It’s been a shamefully long time since I’ve updated the blog so I decided to dust off an old gem from my Facebook notes. Why write new and relevant posts when I can just copy and paste something from Oct of last year? It may be old, but this is one of the most absurd and funny correspondences I have ever had so it’s certainly worth reposting.
I have changed the name and place of the other party involved in this exchange. Read on… Read More
This story was originally published on September 16, 2005.
Three Happenin Guys were once almost personally responsible for the death of another person. We almost killed a guy. It wasn’t the kind of thing where we hit a hobo with our tour bus, or a fan was crushed underneath a thousand other overzealous fans at a sold out show. This was a perfectly calculated ingenious murder plot, and it happened completely by accident. There are two ways for you to read this entry. If you are well balanced and mentally sound then please enjoy this entertaining story. But if you are an angry psycho then read this for what it really is: a blueprint for the perfect murder. Go ahead and pick a side. Got it? Now picture yourself in Lambert Fun Zone with a dumb, sweaty, chubby, blond-headed, crunk-toothed, goofy faced, home-schooled oaf in front of you. His employee name tag says Chris.
Chris Oats loved Fun Zone the way an illegal Mexican loves America. He was the only white kid in the category of Fun Zone employees that spent every waking hour at Fun Zone- the kids who ate three square meals a day in the snack bar. He’d show up at the butt crack of dawn and wait for the managers to unlock the building and let him in. He would request Gotta Girl by TCP every hour like clockwork, then skate in a blaze of glory whilst doing the Bankhead Bounce and various other ghetto moves as if he were in a one man episode of Soul Train. After a long day of skating to crunk ace skate music we would have to force him out of the building, then he’d get in his car and blast crunk ace skate music all the way home. Fun Zone was the only place he wanted to be.
He was a dirty ace pedophile. Chris Oats was sixteen when he was fired from Fun Zone for asking a twelve year old girl for her phone number, but if that was criteria for firing then he should have been fired a hundred times over. He wasn’t the kind of pervert that creeps you out though- the ones with the dirty ace glasses, the pit-stains, and the greasy thinning hair. Chris wasn’t an evil schemer with perverse plans to violate other people. Chris was a pedophile simply because he was too dumb to know that little girls weren’t fair game. His grandma had never home-schooled him that important bit of social information. I told one of my managers one day that Chris was dragging little girls’ bodies across his face as he “helped” them descend from the rock wall. Chris didn’t even get a warning. I guess his acorn sized brain had figured out the Fun Zone secret too.
We tried to keep him in check by making fun of him, but it never seemed to click. There were countless other things to make fun of Chris about though, and he quickly became Three Happenin Guys’ favorite co-worker. He was like our lovable little brother who came out the wrong way during childbirth. He wasn’t clever enough to joke back at his detractors, so his defense mechanism was to punch people who he suspected were teasing him. Three Happenin Guys were punched constantly.
One night at work Three Happenin Guys decided to take Chris Oats for a night out on the town. We invited Chris to participate in one of our famous “crazy adventures”, and he jumped at the opportunity. Little did he know that he was falling for a trap. The plan, we told him, was to go and explore this crazy long tunnel in a random Montgomery neighborhood. The truth was that the tunnel, which we had explored before and never reached the end of, was in a neighborhood that we knew very well. Clint’s long time best friend Johnny Turbo, A.K.A. the Turbo Twins lived there. Read More
This story was originally published on September 15, 2005.
At Fun Zone there were certain things that you came to expect to see on a regular basis. You expected to see pissed-off parents who wanted their money back for all the broken games and rides that they paid to find covered in Out of Order signs. You expected someone to fall on the skate floor and become disabled for life about once a month. You expected to see Chris Oats pursue all the eleven and twelve-year-old girls. When Mrs. Lambert came in with her sixth or seventh new husband, and her bratty ace kids told you to give them a bunch of free toys and candy because their mommy was your boss and she said they could have whatever they wanted today, you didn’t bat an eye. It was just another day. You weren’t surprised when Animatronic Man showed up and skated like a sixty-year-old android. And when Ticket Boy won thousands of tickets at a time, and he looked around at all of Fun Zone’s inhabitants with a look of great pride- pride that he had mastered the skill of hitting the Cyclone jackpot- on his gangly toothed, mullet framed, chubby face, you thought nothing of it.
Those were things you came to expect. There was another thing you came to expect at Fun Zone, and even though you expected it, it was always a crazy surprise when it showed its ugly brown face. That thing was poop. Fun Zone was full of little kids, and poop is like a currency to them. They make the stuff like they’re afraid they’ll get behind schedule, and they don’t give a F where they are when they do make it. Poop would show up in the ball pit. There was poop in the snack bar. It would get dumped on the floor in front of skate rental where people walk barefoot to get their skates, smearing warm diarrhea between their toes. Poop once found itself streaked by roller-skate wheels across the shiny black skate floor. When a group of middle eastern women found that particular pile they exclaimed that the floor was “unclean” and fled in disbelief, but it wasn’t all that unbelievable if you worked at Fun Zone.
The tubes were just one long twisted rainbow colored toilet. Kids would piss and puke and S throughout them like they were leaving a trail of bread crumbs. One special little boy crapped his pants, got the poop all over his ace, then slid down the wavy tube slide, WEEEEEEEE!, leaving a long wavy streak of poo for all the other children to slide through. Chris and I cleaned that one up.
It was a poop zone.
In the summertime Fun Zone would get most of it’s weekday business from group field trips- YMCA’s, youth groups, vacation bible schools, retarded kid groups, and year-round schools. The year-round school groups always came from the poorest black counties in Alabama. They’d drive three or four busloads of elementary school kids miles and miles to Fun Zone to tear the place up. The kids were poor, and they were dumb as S. They smelled like S. They communicated in a crude patchwork of the words Be, That, and Is. Even their teachers couldn’t speak proper English. For every Fun Zone employee there were about a hundred of these dirty little customers. It was hell on earth.
Now if this all seems insensitive to you don’t assume that I’m completely shallow and heartless. I’m perfectly aware that these children are less fortunate than myself, and that they never had a chance to receive decent schooling. The fact that their educators weren’t even educated is testament to that. Blame the school system, blame the state, blame the taxpayers, and blame whoever else you suspect. The kids were a product of their environment. Nevertheless, when you are being manipulated by a hundred of these little jerks, having compassion for each individual one isn’t an option. So let me continue my negative description.
The kid’s were f’n thieves. They’d steal the D between your legs. They’d sneak their thieving little hands behind the prize counter and steal prizes with you looking them in the eye. If you went to fix a broken game for one kid, twenty kids would crowd around you and say that the game took their money too. Even the kid’s parents stole S, and they weren’t any more clever about it. Poor, dirty, and dumb; you get the picture.
It was very easy to despise those groups and despise the days that they visited. There was one time though that poop made the whole day worthwhile. I was working at the rock wall, hooking up the dirty little crooks to the twenty foot mountain. Clint was loading children into the virtual roller coaster. Across the building I spotted Christopher of Three Happenin Guys laughing and shaking his head behind the prize counter. He motioned for us to come over and find out what was so funny. I began walking his way but was stopped about fifteen feet short by an impenetrable force. A smell.
This was a smell that I wouldn’t wish on Hitler. It wasn’t a smell that just stunk, it made you question existence. This smell was so unimaginably awful that it made you ask how a just creator could put us in a world where such horrible smells exist. When I first tried to describe this smell to others I would make references to other things that stunk, like “It smelled like if somebody took a dump inside a month old beached whale in a steam room”, but those comparisons are irrelevant. It was nothing other than a poop smell. It was just that that simple poop smell, which is arguably the worst smell there is, was magnified at least ten times than the worst smelling dump your dad has ever taken. If you think you’ve smelled something as bad or worse than this then you’re an idiot and I hope you never talk to me again. There has never been and will never be a smell as bad as this. Ever. Enough said.
Chris was heaving with tears in his eyes as he laughed at what was in front of him. I held my breath and got close enough to see for myself the twelve year old boy with S smeared down the back of his shorts. It was a greenish brown. I was becoming dizzy so I ran to safety and watched the scene from there. The kid stood looking at the colorful prizes underneath the glass as people walked by and immediately scrunched their faces in agony. “What that smell is?” the other children would cry before running for their lives. The young man left the prize counter to tour the rest of Fun Zone so Three Happenin Guys followed and observed from a safe distance. Everywhere he went people nearly fainted, but they were so dazed by the stench that they didn’t realize who it came from. The filthy child walked up to a wrestling game where four other boys were playing.
“Nigga you be stank!” exclaimed one of the horrified boys. All four of them abandoned the game and got as far away as possible. We watched Poopy Butt walk up to play the abandoned game and noticed that he was unfazed by his classmate’s reaction. He had the expression of a man who didn’t know or care where he was. It was as if poop coated shorts were part of his every day attire. Read More
This story was originally published on Wednesday, September 14, 2005.
I plan on writing a few stories in the near future that are tied to one central place. As much as I desperately want to write those stories right now, they will not be as profound if I don’t first write about Lambert Fun Zone, the place where Three Happenin Guys used to work. Lambert Fun Zone was more than a family skate rink; It was Utopia. But like all great civilizations it would eventually come toppling down. This is the tale of the rise and fall of a great empire.
Clint was the first to work there. He signed the dotted line the day that Fun Zone opened it’s doors, and his description of the place was so unbelievable that John and Chris and I had to see it for ourselves. Walking through those red double doors for the first time is probably the closest thing I can imagine to that scene where the ticket holders first enter Willy Wonka’s factory. Fun Zone was an all ages Chucky Cheese on steroids. There were bumper cars, there were arcade games everywhere you looked, there was a rock climbing wall, a virtual roller coaster, cyber pods, skate rink, snack bar, moon walk, and tubes – tubes as far as the eye could see. A manikin with a pink wig and roller blades was suspended from wires up high next to a bunch of busted drywall to look like, get this, He Had Crashed Into The Wall! The skaters, most of whom were either little kids or kids springing their first pubes, sweated to the pulsing beats of only the crunkest hits. They chanted along to classic lines like “sweat drop down my balls”, as the DJ cranked out the jams in a booth underneath a giant purple Styrofoam octopus.
In the farthest, darkest corner of the building, far from regular adult surveillance, there was a nonstop budding pubescent heavy petting makeout orgy. A congregation of sweaty thirteen year old ChismItes and white trash bumped and grinded in the shadows, interrupted only occasionally by a concerned manager. Those interventions just meant that the sexual activity would be moved to the enclosed video games and the tubes, the miles and miles of tubes. The party never stopped at Fun Zone.
The future coke whores and the young men that would eventually beat them weren’t the only ones having fun at Fun Zone though. As I found within days of being employed there, Lambert Fun Zone was the easiest job on earth with the most immediate benefits. For starters, there were chicks wall to wall. Hot chicks with huge T’s. And the managers hired them by the dozen, so Three Happenin Guys saw huge T’s everyday. In fact, Chris and I were denied employment the first time we applied because two chicks with huge T’s got the job instead.
The greatest benefit was the complete lack of employer leadership. All day long you could play video games. You could eat free pizza till it came out your ears, and free candy till you reached the ‘if I eat another piece of candy I’ll throw up’ point. Nobody gave a F. You could watch some little kid fall and scrape his knee and say “Hey little kid you need to learn how to skate cause you skate like a dumb piece of S”. You wouldn’t get in trouble. You could play some video games, eat some free cotton candy, take a free slice of pizza and throw it at some kid’s grandpa’s face, then leave work for two hours, come back to work and dump some trash in the moonwalk, then clock out. You’d get a fat check at the end of the week. It was a lawless frontier.
If you think I’m making this up then just go end your life now because I’m trying to tell you about the greatest job on earth and you refuse to believe. Now in all honesty not just anybody working at Fun Zone could pull off such poor work skills and keep their jobs in tact, but Three Happenin Guys did on a daily basis. We discovered the Fun Zone secret: Our managers didn’t want to take the time to hire our replacements. Plus, we had made such good friends with them that they didn’t care what we did, and they knew that the owners were too busy avoiding the IRS and the investors who they owed hundreds of thousands of dollars, and sleeping around and getting trashed to make sure that the place was being managed properly.
It paid minimum wage, but it was the greatest job imaginable. All day long we would talk to chicks and watch little kids crap their pants. There were other employees like Chris Oates who loved Fun Zone so much that they would never leave. These kids would clock out after their shift and keep on skating, keep on eating free candy, keep on requesting their favorite song, keep on getting crunk like it was their last chance ever to get crunk. Every single day they would do this, showing up even when they weren’t on the schedule. Fun Zone was so great that it consumed their lives. It became their home. It was a golden age.
That golden age would slowly fade over a two year period though. Management changed. There was a crackdown on pizza theft. Dirty ace crunk music was taken off the playlist. Fun Zone was now going to try to appeal to white families only. The T’s on our co-workers became smaller and smaller. When a video game broke we really had to fix it. When a kid took a S all over the floor, Three Happenin Guys actually had to clean it up.
It had become an actual job. Clint quit almost immediately. Chris and I sucked it up and continued to earn our checks. And although that golden age of Fun Zone was long gone, it had produced a handful of incredible stories, and the place continued to produce incredible stories even after its prime. These are stories that will change your life, so if you’re already satisfied with your life then read something else. Chicken Soup for the Soul or something like that. You’ve been warned.
Previously: Natural Selection
This story was originally published on Friday, September 23, 2005.
As you should know if you have read a newspaper in the past year, the hot topic in the world of public education nowadays is the teaching of evolution versus “intelligent design”. The whole thing seems very silly to me. I believe in God, but I don’t see how belief in a creator cancels out the simple science of natural selection. Evolution is visible on a daily basis. Your science teacher will point this out by saying something about a hummingbird’s beak being long and slender enough to enter a flower and suck out it’s sweet nectar, and how that specific shape was derived by a series of eliminations of birds with short beaks over hundreds and thousands of generations. But you don’t have to look that close to see evolution. It’s right in front of you.
When I was learning about natural selection and ancient species in junior high school – free of glued in science book disclaimers – I was able to view the real deal on a regular basis at Boy Scouts. My troop was filled with variations of the human race that would never survive in the wild. There were kids that were too fat to hike up Mount Cheaha. They’d never escape the jaws of a saber-tooth tiger. There were kids that were too dumb to pitch a tent or start a fire on their own. They’d die the first day of an ice age winter. And then there were the kids that were just so weird that they would have been killed and eaten by their own species the first time they opened their crazy-ace mouths and said that they had an imaginary alligator named Jack who tells them secrets in the bathroom. The almost normal boys of the troop were like raptors, traveling in packs and eliminating the weak with their razor sharp joke-downs. Blood was never shed, but those who weren’t fit for troop 406 soon found themselves out of troop 406, and our species evolved into a group of boys who talked a lot of S, paired with boys that could put up with a lot of S. But no single raptor can take on a T-Rex. Our fellow scout Frank had to learn that lesson the hard way.
Mike was a T-Rex. From his first days in the troop he was twice as tall as every other scout, young and old. He was a tragic display of pubescent awkwardness, as if all the development from ages eleven to eighteen were jammed into him overnight. He was greasy, he was crazy tall, and strong in random parts of his body. He had zits and curly hair dripping with sweat, and his voice sounded like someone was constantly flipping the 33”-45” switch. His limbs bent and moved in impossible directions totally at random. This made walking almost impossible for Mike. If you were in the same room as the kid he would at some point collide violently into you no matter what. When we were hiking he would veer from one side of the trail to the other because walking a straight line was a physical impossibility for his teenage body. It didn’t matter how steep the cliff or how far the drop, Mike would almost fall off of it. If there was a cast-iron bucket full of potatoes hanging from the tent ceiling, Mike would hit his head on it every time.
Mike would eat all the F’n food for your entire patrol and then brag to your emaciated face that he was a growing boy with a big appetite. Then he’d slam some little crying Cub Scout on the ground during a game of King of the Hill and stare at his own hands proclaiming, “I don’t know my own strength.” He wasn’t a jerk. He just wasn’t prepared for the responsibilities of being an overnight T-Rex, and we as a troop had to bear the consequences.
This story was originally published on Wednesday, September 21, 2005.
As I write this entry it is now Fall, and Winter is not far away. It was hot as S all day today, but very soon you and I will have to bundle on layers of warm cozy clothing. When you’re wrapping up in your gay-ace scarf you’ll probably say “Ooh, it’s so cold out today. Oh my gosh I’m so cold.”, but you my friend, have never been cold. You’ll never know the cold that the poor bastards of troop 406 had to experience, and if you think otherwise then you deserve three sharp punches right in the face.
Although it was a troop of freaks, my Boy Scout troop never cut any corners when it came to roughin’ it. Troop 406 would go on a weekend camping trip once a month no matter what the weather. We’d hike through lightning storms, set up camp in hurricane winds, and freeze our nut sacks off at below-zero temperatures. We were involuntarily hardcore because the older men in the troop were hardcore. But the most hardcore part of our trips were the sleeping arrangements.
We camped in crappy, derelict army surplus tents made of green canvas and wood poles. They were already poorly designed enough to be rejected by the army, and they were riddled with holes. If it rained during the trip then you slept in a wet sleeping bag- without exception. On cold nights the freezing air would rush through the tent holes mercilessly. Your only escape was to curl into the bottom of your possibly wet sleeping bag and periodically come up to breathe the painfully cold air. It was so cold that you couldn’t cry about how cold you were because you didn’t want to ice up your face.
We were dumb ace junior high kids so there invariably were a large number of boys that didn’t pack the proper clothing for those freezing winter trips. There would always be one or two boys that only packed a t-shirt and would have to beg borrow and steal jackets from the other scouts. The cold often approached fatally hazardous levels. One scout went into hypothermia by sleeping in a frozen wet sleeping bag. Another scout, who happened to be mentally retarded, had to piss one night but was too cold to make the trip out of the tent. He decided to stay somewhat warm by sticking his D through the door slit and pissing directly out the tent, a wise move that we all pulled when necessary. At some point though he lost control of his D and he and his tent partner awoke the next day in a tent painted with frozen piss.
There was one boy in the troop who was used to being cold in the woods. His name was Frank, and he was a redneck. Frank was always doing bad stuff. Read More
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This story was originally published on Thursday, September 08, 2005.
My Boy Scout troop, Troop 406, was a dumping ground for adolescent freaks. A lot of folks are surprised to find out that I am a certified Eagle Scout, I guess because I don’t go around tying knots and building fires at random. I was one of the few proud scouts in 406 that achieved that prestigious rank because most of the other kids weren’t there by choice. You might expect that they didn’t want to be there because they thought it was lame, or gay, or for nerds. But it was the total opposite. Their parents forced them into the program because they thought it would make them normal. The boys were so abnormal that they couldn’t handle being there.
Now “freak” is not a word I use lightly. You or someone you know might see some pale chick wearing a lot of black shiny clothing and say “That chick is a freak”. Or someone watching the Jenny Jones show might see a man dressed in woman’s clothing and say “He be a freak”. Those aren’t freaks though. Those are people that fall into a fashion culture or gender identity minority. They might be very different from me and you and your mom, but they still follow the trends of a fairly large group of people with similar interests.
The boys in my Boy Scout troop were freaks the way Michael Jackson is a freak. These were kids that were one-of-a-kind weird. You can scour the earth for years but you’ll never find another person that has the same crazy-ace speech impediment as this one kid, or the gag inducing stench of this other kid, or the general creepy mentally disturbed vibe that resonated from at least half of the group. In my years there I was threatened to be killed numerous times, a kid tried to stab me and all the other kids in the troop, and I had to hear more sobbing than you would in a nursery.
It was troop of freaks.
There were maybe four boys there that were just normal kids. But they were viscous. Kids love to pick on other kids who are going to react in an erratic way, and our campouts and meetings happened to be the World’s Fair of unpredictable behavior. I was the leader of the troop so I had to keep things from getting too far out of hand. I won’t say I protected the weird kids from everyone else, because really, that was our only source of entertainment. As shameful as it sounds, it’s funny to see a thirteen year old kid cry after hearing a ridiculous ghost story. It’s funny to see some crazy kid rage out and break a bunch of stuff because you called him “Mouse” one too many times. It feels good to laugh at some kid that pisses and craps his only pair of pants for the entire weekend. When you grow up you tend to pity those people and try to help them out, but that’s not the case when you’re a teenager. I just tried not to let things go to dangerous extremes.
One of the weirdest kids in my troop was Blakely. Blakely wasn’t one of the kids that wouldn’t shower, and he never threatened to kill anyone. He was just unbelievably socially awkward. It seemed like he knew how goofy he was so he tried to play it off as his comedic shtick. He was so easily provoked to tears or temper tantrums though that it was obvious that it wasn’t an act. He was kind of a chubby kid, with glasses and a voice like some Sesame Street character reject. He would proudly joke back at the kids who picked on him, but his comebacks were terrible. I think at one time he was suspended for sexually harassing one of his teachers, and I doubt he understood the meaning of what he said or motioned to her. He was most likely parroting his peer’s behavior. Anyways, you get the point. If my description isn’t fleshed out enough then just imagine the weirdest kid you went to junior high school with, and insert him in this story.
When you are hiking through the mountains and you have to take a S, you lean back against a tree, pull your britches down, and take a S. Read More
This story was originally published on Friday, September 30, 2005.
Substitute teachers are the babysitters of the educational world. They have no real prerogative to help the young people under their care grow in any way. Their only purpose is to make sure that you don’t die. As a student I realized this fact quickly from observing our many substitute teachers’ behavior. They had no idea what we were supposed to be doing in class and they didn’t want to take the time to figure it out. It was just a quick buck. This fact was most obvious with the subs who wanted to be cool with the kids- The fat blond college chick who told my tenth grade math class “I don’t know about you guys, but how about we just watch MTV until class is over?”, all Generation X hip-like, and who was fired an hour later. She was replaced the next day by another college age sub who wanted to be just as cool with the kids, but he approached it from the angle of proving he was a badder bad-ace than us. He hit on the young girls, he joked on the dudes, he called Cory Will “ole jerry curl head lookin self”, and he undeniably established himself as the alpha male of the room when he lifted me up by the underarms and pinned me against the wall for looking at him the wrong way.
These total strangers barely qualified to push shopping carts, not to mention teach students, but they were given complete responsibility for our health every time the real teachers couldn’t make it. There was a gorilla woman who repeated the phrase “excuse me” every time she opened her mouth. There was a toad woman, not a woman who looked like a toad but an actual woman-toad hybrid, who never opened her mouth, ever. She didn’t give her name. She didn’t repeat instructions left by the teacher. She just sat silently at the front of the class with that stern but content toad expression. There was a really pissed off middle-aged rock n’ roll sub who told us that we all “sucked”. Montgomery’s public school substitute teacher department was a Rolodex of rejects. We students couldn’t care less about the lack of professionalism though. The less competent the sub, the more fun our mini vacation was. There was one substitute who crossed the line though, and I took it upon myself to put her in her place.
One day in art class there was a little old black lady behind Mrs. Strange’s desk. She introduced herself by telling us to be quiet and make our art, which we quickly did. At some point I went to ask her a question and received a cold “Boy shut yo mouth”. I shut my mouth and observed the woman as she entertained herself by creating her own art work. All day long she had been grinding our expensive oil pastels into our expensive drawing paper, creating crude diarrhea-like images of flowers and cats and other generically pretty things.
B.T.W. was an Alabama public school, which means we had a very small budget and most of our resources came from fundraising. We could barely afford the art supplies that our substitute was wasting. From one piece to another she created artistic atrocities in every imaginable medium with a look of smug satisfaction on her face upon every horrible completion.
“Wow, that’s a beautiful still life”, said Cynthia, the class ace-kisser. Cynthia was a senior teacher’s pet with two goals in life. One goal was making paintings that looked like Baby Sitters Club book covers. The other was trying to get me in trouble. When Michael Boothe sat on the toilet seat that I left ketchup packets under, Cynthia told him it was my fault his shorts were all red. When Mrs. Strange said she would have the student that busted a stink bomb in the bathroom expelled, Cynthia tried to anonymously blackmail me out of fifteen dollars. She was a B. Read More
This story was originally published on Thursday, September 08, 2005.
The corner of the cafeteria where my peers and I eat has just this year become infested with flies. There are at least thirty of them at a time buzzing around, landing on your food, your knees- anywhere you don’t want a fly to be, which is anywhere at all. The first day of school we tried to ignore the flies but by day two it was impossible to not want to interact with them. I caught one of the flies on accident just by waving my hand through the air- that’s how many there are. This chick told me to drown it so she could show everyone a trick. We drowned it in pink lemonade, then let the dead carcass wash up on a napkin. It lay there lifeless, then Briana, the science trickster, poured salt on it and ‘TahDah’, it was revived. I suggested that we tie it to a leash, so Briana plucked out one of her long hairs and we lassoed it around the fly’s neck. That was pretty sweet so we caught another fly, lassoed his neck, and roped him to his friend.
Much hilarity ensued, but it was the kind of hilarity that you would have had to been there for. High school was much funnier, and the above story was just a clever introduction to segue into a good old high school story. My first MySpace blog. It involves lunchrooms, and it involves plucking hairs.
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It was eleventh grade. Three Happenin Guys sat at what was probably the most exclusive table in the whole lunchroom. There were hot chicks. There were Three Happenin Guys. It was in the back of the building. That’s where bad aces sit. It was next to Street Fighter Higgins and Turtle Boy’s table. It was a cool table. Read More
This story was originally published on Monday, September 12, 2005.
As much reading as I do in a day, very little of it is what you would consider fine literature. USA Today, Rolling Stone, Boing Boing and all of it’s associated links are what I read when I’m bored, and since my dorm room consists of a computer and a record player I’m bored almost all day. Most of the novels and short stories I was forced to read in school I actually enjoyed (Great Expectations, Adventures of Huckleberry Fin), but it would take a lot of convincing for me to voluntarily read another book. I think I’m just weary of committing a large amount of time to something that I might end up hating (Heart of Darkness, Wuthering Heights).
I had a high school English teacher who got me really excited about the transcendentalists though. Her name was Mrs. Lawrence. Most of the students at my school weren’t so fond of her because of a ‘monumental’ book analysis assignment she gave called the Anthology. It really wasn’t an unreasonable task; high school kids are just lazy. The students who were pissed about the assignment would B about how much they hated Mrs. Lawrence and give their Anthologies titles like The Reason I Wasted My Entire Spring Break Instead of Going to the Beach with my Friends, or I think Mrs. Lawrence is a Stupid B. It was obvious that it hurt her feelings. One day Mrs. Lawrence just snapped and screamed/cried at this sassy black chick who asked to go the bathroom.
“Can I go to the bathroom?” asked the sassy black chick.
“j j jj jj Just GO! JUST GET UP AND GO AND DON’T COME BACK! Get out of my classsss bwuuu hu hu wah wah….”, blurted Mrs. Lawrence before running out of the room, hands covering her red face.
The sassy black chick responded with one of those sassy side to side neck motions and a sassy “MmmmmmHhhhhh” sound.
Certainly there was something else traumatic happening in my teacher’s life to spark such a dramatic outburst. I’m sure the hate coming from a lot of the students didn’t help her mental health either. I believe though that one of the greatest contributors to Mrs. Lawrence’s stress level was the idealism of the Transcendentalists. Read More
Like most of you readers I have a Myspace account, and also like many of you my Myspace has been neglected for ages since I discovered the much more elegant and efficient world of Facebook. Two things have been holding me back from deleting my account. The first was my Max Magician group, which I just finished migrating to this site. The second is my collection of illustrated short story blog posts with which I am doing the same thing now. I will post a new one of these old personal essays every few days. All of these were written during my college years, and I hope to get back in the habit of writing stuff like this again soon. I’ll kick things off with some high school tales.
This story was originally published online on Tuesday, September 13, 2005
This is a story of transformation. It details the metamorphosis and development of a true hero. The hero isn’t one that you or your little sister or your great grandfather from the civil war would know. This hero’s name is Higgins. His story, like all the best stories, takes place in high school.
Higgins, although he really does exist in this material world, was largely a product of Three Happenin Guys’ collective imagination. The one true source of entertainment at school for Clint, Chris, John Teschner and myself was to observe other students who we referred to as “characters”. To qualify as a character one had to have distinctive and unique traits. You had to be one of those kids that made people laugh even though you weren’t trying to be funny. You had to be weird, or just incredibly unattractive.
Now don’t get ahead of me. This sounds like a setup for the typical high school ‘popular kids pick on the misfits’ story, but it’s the exact opposite. I’ll continue.
To enter the catalog of characters you had to have a distinctive and unusual trait that was name worthy. For instance, if you were a hardcore punk rocker with an incredibly normal kid looking face you would be named Normal Face Punk. If you looked like a stupid ace goose that you just wanted to punch in the f’n face you would be called Goose. If you were a kid that wore a trench coat that made you look like two little kids, one on top of the other’s shoulders, who put the long coat on so they could look like a teenager and be able to sneak into the high school unnoticed, you would be called Two Kids Sneaking In. If you were a really fat guy who was surprisingly good with chicks you would be called Fat Guy Good With Chicks, or eventually just FGGC.
Three Happenin Guys were lucky enough to exist in a world filled with these people. We observed them like they were true life characters from some insane TV sitcom. Would Ugly Boyfriend and Ugly Girlfriend ever break up? Why did Goose rip the partition out of the boys bathroom, and why did his girlfriend get stabbed in the eye with an umbrella? What shirt is Thief Of Shirts going to rip off next? Their habits and day-to-day exploits were what made our time at school exciting. As much as we admired them, we intentionally separated ourselves socially from the characters because meeting them would humanize them and destroy the mythos that we had created. Those people had no idea how important they were to us strangers.
Higgins and his sidekick Turtle Boy were two rare characters that maintained their character status even after we met them. Higgins started off as just any other slightly unusual kid. He was skinny and pale with rosy cheeks. He had the fashion sense of a little kid, he had a nasally voice and a somewhat gay southern accent, and he lacked basic social skills. He also had a name that wasn’t Higgins, or anything close to Higgins, but his real name wasn’t important.
One day all of those things changed. It would be the first of a series or incredible transformations. This kid who we had never paid much attention to suddenly decided that he would be a fine scholar. More and more we noticed his increasingly scholarly behavior until he was finally deemed Professor Higgins. Professor Higgins wore corduroy blazers with leather elbow pads. He tucked in his dress shirts and turned up his nose at ignorant commoners such as ourselves. At lunch he would sit alone and read books while slowly sipping his tea. He was the poster child of higher education.
Then, without warning, and for reasons totally unknown to us, Professor Higgins changed over night into Street Fighter Higgins. Street Fighter Higgins didn’t give a F. If you looked at him out of the corner of your eye he’d probably say “What are you looking at, buddy?” all threatening-like. He had stubble. He wore a black leather jacket and two bad ace leather gloves with the fingers cut out. Street Fighter Higgins wore the bad ace gloves because he was a bad ace. He had moves and postures similar to Michael Jackson circa 1989. Street Fighter Higgins rolled with Turtle Boy, but he was still a one man army, a desperado-slash-renegade. Read More
