Reckless Abandon

Another Evening In The Cosmic Pinball Machine

2008-04-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

"I could murder a beer right about now," I say to myself as I pull out of the church parking lot. It's been a long day and I have not had a beer in weeks. I pull across the road and into a shopping center. I squint out the driver’s side window as I idle past the doors of the super market, trying in vain to read the store hours. It's 9:15 PM. People are coming and going from the store and I know that I can stop and buy a six-pack of Hoegaarden or Anchor Steam, but for some reason, I drive on past and head for home.

9:30 PM. The doggies are waiting for me. The ratta-tat-tat of claws on the wood floor as they follow me out back into the moonlight to do their business. There's an unseasonable chill in the air and I decide to build a fire in the fire place. It's late, but it will give Lori Beth something nice to come home to. Back inside, the doggies sniff through the kindling pail as I place the splintered flakes of wood piece-by-piece over the tender on the andirons. I wrestle a piece from big-dog before she can munch on it.

9:45 PM. I walk out front and rummage through my wood pile, looking for suitable pieces to burn. I stand up with an armload of oak, poplar, and cherry. Somewhere in the distance, I hear the shrieking agony of rubber on asphalt, punctuated by a sickening crunch. It's just the background noise of modern life. I barely notice it as I walk back into the house.

9:50 PM. The flames burn in Arabic. Leaping tongues spelling strange words along the tops of the logs. I poke at it, rearranging the logs. A flaming piece of bark tumbles out onto the hearth. With tongs in hand, I try and place it back in the fire and as I do so, my phone begins to ring. I fumble with the tongs and it takes a few tries to get the ember back into the fireplace. Setting the tongs aside, I jog into the kitchen for the phone. The caller ID says "Lori." I answer. She always calls when she's on her way. But her voice is not right. It sounds strange and distant at first and I can only tell that she is crying. Immediately, my mind begins to invent scenarios that explain the panic that I am hearing in her voice. It's one of those conversations where you will remember it forever despite the fact that you can not recall the words that were spoken. "Pinegrove," I hear her say. "I'm coming." And that's all I remember saying in reply. I'm strangely calm. I'm on autopilot here. I know I'm leaving the house. I'm watching myself grab keys and put on a pair of flip-flops. It's a serious situation. Of that much, I'm certain. Serious situations always make me think about guns and I move as if to grab my H&K from beneath the pillow on the bed. No. She's fine...sort of...God, I hope so. No one is trying to hurt her. I know emotions are going to be running high wherever I'm going and the last thing I need is a gun in my hand. I've got my fists and elbows, I can dispense justice on the spot if needs be..."What the hell am I saying?!" I half yell as I slam the front door behind me.

10:01 PM. I never speed in residential areas and tonight is no exception. I've had the phone pressed against my ear since I left the house. She's crying but I have to lay the phone in the passenger seat in order to shift gears. I'm as good as there anyways. She's only four blocks away. Only. But twenty-five miles per hour is agony when your love is waiting for you, bleeding and broken in a smoldering pile of mechanical chaos that reeks of antifreeze and brake fluid. "God, I know you are sovereign..." I start to pray as I wrestle with the speedometer needle. "Some things just happen by shear dumb chance, this is just an artifact of the cosmic pinball machine that is the world you created. Right?" This is not the time for this, but circumstances beg the obvious question. That is, how can God allow things like this to happen? Or, more succinctly, surely He doesn't have an immediate and direct hand in causality at this level. Or rather, some things happen by shear chance. I mean, He is sovereign in that he created the world, set everything in motion, and then let things happen without further intervention. This randomness, this chance, is here because He willed it to be this way at the beginning. In that sense, EVERYTHING that happens, by chance or otherwise, still happens according to His will. Thus chance exists in harmony with His sovereignty. I know in my heart that this cannot be so. But it sure makes me feel better, right now, knowing that He wouldn't just deliberately do something like this to my girl. But if He is everywhere and everywhen, then he knew about this before it happened. Because, after all, for God, there is no chance...or is there? Do the numbers that come from a random-number generator remain random if He knows what they will be before hand? What do I mean by randomness? SMACK!!! I slap myself mentally. My wife could be dying and I'm penning a mental treatise on causality. Mailboxes and trashcans file by in the crepuscular cone of my headlights. Ahead I see the flashing red and white lights...north of the intersection where I'm expecting her to be..."God, you are sovereign and you are in direct control of everything and I refuse to believe otherwise."

10:04 PM. I pull onto the grass and turn on my caution lights. Before I can even climb out of my car, my father in law is leaning in the open door with his arm resting on the roof. "Lori's been in an accident." He says. "I know, Dean..." I say as I step out of the car, "...Let's go find her." The crunch of broken glass underfoot as I cross the intersection on foot. I can smell the pine trees and I know that I could hear the wind in their branches were it not for the sound of idling diesel engines and radio chatter. I'm amazingly calm, to the point where I actually wonder if I have a soul at all. Faceless people are milling about. Blinding light seems to be coming from every direction, but their faces seem to be ensconced in shadow. A ring of vehicles with lights shining inward, painting the scene in an eerie spectrum of surreal hues. Crunch-crunch, glass and shards of plastic making tiny explosions under my flip-flops. We pass an old Honda Accord. It looks like it’s dark green in the light. Its guts are hemorrhaging through the crumpled body-panels. Brake-fluid, anti-freeze, oil, all mixing together and spreading out over the asphalt as the engine continues to scream incessantly at a high rev. And somehow, the sound of its racing engine will always remain impressed in my mind. I studied the dying vehicle as I passed. The car is empty, deflated airbags. I turn away. Dean is pointing but I already see her Toyota, silhouetted against the blazing headlights of an emergency response vehicle. My pace quickens along with my heart-rate. The front wheel on the driver's side is set at a severe camber, like the wheels on an overloaded cartoon car. I step up the curb and into the thick sod. Immediately, I'm ankle deep in sandy mud. The slimy grit oozes between my toes but I barely notice it. Her door is open and there is a stout black man standing in it. He's dressed in black and wearing a funny floppy black toboggan on his head. He turns toward me; all I can see are a pair of big eyes that exude compassion and sincerity. I like this guy. It's something in his eyes. "I'm a police officer," he says. I like him even more. "I'm her husband." I say. He takes me by the arm and pulls me past him so that I am face-to-face with her. I've never really seen her cry before. Her face is a mess, mascara slithering down her cheeks. There's no blood. But if there had been, I would not have noticed. It's her eyes that cause me to catch my breath. So full of fear and desperation. She's looking at me sideways. There's a man in the back, reaching over the top of her seat. He has her head in his hands. "Hey...Babe." My words come as a whisper. Say something. "You've got to hold still, ok? You've got to maintain c-spine." I say with a little more confidence. Why am I so calm? I glance at the guy in the back. He's all business and says nothing. Lori's left hand is held aloft as if she's reaching back for her seatbelt. She's just holding it that way, like she doesn't trust the guy in the back seat and she's thinking about pushing his hands away. I take her hand in mine and caress it gently. She sobs softly. Dean is leaning in the passenger side with her other hand in his.

10:08 PM. I'm brushed aside by paramedics. "Here." Dean hands me her purse and keys. The strobe effect of the red and white flashing lights makes everything feel like time-lapse photography. I stare at the purse and keys before turning to take them to my car. I've forgotten about the mud but I'm quickly reminded as my feet sink in. I stagger, fighting to keep my flip-flops. My jerky movements are illuminated by the ambulance whose lights are trained on the rescue scene behind me. Paramedics are rushing back and forth. Someone is calling for a backboard. I wonder if they are going to pull the ambulance through the grass and I feel like I should warn them about the mud. But that's stupid. They would never do that. Why am I even thinking about this? I put Lori's purse in my trunk and return. I'm so calm. There's a swarm of people pressed tightly around her door. I don't know what to do. For the first time, I notice the cold. I notice that I am shaking violently. I hug myself as I bend down to study the damage to her Toyota, trying to piece together what happened, hoping to somehow discover something, I don't know what, that will convince me that things are not as serious as they seem. My stomach twists as I look behind the driver's side wheel. The drive-shaft and all of the suspension linkages are sheared off and hanging in a sludge of lithium grease. It looks somehow like a grizzly football injury or something. I circle the car. A trail of anti-freeze marks the trajectory. She's nearly forty-feet from where the impact occurred. My mind starts doing tentative calculations. I don't like where they are headed. There are no skid marks, only the trail of anti-freeze. "He ran the stop sign,” I heard a voice say. Who? I'm going to kill him. I look up to find Lori staring at me through the wind shield. She's reading my mind, pleading with her eyes. I nod subtly, close my eyes, and swallow. "Take this," It's Dean's voice. He's handing me Lori's phone. "And this," he hands me her headset. I make my way back to my car, forgetting about the mud again. The grit between my toes is starting to chafe the skin. I look up to see a kid. He couldn't be more than sixteen or seventeen. He’s black, and he’s wearing black slacks, a nicely pressed white dress shirt, and a black waiter's apron. He’s holding his left arm in a funny way. In his other hand, he has a cell phone pressed to his ear. "...bad wreck," I hear him say. This is the guy. I know but I don’t know either. Kind of like the time I saw the guy who made a cuckold out of me. We walked passed each other in a Wal-Mart one afternoon. I knew it was him...but I didn't know. Kind of like the way a mom knows her kid is doing drugs...but at the same time she doesn't know. This is the guy I almost vowed to kill only moments ago. Across the intersection, another boy in identical clothing stands helplessly. They could only be brothers. I feel badly for them. You can read the fear in their body language. Some kid and his brother, coming home late from work. It was a hard stop-sign to see, especially at night...but to send Lori's Toyota flying forty feet down the road; they had to be going faster than forty-five miles per hour. But I had done stupid things at their age too.

10:23 PM. I returned once more to the Toyota. My brother-in-law, Ralph, is standing next to Dean. I feel naked and exposed with these members of my new family gazing upon me and my tragedy. We are all concerned for Lori, but when Ralph and Dean look into my eyes, I can see this overwhelming sense of pity. Those glances that make you realize how fragile your composure is, the kind that make your throat throb with a stifled sob and your nasal cavity burn the way it does as you try to fight tears. I barely know these people. Lori and I have been married for less than four months. And before that, my ongoing divorce had forced the meet-the-family routine to happen a few weeks before the wedding. But we are covering a lot of ground here tonight. We watch as half a dozen shouting guys move Lori from her seat and onto a bright orange backboard that looks red under the street light. "They say that you can ride in the ambulance with her, but you have to ride up front," Dean says. I nod. As if reading my mind, Dean goes on, "If I were you, I would drive your car, though." I nod again. "That's what I'm going to do," I say. Ralph appears next to me. "Don't worry about the car. I'll take care of all that," he says. "Thanks, Ralph," and I mean it as I try and look him in the eyes.

10:30 PM. I’m almost to the intersection of Wal-Triana and Highway 72, fighting to keep my speed at forty-five miles per hour. I have to beat the ambulance to the hospital. My phone is lost in the passenger side floor boards. But I’ve put Lori’s headset on and I’m dialing Mom and Dad. Not really sure why. It just seems like something that I should do under the circumstances. Mom is concerned. I feel stupid and incompetent for not having more details. The phone beeps. It’s Dean. I have to let Mom go, promising to call her later. “Do you have Lori’s keys?” Dean asks. And I do. They are in the trunk with her purse. “They need them in order to move her car,” he says. I affect a sharp u-turn and head back. Frustration is setting in.

10:35 PM. It’s like revisiting a nightmare as I pull up on the accident scene again. Ralph is waiting for me. I roll my window down and hand him the key. “The state trooper needs to talk to you,” he says with a look on his face that resonates with my frustration. I park my car and walk to the squad car. The trooper wants her license. I retrieve it from her purse. “Does she live on Pinegrove?” He asks. I blink; I’m not really paying attention. “Uh, no….111 Coldsprings Drive-“He cuts me off, completing my sentence as he notices the address on her license. He hands me her license. “You can go,” he says without even looking up from his clip board. Ralph is waiting for me at the car. “She’s gonna be ok. Just take it easy and be safe,” he says. It’s comforting to hear him say this.

10:48 PM. I get on the on-ramp at I-565. It’s late, the interstate is empty, and I’m about to blow my lid from the tedium of adhering to the speed limit. I’ve had enough and the stress boils over. I down shift to forth and drop the hammer. My little red Evo screams as the tach-needle surges to redline. Bam. I knock it into fifth just before the rev-limiter engages. I’m pinned in my seat by the acceleration. One-hundred ten, one-hundred twenty, one-hundred thirty, one-hundred forty miles per hour, I catch my breath. At one hundred and forty-five miles per hour, every hair on my body is sticking straight up. My mouth is as dry as a cup of flower. She could easily go faster, but I dare not try it. What have always been long sweeping turns in the interstate, suddenly seem like diminishing radius hair-pins.

11:00 PM. The freak show that is the ER from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM. I sign in and they give me a tag to wear that has her room-number on it. A4. I brush the curtain aside to find the room bustling with activity. The cacophony of medical-speak between the nurses, the squeak of sneakers on the linoleum, the beep-beep of her heart monitor, the crackle of plastic wrappers being removed from sterilized instruments. Hoses, tubes, and chords coming out of the walls. My mother in law looks at me from across the room. She’s in the corner and she’s assaulting my composure with her eyes and quivering chin. I go to her and hug her before turning to Lori. “Can she feel her legs?” I ask. Linda nods, “She can feel them and move them.” This comes as a huge relief and manifests itself in the form of an audible sigh. Only one of us can stay. Linda picks up her coat and leans in over Lori to tell her that she will be right outside. I move next to her and put my fingers gently in Lori’s hair. The left side of her face is pink and swollen. The neck brace forces her to look at me out of the corner of her eye. I don’t even know what to say to her. As my fingers slide gently along her scalp, I see the fear and panic subside a little in her eyes. “How ya doin’, babe?” I ask. What a stupid thing to ask. “I’m ok,” she lies. I nod, watching the nurse fiddle with the monitor. Lori’s blood pressure is 117 over 50. I wonder if this is a safe number. I wish I was a doctor so badly. A nurse explains that she is going to have to cut Lori’s clothes off since they don’t want to risk moving her. Lori nods with her eyes. Bit by bit, her clothing is removed. Lori glances sideways at me and grins, “you’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” I smile, “It’s the highlight of my evening.”

11:10 PM. We are alone now but for a single nurse. LaGina. She has a kind face and a soothing voice. “Ok, baby?” this and “ok, baby?” that. She’s clearly younger than either of us but with her calm confident actions, I barely notice. “I’m going to have to start an IV and get some blood for the lab. Ok, baby?” she says. Lori’s eyes roll towards me and her face contorts as if to say: “Here we go again.” I smile, causing her to smile back at me. Her voice is weak but she says: “Good luck with that. I’m a hard stick.” “She really is,” I add, “Her veins are shot.” Lori smiles sardonically at the ceiling. Her cynicism is comforting to me. This is my Lori alright. LaGina comes around to my side of the bed and with a pile of glass tubes and an IV needle. Lori offers her her hand dutifully. “Wow,” LaGina remarks after looking the arm over for a moment or two. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m only gonna try once. Ok, baby? Don’t wanna make a pin-cushion out of you.” I force myself to laugh at her joke. Lori smiles. I say a silent prayer, asking God to make this easy for once. LaGina wraps a thick rubber strap around Lori’s bicep and starts flicking her arm all over. She finds vein in Lori’s hand. “Wow, that’s a good one,” I remark. “This is gonna stick. Ok, baby?” Lori’s eyes squint as the needle punches through the skin. Blood appears in the clear tubing behind the needle. “Score,” I say. I’m truly impressed. Thank you, Lord. I’ve seen nurses stick Lori more than a dozen times before calling for someone else to try. With Lori’s BP at 117 over 50, it takes a veritable eternity to fill four viles with blood.

11:20 PM. The curtains are swept aside as Phillip enters. He’s got a grin on his face. He stands over the bed and watches the blood trickle into the vile and remarks on the fact that LaGina was actually able to stick a vein. I nod. “Boy, nothing’s worse than those nurses in the Navy,” he says, “When they stick you, it’s like BAM!” He punches me in the shoulder. I grin. Lori smiles feebly. LaGina can’t fill the last vile and she moves to the other arm and uses a butterfly needle. When she finishes, she tells us that they will be in to do X-rays in a little while. This means in about an hour if we are lucky. But we are more than lucky. After fifteen minutes, a hippy looking X-ray tech wearing cargo pants and a scrub top enters the room. “You guys wait outside,” he says to Phillip and me as he goes through the contents of the cabinet above the sink. I run my fingers through Lori’s hair one last time before complying.

11:30 PM. It could be 11:30 PM. I don’t know. I haven’t looked at a clock since I parked my car outside the ER. Lori’s X-rays are done and we are told that we are now waiting for a CT-scan. It’s just the two of us in the room now. Her eyes are closing and I get nervous. What if she has a concussion? I try to make small talk to keep her awake as I caress her scalp. Her hair feels soft and cool as it falls between my fingers. Hours pass as we wait. Lori begins to cough when the orderly comes to take her for the CT-scan. She almost screams from the pain. “Oh! My back!” her voice cracks as fresh tears stream down her face. I see panic in her eyes. I begin to fear that her injuries may be severe.

2:58 AM. The CT-scan is done and a nurse comes in to tell us that everything looks good and that the doctor will be in to see us before they discharge Lori. I don’t think I’ve ever been this relieved in my life. I return to the waiting room to give Dean and Linda the news. The lights are low in the little private waiting room just off of the ER. Dean and Linda are slumped in their chairs as a news anchor rambles on and on from a flat-screen television on the wall. Dean’s eyes are red with fatigue. We savor the moment together as I tell them that everything is going to be fine.

3:00 AM. The doctor enters the room. Emotionless and impersonal. It’s a perfunctory measure for him. Lori is going to be fine. Take X tablets of Z, Y times daily. She has lumbar and cervical sprains, which is med-speak for whiplash. I jokingly comment that it must be acute because Lori has a lot of whip to lash.

3:33 AM. Finally home. Lori breathes softly in the bed next to me. I pray a prayer of thanksgiving again for the hundredth time as I watch her sleep. Everything is going to be fine. The street lamp outside paints lines on the comforter as it shines through the slits in the blinds.

The Banquet

2007-10-16T09:09:00.001-07:00

So I grew tired of organizing the banquet every year. It's not as if I'd volunteered the first time. It was a thankless task and no one ever helped out. This year, however, I could not bring myself to do it. I'd wake up in the morning, bent on organizing the dreaded event but a perpetual lethargy would linger over me throughout the day. By late evening, I would find myself completely exhausted from a day of doing absolutely nothing. The whole ordeal reminded me of graduate school.

I HATED graduate school. It haunted me like a bad case of herpes. At least with herpes, there's the initial bliss of erotic pleasure but with grad school, it was one long drawn out prison rape.

Thus I began to loathe my existence as the date of the banquet loomed on the calendar. The phone rang daily. Charity people, anxious and curious about the status of the un-mailed invitations. Some were curious about who this year's guest speaker would be. I could hear them blabbing to my answering machine as I cowered, naked in the floor of my closet, illuminated by a thin slice of yellow light that accentuated my jaundice.

It is now day 39, I am nearly catatonic. I have exhausted my supply of vodka and cigarettes and I have no choice but to brave the cruel winter air in my quest to resupply. My bathrobe offers little in the way of protection. I think my balls may have frozen to the bench at the bus stop. I don't know. Vodka puts hair on your chest. I imagine it can grow you a new pair as well.

The seat is warm and the bus smells like sulfur. I can feel them staring at me from every corner, judging me. Surely they know about the banquet! The rage wells up within me. The shame of defeat. Humanity conspiring against me. So I'm broken. So I failed. "You win! You win! Are you happy?!" I scream as time stands still. Sometimes it's not about winning, it's about tearing away from security, cold-cocking the guy on the podium, and whippin' out your ding-dong for the whole world to see.

The Dogs

2007-08-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

Joel was five, maybe four at the time. I was ten-ish. This was when we lived in the first house in Tai'tung. The gaudy duplex that looked like an owl from the front. The one that was just around the corner from the Zhang's home.

It was a hot steamy day, the kind that made your eyes feel glazed and your limbs feel heavy. A day that blended seamlessly into the perpetual Taiwanese summer. With air so humid and so thick that you felt the need to chew it up and swallow in your efforts to breathe. There was no breeze and the little yellow BMX that I pedaled along on was travelling too slowly to create its own. It felt as if my head were inside a fish bowl full of steam. The brake levers rattled with every bump and little droplets of sweat fell from my nose and chin and splattered on the foam pad that protected my posterity from the savagery of the steel that ran from the seat to the handle bars.

I was inching my way down the broad un-trafficked road that led to the hospital, the road that was flanked by the abandoned market to the west, and the typical tangle of chest-high grass and mounds of rubble to the east. My eyes were heavy with the strain of existence in the merciless sun, and so they watched the asphalt sliding by beneath my pedalling feet. So it was that the black blur came as something of a surprise. I snapped to attention, squeezing the brake levers and skidding sharply to the right in an effort to avoid colliding with the mass of black fur. Pebbles and dust scattered as my bike ground to a halt next to a pair of mutts whose butts were spot-welded together. They had foolishly chosen to breed in the middle of the road at noon on asphalt that was hot enough to sear the conscience of a saint. The female looked up at me with eyes that bespoke her woe. So typical in dogs. Such impulsive creatures with such short memories. They suffer the consequences of their actions in such a bewildered state. The male looked back at me over his shoulder and the mirage from the asphalt put tears in his eyes.

I had seen dogs locked in this configuration many times before. In fact, it was not an uncommon sight in that part of the world where dogs roamed the streets like vermin; dirty, diseased, and often starving. Not an uncommon sight and yet it was still so compelling. And for a kid as oblivious to propriety as I was, such occasions offered the opportunity to roll up the sleeves and get an intimate look at the business of procreation. I remember the first time that I stumbled across a pair of mating dogs. I had a pretty good idea of what I was looking at and to be sure, I had walked up and inspected the mechanics on my hands and knees as a crowd of snickering locals looked on.

My father had conveyed the facts of life to me one evening after I had asked some very difficult questions at the dinner table. Questions prompted by a very confusing discourse that I'd engaged in with some of the local children earlier that day. A discourse marked by a barrage of confusing hand gestures and a steady stream of very graphic depictions etched in the dirt with a stick. "The man has a penis and the woman has a vagina," my father had read to me that evening from the book that I had never seen before. And upon that first encounter with breeding dogs, I had discovered a very amusing corollary. That is, dogs have penises and vaginae too. And fueled by a euphoric sense of accomplishment, I had produced a stick and attempted to pry the dogs apart, whereupon I was forced to conclude that a two-headed dog made for a rather intimidating foe.

I was done with silly experiments. And on this day, it was enough to stand by and watch. So I stared until gripped by a sudden impulse. I turned my bike around, and set out at a mad pace for the house. The dogs watched with dreary indifference as I vanished in the undulating shimmer of the mirage.

I skidded to a halt in front of the house and jumped off of the bike without even bothering with the kickstand. "Joel!" I yelled as I burst through the front door. "Joel's outside. Don't yell in the house!" My mother scolded. I turned and dashed back out the door. Joel stood on top of a flint boulder the size of a washing machine that rested at the far end of the "yard." The "yard" was a rolling lumpy field of waist-high grass that was partitioned by foot-worn paths that zig-zagged among the mounds. Joel was the self-appointed supreme commander of the world. He stood atop the rock in his camouflage cowboy hat that tilted back high on his forehead. He wore a tattered Houston Oilers T-shirt underneath his camouflage vest. Both were tucked into his camouflage shorts that were held up by an elastic belt that had snagged a belt loop or two. He had completed the look with a pair of red rubber rain boots and a plastic UZI submachinegun that was almost as big as he was.

"Joel," I shouted again. He eyed me imperiously from his perch. Evidently, he was in one of his more serious moods. I quickly realized why this was. He had mounted the boulder in an effort to escape the neighbor's billygoat whom he had provoked by prodding it with the barrel of his gun. He had been on the rock for some time. The billygoat had lost interest long ago, but Joel wasn't taking any chances. "Come here," I shouted and motioned to him with my hands, "hurry!" He took one long look at the goat, jumped down and stumbled through the grass in his frantic four-year-old run. His dirt-smudged face was all that I could see. He scowled with his eyes as he ran. Joel was never scared. It made me smile. He was only four but he was already pretty much the man.

He arrived out of breath. "Get on." I said as I picked up the bike. He complied with a shrug, shoved his gun down the front of his pants, and clambered up onto the little luggage wrack behind the seat. I strained at the pedals and the bike teetered back and forth as I struggled to maintain balance while we got going. "Where we goin'?" he asked, a minute or two after we got under way. "I gotta show you something." I replied.

The dogs were there, just as I had left them. They looked up with glum disinterest as we pulled up in front of them and climbed off of the bike. Joel and I stood side-by-side, staring at the spectacle. I studied his face for a reaction. He was grim, but I could see the faintest indication of an inquisitive luster in his eyes. Joel never indulged anyone with a reaction. He was born with an indefatigable determination to refuse to be caught off-guard. He soaked up the scene for a minute or two before pulling his UZI out and making as if to prod the bizarre creature with the barrel. "Nuh uh," I planted a hand against his chest and shook my head. He glared up at me and shoved the gun back down his pants. Together, we stared for a minute or two before getting back on the bike and heading back home. Not a word was spoken but I could tell that he was deep in thought. I knew he was perplexed and I gleaned a fair amount of satisfaction from this.

Later that evening, as my family sat around the dinner table eating, the usual conversation dwindled. Suddenly, Joel's eyes went wide as if he'd just remembered something very important. I knew what was coming and I gulped hard. I opened my mouth to cut him off but it was too late.

"Today I saw a long dog with two heads and a bunch of legs." He said excitedly. My parents slowed their chewing as they processed the statement. It didn't take them long to figure out just what he had seen. Mom and Dad stopped chewing and stared at each other uncomfortably. Dad cleared his throat loudly and wiped his mouth with his napkin. Tea almost exploded from Em's nostrils as she cupped her hand over her mouth.

Poor Joel mistook all of this for incredulity and he looked at me angrily as if to say: "You saw it too! Tell them!" I shook my head. "No!" I said to him emphatically, using only my eyes. He looked around. His rage was building. "JOSH SHOWED IT TO ME!" He screamed. I slumped down in my chair until my eyes were level with the table top. Dad glared at me with the unmistakable sarcasm that said: "Thanks a lot, Josh!" He didn't like reading the book. And Joel was about to get the book.

My Day So Far

2007-08-23T07:49:00.000-07:00

[joshua.hewlett@drsys138 rhel4]$ sudo rpm -Uihv --nodeps ptags-6.4.74-1.i386.rpm

Password:********

joshua.hewlett is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

[joshua.hewlett@drsys138 rhel4]$ fuck you

bash: fuck: command not found

(Aaaaarrrrrrgggghhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!)

Lover Boy

2007-08-22T08:42:00.000-07:00

A large cardboard box in the middle of my office floor. I eyed it suspiciously from the door, expecting Johnny Knoxville to come busting out of it at any second. I sidled to my desk, refusing to turn my back on it. At the same time, I scanned the office for hidden cameras. And for the first time in the five years that I had occupied that office, I truly noticed all of the little arcane details. "What a dump," I muttered. I nudged the box with my foot. It was heavy, but not heavy enough to contain a man. I set my coffee on the desk and produced my keys from my jacket pocket. I used my car key to punch through the tape. No packing labels or invoices taped to the box, I noted as I pried the flaps up. A layer of crumpled brown paper lay beneath the flaps. I plunged my hands into the paper. No use being delicate at this point. I went at the paper like a crazed terrier, shoving fist fulls of the paper back between my legs. I saw a patch of shiney vinyl and I smelled that new rubber smell that reminded me of new school supplies. I pulled the folded heap of vinyl from the box.

It was a hideous thing!! The enclosed invoice showed the last four digits of MY credit card number. A life-sized, anatomically complete, inflatable Elvis doll. This had to be Ginger's work. Clearly she had ordered it off of Amazon using my account and had not thought to change the shipping address. "Eeesh," I shuttered at the thought of a flushed Ginger lying in bed next to Vinyl Elvis, lit cigarettes hanging from their mouths. I wanted to kick this guy's ass but I suddenly felt foolish about laying into a lumpy pile of vinyl right there in the office.

Footsteps in the hallway. I struggled to shove the deflated hunka-hunka burning love back into the box. I folded the flaps back down frantically.

"Jeff." It was Mr. Bennett's voice.

"Goodmorning, sir." I stood and spun around to face him.

"Whatcha got there?" Mr. Bennett pointed with his chin as he took a sip of coffee from the chipped Boss-of-the-Century mug.

"That? That's nothing, sir. It's a uh birthday present for my nephew. He's turning six tomorrow..." I was a bad liar and I could feel my collar getting scratchy. I loosened my tie.

I could see Mr. Bennett's eyes squinch up the way they did when he grew skeptical. "Jeff, that looks like a um..." he gestured towards the box with his coffee mug. I turned. My heart nearly shattered my sternum. Shit! Six inches of flaccid penis protruded from beneath one of the flaps. I was going to kill Ginger. I was going to kill her!!!!!

Dream Come True

2007-06-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

A pill cutter and a bottle of ginko. These were the items on a rather abbreviated shopping list, scrawled out on the back of an old dry-cleaning receipt that I pulled out of my blazer pocket. A list that short didn't warrant the trouble of searching for a pen and a scrap of paper. But somehow, by seeing the list set in drying ink, I was able to establish my resolve. Today, armed with this list, I will become the master of my fate.

It's only a zero-sum-game if you're breaking even. Fairness. Yet another multisyllabic word that's nothing more than a jumble of vowels and consonants to me now. A lot like justice. If you've ever been asked to define the concept of justice, you know what I'm talking about. It's an exercise in futility. We all cruise through life thinking that we know what's fair and what's just...what's normal. You're seven years old, in a classroom full of children, they are making you read stories about people with names like Jan and Ted and their little three-letter world. But your little mind can't focus because you're staring out the window at a multisyllabic world full of people and places and things that are so much more interesting than Jan and Ted who are telling their dog, Pug, to "Run, Pug, run." So you find yourself sitting in a doctor's office. Your parents standing across the room, conversing with the doctor in low voices. The doctor is talking to them but he's looking at you. And when he comes over to talk to you, he has a superfluous smile stitched to his face and he calls you names like sport and pal.

The pills make you like Jan and Ted. The pills make you normal. But the window still tugs at your heart as the years turn into decades. And it's not Jan and Ted anymore, it's differential equations and abstract algebra until one day you find yourself sitting at a desk in an office with your name on the door. A three-piece suit, a briefcase, an electric razor, and gourmet coffee. The blinds on the window are closed because you don't want to realize that this is not your dream-come-true. Because deep down, you know that it's their dream-come-true.

Turnabout is fair play. Dreams are fragile. I know. Because the pieces of all of mine still crunch underfoot whenever I move in life. The damage is done and it's irreparable. But I don't care about that anymore. It's not about my dreams anymore as much as it's about f##king theirs up and I'm going to start with a pill cutter.

"Cut the pills; reduce the dosage. Get yourself off of the stuff." I wish it had been my idea but it was Graham's. He'd told me this after we had sat down for a heart-to-heart in which I told him about what the CIA had done to me over the previous eight months. There was a sympathetic glimmer in his eyes and for the first time ever, I found myself actually liking the guy. I'd chosen to tell him because I knew that he had noticed the decrescendo in my work performance. You mention the CIA and eyebrows go up all around. Afterall, I needed this job and he deserved an explanation. And I deserved to get something out of the whole experience. F##k the CIA and their non-disclosure forms. I'd jumped through hoops for them for eight months only to have them can me despite the fact that I was multi-lingual and faster, stronger, and smarter than any of their other recruits. They wouldn't tell me why. They never tell you why. But I knew it was the Ritalin. You take it for twenty years and no matter how competent you are, people always treat you like you're a f##king half-wit when they find out.

The Swelling Pony-Sploder

2007-06-20T12:17:00.000-07:00

The Bufo Inflarenis - also known as the "speckled puff toad," the "belching dozer biscuit," the "swelling pony-sploder," or simply the "sploder toad" - is a rare species of toad that is native to the Bufo Islands, a small island chain west of Guam. Mature female puff toads are known to reach weights in excess of 40 kilograms (88 lbs) but typically weigh anywhere from 20 to 30 kilograms (44 to 66 lbs) and grow to be about the size of a car tire. Mature males are considerably smaller; usually no larger than a tennis ball and they weigh between 300 and 800 grams (10 and 28 ounces.) Bufo Inflarenis is gray in color with a stripe of black warts down the center of the back. Males are identified by the yellow markings on the underside of their hind legs. Bufo Inflarenis' diet consists primarily of bauxite ore, a variety of plants and insects, and, on rare occasions, dead batteries.

Following the discovery of Bufo Inflarenis, a sharp and ongoing taxonomic debate arose within the herpetological community. The debate centers on two peculiarities that distinguish the speckled puff toad from other members of the amphibia class. Namely, the speckled puff toad's possession of teeth and the fact that two out of five female speckled puff toads give birth to live scoliotic snow turtles. It is the toad's teeth that allow it to masticate and ingest naturally-occurring bauxite ore that is abundant in and around the islands' numerous sulfur pits and hot springs.

However, it is Bufo Inflarenis' bizarre defense mechanism that makes it truly unique. As bauxite ore passes through the toad's gastrointestinal tract, it is broken down, producing small quantities of aluminum that are stored in a small fistulous pouch that is located near the toad's anus. When startled or threatened, the toad injects muriatic acid from its intestines into the pouch that contains the aluminum paste. The ensuing chemical reaction yields aluminum chloride and hydrogen gas. The excessive elasticity of the toad's pouch and abdominal skin help to facilitate rapid expansion of the hydrogen gas. Consequently, the toad inflates almost instantaneously, increasing its total volume by approximately 5000%. It is not uncommon for a fully inflated female to occupy a volume comparable to that enclosed by a studio apartment or a two-car garage. In contrast, the average male is approximately the size of a dumpster when fully inflated. In either case it is no surprise that such rapid expansion can prove catastrophic for wildlife in close proximity to the swelling toad. As expected, the pony-sploder has no natural predators. This, however, does not result in the prolificacy of the species as might be expected. Lengthy gestation periods and the occasional birth of a scoliotic snow turtle combine to mitigate the risk of over-population. Furthermore, the high volume of hydrogen gas contained within an inflated puff toad causes the puff toad to float upwards as buoyant forces act upon it. Though this uncontrolled flight carries the puff toad swiftly away from danger, there are some associated risks for the airborne amphibian. Namely, the potential for the toad to be carried out to sea where it will invariably fall prey to sharks and trigger-happy pirates. Or, in the off-chance that it fails to deflate in a timely manner, the toad can be carried high into the atmosphere where the trapped gas will continue to expand until the toad's abdomen ruptures.

Despite the current absence of predation, the swelling pony-sploder has been exposed to predation in the past when non-native animals were introduced to the islands. Early Spanish visitors were the first to introduce such animals, arriving in the early 18th century with a variety of domesticated animals and livestock. In 1743, ignoring the warnings of the natives on neighboring island chains, Spanish colonists landed on the beaches, delivering a heavy blow to the islands' ecosystem as they unleashed their herd of ponies on the lush plant life. The islands were not without their defenses as the formidable and aptly-named swelling pony-sploder would demonstrate shortly thereafter. Naturally curious, with little in the way of discriminating culinary tastes following months at sea, the famished ponies discovered what they hoped would be a scrumptious delicacy. The Spanish colonists' journals are rife with accounts of the subsequent carnage.

Having no natural predators, the puff toads are remarkably docile and languid. Thus they were not particularly alarmed when the pony vanguard came prancing through the surrounding vegetation in 1743. The ravenous herd paid little heed to the larger female puff toads, choosing, instead, to focus on the somewhat smaller and thus more palatable males. These they devoured instantly and with tragic consequences. It is believed that the entire herd of ponies - 108 ponies in total - was destroyed in less than 2 minutes. Some of the toads inflated in the ponies' mouths, dislocating the ponies' mandibles and tossing the ponies themselves several metres into the air. Those ponies that survived the short flight starved to death without their lower jaws. Some of the toads, however, reached the ponies' esophagi prior to inflation. These ponies suffered more violent deaths when their heads were separated from their bodies in instantaneous and violent explosions. Still other toads actually reached the ponies' stomachs before inflating and in these instances, the carnage was more than some witnesses could bear. Dumbfounded and horrified, the colonists watched as their ponies burst, showering the surroundings with blood, bone, meat, and vital organs. And in the space that the ponies had occupied mere milliseconds prior, immense grotesque spheres, gray in color, appeared and floated slowly up into the air before the sea-breeze carried them inland over the tree-tops.

Another cause of fatalities among pony-sploders - and hapless bystanders - is open flame. This, of course, is attributed to the volatile nature of the hydrogen gas that is trapped within the toads' inflated bodies. The islands to which the puff toad is confined were not inhabited by humans until the early 1900's when science won out over local superstition and lore. Theretofore, the natives who inhabited nearby island chains feared and avoided the puff toad's habitat, believing the strange creatures to be the physical manifestations of malevolent spirits. Thus, fire was uncommon on the islands except in rare instances when natural phenomena such as lightning strikes and meteorite impacts served as ignition sources. According to anthropologist, Dr. David Nelson of Cornell University, the first human-witnessed incident involving open-flames and the pony-sploder occurred as early as the 14th century when a fleet of Yapese fishermen landed on one of the islands to wait-out a passing storm. The account has survived in Yapese oral tradition for nearly 7 centuries. According to legend, after landing on the island, the fishermen, who were prudently reluctant to venture any further inland on the unfamiliar island, made camp high on one of the island's leeward beaches. Dusk had left them huddled around their roaring bonfire, anxiously waiting for the storm to pass. Towards midnight, a fully inflated female puff toad came rolling down from the tree-tops, eclipsing the night sky as it landed on the screaming party. The bonfire ignited the trapped hydrogen instantly, producing an explosion that wiped out the entire camp, leaving in its place a crater the size of an Olympic swimming pool (supposedly producing what is today the island's main harbor.) The only surviving witnesses of the disaster were a pair of young boys who had been scouring the beach in search of firewood. The boys, though badly burned, managed to salvage one of the canoes and carry their fateful tale back to Yap. Various forms of this tale propagated throughout what is today Micronesia, reinforcing the dread and superstition that perpetuated the unmolested and pristine state of the islands' unique ecosystem.

In 1897, two Guamanian brothers, together with their extended families and the families of several of their friends, fled to the Bufo Islands after murdering a Spanish priest. It was a truly desperate flight. "We knew of the peril that awaited us and yet we paddled madly into the sunset, trading one fate for another; believing that nothing could be as insufferable as the perfidy of those Spanish bastards." said the elder brother, Malaguana, in a 1953 interview with National Geographic. In answer to the question, "Were you frightened?", Malaguana chuckled derisively and mused: "It is amazing how silly centuries of superstition look when juxtaposed with the logical deductions of science. And we know that things are always clearer in hindsight. But yes, we were very frightened...then."

Malaguana and his relatives landed on the largest of the Bufo Islands that would later come to be called Isla Iranna (which, in the Chamoru language means: Toad Island.) Exhausted, yet wary and cognizant of the old legends regarding the fate of the Yapese Fishing Party, the families refused to burn fires for cooking or warmth. "We knew that the dark spirits were angered by fire," said Malaguana. Theretofore, the islands' "dark spirits" were ensconced in mystery. Human eyes had only ever witnessed the toad in its inflated form, a form devoid of the toad's identifiable features. The enormous, buoyant, gray sphere was a sight so alien and surreal to ancient Micronesians that it elicited supernatural explanations. Thus the reservations harbored by Malaguana and his family served to confine them to the beaches upon arrival. For no one in the party dared to venture inland. Instead, they erected lean-tos constructed with driftwood, palm fronds and materials that they scavenged from the shore and they subsisted on raw fish and what meager victuals they had managed to procure before fleeing Guam.

"It was hardest on the children." recalled Malaguana. "We all know that children are not vigilant when danger is latent. They could sense our [the adults'] apprehension, but they could not comprehend it. We were always shushing their laughter; hissing at them to sit down and keep quiet. Oh, they were incorrigible," Malaguana chuckled reminiscently. His eldest son, Hanomtano, - who was six years old at the time - recalls: "I remember their somber faces; my father always begging us to be still and quiet, begging us through clenched teeth as if he were angry, but in his eyes you saw only the fear. And at first, this frightened me. But day-after-day, the breezes and the sound of the surf spoke not of fear but of playful bliss. And so we began to squirm under their watchful eyes, eager to run and play and explore." It was on their sixth day of exile that Hanomtano wandered up into the lush tropical forest that lined the beach. "My mother, she was asleep; my father, he was cleaning fish. And I was irritable with the boredom and I was determined to do something. Anything. I took a few defiant steps towards the trees, looking back over my shoulder as I did so. And then I ran. I had not gone very far when I encountered the toad. It was a welcome sight, this toad. I remember thinking that he would be my pet." Hanomtano grinned sheepishly as he related the anecdote. He lunged, bringing his hands down swiftly to trap the toad.

"Sphhhhh! It was just like that! Sphhhhhhh," Hanomtano, wide-eyed, thrust his hands apart to indicate an explosion. The force of the toad's inflation flung young Hanomtano's little body nearly 200 metres after dislocating both of his shoulders. He landed face-down in the ocean where he was rescued forthwith. Malaguana reminisced: "I was cleaning goatfish on the beach when I heard this strange noise, like when skinny people fart, except much much louder. Like 'Phhhhhttt!' And I looked up and saw Hanomtano come soaring out of the trees and into the heavens. We all saw this happen, except for my wife, who lay sleeping in the lean-to. My brother was running to the canoes before Hanomtano even hit the water. But I was in shock; paralyzed and speechless. I was tracing the arch of his flight when I heard my brother's wife shrieking. I turned and saw a giant gray ball rising slowly out of the trees. 'The dark spirits!!!!' I thought. They [family] tried to restrain me, but it was no use. Quivering with rage, I grabbed a sharpened wooden pole and rushed up the beach. And with every fiber of my being, I hurled the spear at the hideous thing. 'Phhhooot,' the spear made a strange noise as it went in. 'Psssssssss,' always the farting noises with those things. It shrank back on itself like a balloon and together with the spear, it fell back down into the trees. And into the trees I went, with my machete drawn and ready. Aye! you would have laughed had you seen it then as I did. It was a wee toad that looked up at me. Wee (Malaguana uses his thumb and index finger to indicate the toad's diminutive stature.) His head was tilted funny because the pole was running straight through him and he looked up at me like he had a crick in his little neck. I shook my head and took the spear in hand."

Frantic family members gathered in the surf as Malaguana's brother paddled ashore with a soaked and disheveled Hanomtano slumped over in the bow. They pulled the boy from the canoe and carried him to a lean-to where they made him as comfortable as they could. "There were so many faces, all of my family trying to crowd into our lean-to. My little cousins and brothers and sisters were wedged between the thighs of aunts and uncles. Their eyes were so big that it made me laugh in spite of the pain. That calmed them a little. Then my father came charging through their midst. When he saw me, there were tears in his eyes and he made to embrace me but my mother restrained him for the sake of my arms - we thought they were badly broken. 'What happened?' He asked in a trembling voice. Everyone nodded and mumbled their approval of the question. I replied: 'It was a toad, father. I wanted to catch it but when I tried to, it went Phhhhhhht!' I tried to move my arms to show how the toad got big and the pain made me wince. Mumbles of disbelief followed. But Father smiled knowingly and turned and shushed them. 'It's true.' He said. 'Our ancestors are fools. There are no "dark spirits." There are only these strange toads.' My father lifted his spear in the air, from which dangled the impaled body of the wretched toad. It was a magical thing, watching eons of superstition and fear vanish in the passing of a moment."

The Guamanian exiles moved inland where they learned to peacefully coexist with the toads. This arrangement was a beneficial one from the outset. That is, the sploder toad's legendary guise served to stave off a much-feared Spanish reprisal. There were, however, a few inconvenient trade-offs. Namely, the prohibitive risks associated with the use of fire for cooking and heating purposes. Malaguana and company had nothing to rely on aside from the Yapese fishermen's legend. Nevertheless, they were quick to deduce from it that the toads were somehow violently opposed to open flame. Hence, a precautionary edict, forbidding the use of fire on the islands, was issued and unanimously accepted. This edict remains in effect today. While it is rigorously adhered to by the islands' residents, visitors to the islands have historically been somewhat less compliant.

In 1942, an Imperial Japanese Naval reconnaissance team landed on one of the islands to conduct surveys. Though the islands were not occupied by enemy combatants at the time, the team did suffer nine casualties when Junior Grade Lieutenant Hitaro Yuki absent mindedly stumbled over a female sploder toad whilst he was lighting a cigarette. The sploder toad ballooned instantly, uprooting surrounding trees; hurling Lt. Yuki head-long into a ficus plant where it is said that he likely suffered only minor wounds. An otherwise memorable encounter with exotic wildlife became terribly tragic when the forces of fate turned on Lt. Yuki. The toad had already begun to rise into the air when Hitaro's cigarette ignited a patch of parched underbrush. Ensign Itsuko Ikaru recalls the tragedy in his memoirs.

Journal Entry (May 10th 1942): "Captain Motsuki is a douche bag. Today we were on our first patrol and Hitaro said he needed a smoke. He said he would catch up to us. But I knew better because he had the dirty magazines and an urge for the excitement. I looked back and saw him go into the trees. Captain Motsuki was shaking his head because he knew about Hitaro's dirty magazines too. We continued inland but stopped when we heard a shrill hissing and the cracking of shattered timber. We turned, unslinging our rifles. 'Americans,' Captain Motsuki breathed as he signaled for us to fall back on his flanks. We heard Hitaro scream. A hideous death-scream. 'Get the magazines! Save the magazines!' cried Captain Motsuki. But we dared not advance for we could see a vast and ominous silhoutte looming in the trees and we fired upon it in panic without the Captain's bidding. We knew of these toads, but we had never seen one and, at the time, panic dictated our actions. Our bullets whistled through the air. 'Phoop phoop phoop' the strange noise the bullets made when they struck the disgusting thing. I remember thinking: 'Damn.' And then the hissing: 'pssssssssstttt.' And 'Boooooom!' a bright flash of light. When I awoke, I was in my bunk aboard ship and had bandages from head to toe. My body was on fire. 'Lt. Yuki has perished.' they said,'Killed by a toad.' By a toad no less. This is highly dishonorable."

Evidently, when the toad's skin was perforated by the volley of bullets, the escaping hydrogen was ignited by the cigarette-induced brush fire; precipitating the massive explosion that claimed Lt. Yuki's life and critically injured eight other members of the reconnaissance team. Had the team held their fire, the toad would doubtless have floated clear of the small brush-fire and Lt. Hitaro Yuki's life would have been spared. Historians surmise, though, that had he survived, Lt. Yuki would likely have died regardless when the rest of his team got attacked and eaten by feral wallabies three months later.

Sadly, the vast majority of human encounters with sploder toads end in tragedy. An inundation of tourists in the early 90's accompanied an alarming rise in sploder toad incidents. In an ongoing effort to combat the rising rate of toad-related fatalities, local fire and rescue squads have initiated an ad-campaign to warn tourists and residents of the dangers of molesting and handling the sploder toad. Signs with messages like "Don't touch the f&%kin' toads!" were posted in the airports to be read by arriving tourists. Billboards were erected throughout the island chain. One billboard depicts the aftermath of a pony-sploder incident in which a 747 sucked a sploder toad into its engine during takeoff. Nameless, faceless, charred bodies litter the runway with a seemingly unscathed baby-doll lying in the foreground; big, blank, blue eyes staring at the camera as if to say: "What the f&%k just happened?" And in a flaming font, the billboard's caption reads: "Toad-al Devastation!"

Gunther Boghart, a Canadian seismologist, is well acquainted with the toads' destructive capabilities. In 1995, Gunther, his wife, his eight-year-old son, and his twelve-year-old daughter chose Isla Iranna as their summer vacation destination after watching a promotional DVD that featured the island's ever-popular Yak rodeos and world-famous Man-Bullet Festival - a coming-of-age festival where adolescent boys are encouraged to don costumes representing various sexually transmitted diseases and parade around town before being loaded into a giant pneumatic cannon and blasted out into the harbor.

Late on the second day of their vacation, after enjoying a picnic lunch together in one of the island's numerous parks, Gunther and his wife reclined in the shade while the children threw lawn-darts at a homeless rodeo clown. Seth, Gunther's son, ran into a nearby bamboo grove to retrieve a stray dart. "At first, I thought it was a rock." he remarked glumly to reporters later that day as he described his encounter with the male sploder toad. After picking up the toad and placing it carefully in his shirt pocket, Seth continued to search for the lost dart. After half an hour, he abandoned the search and returned to find the family preparing to leave. They climbed into their tiny rented Cushman van and set out for the resort.

About five minutes into the ride (3:28 PM local time), Seth and his sister, Claire, began to quarrel over the lost lawn-dart. Mrs. Bogart turned in her seat to shoot a reprimanding scowl back at the fighting children. "I was telling them to stop when Claire struck Seth in the chest with her elbow." Said Mrs. Bogart. "Pow! Just like that. Pow! And I blacked out." Claire's elbow struck and startled the sploder toad in Seth's pocket. The toad exploded, pancaking the van's occupants against the walls and windows. Mr. and Mrs. Bogart's seats were ripped out of the floor of the van. Mrs. Bogart, who had turned in her seat prior to the explosion, was pinned with her back to the ceiling and her buttocks to the wind shield. Gunther was pinned to the dashboard with his face plastered against the wind shield like an over-eager fat-kid at a pastry counter.

"I could feel the steering wheel digging into my hip, but I could not budge it." Said Gunther who had starred helplessly out the wind shield as the van veered off of the road and into knee-deep grass. "It was VERY confusing. I couldn't see what was pressing me against the wind shield. I couldn't breathe or wiggle my fingers and toes. I thought maybe I was having a stroke or something." Police reports indicate that the van's tire-tracks left the road and veered into a grassy meadow and continued for thirty-six metres where they ended abruptly. The van was found lying on its side in a banana grove three kilometers from the meadow where its tire-tracks ended. It was Gunther's testimony along with supporting evidence from the radar facility at Iranna International Airport that rounded out the investigation and silenced the alien abduction theorists.

"After the van left the road, I was relieved to find that we were slowing down. As we coasted through the grass, I saw what looked like a rock that was about the size of a basket ball. I could tell that we were going to hit it. And then, BANG!!!" Said Gunther later that evening after being released from the hospital with a shattered clavicle and a sprained knee. "The jolt was incredible. I saw the sky and the clouds and then I saw the ground again only then it seemed very far away and I felt tickly in my stomach like I was falling." At 3:29 PM, radar operators at Iranna International Airport picked up two unidentified objects in the air over the southern tip of the island where the Bogarts had been picnicking. The first object traveled approximately three kilometers due north from point-of-origin, covering that distance in less than six seconds. Radar operators tracked the second object for three hours in which time it climbed to an altitude of thirty thousand feet before it vanished.

Randal Tate, the airport's senior radar technician stated that anomalous objects like the second one were commonplace. "Sploder toads. We see 'em all the time. They inflate and float up into the upper atmosphere where they bust open. F&ckers'll come outta no wheres 'n' f&ck sh!t up, you know?" He said. It was the first track that baffled Tate and his staff and eventually led investigators to the Bogarts' van. Miraculously, the Bogarts survived the ordeal, suffering only minor injuries.

It was a female sploder toad that catapulted the van and its passengers, sending them on a wild three kilometer long flight. Ironically, it was the male sploder toad inside the van that saved the lives of the passengers by absorbing the energy of the impact. When asked if he would be returning to the Bufo Islands, Gunther Bogart replied flatly: "I'd rather run through Mecca wearing nothing except a yarmulke."

The French Magic Alpha-G Box

2007-06-15T08:10:00.000-07:00

French Magic Alpha-G Box. The words were painted in gold around the perimeter of an oval on the lid of the little green tin box. And in the oval was the portrait of a man, also painted in gold. He wore a leather aviator's cap, with goggles pulled down over his eyes. His bushy mustache framed a jovial smile and his scarf danced in the wind. I held the little box in the palm of my hand and stared at it distractedly. Lori and I were in a little general store somewhere deep in India. Rough-cut, splintery, lumber planks for floor boards and the same served as wall paneling. A layer of dust a mile thick on every exposed surface, and half of the merchandise looked as if it had faded in the sunlight of a shop window. But there were no shop windows in this shop. It was dark, lit by a single bulb that dangled from the ceiling by a frayed cord.

I had been trying on T-shirts when Lori handed me the peculiar box. It was clearly old and seemed to be marred from years of use, like so many of the little trinkets that clutter grandparents' garages and attics. I bounced it in the palm of my hand, noting its weight and the strange vibration of jostled contents. Little lines of rust peeped through the scratches in the paint and there was a shallow dent in one side. The perimeter of the lid was outlined with rope that had been painted on, once again, in gold. "French Magic Alpha-G Box," I said to myself as Lori held a shirt up against my back. There was something special about this little box.

I thumbed the lid open carefully, and was surprised when it seemed to open by itself. A strange mechanism popped up as the lid swung back on its hinge. There was a little sheet of wax-paper, brown with age, that was thrust aside by the little spring-loaded mechanism. I pushed the rest of the wax-paper aside with my index finger. There was a little, red, die-cast, metal, toy-car beneath. It, too, was old and worn with handling. I let the wax-paper fall back over the little car as I turned my attention to the little spring-loaded mechanism. I pushed it back down into the box and noticed a little pinion gear rolling down a rack. The clickety-clack of tiny machinery made me smile inside. I could feel gyroscopic forces acting on my hand. I quickly closed the lid and waited for the little machine inside to wind itself down. Instead, I could feel a rise in tempo, and the mechanical clickety-clack crescendo-ed into a whirring hum. I tightened my grip on the little box to ensure that it did not escape my grasp.

Without warning, the lid swung open all by itself. I watched in amazement as the little car slowly rose into the air where it hovered about three or four inches above the box. My jaw dropped and I could feel Lori staring over my shoulder. The car moved off to the side and another tiny round object the size of a walnut rose to take its place. The little round ball expanded instantly and was transformed into a World War II era combat helmet. The helmet spun around and around. I shook my head in disbelief.

Suddenly, the machinery began to slow and the helmet and car re-stowed themselves in the box, the lid slamming shut behind them. A chill ran down my spine, the hovering objects were strange enough, but before the helmet and car had returned to the box, my eyes had been drawn to the box's interior and what I saw there was inexplicable. Cold desolate emptiness. A darkness that seemed to suck the light from the room. I sensed a surge of energy deep within myself, a strange fear and awe, as if the secrets of the universe were about to unfold before me. And then the machine had stopped, drawing its wandering contents back into itself.

I stood breathlessly and transfixed, unable to shift my gaze away from the tiny box. My mouth hung open, my lips forming a silent "Oh." The cackle of geriatric laughter startled me and I looked up to find a small wrinkled hag of a woman, grinning a toothless grin. "You did not wind it properly!" she barked in a derisive tone. "It does so much more than you can possibly imagine!" Her eyes flashed from behind the milky cataracts. "How much?" I asked. But she spun on her heels and hobbled off into the darkness beyond the cone of sepia light that painted the store's interior in shades of brown and pink. I turned to Lori. "Babe, where'd you get this?" I asked. The scratched paint and dented side seemed to suggest that the French Magic Alpha-G Box in my hand was a display model. "Over here." Lori replied, signalling for me to follow. We wound our way through the labyrinthine sprawl of shelves and overflowing bins. Dust bunnies scampered into the shadows for cover. We made our way down a long display case whose glass panes were scratched and smokey. Daylight crept half-heartedly in through a small window, it lingered indecisively as if weighing the consequences of remaining inside the dreary shop or violating the laws of physics that had sent it there to begin with. And after what I'd just witnessed, the laws of physics suddenly seemed rather silly and irrelevant.

"Here." Lori pointed at a basket of trinkets that sat next to an old cash register. Perhaps the little box was for sale after all. I rummaged through the basket as Lori scoured the display cases. Nothing. This was the only one. I held the box tightly, like a dreaming child; afraid to lose his fantastic, newly-acquired toy as his dream dissolves. And then, to my horror, the box was plucked from my grasp by the old woman as she scurried past and took her place behind the counter. "Not for sale!" She croaked. "But it MUST be!" I replied in a desperate tone. I wasn't going to let it go that easily. In this part of the world, EVERYTHING was for sale. A little haggling and then a quick transaction that would leave me broke. Broke, but satisfied because something inside told me that the box's worth transcended the primitive concepts of wealth that permeate the human perception of value. I had to have the box. It was not enough to unlock its secrets there in the store. I wanted to own its secrets.

My attempts at haggling were met with silent disdain and I was dragged from the store and thrown out into the street after leaping over the counter to pry the box from the old hag's hand. I found myself walking alone, down an old dusty desert road. Far in the distance behind me, I could hear the groan of an engine and the crunching of tires on the gritty road. I turned, squinting into the sun as it was setting behind the car's dust-trail. It was an old, black, 1950 Ford Pilot sedan that seemed to hover on the mirages. I stopped and watched the approaching car. I strained to see the driver as he passed, but the sun was in my eyes. I fanned the dust off of my shirt as I watched the old car rattle down the road. A hand shot out of the window, tossing a small green box out onto the roadside. I caught my breath. Surely not. The box hit the ground and tumbled end over end, pieces flying everywhere. I ran and retrieved the battered tin box. French Magic Alpha-G Box. Written in gold on the lid. It's priceless contents were gone! I turned in circles, searching the ground near my feet. The little toy car, the morphing walnut helmet, the strange little machine, it all had to be here somewhere. But it was getting dark and I knew not where I was. Darkness fell as I groped about in desperation on hands and knees. It was then that I awoke from the dream and for nearly an hour, I lay awake, wondering what secrets the strange box had contained. Before I drifted back to sleep, a train whistle blasted in the distance, somewhere across town and in my slumber-induced delirium I remarked: "Wouldn't it be hilarious if locomotives had turn signals? 'Where the hell are you going to turn, fool?' I would say to the engineer. And it would be scary if they had brake lights because you would never really need them...and if you did...you still wouldn't. That's not a world I want to live in."

The Gnawing Gomer Donkey

2007-05-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

The Gnawing Gomer Donkey belongs to a renegade band of disenfranchised pack-animals that were originally known for scouring the Andes Mountains in search of slow-moving prey like quadriplegic midgets and Canadian tourists. A recent escalation in aggressive behavior among this marauding herd has been attributed to a disturbing trend marked by an increase in substance abuse among the herd's members. Dr. Horatio Fernandez, a mammalogist from the University of Buenos Aires who has spent nearly two decades in the field studying the behavior of the gnawing gomer donkey, maintains that the increase in aggressive behavior among the herd began after it overpowered a caravan of clinically depressed rodeo clowns who were smuggling crack into Argentina in March of 2005. Dr. Fernandez says that he watched in horror as the gnawing gomer donkeys gnawed their way into a large wooden crate that was loaded with cocaine. In a brazen effort to verify the contents of the crate, Dr. Fernandez braved subfreezing temperatures, doo doo ticks, and rabid llamas as he crawled on his belly through a rock slide in order to get a closer look. "That's how I got the chlamydia," he later told his incredulous wife. His worst fears confirmed, Dr. Fernandez watched in awe as the herd scaled a 2000 foot tall rock face in just under three seconds. According to Fernandez's GPS data and official reports, the herd sprinted for 3oo miles before stopping to raid a meth-lab and push a 6000 ton boulder over onto a Bolivian border-town. Experts say that the herd now feeds exclusively on crack to the extent that when they defecate, only powder comes out.

Carlos Mendez, a Bolivian goat herder from a small mountain village in Oruro recently survived a rare encounter with one of the vile beasts. Said Mr. Mendez: "I see a wolf near my goats and I say: 'Bah! There are no wolfs [wolves] in Bolivia.' But I run at him with my stick and say: 'Go! You go, bad wolf!' But the wolf, he does not run away so I run to hit him with the stick and when I get close I say: 'Whoa! You are not wolf! You are I don't know what!' He have eyes like el diablo and he have the white stuff all over his face! And teeth like this (Mr. Mendez raises his upper lip in an effort to exhibit buckteeth.) He had not much fur and he smell like potatoes. He look at me and make a noise like: 'Gnurrrr!' Like this!" (Mr. Mendez gurgles spit in his throat and his eyes grow wide.) Mr. Mendez was fortunate to have survived his encounter. But for a loaf of flower bread - dropped by Mendez - that the gomer donkey mistook for a bundle of crack, the unassuming Bolivian goat herder would doubtless have been gnawed upon. Later, however, the "wolf" turned out to be a lost and emaciated Canadian tourist who was simply asking for water.

The Pounding Boner-Possum

2007-05-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

The Mustela Phallusenormis - also known as the "odious penis weasel", the "cock rat", or the "pounding boner-possum" - is a carnivorous weasel that is indigenous to the mountain forests of French Guiana. This seemingly benign mammal makes its home in burrows, hollowed out in the root-structures of Balata trees. The mature male will grow to approximately 50 centimetres in length and can weigh as much as 24 kilograms. The odious penis weasel has long, brown, matted fur that obscures its limbs and drags along the ground when it walks. The male of the species is the only creature in existence that is known to tailor clothing for itself. It fashions for itself a primitive loin cloth of sorts out of dried bark and tree-sap. This article of "clothing" is purely functional as it serves as a container for the weasel's immense penis.

Weighing on average 8 kilograms, the penis of the Mustela Phallusenormis comprises nearly half of the animal's total weight. Even more shocking is the tremendous dexterity of the penis. The approximately 80 centimetre long penis serves, more or less, as a fifth limb and is capable of slithering like a snake. In fact, most males , when moving over longer distances, will ride atop their own slithering penises and can reach speeds as high as 30 kilometers per hour!

The odious penis weasel can and will only achieve an erection when sexually aroused, enraged, or simply frightened. When this occurs, the penis reaches lengths of up to 1 meter and can weigh as much as 10 kilograms (consequently, the females of the species are commonly referred to as piñatas.) The erection is achieved in 20 milliseconds, causing the weasel's bark undies to explode with a loud pop that is said to resemble the report of a 20 gage shotgun. When the weasel achieves an erection, glands near its testis secrete a powerful hormone that causes the animal to become highly aggressive and irrational. In this frenzied state, these weasels have been known to thrash their turgid penises about violently, causing incredible damage to their surroundings. In a recent study, biologists from the National University of Columbia placed a male cock rat in a steel box that had 2 centimetre thick walls lined with load cells. Their intent was to measure the average force of the weasel's penis-strike. The weasel was electrocuted in a successful and ultimately tragic effort to induce the erectile frenzy.

The force of the ensuing erection was unprecedented! Mustafa Hamza, a Kuwati graduate student in biology at the University and the only surviving witness of the boner-possum's erectile frenzy stated that: "It was horrible, this boner was! A big big boner and very mighty, like fists of Allah it smite us!" After utilizing its beefy dong to punch a gaping hole in the side of its steel enclosure, the boner-possum burst forth and commenced to decimate the lab and annihilate its captors. Dr. Emilio Gomez, the team's senior zoologist, became the first casualty when he attempted to restrain the animal with a trained attack-chimp. The chimp sustained minor contusions and a lacerated cornea before fleeing the scene. The professor, however, did not fare so well. The boner-possum charged Dr. Gomez and shattered both knee-caps with a single blow of its rock-hard weener. "Dr. Gomez look at me and wave his hands and he say 'Run, Hamza, run!!!!', but I did not run. I climb up onto the cabinet and pray to Allah for dynamite vest or scimitar to make jihad on possum's boner. Then I hear Dr. Gomez legs go 'CRUNCH' and he scream very loudly," said a visibly shaken Hamza to reporters only hours after the attack. The autopsy and Hamza's eyewitness account indicate that Dr. Gomez was dead before he hit the floor. Purportedly, as he fell, the boner-possum did a triple back-flip and used it's boner to tear the professor's head off while he was still screaming and falling.

Ernesto Buendia and Hernando Fuente, Dr. Gomez's research assistants sought refuge atop a refrigerator but were both killed by flying debris as the boner-possum reduced the lab to rubble and splinters. Stephen Hawking's computer simulations of the tragic event show that the penis weasel's boner penetrated the fabric of space-time and made wild weasel-love to a worm-hole before thrashing its way through a cinder-block wall, severing a gas main, and totalling a commuter bus in the streets below. Miraculously, Hamza suffered only minor burns and inexplicable anal tenderness when the gas main ignited, obliterating the building and flinging him nearly 800 metres before he crashed through a skylight and landed - unconscious - in a hot-tub at a gay spa.

The body-count reached 439 this morning after the deranged weasel leveled a catholic primary school in downtown Bogota. Concerned and outraged citizens took to the streets, demanding that the government take action. Meanwhile, zoologists and specialists are being flown in from every corner of the globe to offer their services. President Bush has expressed his deepest condolences and has vowed to send Chuck Norris and a team of Navy SEALs to hunt down and kill the vicious weasel. In a related story, Al Gore has volunteered to fly to Bogota where he will promote his new book: Boner-Possums and Global Warming ~My Struggle With Erectile Disfunction~.

Amidst the resounding public outcry, several voices rise above the rest to ask the important question: Are there circumstances under which the deliberately induced extinction of a species becomes both ethical and warranted? The author would argue: "Yes, indeed." When you lock a pounding boner-possum in a steel box and electrocute it, you are effectively staring natural selection in the face. Having said that, it should be apparent who the endangered species is.

The Smoking Benjo Snipe

2007-05-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

The Ornithosis Pyrosphinctus - also known as the "smoking benjo snipe," the "smoking rocket bird," or the "ugly f%&ker" - is a large, awkward, bug-eyed bird indigenous to the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. It's tiny legs, grotesquely rotund body, and sparse rust-colored plumage make it one of nature's less glamorous creatures. It feeds primarily on algae that grow on the rocks that surround coastal tidal pools. A small organ that is attached to the bird's pancreas produces a rare digestive enzyme called gigazene quasimerase that is unique to the species. As the algae travel through the bird's gastrointestinal tract, it interacts with this enzyme to produce a foul smelling and highly volatile smoke that perpetually seeps from the bird's anus and lingers in its plumage. The smoke is beneficial in that it repels both parasites and predators but it does little to protect the bird from its most serious threat - natural selection.

Furthermore, as a result of its smokiness, the bird has found its way into the lore of native Islanders who believe the smoke to be the manifestation of the bird's psyche. It is said that these birds can transform themselves entirely into clouds of putrid smoke and can thus be inhaled into the lungs of sleeping victims.

Perhaps the most intriguing and remarkable thing about the smoking benjo snipe is its bizarre mating ritual. Every year in early November, the males gather on the cliff-tops that overlook the sea. They hop about excitedly on one foot or the other as they peck at each others' genitals and puff enormous volumes of smokey gas out of their puckered birdy butt-holes. Then, one by one, they dash wildly toward the cliff's edge. As they run, they crush the flint pebbles that are scattered about. The sparks that fly from the crushed flint ignite the bird's smokey flatus and a jet of shrieking flame spews from the bird's anus, propelling it off of the cliff and into the air. This is the only time at which the Ornithosis Pyrosphinctus is capable of flight. They are known to reach speeds in excess of Mach two (1,522 miles per hour.) This, of course, has earned the bird the title of "fastest creature on Earth" (the Peregrine Falcon comes in a distant second at speeds just over 200 miles per hour.) Only one in three male smoking benjo snipes survive this ritual. For two out of three explode violently mid-flight. Consequently, the bird's meat is something of a culinary delicacy as it requires no preparation and literally falls from the sky.

"Eeesh"

2007-05-11T08:10:00.000-07:00

The pitter-patter sound of the maggots falling out of the wound and onto the table sounded like the onset of a summer shower. The amused field-surgeon hovered over the man, his eyebrows arched upward, his held tilted back so that he stared down over the tip of his nose at the man's writhing wound. The scalpel didn't seem to be the appropriate tool for the task and the young surgeon was at a loss. Removing maggots from an open wound had not been treated in the curriculum. Without taking his eyes off of the wound, the surgeon placed the scalpel on the tray, reached around, and grabbed a plastic spoon. The man winced as the surgeon plunged the spoon into the wound. It was like serving macaroni and cheese: the thick squishy noise, the way the gelatinous mass of maggots jiggled on the spoon. "Eeesh," said the surgeon.

A Beer And A Sea Breeze

2007-05-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

There's something about sailing in light wind that pisses me off. This day was no exception. The spinnaker sail was bulimic. It would fill partially before spitting the air back out. Our magic wind-compasses wagged their vanes lethargically. And the sun pressed down firmly upon our backs, causing our shirts to stick to the skin. All I wanted was to get home, to get food in my stomach. Every glance at my GPS receiver was a grim reminder that home was a long long way away. Our velocity made good was negative for we'd to round the promontory in the bay in order to reach Fairhope.

The mainsail would not stay full so I was perched on the gunnel, in the shade of the main, holding the boom in an effort to keep it from swinging athwart ship under its own weight. The shade was pleasant but I was far too famished to enjoy it. We had ordered our breakfast two days prior. Nancy had been responsible for bringing our breakfast down to the island when she came to meet us, but somehow the bag containing my breakfast never made it. An unconvincing "sorry" had only served to temper my ill humor. The skipper and his first mate had breakfasted blissfully while the rest of us looked on glumly. All except for asshopper who begged his way into an apple pastry.

Thus as I squatted on the gunnel watching the pelicans (or pelicunts as we often joked) dive into the bay, I was not only in a foul mood, but I was nearly delirious with hunger. I had lost interest in the bottle of stale drinking water that was tucked away in my life jacket and thus I was beginning to battle dehydration as well. My arms ached from holding the boom. I was young and spry and the strenuous tasks were always assigned to me. And theretofore, I'd always welcomed such tasks.

I sighed and allowed my head to fall forward. An incoherent string of mumbled expletives tumbled from my mouth as I glanced down through the porthole next to me. I could see asshopper asleep in the cabin, his leg propped atop the beer cooler. Asshopper. He had a real name like Bill or Jim or something but no one cared. To us he was just asshopper. My God! Had he not the decency to suffer along with the rest of us? He had even had the luxury of an apple pastry and there he was sleeping soundly below deck whilst the lactic acid was turning my aching forearms into mush. But propping his leg on top of the beer cooler was by far the most outrageously inconsiderate act that I could think of. I stared murderously at his leg in hopes of splintering his kneecap with my mind-bullets.

Beer! My God! "I must have it and now!" I said under my breath. Asshopper's kneecap was impervious to mind-bullets and I stirred from my haunches and looked around as if I were rousing troops for an assault. I ducked my head under the boom so that I could see the helm. Big Dave was smoking a cigar that was as big as a salami. "Butch," I growled hoarsely, "rouse asshopper and tell him to fetch me a Hoegarrden from the cooler." Butch nodded and yelled to asshopper through the hatch. Beer: It kept Belgian monks alive during lent. In fact, the most famous of all Belgian beers, Chimay, is actually brewed in a monastery. I had no Chimay, but Hoegarrden was a fine substitute. It was a Belgian white beer with a fine smooth flavor, heavy on the malt and light on the hopps. Just the way I liked it. I had three bottles of Hoegarrden in that cooler and all had been submerged in ice-water for the last twenty-four hours. They were chilled to thirty-two degrees exactly.

I could hear asshopper stirring below and I looked through the porthole and saw him up to his elbow in ice-water, rooting around for my Hoegarrden. I smirked. I watched as the ice-cold bottle of beer was passed up to me. The glass was frosty with condensation. The soothing sound of the hiss as the cap was pried loose. I looked down at the little vapor cloud that lingered in the neck of the bottle. I lifted the freezing cold beer to my parched lips and tilted my head back so that the world began to spin. My eyes closed to the image of the sail rising into the deep blue sky. Tears formed as gulp after icy gulp of beer surged into me. The little bubbles tickled my throat. Chill bumps formed on my skin as my body temperature plunged.

As I sat in the shade of the mainsail, gulping down the fresh Hoegarrden, a brisk sea breeze came at us from the south and I heard the reassuring crackle of the spinnaker filling with air. The breeze carried the sweat from my skin and chilled the painful sunburn. I felt the boat accelerating and shortly thereafter, I began to hear the sound of the prow slicing through the emerald-green water of the bay. I motioned for a second bottle of beer and consumed it just as hastily as the first. I was drunk and I knew it. And with the sea breeze dancing in my hair, I could not imagine a more blissful state.

Joel

2007-04-20T14:54:00.000-07:00

My brother had called a week or two ago to tell/ask me about the graduation trip he was planning. He wanted the two of us to fly to Pamplona, Spain to run with the bulls in the San Fermin festival next July. Under other circumstances, I'd be really confused because Joel and I have no Spanish ancestry or, for that matter, any interest in Spain and things Spanish. Please understand, I respect Spain and it is a lovely country with a vibrant culture and myriad history. Naturally, I had to point the discrepancy out to Joel. "Dude, why Spain? We could go cardboarding in New-Zealand or something."

Joel had always been very quiet and he lived in a world all his own. But unlike most detached people who are completely oblivious, Joel's world had annexed ours somewhere along the line and thus he was always acutely aware of his surroundings. Most people regarded him as a socially handicapped idiot savant, a corner lurker; they felt sorry for him, and always tried to engage him and speak to him in social settings. But Joel was always "with it." What he was doing in the corner, was psycho-analyzing everyone in the crowd, listening in to all the conversations, reading between the lines. He had that amusing knack for euphemistically insulting obnoxious shallow people. He could do it so well that sometimes they would even smile and blush and thank him. This'll get back to Hemingway in a bit. I promise. In the meantime, indulge me. I'm a cuckold.

Joel always took up the most fascinating and obscure hobbies. Japanese puzzle boxes, Burr puzzles, Chinese meditation balls, 5x5 rubiks cubes. He could build and program robots using parts from house-hold appliances and old twenty-ounce soda bottles. A textbook eccentric right down to the punctuation and the footnotes. He would walk into campus at sunset and lie around on the benches in the Concourse, smoke cigars, and think about things like probability or the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle. He understood WHY Bach was brilliant and he always cringed when pianos played the harpsichord parts. He was an athlete nonpareil, excellent on the baseball diamond, and phenominal on the gridiron. His was a carousel personality that could engage anyone on any level if he so chose. He new a lot about several things and little bit about everything and was practically worshiped among family and friends as a lesser diety. We all learned to simply nod and say: "Well OK." Like the time Dad and I had to borrow Joel's little rusted out '88 Honda Accord to go get fertilizer from the nursery because Dad didn't want to soil his Ford Windstar (Aside: God forbid that we soil thee; oh, thou, most blessed among mini-vans.)

We were standing out in the driveway in the shade of the huge oak, the one that got decapitated by Hurricane Opal. This was back when Mom and Dad's house was still covered in ivy and they still had French doors on the side porch; back before the stone lions got painted black to match the flower boxes. And Dad and I stood perplexed, scratching our heads, and staring down at a trunk that was crammed full of flattened cardboard boxes and a couple of spent cans of cooking spray. It was a good sized trunk for a small Japanese four-door sedan. In fact, later on in graduate school, I would discover that you could cram a whole full-grown whitetail buck into that trunk. "Joel!" Dad shouted. And Joel got up from the side-porch where he'd been hunched over his do-it-yourself home-mayhem kit; busy, using a benzene torch to mutilate a meticulously assembled and hand painted plastic Ford F150 model pick-up truck. The thick black smoke was still rising from the twisted wreckage. This was just the sort of reckless decadence that Dad so detested. Momentarily distracted by the smoke, Dad stretched an accusing finger towards the sizzling 1:32 scale conflagration. Joel was already halfway to us, stepping over the monkey grass, benzene torch still inhand the hissing blue cone of flame coming dangerously near to his trousers with each step. He was wearing his old REAL skateboards t-shirt with the REAL silk-screened onto the front. The one Tony Hawk had signed in Pensacola even though he was skating for Birdhouse at the time. And then came my Dad's signature: "Doggonit, you guys!" Guilt by association. He was craning his neck and squinting through his glasses to see what was burning. And he was still pointing at the totaled out plastic F150.

We had all seen Joel working on that truck. He'd spent the last three weeks slumped over his workbench under the sizzling ochre cone of an old telescoping architect's lamp, carefully assembling the little truck using tweezers and Testor's plastic cement, the kind that smells like cancer; and painting every piece with his miniature air brush kit and an assortment of tiny little brushes. The truck was a gorgeous electric-blue Ford F150 with a lift-kit, little yellow smiley-face rally lights perched atop chrome rollbars, and a taupe leather interior; and it was impeccable, the level of detail was staggering. And here it was with black smoke curling off of its flames. I think profligate was the word that Dad was searching for. "What are you doing?!" Dad never used profanity, but there was an understood "the hell" in there somewhere. If this was a movie, this would be the part where the hellion kid with the red mohawk, plaid pants, and pierced septum lights up a cigarette and blows smoke in my dad's face. Joel just stood there silently with his bored you-just-don't-get-it-do-you expression. And Dad shook his head and we all looked down at the trunk-full of cardboard. Joel, anticipating the question says: "It's for cardboarding." And that really cleared it up because we all knew what the hell cardboarding was. He said it with a nonchalance that left you buckling under the compulsion to nod and play along for fear of looking ignorant. Joel stared at our faces and took a drag from the invisible cigarette. "Well OK...get it out...we need to make room for the fertilizer," Dad grunted. Joel shrugged indifferently and swung his head, slinging his shoulder-length auburn hair out of his eyes. "...and get a haircut!" Dad barked as he stormed back up the driveway to the house.

It wasn't until Joel was in college that I actually asked him what cardboarding was. It was Christmas time and we were all home at Mom and Dad's. This was after the ivy had been peeled off of the house tendril-by-tendril; all thanks to idiot-savant-sibling and yours truly, who labored tirelessly under the ruthless supervision of the parental gestapo. This was after Dad learned about stick-edgers and self-propelled lawnmowers. After their pipes froze and I'd had to suffer the misfortune of crawling under the house and using the propane torch to mistakenly thaw the natural gas pipe which, incidentally, did not need thawing although it looked an aweful lot like a water pipe. The stone lions were still green and Mom and Dad still had French doors on the side porch. This was a couple years after I had walked past Joel's workbench one evening a few days after he had fried the model truck. And I had noticed the torched, blue, F-150 model sitting under the architect's lamp. Only now it had perfect miniature rust painted on the charred sections and little glints of exposed aluminum painted into the dents. The plastic windshield had been carefully scored with an exacto-blade to duplicate impact fractures. There was mud caked in the wheel-wells and I noticed that he had put bands of fine-gauge orthodontic wire inside the tires so that when they melted, the wire rusted and the rubber oozed down and hung over the bands like wet cloth: perfect 1:32 scale charred tires. Of the millions of mass-produced Revell brand, 1:32 scale, electric-blue, 1995 Ford F-150 step-sides; in its own way, Joel's was the only one that was perfect. All the typical and unavoidable imperfections had been masked by the intentionally warped frame and deep-fried body panels. The driver's side door was missing and there were tiny electrical wires snaking out of the dash where some little 1:32 scale pilfering punk had made off with the stereo. I couldn't believe how perfect it was.

We would have learned to expect this kind of ordered chaos from Joel. But that's where Joel's personality and character really diverged from the norm. Because Dad never saw the finished product. And If it had been me, I would have shoved that work of art in Dad's face, the very second after I'd added the finishing touches. Did someone say profligate? But Joel, in contrast, exuded quiet confidence. He never bragged or defended himself. I think that's what I admire most about him. He only offers up tidbits of information when he's in the right mood and only if you're willing to fish for them. He's a locked vault full of hilarious anecdotes and witty comments and our Holidays were spent sitting around, probing him with conversation, waiting and hoping that he'd slip up and casually mention some unbelievable misadventure in passing. It was like standing impatiently around the baggage claim at the airport, knowing that the little buzzer is going to sound, knowing that the red flashing light will begin to strobe. Standing and waiting anxiosly, trying to anticipate the exact second that the conveyor belt will lurch forward. It was just like that. And it was during one such episode last Christmas that we found out that he'd spent the previous week sleeping on the roof of Auburn's Ralph Brown Draughon Library. Apparently studying for finals had been so taxing that driving home in the evenings when the library closed had been out of the question. He'd apparently decided instead to bring his sleeping bag along. His sleeping bag and a homemade lockpick which he used to pick the lock on the library freight-elevator which deposited him under a ladder that led to the roof.

Anyways, back to cardboarding. Once again, we were all home at Mom and Dad's for Christmas. This was back when the ten-foot Fraser fir made the livingroom smell like turpentine and the Christmas lights cast pine-needle shadows all over the walls and ceiling. Back when cinnamon potpourri simmered on the woodburning stove and you could smell Mom's clam chowder cooking in the kitchen. It was late and Joel had been foraging in the kitchen and was then busy, slumped on the sofa eating a bag of pastel-colored duck-and-bunny-shaped sweet-tarts that were left over from some Easter. He and I were in the den watching some Turner South rubish like American Ninja Twelve or something as we silently contemplated the pros and cons of ritual suicide. I piped up and asked the question bluntly: "Just what the hell is cardboarding anyways?" Joel was halfway through a pink chalky duck. He just stopped chewing and stared at me like I'd just asked where babies came from. I mean we're still not sure that he knows what sex is. I mean no one ever told him about it and he never asked. We think he was dating the daughter of a local attorney during his first year of college, but again, we're not sure. Sometimes I'm tempted to draw an invisible cross in the air with my fingertip and ask him: "Does a vagina go this way or that way?" You know, just to see if he knows.

Anyways, Joel said nothing and finished chewing the sweet-tart duck as he rooted around in his pocket in search of his cell-phone; and as he did this, he just continued to stare at me. He produced the phone, flipped it open, hit speed-dial, and pressed the phone to his ear. I could hear someone else's phone ringing on the other end. He crammed a purple bunny in his mouth and started crunching. "Tyler." Apparently, anymore, a person's name isn't just their name; it also functions as an informal greeting. "Hey, man, you wanna go cardboarding?" He asks the garbled voice that is supposed to be Tyler's. The garbled voice says something that I can't make out and Joel says: "Not yet. You can call them and see. Yeah. Josh is going." A couple more seconds of unilateral cell-phone chit-chat and Joel slammed the phone shut. "C'mon. Get your jacket and some gloves...and try and find some packing tape." He said as he stood and stretched. Then in the kitchen, he turns to me with this playfully derisive grin and says: " You better shut up and pay attention, fool, because you're about to get educated."

Joel had always had an entourage. An amalgamated conglomerate of the faithful. Something like a 24-hour on-call lynch-mob/insurgent guerrilla army/demolition crew/evidence disposal team. Close your eyes and imagine a pimple-faced, underaged version of the A-Team. Now take away the sweet-ass van and the guns and give them an old beat-up '88 Honda Accord, a pile of skateboards, and enough PVC pipe to construct a semi-automatic potato-cannon. Joel refers to them fondly as: "...my legion of cold-ass, no-bullshit, tough-guys... made up entirely of dudes who...are required to train in the art of cowboy-rules no-limit beat-down and who... fit the description of 'ruggedly handsome, balls-to-the-wall genius, and all around bad-ass,' not unlike myself."

We're talking Team Macgyver here.This crew could topple a South American government in less than 24 hours using nothing except the change in their pockets, a half cup of brake fluid, and a jar of creamy peanut butter (preferably Jiff.) They could devastate a third-world political structure and get it all on videotape, and be home in time to watch Jackass. Now fast-forward a couple of years. They've got a couple semesters of chemistry, system dynamics and controls, object oriented programming, and political economy. And they've upgraded from skateboards and '88 Accords to Toyota 4-Runners, Vespa motorscooters, and tweed blazers. A seemingly refined bunch of fellows (strong emphasis on "seemingly.")

I shimmied into my polar fleece as Joel came clopping down the stairs. He was wearing his Marmot fleece, the matted greenish-gold one that looked like a giant booger and the fingers of a pair of gloves hung languidly from one of the pockets. "You find any packing tape?" He grunted as he groped about beneath the sofa cushions in search of his keys. "Seriously, I haven't lived here in like five years, man, how the hell do I know where they keep tha tape?" I said. Joel just stopped and shook his head and looked at me with an expression that said: "You lazy piece of shite." He pocketed his keys and together we searched the kitchen for packing tape. I succeeded only in finding a half-roll that was yellow and cracked with age. I turned to see Joel sitting on the counter-top munching on a bag of stale Cheetohs. "Cheetohs." He said with his mouth full as he thrust the open end of the bag in my direction. It's funny how we never abandon that infantile tendancy to verbally label things for everyone. I shook my head no, trying to decide whether or not to be disgusted with the fact that he hadn't helped me search for the tape when he seemed to need it so desperately. Joel crunched on the last fist-full of Cheetohs as he dusted his hands off and cast the bag aside. "Need some Jones [Jones Soda]..." He spoke with his mouth full again and it came out as: Nid Shom Jownsh. He had a couple of cans of cooking spray on the counter next to him and these he collected as he hopped down off of the counter. He wagged the cans in my face as if I understood what the hell they were for. "Cool," said I. He nodded and gulped the Cheetohs down and I followed him out the back door.

Together we stood out on the side walk and listened to our teeth chatter as we watched our breath turn gold in the light of the patinaed Tiffany-style street lamp. The air was crisp and and sharp with the cold and the stars seemed to be burning holes in the night sky. I pulled my wool hat down over my ears and fished my gloves out of my pocket. Tires screeched in the distance. The sound reminded me of the pig farms near our home in Taitung. Joel and I turned just in time to see Tyler's sticker-encrusted four-door Honda spill out of a side-street and onto Oak Street. He always drove with his interior lights on and we could see him smiling behind the wheel. At one time the car had been a black '95 Accord but it had slowly become a mobile billboard for Toy Machine, Spitfire, Hook-Ups, et al. Evidently, Tyler's muffler had fallen victim to a parking block or a speed bump some ways back because the little Accord put-putted like a go-cart and belched smoke like an old steam-locomotive. Wahhhh. Tyler mashed down on the gas as he spotted us. Joel and I exchanged sidelong glances and took a couple of slow wary steps back from the street, fighting the urge to dive for cover. The suspension linkages made a terrible mechanical crunch as the front driver-side wheel hit the curb and disappeared up inside the wheel well. Tyler's head jostled violently about behind the steering wheel, he looked like a marionette having a seizure. The car ground to a halt, the tires narrowly missing our toes. Weeebada Weeebada Weeebada, to hear the old four-cylinder engine idle like that, you would swear it had a headcold. Tyler's goofy smile was wild and as crooked as congress. When he smiled like that, you knew not to turn your back on him for fear of getting donkey-punched or shoved. We could hear the stereo booming and as the window lowered, a torrent of grungy power-chords assailed us.

Joel and I stared back at him crossly and Joel ran his hand across his own neck like a knife, signalling Tyler to kill the music. Despite our best efforts to educate him, Tyler still thought loud music was cool. The music faded out, giving us room to notice the sickeningly sweet and spicey aroma of some cheap, DollarTree, air freshener. "Sorry," Tyler's apology came as a mumble. Joel and I climbed into the car. Something about the inside of Tyler's car reminded me of the Death Star's trash compactor that Leia, Han, and Luke got trapped in in Star Wars. I was up to my ankles in emptied Funnions, Bugles, and Cheetohs bags. The seat was littered with receipts, old AA batteries, bits of hardware, a socket wrench, an empty bottle of Castrol GTX 20W-50, an assortment of badly worn skateboard wheels, jewelcase fragments, the disturbing stains, etcetera. And in the crevices and seams there were deposits of food crumbs and drinking-straw wrappers and some sort of oily mystery lint. He was probably culturing anthrax in there without even knowing it. Then there was the interesting stuff like a fresh box of Lucky bearings and a road flare, the kinds of things that you wondered if he would care if you pocketed them. "What the hell, man?!" Tyler barked. I looked up to find him glaring at me, or rather, trying to glare. I shrugged sheepishly and pulled the box of bearings back out of my pocket and placed it back on the seat next to me. Tyler tried to glare at Joel too, as if to imply that Joel was somehow responsible for me. The glare shattered as he broke out into a smile and added laughingly: "Ask before you take crap!" He pressed down on the gas and the engine coughed and groaned. "You got any tape?" Joel asked Tyler. Tyler shook his head. I desperately wanted explanations. Why did we need tape and what's with the cooking spray?

Moments later, we were crusing along the local Industrial Parkway, the streetlights made our shadows sweep long archs over the interior of the car as we passed them. "What are we doing?" I finally asked. "Looking for cardboard..." came the distracted reply. I raised my eyebrows and nodded. I couldn't see a thing. The rear windows were completely fogged. I slummped back in the seat and fiddled with an old kids meal trinket that appeared to be a box of french-fries that transformed into a gay-looking robot. The car was loud and I couldn't hear Joel's and Tyler's conversation, but I could tell by their facial expressions that the search for cardboard was not going well at all.

We left the Industrial Park to search behind the various funiture and appliance stores along Mainstreet. I was busy drawing and quartering the gay french-fry robot when Tyler slammed on the brakes. "Whoa!" Joel exclaimed. Just like that they were out the doors and sprinting. I sat up and craned my neck between the two front seats. All I could see through the foggy windshield were their backs and the bottoms of their shoes illuminated by the headlights as the ran. I felt like the dash-mounted camera on a police cruiser. I opened my door, got out of the car. Joel and Tyler were gawking at a collapsed cardboard box that was leaning against the back wall of Badcock's furniture. The collapsed box, that had at one time, housed a seventy-two inch plasma screen, was easily eight feet by ten feet. I walked over and stood, looking over their shoulders. Joel turned to Tyler without taking his eyes off of the box. "Cowboy-rules..." He said, which translates as: "This is going to be so frickin' insane that we're all going to crap our pants!;" which in turn translates as: "Awesome! We are going to have ever so much fun!" Tyler just nodded.

We dragged the box over to the car and tossed it up onto the roof. The car looked ridiculous under the box, like an ant trying to carry a graham cracker. We piled in and rolled the windows down and each of us reached out and took hold of the edges of the box to hold it down on the roof. The box jutted out so far fore and aft that it hung down over the windshield, forcing Tyler to slump over the steering wheel and rest his chin on the dash to see where he was going. At one point, he was steering with his chin, using his free-hand to squeegee the fog off of the glass. We veered a bit and sideswiped a row of azalea bushes and ran over a plastic tricycle. Fortunately, we were less than two blocks from the house, of course, in that town, everything is two-blocks from everything else anyways. Nevertheless, we were grateful because even at ten and fifteen miles per hour, the icey wind was gnawing ravinously on our fingers inspite of the gloves. And Tyler whined all the way to the house for he had no gloves. We deposited the box on the front lawn as we passed, launching it on the count of three.

We drove to Walmart and pooled our pocket change to buy half-a-dozen rolls of clear packing tape and nearly as many cans of cooking spray. The cooking spray was store-brand and this irked Tyler immensely as he had heatedly vouched for the superiority of Pam and other name-brands. Such cardboarding minutiae fascinated me to no end. I was still largely in the dark, but I was accumulating my vision of cardboarding piecemeal. The cooking spray would likely serve as a lubricant, this I deduced simply because I knew from my previous exploits with Joel and Company that it wasn't flammable and all of Joel's and Company's exploits were subdivided into two classes. Class one encompassed activities invovling all manner of fire and explosions. Class two dealt with engaging in dangerous activities (including those activities in class one) whilst traveling at high speeds. Lubricant was typically applied in the pursuit of activities in the latter class.

We arrived back at the house where we emptied the contents of our Walmart bags onto the enormous cardboard box. It was well after midnight and the streets were quiet with the exception of a dog barking in the distance. The burping noise of tape being peeled away from the spool broke the silence and I looked down through my steaming breath to see Tyler and Joel running a line of packing tape over the length of the box. Joel walked backwards on his knees, allowing the spool to rotate in his hands as it fed out a stream of tape and Tyler followed on hands and knees, pressing the tape firmly down onto the cardboard and smoothing out any bubbles of air that formed underneath. I stood and watched selfconsciously, not sure if I was supposed to be doing something or not. Joel and Tyler worked like pre-schoolers, quietly and intently, not even stopping to wipe their dripping noses. They just sniffed and comunicated with hand-signals until Tyler started bitching about how cold his hands were and Joel huffed: "Dude, don't be such a pussy. Here..." and he took off one of his gloves and handed it to Tyler who shook his head and said: "Dude, that's retarded! Don't you have any more gloves in the house?" Joel pulled the glove back down onto his hand and told me to go fetch another pair of gloves from the house.

Tragically, my search turned up nothing and upon hearing this, Tyler stomped off to his car and thrashed around in the back seat for a bit and returned with a pair of thick wool socks that bore a hideous argyle print. These he wore on his hands like mittens and on his face he wore a scowl that defied laughter. Joel and Tyler continued to laminate the box with packing tape and I grabbed a roll myself and started at the other end of the box. It took all six rolls to cover the box and when we were done we stood and admired our work. It was no longer merely a flattened cardboard box. It was suddenly substantial, solid, and more permanent. The light from the lamp shown on the glossy expanse of the laminate. After a few moments of silence and sniffing, Joel motioned with his hands and we gathered around and lifted the box and carried it over and slid it up onto the roof of his 4-Runner. Joel and I climbed in and rolled the windows down and Tyler ran back to his car and returned with a pair of crusty gym socks, cursing under his breath as he struggled to get them on over the woolen argyle ones.

In an effort to avoid local law enforcement, we cruised the back streets until we were well beyond the city-limits. The cardboard kept lurching everytime we caught a breeze or traveled faster than fifteen miles per hour and my fingers burned terrifically from the cold, the pain was nearly unbearable and I chewed on my tongue until it bled. We were poking along, headed North on highway 263 and I was fairly certain that I knew our destination. We were going to the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail on Cambrian Ridge and there we would, no doubt, lube the base of that glorious slab of cardboard, before climbing aboard and whizzing down the grassy hill beneath the driving range. I call it a hill but "hill" does not do that geological anomally justice at all. Top-to-bottom you are looking at about 200 feet of elevation and the face of the hill itself is more or less vertical, how the grass clings to that hillside is a mystery. It was one of those hills that you climb on all fours and keep your head down, for if you stood and looked up at the crest, you would surely fall over backwards from the vertigo. I was no stranger to that hill for I had experienced it once before. Hills like that combine splendidly with gravity and juvenile foolery to bring about a visceral tickling sensation in the pit of one's stomach. I know this because Joel and I carved that hill to ribbons on homemade snowboards one winter after Lower Alabama got a freak-dusting of powder. It had been a perfect day and had ended magnificently after an irate, morbidly obese, red-faced grounds keeper charged us like a rhino. He was nearly upon us when he slipped on a patch of ice and planted his ass solidly on the frozen turf. A look of pure terror spread over his round chubby face and he flapped his arms like great beefy wings as he teetered and disappeared over the edge of the hill. We watched, paralyzed with pure amusement, as he plowed a gaping furrow down the face of the hill. I laughed so hard that I peed myself and had to leave my thermal undies in the woods.

We turned left off of 263 and onto Sherling Lake Road. I knew then that I was right. I grinned just as Joel glanced in my direction. He smiled. The heater was running full blast and my feet were on fire inside my sneakers, but the open windows devoured the toasty air before it could warm the rest of me. Our impatience and cardboarding-induced delerium had overwhelmed our better judgment and we had, each of us, conscioulsy avoided suggesting that the cardboard be lashed to the 4-Runner's luggage rack with bungie cords or nylon rope. The extra ten or twenty minutes of knot-tying and rigamarole had been quite out of the question as simply securing the slab of cardboard with our hands seemed most expedient and conducive to haste. But by the time we arrived at Cambrian Ridge, we were cursing ourselves for the oversight. The gate to the clubhouse was closed as always and we continued driving until the asphalt gave way to a dirt road that led into a thick grove of pinetrees. There the line of street lamps halted its pursuit and, like all mischievous interlopers, we were glad of the darkness.

We stood in pitch blackness, huddled next to the 4-Runner whose engine made tinking and popping noises as it cooled. And aside from the engine's popping, the silence was so intense that my ears rang. We waited anxiously in the trees to see if we had been followed. And as we did so, a gentle breeze came rushing through the treetops and I was glad of the noise for it rid my ears of the ringing. Though cold, the breeze was laced with the scent of the pines and was an absolute pleasure to my olfactories. I shivered excitedly and looked up at the myriads of stars that peeped down at us twixt the swaying boughs. I could feel myself getting sentimental. A gorgeous night like that, being home for the holidays, committing Class-2 mischief with Joel and Tyler just like old times. I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I struggled to blink them back and I was once again glad of the darkness.

The breeze abated and my ears began to ring again. My eyes had adjusted and I could see my breath coming out of me in great ghostly clouds. The silence was insufferable and I fought the impulse to crack my knuckles as I waited for the breeze to return. And return it did only this time it blew hot and limey from Tyler's putrid bowels for he shifted his weight and gave birth to a substantial fart that warbled like a bowling ball rolling down a marble stair case. The seat of his pants steamed in the starlight. Joel and I didn't even flinch. Tyler was a casual farter and his brand of sulfur was downright deadly in tight quarters, but out in the open, he was usually harmless. And so we stood motionless next to him. This we would regret for we had grossly underestimated the potency of that particular batch of flatus. The surly fumes reached our noses all at once. Joel's eyes rolled back into his head and he made as if to sneeze. I reeled backwards and cupped my hand over my nose and mouth. And Tyler just grinned giddily back and forth at the two of us. He caught a glimpse of the remnants of my tears in the starlight and he remarked facetiously: "C'mon! It's not THAT bad!" "Not THAT bad?! Christ, Tyler! You could can that sh!t and sell it to SWAT teams!" Joel exclaimed in falsetto as he fought for air.

We quarantined Tyler by shuffling around so that he stood in our lee. Joel and I scowled at him and clucked disapprovingly. Tyler was very pleased with himself and with our apparent disgust. Of course, we were not really all that disgusted with him. It was all part of the game. A timeless game that had found its place in the male sociopolitical structure the world over. That is, that the expulsion of flatus from the bowels is to be acknowledged by one's peers with exceedingly disproportionate disgust. Typically, this is accomplished via fake convulsions, panicked flight, or simply by the administration of acute chastisement. "Good grief..." I shook my head and drew a hesitant probing breath through my nose. Despite our seemingly disgusted tones, you could hear our smiles in the darkness.

We felt that we had waited long enough, so we each grabbed an edge of the flattened cardboard box and carried it back up the old dirt road. We quickened our pace to a jog as we emerged from the pines. I could hear the sound of our shoes padding along on the asphalt, our heavy breathing, and the hum of the street lamps above. As soon as we could, we turned sharply to the left and hopped over the curb and ran down a steep grassy declivity that led to the safety of the driving range which was hidden in the shadows of the hills that surrounded it. The dew had fallen and frozen and the grass crunched gratifyingly under each step. Crunch crunch crunch. We were then marching along the rim of the great slope that vanished into the darkness below, and the breeze was carrying the scent of the pines up to us once again only now it came laced with the scent of hickory and chimney smoke as well. The stars were mirrored in the sparkling dew crystals on the grass and I was giddy with anticipation. Joel and I carried the bulk of the weight as Tyler's dexterity was substantially diminished by his woolen argyle and gym-sock mittens. Add to that the fact that he had volunteered to carry the half-dozen or so cans of cooking spray that we had brought along. These he had crammed inside of his jacket and they kept falling out, whereupon he would curse under his breath as he batted them around in a series of attempts to retrieve them. Exhibit-A in the case for opposable thumbs.

We stopped infront of a sand trap and dropped the slab of cardboard onto the grass. Tyler handed each of us a can of cooking spray and we commenced spraying down the laminated side of the flattened box. The hissing of the spray mingled with our sniffing as we tried in vain to keep our noses from dripping. It was so cold and my hands were still stinging. We stood, snapping the caps back onto our cans of cooking spray before tossing them into the sand trap where we would be sure to find them later. I stood by and watched as Tyler and Joel flipped the cardboard over so that the lubed side was down. They pushed it slowly over to the lip where the slope began its descent in earnest. And very carefully, as if having placed a sleeping baby into a crib, they backed away with their palms facing downward as if to hold the cardboard in place by sheer force of will. They turned slowly to face me and Joel opened his mouth, I assume, to explain to me the boarding process, which comprised us getting a running start and leaping altogether onto the massive sheet of cardboard. He was cut short. "Ahhhh!" I shouted, pointing as the cardboard began sliding over the edge.

Joel and Tyler spun around instictively and sprinted after it. I gave chase and succeeded in overtaking them just as they dove headlong onto the accelerating sheet of cardboard. I dove after them and swam through the air with some semblance of a flailing breast stroke. "Umph!" I grunted as I pancaked ontop of the heap. We had been running at a dead sprint and even then we had only barely overtaken the cardboard. And the momentum of our concerted dive had succeeded in accelerating the cardboard to a dizzying speed. The laminated underside of the box made a whistling noise as it screamed along over the frozen blades of grass. The roar of the wind in our ears became deafening and Joel's and Tylers laughter came in shrieks that seemed somehow distant and muffled. We were all struggling to stand as if to surf, but every little depression or swell in the slope sent us tumbling and bouncing like a skillet full of sizzling shrimp. My stomach tickled the way it had when I used to jump out of the swings at the park as a child. I looked over and saw Tyler's wobbly frame standing near the starboard edge of the box. I could see the triumphant luster in his eyes, his mouth hung wide open in a gaping smile as he struggled to concentrate on maintaining his balance. Our eyes met just as the box bounced across a discontinuity in the slope. Our cardboard chariot bucked violently, tossing Tyler's feet from beneath him. The triumphant luster in Tyler's eyes vanished, and in its place came a look of severe consternation as he flailed his arms in what looked like a backstroke. I watched as he fell butt first towards the carpet of blurry grass that bordered the cardboard. I braced sympathetically for his impact and was stunned as he vanished before my very eyes. The torrent of speeding grass had snatched him from my sight the very instant that his buttocks had touched down upon it. All that remained was the impression made in my mind by the look of hopeless resignation that had appeared in Tyler's eyes during the milliseconds prior to impact.

I struggled to sit up but thought better of it when my abdominal muscles began to cramp from the laughter. I rolled over to find Joel laughing hysterically. We had tears in our eyes and our laughter came in high-pitched staccato bursts, punctuated by sharp coughs as the cardboard lurched over the bumpy irregularities in the declivity. The tickling sensation in my stomach regressed as the hillside deposited us in the meadow at its base. We sped across the meadow, and just when I thought the ride would never end, the leading corner of the box was gobbled up by a divot in the sod and Joel and I were tossed into the air like rag dolls. We were then harshly introduced to the turf after what felt like an eternity of undignified aerobatics. The stars twinkled high above as the aftershocks of our laughter came as hiccups and moaning, gasping, sighs that echoed across the hillside. We simply lay there in mirthful exhaustion, unable to move, with the icey blades of grass pressed against the backs of our necks. Evidently, Tyler's descent was ongoing because we could hear his grunts amidst the thudding of flopping arms and legs.

I sat up and wiped my nose on the back of my glove. Joel stood next to me and dusted the frost off of the seat of his pants. I stood and did likewise, and together we limped over to the cardboard where we each grabbed a corner and began dragging it towards the foot of the hill. We all but stumbled over the tangled mess that was Tyler. He rolled over on his back and stared up at us through his tears and snot. He was laughing so hard that he was suffocating. He was trying to say something but all he could manage was a chorus of falsetto squeaking. "What?" Joel and I asked simultaneously. Tyler's eyes rolled back into his head, he squeaked and shook. "Oh! Oh! DAMMIT, TYLER, DAMMIT!!!" Joel and I dropped the cardboard and staggered backwards. The stench was horrific. "Oh the humanity!" Joel cried. Together, Joel and I held our breath and rushed in; each of us seized a corner of the cardboard and we took off up the hillside. Tyler stumbled after us. "Man, you need to do something about that crap." Joel said to Tyler and I added: "Yeah, you need to go rip a loaf or something 'cuz that shite is surly!"

The hill seemed to rise before us without end. Its dark mass filled our vision, blotting out the stars. We crawled slowly up the slope with the cardboard in tow and the cardboard seemed to grow heavier with each awkward stride. The muscles in my hand began to throb and cramp as I labored to gain purchase on the obstinate piece of cardboard. I could feel the sweat running down the middle of my back and I paused to rip the wool hat from my head and I noticed that it was steaming. We could not shove enough of the cold night air into our lungs. We gasped and winced and grunted and had Tyler farted then, I would surely have met my end there on that frosty hillside.

After half an hour of agonizing work, we crested the hill and collapsed next to the sand trap to catch our breath. Shortly thereafter, we applied another coating of cooking spray to the glossy side of the cardboard and placed it carefully on the grass at the crest of the slope; only this time, not as close to the edge. With a couple dozen paces between ourselves and the cardboard, we readied ourselves along an imaginary starting line. "On three," said Joel. Tyler and I nodded. "One...Two..." we began the countdown. "Three!" blurted Tyler and with that, he darted for the box. Joel and I hesitated briefly in disbelief before racing after him. I was sprinting as fast as I could but Joel surged ahead of me and overtook Tyler. Together they jumped onto the box and landed side-by-side on all fours. I exploded forward, and propelling myself with everything that I had; I leapt into the air, gritted my teeth, and closed my eyes. I succeeded in landing on the cardboard, and I did so on my knees just aft of Tyler. I opened my eyes to find his raucous bum bobbing up and down mere inches from my beak. The box accelerated to terminal velocity and the hillside blasted past us on port and starboard but I didn't notice because I was transfixed. Tyler's arse loomed before me like a loaded musket with an unruly toddler at the trigger. "Noooooooooooo!!!!" I shook my head in slow motion. The seat of Tyler's pants billowed in the clap of his thunder and his fart resounded with a noise that sounded like an orchestra pit full of tubas. My mouth was open and everything. I lurched backwards in an effort to distance myself from the roiling butt-fumes and I was instantly devoured by the blurry sod. The stars and the frosty turf coalesced into a single disorienting blur as I spilled down the slope. I was nothing more than a discombobulated mass of bone and flesh and with each bounce and thud, I cursed Tyler's wretched bum. Tyler's and Joel's laughter dwindled in the distance and I began to wonder if I would ever stop rolling.

The Foundry Hall

2007-04-03T11:18:00.000-07:00

They came in the night and drove us from the alleys and the derelict shanties under the bridges. Some of us looked about with wild panic in our eyes as we ran. Others staggered along apathetically as drug-induced deliriums fed them to the ravenous hooves of the pursuing horses. Into the waiting wagons and camions they herded us. Thus we were taken to the foundry where we were locked in a great hall. We screamed and gnashed our teeth and pounded the colossal iron door with our fists until we collapsed in exhaustion. When our rage dwindled to despair, they came to us and taught us how to work metal. We set to work in an effort to dull our senses. For years we labored in the darkness, our shadows leaping about in the furnace light and the blinding glare of the welding torches. Our sweat and blood mixed with the coolant fluid as we slaved tirelessly over old mills and lathes. We worked day and night. The tiny windows high above had panes of smokey glass that admitted light only in the evenings when they glowed pink. Day and night became nothing more than silly words whose obsolescence made time linger to visit as it passed. The clanking of chains, the rumbling of the gantry cranes, the giant machines rattled our teeth in their sockets. At times, the showers of sparks were so thick that they sucked the oxygen from our lungs and bleached the walls so that they glowed like burning phosphorus. The metal screamed in agony as the machines chewed and spat.

In the early days, fist fights would break out at the towering scrap piles that we mined for choice pieces of stock. Metal shavings in our beards, fists flying in the light of the furnace and the sparks, we were a brutish bunch. They used to hand parchments through the slot in the iron door when they gave us our bread and beer. The parchments were strewn with tangled diagrams and geometric blasphemy. Beaver Steve was our oracle and as we reclined on the cold oil-stained granite floors and gnawed on our bread crusts, he would move from man to man, interpreting the parchment for each. Sometimes, at dusk, when the smokey glass high above turned pink, we would gather at the scribing bench and listen to Beaver Steve as he told tales of epic battles between the stoic machinists and maniacal engineers of yore.

In time, we grew civil and camaraderie burgeoned. The work consumed us. Thus the years coalesced into decades and our beards grew long and our hands gnarled. The arc welders' electrodes cackled and hissed, the great mills roared in the dark and tepid shadows. When at last our work was complete, we knew no life apart from that which we lived within the sooty stone walls of the foundry hall.

One evening, Beaver Steve addressed us. His glass eye twinkled behind his monocle, his beard was yellow from pipe smoke and sweat. His three teeth peered out over the crest of his crooked lower lip as if they were looking for their missing comrades. With a voice that sounded like jostled marbles, he told us. We turned to see it, and although it had begun to be among us long ago, we saw it now as if for the first time. From our forges was born the Theistichron, a mechanical god who needed no lever to move the universe.

Living The Dream

2007-03-15T14:43:00.000-07:00

As is so typical of these things, we don't know whom to credit the original idea to. But the sheer genius of the idea is sufficient to overwhelm such extraneous details. This idea, like that of the Bulgarian Ass-Inhabiting Hermit Crab, was conceived late one night when my brother and I where driven by our boredom into a strangely euphoric delirium. It had all the trappings, the bizarre comical quality and the existential luster of reckless abandon. Aye, we dreamt of a legion of macho dudes who fit the description of : "ruggedly handsome, balls-to-the-wall genius, all around bad-ass, no-bullshit tough-guys." Every man would be required to train in the art of cowboy-rules no-limit beat-down. We would call each other by our assumed names, names like El Diablo, Buffalo Ted, Ape-Shit Ben-John, Rancid Donkey, Phoenix, and the like. Combat boots and leather chaps, spiked chokers and wrist bands, matte-black spray-painted football shoulder-pads with long spikes, an abundance of dark eye-makeup and chipped ebony nail-polish. We would be the thunder inside a riotous cloud of cigar smoke and maniacal shrieking laughter. The kinds of guys who will cold-cock each other just to see fresh blood. The kinds of guys who will go into a bar and fight each other to the last man if they can't provoke anyone else. The kinds of guys who will break a cue-stick over somebody's head and scream: "This ain't pony-camp anymore! We're going for the throat now, mo#her f$%kers!!!!!" Like a schizo Kiss cover-band who watched Mad Max one-too-many times.

TO BE CONTINUED...

This bellicose band of hellions would meet once or twice a week in the slumbering suburban sprawl of middle-class America, arriving on miniature motorcycles the size of small terriers, their long gangly legs bent double as they cram their slouching frames onto the tiny bikes. They would look like bullfrogs riding on fleas. The little weed-eater engines that propel the bikes would sputter and scream at each other as the hooligans wailed upon one another with baseball bats, clubs, maces, and other unwieldy blunt objects. They would race down the paved nature trails and jogging paths and through the parks, sending soccer-moms scurrying for cover with their wide-eyed offspring in tow. Children, huddling in the bushes with their mothers, would hear strange words and phrases emanating from the raucous tangle of mayhem and would later be prompted to ask profound questions at the dinner table. Questions like: "Mom, what's a felch-pump?" or "Mom, what's a f%&ker?" The grim-faced mother's would stare blankly into space like busts of the blessed virgin and they would pause indefinitely before mumbling things like: "Shut up, Charley, and eat your broccoli or the scary men will get you...don't you think that broccoli sounds like an Italian word?"

TO BE CONTINUED...

Your Attention Please.

2007-03-15T10:52:00.000-07:00

Last night, I dreamt that I was attending a big banquet and I had to urinate and the only toilet was up on a stage in front of everyone. I had no choice. And I was emboldened by my indignation at the facility's sparse accommodations. So I unzipped my pants, pulled out my pecker, and laid down on the toilet bowl so that I was slumped across it like an unconscious prisoner thrown over the back of a horse. I then stared peevishly at the crowd as I relieved myself. The clatter of crystal stemware and the din of conversation waned, everyone smiled politely in the gentle sepia glow of chandelier light and looked on attentively as if I were delivering a brief speech or making an announcement. With my cheek smashed against the floor of the stage, I looked at them, rolled my eyes, and said: "Christ! Can't a fellow have any privacy?!"

So It Would Seem.

2007-03-15T09:47:00.000-07:00

This morning, while on the way to work, I had this interesting thought. That is: Life is what passes you by as you wait for your situation to improve and death is what happens before it does. Life is measured in pay periods and shortened by tax seasons. Those who know and accept this are what we call "adults." Those who refuse to believe it and can't handle it are put on medication. I'm riding the fence at this point and it's a pain in the ass as you might expect.

And as I was careening through traffic in my little red slice of mid-life crisis, I noticed one of those late model pastel-blue convertible VW bugs. And I was wrenched from my meloncholic stupor by the promise of seeing something beautiful. The movie, The Girl Next Door, forever altered my perception of the little cars. After that, I would see a late model bug and I'd pull along side, expecting warm vivacious flesh with bouncing golden and yellow tresses, big sparkling innocent eyes with a dash of sultriness. In short, I came to expect Elisha Cuthbert behind the wheel of every bug that I passed. And, indeed, I was never disappointed. Blondes, brunettes, redheads, all breathtaking despite the initial and brief disappointment of not seeing Elisha at the wheel. But breathtaking nonetheless and a pleasure to behold. Anymore, the only people driving bugs are old women and gay men. And you cannot imagine how depressing this is for me. And I grieve because I know that I'll die before this changes. Entropy dictates that everything will just get shittier and shittier and if you don't believe it, take a good look in the mirror, or at your account balance, or just go pass a VW bug on the highway.

2007-02-28T10:01:00.000-08:00

Aye, the wind was blowing coldly and cruelly from the north at what I guessed to be around 50 knots. And as I stood on the rig floor, I could hear the steel in the derrick groaning as the wind screamed through the trusses, plucking the turns of wirerope as if they were strings on a zither. The roughnecks were slinging the monstrous iron tongs about as if they were little plastic prizes from a box of cracker jacks. And the snow poured in over the tops of the steel panels that shielded us from the wind. And I stuck my head out of the side door next to the vee-door and screamed down through the churning snow, hoping that my voice would penetrate the roiling sheet. Somewhere in the distance I heard Dennis shouting back at me and I took it to mean that he had heard my request, whereupon I ducked back into the relative warmth of the rig floor enclosure, back into the haze of diesel exhaust fumes. I fixed the latch on the steel door and turned to see the tongs attack the drill pipe. The squealing of the cathead was a haunting noise and the rig floor shook as the chains went taught on the tongs. The thunder of the generators and mud pumps rattled my teeth in their sockets. The rig floor is an exhaustive collection of exotic ways to die and the passing of time is measured in near misses and close calls. Hence the bristling hair and tickling sensation in the back of my neck and the tightness in my throat.

The two dozen or so stands of drillpipe that towered in the derrick looked like bundles of giant black whiskers as they writhed in the wind. And I shuttered. These stands were of heavy weight drill pipe and to stand beneath them as they bent and gyrated in the fingerboard was as frightening as being exposed to the indiscriminate malevolence of a tornado or a surging tidal wave. To see such massive iron objects bend like boiled pasta was highly unnerving. You could not but anticipate the violent consequences of even a single break, a thousand pound javelin plunging through your body like a lawndart through a ziplock bag of tomato soup. The roughnecks, as a matter of course, were oblivious to such remote hazards and they looked like fleas as they worked amidst the weaving iron shafts.

The drawworks roared back to life and began winching the wirerope into its ravenous belly. The travelling block, a colossal pulley the size of a small car, rose ominously into the night, vanishing into the blinding glare of halogen lights shining through blowing snow. Again the rig floor shook as the tongs wrenched the joint loose. In went the slips and the kelly whined as it spun up.

The Bulgarian Ass-Inhabiting Hermit Crab

2007-02-23T12:12:00.000-08:00

Ok. I've decided to continue blogging. But I'm going to start over. As you may have noticed, all previous posts have been removed. Family and friends were deeply disturbed by the content. Thus I am attempting to write a tamer blog. No more profanity. No more stories about family and friends. Henceforth, my writings will be a departure from the narrative style that marked my previous work. I will focus an a more impersonal journalistic style. To family and friends I say: I'm very disappointed in you. What you saw here was a part of the real me. You disapproved (and I don't blame you for that because its your prerogative). But know this, I will never stop writing as myself. However, I will not share those writings with you and they will be published either under an assumed name or posthumously. Consider yourselves deprived of ever really knowing the true me.

As for my devoted readers, send me your email addresses and I will be sure to supply you with the "good stuff."

What follows is a brief description of a terrible creature that came to be late one evening when my bother and I were delirious with sleep deprivation. We laughed and cried until the sun came up the following morning. In fact, we still laugh about it.

The Bulgarian ass-inhabiting hermit crab (also known as the Fijian Nard Wrangler) is a particularly pugnacious species of hermit crab that inhabits a chain of islands near Fiji in the South Pacific. It was (accidentally) discovered by a Bulgarian naturalist late in the nineteenth century. These hermit crabs are unique in that they do not have shells. Instead, they creep up on the native male population as they slumber on the beaches under the stars after a wild night of fire dancing ( or other seemingly pointless native activities ). These crabs get a running start and weasel their way past the natives' loin-cloths and lodge themselves in the victims' bums. These bum-dwelling crustaceans are notorious for their surly dispositions, their marked propensity for violence, and their abhorrence of things that jiggle. When provoked (which is most of the time) the bum-inhabiting Bulgarian hermit crab will burst forth from the poor fellow's rectum and viciously attack his scrotum. When the disgruntled crab is sufficiently exhausted it retreats back into the cozy confines of its bum-home. Eventually, the skin on the hosts scrotum becomes thick and leathery and the man and his crab become surprisingly fond of one another. Thus an unlikely symbiotic bond develops. The crab continues to use the host's scrotum as a punching bag and by-and-by becomes outrageously powerful and even begins to exhibit territorial behavior. In one incident that was reported last year to a local UN relief office, a local islander was courting a young lady in a nearby village. One evening, as he trotted through the jungle; en route to a tete-a-tete with his beloved, he was accosted by the young lady's father and six nefarious brothers. All had large machetes and were only seconds away from hacking the poor chap to bits when out burst his viciously territorial bum-dwelling comrade. The crab went to work on those surly mofos and when it was done, the bodies of the assailants were un-identifiable. The young man was later quoted as saying: "These crabs are totally auspicious. I don't know but sometimes I believe this in my heart."

2007-01-05T10:34:00.000-08:00

Au Revoir, fine folk! I wish you all the best.

Bachelor par Excellence.

2006-12-22T12:22:00.000-08:00

I opened my eyes and waited for the room to come into focus. I lay on my back in my sleeping bag, on the carpet, the clear blue sky shining down on me through the mini-blinds. "What time is it?" The clock was of no use to me for it stood on the window-sill, silhouetted in sharp relief against the glaring daylight beyond. I loved waking up to the sky like that. From the floor, the trees and pasture are cropped out and all that can be seen is sky and clouds. And I could be anywhere, my apartment could be floating in the clouds itself or resting on a beach in the South Pacific somewhere. In those waking moments, the blissful disorientation made my heart flutter. I felt like I'd awakened in the foreground of a Salvador Dali painting. I yawned and stretched in my sleeping bag. I could feel the familiar chill of steel in the back of my thigh where the slide of my pistol was pressed against my skin. I unzipped the sleeping bag and withdrew the 0.40 caliber H&K USP. The gun felt solid and heavy in my hand with the tang nestled snugly in the crotch between my thumb and fore-finger. The athletic tape around the grip had been white at one time but had turned brown with the sweat and grime of constant handling.

I set the gun aside on the carpet and sat up, resting on my elbows. My eyes had adjusted. The hands of the clock indicated that it was half past eleven. But this meant that it was actually half past ten because I never changed my clocks for daylight savings. I stood and fetched my housecoat. It was a long, thick, black robe. I called it my "czar robe." It made me feel very aristocratic. It was Saturday and I had no appointments or obligations and the prospect of leisure made me euphoric. I turned and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. "Yes, indeed, very aristocratic." I mused, trying not to look at my unruly matted hair. I flared my neck muscles and set my jaw, making my czar face. My appearance was rather startling for I had the stubbly beginnings of a beard. A red beard. I turned my head to the side and tried to observe my profile out of the corner of my eye. This made me dizzy and I stumbled out into the living room.

I walked to the sliding glass doors and thrust the verticle blinds aside, allowing the sunlight to flood the room. Zoe stood next to me, wagging her tail and nudging me with her nose. " 'Morning, baby!" I yawned as I stooped to pat her head. Turning to face the room, I noticed the Samurai sword in my display case. It was actually a kai gunto (WWII Japanese naval officer's sword.) My grandfather had brought it home with him after WWII. I walked to the display case and drew the sword from its shark skin scabbard. The brass on the hilt was tarnished but the blade was in perfect condition. The steel gleemed in the morning sunlight, blinding me. I settled into a horse-back stance and lifted the sword above my head menacingly before plunging into the grizzly business of slaughtering invisble ninjas. I only knew a handful of Japanese words but these I half-shouted in an angry tone as I chopped at the air. When I was sufficiently exhausted from the carnage, I stopped and let the back of the blade rest on my shoulder. I was a bit out of breath. Zoe had wisely run for cover the instant that the sword had been drawn.

Next to me was the shelf where I kept my humidor. I lifted the lid with my free hand, reached inside, and retrieved a nice fat Nicaraguan cigar. The air in the room seemed stuffy so I stuck the cigar in my mouth and headed for the sliding glass doors. Zoe trotted after me and waited eagerly as I slid the glass door open. She shoved past me and pranced out onto the balcony ahead of me. The air was cool and sweet and the sun was warm on my face. The wooden planks were rough underfoot. The grass in the pasture had already gone gold with the first frost and tufts of dead gorse were scattered about. The wind chimes sang as they always did. I stood admiringly with the sword resting on my shoulder like a musket, the cigar protruding from my mouth, and my left hand buried in the front pocket of my robe. A mocking bird flitted past and I would like to have taken a swing at him with the sword for I was certain that he was the brazen cock sucker that had been defecating on my shiny red Evo.

It was then that I felt the weight of their eyes. I turned stiffly and noticed a crowd of staring people standing on an adjacent balcony. They were clearly dumb-struck. I had to feign arrogance to mask my embarrassment so I raised my chin at them in a stately manner and turned my gaze back to the pasture before me. And then the awkward pause where I counted off the seconds anxiously. I couldn't simply walk back inside after that little showdown, I had to wait. I had to let them know that I was a czar and, consequently, ashamed of nothing. I finally turned very slowly and stepped back inside the apartment. Ah, the amusements and day-to-day experiences afforded by the bohemian lifestyle.

Sunday School

2006-12-07T12:00:00.000-08:00

The little house that sat off of I-65 and Alford Avenue was situated on a quiet little dead-end street that was skirted with quaint '70's-era homes and thick-trunked hardwood trees like oaks and maples. The asphalt had turned gray long ago and the edges of the street had begun to crumble as little sprigs of grass wormed their way up from beneath. The dead end of the street was halted by a densely wooded slope. It was there that a little trail wound its way from the road down through the trees to the parking lot of a modestly sized church. Conveniently enough, this was the church that we attended. On most Sundays when the weather was fair, we would stroll down the road in our Sunday clothes and follow the trail through the woods. Correction: Mom and Dad would follow the trail and Em', Joel, and I would dangle from their clenched fists like limp little tiger cubs as they staggered over the treacherous braids of tree-roots. It's just low-bred to do anything on a trail besides hike or camp and emerging from the woods into a public place like that just wreaked of hillbilly-ness. A family of five spilling out of a hobble-trail into the parking lot was a real show-stopper. Fortunately I was too young to be embarrassed by much of anything other than falling down or getting yelled at by big people.

It's rather silly, the institution of Sunday School is. It's not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. That's because the Brits invented it. They invented it so that they could collect and torture orphans for a couple of hours every Sunday. Then the big people decided that it wasn't fair to torture only orphans on Sunday so all kids were dragged kicking and screaming into little rooms full of paste and construction paper where they were taught to glue macaroni pasta to stuff. This is really confusing because they tell you about all the poor starving children that don't live in America. If these kids are starving to death, then why the hell are we gluing perfectly edible macaroni pasta to xeroxed black-and-white portraits of the baby Jesus? You'll only ever ask the big people that question once because they'll make you sit in the corner until your parents come to get you.

With a biblical name like Joshua, it's hard not to be importuned with all that Jericho business. How you "fit" some damn battle or something. I had my own song and the teacher would always wink at me collusively when we sang it. "And the walls came a tumbling down..." Ho f-ing hum. Everytime you turned around, some condescending big person was telling you what your name meant. Then they would tuck their jaws into their triple chins, raise one of their eyebrows, and stare at you as if you were suddenly going to worship them for enlightening you.

And the clothes. Of all the psychologically degrading rubbish you could be exposed to. The Summer clothes were egregious. After church, the playground always looked like a Summer camp for aspiring rodeo clowns. I think that on some Freudian level, Church clothes are why nudist colonies exist. I admit, some kids are exhibitionists from birth, but when you're hiding in a miniature fortress made of railroad ties, and you're tearing a hideous pair of seersucker britches off, the last thing you're thinking about is showing people what you've got. Aside from being dreadfully uncomfortable, they restricted your mobility. Not so much physically. Sure, they were tight in all the wrong places, but if you so much as thought about mud or dirt or grease or tar or persimmon juice or blood, you were sure to get covered from head to toe in the sh!t. I mean that stuff would be on you like Michael Jackson on a bus load of drunken cub scouts. So you ended up walking stiffly past mud puddles like you were sneaking past a den of rabid werweasels. You never left the sidewalks and you got funny looks for wearing your raincoat all the time.

After the baby Jesus was sufficiently burried beneath a veritable mountain of macaroni pasta, cotton balls, sequins, paste, and glitter; and after you had glued your hands together, the big people would make you sing silly songs about your "little light" or never marching in the "infant tree." The "little light" song was really perplexing. You hold your index finger up and sing: "This little light of mine. I'm gonna let it shine." Is it a flashlight or a candle or what? They don't tell you. And then it gets to the part: "Hide it under a bush? Hell no!" Ok, I'm with them there. I mean, if my "little light" is a candle, then I certainly don't want to put it under a bush. But, "hell" was a word that got you a mouthful of dish detergent and here we were singing/shouting it in Sunday School! It was very confusing. Once I tried to sing it as: "Hide it under a bush? Dammit no!" And I got the taste slapped out of my mouth.

Crafts and activities. "Crafts" and "activities" were the rudiments of the Sunday School ritual. Everything was centered around "crafts" and "activities." Crafts were pretty straight forward: you glue macaroni pasta to stuff. But activities were a product of big people's desperation to maintain some semblance of order when things went awry. Invariably all activities began with enticing the snotty-nosed lot of us to sit in a circle, be it around a table or on the floor. It didn't matter, the point was you and your inmates were all sitting in a circle facing each other. The big people accomplished this feat with the promise of food or the application of reverse psychology. Really, you can't deny the brilliance of it. "Hey, kids, by all means keep throwing blocks and lawn darts at each others' heads. But whatever you do, don't sit in a circle...HEY! I SAID DON'T SIT IN A CIRCLE!!!" So you are all assembled in a circle, or some geometrical abortion that passes for a circle. It's then that the big people toss a random pile of household items in front of you and proceed to give you "instructions" to follow. That was a mistake. The big person would say: "Follow the instructions, Josh." And I just shrugged and thought to myself: "Follow 'em where? Around the room? You tools already told me I couldn't go out in the hall." Invariably, the big people would get flustered and shove you aside. "No! Like this!"

You could tell that they were making it up as they went. The activity that I always love to bring up is so retarded that you can't even give it a name that has fewer than twenty words in it. As always, they would compel us to sit around a table. Then a bowl was placed in the centre of the table. At the age of four, my qualitative analysis skills were as yet terribly undeveloped. Theretofore, such skills had only been employed to deduce the constituent ingredients in strange and unappealing casseroles and quiches. Now, with the advantages of college chemistry and life experience in general, I can maintain with confidence that the bowl held a solution that was a mixture of paint, dish detergent, water, and high-fructose corn syrup. I'm most confident about the latter ingredient because that sh!t's in everything. Anyways, before we had time to decide our own fates, they would shove plastic drinking straws into our glue-covered hands and command us to "blow bubbles." We were kids but we weren't stupid. Everyone knows that big people snort and fuss and swat at you when you blow bubbles in your milk or your juice. We all looked across the table at each other with confused expressions as if to say: "You think this is a trick or a test?" We were kids but we weren't stupid. We just looked at one another and with our eyes, we were asking: "What does this have to do with gluing macaroni to baby Jesus?" And so a few seconds of silence would pass, marked only by the occasionaly sniffle of a snotty nose. "Like this!" A big person would snap impatiently, as they leaned over and blew bubbles in the mysterious concoction. We would look at each other skeptically and one by one we would lean forward and blow through our straws. It was pretty exciting...at first.

Indeed, the bubbles began to fill the bowl as we puffed. And as children are wont to do, we grew very preoccupied with the activity. Though I've never seen it accomplished, I think this activity was originally intended to be a craft. That is, when the bowl began to overflow with bubbles, a piece of white paper was placed over the top and as the bubbles beneath the paper burst, they would leave behind beautiful patterns. Again, I'm only surmising here because we never got that far. The idea that this activity had no pratical purpose; has, for me, been the cause of extreme mental anguish. Thus in the years following the incident, I spent many a sleepless night tossing and turning as I struggled to comprehend the purpose of such a cruel and seemingly pointless activity.

As I was relating, this bowl full of mystery goo was set in the centre of a round table and we were directed to blow bubbles in the goo using the drinking straws that the big people had handed out. The table was rather broad, so we were forced to stand in our chairs in order to reach the bowl; some of us even had to army-crawl to the centre of the table. We blew through the straws as hard and as fast as we could. The big people looked on and urgently prodded us to "blow faster." I blew as hard as I could and I could feel my face turning bright red. My cheeks were throbbing and I was beginning to hyperventilate. I emptied my lungs through the narrow straw and I suddenly started to feel very sleepy and I saw little pink and purple dots of light flickering all around me. This was very distracting and when I went to inhale, I forgot to take the straw out of my mouth. I sucked up a mouthful and half a lungfull of the bubbly blue concoction. My eyeballs thrust the lids aside and climbed out of their sockets. My stomach went tight. BLECH!!! Blue stuff burst from my nose and mouth and a cloud of blue mist obscured my vision. When the cloud settled, the kids across from me looked like little smurfs. I blinked in horror. Their little blue faces blinked back at me, mouths gaping. Before I could react, my stomach tightened once more and my cheeks ballooned. BLECH!!!! I opened my eyes to find that I had contributed a stomach full of soggy Cheerios to the bowl of blue sludge. BLECHHHHHHHH!!! I had initiated a chain reaction. We emptied ourselves like confetti cannons.

In under a minute, the tabletop was hidden beneath a writhing mass of vomiting three year olds. BLECHHHHHHH!!! Torrents of Fruitloops, oatmeal, Lucky Charms, scrambled eggs, sausage, marmalade, and grits spilled out onto the table. The smell was revolting. Some of the big people gagged and coughed, the rest just gasped and ran to get paper towels. Those of us who had finished retching, began to scream in terror. It was pure pandemonium. I'm still in therapy.

I'd be remiss, if I did not mention the practical lessons that we learned in Sunday School. For instance, one Sunday, I unwittingly demonstrated for the class the wrong way to stand on a folding chair. Consequently, I also demonstrated the wrong way to patiently and calmly wait for assistance after being eaten by a folding chair. After wrestling with folding chairs, I learned that despite the amazing similarities, brown crayons do not taste like Tootsie Rolls. And for those of you who may not know this, you can make orange Play-Doh by mixing yellow Play-Doh with blood.

The "Known World"

2006-12-07T10:29:00.000-08:00

The very first house that I can remember living in was located in Bluff Park just off of I-65 and Alford Avenue. What stands out most prominently in my memory is the yard. I guess now is as good a time as any to describe The Yard. The backyard, to be precise. The front yard was about as foreign to me as the rest of the territory that filled the world beyond the chainlink fence that encompassed the "known world," that is, the backyard. When we were not in the bathtub, we could usually be found rolling around in the luxurious carpets of thick green Saint Augustine grass beneath the sprawling pines, rooting around in the monkey grass that bordered EVERYTHING, or peddling our Big wheels around on the huge brick patio.

That patio stood out like a cameo. It was thirty-feet in diameter and it floated like an island in the centre of the yard and was connected to the back steps of the house by an isthmus of solidly mortared bricks that formed a wide walkway. At the foot of the back steps, this walkway was joined by another that led to the gate in the northwest corner of the yard. The bricks in the patio were lain unevenly causing the patio to ripple the way that the surface of a catfish pond ripples on a breezy day. Here and there, the crevices between the bricks were stuffed with moss, or splayed around the mouths of chipmunk burrows. In the mornings, a haphazard assembly of oaks, hickories, and dogwoods draped their shadows over the patio like a giant sheet of black lace. These trees, that lived on the eastern side of the patio, blanketed the bricks with their leaves in the Fall. And the dogwoods dropped their clusters of berries that reminded me, for some odd reason, of stars and I would often point these berry clusters out, insisting that they had fallen from the sky during the night.

One of these dogwoods originated from a tangled mass of roots that was wedged between the patio and one of the rusted iron poles that supported an old moss-covered awning. This awning was crammed uncomfortably between the trunks of the bigger trees and a pair of brick steps led from the patio down to the bare earth beneath the awning. It was there that Dad kept his lawn-mower. And to the north of the awning stood a veritable Goliath of an oak tree. From this tree our magnificent rope swing hung. It was a simple swing, made from a single length of manilla rope that Dad had fastened to one of the tree's upper boughs. The manilla rope was as thick as my leg, so thick that I couldn't close my hands around it and had to hug it instead. It went up up up into the shady confines of the leafy canopy, so high that if you tried to see where it was tied off, you would fall over backwards. There was a round wooden seat that Dad had made and the rope went through a hole in the middle before forming a knot that was as big as my head. Below the the knot, the unraveled strands of rope hung and swept the dusty ground like a broom. The ground was dusty there because it was bare where our feet had vied for traction. Mom had done her part too. She had painted the seat a dark green color and over the green, she had painted a glossy pair of cherries. Why cherries? I don't know. It made no difference because when Dad pushed you on that swing, cherries were the last thing on your mind. He would push you so high that you could see the leaves rotting on top of the awning and you could see all of the world that stretched beyond the fence.

The other end of the awning bordered what could be described as a monument to Mom's shortcomings as a gardener. It was a scraggly tangle of grass that every now and then sported a lethargic tomato plant or an emaciated stalk of corn. Mom always yelled at us when we ventured there, always worried that we'd kill the poor plant before she did.

In back of the awning, on the side farthest from the patio, there was a cinderblock retaining wall that spanned the width of the yard, and running parallel to the back fence. The remianing strip of yard between this wall and the back fence was hidden beneath waist-high grass. We never ventured there because everyone knew that big big snakes lived there. But we wasted plenty of time standing atop the retainig wall and heaving big rocks into the grass in hopes of provoking the big snakes to come out into the open where we could see them. We nearly gave up this obsession after Mom caught us shoving Dad's lawn-mower over the retaining wall.

The part of the yard west of the patio, the part that flanked the walkway on either side, was covered with rich green Saint Augustine. And here and there, the tallest pines you've ever seen stretched to the sky with arching boughs that cradled the clouds. I was convinced that these were the trees that had inspired Rock-A-Bye Baby. Just north of the walkway was the infamous barbecue pit where the carpenter ant munched on my right nut. Let's not forget the little flower beds all bordered by monkey grass. These sat off of the north side of the patio as well. Though Mom planted the bulbs upside down, the tulips never ceased to grow.

That was The Yard. In the Summer, we danced there barefoot and picnicked and napped under the pines on a big quilt that Mom spread on the grass. And in the Winter, we waddled around back there with drippy red noses or stood in a circle facing each other with arms akimbo, trying to act like big people. Regardless of the season, we enjoyed ourselves immensely.

Batting Practice.

2006-12-06T10:38:00.000-08:00

Interestingly ( or perhaps dusturbingly ) enough, most of my childhood memories are of bathtub activities. We took a lot of baths, my sister, brother, cousins, and I. In fact, I was in third grade before I learned that my fingers were not supposed to be all pruney like that. As I mentioned in a previous anecdote, my Mom more-or-less raised my cousins during the time that my aunt was divorced. Thus, for all practical purposes, my mother had five children ranging from birth to five years of age. Four of us; my cousins, Paul and Phil;my sister, Emily; and I, were between the ages of two and five. My mom always tossed the four of us into the tub at once. This made for some very fascinating discussions about what had "happened" to Em's "weenery." It was obvious to us [Paul, Phil, and me] that Em' had no weenery and we were quick to point this out whenever the subject arose. Em' was very exhasperated by this, and she declared that her "winnowee" was on her bum.

My cousins and I, being children, were not keen on backing down when it was obvious that we were right. But when Em's face turned red, we knew that we had better start pretending. You have to understand some things about Em'. She was born with fiery red hair and a wicked cow-lick that left her with a permanent mohawk. The surliness of her hairdo corresponded remarkably with her disposition and her marked propensity for violence. She was younger than we were and yet she could give us all a beating that made Dad's belt feel like an all-girl pillow fight in an anorexia ward. To her, every toy and house-hold item was a melee weapon. She was peerless in her ability to deliver blunt force trauma with a Rainbow Brite doll or Teddy Ruxpin. And that battery-pack in Teddy Ruxpin is a bitch! She could do things to you with a Skipper Doll that would make Schutzstaffel interrogators blush with envy. But what made Em' really scary, was that she was wild and uninhibited, the kind of kid that you don't turn your back on. Kind of like a billygoat. If you turned your back on her, even for an instant, you could get coldcocked for no reason at all. It was some scary sh!t. You'd be humming along to Dixie whilst watching The Dukes of Hazard and sipping apple juice and then WHAM, you'd get donkey-punched in the throat. You would hear her shrieking diabolical laughter. She sounded like an emphysemic Tasmanian devil in a yodeling match. Sometimes it was scarier to see her coming especially when she was stalking you; she would dash behind a piece of furniture and all you could see was her little red mohawk bobbing up and down with each step. It was like a fuzzy little dorsal fin. If you can imagine a sadistic Treasure Troll in a cloth diaper and plastic pants, you've got the picture. We were all terrified.

There was nowhere to hide. One morning, I was riding my Big wheel around on the enourmous brick patio in our backyard when Em' decided that it would be expedient to use my head for batting practice. It was Saturday morning and Paul and Phil were at home with my aunt so I was alone in the backyard with Satan. I had seen Em' pick up the baseball bat about five minutes earlier and had kept one eye pop-riveted to the back of her skull as she assaulted a bed of tulips and daffodils. My heart bolted and the back of my neck felt like a pin-cushion as she turned. I jerked my eyes away, retracting my gaze like a tape measure, and I pretended to make motorcycle noises as I peddled around the patio. "Don't look her in the eyes, it only makes her aggressive." Famous last words. My Big wheel jolted as the front tire grew wedged between a couple of bricks. I gulped. Sudden movements were bad. She always homed in on stuff like that. You know, the usual stuff like the smell of fear, fresh blood, shiny objects, small children, wounded animals, et cetera. ( Seriously, the first time I saw the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, I was like: "You f-ing amateurs!" ) I strained at the peddles in an effort to get the Big wheel moving again but I froze as I heard the crunch of monkeygrass. I had to look. I swung my head around to face the noise. All I saw were two crumpled tufts of monkey grass that were slowly standing back up. There! I saw a dark blur of OshKosh denim in my peripheral vision and I could hear the skuffling of her Buster Browns on the bricks. She was breathing heavily through her nose, a sure sign that she was focused too intently on being sneaky. I ducked instinctively, shoving my head between my knees. Crack! The bat caromed off of the top of the Big wheel's seat and the report was followed by a shriek of maniacal laughter. Strike One. I had to act quickly while she was winding up for the next swing. My blood was saturated with adrenaline and I had cotton mouth like a champ! I shot up out of my seat, spun to face her, planted the palm of my hand squarely in her face and shoved. It was like a reviewing footage of a tragic gymnastics accident. Everyone tilts their heads and grimaces and goes: "Ohhhh ouch!" as the guy's neck folds in half. It was that bad. Fortunately for her, her mohawk broke her fall and; unfortunately for me, she was back on her feet and charging before my squeal had escaped my throat.

It was a panicked sprint that carried me the thirty-or-so yards to the back door of the house. She was right on my heels and her laughter had taken a crazed throaty tone, indicating that she was done playing and had grown feverish with bloodlust. My shoes tore at the grass and my Toughskins whistled hoarsely between my thighs as I ran. I was pulling away, but I still had to negotiate the impending bottleneck at the backdoor. The tarnished brass knob presented a formidable challenge. I was only four and I had the dexterity of a quadriplegic ox. Besides, theretofore, none of us had ever succeeded in turning that knob. It was an obstinate old relic that only "big people" [adults] could manipulate. If we ever needed to get into the house, we had to assemble ourselves at the door like little siege engines and pound away with our little fists and yell until Mom opened it from the inside. But I didn't have the luxury of time that day so Mom was of no use to me. On the bright side, though, I wouldn't have a screen door in the way to slow me down. All we had was a classic exterior door with a window in the upper half.

I had to climb six whole stairs to reach the porch and at four years old, a stair comes all the way up to your groin. I busied myself with the ascent. Em' had to lug the bat up the stairs with her so that bought me a couple of very precious seconds. I had the tickling sensation in the back of my neck because I expected her to take a swing at me at any second. Finally! I heaved myself onto the porch and dashed to the door. I took a running leap and bear-hugged the enourmous doorknob. My feet dangled beneath me as I grappled with the stubborn mechanism. I glanced back over my shoulder just in time to see Em's face as she crested the stairs. She was breathing heavily and her face was suffused with a red glow. The bat was at the ready, raised in the air above her head. Her tongue never seemed to fit in her mouth and, as always, it was thrust out to the side. Her tiny irises and dilated pupils were mere specks floating on the whites of her eyes and her smile was empty and manic. I could see the gates of hell reflected in her visage. Then would have been an appropriate time to scream something like: "The power of Christ compels you!" But I was too busy begging the obstinate brass knob for my life.

To my utter astonishment and immeasurable relief, the knob gave a mechanical belch and began to turn. I hung on for dear life as the door swung slowly inward. I was in no mood to enjoy the ride. ( Later on, I would introduce the concept of door-swinging to Paul and Phil and we would spend an entire afternoon swinging on my bedroom door until the hinges tore out of the jamb and the door fell on Phil.) I dropped onto the kitchen floor and landed awkwardly before staggering around to the back of the door and slamming it shut. I listened for the clink of the engaging latch and when I heard it, I collapsed with my back to the door. My heart was playing my sternum like a kettledrum and mouth was so dry that I was choking on my own tongue. Silence...

This is the part of the movie where the good guy thinks the bad guy is dead and he turns around to kiss hot babes or play a power love-ballad on his air guitar while the credits roll. I was young but I wasn't stupid. I knew that the beelzebatter was still out there. I tilted my head back slowly. Maybe she had been distracted by the mailman or some other small defenseless creature. CRAAAAASHHHHHH!!!!!!!! I screamed like a little girl. The bat blasted through the glass in the window above. I was baptised in a fountain of falling glass. I was young but I wasn't stupid. The sound of breaking glass! I went cold with dread. That sound was the precursor of the ass-ravaging hell that only Mom could dispense. That sound made big people foam at the mouth and chase you through the house. That sound meant that your bum was doomed.

I had glass in my hair and down my shirt. But that wasn't why I was crying. I was crying because Mom was foaming at the mouth as she stood, towering above me with a beefy wooden spatula in her hand. She was livid. I squealed and hid my face. With one fluid and powerful motion, Mom lifted me from the floor by the arm and set me aside on my feet. The glass grated and crunched under the soles of her shoes as she stepped to the door and flung it open. Mom stood in the doorway and Em' stood on the porch beyond, framed in the silhouettes of Mom's thighs. A twinge of glee checked my tears as I saw the fear spread across Em's face. She turned to run but Mom snatched her up so quickly that she seemed to have vanished. All that remained was the baseball bat which rolled to the edge of the porch and went clickedy clacking down the steps. POW POW POW POW POW!!! The sound of wooden spatula connecting with diaper-clad bum. And then Em's howling. My bum was already burning in anticipation. I turned to run. But Mom's hands were like vices. She spun me around to face her.

Strangely, she wasn't foaming at the mouth and her eyes were wide with concern and compassion. "Are you alright?" she asked. I nodded and sniffled as she dusted the shards of glass out of my hair and pulled my shirt off. Em' was still wailing behind her. "You two need a bath." Mom sighed.

The Ant In My Pants

2006-11-29T12:04:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure why, but recently I've had wave after wave of childhood flashbacks. I think that I may be dying. I have a strange mark that has appeared on my left cheek. It's like a freckle but bigger. I'm thinking skin cancer and I'm very comfortable with this. I've been visiting the tanning bed for the last year in hopes of getting cancer. I think that it gives you a good excuse to lay down and expire. Don't you? And it's much less traumatic on loved ones. I mean, a self-administered load of double-aught to the cranium usually comes as a surprise to everyone. Whereas: "Hey, I've got cancer." kind of prepares everyone for what comes next. You know, it sort of lets them down easy. Just kidding! I'm getting the freckle looked at next week so relax. Anyways, I thought I'd take advantage of this acute hindsight and write down as many of these childhood memories as possible. Enjoy.

As I mentioned in the previous post, my cousins more or less lived with my sister and me from the time I was four years old to the time I was nearly seven. My aunt would drop them off at our house in the mornings and we would spend our days together riding Bigwheels, drinking apple juice, licking the contents of the boogie truck, and pretending to be The Dukes of Hazard and the Super Friends. We also amused ourselves with other more interesting and less conventional activities. Videlicet, after we were all potty-trained, Paul, Phil, and I would congregate at the toilet where we would "sword fight" with our piss-streams. This activity was not very popular with Mom, whom the task of mopping up misdirected sword-strokes fell to. There were other aspects of the sport that irritated her. If you've ever watched young boys attempt sword play (with toy swords and not piss-streams), you've likely noticed that the coup de grâce ( death blow ) is never dealt. In fact, their blades rarely touch their opponents and when they do, it's usually unintentional. Instead, proper sword-play from a boy's perspective, is accomplished when the swords are bashed together repeatedly until one or both parties are sufficiently exhausted or become completely bored. Paul, Phil, and I, however, pioneered a form of sword-play wherein the object was to slash one's opponent with the blade instead of simply slashing his blade. My mother failed to see or appreciate the genius of this as she was the one who had to wipe us down and change or shirts and britches after the fight.

We, being the perceptive and thoughtful boys that we were, noticed Mom's frustration and sought to lighten her burden by taking our sword-fights out into the backyard. This we felt would spare her the trouble of mopping up after us. And, to further reduce the collateral damage, we stripped down to our birthday suits before each fight. But there is no pleasing some people, chiefly my mother; who upon witnessing what would be our final skirmish, came screaming down the back steps and dispensed a very potent dose of corporal punishment. In hindsight, I can see why she reacted this way because at that time, we lived on a corner lot with the backyard facing the corner which happened to be the intersection of our street and a major thoroughfare. There, the respectable citizency of Bluff Park were subjected to the sight of three little boys in nothing but cowboy boots micturating upon each other and laughing.

As you can imagine, our activities warranted frequent bathing and, in an effort to thwart the mounting utility bills, Mom developed the habit of tossing us all ( my younger sister, Emily, included ) into the tub together. Later on, Paul and Phil moved to Florida after my aunt and uncle remarried (each other!) By that time, I had a little brother, Joel; and the three of us, Joel, Emily, and I continued this bathing tradition. We continued until I was about ten years old and a long squirrelly hair appeared on my scrotum. Emily found this to be quite humorous and she pointed it out to my mother who, with a constrained smile and suppressed laughter, informed me that thenceforth I'd be bathing alone.

Since we are on the topic of scrotums, I have to tell you about the time that I constructed a tent in the backyard by draping a sheet over an old semi-circular stone enclosure that had once been a barbecue pit. It was summertime and I crawled into my tent with a blanket in hopes of getting some unnecessary shut-eye. Things were going splendidly until an enormous black carpenter ant took up residence in my little cotton jogging shorts and decided to make a tasty snack out of my right nard. I didn't have any relevant words like "shit" or "fuck" in my vocabulary so I just screamed and started punching myself in the balls frantically. And that's how Mom found me. Of course, by that time the ant was quite gone.

The Boogie Truck and the Gorilla Mask

2006-11-27T16:54:00.000-08:00

My aunt and uncle divorced shortly before my fourth or fifth birthday, I forget which. What's important is that my cousins; Paul, a year my senior and Phil, a year my junior; came to stay with my sister and me on the week days when my aunt would work. And this, of course, was a catalyst for a great deal of mischief. But the anecdote that I am about to relate happened a year or so prior to that. My cousins had a Matchbox Fedex truck. Nothing fancy, simply a die-cast boxy-looking truck, painted white with a Fedex logo on either side and a pair of black plastic double doors in the rear. What set this particular truck apart from the myriads of pointless trinkets that passed for toys was what was inside of it, for it carried a priceless cargo. We had spent months and months, which at that time amounted to a sizeable portion of our lives, depositing our "boogies" in the back of that little truck. It was really very exciting. You would pick the truck up and and pry the little doors open and see that it was packed to the rafters with boogies. Yeah, I know. But it gets worse, trust me. On evenings when dinner was late and our little tummies growled, we would force the doors of the truck open and pass it around and lick the boogies for salt. I know, its repulsive.

This was around the time when my father learned that children can be remarkably savage when engaged in fight-or-flight mode. It was a brisk October evening and my sister and I were in the bathtub sporting our Johnson & Johnson mohawks. Yes, together in the bath tub and yes it was innocent. We were very young and we had plenty of bath-toys to distract us from playing with each other's no-no's. So relax. As I was saying, we were in the bathtub with little toy tugboats, rubber duckies, and Fisher Price people bobbing up and down around us. The bathtub was set back in the wall, obscuring it from the bathroom doorway and thus we could not see our parents who were out in the hallway, nor could we hear my mom's frantic whisper as she pleaded: "Bud, oh Bud, don't do it! Don't you dare do it!" My sister and I were completely oblivious as we were entirely engrossed in a mock tugboat-disaster that was unfolding before us. Oblivious, also, to the fact that my father had stopped by Kmart on the way home from work. And after walking past the seasonal aisle on his way to the hardware section he had somehow decided that he desperately needed a rubber gorilla mask. And this was no ordinary gorilla mask. It had wrinkled gray skin, bloated features, and tumorous growths everywhere. The eyes were cut out and the entire face was framed by a matted explosion of greasy jerry-curls. It smelled like my nightmares and tasted like earwax.

My mom's hushed pleading and Dad's stifled laughter and the sloshing of our bathwater and suddenly the lights in the bathroom went out. My sister and I looked up. We were still smiling innocently when Dad came bursting around the corner with his gorilla mask on. He had his hands raised ominously and his fingers were curled like claws. He gave a terrifying roar that I could never duplicate for you phonetically. If pressed to describe it, I would say that it sounded more-or-less like wookiee getting an unexpected enema. As you might have guessed, we screamed. And not just any ahhhhh-ok-you-got-me scream, these were death-screams. Our little hands were playing invisible bongos as we emptied our lungs over and over again. We, my sister and I, were about to be devoured by a vicious beast, of this I was certain and I resolved not to go without a fight. Somewhere in the darkness and the confusion, my little pink wrinkled fingers found and closed around the prow of my Fisher Price tugboat and I lifted it and hurled it with all of my might. The little boat's flight was a brief one. It traveled no more than twenty inches before it connected solidly with Dad's gonads. The impact was punctuated by Dad's consternated "oomph." And he sank to his knees and crawled to the doorway before collapsing in the hallway, whereupon the lights came back on and my mother, rushed in to console us. She was laughing hysterically and this only confused us even more.

We eventually learned that it was a mask and after a month or two, we even made a game of having Dad put it on and chase us around the backyard in the evenings. This went on for sometime until the neighbors called and said that their little girl had witnessed this activity from her bedroom window and had grossly misinterpreted it.

Plastic Flowers

2006-11-01T09:52:00.000-08:00

Preface: This post has caused a great deal of confusion and I've received numerous emails as a result. To clarify, no one died, and I have never impregnated a woman much less sired a child. The end of the post is a flashback to my undergraduate research. When I wrote this, I just let it flow. I'm sorry of some of you took it seriously. For those of you who have made a hobby of psychoanalyzing me via my posts *Jen cough cough* go ahead and knock yourselves out.

The scrub-clad courier of death, with the paper mask bunched up under his chin, and the sharp hospital breath. My imagination had been off by one shade of brown in his eyes, raw umber, and the sandpaper stubble on his face. His voice was like sandstone, it came with the shrill ringing grind like a door to a hidden passageway in an Indiana Jones movie; and the chilling detatchment in his stare could not be far from the musty stillness and emptiness of a tomb full of bleached bones. The divots on the sides of his nose were still purple from the weight of the glasses. He never knew her and yet he got to watch her die while I sat out in the corridor with the silly blue paper booties that looked like shower caps, pulled over my shoes. With the cheap sconces and dusty plastic flowers. Buttercups the color of banana Laffy Taffy. Here. The years had deposited me in here in this moment with fake flowers to mock my turmoil. "We lost the baby..." His words echoed off of the corridor walls. The plastic flowers listened eagerly. We lost the baby. And who's "We?" Because he's telling me that they couldn't stop the hemorrhaging. Iestyn. We'd fought over what his name would be. And now he was like a forgotten dry-cleaning order. I'd never even know where they buried him and I'd never care because he killed her. She's gone. He's telling me she's gone, serving it up cold on the roughly hewn slab of sandstone. Did I want to see her before they took her down to the morgue. Did I want to see her.

She always got surly and irritable when she was hungry. She let it slip later that it had something to do with bloodsugar. Theretofore, I'd taken it personally. She'd come home in a fowl mood and I'd just go into the kitchen with her words following me, gnawing on my heels like rabid min pins (miniature doberman pinschers, the dumbest and meanest dogs ever bred.) I'd just cook something for her and she knew what I was doing and she hated it. Always the shame and downcast eyes and softness in her voice after she had eaten. I never minded. There's always a reason for people's bitchery, even when there's not an excuse. Always a reason for it. And if you know them well enough, you'll know their reasons and you'll just smile sadly and knowingly inside of yourself when they send their min pins to gnaw on your ankles.

We used to go down to the basement of Ramsey hall, down where Suhling's labs were. Dr. Tippur, Medhat, and I. We had a huge optics bench down there that was the size of a large billiards table. It was covered with what looked like a hap-hazzard game of chess with the beam-splitters and lenses and mirrors that stood waiting for the green laser. All configured to produce a Coherent Grating Sensing Interferometer, per Dr. Tippur's scrupulous calculations. And we had a pneumatic ram for shattering the fracture test specimens. The ram's tup had a strip of copper tape fixed to the leading edge. And copper tape on the top edge of the test specimen, too. When the ram came crashing down, the copper tape on the tup would touch that on the specimen and the circuit would close, sending a signal to the shutter to expose the film. The film in Dr. Tippur's fantatstic high speed camera. A dinosaur of a camera that looked like a relic from a battleship with the gray bumpy flecked paint like you see on vintage slide projectors, the kind that smell like an electrical fire and burning cardboard. It was so big that it had wheels. 2000 plus frames per second. And all we had in it was a thirty-frame roll of 35mm film. That'd buy us 15 milliseconds of footage. And that was still sloppy because we were filming a crack that was propagating at nine-hundred and eighty million meters per second squared. That's ten to the eighth times the acceleration of gravity. I know! I was shocked also. The lights would go out and sometimes on cold days, you could see the lazer if Hashem and Yassir had been smoking inside. I'd stand in the corner next to the CO2 tank and twist the valve open when Tippur gave the signal. The instrument panels glowed like Las Vegas. I always wondered why we never had an oscilloscope in there. One of the old ones with the green and black display monitors. Because it never feels like science without an oscilloscope in the room. The air hose would writhe and hiss and the turbine in the camera would whine as it spun the mirror up. And I would get chills because I thought that fracture mechanics was what I was passionate about. But later, grad school would just be another bad descision and so would marriage, so would all the times I never went on the 0.40 caliber, 145-grain, jacketed hollow-point diet.