I Miss My Christmas

On December 1st of every year, my mom would hang a little cloth calender on the door in the kitchen.  It had 25 little numbered pockets in it, and a little stuffed mouse that you would move from pocket to pocket, counting down the days until we got to open presents.

It was a big deal, between my sisters and I, being the one who got to move the mouse.  It was as if Christmas wouldn't come if the mouse didn't move; whoever moved the mouse was directly responsible for the progress of time.  Sometimes we'd even try to cheat and move him forward an extra day or two as if that would make Christmas come faster.

Sometime in December, a couple weeks before Christmas, we'd gear up to go get our tree.  Since I was lucky enough to live in a house in rural Vermont that was situated on a hundred-some-odd acres of forest, we could just hike out into the woods and find our perfect tree.  My dad would climb into his giant tan cover-alls, we'd bundle up in our scarves, hats, and mittens that my mom had knit for us and we'd brave the cold and snow up to our knees, walking the old skidder trails out into the woods. 

When we found a good one dad would put his hatchet to work and have it down in no time, and we'd lay it on a sled and tow it home.  For a couple of days it would stand undecorated on the porch so it could dry off. 

Decorating the tree was the same every year:  Trim it to size, wrestle with the stand, make sure it doesn't fall over by tethering it to a little hook on the exposed beam on the living room ceiling, string the lights.  All that was dads department.  Then mom took over.  Break out the box with the ornaments, each of which had a little story of its own of who had given it to whom and when.  Mom would take each one out of the box one at a time, put the little hooks on them and let us hang them, all the while pointing out spots that looked empty. 

She was in charge of the tinsel.  The tinsel was the same every year, recycled from years before I was even born, in a beat up red tinsel box.  It had to be perfect, never clumped, draped one ancient strand at a time carefully over each branch.  When the decorating was all said and done, we'd put on some Christmas music and sit down to admire our handiwork for a while with the wood stove crackling and warm beside us. 

Not every year, but some years mom would make ginger bread houses from scratch and there would be a big production of assembling and decorating those.  Confectioners sugar mortar and bowls of candy covered the kitchen table until there was an entire neighborhood of edible homes littering the place.  One year dad built a gingerbread castle.  It was the coolest. 

Without fail, on Christmas eve we'd load up into the car and go out for a drive into town to look at the lights and "oo" and "aw".  When it was time for bed, since the wood stove wasn't a good place to hang stockings, we'd lay them carefully on the back of the couch, always in the same order.  We'd all sleep in sleeping bags in one room and whisper and giggle and squirm around until we inevitably got yelled at and finally went to sleep.

In the morning, as was custom, one of us would have to go out and feed the horse and the rabbit, and someone would have to make coffee before we could wake the folks.  Feeding the animals meant throwing on some boots and a jacket, running a bucket of water and a bale of hay to the horse, then changing out the rabbits water bottle and food.  All this in the pre-dawn, in the middle of the winter, in Vermont.  Every year, somehow, my sister made the coffee. 

Having everything done, we'd peek down into the living room and see that our stockings were bulging on the couch.  We'd wake mom and dad up and go sit on the couch holding the stockings and fidget until the folks hemmed and hawed their way downstairs while we squirmed impatiently until they finally settled in and we could start digging in to our loot.

My sister played Santa and handed out presents, and we tore them open just as fast.  We'd have a couple of hours to bask in the glow of our new stuff as the turkey in the oven started to make the house smell good.  Round two came when my grand parents got to the house, with another stocking for each of us and more presents.  Every year my dad opened the same box he'd been opening for decades and every year it was something to talk about. 

Dinner around the table was always the same, my mom would make a feast and everyone would tuck in.  Sometimes we had cousins and aunts and uncles, sometimes not.  My gramma brought the same delicious raspberry jello with cool whip, and every year she mentioned how one lady at church complained that everything was always "Please pass" at big church dinners. 

When everything wound down, my grandfather (Gramp) would take us out in his truck to go "hunting" which meant we'd ride around on the back roads looking for deer in the fields. 

"See that right there?"  He'd say.
"What, where?"  We'd say, craning our necks to see whatever it was.
"Nawthin."  He'd say.  "Great gobs o' nawthin."
Then we'd start pointing out all the nawthin that we could see.  There were great gobs o' nawthin everywhere.  

Every year.  It was great.  I don't think we ever saw a single deer.   

At the end of the day, or maybe even a day or two later, someone would remember to move the mouse to the last spot on the calender.

Now I'm grown and have a daughter of my own who is excited about Christmas.  She met Santa for the first time the other day.  I'm sure my little Peanut will remember Christmas and the things that made it special in her own way, from her own frame of reference. 

We live in the suburbs, and I'll do my best to make it as memorable and fun as I can for her, but I'll never be able to replicate what I had when I was little.  She'll have her Christmas stories I'm sure.  I hope she'll have as much to reminisce about as I do. 

In the meantime though, I miss MY Christmas. 

College

Well it's official; I'm a college student again.  In three weeks I'll be prostrate to the higher mind again.  And unless there's some other procrastinator in the electronics technology program this year, I'll be the old guy in the classroom again.

I got my books and everything.  Still need a backpack though.  And a trapper keeper.  Do kids still use trapper keepers? 

Maybe I'll use one just to see what college kids will think of a 33 year old man with a trapper keeper in their class.  Gotta give them something to whisper about while they're passing notes and recovering from their hangovers and their VD and whatnot. 

In hindsight, I was doomed to this electronics technology thing from the get go.  

When I was a kid I'd tinker with electronics all the time.  In my mind, technological marvels materialized at my fingertips in wild arrays of beautiful snapping arcs of lightning, sort of like this:

In real life it was this:  

Which is fine, I was a kid and all so I could get away with stuff like that.  Now things have changed.  In my minds eye now, the visions are much more practical.  Like this:

And despite the many years that have passed, the multitude of teachers and trainers and mentors and other people generally smarter than me who attempted to learn me up right proper, what happens in real life is still this:

Soon, if I can ride my little barrel successfully through the rapids that stand between me and a college degree... if I can kick, dog-paddle and sputter through the waters of higher learning which forever threaten to flood the river of knowledge; then I'll get my piece of paper that makes me official....

THEN people will have to LISTEN when I laugh maniacally and wave my nine volt batteries and crappy little DC motors around!  Yes, haaahaaa, YEAH!  Then it's ON!  Watch out suckers.  

Everybody's an Expert

 

No matter what time of day it is, there's probably a show on that takes place in a hospital.  Nobody wants to have to go to one, but I guess everybody wants to watch what goes on in one.

There are always too many people walking around with clip boards using all sorts of medical jargon that I don't understand, but that I can almost understand just enough for me to start to think I'm qualified to be a Dr.  I'm not, but for brief moments during a hospital show I almost think I am.

TV doctors do unkind things to my beloved (and already highly bastardized) American-English language.

Everyone knows what "impacted-cranial-rectitis" means (see above), but there are so many more!

For one thing, they put the word "Cardio" in front of any old gibberish.  They can't fool me, I know that "cardio" is another word for sweating:  "I need to do some cardio." means the same as "I need to do some sweating."  

"Bed six is suffering from Cardio-taquito-gravity-impact-displasia" means that there's an overweight Asian patient in bed six who dribbled Mexican cheese onto a treadmill mat and then slipped and got blasted like a tennis ball out of a launcher into the back wall, where some subsequent wall-slamming sort of injuries occurred. 

"Respiratory" this or that is another favorite.  Something about pirates.  It has "re", which means something is happening again.   

"Bed six underwent a respiratory-radiological-neuropathy" means the patient heard something frighteningly illogical about pirates on the radio and has run off into the woods again. 

Doctors need everything "stat!"  I tried to order some things "stat" from the guy in the taco cart.  He got mad.  I had to go to the other taco cart that day. 

They talk about "stool samples" like it was easy to get one.  I got kicked out of three bars trying to whittle off a piece of a stool for my Dr... Finally I had to tell him I couldn't produce a sample, so he gave me some funny tasting chocolate and later I was scraping porcelain out from under my fingernails.   

I don't know what a "Uvula" is, but I assume it's some sort of a mythical cross between a violin and a unicorn.

Once I wore a bedpan on my head during a rainstorm.  Then it started to hail, and I became deaf.  At first I thought it was on account of the noise, but it turned out I just had poop in my ears.  I couldn't hear shit.  Or I could... I don't know.    

When Knights Were Bold

I seems like we don't have "Knights" anymore, at least not the way I imagine them: Strong, powerful, avatars of honor and truth, riding valiantly into this or that fracas on horseback. 

Defenders of the crown and all that. 

It's possible that we've so over-romanticized knightliness and its inherent cultural penchant for righteousness.  Some knights must have been real knuckleheads!  Maybe it's just that people were more naive then (not that we aren't still).  Imagine a guy in a bar downtown, dressed in armor, talking about his single-handed defeat of a hundred invading barbarians in order to impress some college girl.

Wait... hang on that might actually work.  He'd be more interesting than any of the other stiffs in the place.  Maybe that's a bad example... unless he was also largely unwashed, in which case the example might still be relevant.

Either way, today's college girl isn't going to actually believe him, which was the point (I think).  A medieval serving wench might have fallen for it at face value for lack of a frame of reference.  Either of them might have gone home with him, so he wins either way I guess...

Hmm... 

We need knights, shining armor or not.


They have evolved... they are more clandestine now, and their methods more subversive and cunning.  No more relying on brute strength and 1/4" plate armor.  Instead of hacking off your head on the spot for orchestrating volleys of snot-rockets onto parades of visiting dignitaries, the knights hack your computer, take all your money and change your Facebook relationship status. 

That way when you get home your love-life is in shambles, all your stuff is lying broken on the lawn and some over-privileged trustee five thousand miles away has already spent your money on gaudy new bling for his pet chicken.

So we do still have knights.  They're out there now, fighting for the causes of their nations, sacrificing for the good of everyone else as best they can.  Men and women who keep the rest of us safe, then come home to the bars and clean house with their exotic tales of bravery, travel and camaraderie.  And we can believe their stories, because what frame of reference do we have after all?  

Nothing new under the sun I guess.

Food Snobs

I'm not proud of this, but earlier today I wasted $2.80 and sacrificed who knows how many years of my life on a holiday McIceCream of one sort of another.  I have no idea what the little bits of goop in there were that tasted like mint, but they were delicious. 

Later (now) I regret it, so I sent some samples of the bits of goop off to a forensics laboratory to see what they were made of. 

The results are in:  Scientists have no idea what the bits are made of, but the guy who worked in the factory where they were made stepped in some poop on the way to work.  The poop was from a rare species of gopher, found only in southern Malaysia. 

There was enough gopher poop in the minty bits to clog up their centrifuge. 

Seems like there are more food snobs than ever out there nowadays.  Maybe it's thanks to reality TV cooking shows where panels of elitist jerks are paid to find something wrong with every dish even if it was prepared by a master chef.  Maybe not, who the hell am I to judge?

Olive oil has to be fancy, in a dark bottle (never a can), first press, cold stored, and hand-delivered by a Tibetan monk on a moped. 

Butter must be hand-churned, clockwise, from milk cream that was extracted from the smartest cows, by Persian kittens.

We can't eat just "cottage" cheese, it has to be "mansion" cheese, or at least "uptown" cheese.  We'll eat suburban cheese in a pinch, or if we're on a road trip or something.  The cheese must be delivered by an old man in a Volkswagen.  I don't know why. 


We only buy apples that weren't clumsy enough to fall off the tree.  Our apples plummeted from the tree intentionally, in pairs and holding hands in a last testament of their undying love for each other.

Our eggs all come from hens that are married.  And monogamous.  

Of course, occasionally I still go for a gas station burrito.  That helps keeps me level, if not regular. 

Bone-a-appetite

30 Fun Things To Do In An Office Bathroom

Not for the squeamish!  But then again, what is?  

Hide rings of bubble wrap under the seats

Remove the spring from the toilet paper holder

Grunt for twenty seconds, then drop a coconut into the bowl

Lock all the stall doors from the inside, then climb out and put laxatives in the coffee

Cover the exhaust vent with plastic wrap

Connect obvious but non-functional electrical wires to the flush handle

Put a live horseshoe crab in the bowl

Leave a dirty fork on the back of the toilet 

Yodel

Install a clothes line and hang a load of laundry to dry

Unscrew the flush handles so they fall out when touched

Fill the back tanks with red food coloring

Leave an intact hard-shell taco on the seat

Stand next to the sink with a towel over your arm - bark at anyone who tries to use it

Install a disco ball

Put peanut butter on some TP, drop it and say "Could you kick that back over here?"

Fuse tootsie rolls together in the microwave and leave the resulting mass in the sink

Put fake legs and shoes in all the stalls so it looks like they're occupied

Count down from ten loudly, then let out a bloodcurdling scream

Install seat belts

Dump 6 boxes of lime green instant jello into the bowl

Fill the hand soap dispenser with maple syrup

Steal all the paper ass-gaskets and sprinkle lemonade on every toilet seat

Spread Chia-pet seeds in the grout seams; claim it's toxic mold when it grows

Install a pay-box at every urinal

Challenge people in adjacent stalls to various competitions

Leave a soup ladle hanging from the coat hook on the back of the door

Say things like "There you go little buddy.  This is your home now."

Leave a good sized piece of firewood in the bowl
Practice the tuba

How To Cook Like A Pro

Lesson Alpha

     Since the Internet provides quick and easy access to thousands of recipes, it has all but eliminated the  need for anyone to own a cookbook.  Just find a foodstuff, type the name of whatever you see there into your browser followed by the word "recipe" and presto!  Instant gourmet. 

In my searching I've found some recipe commonalities which I've boiled down (that's a little cooking pun there) to seven easy steps which, once mastered, can be used as a guide for cooking just about anything. 

Step 1:  Hunt/gather ingredients.  These days it's not always necessary to go outside while hunting/gathering your food.  More often than not there is a store of food somewhere in the house.  **Note:  Hunting/gathering may become necessary following the zombie apocalypse.**

Step 2: Put the ingredients in a pan.  It's useful to have a container of some sort on hand.  If one isn't handy, your local blacksmith will likely be able to help.  The next step will involve high temperatures, so it is inadvisable to try to hold the ingredients in your hands while they're cooking.   

Step 3: Add heat.  This step seems self-explanatory, but as anyone stuck in a snowbank or living in a cave in 10,000 BC will tell you, it's not always easy to make fire.  Most recipes you find online will name the heating device as a "stove", "grill" or "oven".  There are other options.  

Step 4:  Stir.  Some amount of stirring is nearly always necessary, with a few exceptions including the night before Christmas.  This step provides a great opportunity to multitask, since anyone wielding a large wooden spoon or 2-story ladle can easily stir while threatening disobedient children with bodily harm.  

 Step 5: Season to taste. This is where the chef can personalize the dish to his or her exact specifications, adding in many cases a so called "secret ingredient" or, in cases when the ingredient moonlights as a Female British Pop Singer, "Proprietary Spice".

Step 6: Wait for it to cook.  Often it is tempting to eat the dish immediately, but as science and the FDA have shown, it is inadvisable to eat anything that hasn't been tampered with genetically, chemically, and with excessive heat to kill all the genetically altered chemicals.  This step is where the real magic happens.  Be patient; it'll be done when it's done. 

Step 7:  Serve!  Finally!  Display your culinary creation for all to behold, believe and bejealous.  The genius of your craftsmanship will be readily apparent with both the aesthetic appeal of the dish and the forthcoming taste-bud party the likes of which your patrons/guests have never experienced.

Alternate Step 7:  Order a pizza. You know how to do this already, I'll wager. 

Then eat.  That's all there is to it!  You are now a professional chef. 

25 Ways to Keep Your Job Interesting

^This picture of Milton was blatantly stolen.  Thanks Google images! ^

Leave cold-sore medication next to any baked goods brought in by co-workers

Assume the fetal position with your thumb in your mouth anytime the boss enters the room
Sand/whittle flat spots on all the wheels on coworkers chairs

Carry a measuring tape around and randomly measure things

Encircle your chair with garlic and use only silver-coated staples

Print all emails and put them on bosses desk for approval

Buy a blow-up doll and label it "whipping boy"

Learn "Yes sir/ma'am" in 10 languages

Wear a lollipop ring and try to get everyone to kiss it

Don't mute your phone during conference calls - hum "It's a Small World" repeatedly

Answer everything with:  "That's not what YOUR boss told me."

Practice the bagpipes during coffee breaks

Set up an inflatable pool in the smoking area, then sun bathe at regular intervals throughout the day

Bring a child to work every day

Buy a doberman and train him to guard your chair 

Reorganize bosses office at random intervals

Install taps on your shoes 

Trade your office chair out for a bar stool - explain that you wanted to feel more at home

Pretend your hand got caught in the coffee fund can - run around screaming and pleading for help

French-kiss the vending machine while wearing an "I love chocolate" t-shirt

Show up to work in the same toga you wore to the office Christmas party the night before

Wear a giant drive-through window headset and act as if you're on a secret conference call

Ask for mornings off to attend Facebook-addict support group meetings

Put pictures of boss's spouse on mid-level supervisors desk

Begin or end every sentence with the words "inferior mortal"

Infinite Monkeys

There's a saying, or a hypothesis... maybe even a law of probability, that says something fascinating about a very patient monkey (I shall henceforth call him "Irwin") at a typewriter.  It states that it's possible that Irwin could randomly mash keys and sort of 'accidentally' write Shakespeare.

That is it works if you try the experiment enough times, or try it once but you use infinite monkeys.  The theory seems reasonable I guess, since if you do anything infinity times you're bound to get some interesting results. 

Infinity being all big and whatnot. 

Here's a picture that I have shamelessly borrowed from the inter-tron (with no permission whatsoever) of what Irwin might look like:

I'm no scientist.  I don't have nearly enough time or monkeys to conduct such an experiment even if I were.  Actually that reminds me of a conversation that nobody has with me:

Nobody: "Do you have a minute?"
Me:  "I've got nothing but time and monkeys."

What I know for sure is that if you sit one monkey in front of a keyboard right now, ask him to close his eyes and hammer like a sleepwalking blacksmith at the space in front of him, he'll type (at least once) this: 

mv uiemd;pcvhc,z.;cvj. 

Inspiring stuff. 

In the end though, I submit that the very presence of infinite monkeys would be far more interesting than anything even Mr. Shakespeare could write.  After all, who can walk casually past infinite monkeys and not bother to look up from their book?   

It keeps me awake at night, wondering. 

Tough Decision

One day I woke up in the northernmost town in the United States: Barrow Alaska.  I had chosen to visit in January, because I'm not very smart.  I lived here:

I don't know whose bright idea it was to tilt Earth on a rotating axis, but it's amazing how much difference it can make just being a few hundred more miles from the sun.  It's damn cold in Barrow Alaska in January.  Here's a picture of me during my visit:

It begged the question:  What population of people, migrating from wherever it is that people migrate, stopped in Barrow Alaska and said "Hey this looks nice, let's stay here!"  In my mind at least, it seems like it would be tough to make that delicate decision over the sound of hundreds of nipples ripping through sturdy fabric all around me.  

Meanwhile, thousands of miles to the south, people barely wear clothes.  Food grows on trees, plants exist, the sun is visible and you can run around outside naked if you want without having to worry about death by instantaneous shrinkage.

To a polar bear, an igloo is just an upside down bowl of furry chicken nuggets.

Life lesson learned:  I'm more of a temperate zone kind of guy.

Being Tall

A Day In The Life

It's pretty accurate. 

25 Late For Work Excuses

I swear...

My cat is having puppies

Someone stole my windshield

Ghost pirates dropped an anchor on my mailbox

Google Earth photographed me naked, and I had to take them to court

My belt loop caught in the garage door and I hung there for an hour

The power went out and the traffic light never turned green

I got Gorilla Glue mixed up with my contact cleaner

The baby ate my car keys

My water-pick was actually the bidet, and I damn near drowned

My GPS was set for Bangkok

I had to carry my wedding ring to Mordor

The kids nailed my shoes to the floor

A buffalo ate my smart-car

I got the carpet steamer confused with the blow dryer, I'm on my way to the ER

I tried to plug in my straight razor

The bomb squad robot was going through my underwear drawer

My driveway was pointed the wrong way

I got my tongue caught in the toaster

My atomic clock ran out of atoms

The parking meter only takes gold bullion

The cop who arrested me didn't speak English

The ferry sank with my breakfast sandwich still on it

I got stuck to a bus stop bench

My gas tank was clogged with Mardi Gras beads

A tornado dropped a house on my ex 

And THAT'S why I'm late for work.  

Coffee

I love the stuff, and my little coffee drinking community at work gradually makes it stronger and stronger.  At some point I think I must have made a conscious decision to develop a taste for it, because at first the taste of coffee didn't interest me at all.  My first taste did not make me an instant fan.  I was like "Aww, what the hell is this crap?"

Maybe it was just the sheer amount of exposure to lousy coffee during my military years, but now I think the stuff is great!  We grind beans, get excited about trying different kinds, and discuss each brands propensity to instigate bowel movements.  We are a classy, classy bunch let me tell you. 

But the coffee pot is rarely empty.  Since we spend so much time on the road traveling to different parts of the state we're also pretty well versed in the coffees offered by various chain restaurants and gas stations.  We're regulars at more places than I can count.  Most days can find us standing in line with our cheap gas station mugs in hand, battling the temptation to buy a taquito that's been on the warmer since the signing of the constitution. 

One conversation at a Wendy's was particularly memorable:

Me: "Hey do you guys have that new coffee from the commercials?" 
Guy:  "Yes we do." 
Me:  "Is it any good?" 
Guy:  "It's the same crap, they just gave it a new name." 
Me:  "Awesome.  I'll have that."



Surely a coffee snob am I.

Happy grinding! 

Green Dance - A Poem

Green Dance

tiny grains

in soil slumber

waiting, warm

damp earth cradle

dark and quiet

slowly stirs

patient growing

creeping seeking

soft embrace of light

spread and stretch

reach and rustle

carefully unfurl

frail and strong

swaying gently

dewdrops fall

silent symphony

bursts to life

delicate explosion

The Jeremiah Saga Part 6: The Aftermath

The face that came out of the water dripped black lines of soot and was a good deal more pink than it should have been.  His eyes looked strange too.  It took me a second to figure out why.

Jeremiah had no eyebrows.  None.  They'd been blown clean off.  I imagine that at this point they hadn't yet floated back down to earth and that a flock of geese was passing them around, laughing and pretending they were mustaches.  His forehead was too big too.  It was more like a five (or even a six) head.  Where once had lived the front half of Jeremiahs proud bowl cut was now bare skin, his locks singed back almost to the middle of the top of his still smoldering dome.

My youthful mind scrambled with possible avenues of escape from the doom I knew we were about to face, but the reality of the situation set in quickly.  In Manchu China, it was all the rage to sport a six-head around town, but the style had somehow not caught on yet in Vermont, and no amount of wearing a hat would cover up that glistening pink melon.  Jeremiah would have to face the world with a hairless (yet strangely radiant) moon-face for quite a while.  

Truth be told, in the ten or fifteen seconds I spent staring stupidly at him, I entertained quite a few ridiculous ideas about how I could get away with all this.  Swamp gas, drive-by shavings, fire breathing dragonflies, spontaneous combustion, alien abduction, bullies, acid rain... nothing seemed to fit the bill.  I might have come up with something better but Jeremiah was rapidly realizing that burns hurt.  The only relief for him was to stick his head back in the water for as long as possible.  Each time he did, the black cloud was less and less thick and the shiny pinkness of his head stood out more and more.

I felt my own head and was terrified when my hand came back black as night and stinking to high heaven like burnt hair.  The wave of heat had been enough to singe my hair even from where I had stood quite a few feet away.  It reeked the way only burnt hair can reek.

Even as stupid as we were, we knew that eventually we'd have to go back to the house and face the music.  I soaked my shirt in the pond, wrapped Jeremiahs head in it and we beat feet back to the house.  
I think my mom smelled the odor of singed head and shame long before we ever got to the house, me wild-eyed and shirtless with poor Jeremiah in tow, lurching along with a poorly-wrapped, soggy turban covering his entire head.  I don't remember the run back, to be honest.  I remember being at the pond, and then standing with a permanent wince in front of my mother as wave after wave of unflattering words poured over us.

It felt as if someone had replaced the water in Niagara with disgrace, and we were standing at the bottom looking up as it pounded us endlessly in our faces.  I'm not sure how long the initial berating lasted before my mother decided it was a good time to take Jeremiah home, but it seemed like forever.  In the end, she filled up a bowl of water for him to stick his face in and I watched them pull out of the driveway with a heavy dread in my heart.

When his father asked, the father of my country was honest about cutting down the cherry tree.  That was mighty good of him, but then again I'm no George Washington.  In the end it boiled down to this: "Blame Jeremiah".

The fact that I still had hair on my face and head was a testament to my innocence, and I played to that thin fact with the expertise of a career politician.  I still caught hell, don't get me wrong, but it was tempered I think by parents subconscious (but understandable) desire to remain oblivious to the sheer force of my rampant stupidity.  The important thing was that I learned my lesson.  In fact I learned a few lessons from it all that I still carry with me.  Among them are these:  Filter the chunks out of explosive powder, don't give up on the fuse, keep water handy, and don't push your luck.   

I don't know if Jeremiah learned any lessons that day.  It was the last time I would ever see him; hunched over in the passengers seat of my moms car with his head in a bowl of water.  Our friendship, however brief, had been memorable.

Jeremiah, wherever you are, here's to you:  May your eagerness never dwindle, and may the bushiness of your eyebrows forever be an inspiration.  


Previous: The Final Mistake
Next - If you enjoyed this, you might also like:  The Airplane Saga - Part 1

The Jeremiah Saga Part 5: The Final Mistake

Racks of candy next to grocery store checkout counters are the bane of parents everywhere.  You can bet it wasn't a stupid person who realized that kids would help drive impulse candy purchases.  You can also bet that it was a stupid person who bought the can of Bubble-Tape from such a rack in which Jeremiah would place entirely too much faith and subsequently cement his place firmly in the archives of my childhood memories.  The can of Bubble-Tape cost me 50 cents.  It cost Jeremiah significantly more.  

Since the heart-wrenching burial of my unfortunate pants and my protective instincts of the tender bits that had so recently cowered within them, I wasn't interested in trying out another rocket right away.  Instead, we decided that propulsion would be more fun if it happened all at once rather than over a period of time.  It followed logically that we should see what would happen if we pounded all the propellant out of the little tubes with a hammer and lit the resulting pile of explosives on fire.  I still had some cannon fuse after all.

Happily we made our way to the shed, where my dad kept his blacksmith tools.  There's no place better to beat propellant out of cardboard tubes than on an anvil with a giant blacksmiths hammer.  In seconds there was a neat little pile of propellant, mixed with chunks of the cement-like mixture that caps each end of a model rocket engine.  It was a small pile, so we pounded out a few more tubes until it grew to sufficient proportions.  It didn't occur to us to filter out the chunks.  What did occur to us was that we needed some sort of a vessel to transport our little sulfur-smelling pile of powdered doom.

Luckily, I had just the thing:  My can of Bubble Tape.  There was still a good bit of gum in the can and I was loathe to throw it away, so Jeremiah and I each took half of the remaining roll and commenced gnawing on the resulting wad.  Then, ever so carefully (not because we were concerned for our safety but because we didn't want to lose any), we scooped the pile into the can, checked our pockets for matches and cannon fuse, ducked under the electric fence and headed out to the big horse pasture behind the shed.

Jeremiah wanted to light it and I, feeling a bit like a mentor, was happy to let him.  Very gently he stuck the fuse into the pile of powder.  Gingerly he lit the strike-anywhere match and brought it to the fuse, which came to life triumphantly and began its sparkling march towards the powder.  To our credit, we both ran away and hit the deck like two smart people with reasons to live.  Peeking out from behind our bowl-cuts we saw the little tendrils of smoke from the fuse get closer and closer, over the lip of the can, into the powder and then.... nothing.  Nothing happened at all.

We waited a while.  That was a smart thing to do.  When we were sure nothing was going to happen we investigated and found that the fuse had slipped out just short of the pile.  We reloaded and tried again.  Light, run, duck, cover, peek... nothing.  We investigated again but this time we couldn't find a reason why it hadn't worked.  It should have worked, and in hindsight it was probably just the universe preparing its own punishment after having let us soak up too much good luck for the day.    

Jeremiah was fed up with the fuse not working so he lit a match, tossed it at the can, and bolted.  I dropped to the ground in a ball, and laid there like a frozen moose turd.  Nothing happened.  I stood up.  Jeremiah, in a display of abject stupidity and lack of self-preservation instinct, lit yet another match, leaned over, and dropped it directly into the can. I was probably some 10 feet away at this point, but I saw the match falling in close-up high-definition reality.  I was unable to move, as if in a dream.  When it hit the powder, a lot of things happened in about 1/10th of a second. 

Had we left the powder on the ground it might not have been so bad, but since we'd contained it in the little plastic can the entire giant explosion was directed upwards in a sort of upside down cone of doom.  Jeremiah took the blast full in the face like Yosemite Sam with his head in a cannon.  Why he chose to lean directly over the pile I'll never know.  The blast knocked him over backwards, pelting him with hot bits of cement even as it heated the air around him to temperatures rivaling that of the sun.  His arms and legs waved wildly like ribbons in a tornado and the wave of heat smacked into me like a wall.

I opened my eyes to find Jeremiah rolling around on the ground.  As he opened his mouth and commenced wailing like a banshee with a nail in its foot, the giant pink wad of bubble gum in his mouth contrasted dramatically with the sheer blackness of his face and I stared at the spectacle stupidly for a second before I did the logical thing and panicked.

Water!  He needed water for his face.  We were literally twenty feet from, and in plain sight of, a swampy area big enough to ice skate on in the winter.  I overlooked that fact.  We were also about 50 yards from a pond that I swam in almost every day.  I overlooked that fact as well.  As Jeremiah staggered around gnashing his teeth, I lit out to get a bucket of water from the shed.

I was in a full sprint when I came to the electric fence and I leaped over it like a gazelle.  Almost.  Instead of soaring gracefully to the other side, the knot in the lace of my sneaker caught on the fence and jerked me to a stop in midair.  That wouldn't have been as much of a problem except that as soon as I face-planted into the dirt my body made a nice path to ground for all that electricity that was stored in the fence.  There I lay, one leg strung up on the electric fence, thrashing around like a wounded beaver.  My wad of gum went flying. 

Somehow I got free, and I remember briefly wondering if I'd peed.  I hadn't, which was lucky; that would have been embarrassing.  I ran, dazed, to the shed where I searched around for a container.  In my frazzled state I determined that the plastic bubble container from a package of disposable dust masks would do the trick.  I took it to the hose, filled it up to capacity (which was about 10oz of water), and headed back to the pasture, walking quickly and trying desperately not to spill it.

When I got to the fence I couldn't jump, so I ducked under.  Not far enough.  In my hastiness and inability to multitask, the back of my neck grazed the fence and the resulting jolt struck me like a sucker-punch in the back of the head.  It knocked me on my face on top of what little water remained, and by the time I struggled back up and made it to poor Jeremiah, I had about three drops of water in the container and a soggy shirt.

Maybe the jolt from the fence had helped clear my head, because I remembered the pond.  I took off my shirt, put it over the soot covered smudge that I assumed was Jeremiahs face, and led him down to the edge.  When he knelt down and plunged his head into the water a cloud of blackness spread out from him like an oil slick the likes of which causes Greenpeace to scrub penguins.

For a split second, I entertained the possibility that everything would be okay.  That notion passed the instant Jeremiah pulled his head out of the water.

Previous:  Part 4: The Pants Debacle
Next:  Part 6:  The Aftermath

Intermission Short 2: Wich One Fills Up First?

I think the picture speaks for itself.

The Jeremiah Saga Part 4: The Pants Debacle

After much deliberation, Jeremiah and I concluded that there was no reasonable explanation that my mother would believe for the condition of the Swiss cheese that I was pretending were pants.  No roving hordes of starving moths had been spotted in the area, no acid rain of sufficient strength had fallen, and we had heard of no news headlines recalling pairs of rapidly evaporating denim pants, at least not in my size.

So instead of a cover story, we decided it would be best to hide it and pretend it never happened.  I left Jeremiah on the porch and ninja-stalked my way into my room for a fresh pair.  It wasn't easy.  Every footstep and creaky board reminded me that it was one thing to be caught with abnormally breezy britches, it was another to be caught trying to sneak into the house to destroy all evidence of said britches right under my mothers nose.

There were two elements which played out in my favor:  First, the rung'achik machine was working overtime, doing its very best to ensure that legions of little old ladies would remain conspicuously fashion impaired.  This fact allowed me to time my steps, each one taking my weight exactly as the next line of doomed yarn was being knit into its predecessor.  Second, almost all of my pants were pretty much exactly the same, which meant that I could slip into one of many convincing doppelgangers and be on my way, free and easy.

By my calculations it took me about an hour to weasel my way up the stairs into my room.  My room, of course, was directly above the room my mother used as her knitting station.  As such, my heart was gripped with a terror that only a kid who is guilty of heinous crimes against laundry, and who is exactly one creaky floor board away from being caught and ultimately destroyed, can feel.

Somehow, against all odds, I made it.  I threw my holy pants out the window and got the attention of Jeremiah who had become preoccupied with a bucket of baseball bats on the porch waiting for me.  He maneuvered over to where they had fallen and picked them up, trying in vain to hide in plain site by bobbing and weaving, all the while glancing furtively around like a chipmunk in a room full of hyenas.  Once he had them, he didn't know what to do with them and stood there on the porch holding them out at arms length as if they were some sort of sorely injured poisonous snake.  I motioned that he should run.  He ran.

I listened.  I didn't hear anything.  The rung'achik machine was silent!  Had my mother seen the passing shadow of flying pants graze her window and gone to investigate?  Had she seen Jeremiah running like a guilty chicken around on the lawn, obviously up to something?  I didn't know, and wasn't about to find out.  Rather than risk the unknown dangers that lurked in the kitchen, I opted instead to tango with gravity.  We had tangoed before, with mixed results.  I'd won a few rounds, gravity had won a few rounds.  I had never, on the other hand, won a round against my mother.

New pants in hand, I wormed my way out of the window and onto the roof of the little shed that was attached to the house.  It's lucky that we were in rural Vermont instead of in some suburb somewhere, because the site of a skinny kid in his tighty-whities shimmying out of a second story window while waving a pair of pants around wildly probably wouldn't have gone unnoticed.  I closed the screen behind me, scooted rather uncomfortably down the shingles and jumped down onto the lawn.

I landed in a crouch that I imagined was like that of a cat, but what was undoubtedly much more like a gangly, pale kid with a bad haircut, a serious wedgie, and shingle-grit in his butt squatting awkwardly on the grass.  I donned the pants, rendezvoused with Jeremiah who hadn't gone far, and we bolted again into the relative safety of the woods where we'd left our remaining rocket engines.

We buried the pants in a shallow, unmarked grave in a sunlit clearing there in the woods.  No words were spoken, but there was a sense of loss, of relief, and a sort of collective understanding that we must never speak of what had happened there.  Only now some twenty years later am I secure enough to talk about it.  Amazingly, as testament to just how unbelievably stupid we were, we continued to want to play with fire.  Jeremiah had been formulating a new terrifically bad idea, and we decided to try it.

Previous:  Part 3:  The Second Mistake
Next:  Part 5:  The Final Mistake

The Jeremiah Saga Part 3: The Second Mistake

There is much to be said about the merits of curiosity... but... as cats will tell you, in any act of discovery there is a decent potential to be railroaded by the unfettered forces of chaos and mayhem, and tossed headlong into the annals of miserable statistics.   

Our youthful confidence bolstered by misleading evidence about the nature of our indestructibility, Jeremiah and I continued to make the sort of decisions that stupid kids make.  We were, after all, still packing a cubic mile of model rocket engines in every conceivable size.  The lopsided wheels in our heads turning enthusiastically and our home-trimmed bowl-cuts bobbing in unison, we happily considered the wondrous possibilities that lay before us in each tightly packed cardboard tube of explosive powder.

I wasn't new to the science.  I'd built some hundreds of model rockets in my lifetime, and in that capacity I'd taken part in countless carefully executed rocket launches, each more glorious than the last.  Jeremiah had not.  I prided myself on my ability to make a rocket out of anything.  Jeremiah, despite the only evidence he had, trusted me.

Ordinarily I would have used the official rocket engine igniter, a 9 volt battery, and 25 feet of wire.  This time however, for reasons that would take too long to explain here (innocent though they were), I had in my possession a good bit of cannon fuse.  I imagine for the average 10-13 year old kid it is much more difficult to get cannon fuse these days than it was for me.  That's probably a good thing.  The fuse was a lovely green color, and once lit would burn slowly enough to give smart people a head start, and hot enough to continue burning underwater.  It was good stuff. 

Rather than assemble all the parts for the legitimate igniter, I decided it would be easier just to jam a piece of cannon fuse into the little hole in the bottom of the engine.  I also decided that a nose-cone on a rocket was unnecessary, as were the fins.  Basically I'd revolutionized the established rocket building industry and simplified the entire operation to a cardboard tube filled with explosive powder with a bit of fuse poking out the bottom.  For some reason this setup didn't conjure up images of Wile-E Coyote at all, but rather seemed quite logical.

For a launch platform; I dug a little hole.  I was pretty sure it would work.  Jeremiah continued to trust me. He was even excited about doing the honors of lighting the fuse.  He lit it, and we backed up a little.  Not a lot, but a little, which in hindsight was not a safe distance.    

The propellant did what propellant does:  It sent that little tube on an adventure.  Unfortunately, the scientists who design rockets had been right all along:  It IS important to put a nose-cone and fins on a rocket after all, and without them my little would-be spaceship was about as aerodynamic as Fat Albert.  

Rather than going up in a glorious 300 foot arc of smoke, it instead opted against thousands of alternate angles and fired itself directly at my unprotected crotch.  With reflexes only someone with a threatened crotch can have, I twisted away in such a manner that the flaming projectile skipped like a well tossed pebble down the length of my jeans instead of lodging itself directly into my groin.  It left a little trail of burnt denim in its wake.

There, all the while presenting very real danger of obliteration to my tender naughty-bits, is where the fireball stayed until the propellant burned out; bouncing around between my flailing legs like a super-ball on its way over Niagara falls in a barrel.  It burned everything it touched.  Jeremiah had jumped bravely into the bushes and was peeking out like a frightened squirrel at the spectacle.  I would have done the same.

At long last, the smoke cleared and the dust I'd kicked up flopping around like a mackerel in a canoe finally settled.  I surveyed the damage.  My pants were destroyed.  Holes the size of quarters riddled the inner thighs on both sides, but through some miracle the thighs themselves were intact!  I was, in fact, entirely unhurt, which is by all logical reasoning theoretically impossible and I couldn't even believe it.  I checked and rechecked myself over and over, but it soon became clear that only thing I really had to worry about was the fact that I'd destroyed a pair of pants, and my mom was not likely to be particularly understanding given the purple smoke debacle.

We had already pushed our luck quite a lot.  It's obvious now that even marginally intelligent people would have found something better to do with their time at this juncture, but again we would endeavor to prove that "idiot proof" is a myth.  The minute somebody makes something idiot proof, somebody else builds a better idiot.  

Previous:  Part 2: The First Mistake
Next:  Part 4:  The Pants Debacle
 

The Jeremiah Saga Part 2: The First Mistake

I can't speculate with any authority on the differences between the world in which boys live and the world which greets girls every morning.  What I can say with certainty is that I was an idiot when I was a kid.  My world was filled with stupid things that I was doing or had already done.  As it happened Jeremiah was an idiot too, and when you put two idiots heads together, one plus one equals zero.  Or less. 

We hit it off just fine.  My mom picked him up when she went to drop off a box of those godawful sweaters and I happily showed him around to all my favorite spots.  Favorite trees to climb, favorite pile of old lumber to look for snakes under, favorite things to shoot with BB guns, favorite electric fence to try to jump over without getting electrocuted (hopefully), and many more.

It wasn't long until my carton of 10 million BBs was empty, so we put our heads together and decided it would be a good idea to ride bikes to the hardware store in town some 13 miles away to get some more, and that's what we did.

It's unfair to blame the marketing genius who put the bags of smoke bombs and model rocket engines next to the BBs in the aisle at the hardware store.  It's unfair to blame the kindly old woman behind the counter who sold them to us without asking questions.  Tempting, but ultimately unfair.  This was still the pre-terrorist paranoia age of bliss and ignorance you see. 

Armed with 10 million more BBs, an arsenal of smoke bombs, and enough model rocket engines to push the world out of orbit in a sack big enough to make Santa look twice, we arrived triumphantly back at the house on a mission for strike-anywhere matches, which hadn't yet been deemed the worst thing in the world to keep around the house by the department of "Holy Crap Whose Idea Was This?"  We found them, and began joyfully filling pockets of the atmosphere with brightly colored smoke that reeked like sulfur and taco farts.  That's when one of us (I'd like to believe it was him, but we'll never know...) had a brilliant idea.

It rarely gets above eighty in Vermont, and nobody had bothered to install air conditioning in the house.  It was kept cool instead by placing a giant fan in the window on one side of the house blowing in, and another one upstairs in a window blowing out, resulting in a nice breeze of fresh air through the whole house.  It was just beneath the downstairs fan that we, giggling, simultaneously lit every purple smoke bomb in the sack.

The little fuses burned quickly, and like every other time we'd lit them nothing happened for exactly one split second; just long enough for us to wonder if they hadn't all been duds.  Then, tremendously, each unassuming little purple ball began to belch thick purple smoke in rich churning clouds, every one of which was sucked directly into the house by the giant window fan. 

Seconds later we recognized the telltale silence that follows when the rungachik machine stops defiling the fashion world, and we were suddenly terrified.  The silence was almost immediately broken by a screen door slamming on the other side of the house and the rapidly escalating air-raid siren that could only be my mother about to rip our skeletons out and beat us with them.

Somehow, miraculously, we survived.  If I remember correctly we used the "I had no idea the fan would suck up all the smoke" defense.  We were ordered with no small amount of gusto not to come anywhere near the house until our early twenties and had to relinquish our remaining smoke bombs.  We failed to mention that we also had rocket engines.

Instead we ran to the hills.  Behind us was the sound of windows being thrown open, and the odd sight of an entire house weeping stinky purple smoke in swirling tendrils up into the sky from every opening.  It was a sight to behold, but we soon forgot about it and set about finding new and exciting ways to implement rocket propulsion into our daily lives.

We were, but would not long be, unscathed.  

Previous:  Part 1 The Setup
Next:  Part 3:  The Second Mistake 

 

Intermission Short: The Zombie Apocalypse

It's coming, I think we all realize it.

Here's us now:

                       
And later we'll be all like




                          

And then it'll be like
                                     

Then

And that's the whole story, really.  Not much to it.