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Everybody's got a story, right? Maybe one about yourself or someone you know, maybe even something you've heard around, but if it's true and at least a little interesting, why not share it?


I'll start:

When my dad was in elementary school his teacher assigned the class a writing project called Treasures From Trash, in which they were supposed to write a famous person and ask them to please mail them back some small item from their daily lives that they might otherwise have discarded. My father wrote then-First Lady Lady Bird Johnson, and she sent him back a fountain pen she had used at her desk. Nice of her, wasn't it?


Next time (yes, I am copying you, Boy Scout Kevin) the story of the one and only fight I have ever gotten into...

After taking my first psychology class in middle school, I suddenly started worrying that I might be a sociopath.

Though my default switch is set to “quiet” (never shy), with little effort I can be outgoing and charming and manipulative, like sociopaths are said to be. I also had a well-hidden vicious side. For instance, all I wanted to do when I played another girl tennis was beat her, and beat her badly, which better than 75% of the time, I did. No mercy or consideration for how she might feel about what I was doing to her, just game, set, match and I was one step closer on my path to the pro tour. It scared me and oppressed my thoughts so much I mentioned my fears to my dad while he was driving me to play one Saturday.

He didn’t laugh, but I could tell he wanted to. He said, “You’re supposed to want to win. But for the record you’re one of the most compassionate people I know. Plus you worry about everything. Sociopaths don’t worry about anything.”

I said yeah, but sociopaths can seem compassionate, they’re just acting that way because they love the praise things like that get them.

Dad asked, “Don’t you often do kind things no one knows about?”

“Well, yeah, I guess,” I conceded, “but sometimes I feel like a blank slate, or a mirror that just reflects back at other people what I think they want to hear. I’m kind of like a chameleon, and that’s scary.”

He said everybody does that sometimes, and I was young and who I was ultimately going to wind up being wasn’t fully formed.

I countered with something I read in the psychology class, that our personalities are set before we’re two.

Dad said people change all the time, Saul into Paul, bad Scrooge into good Scrooge, and who someone is at one moment isn’t who that person will be in the next.

I said, yeah, exactly, and maybe my full sociopathic transformation wasn’t complete.

He laughed then and said, “You’re no sociopath. Trust me. I wouldn’t sleep under the same roof with you if I thought you were one of those.”

So, okay, I wasn’t a sociopath, but I was sort of a psychological hypochondriac, being convinced before that class was through that I might also suffer from just about every condition we read about, from having a martyrdom complex, to being a paranoid schizophrenic, to being a pyromaniac, to being a victim of latent birth trauma, to being an egomaniac (ahem), to being a sex addict because I thought about boys a lot. But in the end I do think Dad was right, I don’t think I’m a sociopath, I just think I’m Joan of Ark.

From the age of 5 - school in my home country of Zimbabwe started for us then - teachers would always tell my folks things like "Trevor is strange, doesn't talk much, doesn't interact much, reads and writes a lot, likes movies and sports" etc, etc. They would always comment on how I never seemed to pay attention in class but yet managed to pass tests and exams and they wondered how that was possible.

One teacher in my high school told me because I had a low IQ, I would never amount to anything and did not deserve to be there.  :buggedout:

Answer to all this: you [expletive deleted] teachers always wrote me off and I proved you wrong: I continue to do so, so  :tongueout:

One time we came in from an arrowhead hunting expedition and beached my boat while I went to change out of my wet clothes.  Ray was not paying attention and the boat drifted off; I didn't want my dry clothes to get wet, so I stripped naked and swam after the boat!

For his seventy-fifth birthday in the spring of 1994 Carl Lindner, then-owner of the Cincinnati Reds, Great American Insurance, and much else, rented out the 1870s concert hall where the local symphony performs, and a private birthday party was held for him.

Without much fanfare or publicity, the performer for the event was none other than Frank Sinatra.

I was allowed to be backstage that night because a relative of mine was among the invited, and a college-age family friend who worked for the symphony was assigned to keep an eye on me, though it ended up being the other way around since he was flamboyant and outgoing and into everything and was a weekend drag queen to boot, a hilarious person.

So we were there backstage, and Frank Sinatra came out and stood behind the curtain, and I thought the guy with me was going to have some kind of heemie, and he politely and with groveling humility asked "Mr. Sinatra" if he could please have his autograph, and "Mr. Sinatra" obliged.

That in itself was cool (even if at that age I wasn't all that well-versed in who Frank Sinatra was....I knew my grandpa hated him for his conduct in WWII, but that's another story) but right before the introduction came and he went on stage, Sinatra turned around and told several of us standing there that they gave him a big relish tray in his dressing room that he didn't want and hadn't touched and we could help ourselves to it.

So while he was singing, a bunch of us, some backstage workers there, the guy who was supposed to be keeping me out of trouble, and of course myself, went and snacked on Frank Sinatra's relish tray.

Okay, NEXT TIME, the story of the one and only fight I ever got in in my life!

One day construction workers dumped a huge pile of fill dirt in the corner of the parking lot of the apartment I lived in during my first year of college. After a four inch rain, I walked by the pile and found a very nice spearhead sticking out of it!

At my old job, I usually came in by myself to open. 

One day I came in, unlocked the door, went in, and inside the building, I saw a man standing there in the dark. 

I looked away for a second, looked again, and there was nobody there.  I searched the place, there was nobody in there and no way anybody could have gotten out with the keys.   

I'd heard my co-workers talk about the place being haunted before, but I hadn't given it much thought until then.  Needless to say, I felt really uneasy the rest of the day.

One of my earliest memories that can be dated to a specific time happened on December 16, 1982. I was in the townhouse we were living in, with my mother, when we heard this sound of a plane flying fast and too low, basically right overhead, with that classic shrill diving sound you hear in war movies, then this immensely loud crash that sounded like a giant box being crushed, followed by sirens coming from what seemed like all directions.

It turned out a small plane carrying several FBI agents, a retired police officer, and a known embezzler were in route to the secret location where the embezzler had buried a substantial amount of cash, which he was in the process of turning over as part of a plea bargain, when for reasons unknown to this day, the plane took a nosedive right into a real pretty little house built in the early 1800s, destroying the house (somehow sparing those inside) and killing everyone on board in the single worst one-day disaster in FBI history.

That day and its sounds and the hustle it set off with rescue workers and reporters and police and closed roads and the rising rolls of smoke has stayed frozen in my mind for a third of a century now.

http://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/cincinnati/this-week-in-cincinnati-history-location-of-embezzled-bank-money-lost-in-1982-plane-crash (http://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/cincinnati/this-week-in-cincinnati-history-location-of-embezzled-bank-money-lost-in-1982-plane-crash)

My earliest memory is going fishing with my dad in a small rowboat. 

I have no other memories of that boat even existing. 

Back in the mid-70s my dad went to college in New York, and while there he met this cute girl from a Portuguese-American family whom he thought was sweet, and he started having certain feelings for her. (I think maybe my dad sort of went for foreign girls, my mother being Irish.)

Well one evening she was acting funny and said there was something she wanted him to know about her, and my dad said, oh yeah what's that, and she told him in late childhood she was demonically-possessed and underwent a prolonged process of exorcism.

She was absolutely utterly serious, and told him the story, how it began with her feeling watched and depressed, having sleepless nights because something would pinch her until she came awake. She said she heard voices telling her she was worthless and unwanted and unloved, how her mother wished she'd miscarried her instead of having yet another child, and it started making this girl physically sick to join in the family's nightly rosary praying, or to go to church, and one day when her father dragged her to Mass, she lost control of her bladder right there in the sanctuary doorway.

So I guess being a traditional Old World sort of family, instead of thinking the girl maybe had psychological problems, a priest was consulted and an old man who was an exorcist was brought in. He lived with the family for, as I remember Dad saying, weeks. He read the Bible every day there and prayed (always in Latin) and put holy oils and water on doorways and windows and floor vents, and made crosses with it on the family's foreheads, and had them fast some days and stop eating meat and stop watching television or listening to music, had them take communion nightly and set up a small altar in their living room, and I don't know what all else, prayed over the girl a lot and had her read long ritual prayers over and over, I think Dad said she told him.

And after a while the girl felt better and the demonic influence was said to have been "defeated." She slept fine again, went to church, stopped hearing the voices and stopped feeling self-destructive impulses.

So she turned to my dad and said (in what he said was a scared voice), "I thought you should know all this about me."

And upon hearing all this Dad didn't quite know what to think but he said he told her reassuring things about how, no, that didn't freak him out, and, yes, he believed her, and he was glad she was better now, and yeah, it was all cool.

And then he basically never went out with her again.

(Long before they were our parents, our parents were themselves once teenagers.)

So.....

One time when I was walking the lake shore, I found a note in a bottle.  I pulled it out and read it.  Its message went something like this:  "HELP!  We are stranded on a remote island and the Indians are surrounding us.  They will attack at dawn!"

The note was in a plastic Dr Pepper bottle and written in ball point pin, and the lake was a man-made reservoir only a couple miles wide, so I did not notify the authorities.

I hope the Indians were merciful.

In 2003 I was playing tennis at this big complex of open courts, and to my left I heard these girls scream, and out of the corner of my eye I saw something explode into this big cloud of fluff, and it seems some bird chose the wrong moment to fly directly in front of this power server, and WHOMP, that was it. Poor thing. But what're the odds, y'know?

Ever see the video of a pigeon colliding with a Randy Johnson fastball?  Poor bird!

So once upon a time, like, oh, I dunno, three days ago, I show up  at work and my boss tells me he's running off and marrying my mother, who is like fifty-six and looks like eighteen on her bad days, freak of nature, that woman.

I was like, yeah, okay, whatever, but be careful of her, she's flighty. Good luck, best wishes, yeah, put me in therapy again why doncha. (Head was spinning.)

So my boss was like, yeah, whatever, here, run the business for me til I get back from Ireland and parts unknown in a month. Then he kissed me goodbye and gave me the keys to his house, cause we're close you know, you might say he's like a father to me because he sort of is my father.

So I sat and stared a minute and thought, um, growing up with parents like these why again am I not an alcoholic, I wonder, instead of the stable, even-tempered person I am?

But okay, cool, fine, whatevs, Daddio, if she knocks you down for twenty-one years, get back up, that's the spirit that made America great.

So mad with power I kick out all but two interns, say here give me your sheets, I'll sign them, don't show up anymore, you get full credit, you're welcome, enjoy the summer, except for you Missy, who called me "ma'am" all the time, I'd fail you if I could.  "Ma'am" is my grandmother, you little worm. (I only said that in my head, fear not.)

Then I realize I don't just want to skate by in my father's absence, I want to elevate things to Olympian heights, so I ask my dead one-time fiance's father, this man who could sell ice to Eskimos, to come help me run the place, and he said oh sure, glad to help, nice of him considering I not long ago wished all manner of Hellish curses on him and spent twenty years ruing the day I saved his life around Christmas 1996, and...

Oh, wait, back up, back up. Oh, yeah, lest I forget, my four-year-old could have drowned yesterday, gray hairs, much, right?

So anyway, I walk in today, open the door, it's raining, I think, oh, nice, I like rain, Irish do not melt in rain, just sunshine, yaay rain, I'm happy for a minute in other words, shell-shocked about yesterday's pool-related mishap but happy, and I think I was humming Tonight, Tonight Billy Corgan's all-purpose time-travel back to high school ode to the 90's, or maybe it was Pepper by the Butthole Surfers, and out of the blue I get a call from the firm's lawyers, this paralegal, actually, who talks like she's from Wales, that almost West Indian-sounding accent Welsh people can have, you know the one? Bing it if you don't, it's a trip to hear, and oh sparkling, she wasn't for some reason calling to tell me hi, she said we've been handed this big hawking fine from Germany for violating some sort of cheesy overprotective policy or other by "unduely" severing the account of someone overseas whom we never met.

There was an undercurrent hint that just perhaps said firing had something to do with the firee's being a transsexual, which is balderdash, if you aren't comfortable with trannies, don't get in the art business, y'know? Couldn't have cared less that the dude dressed like Amanda Palmer in his off hours, his work didn't market, so that was the whole of it. (Germany is way overprotective of LGBT people right now, almost like they're making up for past issues with singling minorities out, but I guess it couldn't be that, could it?)

So I punched into Bing how much that fine's amount was in dollars, and I'm like, oh, not good.  I call my boss, from whom, don't forget, I get half my DNA, and he was like, just close the place down. Shut it down, I am not paying the Germans one dime over a hack artist whose work didn't sell. I was like yeah, well you're on your honeymoon in Ireland under her spell again and not thinking straight I am not shutting this place down. He was like yeah shut it down. I said don't you like your grandkids to have, you know, like food and stuff, and he said, do whatever then, I don't care, go work for your dead one-time fiance's father, didn't he offer you a better paying job, but do not cut any checks to the Germans.

So I was like yeah okay got it, no checks to Germany, but I am not closing down. He said that's fine, I don't care. (Oh, has she got him under her spell...) And he suddenly got narcotized cheery and pointed out that the new anniversary to punch in on my calendar is 7-16-16, which is almost numerically alliterative, don't you think?

Yeah, cool, dad, g'bye, whatever, thank you for dumping it all on me, have a good day in the Celtic Holy Land there.

Then my aforementioned dead fiance's father showed up looking like he just stepped out of a Brooks Brothers catalog, kind of made me do a double take, he's got those same gray-blue eyes and that just about creeps me out when it doesn't make me feel like crying because I loved his son so much, and right behind him comes our dear little Mormon intern, love that girl's German-meets-South Korean-meets motivated Jamaican work ethic, and I said welcome in, everybody, let's conquer the world, but first pay no heed while I proceed to bang my head on this desk.

My DOTF'sF was like oh what's wrong, um, "ER"?

Good question to ask actually, so I unloaded the full story of my last few days, absolutely ended up telling my dead fiance's father everything about everything and he said:

"1. don't pay the Germans, who cares, 2. be happy your father's so happy, plus give your mother the benefit of the doubt, maybe she'll be more stable this time, and 3. you should never again feel like anything that happens to you short of dismemberment is bad again, because your little girl didn't drown yesterday."

And he was totally right. I mean....yeah, she could have drowned and didn't. That's worth overlooking everything else.

Which brings me around to this: my little girl did not drown, and I am thankful for that, so thankful I will say it in non-prose form:

These are the things to cherish,
A seed and a dream and a child,
Else must the nations perish, and earth fall away to the wild...

I hope everyone has a brilliant day, I love you all: yes, even you!

Now THAT was a full day, my friend!!!

in 2003 a friend of mine named Rob got a little mixed-breed dog named Bow-House (a play on Bauhaus, of course) who was all shiny black and energetic and always smiling with his little fox-pointy mouth, and this dog was never tired, and he had this trick, you could hold a treat in your hands six feet above Bow-House, and he'd leap up full blast and just barely get it but he'd snatch it from your fingertips, and he could do this over and over. He had tiny little paws, minuscule on his already diminutive body, and each of them was jet black, and his fur was glossy and seemed to almost repel water, and he loved going out in the rain. He was alert and friendly and fast, so fast, moved in and out dodging like a flash. Where Rob lived there was this balcony, and Bow-House would run full speed, scaring all of us, and leap right up on the rail, like a cat, and balance there so he could see over, something I've never seen any other dog do, and didn't know dogs were capable of. That little dog was a trip....

About a week ago my cousin-in-law, best man at our wedding, came by with his little boy to hang out while his wife was off for psychological maintenance and my husband was up the street with our son, and while my youngest was showing his toddler the sandbox, my cousin-in-law stood out in the back yard with me and fell into an expansive mood, telling me how in the second semester of his first year in college, his roommate was gay.

He said that was a little weird for a minute but he liked the roommate well enough and they got to be friends and their respective preferences never were that big of an issue, and in fact after a couple weeks my cousin-in-law got to talking with his roommate about what it was like being gay in mid-1990s America, and his roommate said in effect well if you want to know come with me.

So my then eighteen-year-old future cousin-in-law, who doesn't strike me as having a gay bone in his body, started going with his roommate to all these gay-centric places. Not just a couple times to clubs but to this notorious local park where homosexual men were always meeting in the bathrooms. He said he'd play disc golf and read graphic novels while his roommate vanished into the bathroom with various men, and once his roommate told him he was "good man bait" since guys were always checking him out and asking, "What's with the new kid?"

He did get hit on sometimes but that was it, but he said maybe once a week for a few months he kind of went along for the ride and all this was something I for sure never knew he'd done, and it was funny, him being in those sorts of places and scenarios.

He of course had to say, "But I never did anything myself..."

Which I 100% believe, but....that was just funny, him having this unguessed-at brush with gay culture.

Once there was a marvelous store chain; they rented and sold movies, music, books, memorabilia, trendy cool T-shirts, comics, and vinyl.  Their local branch was my second home; I rented movies there at a rate of several a week and sold over 400 books in the last two years, since I became an author.  The manager and all the associates were friendly and welcoming; this was my own personal "Cheers."

Now the corporation is bankrupt and our local store is being liquidated.  RIP Hastings, I will never forget you!

(For the record, this day has SUCKED all the way around!)

My husband had a prodigious single life and has probably told me about most of it. He started relating those types of stories beginning in the fall of 2001, back when he and I would just hang out as something between friends and haven't-seen-you-naked-yet whatevers, and his general pursuit of women was still ongoing.

Strangely my usual response for some reason was to find his escapades hilarious. I would lean back in a chair and laugh myself silly over some of them, and it was good to do that because the first year I knew him I was going through life caught up in deep sadness and didn't laugh a lot, so since his bedroom tales seemed to cheer me up for reasons he didn't quite fathom, he kept telling them.

One that amused me happened in 1996, about five years before I met him, and he was at a Borders reading, and he struck up a conversation with this hippie girl in a flower-print sundress, and after a bit they went over to the store’s cafe together and got some things and talked longer about books and the upcoming election ("Go, Bill!"), and it ended with them going back to his place.

Well fast forward to the bedroom, they wrestled around a minute, she was, he said, surprisingly strong, Womyn Power, all that, and at one point pinned his arms down and said sex wasn't about men dominating women, etc etc etc, he was like, yeah, whatever, blahblablah thinking wish she'd shut up now. So finally she pulled her sundress off over her head, and lo and behold she had hairy underarms, like furry-hairy, which he thought okay, whatever, not cool but not a deal killer, hope she keeps her arms down so I don't have to look at those, already knowing she probably wouldn’t be getting a next-day phone call, but what the hey, another notch on the bedpost was another notch on the bedpost.

But then she leaned down, being above him, nothing had really happened yet, crooked her arm at the elbow and stuck her underarm practically in his face and said, "Kiss my armpit."

He said he stopped actively trying to hoist her leg over top of him and asked, "Why?"

And he said this girl, uh, I mean Goddess-Empowered Womyn, goes, "Because I f**king said so!"

He said other times he may have done it but she was starting to put him off all the way around and she was so furry under her arms it was like being confronted by the top part of Burt from Sesame Street’s head, so he told her, "I don't want to do that."

She went, "But you're going to. " And she was trying to seriously like rub her underarm in his face, literally, so he said enough was enough and he flipped her off him and she freaked and said no she was always on top and started flailing around to get back up and she told him "You ARE going to do what I say starting now!"

He said his inner Weird Chick Alert radar went off too loud to ignore at that point, and long story short, he remembered, as the great Patrick Bateman always said, he had some urgent videos to return, and she got furiously mad that he was turning her down that far into it and she was gone in a self-righteous huff inside of another two minutes, telling him off the whole way with lots ‘n lots ‘n lots of use of the eff-word.

The moral of the story here? Even men have their limits.

When I was growing up I used to spend most of every summer in Ireland, visiting my grandparents and that side of the family, and among the bevy of relations over there I had a darn cool aunt three years older than me, and a sometimes challenging but mostly all right cousin a year my elder, and most of my interacting would center on them. They were the fire and ice, the ying and yang, the Good Goofy/Bad Goofy of my summer existence, and they didn’t much like each other.

Well one July night when I was almost ten, my cousin, my aunt, and I stayed up til the wee hours watching horror films and telling scary stories, and my cousin told us the urban legend of Bloody Molly (over there known as Sanguine Sinead---okay, yes, I made that part up) and how if you go into a pitch black room and stare in a mirror while repeating, “Bloody Molly, I summon you from Hell, show me your face….” over and over with your eyes an inch from the glass, you’ll see something creepy appear in front of you, something that may or may not have been the visage of an infamous Victorian murderess damned to Hell.

After all, she swore to God, she’d heard it happened exactly like that to her neighbor’s teacher’s brother’s girlfriend’s dance instructor’s dog-groomer’s friend.

I was a little keyed up after hours of slasher flicks but I told my cousin that was probably THEE stupidest thing I’d ever heard, so she dared me to back up my boast and go try it then in the downstairs bathroom of our grandparents’ two-hundred year old house, where at least five people have died and surely many more: in the house I mean, not the bathroom, though they may have died there, too, I guess.

I suddenly did feel slightly freaked about the idea but I was more afraid of losing face in front of my Celtic relatives, so we creeped downstairs and I went in alone to this closet-sized bathroom and shut the door, didn’t turn on the light, and my cousin and aunt stood outside and my cousin said, “You have to speak the words….and we can hear you, so don’t try to cheat.”

I heard her say to our aunt under her breath, “Blood Molly probably won’t understand her ugly American accent.” (Why she failed to grasp SHE was the one with the accent I never got.)

I played by the rules of the game and leaned very close to the mirror, kept my eyes open and said over and over, “Bloody Molly, I summon you from Hell, show your face…. Bloody Molly, I summon you from Hell, show your face….”

I felt my heart kick up a gear….

“Bloody Molly, I summon you from Hell, show your face….”

My eyes adjusted to the lightless space, and I could actually see the silvery surface of the mirror appear in the shadows…

“Bloody Molly, I summon you from Hell, show your face….”

The whole thing got creepier and creepier, more and more intense…the tension built up, thirty seconds rushed by…

“Bloody Molly, I summon you from Hell, show your face…”

 …I was almost afraid to blink, and…

And
abso-friggin-lutely
nothing
happened
at
all!

Except I got bragging rights over those two the rest of the summer of 1988!

Back around the summer of 1996 my agnostical friend felt he had enough of life without a deity in it, so he decided to pray to the old Norse gods, and dedicate himself to their service, reasoning that not only were the Norse gods just plain frakkin’ awesome, but since they had so few followers left to distract them, maybe he’d get noticed more than he had as a Missouri Synod Lutheran.

I felt this was an odd theological choice for him to make, for while this friend did sort of have a b***hy-bad attitude sometimes, he was perhaps the least warrior-like person I knew, once getting tears in his eyes (in front of a teenage girl, no less) after he thumped his finger while nailing a 2x4 against his door to keep his mom out of his room.

Nevertheless this dude decided he’d heard the Calling, that divine Scandinavian voice bellowing through a yak horn from cruel climes of ice and midnight suns, so he sent off a membership card to a group in Denmark which regularly ran ads in gaming fanzines, and for a mere $19.95 was sent back a card that told the world he was now in good standing with the Church of the New Valhalla. He also received a genuine plastic Thor’s hammer amulet (made in China) to wear on a chain, and he took every opportunity to tell anyone who would listen that the hammer was the sign of his faith, and was known as Mjolnir. (Mule-near: and yes, we kidded him about that.)

For most of the summer this fixation lasted, he would go around and bellow out, “Odin!” at the top of his lungs, saying it was a form of prayer, and would make little vows like, “By Loki’s forked beard I swear I shall have a Mt Dew refill.”

We were all kind of like, “Uh-huh, yeah…”

But this was America, you could believe what you wanted (back then). Plus it was maybe a tad bit cool under its too-nerdy-to-be-taken-seriously overtones, someone we knew actually howling beseechment to Viking gods with names that sounded like a cross between J.R.R. Tolkien and Led Zeppelin.

He also could not wait for school to start, so that when some teacher told him to take off his “necklace” he could cite religious rights and make a big scene, maybe even sue the school district for discrimination. Gee, wouldn’t that be sweet? Perhaps he’d make the eleven o’ clock news, “Local pagan persecuted… he’s single, Goth girls.”

Thoughts of that kept him bright-eyed and cheerful all summer long, and he even strategized elaborate response plans for when the day came he found himself called to the office. “It’s my right, man!” he’d thunder. “So get use to it!”

Then there came the painful night of the first cracks in the foundation when he and a couple of us were at Taco Bell, and some guys from another town came by and saw his plastic hammer and picked a fight with him, even trying to tug it off his neck til a girl told them to stop or she’d mace them. (It was the least I could do.) As for our latter-day Viking, he kow-towed to his assailants with truly b***h-like resolve, and avoided the confrontation.

Now I thought that was essentially a sensible decision, since he couldn’t fight his way out of duct tape handcuffs, but this girl who was there with us refused to let my buddy live down the fact he was going around claiming to be some sort of modern-day Viking who chanted to Odin and lived to claim his place in Valhalla, yet he cringed his way out of a tussle. After all, chickening out of fisticuffs HAD to have been against Thor’s rules, wouldn’t you think? And didn’t that make him a….well, sinner?

So not long after that painful night of nachos thrown around Taco Bell’s dining room like Chinese stars, we noticed our friend stopped wearing the hammer, and he said he’d quit sending in his $10.00 a month dues (half his allowance) to the church in Denmark, though he said he still believed in the “Old gods” just felt like maybe religion was a more personal thing, and he shouldn’t be going around advertising his faith because it was “gross” to influence other people when it came to spirituality.

School started that August and his plot to entrap the teachers came to nothing, though by then he’d found a new way to try to shock the world: he wanted to fake his death on video…

But that’s a Random True Story for another time.

One time in middle school, I had very bad headache.  I decided to say at school for some reason.  But towards the end of the day, I decided it was so bad I felt like I was going to vomit, so I asked to be excused.  Teacher let me go, but the vomit feeling kept rising.  Eventually I started sprinting to the bathroom.  Then I projectile vomited a big splash of liquid while running. 

Fortunately, none of it got on my clothes.  Unfortunately, I was running too fast to stop, slipped and flew in the air, and landed square in the middle of a puddle of my own vomit flat on my back.  I got up, and luckily was wearing a sweat shirt which absorbed most of the worst of it.  I took it off and walked home.

While in the throes of fever and delirium at the ER last night, I recited the Rhyme of the One Ring in the Black Speech of Mordor and got every word right!

In the '90s I had a friend who loved to play guitar but had to sell the one she grew up with. (She'd left home at sixteen and had lived rough.) She really wanted a guitar but didn't have the money for one, but she was inventive and bold, so she wrote letters to all these female musicians out there, explaining her circumstances and saying in effect, "Do you by any chance have an old guitar you're not using? I'd take really good care of it and play it often."

A few weeks after she sent these off, she got a package, and in it was a nice acoustic guitar sent to her by a singer named Bonnie Raitt.

In this day and age when it seems like so many baby girls have their ears pierced, it's funny to think my father wouldn't let me get mine done til I was thirteen. (The man was a total tyrant; never let me do anything as a teenager.... Yes, Indy, I'm being facetious.) But finally thirteen came and I waded into the post-Christmas crushing crowd at the mall and got my ears pierced, and it was great. Trouble was, my right earlobe got inflamed that night, so I put an ice cube in a paper towel and held it there in bed, fell asleep, the ice water from the melting cube dribbled down into my ear and I got a bad infection from that. So bad in fact it formed scar tissue and to this day contributes to a partial hearing loss on that side.

Random.
True.
Story.

Next time: prom night '96, when I shaved my head, otherwise known as "adventures-in-no-this-never-actually-happened-but-I-thought-I'd-go-for-a-fake-psycho-chick-vibe-in-here."

Perhaps to be continued at a thread I'll dub:

Random.
Fake.
Story.

Pax Dei, BMDO-ers!

     Back in the late 80's, I had a "friends with benefits" relationship with a cute redheaded Irish-Catholic girl named Brenda, about ten years my junior (I was 32 at the time of this story). One evening, we were hanging out at a gay bar across the street from the apartments where I lived; Club 1504 was convenient, and I knew the owners.

     An'hoo, we were sitting in the basement bar / dance floor area, which hadn't yet opened for the evening, as it was only seven or so. I was sippin' on a San Juan Boilermaker (a draft with a splash of Bacardi 151), and Brenda had a Coke, as we chatted with her cousin, Phil, who was DJ'ing that night.  I was asking Phil if he had this song or that, and the answer was always "no", until I mentioned "We're All Alone", by Rita Coolege

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDdubxltL4E (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDdubxltL4E)

    That one he had.

     The two of us are sitting there, quietly, when Phil fires up the dance floor lights, the mirrorball, and the sound system....out comes "we're All Alone". Without a word, Brenda gets up from her chair, walks over to directly under the ball, and begins to dance, a slow, sensuous, sad / beautiful movement driven by the music from without and within.

     As you can imagine, I was transfixed.

     When the song ended, Brenda walked back to the table, and sat down without a word.
Almost exactly twenty-eight years later, the moment is still as clear as now.

     Slainte', Brenda.

I brought over some kung fu movies for my girlfriend's father - he's an elderly Chinese man. He relates to me how when he was 8, he worked on his family's farm in his village doing manual labor. In his downtime the older men trained him in kung fu. Why? Well, he explains how he doesn't know the English word for them, but there were bad men in the nearby mountains (raiders or bandits) who would come down every so often and steal everything and kill you if you resisted. At this time, the country was still devastated from World War II and the civil war, so barely any authorities anywhere other than warlords. So they had to be prepared to fight. 

These days he lives in a nice house in the suburbs, retired.