the liberating power of dance to small town USA and it was filmed at my high school. Many moons before I was in attendance but still to walk the hallowed halls where Mr. Bacon once walked – priceless. I watched carefully in the film to see his locker number and then when I got to high school traded lockers with the girl that has his number so I could tell people I had Kevin Bacon's locker. Were people impressed, no not really. Why? Because no one cares about the locker used in a stupid movie from the eighties that is why. Incidentally, I have also bought muffing mixes from the roller mill where they staged the iconoclastic final dance finally – they were delicious and rebellious.  

Packing High School

 A wise man once said never to quote wise men but I just did so I have entered a time loop paradox which can only end with a firm period to punctuate this sentence. What I was trying to get to before that aforementioned paradoxical unpleasantness – is that it is better to be a big fish in a small pond than vice versa. All of the sudden I was in competition with older, better looking, good looking, driving license having punks for the affections of all the choice women. I also greatly increased my chances of getting a good beating for smarting off because some of the kids were old, adult old. It was a new strange ecosystem where I was the interloper unsure of the cultures and customs in this strange new place. The first thing I noticed was that all of the cool kids were wearing backpacks. Backpacks at school you say, how strange. But wait I will reply, these were not regular school backpacks but expedition size internal frame backpacks that would be suitable for an assent on the north-face of something cool to climb the north face of. I have no idea how things become cool but if I wore a huge backpack to school in a vacuum high school I would be thought a fool, but when some cool kid does it first somehow it is not only acceptable but required for inclusion into coolness. I sat with a couple f the cool seniors in my math class and they all had these ungodly huge backpacks and I wanted in on that worse then I knew could be possible having never even considered using a backpack at all. I loaded up one of my huge camping backpacks with stuff I would need at school and missed the essence of the thing which was that they had sleek new back packs and I did not. Luckily, I am just to clueless to notice I am doing it wrong and my essentially wrong back pack seemed so intentionally wrong that it was taken as an ironic commentary on the backpack culture that was sweeping the school. Yeah. . .that’s what I meant, haha. One of my friend's older brothers thought that it was so funny that I was mocking the cool kids that he brought a thrift store old orange external frame job that could be nothing but a joke and escalated the back pack arms race to the point that they were eventually banned in the halls and in classrooms because they were too much of a distraction. Too bad because I looked good as a pseudo-Sherpa. Real good.

I Get Dumped By a Girl I Never Dated

As a general rule if the cause of an event seems illogical or without a clear mechanism you should always guess it was caused by an icicle. Because that is almost always the answer. The paradoxical mature of my title is the exception that proves the rule in that it was not caused by ice of any kind. An icicle as a weapon is still the perfect crime though. My girlfriend and I had been spending less and less time together ever since she started going to the psychiatrist who said all boys were bad news and she should steer clear. We still talked on the phone and that was about the only connection we had that summer between junior high and high school. We were still nominally going out but for all intents and purposes we were two islands in the adolescent stream. After I got back from the "All Stars" camp I gave her a call but she was distant and kept talking about this cool older boy she had met at a dance she went to when I was away. If you are new to the boyfriend/girlfriend game I will just let you know that having your significant other tell you how cute and cool someone who is not you is, is not a good sign for the health of the relationship. We talked about the city celebration that was that weekend and we agreed to meet up to go to the parade, the fair, and the mud digs. She came with two of her friends and she looked and smelled amazing I tried to hold hands or hug or cuddle but she kept spinning away to go take care of some suddenly urgent business. After the parade she avoided me at the fair as much as she could in a group of four. Then after the fair and on our way to the mud digs a block away she pulled her friend aside and had a fervent little private chat with her and then jogged off towards her house. The other two girls and I continued on as I asked what was the matter my girlfriend's best friend gathered up some courage and pressed forward into the unpleasant task she had conspired to carry out. She said, "I am really sorry but she wanted to tell me that she doesn't want to be your girlfriend anymore and she wanted me to ask you not to call her anymore because she doesn't want to talk to you about it."

I was struck stunned and hyperventilating a little so the over-brightness of the late summer sun seemed all at a moment overwhelming. I swallowed down my tears and told the girls I was going to forgo the mud digs and was just going to go home. I walked the two blocks home in a stupor crying and hyperventilating. When I walked in the door Rob was the only one home standing shirtless and sweaty under the swamp cooler vent in the hall which meant I had to walk right passed him. When he saw my dishevelment and distress he asked, "Whats wrong with you? Your girlfriend dump you?"

I told him that she had in fact dumped me and thanks for asking A-hole. He tried to hit me for calling him by this honorific title. For some reason antagonizing Rob got me quickly on the road to recovery. I had a little angry self-pitting hateful temper-tantrum about how I was there for her when she was having trouble but when she was better she dumps me for someone with a driving license and a car. Self indulgence indulged I fell asleep, woke up just before the rodeo, went and found a nice girl from a nearby town and took her to the after dance, made out with her, called it a night and started high school the next week with a clean slate.

The Knife Trader

The last day of “All Stars” camp I got my knives back and we went to a little mock Indian pow-wow with native dancers and nonnative traders. The three knives and tomahawk were not as cool as some of the stuff on the blankets and the trading was all being conducted by the secret language of Indian sign with every gesture explained seconds later in English for those of us that were unfamiliar with Native American trading signs. Which was all of us. I was not a bold kid when it came to the serious business of haggling and trading so I hung back seeing how this whole haggling Pas-de-deux was enjoined. When I saw a replica bone handled knife with a stone blade I had to have it and I pushed through my commercial shyness and sat down in the traders spot on the blanket and pushed one of my knives forward. The ersatz Indian trader made the sign for wanting to inspect it and I was guided in how to sign my approval. He unsheathed it and read the makers mark and gave a passable Chief Stone-face grudging nod of approval. He motioned to his wares asking which I wanted in trade. I pointed to the bone handled stone bladed beauty and he gave a great 'Oh there is no way I could ever feed my family making such foolish trades as this' look. I sweetened the pot with a second knife and he repeated the inspection process. This was a ripper kind of knife that looked as menacing as a knife could within the constraints of law. He looked it over and once again nodded his approval of its look and quality. He then reluctantly pushed the bone and stone object of my desire to the middle opposed to my two knives and made the sign for a trade. We traded and I walked away a happy man because I got a really cool knife in trade for a pair of knives I had stolen from my dad to take on this trip so all in all I was doing pretty good at this trading game.  

The Songs

 Every night we would eat dinner and then go up to a campfire for a motivational speech and some sing along songs and then a treat. The motivational speeches were generally pretty good, we heard from a guy who blew himself up with some fireworks and blinded himself at a scout court of honor. I don't know what the point was but I do remember he had some awesome medieval weapons that he let us all check out, heft and swing. I made a joke about how he should have had those confiscated at the gate but one of the more literal minded leaders pointed out that the rule only applied to the campers and not the talent. Noted. We had another guy who was able to start a fire by pouring plain old water onto the firewood. Don't panic, it was not some kind of which-craft performed by some powerful warlock; he would have had to have super natural powers to do that and he didn't have super natural powers, he used the everyday magic of chemistry! He gave it some passable patter and a flourish and then poured on the water but he missed the container carefully hidden in the sticks and then had to do it again which lacked the polish and panache that I expect from my fireside lectures. C. . .C+. The second to last night we had a delightful duo put on some yellow face and sing a song, a catchy tune, about fried chicken.

♫ Our chicken golden brown, wrapped in tin foil

five finger licking good, stole from the Colonel. ♫

(spoken in Chinese accented broken Engrish) “Onry five finger Ricking good?”

“Yes, ah so, to avoid costly copyright Ritigation”

“Makes sense.”

♫ Our chicken golden brown, cooked to perfection

Sold with a honey butter cup to choke it down♫

(Again Spoken) “ No biscuits?”

“Ah so, no, we are to busy making delicious chicken to make biscuits, you can make them your self if you want them so bad.”

“Makes sense”

The first verse was repeated and then they were done. The song and performance were not to terribly funny but for some reason it has stuck firmly in my head and every once in a while I will break into song about chicken that is golden brown and five finger ricking good. The last night we were at the campfire devotional they did a flag retirement ceremony with a lot of patriotic songs and thoughts. It was really cool and one of the more moving experiences of my childhood. 

The Ewocks

 An Ewock was the camp's name for log and lashing liability nightmare structures that were modeled on the dwellings of a fictional race of teddy bears from some movie. ← I wrote that bit right there to fire nerd rage and for no other reason; I know the Ewocks are from the Star War. We were supposed to find four roughly squared off trees and get four logs to make an elevated square lashed to the trees. Next we took other logs and made an air raft to sleep on. It was every boy who grew up on Swiss Family and Star Wars ideal camping situation. We ever made three other smaller decks to sleep and hang out on and one small deck that we called the piss awning which was used for peeing off of. By the end of the week with eight boys all making use of the facility it ended up smelling pretty strongly of urine. It was awfully convenient to have an en-suite bathroom for the old number one though, that is the kind of luxury normally reserved for Ewock dignitaries and the ewock equivalent of Donald Trump. That was not an easy joke to come up with, I had to think of someone who was well known for being rich and boorish but once I hit upon the big D I imagined a Ewock with a poopy little twisted up face and a horrid comb-over and it was actually really funny in my minds eye. Imagine it for yourself now. Now imagine that self-important little fuzzball steepling his chubby little fingers and leaning over an ewock sized mahogany board-room table and saying, 'You're fired' in ewockese. Awesome. We had been working at a feverish pace for six hour by the time our adviser showed up to see what we had done and he was horrified at the height and scale of the uppermost lofts. The idea was for us to build a single deck 4 or five feet off the ground but under my guidance we had built a deck 10' up and 14' up and 16' up. He said that we couldn't use the high decks because if we fell in the night we would die and then he made up put up a railing around the twelve footer for safeties sake because we had refused to dismantle it and put it at a tamer elevation. We had made such a nice and high shelter that lots of other campers came to see and pay homage to the real forest kings.  

All Stars – I Am Bad Leader

The last camp I went on that summer was a leadership camp called 'All Stars' for scouts that were 14 years old. One other boy and I from our town were invited to go so we car pooled up. It was held in a canyon about an hour away from my house in some old Native American camping sites so it was littered with old artifacts that we were forbidden, by law, from touching , disturbing or collecting. Who would place a group of two hundred fourteen-year-old’s in the midst of a federal crime entrapment mess? All week long at camp we would walk passed old piles of arrowhead chips and fought massive internal battles of temptation to just pick one up and maybe no one would ever know. I never took one but I am sure that the temptation was too great for all to resist. When we rolled up to the camp the first morning they pulled out all of our backpacks and did a contraband check. We were not allowed to have fixed blade knives, no guns, and no fuel or explosives. Talk about your kill-joys picking over every object of pleasure and taking it away for safe keeping. They took all three of my knives and my tomahawk as well as my lighters. I was not super happy about that but what can one do in the face of tyranny? My personal position is to not say anything when they come for then knives because I am not a knife. We were taken down to be divvied up and I met up with my new best friends. We did some get-to-know-you and trust and skill exercises to see how we got along and during these tasks I took charge and got us through well ahead of all of the other teams. This made a good impression on the other boys and our adviser and they voted me the team leader for the week. What they didn't know was that as far as leadership went I was best in a sprint and not to be trusted with long-term projects. Secondly, they were not aware that I would have to tighten up my respect for the rule of law quite a bit before I could qualify for playing fast and loose with the rules. They did learn those things soon enough. It started out with us needing to choose an animal name for our team and I choose the double entendre rich animal name the 'Cocks'. We were then supposed to come up with a team yell and I once again plunged right over the good taste line with a yell rich in the language of adolescent ribaldry clothed in the barest of disguises. When we presented our name and yell the other boys found it amusing but the camp adult leadership were not impressed and reassigned us the name 'Roosters' by fiat. The Roosters is a much less funny name and is very hard to make into a funny rime even. After they crushed my attempts at levity we were sent to our camp sites to build Ewoks.     

Melted and Drowned Chocolate Bars

 Some well intentioned soul thought some nice s'mores would be, well, nice on our little youth camping trip but they forgot that the temps in lake Powell are well above the hundreds in the day time and the chocolate all melted into a amorphous mass. They tried to save them by belatedly popping them into the cooler but by then they were ugly and then they sank to the bottom of the cooler juice and all of the wrappers got wet. Oh no the horror. Maybe a little bit melted and soaked in cooler water turns off a fancy pants to what is essentially still chocolate but not my siblings and I. We took out the garbage bags worth of soggy confections and started excavating the precious chocolate out from juicy paper and entrapped foil. We were digging through and eating pounds of discarded chocolate when one of the more sassy other leaders, who had not liked that we came on the trip at all, told us that that chocolate was for the youth campers and not us. I pointed out to her that it had been thrown away. She said it didn't matter it wasn't ours and took the bag away. Spiteful old witch. We didn't really care except in principle because we had our fill of chocolate for a while. That lady just kept making sure that we didn't get anything intend for the campers and would say passive aggressive stuff about how we shouldn't even be there. Noted, now shut up you hateful harpy. Before the end of the trip we stole the garbage chocolate back and ate all of it. Ha ha.  

Lake Powell Camping

After summer camp that year we went down with a youth group with my parents to camp at lake Powell for a week. The trip was for kids sixteen and older but my siblings and I got to go because our parents were some of the leaders in charge. We were miserable little brats and our presence was not entirely welcomed by the other, older kids. We were generally tolerated while my mom or dad was around but as soon as they were gone we would start sassing off and then we would be yelled at or abused. The ones that would get the most mad were the young men who were trying to be cool to impress the girls and we were ruining it. We went to jump off some cliffs and some of the boys were doing trick jumps to show off and we were pointing out that they were showing off so they tried to throw me off the cliff. I jumped and ruined their little plan, ha ha. One night when we were coming in from boating a boy slipped trying to get off the boat and he fell part way into the water and exclaimed that the water was wet. My brother and I seized on this and started pointing out the nature or all sorts of things around camp. We mentioned that the fire was firey. The Sand was sandy. The Air was Airy. The kid told us to stop but it was too fun by now so we kept right on analyzing the intrinsic adjectival potential of all and sundry about camp. The wind was windy and the dirt was dirty and the boy had lost patience. He and a friend chased me down and grabbed me by my hands and feet, counted three, and hurled me into the lake. When I came up I wiped the water from my face and yelled back that they were right the water was really wet. They thought it was funny how I was able to bookend the joke and so they laughed and all was forgiven. Nah, they threw rocks at me and threatened to throw me back in if I came back to the campfire that night. I didn't so they didn't and I dropped the joke after that. 

Swirly

 I was talking to my brother Matt the other night and he was asking why I had never written about the time I got a swirly. I honestly told him I didn't think I had ever gotten one. He reminded me of the details and it all came back to me so without further, or farther ado. As was my custom I liked to keep a joke going on past the point where it was funny for most reasonable people and on into the wasteland of personal danger. One night at our weekly church youth activity night playing basketball with some older boys when I started making a joke about one of the heavier and less coordinated one. I kept pushing my luck because I thought if we were in church there was not a chance that they would beat me up. They warned me to stop several times. I declined to take them up on that word to the wise a kept right on joking. After a few more minutes they followed through on their threats and three of them picked me up and took me into the bathroom for a swirly. A swirly is when someone or someones dip your head into a toilet and then flushes it and thus swirls your hair. Not the most dignified of experiences I can assure you. I was struggling and fighting to wriggle free when they dipped my head and flushed and then let me go. I fought back tears and tried to dry out my hair and one of the boys who did it to me made sure I was okay and then told me I just needed to learn when to shut up. I already knew that. I tried to gather myself and put my long floppy hair out of my face. I tried to take the most direct route home to take a shower and have a good cry but I still ran into a few people on my way out of the church and on my way home and I had to explain why I had sopping wet hair in the middle of the night in the winter. I told them quickly and kept up a brave face until I was out of the building and then I broke down. I went home and cleaned up and a little while later on of the church youth leaders called to see what happened and to offer to talk to the kids who did the swirling parents to get them punished but I said that it was okay and that I had been teasing the fat kid so I was not really on the moral high-ground.  

Doop Doop Doop Splash.

 There was a kid named Scott that was a little awkward, tall and gangly and a little prone to accidents so naturally I helped point that out to comedic effect. One time when we were out fishing on the beach he came running down the shore, probably to tell us to come to a meeting or for lunch or something and while he was running towards us I started making a funny sound like 'doop, doop, doop' in time with his goofy bouncy run. Like he was working with me on the joke he tripped stumbled towards the water and fell in. I went, 'Doop, doop, doop, doop, wahh, wahh,wahh splash'. I was killing with the five or six boys on the bank with me. Scott got up out of the water and came over and told us his message along with an explanation of why he fell in the water. He said that there was something in the sand that made him trip and fall. I in all honesty had no malice towards Scott I was just trying to be funny but the timing and the joke worked out so well that the other boys started saying, 'doop, doop' whenever Scott was running. This went on for at least a year maybe longer and Scott rightly blamed me for it and was not really happy about it. As a kid who was the brunt of a lot of bullying when I was younger I felt terrible about having started the joke because unlike some of my other targets who I did want to punish in a passive aggressive funny way Scott was just a goofy dude who was basically alright guy. I never did the 'doop, doop' myself ever again but I did accidentally start another joke at his expense a few years later. I guess I am just not really good at knowing when to shut up and when jokes are not funny anymore.  

A Squeaky Football.

 The youth leadership was not huge fans of our troop by the end of the week and they challenged us to a football game on the beach to have a good shot at giving us some punishment in a quasi-legal situation. The game was going well if it was a little on the rough side when one of the bigger boys on the other side of the ball made a funny little squeal when he was tackled and I started imitating him with extra effeminate gestures. He started getting really mad at me so I did it more because it was funny. He started trying to hit me even when it wasn't technically legal to do so. When he would come at me I would hop out of the way and do a little exaggerated squeal. The game was close and when they had the ball again I was playing the beach football equivalent of a linebacker and I rushed the quarterback as fast as I could and squealed when I tackled him. I was laughing and my troop was laughing and the other team had enough and we were back into a non-football brawl. It was broken up soon and there was another 100 push-ups for all the boys, not just the ones that were involved. As I was doing my push-ups I was giving out a little high-pitched squeak on every up push. About 15 push-ups in everyone started laughing and and no one could finish the push-ups  The thing is with boys is that a lot of times they will be really angry, and then they will fight, get it out of their system and all is forgotten. We did not get in anymore fights the last night or the morning we were leaving.

Mile Swim

 I was helpless to resist the lure of endurance events because I had an active imagination and unflagging optimism which meant I was able to delude myself into thinking I could easily complete all kinds of ridiculous tasks. At this camp you could earn a special patch by swimming a mile in the lake. I was a pretty good swimmer and a mile doesn't sound like very far if you consider it in walking terms. I signed up thinking it would be no big deal but I was wrong. A mile swimming is a very long, a very very long way. I got in the water along with my required minder in a canoe and swam out towards the first marker which was a a quarter mile out. I was feeling strong for the first eighth of a mile but then I started to get a little tired and by a quarter mile I was a lottle tired. I told my minder I was fine and swam toward the half mile buoy. At this point my minder was getting a little board at my slow pace and he started ranging thirty and then forty feet away. I was starting to feel really tired and my legs were cramping. I got to the half mile buoy that was in the middle of the lake where I was supposed to turn around but I feel like I am going to die if I try to swim back. Unfortunately my minder was now too far away to hear me yell with my missing voice so I switch to a nice relaxed back stroke and start back to the quarter mile marker. I started to loose consciousness and my vision was going brown and then black around the edges. I stopped swimming and tried to control my breathing and float and when I was able to see clearly again I turned over and tried to locate my minder who was way out of yelling range with my horse voice so I started crying a little bit and went over to my back and started swimming again. I was really terrified because I was not even to the last quarter mile and I was feeling really badly. I was not passing out anymore but I was cramping badly so I stopped swimming with my arms and just kicked my legs. I was planning on stopping at the quarter mile buoy and just waiting for help but in my back stroking had gotten too far off track and overshot the buoy so when I looked up again it was a couple of hundred feet away and I started crying again and decided that I just needed to get to shore so I just kept swimming until my feet hit the ground and I turned around and tried to stand up but fell back face down in the water and I had to crawl up through the shallow water onto the bank. When I had gotten out of the water I vomited, fell down rolled over and passed out. A couple people ran over to see if I was okay but I was unconscious for a little too long so they sent for the camp paramedics who got there and revived me and gave me something to drink. I told them I was about to pass out while I was swimming but my minder was gone. He was still nowhere to be found. We had been on the shore for 15 minutes or so when he came wandering up saying he was looking for his swimmer because he couldn't find me and he wasn't sure where I was. He got yelled at and I tried to get up and walk but my legs were completely locked up so the Boy Scouts got to do the figure our arm carry that they love to pull out in an emergency. They took me up to my camp and I laid down and slept for the rest of the day and didn't wake up immensely hungry and thirsty in the middle of the night. I woke up and tried to go to find some food and water but it was really dark and my legs were cramped so I just ended up knockign over some coolers and pans waking up a lot of people who found me in a pile and helped get me a drink and some cold stew and I went back to bed. It was a good day because I didn't die but besides that not an otherwise great time. The patch was not worth it.  

Fishing and Loss

 What we loved more than anything at camp was to go fishing, and the fishing was good, really good. Any time we didn't have anything scheduled and especially after we got kicked off the kayaks we were down on the shore fishing for some big and tasty trout. One morning when we got up extra early to fish before we had to get all tarted up to go to flag ceremony we were down fishing when the morning warning horn went off which meant we had 15 minutes to get up the hill to our camp, get changed into our uniforms and be down to the ceremony grounds to put up the flag and sing a song or something. I wanted to fish some more so I baited and cast my pole and then put a rock on it before I ran to catch up with the more obedient of the troop. We got done with flag ceremony and breakfast and clean up and then I could go and check my pole. I ran down to the waters edge and there was still a rock but exactly no pole. I ran up and down a little hoping that maybe I had just placed it somewhere else and that it was still here but not precisely where I had left the rock I put on top of it to keep it safe. It was really gone and the other boys mocked me for leaving it instead of offering to let me use theirs. I was so sad and forlorn I went up the hill to a private blue plastic port-a-potty and cried. I stayed away from the fishing bank for most of the day because I couldn't stand the pain of it. When I went back that night to see how the more wise boys had made out the greeted me by telling me that Jay had caught my pole and reeled it in and it had a big fish on it. I was so excited because technically that was my fish. Unfortunately it was more Lord of The Flies then that. Jay figured because he caught the pole that both the pole and the fish were his and he had been using my fishing pole all day. He was so much bigger and violent that when he said he was just going to keep my fishing pole I made the barest of protests. He didn't let me use it again that trip, he kept the pole for the rest of camp and took it home and as far as I know still has it. A great poet once said it was better to have fished and lost then to have never fished at all – or something like that anyway.  

Cheat Grass

There is a type of grass that grows unchecked in the local hills that resourceful scouts discovered could be used as a projectile weapon. This particular type of grass had heavy seeds with tails and the tips were barbed so that they would stick, when thrown, pretty well into the skin of the victim. They would stick in clothes but it was way funnier if they stuck into bear skin. Unless they were being thrown at me and then it seemed rather juvenile and foolish to engage in such feverish nonsense. Our camp was the one proximal to the comunal showers and that gave us an idea about combining the two. A group of us clothed boys collected great gobs of the spear barb grass and waited for a likely group of scouts to get into the showers. We gave them a tick to make sure that they were most likely naked and grouped around the gang shower heads and wet and unshod. We stormed the castle and threw thousands of tiny spears into backs and buts and chests while the naked ambushed victims screamed and scattered and tried to pull the barbs out while more were still being administered to unaffected regions. There were naked boys running out into the world dressed only in their nakies and we were chasing them until we were out of ammo and then to make our escape. We were back at the pavilion reliving the good parts of our escapade when the leadership showed up to ask us a few questions about some boys who raided a shower with barbed grass seeds. More pushups and more lectures. It was starting to seem like all these uptight squares wanted was for every scout to have a nice safe and un-abusive camp experience. Lame. No good story ever starts with how the teller was kept completely safe and secure. They probably didn't like it at the time but in retrospect they probably don't remember it fondly because of a psychological mechanism that blocked the memory. If they can't remember it and we had a great time that is a net gain over a long enough horizon. 

Egg Shooting

 There is a thing that hillbillies and boyscouts do sometimes when they want to up the ante in gun shooting called and egg shoot. The idea is that you get one shot to shoot an egg and if you miss you have to eat the egg raw. Mayhaps the idea was that salmonella would teach all the bad shots to improve or to quit shooting or die. We were each issued an egg and a bullet and we put the egg on special stands about 150' away. Then we all walked back to the shooting range pavilion where the range master made us do a bunch of safety bull crap like put on goggles. He made us check our gun, he made us make sure they were on safety, he made us clear the chamber, he made us all check that there was no one down field. In our troop we were all experienced shooters of a less safe ilk and we were getting antsy with all his safety blah blah. We were finally allowed to chamber our single round and then we had to wait for him to let us take the gun off safe and then we had to wait for him to tell us to aim and then we could shoot. Of the twelve of us only two missed, another boy and I. We had to back step slowly down safety mountain and when we were all safe and secured we went to get our eggs which I was going to have to eat whole and raw and I was not scared a bit about. I thought for some reason that it would be a breeze and I would eat it and then do something funny and get a laugh in the bargain. I did get a laugh. I brought my egg up to the youth leader who was going to act as eggsecutioner and tilted my head back to quick swallow the whole thing in one go. That was the plan. That plan sucked. He cracked the egg and plopped the whole slimy mass in at once and any notion I had that I could just give it the old one swallow evaporated. I sputtered and gagged and tried two or three time to swallow but my body had made an super-executive decision and just puked instead. Like I said I got my laugh but I may have lost a tiny bit of dignity in the mix hard to say though some of those boys could have been impressed by my physical inability to ingest a whole egg and my determined vomiting, I never asked.   

Kayak Attacks

 I mentioned the Kayaks and that was because they were so awesome. They were magnificent injection molded plastic vessels that were built for affordability and rugged wear and tear at the hands of scouts. Our troop quickly monopolized them and used them to terrorize the other denizens of the water. Four man canoe, over-run, mocked, sunk and hit in the face with paddles. We were just to quick and too agile to be caught by those lumbering antiques. We were ravaging the coast and then a couple of the previously capsized sailors teamed up and got out the 'War Canoe' which was a huge 20 man job they thought could overpower our guerrilla flotilla. Obviously they had not read up on their Clausewitz to realize their mistake. They came out chanting, hollering and swearing revenge . They paddled towards us and our pack of ten kayaks tried to swarm them but they were good at holding us back with their long paddles. What they had forgotten that old maxim of the sea – never bring a paddle to a psychopath fight. A kid swung his ten foot paddle and hit Ryan in the head and sealed all of their dooms. He recovered his wits and grabbed the paddle dropping his own and quickly pulled himself alongside by going hand over hand up the shaft. When he was abreast he jumped on board and started punching and chucking as fast as he could. When he had pummeled and disembarked about half of the war canoe's crew the rest were too few to keep back our swarm. We pulled the remainder into the water and Ryan ran back and forth on the boat re-kicking and paddle stabbing anyone foolhardy enough to attempt re-boarding. When we had cleared the decks about half of us jumped on board and stood on the gunnel to sink the boat and when it was under the water we got back in our kayaks and were off to terrorize someone else. The War Canoe humbled and up to the tips in the water took an hour or so to get back to shore and many of her humbled crew required some medical attention for what appeared to be paddle wounds to their heads and faces. When our troop brought in the armada for a lunch break there were an awful lot of camp authorities waiting for us.

“Were you gentlemen the ones that attacked and sunk the War Canoe?” Well now, that's hard to say. Attacked is a strong, almost accusatory word. What we could tell them was that we did engage the War Canoe in a little mutual combat and that we were better at it then they were. The twenty vanquished scouts identified Justin, Ryan, Jay and I as the instigators and the powers that be banned us from the kayaks for the day and made us each do 50 push ups and then apologize to the battered losers. We were all in great shape so fifty push-ups was a joke but the apology was bitter medicine indeed. As we walked down the line of those we had wronged and as soon as I was out of earshot of the leaders I started fake-pologizing by saying that were were really sorry they were such massive pussies and that we were sorry that they had to go crying to their mamas because they lost. This started another fight where Ryan had to punch one of the youth leaders. We got to do 150 more push-ups, which was really hard but which we did as cockily as possible to show it had no effect on us. Then we were ordered to stay in our camp for the rest of the day. It was worth it.

Camp Scout

The summer after ninth grade I went to scout camp twice. I actually wasn’t a good boy scout. I liked camping and playing sports but I was not into filling out forms and wearing uniforms. The first camp I went to that summer was just for any run of the mill scout in our troop. It was a week long affair held at a purpose built camp at a local lake. I had never been to a real camp with scheduled events and rules and singing and crafts and whatnot. I liked that they had kayaks and guns and plenty of water chocked full of fish. I didn't like all the bossiness about telling us when and where to be and how to be dressed and all that nonsense. My scout battalions penchant for anarchism was set on a collision course with Johnny Scout Law and it was just a matter of time before the fit hit the shan. I may not have got that salty phrase exactly right, I will look it up. We started out fine on the first day before we had any obligatory pageantry. We set up camp, got our food out, and got our tents assembled. Then we went fishing and everything was glorious. That too did pass and the schedule started bossing us around we were required to eat dinner at 5, too early by a ways in my opinion because we were burning daylight that could be better served fishing. As we were cooking dinner it started to rain and kept right on doing that for the rest of the night. We stayed under our pavilion joking and playing around until 11 and then we retired to our sleeping bags in our tents. The rain got worse and worse until between that and the rain our tent had fallen down in the middle of the night. A kid named Abe woke up confused and trying to sort out where and when he was and why there was green mildewy ripstop nylon pressing against his face in the dark, trying to loll him. A puddle of rain had formed in a depression between him and I and when he lifted up the tent that was holding the water it flowed right into my open sleeping bag. I was sopping wet and miserable and I had a lot of night left to go when this minor tragedy transpired. I shivered in my wet bag until there was enough pre-dawn to see by and then I got up and changed. That is when I realized that the cold and wet slumber had caused me to lose my voice which was my super power and my curse. I sounded like a smart-ass little raspy frog who had lost his normal projection and volume. This made all of the funny sass that I provided for the rest of the week more funny and less audible which had the effect of having everyone ask what was said and getting to repeat my joke.   

50/20's

After my first taste I forgot how miserable it was on the 50/20 and went back every year until I was sixteen. The next year I started it out with my brother and friends, they lasted about 21 miles again and then I decided I was going to quit as well. I actually got in a minder van and was planning on heading home but at that moment my dad showed up to shame me into continuing. It worked I got driven back to where the van had picked me up and I finished four hours faster then my last years time. The third year I went with a couple of older friends that set a really good pace and never contemplated quitting. I shaved off two more hours and finished in in twelve. I now had three medals but no new savings bonds. The fourth and final year I went on the hike I went with my then girl friend who was on a really monomaniacal girl power trip that had her thinking that any girl had the power to best any boy at anything. Adorable. My passive aggressive nature bolstered my spirits in the face of her misery. I was cheerful and goofy right on through the incessant complaining. When she would say some sexist thing about how women are more pain tolerant then men I wouldn't even argue I would just mention how much fun I was having and ask how she was feeling. She was miserable and getting more and more cranky about my happy go lucky insolence. About the thirty mile mark she said if I wasn't going to complain she wanted me to shut my [Redacted] mouth. I shut my mouth for two hours and that made her even more mad which made me even more happy. I was in immense pain and was absolutely exhausted but my girlfriend's girl power implosion made it all worth while to keep stoic in the face of overwhelming desire to show weakness. As the sun came up and we were coming around the final mountain she yelled at me for being quite and I said I didn't feel like complaining and she had asked me to shut up my cheerful face. She said that I must be in pain because she wanted to quit so I replied that it hurt a little but I must be better at dealing with pain then she was. Needless to say she was super impressed and realized that she was being sexist with all of her constant stream of condescending comments about how women were superior to men. Just kidding she said I was an A-hole and that I had better start complaining or she was going to kill me. I Gave her her wish by loudly lamenting the horrors of the discomforts I felt. She was not impressed and tried to slap me. I jogged ahead a hundred feet and kept yell-plaining at the top of my voice because now it was distracting me from my actual pain. My girlfriend got her second wind from the pure purple rage that she felt because I was not playing along with her game. We finished really strong driven by my pleasure in antagonizing her and her desire to kill me. When we finished all was forgiven and I drove her home where she apologized for being so mean all night. I told her it was fine and didn't apologize. We dated for a few more years and she was still pretty big into girl power but she toned down the pain tolerance and willpower rhetoric. 

50/20

One time in the middle of the last century John F. Kennedy thought Americans were turning into a bunch of soft in the middle, effete wussies. His solution? A fifty mile hike to be finished in less then 20 hours. The original 50/20 is still held somewhere every year but we held a knock off in Santaquin for a couple of years there in the late eighties and the early nineties. When I was hearing about it I thought that fifty miles didn't sound like that far, t is very far but I was young and like they say, the young are idiots. The first time I walked it I was 12 years old and full of unreasonable optimism. My mom gave me some sound advice about wearing some nylons under my regular socks to prevent blisters. She also gave me some rather unsound advice about carrying a fricking ton of water food and first aid supplies. There were minders all along the way and rest stops every five miles or so making my backpack full of sundries a massive waste of energy and a brutal downward strain on my shoulders so I ditched it about five miles in. I had started out with a group of family and friends and by the first rest stop about five miles in we were all feeling just fine. We were laughing and joking and even frolicking if that could be done. By the tenth mile tempers were decidedly less chipper. After the fifteenth mile the sun was starting to go down and about half of the boys and all of the girls called it a night and got rescued by a minder van. The survivors and I trudged the next six miles in the dark down a canyon and the rest of my intreped band called it a night at the 21^st mile. Lightweights. I sandwiched and souped up and was ready for the really hard part – the next 29 miles. Alone. In the dark. On the highway. Spooky. I was determined and I went of softly into that dark night. At the next stop 6 more miles down the road I was really planning on quitting but I met up with a man and his daughter who were both walking at a really brisk pace and even though I was sore and tired their company was more than worth the extra protection from the baddies that seemed to lurk behind every shadowed tree and around every farm building. About four in the morning at the forty mile stop I couldn't summon the energy to keep up with them and they wished me luck and blasted out of there still power walking after 40 hard miles. God's speed you walking fools, god's speed. There was the slightest breeze and the slightest light coming around the hill I had to round to finish my march and shove it in JFK's face. I do realize he is dead but metaphorically, you know? With six miles left to go I was so tired and sore and emotional that I was doing a zombie shamble and crying as the sun came up. I have never wanted to quit and not quit something so badly in my entire life. At the lowest point in my journey a guardian angel in the form of a middle aged scout master came to my rescue. He gave me a graham cracker and told me it was not that far and that if I walked as hard as I could I would be done in two hours. Two hours? Oh, hell no. I decided to quit and end it right then and there but he took me under his arm and told me it would be okay and that no one as young as I had ever finished the 50/20 and he knew I would be so disappointed if I made it 46 miles and quit. He was right I knew but I was so exhausted and in so much pain I was thinking a little shame might be a small price to pay. Before I knew it I had limped and cried my way through another mile and there were only three to go. Knowing that I got a second, or perhaps third wind and pressed on with renewed vigor. The road was very flat and I could see the church that was the finish line from a mile and a half away which gave me a tangible goal and false hope as I closed the final mile. When I stumbled into the church lawn my mom was there and I hugged her and cried and got in the car with little fanfare. When I got home I got in a hot bath and fell asleep . She came and woke me up and I dried off and got on the toilet and fell asleep. I woke up a while later with completely numb legs and only enough energy to walk to my bed and there I slept for 20 hours strait. I couldn't walk well for about a week and couldn't be prouder to tell everyone why I was limping. Sadly, not many people were all that impressed and it turned out that even though no one younger than twelve had ever finished there had been younger twelve-year-old's who had. I still got a medal and a savings bond that would be worth 50 bucks in 10 years. I cashed it in for the face value the next day. Take that Kennedy.  

The Banjo Practice

My dad is a man of eccentric and short-lived hobbies, he hits them hard and them puts them away forever. During this time in our lives and somehow entwined in the power struggle ritual of nightly scripture reading and quite time was my dad's new hobby of practicing the banjo. Every night my dad would open his bedroom door pull out the old five string and start plunking away for about an hour. Some times he would yell at us to be quite or to turn off that noise. That noise was any radio playing anything anywhere in the house. I don't know why he was drawn to the banjo or why he had to have absolute silence throughout the house to practice it but I think it has something to do with his southern upbringing. The genetic makeup of southerners predisposes them to produce and enjoy music made my tinny and piercing instruments. The Ulster-Scott and German blood in my dad's veins made him at turns monomaniacal and fickle. As far as his desire for a irrational amount of control I think that come from just being a full blown butt hole, which he came by honestly. I was about to write that a rational person who wanted to learn to play the banjo would do such and such like finding a secluded spot free from interruption and distracting noises and not expect the whole world to grind to a halt at your whim, but then I realized that no rational person wants to learn the banjo. It is entirely unnecessary. After three or so years of not getting any better and trying to command silence from the family from his Lay-Z-Boy banjo throne, the fancy passed and my dad was done with the banjo. Not knowing the future I can still with confidence say he is done for good. 

I Call An A-Kisser an A-Kiss and Almost Get Stomped

My dad liked to be in absolute control of his little kingdom and every night he would gather us up for some mandatory scripture reading. Sometimes it went peacefully other times one of us would balk and there would be a fight that lasted ten times longer than the reading would have. He didn't care what we were doing or if we were at a good stopping point and there was no set time for scripture time it was just two minutes after whenever the whim stuck him. One night I was in the middle of building something in my room when he hollered through the house that it was scripture time I told him to wait a minute and if horses were in need of holding then so be it. My metaphorical equestrian advice was not heeded and my dad said that if I didn't come in right away that I was going to loose all of my privileges ( that was his favorite catch all punishment). I dropped my project and sulked in and sat on the floor by the hall way. When I came into the living room Rob started in with a little Kiss-A speech about how it was my dad's house and I should just do what he says so that blah blah blah dah blah. I told him to shut his Kiss-A mouth and quit kissing my dad's 'A'. That was the last thing my dad was willing to hear that night and he shot out of his chair with preternatural speed for a guy his size and tried to stomp on me as I quickly crab crawled away and down the hall just ahead of his stomps. I scuttled just out of stomping range as he stomped hard from one foot to the next while punctuating his stomps with rhythmic cursing and oaths of destruction. He had tried to stomp me halfway down the hall way by the time my mom caught up to him and stopped him. He was still furious but he wouldn't dare to disobey my mom so he just told me I was grounded from everything and he sent me to my room. When I was in my in my room and the adrenaline of the situation was wearing off the whole situation stuck me as being really funny and I started laughing to myself. I was pretty mad at Rob for being such a brown noser and at my dad for defending him but I was over it soon and the grounding didn't stick. I didn't know until years later that all of my siblings thought that my dad had actually landed the stomps and that he had been crushing me. That would make the story better but luckily he missed. 

What is This? $h!7 on Jim Day?

My dad was under a lot of stress with having to correct everyone about everything and them making redo stuff. It is a hard job to prop up the whole world when the world resists it. He was working long hours and providing for us and we were just lazing around, playing and demanding payment every time we turned our hands. That was his actual phrase 'every time you turn your hands' that meant made any miniscule effort when translated from the native Floridian. We would make fun of the phrase by dramatically turning our hands palm up to palm down when he had turned his back and say one dollar, two dollars, quietly of course. He would imagine criteria by which he expected us to live by and then not tell us about it but be really mad when we had not done the thing that he had only made up that day in his fevered imaginings as he drove alone in his truck. Whenever he came home riled up and furious at our lack of effort towards the projects he imagined that day he would call us Jackasses and Jennies ( a female donkey), Ape heads, and Sons of Bitches. We really liked that last one because by inference he was calling our mother a bitch and we would tell her really loudly that dad was calling her a bitch. He would then ask us in angered tones, “What is this? Shit on Jim day?”. I need to make perfectly clear this is not a story about the one time this happened, it was formulaic and hardly even varied in phrasing. Like a solemn right that had to invoke the proper words to activate some arcane power he would ask, more or less weekly, for years if this day was in fact 'shit on Jim day'. Of course it was not officially shit on anyone day but my brother and I would often solemnly confirm to each other with pursed lips and knowing nods, and out of my dad's perception that it was, as a matter of fact, shit on Jim day. This little piece of repetitious theater went on for about four or five years and then like any long running show, even the classics, it had run its course and my dad retired the act and the phrase and I have not been asked what day it was in that specific manner since I was 17 or so.