Once I was afraid of love, but when it's your brother those things change

A few weeks ago I got a Sunday morning phone call. It was my dad, asking me about one of my high school friends and if I knew whether something had happened to him. My dad had seen something on Facebook that suggested that something had. Sadly, my friend had passed away early that morning. Nothing prepares you for that kind of news. I know I'm not exactly young anymore, but I'm still too young to be losing friends. It was a heartbreaking moment.

I wasn't able to attend his funeral. I tried and tried to figure out a way that I could make it all work, but just couldn't manage it. I'll probably always regret not going, but at least I sent his family a card with a little bit of cash to put toward funeral costs and a brief note telling them of a few fond memories I have of him, so hopefully they know he was in my thoughts.

I've mentioned him a few times on this blog: There was the time he and I killed Ramone, I told you about him coming up with what might be the best catch phrase ever (see the footnote on the linked post), and he also came up with the worst pick-up line I've ever heard. Of course there are other stories, and in honor of his memory, I'll share another here.

We were in eighth grade and took a class field trip to visit Fremont Indian State Park as part of our Utah history class (I think). We learned about how the Native American relicts were discovered with the construction of a new freeway, about what had been learned about their culture by the archaeologists who'd worked in the area, and we listened to some stories about some of their gods and legends. We also got to see many of the artifacts (baskets, arrowheads, pottery, etc.) that were on display. At the end of the day, we were to go on a hike to look at the rock art after having the difference between petroglyphs and pictographs explained to us.

Through some misunderstanding, a rather large group of us (15 or so boys) didn't realize that we were only to go on the hike if we had a teacher, chaperone, or park employee with us, so we took off on our own. (Okay, maybe it wasn't exactly a "misunderstanding" because at one point we heard one of the teachers with a group of students coming down the trail, so we hid from them, ensuring that we didn't have to go back to the bus just then.) We hiked around, looked at the petroglyphs, took off our shirts to get a tan, had a "contest" to see who had the most armpit hair (spoiler alert: it wasn't me), rolled boulders down the side of the mountain to see if we could splash them in the river below, and just generally had a good time. At one point, my friend (who was Navajo) sat down to eat the lunch that he'd packed, and ended up dropping some cheese on the rocks. He called out to the rest of us and said, "Look! Cheese-O-Glyphs!" then declared he would leave it there for future generations to see, because after all, he was the only Native American in the group.

Eventually we made our way back to the visitor's center and the parking lot, where unbeknownst to us, the rest of our classmates had been waiting on the bus for over an hour while the teachers were out looking for us. Needless to say, we were in a lot of trouble. As punishment, we weren't allowed to go on any more field trips for the rest of the year, and all of us who'd gone AWOL had to write a seven page paper describing in great detail what we'd done while everyone else was waiting for us back at the bus, then read it in front of our classmates so that they could experience all the fun that we'd had while they waited. Not all of us took the assignment seriously. I turned mine in on miniature notebook paper, which just infuriated the teacher and earned me an additional five pages that I had to write (a 12 page paper to an eighth grade student was sheer torture - Now, I'd love to write a paper that was "only" 12 pages long).

One of our other friends wrote about how we were gone so long because we followed the smell of the peace pipe down into the ant world, where we couldn't return until we were able to trick an eagle into flying us up through the hole in the sky to deliver us back to the parking lot. It was a derivative of one of the legends the park ranger had told us. Of course, that earned us a 30 minute lecture from the teacher on not mocking others' beliefs, and got another five pages tacked onto the end of his assignment as well. Seriously, don't ever teach junior high school kids. We were all so very annoying.

There are so many other stories to tell. There was the first time I met him: I was in seventh grade and he was the new kid seated next to me in English class. He told me he was Navajo, so I asked him to teach me some Navajo words. He told me to say, "clit" so I did. Then, when I asked him what it meant, he just laughed. Turns out he had a lot of fun being surrounded by naive Mormon kids. Then there was the time he ground up birth control pills and told everyone it was from a pixie stick and got them to taste it. Or the time we won in the playoffs in football, then stayed to watch the next game, and he went up and asked one of the cheerleaders from another team out on a date. (A year later, I took that same girl to our junior prom.)

He had the most infectious laugh. It was impossible to hear it and not at least crack a smile. I'm going to miss hearing that. And I'm going to miss getting voice messages that simply say, "Where the white women at?" followed by laughter and nothing else. It's hard to believe he's gone. I get tears in my eyes every time I think about it.

For some reason, every time I've thought about him passing away I think of the lyrics from the Jon Bon Jovi song Never Say Die. It might be because Young Guns was one of our favorite movies at the time we met. It might be because the lyrics themselves somehow describe our friendship. Maybe there are parts that remind me of his military service (he was a marine). Or maybe it's just one of the few songs that come to mind that sing about death. Regardless, I find it somewhat therapeutic (particularly the very last verse), so I'm going to post them here.

As we stood there older than the men

And younger than the boys

We were still as the wind

That blows on a hot August night

And you were lonesome as a jukebox

But deadly just the same

I could be as gentle as a newborn

Then spit into the eye of a hurricane

And we knew how to laugh

And we knew how to cry

Yeah we sure knew how to live

But we don't ever

Never say die

Never say die

I guess you'd say we had a pact

These words we knew so well

Still they remained unspoken

And we'd take them to the fiery gates of Hell

Once I was afraid of love

But when it's your brother those things change

'Cause love is just another words for trust

So hear me when I say

Never say die

Never say no

You've gotta look them in the eye and don't let go

When it's your own blood you bleed

And your own tears you cry

When you're brought up to believe

That it's the strong who survive

Never say die

Yeah and we could run like lightning

Through the pouring rain

And we'll be standing like a soldier

Who comes marching home again

They ask what it is that I want written

On the gravestone where I'll lie

Tell them it's just my bones that died there

So save the tears they'll cry

'Cause my spirit is still riding

Somewhere in this night

When it's these three words that come to me as I kiss this world goodbye

Never say die

Never say no

You've gotta look them in the eye and don't let go

When it's your own blood you bleed

And your own tears you'll cry

When you're brought up to believe

That it's the strong who survive

Never say die

Rest in peace, Elston Louis. You were a true friend, and you will be missed!

But now the snow is gone

It rained pretty much all day yesterday. As you can imagine, that much precipitation is pretty rare around here. Someone I follow on Twitter even posted this: Dear Las Vegas: please google "desert" k, thanks. Nobody listened to her, though. It kept raining.

I was walking somewhere mid-day, and when I stepped out into the rain, some cold water dripped down off the roof and onto the back of my neck. That's the thing about living someplace where you hardly ever get rain or snow, you forget to watch out for stuff like that. It was cold. It's times like that I'm glad I don't live somewhere colder. You know, like with snow and stuff. Where you have to worry about trees dumping the snow off their branches, onto your head, and down the back of your neck.

That hasn't always been the case. I've lived in some cold places. I mean COLD places. Like, you're so excited when the temperature finally hits 50 degrees sometime in May that you're out in shorts, t-shirt and sandals and thinking about going for a swim, even though the water temperature in the lake is probably still somewhere in the 30s because the ice just barely melted.

I recently saw a news headline that said they had made it illegal for truck drivers and bus drivers to text while on the road. That, combined with the cold rain water dripping down the back of my neck made me think of some of the things that happened my senior year of high school. Like the fact that one of the bus drivers would READ western novels while driving a busload of kids around on windy mountain roads. You know, because THAT's safe.

One day we were driving the 35 miles or so to school in a snow storm (with the regular bus driver, not the Louis L'amor fan). We're talking blizzard conditions. Like, the only way you could tell where the road went was by looking at the whiteness in front of you, and knowing you were on the road because there weren't any trees. It was kind of scary being that visibility was only about 30 feet anyway. That was before the windshield wipers iced up. The bus driver was faced with a dilemma. He couldn't keep going without being able to clear off the windshield, but he also couldn't stop the bus because if he did there is no way he would have been able to get it moving again. THAT's how much snow was on the road. So he called me to the front of the bus, had me crawl into the small space to his left, reach out the window into the freezing snow and wind, and bang the windshield wiper on the windshield to break the ice off. It was freeeeeeeeeeeezing (yes, that many Es). But I saved the day. We made it to school safely.

By noon, the school had decided to send us back home, so we loaded up on the bus, repeated the procedure. Arrived home safely, despite the fact that they waited until the bus was on the road before they CLOSED THE HIGHWAY. The school district sent a bus full of high school kids traveling home on a snowy mountain road that they knew was about to be closed because of the terrible weather conditions.

Sometimes I wonder how I even survived to see my college years.

Fish on

Everyone in my family is familiar with this story, but since today is Father's Day it's worth telling again.

I was about five years old and we were living in Montana. One day my dad took all the kids out fishing. I remember it being cold, so my mom sat in the car with our baby sister while we fished. I kept messing around with my rod (that's not a metaphor), and my dad found it annoying. At some point, my dad had enough and told me that if I did it one more time then I was going to have to go sit in the car.

I did it one more time.

He told me to go sit in the car.

I looked at my siblings and said, "Ha ha ha you guys. I get to go sit in the car, and you have to stay here and fish!"

The moment has been captured in one of my mother's cartoons about the family:



You have to admit that it's pretty funny considering the way my life has turned out thus far. I guess some of those fishing lessons stuck.

Thanks Dad. I love you!

Naked as a window

Since my life is relatively boring right now, I'm going to take a trip down memory lane to one of my life's most embarrassing moments.

My family moved to the place Flieswithoutwings so lovingly refers to as "Cow Country" near the end of my junior year in high school (you can read about my arrival here). As part of my taking the new school "by storm" I immediately joined the track team. Not because I was fast, mind you, but because I knew it would afford me the opportunity to attend track meets where I could ogle girls and potentially meet up with some of my friends from my old school.

I've talked about this before, but the new town was very small, and we had to ride the bus approximately forty miles of high, winding mountain roads to get to school. The regular bus left right as school got out, but they also ran a smaller bus so that the students who were involved with extracurricular activities could stay after school without forcing their parents to make the long drive to come pick them up. It was called the home-run bus. (How's that for a lame sports analogy?)

One day after track practice, my friends and I were riding home on the home-run bus. There were several girls on the bus as well. Some from the track team, some from the cheerleading squad, and others who had just stayed after to work on homework or to hang out with their friends. I was wearing sweats and boxers. A bad combination it turned out.

At one point I stood up to throw something away, and my friend, "Geppetto" made a motion like he was going to yank my sweat pants down. Knowing that I had on boxers, and firmly entrenched in the belief that boxers were essentially the same thing as shorts, I told him I wouldn't be embarrassed by that. After all, everyone had seen me in shorts* before.

Considering this a challenge, Geppetto yanked on my sweats. Hard. Down came the sweat pants, and along with them, the boxers (like you didn't see that coming). The problem was, I thought the boxers were still up, so it took a few seconds before I made a movement to rectify the situation. After all, I couldn't very well let Geppetto think he'd gotten the better of me, right?

Anyway, by the time I looked down to see Little Minnow and the Boys had come up for air, Geppetto had already burst out laughing hysterically. Everyone else on the bus had turned around to see what all the commotion was about. A girl on the seat right in front of where I was standing turned around, and literally almost got a face full of my junk. Seriously, she was about six inches away**. I'll simply name her Lucky since she was the first girl to see my penis. Another girl, who we always referred to as the Floating Head, also turned around in time to see everything.

Of course, all of this happened in the span of about five seconds, and I reached down and pulled up my pants as quickly as I could once I realized exactly what had happened. I then proceeded to repeatedly punch Geppetto for his actions. He laughed the whole time and just said he probably deserved it.

Lucky and the Floating Head were beet red, but I didn't let that stop me from trying to play it off.

I said, "[Lucky], [Floating Head], you each owe me $50."

They never paid up.









*And I do have me some sexy legs (or so I've been told).

**Had the bus driver hit the brakes, I may have received my first BJ right then and there.

If you're down with P, well then you're down with me

Well, since everybody seems to want to hear that one story about that one time that one guy ate that one perch and then went to that one hospital to get that one stomach pumped, I s'pose I'll tell it.

I took a biology class my freshman year of high school. My seat was at one of the tables in the back of the room (which really has no bearing on this story at all other than to let you know how the 'planning stages' of the incident got as far as they did before the teacher found out). One of the kids at the very back table, we'll call him PerchEater, was constantly trying to do things so that people would think he was cool. You know the type: He came from a broken home, his family was poor, his mom worked a lot so he was attention starved*, so basically just like my kids.

Fridays were dissection days. Or maybe Mondays were dissection days. Or Tuesdays. Who cares? The only point of relevance is that one of those days of the week we dissected things, and one of those weeks of the school year the thing we dissected was a yellow perch. Midway through the class period, PerchEater went around asking those of us who were seated around him how much we'd give him if he ate the perch. Of course, none of us were thinking about the possible ramifications of what injesting something that had been fixed in formalin and preserved in carosafe were, We just thought it'd be gross to watch him do it, so of course we all offered to pitch in. I told him I'd give him $10, some kids said $5 and others as much as $20 - adding up to a grand total somewhere around $200.

Once the total he had coming to him for his performance had reached the max (i.e., nobody else was willing to add to the pot), PerchEater decided it was time to deliver. However, our teacher began to suspect that something was up and started asking what was going on. Somebody told him and he put the kaibosh on it right then and there. Noone was going to eat a perch in his classroom. We were all disappointed, and justifiably so. We'd just had what would probably be the grossest thing we'd ever see anyone do throughout the course of the entire year yanked away from us. What a Quaker.

Well, then, imagine our surprise when the bell rang and we all filed out in the hallway only to see PerchEater procure the specimen from the pocket of his blue jeans. It seemed that there might be a show after all. After briefly asking around to make sure the deal still stood, PerchEater tipped his head back and lowered the fish into his mouth headfirst. I don't know exactly how he thought it would go down, maybe he'd seen to many movies with bachelors swallowing goldfish**, but I guess he thought it would slide right down his esophagus. It didn't. It just got stuck. Then he gagged, and the whole fish came flying up out of his mouth. PerchEater must have had very good reflexes, because he caught the perch mid-air, looked at it and then bit its head off and began chewing. About three bites in, our biology teacher came out of the classroom to see what all the fuss was about, found out that he'd eaten about half a perch, and grabbed him and ran down the hall. Later we found out that he went and called an ambulance and had PerchEater taken to the hospital to get his stomach pumped.

PerchEater missed the next couple days of school. Presumably because he was recovering from either the procedure at the hospital, the beating his mom gave him when he got home, or both. When he came back to class, there was no mention of the money we all owed him. I figured I'd wait until my next paycheck (my paychecks were very small in those days, so $10 was a lot of scratch) and then pay up, but by the end of the month had pretty much forgotten about it. PerchEater moved a month or two after that, so I never gave him the money I owed. If I had a current address I'd mail him the money today.







*I really have no idea if any of the background information I gave you about PerchEater is true. I barely knew him - I don't even remember his last name.

**Not the crackers.

My flying saucer, where can you be?

I'm not sure what reminded me of this, but when I was six years old my family moved from Montana to rural Utah. At first, my parents couldn't find a place for us to live, so we ended up staying in a hotel for the first month or so in our new town, dining in restaurants when we weren't at school.

One day we were eating, and there was a man who'd had a tracheotomy sitting at a table near us. I kept hearing his robotic voice, and was fascinated by it. I had to leave our table to go to the bathroom, and on the way back I stopped by his table, looked up at him and asked, "Hey Mister, are you from outer space?"

He wasn't. Who knew?

And they'd say relax, but I can't be a man this far down the map

Tortellini got in trouble at school for ditching class a few days ago. I immediately assumed it was because she was doing something with her friends, but it turned out she was in the bathroom fighting the urge to vomit and her teacher got mad that she was gone for twenty minutes. I'm sure she was probably gone longer than she needed to be, but it seems like the teacher may have overreacted. We talked to her about how if she really was sick she should have called home, and sided with the teacher even though we maybe shouldn't have. It's a struggle getting kids to respect authority. She had to go to detention, and she's grounded from the phone and computer (gasp - no myspace!) for the rest of the week (a little harsh maybe, but she'd be getting a little more slack if her grades were higher). Anyway, dealing with stuff like this is one reason I'm glad I'm not a junior high school teacher.

Or a high school teacher for that matter.

For some reason, I was reminded of the time my English teacher overreacted to something I said in class my junior year. The lesson was on oxymorons, and the teacher was calling on students to give examples. Various students gave the most obvious answers, "Half empty", "Tough love", "Bittersweet", etc. Then she got to me.

"Chicken Fried Steak."

She got mad at me for not taking things seriously. She said something to me that happened to be the catch phrase of a guy everybody called 'Beef' so I muttered, "Good one, Beef." Of course, I muttered it loudly enough for my friends to hear, which also happened to be a bit too loud. She heard me and freaked out.

"DID YOU JUST CALL ME BEEF!?"

There was really no way to deny it, even though I wasn't calling her that for the reason she thought I was, so I just shrugged. Needless to say, I was in trouble. Not enough trouble that they called my parents, but I did have to do extra assignments as punishment. (Which, now that I think of it, hardly seems fair. Make me clean chalkboards, or erasers, or scrape gum off the desks, sure, but making my grade dependent on extra work? Hmmmm.)

So, after remembering that, I now feel guilty for punishing Tortellini for a teacher's overreaction. (Not that I'll let Tortellini know that.)

Stick-shifts and safety belts and bucket seats have all got to go

I got a phone call from a high school friend a little while back. He wanted me to tell a girl the story about how he and I killed Ramone. I told her the story. Now I'll tell you.

Ramone was an old Datsun pick-up that my friend and his foster brother drove. The name Ramone came from the noise the truck would make when the driver shifted gears. Ramone's horn was too weak to be blown steadily - if honked, the sound would cycle from loud to barely audible and back. Ramone's headlights pointed in different directions. Ramone was very, very rusty. There was a hole in the floor on Ramone's driver's side that would allow water to splash on the driver's foot if Ramone was driven through a puddle or on slushy roads. The remedy for that problem was to place a rubber mat on the floor (of course). One time I hopped over the side of the truck and into the bed only to have my foot continue on through the bed and wind up back on the pavement. Nobody was allowed to jump into the bed after that. Ramone's original color was orange (I think - it may have just been rust), but my friend and his foster brother had painted various designs in white all over Ramone's body. They also wrote Ramone's name across the hood. We loved Ramone. So, you can imagine the sadness we felt on the day he died, especially given that we were at fault.

Ramone's death can indirectly be blamed on another friend of ours who gave me a guilty conscience. I had been asked to a ladies' choice dance by a girl that I didn't think was very cute, so I declined, offering up the excuse that I had a debate meet the next day. This was only kind of a lie. There was a debate meet the next day, but I had told the debate coach that I wasn't going to go. Until the day after she'd asked me out, at which point I told him I'd changed my mind and was going. This didn't sit well with one of my friends, and he told me what a jerk I was for doing that. I decided he was right, so in order to make people happy I decided I'd ask the girl to go on a date with me on another night (since I couldn't reverse course and go to the dance with her or she'd know I wasn't telling the truth about the debate meet - although, you can bet that if I'd been interested in her I would have found a way to make it work).

In those days, nobody in our town actually called people and asked them out over the phone. Instead you had to do something a lot more involved. If it was someone you were really interested in, you had to coordinate with their parents so that you could go decorate their bedroom while they weren't home, or send them on a treasure hunt, or something quite complicated. If it was someone you only kind of liked, you could get away with decorating their locker, or car. For this girl, I decided just to leave a flower with a note at her house. This was all decided with coaching from my friend who drove Ramone, so it only seemed right that he drive me out to her house to drop the rose/note off. She lived on the edge of town, near the cemetery and a cement plant. Her dad (the high school wood shop teacher) answered the door, said that she wasn't home right then, but that he'd make sure she got it. I left, relieved that I hadn't been forced to talk to her, got back in Ramone, and we headed back down the road.

A few blocks down the road, my friend started joking about how I should put the moves on her. As he joked about that he looked at me and said, "This is how you get a girl to come over and sit on your lap." He then yanked the steering wheel hard to the right so as to make me lean over toward him. Unfortunately, he started fish-tailing and lost control of the vehicle. We crashed into the corner of a concrete barrier that was along the side of a culvert. That slowed down the front of Ramone, but not the back, so Ramone's back end slid around and we slammed into the edge of another concrete barrier. The point of impact was just behind the driver's door. The result was twofold. First, Ramone was bent into an unnatural shape. Second, since I wasn't wearing my seatbelt (dumb move, I know), I flew across the cab and slammed into my friend, pinning him up against the door.

Here's a diagram of how it all went down. First impact:



Second impact:



Other than being misplaced, and having a rapidly beating heart for several minutes, I was unscathed. My friend only had the wind knocked out of him from when I flew into him, but he was ok too. We were both able to get out of the truck on our own. We were lucky.

A guy who was working at the cement plant saw the whole thing. He ran over to see if we were ok. I told him I was. My friend, who still couldn't breathe, gave him a thumbs up. He said he was going to go call for help, and that he'd be back. He left, my friend caught his breath, and the first words he said were, "See? It worked!"

Unfortunately, it cost Ramone his life.



Oddly enough, I never felt the need to try that move on a girl. Although, I suppose there's still time.

Far away from the memories of the people who care if I live or die

The other day I went to a sandwich shop hoping to get my favorite sandwich of theirs: Vegetarian Salami.

"They make vegetarian salami?" you say? The answer to your question, gentle reader, is yes. Yes they do. You're probably thinking that vegetarian salami sounds disgusting, because it does, and if you were to see it you would probably think it looks disgusting, because it does, but believe me, gentle reader, it is a very delicious soy representation of an otherwise unhealthy lunch meat that only tastes slightly more delicious when in its "natural" state, but also kills you slowly. (Can you say longest run-on sentence ever?)

Imagine my dismay then, gentle reader, when upon approaching the counter I could no longer see the vegetarian salami sandwich on the menu. I asked the man behind the counter about it and he told me that he was sorry, but that it had been discontinued. Why someone would "discontinue" a lunch meat that's not really meat is beyond me*, but my precious vegetarian salami has been replaced with vegetarian ham.

I know what you're thinking, gentle reader, and that is, "Why didn't he just order the vegetarian ham instead?" Well, I'll tell you why. It's because I have a long, sordid history with ham.**

As a child I never liked ham. There was just something about it that made me recoil and shudder every time I tasted it. Every. Single. Time. Well, one night, when I was five or six, my dear sweet mother prepared ham for dinner. I whined and complained about having to eat it, as five or six year olds are wont to do, all to no avail as I was told to be quiet and eat. I did, but not for long. I took my first bite of ham, recoiled and shuddered (as I knew I would), but that wasn't all. No, at the time when the shuddering would normally have stopped, I felt a little lurch in my stomach, and knew that I had to make a mad dash toward the bathroom. I didn't make it. We're talking projectile vomiting all the way down the hallway.

I have to say, one of the biggest problems with projectile vomiting is that the vomit travels a long distance in front of the vomiter. So, as I was running down the hall, I stepped in a puddle of my own vomit, then slipped and fell. I vomited some more as I tried to get up, stepped into that, and slipped and fell again. After a couple of tries I was able to find my way into the bathroom and finish emptying my stomach. My parents, thinking that I was over-acting so as to get out of eating my dinner, lacked sympathy. They made me clean up the mess, which had little chunks of ham spread throughout.

(I want you to stop for a minute and just imagine the smell of ham mixed with bile so that you can experience the trauma of the situation.)

Once I finished cleaning up the mess, my parents made me sit back at the table and finish my meal. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, choking down those last few chunks of ham, but I persisted. That doesn't mean I'm eager to repeat the experience with a veggie ham sandwich.***




* Not really. I'm sure I'm the only person who ever bought it.

** It's really because I wanted to try the vegetarian turkey instead.

*** Actually, I do like ham now, despite all childhood trauma associated with it. I'll probably give the veggie ham sandwich a try next time I'm there.

I was wasting my youth on grinding down my teeth

I've mentioned before that I grew up in small towns, but you don't really get a sense of exactly how small until you see this aerial photograph on a postcard. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Dutch John, UT:

You know the town you live in is small when you can just circle your house on an aerial photograph and expect people to be able to use it as a map. Sure this is a pretty old picture, and there are a few more buildings there now, but you get the point.

(I've circled the house that I lived in for three and a half years. Feel free to visit, but be aware that the family that lives there now might tell you stories about me that aren't necessarily true. Also, they might not be receptive to complete strangers coming up to the door to ask about me. On second thought, don't feel free to visit. If you feel that you must, just drive by and wave).

As you might imagine, when you live in a town that small, sometimes it's hard to find things to do in order to keep yourself entertained. I mean, sure there's world class flyfishing three miles away, rock climbing, mountain biking, hiking, river rafting, along with a 91 mile long reservoir where you can swim, boat, fish, etc., and it's all within ten minutes of your house, but who wants to do that all the time?

(Just like anything else, those things become commonplace and somewhat boring when you can do them anytime. Take living in Vegas for example. Sure, strippers seem like a lot of fun, but when you're seeing them every single day it gets a little old. Then you have to start looking for something else to spice things up - like snorting cocaine off a stripper's breasts. Strippers and coke: Don't try to tell me that's not a winning combination.)

Anyway, in order to ease the boredom of living in DJ, sometimes I would end up doing stupid things. Like the time when I knocked up my girlfriend and got married. Or the time when I did this:

My mom HATES that picture. The reason? I'm hanging off the edge of Flaming Gorge Dam. She's such a Quaker. But seriously, this is something that could have resulted in me being the recipient of my very own Darwin Award. Let me show you a different angle:

Sure there was a rock ledge about twenty feet below us, but if for some reason I would have slipped, and then missed the ledge, it would have only been about a 500 foot fall. Maybe you'll believe me now when I say it's a miracle that I survived to adulthood.

They'd never make a movie if everything was great

In case you're interested, here's the story of how I came into this world. (If you're not, you don't need to read the rest of this because it has to do with the last part of the story.)

When I was in Kindergarten, we would always form two lines to go to recess. I remember one day the lines were made up of those who had flown before, and those who hadn't. The ones who had flown got to leave the room first*. I didn't know the last part of the story then (the part where I'd flown on life flight on the very first day of my life). To think, had I known that, I could have made it to the playground about 30 seconds sooner that day.

I remember telling my mom about it when I got home from school that day. She told me the story then. I remember being upset that I could have been in the first line after all. Oh, missed opportunities.




* As if they weren't already privileged enough!

I survived, it's good enough for now

Saturday I took my kids to a pool party. Swimming is definitely not a bad way to spend an afternoon when the temperature is nearing 110. And to think, there's still another 5-10 degrees to go before we hit the summer highs. Man I hate this place in the summer. On the bright side, at least it's always sunny (pun intended).

I knew there was going to be trouble when I saw my four year old who was happily standing by the side of the pool shooting his sister with a water gun throw the gun, grab his butt with one hand, and take off running for the house only to have trouble opening the door and then suddenly stop and turn around with a look of shame in his eye. I walked over and asked him if he'd pooped in his swimming suit, and he sheepishly said that he had. To steal a phrase from CW, it was the worst Play-Doh fun factory ever.

I took him in the bathroom, and deftly maneuvered the suit off his body without spilling any diarrhea on my hands or the floor. His legs and the toilet seat weren't so lucky. He looked down and pointed out the obvious.

Him: Dad, there's poop right there.
Me: Yes there is.
Him: That's disgusting.
Me: Yes it is.
Him: Dad, there's some poop on my penis.
Me: Here. You have to wipe that off with this toilet paper.
Him: Ok. **wiping**That's disgusting.
Me: Tell me about it.

I put him in the bath, put his swimming trunks in the washer, and then had him wear my t-shirt until he could wear his clothes again. He was very embarrassed about it, and acted self conscious about being the only person there who was wearing a t-shirt that went all the way to their ankles with absolutely nothing on underneath. I tried to get him to feel less ashamed by telling him that it could happen to anybody, but he didn't really start acting like his usual self until he got his swimming trunks back out of the wash.

I wonder if it would have helped if I'd have told him this story about one of the most embarrassing moments of my life:

I was in second grade when a similar bout of peristalsis hit my eight year old colon. I booked it for the boys bathroom, but when I got to the door that entered it from the playground, it was stuck. I pulled and pulled, but the door wouldn't open. Probably because of the fat kid that was on the other side that thought it would be funny to hold the door shut so nobody could get in. Well, it worked. I didn't make it, and instead dumped a load of the runny stuff in my pants. I went into one of the stalls to try and clean it up, to no avail. It was all over the place.

Now seems like a good time to talk about how traumatic it was to go to the bathroom at my elementary school anyway. I don't know how it is today, but I doubt it was as bad as my school was then. Anytime anyone was using one of the bathroom stalls, there would always be kids who would climb up and look over to see who was in there. Then they would sit there and yell to people in the hall about how so-and-so was pooping. I'm hoping this weird behavior was unique to my school (and maybe some in Germany - they obviously get into the whole scheizer thing over there sometime). I still don't like to go into stalls in public restrooms, and I'm sure it's partly due this experience.

Anyway, this time was no different. As I sat there trying to wipe diarrhea off my clothes, several of my classmates peered down at me from above while chanting pooh-pants over and over again. Then my teacher, who was a woman, came into the boys bathroom to see what all the fuss was about. Obviously this was a very big deal to 8 year old Native Minnow, but she did go to the trouble of cleaning me up and calling my mom to come get me, and for that I should be grateful.

Upon my return to school I was subjected to being called Pooh-Pants on the playground, but that died off after a few days. At least it did with most of the kids. There was one kid who was a year older than me who continued to call me that every single time he saw me for the next few years (basically until he moved on to seventh grade). I remember one day when I had to wear my cub scout uniform to school for some reason, and I thought about what a relief it would be when that kid didn't recognize me because I was in uniform. If he didn't recognize me he wouldn't call me Pooh-Pants.

I was crushed when I turned a corner at recess and that was the first thing I heard him call out. How could this be? How could he recognize me? I was wearing a cub scout uniform for crying out loud. How could he not respect the uniform? Perhaps even worse than that was the time he brought it up during my sophomore year of high school. In front of one of the cutest girls in the senior class. Oh how I hated that guy! Talk about dragging a joke out for way too long.
I must be over it by now though, or I wouldn't be relating this story online to be seen by anybody who happens to come along.

When I was a kid I saw a light flying high above the trees one night, thought it was an alien, turned out to be just God.

When I was sixteen years old I did a lot of stupid things. The kind of things that you read about on the Darwin Awards site. A friend of mine reminded me of one of those stories today, so I thought I'd share it here.

I grew up in a small town in rural Utah. Needless to say, there wasn't a whole lot to do for entertainment. Many nights consisted of dragging Main Street, and that was it. Sure, driving up and down a single street in the hopes of running into friends so you could talk to them in a parking lot is a pointless exercise, but it beat sitting around the house, so that's what we did.

One of the other problems with living in a small town (and part of why dragging Main was the thing to do) is that everything closes by six o'clock p.m. If we got in the mood for snacks, we'd have to drive to purchase them at the "busy" gas stations along the freeway exits. One evening, we got in such a mood, so a carload of us went to the north end of town to buy some sodas and candy bars. It just so happened that I was the last one to pay, so my friends did what any normal sixteen year olds would do in an attempt to be funny: They ran out to the car, got in, and tried to leave me there.

I finished paying, then ran out just in time to be able to jump up on their back bumper and grab onto the car, thus insuring that I would not be left behind. Of course, I was under the mistaken impression that they would stop the car and let me in once they realized I had caught them. Instead, they decided it would be funny to go the other way, and they took the dirt road that led to the city dump. By this time, the car was moving too fast for me to be able to jump off without receiving any bodily harm. Everyone knows how afraid I am of receiving bodily harm, so there I was, stuck standing on the rear bumper of a car traveling ~50 mph down a dirt road, unable to do anything about it.

About this time I looked ahead and saw that one of the Sherriff's deputies was parked ahead, so I did what I thought best given the circumstances. I squatted down on the bumper, foolishly hoping that somehow he wouldn't notice me there as we went speeding by.

He noticed.

Fortunately, I was able to get down off the bumper safely once the officer pulled us over. Unfortunately, we had some explaining to do.

Officer: Alright boys, where's the party at?

Us: What party?

Officer: I'm not stupid you know. You guys are about the fifth car I've seen heading out this way, now where's the party?

Us: Honestly, we don't know anything about a party. We were just fooling around and came out this way.

Officer: So you guys aren't on your way to get drunk?

Us: No. None of us even drink.

[He then checked our IDs and eyed us all suspiciously for a spell]

Officer: Ok, I believe you. I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna treat this like a UFO. I saw somethin', and I don't know what it was, but if I see it again I'll know.

Then he let us go. No tickets. No calls to our parents. He just sent us on our way (making sure we were all inside the vehicle this time) then got back to trying to catch underage drinkers.

I just love that line he gave about the UFO. I'm willing to bet that he practiced it at home, and probably even bragged about it later back at the Sherriff's Office. Either that, or it's the line he gives everyone when he lets them off the hook for something. At any rate, it's a classic.

Sexy woman meet me after work, I wanna show you how I handle business, I wanna show you how the mailboy* flirts

I got this picture via text message from my sister:










Great, now I want to see whores.



*When my parents moved the family to Flaming Gorge at the end of my Junior year, the high school there wasn't prepared to offer me all the classes I needed to take. They basically had to create three classes just for me to finish my Junior year, and I took a bunch of college courses via satellite during my Senior year. However, there were only so many satellite courses offered, and I still had to fill up my day, so I signed up for an hour of being an office aid. My primary job was to walk up the street to the district offices, get the day's mail and sort it into the teachers' boxes. When my friends would see me carrying the mail tote Geppetto would yell out, "Hey look! It's the mailboy," and flieswithoutwings would add, "Isn't that a double negative?"

Of recklessness and water

Lately I've been itching to visit Flaming Gorge. I spent 3 years of my life there, and despite the fact that I hated my parents for making me move there, it is one of my favorite places in the world (you might consider it to be my Brokeback Mountain, although in a less gay cowboy kind of way).

My friend Flieswithoutwings put it well when he described living there as "being part of a magical place and time." I've thought about what it would be like to move back there some day, perhaps after I retire, but it wouldn't be the same unless all my favorite people moved back there too.

I'd like to pay a visit to the area during Spring Break, but don't know if I can afford it. I have a million stories about the area, and Flieswithoutwings has done a good job of telling some of them in his 'Chronicles of Cow Country High' series, but here's one that I thought of the other day and thought I'd share. Besides, I doubt this one is worthy of inclusion in The Chronicles.

Flaming Gorge Reservoir is a fairly large body of water, and approaches a depth of approximately 500 feet in some places. Late one summer night we went swimming off the docks at the visitor's center on the dam (even though it wasn't legal). I decided to swim over and touch the dam. I have to say that it was unsettling by the time I got there because of the amount of water that was beneath me. I had the feeling that if I were to sink to the bottom, my body would never be found. I followed through and touched the dam, but it wasn't a task I was eager to perform again.

As with any body of water that big, there were always rumors about bodies being found by fishermen who were trolling and would think they'd hooked a large fish only to end up netting a human body (in full or in part). Usually the stories stated that the body had multiple fishing lures stuck to its skin (a sure sign of an urban legend, even though the area was far from urban).

While I doubt the authenticity of some of the stories I heard while I lived in the area, there are certainly plenty of bodies in that lake. My mom had a cousin who drowned there when his boat capsized during a storm and whose body was never found. With water so deep, you could imagine that it would be a good place to dispose of a body. In fact, it is believed that Ted Bundy dumped a few of his victims' bodies there.

One day we were talking about how it was kind of creepy that we'd swim in waters where bodies were decomposing. Not that it deterred us, but it is kind of gross when you think about it. During the conversation one of my friends proclaimed, "You know, my missing aunt used to date Ted Bundy."

Tommy the Cat's my name, and I say unto thee

This is the story of how I intentionally scarred the lives of two little girls, but did so unintentionally. You might be thinking that the previous sentence makes absolutely no sense, but you'd be wrong, as you'll see shortly.

When I was 16 years old I was employed at the local meat packing plant. My job was to clean the place up after business hours. It certainly wasn't the best paying job, nor was it the best work environment, but the hours were flexible so it wasn't all bad. I worked there with one of my close friends, and our boss didn't care what time we went in as long as everything was clean by the time he had to start everything up at 5 the next morning. The problem with that was that sometimes it was a little too easy to put off going to work.

The meat packing plant was about a mile from my house, and I usually had to walk there, but occasionally my parents would let me take their car, especially if it was late. It was one such night when 'the incident' happened. I'd put off going to work until about ten o'clock, and my parents let me take the car so that I wouldn't be out any later than I was going to be already.

As I was driving to work a cat crossed the street just in front of me, so I did what any teenage boy who had just obtained a driver's license would do: I swerved to try and hit it. It wasn't until after I swerved that I noticed the two little girls on the sidewalk. Not wanting to force them to witness the bloodshed that was about to occur, I swerved to try and miss the cat as soon as I saw them, but it was too late. I ran over the cat with the back tire.

I didn't stop. I just felt guilty that these kids had witnessed me killing a furry little animal. I felt even worse when I was driving home from work and the cat was no longer lying on the side of the road. Apparently it wasn't just any cat. It was their cat. I hope they thought it was just an accident because it was dark, but I doubt that's the case.

I would say that it was the last time I intentionally killed something, but that would be a lie.