The Day I Met a Bear

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, step right up, take a seat, grab a blanket and a bowl of popcorn, because I’m about to tell you about the day I met a real live bear.
And I’m not going to cheap out on you and tell you about the time I went to the zoo. No sir, no ma’am, there was nothing in between this bear and I but air. And a lake. But it wasn’t a big lake, and science has proven that bears swim better than Micheal Phelps. Freestyle, at least. They have a bit of trouble with the butterfly, and don’t even talk about the breast stroke.
Bears are terrible at the breast stroke.
Anyway! I was at Diabetes Camp, somewhere in the wilderness of…
I don’t actually remember where. All I know is we got in a car, drove for a long time, and ended up in a place where there were trees and we had to sleep outside.
Let me tell you about Diabetes Camp. I don’t have diabetes. Honestly, I don’t. It’s not one of my many faults. And yes, it is a fault. I’m not going to sugar coat it for people who do have diabetes. People with diabetes suck. Wandering around, all “my pancreas doesn’t work due to a genetic defect!” and expecting us to feel sorry for them. WELL I DON’T! Your reign ends today, diabetics! From now on, you must take a SHOT OF INSULIN EVERY TIME YOUR BLOOD SUGAR IS OUTSIDE OF THE NORM! HOW DOES THAT FEEL, HUH?
I’m kidding. Diabetics are cool. Except when you get them all together at a camp in the middle of nowhere. Then they turn into monsters. “Luke, take this saline shot so you know how it feels to be a diabetic.” “But I’m not a diabetic.” “Shut up and stick this needle in your arm for no reason!”
Or “Luke, we’re doing a talent show and you’re in it!” “What? No I’m not. When is it?” “It’s right now you’re on stage haha look they’re all laughing at you for being NORMAL!”
Actually, talent show night was kind of fun. I recited poetry badly and people clapped politely because I was a little kid who thought he was a hot shot and they didn’t have the heart to boo me off the stage.
The person who performed before me left two quarters on the ground, and the entire time I was reciting my poetry I was wondering if it would be rude to collect those. I didn’t, but the guy who came right after me did, and everybody was okay with it. Ah, missed chances. I could have had two more gumballs. Oh well.
I mentioned the sleeping outside, didn’t I? A tarp was required, because if you didn’t use a tarp, you got soaked with dew.
I think something is wrong with your camp when a tarp is required just to sleep. And yeah, some people claim that you’re not doing it RIGHT until a tarp is required to sleep, but they’re crazier than most diabetics. Besides, I was, like, eight.
I think I promised you guys something… what was it?
OH! BEAR! RIGHT!
There was a fishing spot a little way outside the campsite. It looked like somebody had cut out a description from Huckleberry Finn and stuck it in the wilderness for me to find. The second day at camp I went to the nearest store and bought a bamboo fishing pole. The only thing I needed to make the cliche complete was a straw hat, but, unfortunately, they were sold out of those and to this day I do not own a straw hat.
My birthday is coming up, by the way. *cough cough*
So, I spent a few hours out of every day dangling this line in the water, not catching anything but that was okay because at least there weren’t any diabetics nearby, trying to stick unnecessary needles in me.
One of these days I heard something crashing around in the bushes across from my fishing spot. Expecting that they had finally found me, I put my jacket on (because it’s harder to stick a person when they’re struggling AND they have a thick jacket on) and shouted an inquiry as to the nature of the person across the pond.
What peeked out of the bushes at me was almost as bad as what I had expected.
It was a ceeeute little bear cub.
I hightailed it out of there so fast I left my bamboo rod behind, and my nonexistent straw hat spinning in the air as though it were in a Warner Brother’s cartoon.
I found the nearest adult, let him put a few saline needles in me to calm him down, and told him about the baby bear. He took off running, too.
Eventually, somebody brave was found, and they found a pickup truck, and the cub was chased away with several tons of screaming steel rolling merrily behind him, probably creating a serial camper killer in the process but successfully saving a camp full of diabetics who probably deserved devouring.
And I never went fishing again.
Except for that one time when we almost caught a Marlin the size of the Leviathan.
And that other time we almost caught a catfish that was also pretty big.
And that other time.
Okay, yeah, I’ve been fishing a few times since. But I always check the bear forecast first!

My Fourth Grade Teacher was More Insane than Your Fourth Grade Teacher

I remember several things about fourth grade. I did exactly zero homework, no matter how much was assigned (because I really, really hated the things he assigned. They were called XLs and their gimmick was they were 11 by 24 inches of demonic runes, twisted with curses and beaten into the rough shape of numbers which barely formed themselves into equations, which we had to solve in order to save our souls. I said “screw it, if you want my soul that badly, you can have it,” the second week in and didn’t do another XL [or “excel.” This is what happens when mathematicians think they’re clever! This is what happens when they try to make puns like REAL PEOPLE!] for the rest of the grade. I still don’t know why I didn’t fail. Oh wait! I remember now! We’ll get to that in this story!), he loved ghost stories, and I messed up somebody’s joke once.

The joke story has to go first, because it was pretty great.

Here is how it was supposed to go:

A fellow would walk up to you and ask “Hey, what were you eating under there?”

and you would reply with “Under where?” which sounds a bit like “Underwear,” so they would then go “EEWWW GROSS YOU EAT UNDERWEAR?” and everybody would point at you and laugh as you discovered that society as a whole was worthless and irredeemable, and decided to become a super villain when you grew up.

The only reason that I am not a super villain right now (and maybe I am, you don’t know, do you?) is because the day somebody tried to pull it on me, I had sneaked (snuck?) corn nuts into class and had spent most of the class methodically dropping my pencil, reaching down to pick it up, and sneaking a few of the salty, honestly pretty disgusting snacks into my mouth underneath my desk.

So it went like this. “Hey Luke, what were you eating under there?”

“Corn nuts.”

“No… what were you eating under there?”

“I was eating corn nuts under there.”

“Under where? Wait! DANGIT!”

It was pretty funny.

Anyway. Fourth grade teacher. Loved ghosts. Our field trips weren’t to museums or water parks. He’d take us to places where ghosts had been spotted and try to get us to see them. He’d point behind us and yell “Did you guys see that?” He took us to preserved Indian villages (run by old white people). He showed us carvings and then told us that the previous time he was here the carvings were different. He took us to a magic spring that would grant immortality to our souls and then forbade us to drink the water because it might have bacteria in it. He even took us on a hike up a mountain on the hottest day of the year. When we were three quarters of the way up he set up a checkpoint to make sure that none of us were dehydrated. About half the class failed and had to wait and drink and pass out for a bit before they could go to the top. I wasn’t one of them.

He wrote a book about ghosts.

He insisted that there was a haunted elevator in the middle school nearby.

And he passed me when I did almost no work at all even a little bit in his class.

All is forgiven.

My Fifth Grade Teacher was Almost as Crazy as my Fourth Grade Teacher

That title doesn’t make a lot of sense, so let me qualify it.

My fourth grade teacher spent most of his time attempting to convince his class of ten and eleven year olds that the middle school most of them were going to (including me) was infested by the ghosts of Indians buried beneath it. Specifically the elevator.

You’ll hear more about him some other time.

Meanwhile, I’d like to talk about my fifth grade teacher, who was also crazy, but not so much and in a better way. His first name was Kerry, and I won’t tell you his last name because that’s just not a nice thing to do online. Still, a dude with the first name Kerry… Ryan is worse, obviously, but Kerry? I expect he was teased relentlessly. As in, his teachers themselves were getting in on the action. His substitute teachers would be all “Kerry? Is Kerry here today?” and he would raise his hand and they’d be all “Yes, little boy? Do you know where she is?” and he’d be all “I am Kerry.” and they’d say “Very funny. Is she here? Anybody know?”

After a while of him insisting that he was Kerry, they’d send him to the school psychiatrist, and by that point, he’d probably need it.

He was in the Air Force reserves while he was our teacher. Nobody teased him anymore.

I had so much fun in his class. I had a special seat in the middle of the classroom, perfectly situated so the transparency projector thing was directly in between his face and mine, so he couldn’t tell where I was looking or whether I was paying attention or not. I think he approved of this, honestly, because I was aweird kid. He once asked me why I was sucking on my arm. I told him it was because if I had a hickey, the vampires couldn’t get me. I remember getting a solemn nod for that one, because it made perfect sense.

Because of the thing that obscured his line of sight to my eyes, I would basically read books every single day for hours. Occasionally he’d ask me a question and I’d get it right (or, sometimes, wrong, but whenever that happened I tended to come up with elaborate explanations for why I was right. He eventually stopped correcting me.) but I never really paid much attention. Once or twice he caught me reading and made a big show about it by taking my book away, but I always had three or four spare ones tucked away in my desk or backpack. Besides, the books he caught me reading were so far beyond the reading level of the rest of the class I’m sure he felt slightly guilty denying an eleven year old the pleasures of Wodehouse when teachers find difficulty getting high schoolers to read it, much less fourth graders.

Hm. Looking back on it, he WASN’T all that crazy. In fact, now, it seems like he was a pretty cool guy. Why did I think he was crazy?

Oh! Right! The Stink Bomb Incident!

Somebody set off a stink bomb during class. Kerry stopped class immediately, declared that he would find the culprit and they would pay dearly for their transgression.

The culprit, by the way, was not me. I had never found stink bombs very funny, but that was probably because I could never get my hands on one.

Anyway, Kerry demands complete silence, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out a matchbook. The entire class naturally assumed that he was going to start lighting children on fire until one of them confessed, or perhaps do the more sensible thing, find the culprit, and then light just him on fire. Instead, he lit the match, held it up, and started walking around the perimeter of the room, staring at the flame.

It felt like a wiccan ritual, which I had just been reading about. I started to chant a curse shield under my breath, just in case.

The match burned down and Kerry shook it out, probably cursing inside his head. He turned to us and said “That should have… When a flame comes into contact with the gas… let me try again.”

He didn’t elaborate. He simply lit another match.

Now the entire class was assuming that once he got close to where the stink bomb was set off, the flame would blossom into a glorious pheonix and claw the perpetrator’s eyes from his evil head.

At least that’s what I was assuming. Everybody else was probably just hoping for an explosion. Or maybe for the flame to change color.

None of that happened. The second match burned out, and then a third, and then the smell was basically gone and whoever did it was safe. Class resumed with a minimum of grumbling, and that was from Kerry himself.

To this day I have no idea who it was. Maybe it was just the overweight fellow in the front row who had eaten a little too much Taco Bell at lunch.

One day, I’m going to go out and get a stink bomb, just so I can see what happens to a flame when it goes off. It’s been something that has bothered me for years.

Ryan the Teeny Tiny Terror

My middle name is Ryan, and I always resented my parents for that. I kind of want to change it to Rook, but there wouldn’t really be much point. I thought it sounded like the sort of name you give a crazy person, and I was totally justified in thinking that. Ryans are crazy.

Seriously, if your name is Ryan, stay away from me, you’re totally insane. Guaranteed. If I ran a mental hospital, I would have a troupe of security guards secretly kidnap people named Ryan and put them all in a nice room with bouncy walls and see how long it took them to break out using their combination of devious genius and terrible insanity.

There were two Ryans in my elementary school. The first was a math savant who just happened to have a host of psychological problems. We used to make fun of him by singing the ABCs under our breath as we walked by him and watching him freak out.

Now that I think about it, if everybody around me spontaneously started whispering a children’s song, I would freak out, too.

Actually, somebody get me the number for Hollywood. If we start now, we can have this horror movie out by Halloween! Instead of another host of sequels, we can have a completely original script (c) the Ryan Corporation that itself can spawn hundreds of sequels! In the first, a man hears the ABCs whispered every moment of every day and it slowly drives him insane! In the next, it’s Twinkle Twinkle Little Star! And then Baa Baa Black Sheep! Oh man, those movies would be FREAKY!

Where was I? Oh yeah! Ryan the Insane but Brilliant Math Wizard. Naturally his tormentors (me included, because, as previously covered, I was a bit of a jerk. Okay, a huge jerk. Okay, a quantum jerk that somehow managed to not get shot repeatedly in the face for 20 years, and I still don’t know how.) didn’t know about his brilliance. We just assumed he was a special ed student that somehow slipped past the tests, and we put him through enough psychological torture that Geneva itself would have been perfectly fine if somebody accidentally water-boarded us in return, with a small side of car battery nipple clamps. Then I caught a glimpse of his math time trials in passing. We had one every week, and it took most kids two months to pass a single one. Ryan had never failed. Not even once.

I thought I was hot stuff because I had made it to multiplication before the rest of the class was out of subtraction, and Ryan was somewhere in the realm of calculus. In first grade.

I didn’t make fun of him after that. I didn’t DEFEND him, but I didn’t make fun of him. Like I said, I was a quantum jerk.

Enough about Ryan. Let’s talk about Ryan. This kid was incredible. I’m not sure how enough venom to make a cobra stop, look around, and say “whoah.” got into a person that small. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that his parents were getting a divorce, since one was a dwarf great white shark and the other was a midget bear and, try as they might, they just couldn’t work out the differences. He was giving sixth graders wedgies when he was still in diapers (which isn’t saying all that much. He wasn’t fully potty trained until 4th grade. Neither was I, but that’s a story for another time.) and abusing his needy girlfriends before he had even heard of puberty (again, not saying much. He failed sex ed twice.). He was short, he was mean, and I sprayed mustard all over his favorite sweatshirt.

It was an accident. I was messing around during lunch one day, and a friend of mine had a packet of mustard that neither he nor the four people nearest him could open. Thinking the packet invincible, I snatched it from the nearest fellow, laid it on the table, lifted my fist as high as it would go, and brought it down hard.

Apparently, this packet’s Achille’s heal was being punched by an idiot. It let out the most glorious spurt of mustard-blood I have ever seen.

You see, Ryan was sitting across the lunchroom/auditorium. Hitting him with mustard should not have been possible without some sort of bug in the physics engine that runs the universe, but every drop of that mustard ended up somewhere on him, without a single person between the two of us even getting a splatter. I felt one single moment of elation that I had just sprayed foodstuff on a person I didn’t like, (which is an extraordinarily cathartic act. Try it on your coworkers tomorrow!) but then I experienced the fastest turn around from elation to horror ever, before instant sober pills will be invented.

Because we locked eyes, Ryan and I, and I knew I was dead.

He cornered me later that same lunch period, pushed me up the wall, and asked my belly button why I had ruined his favorite sweatshirt. It was a rhetorical question.

I began blubbering like an overweight whale, and they have a LOT of blubber. I was sobbing so hard I could barely stutter out that it was an accident and that I didn’t mean to and something about my hand slipping, which I’m not sure why I said because my hand most certainly did not slip.

Ryan was completely speechless. I don’t think he had ever made a person cry before just by asking them a question, and he was kind of at a loss. Instead of beating me down like a dirty rug, he gave me a hug and told me it would be alright, it was fine, it wasn’t actually his favorite sweatshirt and he had a few just like it and his midget bear mother could probably get the stain out anyway.

And that’s how I got out of getting beaten down by the shortest, meanest person I have ever known. I used humiliation again.

I am like a humiliation squid. Whenever danger threatens, I just squirt it everywhere and pick up the gift cards and hugs just lying around in the aftermath.

Wet Chickens are Unhappy Chickens

If you ask almost any guy in the entire universe about a story involving him and small furry animals when he was very young, you will get a horror tale, probably involving death and mutilation.

Unless you’re a pretty girl that he’s trying to impress, in which case you’ll hear about that one time he nursed a baby squirrel back to life, which, by the way, will be an outright lie. Unless you’re talking to me. I totally nursed a baby squirrel back to life. I nursed thousands of baby squirrels back to life. Hundreds of thousands, even.

Now, cruelty to small animals is one of the early warning signs that correlate with psychopathic (sociopathic? Get your crap straight, scientists! I don’t want nit pickers all over ambiguous word choice in my posts. They should be able to call me a horrible human being without having to split hairs between similar words.) behavior, but we are, at heart, animals, and animals kill other animals.

But before we get into that, I’ve got to tell you about this. And this… is downright adorable.

I used to have two imaginary friends. They were both alligators (because giant amphibious lizards figured prominently in my formative years for some reason. Maybe I was destined to be the next crocodile hunter!) and one of them was named Jackie and one of them was named Beauford.

That’s right. I named one of my imaginary friends Beauford. Or he named himself that. I’m still not quite sure.

I do remember feeling a little confused, because one of my mother’s good friends was named Jackie, and every time she visited Jackie would disappear for a bit and I was left to play with just Beauford, which was annoying, because Beauford was kind of dull.

By the way, and I know this is barely relevant, but Jackie and Beauford lived on the roof.

There are loads of stories about Jackie and Beauford, but I’m only making this one post about them, so I’ll try to fit as many in as possible. Basically, I used them as my scapegoats.

The San Jose airport had a playground that I randomly wanted to play on one day, so I attempted to convince my mother to drive Jackie and Beauford to the airport because they had to catch a plane to Florida to visit their family because they were alligators, and that’s where alligators lived and while we were there could I please play on the playground. My mother said no.

I once had a tea party with Jackie and Beauford, but it was a disaster. Tea was everywhere. Everything was soaking wet, because alligators are freaking TERRIBLE at drinking tea.

I once asked my REAL friend Jackie if she would ever date a guy named Beauford. She said that she would, but only if it were pronounced Byoo-ferd (which it was) and not Bow-ferd (which it wasn’t.) Jackie and Beauford weren’t dating. I think they had an on and off marriage, if I remember correctly.

Anyway, on to the title story. We had a batch of adorable chickens. I can only remember two of their names. Brynn and Goldie. Goldie was the hands down favorite, although she was hilariously weird. She laid green eggs (seriously. Green eggs. I didn’t know it was possible.) routinely flew out of the pen to mess with the dogs, and, in the morning, she would crow. Goldie was a lesbian chicken.

Wow.

That actually just occurred to me. Right then, when I wrote it. All these years, and I never realized…

Mind = Blown.

Where was I?

Oh yes! We had a cute little barn in which they all slept and laid their eggs and generally had a good time until one horrendous day, from which they would probably never recover (although it’s difficult to tell, with chickens.)

It was the day I discovered the hose could reach their barn.

It was like a video game! I could spray one chicken and it would squawk and jump up and then I’d turn the hose on the other. I’d try to get them all into the air at once. I’d make them switch roosts back and forth. I’d follow one around for a bit until it collapsed from exhaustion and then move onto the next one.

My mother found me after I don’t know how long. She was livid. She asked me what I was doing, and, to this day, I can remember what I told her to try to get out of it.

“Jackie told me to.”

Not “I was cleaning the pen!” or “I was trying to chase away the rats!” (and there <i>were</i> rats) or even “I dunno.”

“Jackie told me to.”

I was in therapy the very next day, working out some “issues.” It didn’t really go anywhere. I wasn’t broken, or psychopathic, or even scared. I was just a kid, being stupid.

Jackie and Beauford eventually left my life. Violently. I still remember the day that I beat them to death with a stick in the back yard, so I could make “alligator soup.”

The soup wasn’t very good, and my mother had a FIT about her rose bushes.

Hats I have Owned

I spend far too much money on hats. It’s a fault of mine that I find difficult to steer away from, partly because it’s not all that terrible, as far as faults go, and partly because I don’t actually want to stop.

I’ve received several hats as gifts, two of which have been from my Aunt Denice. Both were brown, one of my favorite colors to wear for reasons that I won’t get into now but which I can basically sum up with the phrase “I’m duller than a tenured college professor who hasn’t actually attended his classes in five years.”

The first was a hat that looked like she had built a time machine, zapped back to the nineteenth century, and ripped a hat off of a (probably loudly protesting) newspaper boy. I like to think he was a tabloid seller, and the next issue had all of his esteemed colleagues shouting “Extra! Extra! Time Travelling Tart Takes Tom’s Top, Probably For Use in Some Strange Future Sex Ritual!” She probably just bought it in a hat store named something clever, but I have my dreams.

It didn’t fit, by the way. I have an unusually large head. My mother cut a slice out of the back and sewed some weird fabric into it so I could actually get it on my noggin.

The second hat my Aunt bought for me was weird. It was basically a fur lined baseball cap, with shades of Guevara in the design. I have no idea where she found it. It’s a good hat for summer.

Another excellent summer hat I obtained by providing my extensive acting experience (HAH!) to a promotional video advertising a book. It’s a white hat of the sort golfers wear, where (where, wear, whatever) the top merges with the bill. Typically I put it on when I feel like being pretentious.

I have a purple headband, too. I don’t usually wear that one in public.

Oh! Speaking of pretentious hats… I was on a band trip in Canada at one point when I found just the greatest hat. It is a classical felt top hat, of the original style. It is a thing of beauty, but the price was… on the high side. I agonized about it for a while, debating whether to purchase it or a bright pink tuxedo shirt with a black lace ruff. I think I made the right decision. Even if it was eighty dollars.

But that’s not my most expensive hat! That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, I once purchased a hat that was over one hundred dollars. And I don’t regret it the tiniest bit. It’s a reddish brown, molded leather wizard hat with the shape of a skull pressed into it. Imagine the sorting hat if it died and then decomposed.

My most recent hat was a christmas present from my dear sister. It’s a wool cap with tassels hanging down to the chest. It has ears, eyes, a nose, and (seriously) teeth, all along the rim. It’s one of my favorites.

I have others, but I’m too tired to list them right now, and this post hasn’t been particularly amusing anyway, so I’ll just end with this:

I own not a single baseball cap.

So this is kind of late,

but I totally wrote a guest blog over at this wonderful, awesome place, and if you happen to be poking around in that corner of the internet, take a look. Leave a comment. Buy a shirt.

Also in this post, THIS BOOK! which I wrote and published for YOOOUUUU! It says so, right there in the dedication. Yes you. Holding onto the mouse!

So buy it, give me money, and I will keep busily lying to you like I have this past week.

Speaking of lies, and it's a short one today, but around the fourth of July a fellow waltzed into the toy store I own... well, work at, and asked if we had model rocket engines.

On the fourth of July. Model rocket engines. I wanted to ask for his address so I could stay far, far away from that house forever, but that wouldn't have been socially acceptable. So I spent the evening cowering under my bed (which is kind of impressive, considering that my mattress is on the floor) and HOPING that he didn't live next door to me. He didn't, and I made it through the night alive, although lacking any faith in humanity I had managed to grow since the mascot incident, which is on my tumblr, so you don't know about it because I STILL haven't migrated those stories over to here. Next week. I promise.