I have changed the name and place of the other party involved in this exchange. Read on…

I recently saw a want ad for an art teacher on the Huntsville Art Blog. The ad read:

Help Wanted: We need an adult Art Teacher – any type of art.

If you are interested, please contact Mark Brownfield, President
Brayburn County Arts Center, Inc. at info@brb-artscenter.com

I don’t need the work right now but I thought I’d look into it for possible future employment. I sent an email. The response I received was condescending, amusing, and earnest, so I decided to share it here.

My emails are in bold font. Brownfield’s are regular.

***************************************************************************

Hello, I am responding to your notice on the Huntsville Art Blog about a teaching position. I would like to know more about the job. What are the hours, days, pay, start date, and so on?

Dustin Timbrook
www.HappeninRecords.com

***************************************************************************

Mr. Timbrook,

Thank you for responding to the offer to teach art. We let the teacher charge the fees and as a result pay themselves. We offer assistance, guidenance, and a building.

However, after looking at the Art on your web page I do not feel it would be a good fit for Brayburn and that you would not make enough money in this community to off set your time.

My daughter is an artist, and it has taken her several years to learn that she too needs to paint for the community and not necessarly her taste if she wants to sell her art. I’m sure there are communities that might appreciate your style of Art, unfortunately Brayburn is not that advanced yet. Showing your Art up here of course would be great, however, I don’t feel you would get enough of a following to have a class.

If you have any art that is a little more main stream (conserative) I’ll be glad to look at that and re-evaluate for teaching art in our community.

Mark L. Brownfield President Brayburn County Arts Center, Inc. or Secretary Brayburn Lions Club

**************************************************************************

Mr. Brownfield,

Dustin Timbrook

Ole' Hamster Head

*********************************************************************************

Udpate: I received this response from Mr. Brownfield today. I think it’s clear that there is no need to continue writing.

Dustin,

I agree with what you are saying. I’m not sure how our request for an Art Teacher got out, it been on our Web page for over a year and now all of a sudden I’m getting request for teaching left and right. I’m going to add a page to our web site with more info regarding the position.

Re: Marketing your Art (you referenced it as sales) I would like to let you know that we are going to have a class taught by a professional Artist, in the near future. He is been rated by the U.S. Government as one of the top ten Native American Artist in the United States. I just had a meeting with him today and we discussed some of the points of interest you brought out in your E-Mail. Like you he has a very select market and he can offer you some good advice. He has sold to the likes of Silvester Stallone, The Elvis Presley Estate, The Micheal Jackson Estate, and many other famous people.

I realize your art and his is not similar, however, the basic marketing principles are the same. My daughter who is an artist went through the same process (she is only about 4 years older then you) and after she finally ignored what she learn from her Art Teachers and then started following what she has learned in Marketing in graduate school (she started graduate school after spending years as a starving artist)her Art sales are finally started to support her and she is a much happier person. Graduate school has been an expensive lesson, but at least she is finally becoming a success at what she wants to do.

You stated, “In other words, the set of skills required to create a painting of a man being enucleated by an ostrich are the same skills necessary to paint a prize ten point buck atop an Appalachian bluff. ” I understand that, however, the general public does not! As I said earlier, I’m not an artist, and until I got involved with the Arts League here I wouldn’t have understood your statement. Therefore, most of the amateur students that would be taking an art class here would not make that association. Once again that’s where Marketing is so important. We run into the ignorant public all the time when they try to purchase a piece of art for less then what the frame cost. That’s why I tell our artist it is so important to be present at the shows. It’s the story behind a painting that sells the painting more often then the actual Art work. We have to educate the public in this area of the county on Art, they don’t have the understanding of Art that
is found in New York or Seattle.

Mark L. Brownfield President Brayburn County Arts Center, Inc. or Secretary Brayburn Lions Club

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.

Three Happenin Guys called Johnny an hour before the adventure and gave him his instructions. He was to go deep in the tunnel and wait in the dark with fire crackers and a lighter. Upon seeing a pair of flashlights enter the tunnel he would shout in his scariest crackhead voice, “What ya’ll niggas doin in my tunnel?! I’ll kill yo ace MF’rs!”, then he would light the firecrackers one at a time and let them echo through the tunnel like gunshots. Chris Oats was gonna S his pants.

After some motivational talk Johnny Turbo agreed to the plan and everything was set in place. Fun Zone closed, THG and Chris Oats loaded into a car, and off we went for what should have been a harmless prank. It was eleven O’clock when we parked in the dark next to the storm ditch that led to the tunnel. We jumped the fence and rushed into the ditch as stealthily as we could, but it wasn’t stealthy enough. Right as we reached the opening of the tunnel we were blindsided by two flashlight beams coming from an adjacent back yard. We quickly retreated to the shadows under the bridge where the car was parked. The beams surveyed the ditch while we waited in suspense. “I think they’re under the bridge.”, one of the voices rang out. It was Freedom Fighter.

Freedom Fighter was a cop who lived in Johnny Turbo’s hood. He took his job very seriously- so seriously that he would look out his window at all hours watching for suspicious activity. This wasn’t our first run in with Freedom Fighter. About a year beforehand he held gun to Clint’s head, but that’s a whole nother story.

Freedom Fighter and his sidekick’s flashlights were getting dangerously close to Three Happenin Guys and Chris Oats as we huddled under the bridge. THG whispered escape plan ideas back and forth hectically, while Chris Oats, the epitome of down syndrome James Bond cool, smoked a cigarette and announced that he wasn’t scared. I offered a far fetched plan that we come out and tell Freedom Fighter that we were just some underage smokers looking for a place to smoke in secret. John Teschner said it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard and the rest of the group agreed. Then Chris suggested we just make a run for it, his favorite tactic, and after some fast thinking everyone approved. On three. One, Two, Three…

We bolted up the hill, jumped back over the chain-link fence, and rushed towards the car. “There they are!” shouted Freedom Fighter. Three Happenin Guys dove into the car, peeled out, and slammed the doors. Atop the sound of screeching tires we heard an oafish voice cry “Wait fer meeeeeeeeeeee!”. Chris Oats was still at the fence, dangling upside down by his shoelace. We slammed on the brakes and watched the boy free himself just in time to escape Freedom Fighter’s “not in my neighborhood” grip. Chris Oats ran. He ran faster than I’ve ever seen a fat kid run. Faster than he would ever run in a backyard P.E. session. We opened the door and he jumped in the moving car, Freedom Fighter right at his heels, as we peeled off at the speed of light.

We ripped around the corner and flew out of the neighborhood, never looking back. Chris Oats was breathing more air than there was in the car and he smelled like a bad day at the onion factory, but we were home free and it felt fantastic. It felt fantastic for about two minutes. Then the feeling that we had forgotten something important crept up on us and rang like a tolling death bell.

Johnny Turbo was still inside the tunnel, oblivious to what had just happened outside. All he knew was that when two flashlights came in the tunnel he was supposed to pretend to be a crazy bum and “shoot” at the people coming his way. The problem was that now instead of Three Happenin Guys and Chris Oats entering the tunnel there would be two strange men, one of them an armed and trigger happy off-duty cop. Upon realizing this we immediately tried to phone Johnny on his cell phone and warn him. We dialed and dialed and dialed but the phone wouldn’t even ring. He was inside a F’n tunnel. It was the setup for the perfect murder, and it was completely accidental. There was nothing we could do but pray.

Johnny Turbo, A.K.A. the Turbo Twins, did not die that night. After we dumped Chris Oats off at his home/school, Johnny eventually called Clint and told him his side of the story. Johnny Turbo was saved by divine intervention and his own inability to follow directions. When he saw the lights at the tunnel opening he forgot to yell like a crazy hobo and hastily lit a firecracker. Johnny threw the firecracker directly into a puddle and it was instantly snuffed out. The men had no idea there was anyone inside so they left, and Johnny, thinking that they were Three Happenin Guys being indecisive, waited for them to come back. After a half hour of waiting Johnny Turbo took off his shirt (don’t ask for an explanation), walked back home, and went to bed. He didn’t even know that he had been spared from the perfect murder.

Read more stories from my Journal.

Previously: S

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.

We eventually lost track of the kid as he mixed into the sea of young faces. Three Happenin Guys figured that his accident would be discovered on the bus ride home and the teachers would deal with it. We couldn’t have been more wrong. As I worked the floor a male teacher approached me and informed me that one of the students had made a mess of the bathroom. Three Happenin Guys went to investigate.

The teacher and the culprit were already inside the boy’s bathroom before we arrived. The second we cracked the door open that smell blasted out in concentrated form. I gagged and began to heave so we shut it back. The poop was stronger than we expected. Three Happenin Guys had to see the damage that could create such a stench, no matter how ugly it might be, so we took two steps back, filled our lungs with clean air, prepared ourselves mentally, then rushed in.

The teacher and Mr. Poopy Britches stood solemnly in front of the shrine that had been created. In the closest stall to the bathroom door there was a sight never meant to be seen by human eyes. There was greenish brown S smeared across the toilet seat. There was S streaked down the outside of the bowl and across the floor tiles. There was S dripping off the toilet paper dispenser. There was S on the partitions and S on the door. There was S smudged all over the wall. S was everywhere.

How could another human being do such a thing? How could the young person in front of us justify such a horrific act internally, and how could his young body produce such a vile substance in that huge amount? At what point did he decide that the ceramic environment would be more absorbent than bathroom tissue? I searched his face for answers, but there were none. Not a trace of remorse or regret. Just, “I be in the bathroom”. I turned to the teacher and his face told me that this wasn’t unusual in his line of work either. It came time to breathe again and I made the mistake of doing it through my mouth. I’m pretty sure I know what poop tastes like now. We quickly escaped the room.

Three Happenin Guys blocked the bathroom door while our manager, after realizing that Fun Zone could not afford the pay raise necessary to get an employee to clean up the S, cleaned up the S. We told all the men who approached to come back later, but when two particular young boys came to the door we let them in without a warning. The door shut behind them, then immediately flung back open. They were wide eyed and pale, like they had just seen some sick snuff film. “What that was?” cried the first one out the door as he flew past us. The two ran far, far away. It was the kind of scene we had come to expect.

Read more stories from my Journal

Previously: The Rise and Fall of Lambert Fun Zone

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

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.

One winter camping trip Frank, Skippy, and I decided to play a trick on Mike. We were at a familiar campground- the old abandoned section of the old camp Tukabatchee. There were two fun parts of our campground. One was a dilapidated baseball field with giant mounds of dirt that we would roll a huge monster truck tire down to chase and run away from. The other was a big ace hole in the ground. The hole was an inverse cone shape, like the sand monster pit where Boba Fett died, about twelve feet wide and eight feet deep. It was filled with leaves so you could throw kids in and they wouldn’t bleed. Our plan was for Frank to hide under the leaves at the bottom of the pit and jump out to scare Mike when he came close by. Frank, an expert in redneck camo stuff, concealed himself in the pit and laid waiting to attack. Skippy and I went to invite Mike into the woods.

“WhERe aRE wE Going”, asked Mike as we neared the pit.

“We’e gonna go play with that big ace tire. You remember the tire don’t you Mike”, I replied.

A huge grin stretched across Mike’s wiry facial-haired face. He took off running for the field and leapt in the air above the pit, howling “Oh Yeah, THE TIRE!!!”. In a true display of survival of the fittest, Mike came down, in the most precise move his goofy body had ever performed, feet first, directly onto the ribs of a concealed Frank. Mike was so excited about the tire that he ran directly out of the pit without noticing Frank’s desperate gasp for air. Skippy and I rushed down to see if the boy had survived. We brushed away the leaves to find Franks red face, which showed as much pain as a redneck boy’s face is allowed to show.

“what the f?”, he whispered through trembling lips. Frank’s pride was hurt more than his torso, but he was lucky just to have survived a run in with such a beast. He never F’d with Mike again.

Previously: Don’t Stop Till It’s Broke

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. He claimed to be a Crip. He was once escorted away by police from a canoe trip after he broke into the canoe company’s bus late at night and discharged a fire extinguisher all over the bus seats. His dirty ace wino dad drove an El Camino with a bed full of empty wine jugs which he generously offered to the troop for storing water and bug juice. He would sit at the camp fire late at night with us boys and tell filthy sex jokes and racist jokes that we didn’t understand, then he’d stagger drunkenly to the El Camino to sleep. One night I was telling my troop mates at the campfire about a schizophrenic man named Jim who lived in a storage shed in the backyard of my neighbor’s house. I told them how Jim would wander around the neighborhood whispering to himself all day, and come into random people’s yards to pet their dogs. He was crazy but harmless. Frank’s dad stared across the flames and told me that Jim was a psycho pervert who would rape me someday.

Frank wasn’t the only kid there with an unusual parent. James had a step dad who claimed to work for NASA, the CIA, and any other highly classified organization he could think up. If you were drinking a cup of water he would say he designed the cup, or if a Scout was tying his shoelace he would say that he was on a committee that was developing a new system for tying shoelaces. He drove one of those huge ace family vans with an overly plush interior, and a spare tire cover on the back that he said contained a parachute in case he drove off a cliff. I’m sure he didn’t believe these stories but I think he was so used to dealing with Cub Scouts that he didn’t know that teenagers wouldn’t fall for that S.

One cold ace night, James and his Cub Scout brother Eddie arrived at camp with their step dad in the jumbo NASA van. The two boys ate with the rest of us, they sat around the campfire with the rest of us, told ghost stories with the rest of us, and participated in the usual Scout activities up until it was time to go to sleep. “You boys come sleep in the NASA van with your cool ace step dad”, said their not cool at all step dad. The wind-chill dropped down to negative twelve. The boys of troop 406 laid awake that night in icy agony, fuming over the two traitors who were cozy and warm in their van as if they had never left home. Frank sunk deep down in his Nascar sleeping bag and plotted his revenge.

At the next Scout meeting we all joked on James for being a P. We called him a P and a van fag and whatever else thirteen-year-old boys call each other till we had thoroughly amused ourselves. Frank wouldn’t stop with the heckling though. “Hey you fat little faggit. You look jest like a stupid ace fag you little sissy fag all sleepin in a van like some kinda fag or sumthin. You aint nothing but a fat little P. Jest a fat little P”. It was obvious that he wanted James to respond with a comeback. James took the bait.

“Why don’t you go F your mom or something?”,  James snapped back.

Frank sprung forward with the speed of a pouncing tiger and punched James three times, Three Times!, right smack in the nose. James’s only defense was to look like he was super sad that he was being punched in the face. That defense rarely works though, and James soon found himself in the hospital with a bloody broken nose. Frank found himself out of Scouts, and Three Happenin Guys found the inspiration to write the song Don’t Stop till It’s Broke…

Download audio file (1-07%20Don%27t%20Stop%20till%20it%27s%20Broke.mp3)

One, two, three
fierce punched to the nose
You can’t take these blows
One, two, three
fierce punches to the nose
Don’t stop till it’s broke

Chillin at Scouts
Getting joked on
Tonights gonna be different
It’s fixin to be on
Someone smells stank
Could it be Frank?
His fists all tense like he’s chillin at the bank
James said “fool”
Frank said “you”
Next thing you know James is in a pool
of blood from his nose
Got punched like a straight up ho.

Boy Scouts aint
what it used to be
Shoot step daddy said “Boys I got a parachute”
Workin for NASA?
You know you is a liar
Finna set it off
like a bon fire
that aint keeping you warm
Gotta sleep in the van
What you expect in this weather
Boy you think you get a tan?

Previously: Latrine Duty

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. If you are with a large group however, and your camp is in a more permanent spot, you set up a latrine. Our latrine was just a floorless tent. We would dig a deep hole far out in the woods, place a folding chair with a built in toilet seat over the hole, and pitch the tent around the makeshift toilet for privacy. If you were smart you would hold in your dump the duration of the trip. The tent smelled like S. There were flies, and it was as hot as ten ball sacks inside the thing. At the end of the trip someone would have latrine duty. All you had to do was pack up the tent and the throne and fill up the poo hole with dirt. That’s all there was to it.

At the end of one particular trip I assigned Blakely to his first latrine duty. He had been a lazy F all weekend and I thought dealing with the stink pit would be punishment enough. It ended up being the worst punishment of his life.

As I was helping with the breakdown of the main campsite I heard some commotion out in the woods. There were several voices. Screaming? Crying? Laughing? I couldn’t tell, so I headed towards the voices to find out. As I got closer I could make out sentences. “Dig Deeper!”, “Now stir it up!”said the voices amidst hysterical laughter.

“But I don’t wanna”, I heard Blakely cry.

“That’s the way you have to do it. Now slap it with the shovel. Slap it! Harder!” the other boys responded.

When I got in view of what was happening it was too late to stop it, but in all honesty I don’t think I would have stopped it if I could. A crowd of about five boys had shown Blakely their own way of cleaning up the latrine. They convinced him, without physical force, with simple peer pressure, that to clean the poo hole he had to stir the poop around with his shovel, dig up the mud/poop mixture, and slap it repeatedly with the shovel as hard as he could.

Blakely stood in front of the latrine, filthy shovel in hand, tears streaming down his poop spattered face, sobbing obscenities at his troop mates. The boys rolled on the ground laughing gleefully. I gave them some BS scolding about not being where they were supposed to be and sent them back up hill to help break down camp. I explained to Blakely the sanitary way to clean the latrine as he glared back at me, pure hatred in his eyes. He muttered something like “ F you, I hope you go to GD hell”. I could tell that he thought I was laughing deep down inside. He was right.

Previously: The Sub

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.

“MmmHhhh it looks good”, lied the substitute teacher. “Hey boy,” she called me, “Go frame this for me.”

“Frame it?” I asked. She nodded her head, pissed that I didn’t say “Yes ma’m, right away mam.” I left my class work to “frame” the woman’s latest pastel masterpiece, a series of doo-doo smudges that I wouldn’t hang on my fridge if my mentally challenged kindergartner had created it. By “frame” she meant she wanted it matted, a very costly way to display student artwork in a show. Having a piece her size matted at Hobby Lobby would probably run about ten plus dollars. I cut the expensive ace foam board. Then I cut the expensive ace matte board. Then as I was about to wrap it in expensive ace acetate I realized my revenge.

With the tiny point of my pinky fingernail I carved a tiny word into the waxy surface of the still life.

P-E-N-I-S

Penis. It was done in a couple of seconds. It was so small that the lady would never notice it, but justice would be served because her work would be forever tainted. Tainted by a penis. I wrapped it in acetate and delivered it with a smile on my face. The sub cracked her first smile all day as she gazed at her professionally displayed crap. I returned to my seat, equally content.

A few minutes later Cynthia, the stank B, walked up to me with an accomplished look. “I know what you did and I’m about to go tell Mr. Meadows right now.” she told me, like a mark-ace trick. I looked up towards the front of the room where a very pissed substitute teacher was glaring back at me and shaking her head. “Do you realize that she was going to give that picture to her granddaughter? Can you imagine what would happen if her poor little granddaughter saw that word? What do you have to say for yourself?”.

What a stank-ace B. Because of her I was going to end up going to the principle’s office for the first time in my life. I would have to hear Cynthia’s speech from my teacher, my principle, and my parents. I swallowed hard as Mr. Meadows asked me to come into the hall and have a talk.

Mr. Meadows sternly stiffled a giggle as he informed he would have to tell Mrs. Strange about my crime. Mrs. Strange failed at holding back a giggle as she sent me to the principles office. Mr. Ross shook his head and giggled as he held up the tainted artwork and I explained my motives. He never called my parents, but when I did eventually tell my mother about the incident she giggled too. My school-assigned punishment was to apologize to the woman for what I had done, but she was gone the next day and never came back. She had slipped back into the substitute shuffle, and in her absence class became a little less entertaining.

Previously: The Hairy Hot Pocket

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.

**************************************************************************************

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.

I don’t know how it is there now, but at the time our school cafeteria hadn’t been privately commercialized like a lot of the public schools out there that serve MacDonald’s and Pizza Hut. We ate the government issue crap that public schools probably should continue to serve. There was an instance though were the students were treated to some commercially available food. As we rounded the corner to the serving line we found stacks and stacks of HOT POCKETS! Hooray! Everyone picked their Hot Pockets and sat down to dine on what was probably the closest thing to a home cooked meal the school would ever serve, albeit the kind of home cooked meal you get when your mom isn’t in the mood to cook.

There was this lady, a Hot Pockets representative. I don’t know if the company was trying to contract to the school or if they were just conducting a study to see if teenagers liked the things, but the lady was walking from table to table asking the students what they thought of their Hot Pockets. “My Hot Pocket is delicious, ma’m” one kid might have said. “Mmmmmmmm, it’s warm inside my tummy” said another…possibly. The woman looked very pleased with the feedback.

I don’t know what came over me . Hot Pockets aren’t all that bad. Their representative seemed like a nice lady. I wouldn’t have minded Hot Pockets being served at the school. But for some reason I decided to sabotage Hot Pockets.

Hot Pockets.

I plucked a substantial tuft of long brown hair out of my head and stuffed it deep in the warm gooey center of my Hot Pocket. The other members of the cool table knew the plan so they remained cool. The lady worked the tables, slowly getting closer and closer and closer to ours. “I love my Hot Pocket so much I want to marry it” this one kid might have told her.  Finally she reached the cool table. “How are your Hot Pockets?” she asked.

I sunk my teeth in and pulled out a mouth full of melted cheese and human hair. “What the F is in my Hot Pocket?” I cried. Everyone turned to see what the F was in my Hot Pocket. They laughed the way you laugh when you see something really gross. The representative went into damage control mode and assured us all that Hot Pockets were not made with human hair, and she was pretty convincing. It was the last time we were ever served Hot Pockets.

Previously: The Finger

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.

One day Mrs. Lawrence decided that the students should use the class time to live deliberately in the spirit of Thoreau, Emerson, and their associates. For those of you who need a refresher, living deliberately is an approach to life where one makes conscious choices about every thing they do to fully experience the world around them. For instance, a person living deliberately would take an unusual route home every day so they could experience different places and situations. Our teacher’s first suggestions were dumb little things like “Sit on TOP of your desk instead of in it!”, or “ Make a crazy bird noise for no reason!”.

She decided to step it up a notch; a huge mistake. “Let’s all go outside and continue living deliberately. Just do whatever you feel like doing!”.

As we walked towards the door Mrs. Lawrence stopped us and suggested that we exit through the window because it would be a new experience. There was a look in every student’s eye at that moment that expressed a shared understanding that all hell was about to break loose. We leaped through the window to freedom and proceeded to live much more deliberately than our teacher had expected. Students ran amok, pushing each other, breaking school property, jumping out of trees. Some students left the school grounds, others sat in seclusion, pulling up grass.

Christopher of Three Happenin Guys immediately formed a tribe of the most hyperactive ritalin kids in the class, of which he was the leader. They simply ran in a giant pack the whole time, hurdling over any obstacles they saw, no matter how dangerously high they were. They jumped off steps, over trashcans and handrails, and ended their tour at a particular picnic table.

While they were running and jumping I decided I would live deliberately at the top of the flag pole. I scurried up about twenty feet and clutched the copper dome at the top. From up high I could see all the transcendental insanity around me. Rick Riley had scaled the amphitheater and he waved to me from its roof. Below I saw our principle Mr. Ross question Mrs. Lawrence as to what the hell was going on. She quickly called off the party.

As I slid down the flagpole I saw the two educators gather around Chris in a concerned manner. During his last picnic table leap, Christopher landed on his hand and dislocated his middle finger. As he describes it best, the finger looked like a snake with a rat still in its throat. Mr. Ross, Christopher, and poor Mrs. Lawrence spent the rest of the day in the hospital.

Ever since that day transcendentalism has really stuck with me. I don’t go around quoting Song of Myself or anything like that; in fact I don’t really like anything those guys wrote. But they must have led some fun lives.

Previously: The Hero