I Beat My Rival To Be On Varsity

My first few tournaments I was on the JV squad and I wanted to be on varsity so I had to beat a varsity wrestler. I couldn't even come close to beating the guy at my real weight and the next weight up was also tricky so I went up two weight classes to wrestle for varsity. The kid was not as good and he was the one who was dating my ex-girlfriend that I had made fun of after the pin myself incident. He was a bit of a jerk to her and she had called me onetime to talk about how she wanted to break up with him but she was scared of him. I had helped her work up a plan that she had ultimately backed out of but he had heard that I was in on the deal and there was some bad blood. We had no practice on the days that we were wrestling for promotion and everyone was supposed to sit and watch even if they were not wrestling. My opponent and I were almost in the middle so it had been about a nervous hour of fidgeting when we were called up. I was really nervous when we were lined up and the coach that was reffing whistled us to start. I was taken down and that was the end of the nerves and the start of the battle. He got around and took my back and it felt like he was trying to push my head under my armpit. To gain leverage he laced both of his legs over the top of mine. It seemed to me that my best option for escape was to stand up with him in this piggy back position and jump backwards onto him. That was a good plan save for one little niggle, it was evidently illegal to slam someone down from that height. I was also trapping his hands so that he had no way of breaking our combined fall and I landed with all of my weight on his chest. The coach hadn't stopped me in time because he thought I knew the rules and he quickly pulled me off of my opponent as he tried to help him get his wind back and there was a general murmur of of disapproval. One of the old timer kid asked me what the hell was I doing, that move was illegal, I mentioned that I was not aware of that and no one cared. After about half a minute he was back to breathing smoothly and sitting up and the coach was asking if he wanted to keep fighting. He said yes and was given a few more minutes to recover. When we were restarted in a neutral standing position and my rival was really pissed. At the whistle he came running at me. More by shock than by training I was perfectly like water and effortlessly caught his charge locked my hands around his head and behind his knee in a standing cradle, rolled back and pinned him. Most of the room had not been paying attention and most of the other guys were pretty surprised to see the match was over, by fall no less. That meant I was the varsity wrestler at my weight class for at least the next four meets until we had another wrestle off for position. I was thinking this is what I wanted but all of the sudden it hit me that I would have to wrestle prime time wrestlers in front of the small but larger crowds at varsity meets. Oops.   

I Pin My Own Self

Did you know that in wrestling you can pin yourself? Well, if you did good for you because until I did it at a tournament I was not aware of that little factoid. It happened when I was wrestling a kid who didn't want to fight that hard and it felt like I just might be on the verge of my first sanctioned and official wrestling triumph when in the third period, while I was up a comfortable lead in the points the match was suddenly called. I was honestly confused because I had not pinned my opponent but I still thought that I won. When we stood up his hand was raised and I didn't know what was going on so I just looked around like I had been jugged in the head asking with my body language anyone who would make eye contact with me, "What happened?" The ref grabbed me and told me I had been winning and that I had been in control of the position but as I tried to roll my opponent over I had laid flat on my back and pinned myself in what was known in the parlance as a 'defensive pin'. Sounds better than 'idiot pin' I guess but it means the same thing. My always supportive teammates were there to offer their howls of laughter and completely unfunny reenactments of me pinning myself. Luckily for me I had dated one of my teammate's girlfriend before he had so to bail myself out of my personal shame spiral I asked him loudly if he could remember the last time he had kissed my girlfriend. He said he never had and I knocked down the set up with, "Oh, yeah that right I was just thinking about the last time I kissed your girlfriend." He thought that was really a clever way to insult him and he tried to give me a high-five on the face with his closed hand. He missed and we were separated and the what kind of idiot pins himself was changed to something about how we should fight.

So That I Can Be and Example and Inspiration

As is common with many sports after a meet or tournament the wrestlers would gather up to see film of the event to see what people did right or wrong so we could all learn from each others mistakes. I was featured prominently in several of these little wrestling video parties because I made such a perfect example of techniques as they were executed on me. One day we were watching as I revisited tape of my bout with one of the famous Sanderson brothers in our match he realized very early on that I was a massively over-matched opponent and started practicing take-down moves on me and letting me go. They were executed with textbook precision and it looked like he was doing a clinic for beginners with a more or less complicit victim. The real tragedy was that I was trying my best to stop him but he was just so fast and strong that I was as helpless as a baby kitten. My coach was so impressed that he just kept rewinding and showing off one of the moves that sent me airborne. The move is called an ankle pick and the offensive wrestler quickly reaches down grabs the clueless beginner's foot and to the great pleasure of the crowd and those watching over and fricking over in a room full of the losers peers, flips him up in the air in a sports version of the slip and fall. We watched about six times in total as my coach publicly marveled at the speed and perfection that sent me on the magical voyage of shame. I eventually just said a swear and then said swear wording skip to the next swear wording match. My coach just laughed and so did everyone else as he rewound my demonstration of exactly what no to do to play it one more swear wording time. Glad I could help.

Hazing

I had been quite unpopular, bullied and teased in school all the way through the first bit of junior high. Ever since the second half of junior high and on through high school I had been by and large shown deference and I was much more likely to be the teaser than the tease-e. I thought my place in the high school hierarchy was set but that was because I only ran in limited debate and student government circles. When I entered the world of sport and the manly sport of wrestling I was once again just a dude who got no special privileges and was subject to hazing. We didn't have a systematized hazing ritual on the wrestling team it was more like some guys were just dicks. One kid in particular, a junior when I was a senior was always doing crappy little things to irritate and annoy. In his own mind I think he fancied himself a clever practical joker. Like almost all practical jokers before and since he regarded his stumbling, retarded comic babies as nothing short of genius while everyone else was just inconvenienced and annoyed. He would steal peoples clothes and throw them in the showers or try and push people outside the locker room naked. He had the comic subtlety of Lenny from 'Of Mice and Men' and he was honestly disappointed when someone got really mad when all he wanted was to make a funny. He had done a couple little things that I let slide for the most part but one day at a tournament I was very tired while I was waiting for my turn to wrestle again and so I laid down on the bleachers to take a nap and as I did he saw the opportunity for some epic douchebaggery. He took a lighter and melted a hole in my sweatpants while I was still wearing them and peacefully unaware as I slumbered. He thought that was some pretty good stuff and was laughing with his jerk friends when I finally woke up to smell the burnt polyester. I took a few groggy seconds to understand what he had done and when I did I quickly labeled him an A-hole. He was offended at my language and got really defensive puffing up like a blow-fish and posturing so all and sundry knew he was not the kind of man who would take a slight to his honor sitting down. He was a row or so up from me on the bleachers and was trying to mad dog me into submission when he stepped closer to me. As a consequence of his elevated position that made us line up with my head to his belly even though we were about the same size. I didn't like having his genitals so close to my person and so I pushed him backwards from the hips and the awkward footing of the bleachers made him fall into a head onto the seats. In the brief time of this exchange our assistant coach had seen there was some problem starting and came to break us up. The crotch melter kid actually had the nerve to claim that I was trying start a fight for no reason. I showed off my newly melted pants and the evidence was a little overwhelming in favor of provocation vs. random act of violence. I was told not to fight and the other kid was made to run around the building and apologize. He was not happy about that and tried, below the level of punishable offense to irritate me for the rest of the trip. I was to busy stressing out over how much I sucked and loosing to worry too much about him anymore though. 

Some People Are Not Even Trying

My first couple of days in wrestling were confusing because everyone else had done this kind of stuff for years and when the coaches would call out some drills to do they all knew what to do and I would try and catch on without having to be told. My biggest problem was that in my weight class there was only one kid who was actually trying and three who were just there to fulfill some kind of parental mandate. Some dads were convinced that wrestling would toughen up, build character and otherwise salvage their slacker sons so they made various life enhancing privileges contingent on their participation. The first time I was supposed to drill some basic take-downs I did what I thought they wanted me to do but my partner just went limp and fell down as dead weight. I thought I must have done something wrong because he was not fighting back at all and on his turn he was just barley moving. I finally asked him if I was doing something wrong and he said no he just didn't want to wrestle so he was trying to do as little as possible. I was there to learn how to wrestle so I could compete and win and I felt weird going hard with two guys who didn't want to be there. To find someone to practice with who wanted to practice I moved up one and then two weight classes above my natural size of 138 pounds to 152. If you are at all familiar with wrestling you may know that it is much more typical to try and loose weight to have a size advantage over your opponent and I was heading the other way. I figured I couldn't be that hard because I could beat the guy at 152 and I disliked him anyway so when we were practicing we were both going hard. When I went to my first duel meet I realized my mistake when I went to the mat and the guy was easily 30lbs bigger than me having cut weight to get to 152. It didn't go well. I didn't get pinned but the outcome was never in question from the opening whistle to the end of three two minute rounds I was outsized and outclassed but not out fought. My coach came up to me after the meet and told me he had never seen anyone fight harder in a loosing effort and that if I kept working and trying I would do just fine. He was wrong. 

The Pink Weenie Sucks

In a sport already so rife with homoerotic overtones one would think there would be an effort to keep any games which involved whacking shirtless boys with a 'pink weenie' out of the curriculum. One would be mistaken. If practice ad gone well some days the coaches would have us play games to finish off our time. The games were always violent and borderline abusive. One was called 'Slap Back' which if I am remembering right is exactly like 'Duck-Duck-Goose' except instead of tapping heads you slap down hard on someones back to let them know that they are 'it'. It was just some regular slapping and running until one of the huge kids, the one that kicked me incidentally, wound up into a jumping slap and smashed one of the more mellow conscripts and bruised his back in the shape of a hand. The poor dude didn't even jump up to give chase he just screamed and writhed on the floor and started to cry. Good, clean, fun. The hit had been so vicious that no one to my knowledge even teased the kid about crying we all just felt bad and were glad it was not us. It may come as a surprise to people who have never been in combat sports of any type how often tears, if not full blown crying, is involved. This holds true all the way to the ranks of professional martial artists and Olympic wrestlers. The game I teased at the first of this story was a modified game of tag where the person that was it had a towel that was rolled tight and and wrapped in pink duct tape. Once again the game was played shirtless and the weenie man would start in the middle of a marked of circle and when a signal was given everyone else tried to get away before he could get his big pink ersatz weenie on their naked bodies. Not unlike a long navel voyage or a stay in prison the winner of this game was the last one untouched by the guy with the mandate to touch one and all with his weenie. Nothing untoward here, just boys learning to be men - real manly men.   

I Need Gift Shoes and Fighting Underwear

My parents had been most reluctant to have me participate in sports it was only by my persistent and focused effort that I had played city league and church basketball. I played soccer for one season when I was 10 and then my dad said I couldn't do that anymore because it occupied too much of my mom's time to drive me around to all the practices and games. This was not strictly true because the practices and games were at my school and I walked to almost all of them. He didn't let me try out for or play foot ball because he said it was too much of a drain on the family's time. I made the soccer team my Junior year and my dad told me I had to choose to play on the soccer team or to have a car because if I didn't work with him I wouldn't get to use the car. I chose car. When it came to wrestling I decided I was just going to do it and drove myself and paid for stuff myself. I didn't want to spend money on shoes and I didn't know where to buy them any way so I had been practicing in socks for a couple of weeks when a kid, as I mentioned before, gave me a pair of his old ones. I had to pay for my own physical and I borrowed an old pair of fighting underwear from the wrestling supply room. There is a strange protocol surrounding fighting underwear that I didn't know. You don't wear it for practice and you keep it covered up even when you are about to wrestle and then at the last second like you are ashamed of it you whip off your sweats and then wrestle and after you lose you put them back on just as quickly. To wrestle you must also have a pair of ear goggles which I was gifted as well. With my makeshift gear I was ready to roll and roll I did. 

I Am A Quitter

It was one of my firmly held fantasies when I was young that I had some special force of will that would push me through when others would quit. This was not true, I had an average to below average force of will. I had hung in with the basketball conditioning drills and I thought that was pretty hard but there is some truth to what they say about wrestling being what men are doing while the boys play basketball. Before we would start practice we would run up and down the stairs twenty times and that would be what I thought was a reasonable amount of excessiveness and then we would work technique and then we would wrestle for thirty minutes and then burn it down at the end of practice. Too much. The final burn-down was a series of relay races from one end of the wrestling room to the other. It was hand walking followed by a bear crawl and on and on at full speed in 120 degree heat. One of the rules that I didn't know was that you were not supposed to sit down while you waited for your turn again in line. I was winded and hurting and came back and leaned against the wall which I guess was okay and then when the line moved forward I sat down and the a bunch of the old timers lost their minds. No warning or gentle correction for me it was just rage about me being a quitter and to stand the F-word up right f-wording then. Before I had enough time to stand up one of the life time wrestlers came up and kicked me hard in the butt. I started a little embarrassed, which changed to rage pretty quickly. I told the kicker that he better not touch me again and that I didn't know that it was a rule not to sit down. I was exhausted but he had pushed the line a little far. I stood up and pushed him which is not in my character when not pushed to the physical and mental limit. He fought back and we went to the ground and were quickly surrounded and just as quickly broken up. I felt like creaming and crying or doing something to express my anger and exhaustion. The coach yelled at us for fighting and then told us to go run two miles. It was so nice and cold outside and jogging two miles was a reprieve not a punishment. As we jogged the kicker kid jogged beside me and apologized for kicking me I said I hadn't known that sitting down was not allowed because it was my first time wrestling. We didn't become fast friends but we did hit it off and never had a problem again. After we were done running I went in and picked up my clothes and didn't change, went to the local grocery store bought a gallon of the cheapest flavored gallon of drink they had and drank it down it one go. I Drove home, ran a bath, went to sleep in the bath, woke up, crawled to my room and slept until morning. Not the best day I have ever had - honestly. 

Sock Basket Shame and Lies

Around our house laundry did not get done, it got started. We would put clothes in a hamper and it would get put in a pile until that pile got stuffed into the washer by my mom or by whoever was on laundry duty that week. It would be moved into the dryer and then more often than not pulled out of the dryer onto the floor in a huge unsorted pile. Where it stayed to be picked through and recycled into the clothing circle of life. Socks were not given any special attentions and they would be put into a jumbled sock basket to await a daily morning panic sifting and plucking of two that were close enough to get the searcher out the door to school. This was usually not a big problem because I wore pants and no one ever knew. They could only tell that I was wearing miss matched socks if I wore shorts then if anyone asked I would say something I thought was funny like that I had a pair just like them at home, or lie and tell the asker that I wore mix-matched socks because I suffered from bi-pedal ambidexterity and I couldn't walk without some differential tactile input from my feet. I know, I know, hilarious. When I started wrestling I didn't have any wrestling shoes and because of disease we were not allowed to practice barefooted. One day that meant I was wrestling in one knee high wool sock and one white athletic sock and I looked like a hobo or a home-school kid or something equally horrible. I was not thinking much of it besides the initial embarrassment of realizing that I would have to play fighting in crazy socks. My coach, however, was more concerned for me based on my ridiculous clothing, fearing it may be a sign of extreme poverty and not just systemic laundry laziness. After practice he asked me to stay after and he asked if I needed some money to buy socks. I was so embarrassed that he thought that I needed sock money that I made up a more ridiculous lie that I was having muscle cramps in my wool sock leg and I was just trying to keep it warm. He looked skeptical and he should have been and I should have just told him the story of the our families disregard for systematic laundry. The next day at practice I made sure I found some nicely matched socks and that day a kid a year younger than me gave me a pair of his own shoes and the socks were less of an issue. 

I Think I Can Wrestle

In between tournaments in the rather longish debate season I heard a call for open wrestling tryouts and I thought I could wrestle. It turned out that I was able to wrestle better than anything else I had tried in high school sports because I made the team instantly. That was mainly down to the fact that everyone who showed up was on the team. The coach said that he liked my can-do attitude for coming out and trying to wrestle when I was 17 and most of the other boys had been wrestling their whole lives since they were 4 or five. I didn't know the rules or the moves but I did know how to go full blast for six minutes of grappling and that turned out to be enough to get onto the varsity team and win four of my 18 matches. This once again was not so much a commentary on my innate ability to wrestle so much as the really pathetic squad we were fielding my senor year. We were loo sign wrestling matches by thirty, forty points and that is almost unheard of. Many of the kids I was there practicing with were only there because their fathers had insisted or bribed them and they gave little to no effort. Because I was doing so well against the ragamuffins in and around my weight class with the one exception of the kid who was in the class closet to my natural weight I thought I would be some pretty big trouble for all those who would have to face me in the squared circle of the wrestling mat. I was almost entirely wrong excepting cripples, the violently ill, and in a particularly low point, a cancer patient.   

I Lose at Debate and Win at Kissing

A few weeks later we were at another big tournament and we were doing the usual debate and wait cycle and in the waits I had been flirting with a cute redhead from parts unknown. I had been trying to find her and talk to her between every round but because she was doing drama and speech events we only saw each other a couple of fleeting times. As we finished the awards show and I was in the quarter finals round I went with my coach to send most of the other kids home and while we were walking back the red headed girl was walking purposely down the empty hall toward my coach and I. She walked right up and stopped in front of me and asked if she could ask me something. I said sure and my coach just stopped and waited. She bet me a quarter that she could kiss me without touching my lips, I was confused but I played along. She leaned in and kissed me right on the lips and then handed me a quarter and said, “I lose”. As I stood there in shock she walked passed me and away and wished me luck in the last three rounds. I stood looking at the quarter and smiling for a long half-second when my coach asked if she had really just kissed me. I said she had indeed. He shook his head in disbelief and then called me a lucky son of a bitch. I went on to debate for the after hours final rounds. I won the first one and went on to the semi finals and then lost for the first time all year. When you lose in after hours final rounds they just hand you the trophy and send you away. When we got in the suburban for the ride home with the six other kids who had stayed to watch my coach told them about the cute stranger that had bet me and won a kissing game. I was so happy about getting kissed that I didn't even really mind that I lost. Anyone who knows a debater knows that they have never truly ever lost a single round of debate, the judges may have been too stupid to under stand the subtle and esoteric arguments that were clearly superior but never was a debater bested objectively.

This is the actual kissing-quarter still taped to the back of my trophy from the Western States Forensics Championship

  

A Pair of Transparent Strategies

In the first full tournament of the year they had a cut after six rounds and only the top 16 went on to debate after that. The rest of the tournament was over as we debated into the double digits of Saturday night the rest of the team was just waiting for me to win or lose. I won out in the round of eight, four and it was down to me and one girl for the final, finally. Going into the debate I noticed that she was wearing a loose knit tight sweater with nothing but her nakies under it. Now it may not be to everyone's taste but she did make a strong case for the sexual attractiveness of a shapely young woman with a cute face and a devil-may-care/peek-a-boo sensibility to her clothing. An optimist might have called her state of dress half-naked, and a pessimist might have called her half-dressed but either way I was quite relived to see that we had a panel of judges and there were four women and one man.

Ha, ha, those ladies care nothing about your ladies.

I am not saying that her provocative clothing was the only reason she had won out to the finals but she was definitely not the hardest round of debate I had all day. I felt good as my last speech ended and I was pretty sure that I was going to win my very first solo tournament. They sent us out to sit in the hall and wait for the results which meant trying to make small talk and pretending to not notices her transparent attempts to manipulate the system by cashing in on her sexualizing clothing. The head judge came out and was holding the two trophies a tall three tiered first place and a more modest second. Without ceremony or flourish he handed me the first place trophy and my opponent the second and told us that I had won four ballots to one. I thought I knew how that voting had gone but when we got our copies of the judges notes I saw that the dude had voted for me. Good for him. I was euphoric walking down the echoy shiny halls of the empty high school out to the commons area where the other twelve kids and my coach were waiting to go home. Then I felt even better as they made a big fuss and gave a loud cheer celebrating my victory. It was a good ride home. 

I Will Not Use Your Bullet Points Sir or Madam

Debate was once again in full swing and I had spent most of the off season scheming and fantasizing about debate. You want to know why? Because I am a massive nerd, that is why. In debate you were expected to keep notes on your opponents speeches and answer them back point for point. I was not into that so I made a new kind of note paper that reflected my disdain for their little point by point system. Instead of writing down everything they said I wrote a big, almost invisible ONE, TWO, and THREE with room a little line for their main point and contention. When I started taking notes I would just write one or two things about their first second and third point and then a note or two about just how wrong they were and go to work on them when it was my turn to speak. Almost every single round a kid, and by kid I mean someone my same age, would get up and do their speech and then I would get up and ask them questions with no good answers just to make them look bad. Following the cross examination I would get up and give my rebuttal to the nonsense they had proposed, which by the by I would be defending myself the next round. They would try and follow along where I countered their arguments but I had not written down their arguments by number or referred back to them. This made them think I was doing it wrong or that I was loosing the game. I was not doing it wrong and they would soon see that they had fallen into a trap. When they got up to cross examine my attack on their weak case they would almost always say I had not countered any of their arguments because I had not referred to them by number. I would then offhandedly observe that I responded to all of their important points I just wasn't going to teach them how to take notes. They would sometimes get flustered and insist that I had lost the debate because I had not answer their points by number designation. I would then burn up the rest of their time by restating my rebuttal of each of their points and then time would be called. All but the best debaters were done there and would spend their next speech explaining how I had not done my job by saying their numbering system back to them. Like thin in the jargon, “Point 1A man is born free he didn't answer that so flow that over to my side I win that point.” So on and so forth till their time was up. I would get up and give a little shuffle of my papers and then say my opponent must have confused the persuasive style of Lincoln Douglas debate with the more analytically rigid Cross-X style and that they had unfortunately not taken the time to defend their case. I would restate all of the content and counterarguments that I had provided and point out it was not my job to tie my rebuttal to their arbitrary note system. The other guy or gal had one last speech to try and save the deal but it was over. Going into my third tournament of the year I had not lost a single round. In the first two tournaments, for the sake of time, they had not declared a single winner but usually four unbeaten kids would all get first place. Then they had one that let us battle all the way to the ground.  

Calculus is No Laughing Matter

Math always came easy for me so I had been on the accelerated path though the available maths until I reached the top of what was left in my senior year the great big baddy of the high school math classes – calculus. It turned out to be easier for me than the previous class because the teacher was just really good and there was a girl who sat by me who was really smart and not averse to sharing homework. She was also cute so I will not let it be said that I was attracted to her purely for her amazing grasp of quantitative reasoning. I did fine on tests without having to do any homework because it just came to me so I would often be goofing off in class while other kids were trying to learn. Inconsiderate right? You are right but where is your proof? <-Math joke. If you thought that was funny I may have bad news about how cool you are. One day I was particularly euphoric and free wheeling and I got a bad case of downward spiraling laughter. I laughed so hard that it started being funny to me that I was laughing and the typically long suffering teacher told me to knock it off or leave. I tried to knock it off but I had not stern English nanny to bring me down off the roof, so to speak. He told em to come up to the front and solve a problem on the board or I would get zero credit for the section. That calmed me down because I took math as performance art very seriously. He wrote out the hardest problem he could find in the section and I went right to work solving the equation. It didn't take me long which I think disappointed him a little because he wanted it to be an object lesson on the need to pay attention. When I finished he said it was correct and that I should go sit down and shut up. I did and then I felt bad for disrupting his class because he was actually a pretty cool guy and the best math teacher I had ever had. I stopped goofing off in his class and it got harder as the year went on and I was required by pure necessity to pay attention. It was a good thing too because in college they expect you to know some of that stuff.   

AP English is Not Hard

I signed up for advanced placement English class because it was good for college credit and reading and writing was what I liked to do in my spare time anyway so perfect fit right? No, no it was not. My teacher who had also been my French teacher was not a good teacher in any sense of the word. The deal with literature is that no matter your interpretation of a passage, poem or book there is a book or article to back you up. It is more true the more mainstream, like high school reading, the material is. If you ever feel like wasting an afternoon type in the name of a book and then a school of thought like feminism, socialism, objectivism or any other -ism and marvel at how people have been able to prove conclusively that both Karl Marx and Ayn Rand are proven right in their world view by The Lord of The Flies. My teacher didn't know about the almost infinite malleability of literary interpretation and she was always marking papers wrong based on their ideology and not their style or content. I was also in calculus and I was okay with the teacher marking my work wrong because if you gave the problem to a hundred trained instructors they would all see if an answer was right or wrong. So it was not a matter of me not being able to take correction. It was just irksome when she would tell me my interpretation was wrong and I would argue and she would dig in and mark me down. Her condescending self-righteous attitude and intractability on the meaning of Tom Joad's trek into the west and down the rabbit hole of murder made it really easy for me skip her class as it was the end of the day any way. My lack of attendance really came back to bite me in the end. All because I couldn't swallow my pride and just tow the rope and write what she wanted written. 

Matt and I are Tricksters

My brother Matt was in school with me that year and he joined up the debate team which meant that now we had double the joking and pranking. One trip we were at a high school a hour north of our house and when you are that far from home with no ride you have to wait in place while all of the rounds end. Usually you just hang out with your team joking and laughing but if there were some cute girls in the area you might make an effort to get their attention. Matt and I used to pretend that we were twins and then start a little street magic banter about how we could read each others minds. When we had some dim-bulbs hooked we would demonstrate our skills. Matt would pretend to think hard about a number and I would pretend to think hard and guess it. You are never going to believe this but I was always right. We would start with easy two digit numbers and then switch roles as we increased the difficulty to five and even six digit numbers. Ideally we would get some sub-critical brain mass girl who would be surprised every time and couldn't figure out the trick. If all went well the others in the crowd would not let her in on how we were doing it and she would just get more and more confused and frustrated. She would not understand why everyone else was laughing until we would feel too bad and let her in on the trick. Even then some true believers would argue with us that we just had to have known and we just had to be telling the truth. It was a fun trick that worked much, much more often than it should have, especially when dealing with people who were playing analytical word games. Actually, there were drama events at the same time so maybe that is who we kept tricking,  

Matchy Matchy Pink Shirt Faggy Friend Dance

If you recall my homecoming dance date's requirement was that I wear the clothes she picked out. She had me come over a day before the dance and got me out a suit with plenty of lapel and a bright pink shirt where the designers didn't skimp on the billow or the collar. It was so awesome I couldn't wait to give it test run. When I did I was shocked, I looked hot, really hot. I was a young magnificent pink plumaged dance ready sex god. When I picked her up she was dressed in a baby doll dress made of the same material in the same style. We looked incredible and then we got to the dance and blew some square redneck minds. I was always a flamboyant dancer anyway so when I was paired up with a equally wild and dynamic dancer the lid came right off the top of that thing. I overheard a few of the inbred sheep diddlers observe out load so I could hear that I was dressed like, and dancing like a fagot. Keep it classy you dirt-bags. We danced it up and partied it up and it was the most fun I had ever had a t a dance because I was not at all interested in trying to turn this into anything more than a good night out with a cool friend. It was perfect until she told me that I had to give back the shirt and jacket. Every rose has its thorn. I did give it back after I wore it to church the next day and then washed the funk off of it.

Oh, I Can Make You a Fire

For spirit week leading up to homecoming there was a traditional bonfire that I was put in charge of. I was supposed to round up a huge pile of wood and put it in the empty field across the street from the high school. I went to an orchard and got a load of wood that filled up the biggest trailer I could find and went back and unloaded it into an unimpressive pile on the ground. Well, crap, that took a long time for not much to show for it. That is not how I roll. I made some calls to some local lumber companies and to a company that built trusses and a couple agreed to drop us a semi trailer load of scrap. Two semi loads looked better but the best looking was a whole load of pallets. They were easy to stack and looked like a whole lot of wood for not much effort. A few helpers and I went over and stacked the pallets first into a tower and then laid all of the other wood on and around it into a pile that was about 30' at the base and about 14' tall. I thought that was pretty impressive indeed. I even thought that because the pallets provided a natural chimney the fire would be easy to get going. That was true it was very easy. The day leading up to the bonfire the vice principal got on the announcements and reminded everyone of some really awesome things that they should not do. He announced that he wanted us all to be safe at the bonfire and then went in to specific unsafe things that we shouldn't do: Do not bring firecrackers to throw in the fire, do not bring glass bottles filled with gasoline to throw in the fire, do not bring cans of paint or WD-40 to throw into the fire. . . He literally said all of that and more giving plenty of specific advice many had never even thought of.

What none of us suspected was that this bad boy right here and a gajillion of his friends where the ones that were going to ruin the bonfire. 

That night when all was ready I poured five gallons of diesel fuel on the fire and waited impatiently for the seven o'clock start time. A few minutes early I lit the fire thinking that it would need some time to get going. That was not even remotely the case. The diesel caught fire and burned slowly and smokey making me worry this may need a helping hand to get going. About a minute in while I was wondering how to get this thing going while the early crowd was growing restless the fire started and flames started to snake out of one piece, then several, then all of the wood. The natural draft that the pallets provided started drawin in air at an unbelievable rate so that there was a gentle breeze I could feel feeding the fire at it grew to be 20, 30 and then nearly a hundred feet tall. In two minutes it was an immense pillar of fire so hot that students who parked their cars a hundred feet away had to move them because the heat was so intense. When the fir e was first taking there were some hoots of excitement but the spectacle was too great and terrible to do anything be walk backwards from in awe as you shielded your face from the scorching heat. At five minutes the fuel started to give out and the fire started to die down. By ten minutes it was mainly just smoldering coals that were still very hot but not very fun to stand by. The bonfire had been scheduled to last for two hours and I had built a fire that burned itself out in less than twenty. My mistake was the pallets, they allowed for too fast a reaction and too efficient a burn and what I should have been looking for a some nice slow burning natural wood. After the initial shocked awe of the massive fire column people started complaining about how fast the fire went out and saying how much this sucked and how whoever made the fire should have gotten more wood. I tried to explain to anyone that would listen that there had been plenty of wood it was the burn rate that was the problem. No one cares about a post fire physics debriefing when they were expecting a nice leisurely make-out-able and marshmallow roasting fire. The people who were really mad were the ones who came at 7:20 and didn't see anything but coals. I was frustrated with the situation and the fact that these complaining idiots did nothing to help be were complaining about their free entertainment not being good enough. I stayed for the full two hours and then the fir department put the little remaining soot out cold and I went home more knowledgeable about bonfire dynamics, information I have never had the need to use again. 

Second Place Flowers

The girl I wanted to take to home coming was already asked by my a friend of mine so I had to come up with a second place option. The girl I wanted to take had a best friend who was really cool and unasked so I decided that should be my plan but I had waited to long because I was so busy with doing school spirit stuff. It was tradition at our school for dudes to make some arts and crafts things to ask a girl out and I had no time for that convention. What I did was drive to a field near the school and gather a handful of weed sunflowers and go to find the girl. She was practicing soccer so I drove down to the field and waved her over. The problem with that is that soccer coaches expect girls to play soccer at practice. We had to wait until she had a break and when I handed her the sweaty wad of weed flowers and  asked her out, she laughed and asked me if I was asking her because her friend was already taken. I said that was part of it but I was in no wise scraping the barrel because she was also super cute and cool and we could best friend double date. She said that would be fun and agreed to go if we could wear matching clothes. We could most definitely do that. It was a date. 

Coming Home Is Hard

Our first themed dance of the year was homecoming and the one power that student council did wield was to follow tradition to the letter. We were also allowed to pick the theme song for the dance. I did both of these things wrong. As I have mentioned I was doing quite well in debate which was good when it was debate time but not so good when it was time to get everyone's input and make a reasoned decision based on all of our ideas. When we considering the theme song I had gotten mired in the facile existentialism of the John Lennon song Imagine and I was flogging that horse pretty hard. I lobbied, begged and cajoled until I got the requisite support and after we had set the song and theme we produced the promotional materials. I was hanging a two sided 'IMAGINE' sign in the hall by the dance studio when I got my first taste of public commentary on my choice. One of the cultured young ladies from the drill team asked me what the hell that sign was for. When I informed her it was a sign for homecoming she asked why it said IMAGINE (capitalization mine). I told her that was the theme song and that did not please her hillbilly highness. She said she never heard of that song and that she wanted the theme to be some godawful country love ballad. I told her that we had thought of using that song but we decided that music intended for children and the mentally retarded would not appeal to a broad audience. That smoothed everything over and she realized that I had made the more musically and culturally sound choice. Nah, she actually rounded up her cadre of hillbilly hussys and yelled at me on my ladder and then then went to complain to the principal and whoever else would listen that they didn't want a classy song to dance to. I thought it was going to end there but in the two weeks leading up to the dance there was significant blow-back over my choice and my fellow student leaders directed all complaints to me personally. They even considered changing the theme after the posters and signs were all up but at that point I was set on making it work and pushed through to spirit week daunted. 

Hot Chocolate Like Warm Piss

We had high hopes and grand plans for what we were going to do with our pitiful student council budget. We planned a dance where we were going to rent outdoor furnaces and lamps in a huge tent we were going to rent until we realized that the cost would be roughly double our yearly budget. We scaled down the plans to an after the football game dance and added free hot chocolate for students at the football game in place of a huge tent. The problem with that plan like the last one is to do it right was going to cost lots of money and we still didn't have lots of money. We organized for everyone on student council to bring five gallons of hot water and we bought some cups and what we figured would be enough mix for twenty gallons. We bought enough mix to dye 20 gallons of hot water light brown and give it a slightly chocolate taste. In to deep we decided to just press forward and serve the warm brown water we had anyway. People started complaining right away because it was too bad even for free hot chocolate. One kid said he didn't care he was so cold that he would drink warm piss. He took a cup and then reconsidered, spat it out and then proclaimed that he would prefer warm piss to this crap. Talk about damning with faint praise. Not only were we getting our free terrible hot chocolate panned by the hoi palloi but the lady who had the contract with the school to run the concession stand was really mad that we were giving away for free what she was charging for. She came out and yelled at us and then tracked down the principal and yelled at him he came over with her and told us to wrap it up and leave because she had exclusive rights to refreshments at the football field. We were then stuck with a hundred dollars worth of really bad hot chocolate that we were prevented from giving to people for them to spit out. We took it to the parking lot and poured it out and decided to just focus on the dance. The dance went better then a mouthful of warm piss, so by comparison its mediocrity was an immense success. 

I Ignite Some Hair By Accident

The football team my senior year was rubbish and I only went to the games because many of the boys were on the field leaving the boy to girl ratio squarely in my favor. At one of the early games I had a lighter in my possession who's provenance I don't recall. I was ignoring the game and filling my hand with the butane and then lighting it into a fireball. Seemed like pretty harmless fun but on one of the ignitions I released the fire ball and it came to rest in a ball of well hair sprayed hair belonging to the girl in front of me. I am not saying that presenting a rat's nest of hairspray is an inherent safety risk but I surely wouldn't risk it, not on a dare. The flame caught instantly and flashed over the top of her head and then was out in less then a second. No damage to her head but the hair was singed and smelling quite a lot like burned hair. Her friend turned around and chewed my butt about being such a huge jerk and lighting her friend's hair on fire. I felt terrible and I tried to explain that it was just an accident. She was not buying it and I tried unsuccessfully to justify why I had been playing with a lighter in a way that lead indirectly, or directly if you look at the facts, to her friend's hair being consumed in flame. She and her friend left in a huff and I didn't think much more of the incident and I didn't even remember who that girl or her friend were. Then years later after college I was visiting a good friend of mine who had married his high school girlfriend who I didn't remember being in the grade younger then me but she sure had some attitude about me all standoffish and whatnot. After a couple of visits I asked him why she disliked me so much and he told me that I had lit her friends hair on fire when we were at a football game. It all came back like bread made of fire on the water made of hair. I once again apologized to her as she looked on skeptically. She took a few more years to warm up to the idea that it was an accident and that it was many years ago anyway. Lesson: don't even accidentally light peoples hair on fire- they hate that.  

I Try To Broaden Horizons

 My parents are not big popular music people so we had little musical carry over from their generation. What my mom was into when she was in high school was some hard and dark rock like Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath. That was not really my cup of tea and I got into ABBA, Cindy Lauper, Madonna, Depeche Mode and Bon Jovi because my sister and the aunt who lived with us were into that. The first tape I bought myself was Robert Palmer because I loved the song “Simply Irresistible”. When I got into junior high Rob came and lived with us and turned me onto AC/DC, Guns'n'Roses, and Metallica. After that I got into grunge like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. I also started to like some darker industrial stuff like Nine Inch Nails which was the first CD I ever bought. By my senior year a friend of mine had opened my ear holes up to the soulful folk styling of Bob Dylan and I bought the greatest hits CD and was hooked. It is a fact of life that if you like Bob Dylan you will find that you are in a world where most people know little of him except fro songs of his that were covered by mainstream artists and on the other hand super fans who have every single song that was ever recorded by Dylan in the last 50 years. There is very little middle ground. By the time I was doing the announcements I was listening exclusively to Pink Floyd, Ween, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Dylan not a play list that was huge on the top forty at the time. I would try and get some of my favorite music on the air and it was not going over well. Most people were telling me it sucked or would give it the tepid 'its okay'. I was frustrated that the plebeians couldn't hear the talent I heard and because country music was the mainstay at our school I decided to make a little joke about it that I stole from from Bob Newhart: “I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down'.”

I did not give him credit and there were lots of hillbillies who didn't get the joke because they were hillbillies. I was asked for two days what that was supposed to mean and I would not explain it any further. I would just riff on the joke by keeping my answers obtuse and esoteric and have myself a little private joke at their expense. I stopped playing songs I liked for the announcement intros and outros but I still stand by my belief that the opening riff of 'Kashmir' is one of the best lead ins possible in the best of all possible worlds. Lay your earballs on this sweet lick and then look into your soul and tell me with a strait face that the part of you that likes other people and believes the world is a good place didn't get just get a little bigger and a little sunnier.

  

I Show My Manliness to the School

 In the morning when we would do announcements we would have a countdown to when the local feed would go out to all of the closed circuit televisions when they were done playing that faux-news-ad-show Chanel One. After we were done the tech guy was supposed to cut the feed and call out 'clear' and then the audio and video would only be on the local monitors again. One time after we were done I said some swears over the still on PA system and was given a mild trouble because it was just a hell-damn brand of swear and not a bad one. I was on probation of sorts for all of the swears, vulgarities, missed swears, innuendos and whatever else I had gotten up to in the six weeks I had been on the air. So when the tech guy called 'clear' I should have stacked up my notes and reviewed the show and gone to class. What I did do was to come in really close to the camera and start dancing in a sexually suggestive manner including sexy bow-chika-bow-wow music I was making with my mouth. I stripped off my shirt and started flexing my scrawny pecks, biceps, and displaying my six-pack abs. You know, the glamor muscles? About the time I had been engaged in my strip tease for about twenty seconds, which I thought was just for my own goof-off on the monitors, the tech kid told me it was still going out to the school. Oh, poopstain, really? I grabbed another shirt than the one I stripped out of and ran out the far door to the library and went and sat in the middle of a group of underclass girls who were allegedly doing some research but we more interested in talking about who the guy with the great abs was on the tv. I resisted every one of my teenage boy urges and told them I hadn't seen who it was and ducked my head into a book when I saw the media teacher, the vice principal and the principal march quite purposefully into the studio. They were in there a bit and then came out looking for someone. I didn't offer my services in helping them find whoever it was they had in mind to corral. When they had gone I slipped out into the central quad and then across and out the doors that were closest to the parking lot and headed to somewhere else which is a very good place to be if you are sought for questioning in an unfortunate case of electronic misconfiguration which may or may not have lead to some CCTV male topless strip dancing. I probably couldn't have helped them anyway. I decided the rest of the day was probably a good amount of time to spend at somewhere else and I was right because by the next morning when I rolled into media class the heat had died down and I explained that I had made a poor choice but had not intended wide distribution f that material. All was forgiven but not forgotten.  

The First Complaints

 A few weeks later on the announcements I got some more complaints. This time it was really a surprise to me and I really didn't see what was wrong. Instead of the live announcements we prerecorded them a few minutes early starting with me wearing lots of coats and jackets and behind me on the white board the rather obscure lines of pseudo-Norse Monty Python moose jokes that runs under the credits on 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'. This, among other things, is what it says:

“A Møøse once bit my sister ...

No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse

with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given

her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and

star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo

Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst

Nordfink".

We apologise for the fault in the

subtitles. Those responsible have been

sacked.

Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti...

We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those

responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked

have been sacked.”

Every time I would finish and announcement I would take off a hat or coat and we would change the line of moose jokes behind me. When we played the tape back it was a fast paced, entirely modest, disrobing in front of inoffensive 20-year-old jokes. We got a couple of comments from students who liked or were confused by the jokes and we thought that it went pretty well. Wrong. The next morning as I was coming into school I was accosted by the vice principal who said he had to meet with me immediately. There was a parent who had been so offended by what her daughter had seen on the announcements that she had come to the school personally to have a little fluster about it. She was in his office waiting for me to explain why she thought I thought it was funny to put references to pornography on the morning announcements. Her daughter had watched the announcements read all of the jokes that were rapidly flashing behind me and picked up on the dentistry double ententes and got her sensibilities tarnished by reading “Fillings of Passion”. Which was a joke name for a joke movie about a joke dentist who gave a joke toothbrush to a joke girl who used it in a joke to carve her initials on a joke moose who bit her in a completely made up joke. I didn't get the problem at all. We had not shown the film, we had not read the name and pointed out that the word 'fillings' could have two meanings and one of them could be naughty. We had not even said, “Wink, wink, nudge, nudge – know what I mean?” I said the closest thing I could muster to an apology, the classic non-apology – I am sorry that your daughter was offended. That was not going to cut it for the mom whose daughter now had been irretrievably soiled and dragged through the filth that I choose to inflict on her against her will. She wanted me kicked off of the announcements and punished because she was mad that I wasn't even remotely remorseful. She was right, I wasn't. She left still mad and the other vice principal came in and we all had a chat about what a crazy prude that lady was and then we talked about how I should leave out anything that could seem offensive in the future. I agreed and went about my business for a bit.     

Some Homoerotic Announcements

 Besides the group activities in which I was supposed to plan and participate I was in charge of the daily morning announcements. Usually that meant that I got in and looked over the news and announcements and then give it a barely funny reading. On occasion I would try and be more than passingly funny or I would prerecord a video short. That was almost always a bad idea. My humor when given time to ferment has a tendency to get more and more edgy and naughty. I had a recorded interview with a good friend of mine who was a star football player, insofar as you can have a star player on a one win team. He was a running back and so I asked him to tell the ladies in the audience who were into bigger guys who in his opinion had the best butt when viewed from his unique prospective. He told me someone who most people knew and we laughed about it and then I edited the tape and the thing was funny because he was so offhandedly sure and quick about his response, like he had considered it many times before and he had an answer right at hand. I sent the tape to teacher-adviser and she said absolutely not. I was a little pissed and I left school for the rest of the day with my poopy pants on. After I left a kid from the junior class took the tape and ad-libed a hilarious voice over where I asked the kid where her got such an amazing shirt and he answers that his mom bought it at Mcfrugal's on sale. It was clean and fit for general high school consumption and light years funnier than what I had recorded in the actual interview. The tape was approved and we played it the next morning. People loved it because the voices and content was so funny. I was on the tape doing the interview but none of the credit for the final product was mine. I had mixed feeling about that, I wanted to be the star and for people to love me but at the same time I realized that this kid had done a much better job at being funny and that hurt my ego. I had a hard time admitting to myself that someone had done a better job at the thing I thought I was the best at. I did my best to be gracious and I complimented the kid and his work and every time someone told me I did a good job on that skit I made sure and tell them that it was not I that was responsible for the voice over. It took me a while to be okay with sharing the spotlight and the credit but fortunately he never made another masterpiece like the first and I was gone in a little bit anyway.  

Rock-Paper-Scissors, Leg Wrestling and Q-tips

 I need to get my stories strait, I left out another one that is pretty telling about my character that happened the end of my junior year. Luckily, this particular time machine is still revved up and back works just as well as forward. When my fellow student council hopefuls and I were supposed to put on an activity to show what kind of organization we would run we made some critical errors in judgment. Almost entirely at my urging we decided on having a three headed bracketed tournament featuring rock-paper-scissors ( good idea), leg wrestling (bad idea), and Mega-Q-tip-tilt-board jousting (terrible idea). Rock paper scissors has the benefit of being quick, universally understood, and non-violent. Double plus good. That bracket went off without a hitch and had a popular kid and a nerd in the final, just like a Disney movie. Like a Disney movie the nerd won but in a shocking turn of events based on what those films taught us, most people were unhappy that the scrappy come from behind nerd won. I am starting to think that those movies may be less based on reality then they claim. Leg wrestling was aborted early on because it is violent and really depends on the contestants being more or less the same size and gender. Almost no girls signed up and the ones that did were quickly eliminated by the football players who were in no way surprisingly dominate at a game that favored speed, strength and athleticism. Some rivalry was ignited and the leg wrestles got more intense then fun and refs were yelled at and we had to call it at an eight-way draw. Balance board jousting was just a stupid idea from the get go. I got the idea from American Gladiators.

Imagine this exact same thing without the hot chicks, the helmets, the knee pads, the referee, and the quality equipment. 

 If you remember though American gladiators had the contestants wear helmets, had well padded sticks and had mature adults participating. Anyone reading this who has had any experience with teenage boys can tell you what I did wrong. I put weapons in the hands of psychopaths. The bracket filled up quickly because there were weapons and hitting and that appeals to a certain high school demographic. The sticks we provided were broom handles tipped with tee-shirt globs taped on with duct tape and we discovered in the very first round two things, we should have done like the Gladiators had and put on helmets and that there was no good way for the ref to stop the action because he had no stick and was much less violent than the contestants. The first joust pitted a kid who needed no excuse to be crazy against one with less self-control then that and the contest turned into a bloody melee in less then ten seconds. The rules were that both people were supposed to stand on balance boards, hold their sticks with two hands and pummel, the first one off lost and then they were both supposed to quit. None of that happened. The first kid fell of before they engaged and then he choked up his stick into a base ball grip and swung as hard as he could at the other kid's head. Thankfully the blow was checked and only caused a bloody nose and not a concussion. The assaulted kid attacked back and battle was enjoined in earnest. I was yelling at them to stop, that had exactly no effect and then I tried to grab one of the sticks away and that was met with resistance as well. Eventually the vice principal came and ordered the fight to stop and that worked. He forbade the continuation of that contest and I couldn't have been more happy to oblige him. The rest of the time the rock-paper-scissors thing was going on people kept coming up and asking where those sticks were because they wanted a whack. I told them they were in heaven with all the pretty angels and left it at that. I was embarrassed at how badly I had misjudged my activities but as time would tell it was actually a pretty fair evaluation of the type of leadership I would bring to the position until I was kicked out.  

Rapid Fire Gun Club

 Being from classic old school hillbilly stock my friends and family really loved shooting at and destroying what-ever(ything) we could round up. Generally ammunition for our semi-auto assault style rifles would be expensive to come by but my dad would by Chinese surplus tins of bullets and then not keep a very good accounting of them so we could go and shoot a thousand rounds for free. Well, free to us. We would then get together any thing that seemed like it would be cool to shoot and go to do that. One of those times we drove to the gravel pit that had been sectioned off for use by the gun club and set up our targets, loaded up our 25, 40 and 75 round clips and then proceeded to rain down hell on the inanimate objects we had pronounced the sentence of shooting upon. Two things are important to note here; first armor piercing Chinese bullets suck, they are too hard and just pass through whatever you are shooting. Second, when you go to gun club to shoot you should check to see if right over the little berm you are shooting into there is a group of a hundred or so armed rednecks that are displeased by you shooting bullets over their head as fast as you can. If you are wondering the answer is that they are most displeased indeed. After our initial and very rapid volley we stopped to reload the magazines and a hornets nest of bearded men in camo got in their trucks and poured around the corner of the hill we had shot into to set us the frick strait. They swore at us and yelled at us and said they were calling the cops to report us shooting illegal guns because they heard automatic weapon fire. Not true, but I was not going to quibble that point. My friends and I jumped in the truck and he drove us away as fast as we could go. For once in a long time we were just too panicked to joke about it and we just went home and put the guns away and didn't go shooting again for a pretty long while.  

A Hike, a Dip, a Share and a Kiss

 Say what you will about me but one thing you have got to admit is that I am massively shallow and unabashedly self-serving when it comes to my relationships. I knew already that this girl I had been dating was not a long term project, not even a middle-term commitment because she was just so insufferably arrogant and self righteous. She was, however, still a woman and to that end still a target in my testosterone addled teen mind for a little squishing and kissing. I invited her to go climbing and camping with my friend's and I as my last ditch effort before returning her to the wild. We climbed until dark with my friends giving almost audible eye rolls to her stupid comments. As we wrapped up climbing we took our camping gear across the river and set up a camp for the guys and then my girl, my friend and I tried to hike some other gear up to that secret spot I used on the disastrous picnic-love-song debacle. That was so I could have a private camp out with the girl and me alone. The hike is very steep and we had installed a rope to help with the accent but my friend who was carrying her sleeping bag lost his footing and dropped it down into the river. I know that sounds a little too convenient and what-ever-shall-we-do-ish with a boy and a girl and only one dry sleeping bag. My friend ran down and retrieved the bag but it was too late and the one remaining bag had to be unzipped and shared between the girl and I. We spent a little more time at the group fire and then hiked back to our set up for the night. We laid down and got covered up the best you can in a shared sleeping bag when the girl is turned quite deliberately away in the classic do-not-try-it position. She didn't talk to me and faked going to sleep really much too soon. I was wondering what my best play was laying there in the dark listening to the distant river and being given the cold shoulder. I decided to try a little light cuddle and see what happened. I put my arm around her waist and tried for a little big-spoon lite. She warmed up to that and cuddled into the little-spoon position and after a hour or so she asked if I wanted to kiss her. I said sure, then we shared a kiss that was as unappealing as any I had ever had. She was not good at it despite all the times she had told me how much her and my friend had made out. I guess there are people who golf a lot and are not very good at that either. It was so incompetent that it actually cooled my jets and we spent the next hour or so engaged in banal conversation and then mercifully to sleep. I told her the next day after we were home and on our respective phones that I just didn't think we were going to work out and she was pissed. After the break up after three tepid weeks she told lots of people that I had tried to molest her out camping which was so absurd that I actually was not even threatened by the accusation and just laughed it off when people would ask. We never dated or even really spoke to each other again. The next time I saw her was after I had been away at college and I ran into her and what was clearly her boyfriend when I was at the video store with my sister and mother. She ran over to say hi to me in an over- friendly and over-happy manner and I snatched her up and pretended to try and kiss her on the mouth that took the wind out of her fake excited sails and she just looked confused. She introduced me to her boyfriend/fiance and I said cryptically, 'Oh, so I guess things have changed.' We said how good it was to see each other and she was talking in an excited conspiratorial way with her man as they walked away. That was the real end of it.  

A Meal of Dead Animal

 It is a curious case with a great number of pretentious idiots that, at heart, seek attention to espouse borderline, yet still safe, alternative cultures and then get real preachy about it for a while. After they have used up the pretended morality and shock value they quite suddenly switch to something else. This can be confusing for people who are not as quick to change their deeply held convictions, or for people who were on vacation or gone for a week or two and then comeback to a new set of rules and outrages. The girl I was dating was a fired up vegetarian with a constant stream of condescending nagging for 'carnivores'. For the couple of weeks we were dating she would feign disgust and loudly complain about people eating or using animal products. It is endlessly entertaining to me to listen to people complain about judgmental people as they, without a shred of self-consciousness, lay on their personal public reckoning and shaming. Hilarious. As is the case with almost all drive-by moralists their convictions are only as deeply held as they are convenient and one day after rock climbing the damn broke and feel-bads were hurt. We had been up the canyon a few cities north and after a hard day of climbing we stopped in to get some warm delicious slow roasted Arby's signature thin sliced roast beef.

Dead and rotting animal parts that happen to taste amazing.

 She was fidgeting in her seat eating her delicious vegetable-based meal while we went and ordered our food. When we got to the table she started in on the 'you-are-eating-a-dead-animal' spiel that anyone with preachy vegetarian friends will have heard. I pointed out that it was mush safer and more humane to eat them after they were dead. She said she just got sick thinking of the rotting meet in her stomach. My friend, a man inexpert at suffering fools, started dramatically pointing out that the napkins were also dead and the tomatoes and potatoes we were dipping and consuming had also passed to the choir immortal and were with all the pretty angels now. She preferred her judgment, as do most bossy people, to be taken with a healthy dose of shame and deference and not a bunch of sassy pridefully wicked comic rebuttals. She was mad and that made the next part even harder for her. The smell of the delicious Arby's roast beef penetrated her conveniently held convictions and she casually picked up one of the sandwiches and started to eat it. Ideally the capitulation and indulgence phase of hypocrisy will happen in privacy to keep up the semblance of a facade but the desire for a taste of dead and rotting animal was just to great and she caved in. We, of course, let it slide and didn't tease her endlessly about her sudden fall from her contrived moral high horse to the depraved and exploitative hedonism of animal flesh consumption. You know? Now that I think more carefully I remember teasing her non-stop until she told us three to just f-word ourselves and said she never wanted to talk to us again. She didn't stick with that resolve but in hindsight I should have respected her wishes.