Category: True Stories

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The Origin of the Stick of Justice

At a church youth activity when I was in high school we had a stick pull competition. The two contestants sit on the ground with their feet together and pull on a stick between them, with the goal of pulling the other person out of their place or having them let go of the stick.

I figured I would have a go at it and sat down with a stick. The first couple of people I beat were only joking in going against me and just having a laugh in doing so. They were followed by a couple of true believers who gave it their best but didn’t last long either. I did not participate in a match that lasted longer than 2 seconds and I am very serious about that number, it is not an estimate. Then came a big fellow from a town about 20 miles from mine whom I had seen around and knew that he was a pretty strong guy. He was a linebacker for the Permian Panthers, you know the team from Friday Night Lights. I was unsure of how a contest between the two of us would go as I was the strongest basketball/track guy but did not play football in any organized way, for very long anyway. If anyone could stop my reign of terror it was him. He had defeated everyone he went against with ease as well. As he sat across from me my stomach began to churn with nervousness. I began to imagine that I would shortly be dethroned. I had actually started caring about competing somewhere around my 6th victory. Since we had both defeated everyone else this was the title match. People gathered around and one of the leaders had a stick with a leather strap through it that had some writing etched on it, which was apparently the trophy for the winner.

We each took our grips on the stick between us and waited. I was a wreck inside and felt certain that I was going to lose the 2 out of 3 matches that would be required for this title match. As we waited for the word to begin I could have quit right there as I was no longer feeling it. The word came and the instant seemed like it was longer, but it was only half a second at most, all in that short time I felt me pulling him up off the ground barely when his foot slipped. With the slippage we were stopped and reset, as it was a misfire. This time I felt much different before we began. The word came and we struggled from side to side for a few seconds before I had pulled him almost up and over the top of me. “Just one more quick one”, I thought to myself. We got set again as I was boiling over with confidence and was drunk on power. You might expect that this is the part where I was served humble pie and quickly lost a match. If you thought that then you were wrong. This match was much quicker than the first and closer to my average victory time. I was declared the winner and shook hands with my, before then, unknown competitor. I expected straightaway to be handed the trophy stick for my decisive win but I had one more challenger. The man holding the stick was from a place called Monahans and he was the guy who scared everybody. He would play with giant tarantulas and had a huge beard that you could hide all kinds of weapons in. He was also very very large. I would have put him at about 280 lbs. to my then 220 lbs. He sat down and said, “You are the winner of the competition but you still have to go against me.” If you guessed that now I was nervous, you would again be very wrong. Even though this was a full grown, bearded, scary guy I was calm like a bomb. I will save you the time and tell you that I beat him faster than the other guy. It was a breeze.


Upon receiving my award I promptly named it “The Stick of Justice”. I still have it and cherish it to this day, as it is the only trophy that I still have from anything. It has an amazing power in that it repels bad guys for some strange reason, as I will tell you about later.

There is a small and annoying shadow that hangs over this victory. It comes from a friend. This friend has been claiming that he beat me at the stick pull that day and he has been spreading his lie for years. He has tried to spread the lie to me twice in the last few years and I remind him that I have the trophy and was completely undefeated that day. It doesn’t seem to sink in and next time I see this friend I imagine he will try to bring up the lie again. It will not work though as I have a perfect recollection of that day and of course the trophy “Stick of Justice”.

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Television Debut

A house exploded next to the office for the job I just got laid off from. I went in to move some stuff out and had to clean up some glass. A local news lady came by and asked me a couple of questions and then they filmed me sweeping. I checked their news story about it and was amazed to see my television debut. I was actually on TV once as a kid singing a song at school but all the other kids were there and you couldn’t really see me. In this one I am clearly visible. Enjoy:

My Television Debut (You will see me at 1:41 in the video)

That’s right my pant-leg and shoe in their full glory. I can’t believe I was on TV. I guess for my fifteen minutes of fame I have 14:58 left.

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Water Wonderland

One simmering summer day a friend of mine decided we should go see what all the ‘wonder’ was about at the local “Water Wonderland”. I had never been to this mystical oasis and decided it might be fun. Upon entering the park it didn’t seem to look as enticing as the commercials led me to believe through my entire childhood. But, I figured as long as they had water I would enjoy it.

Continue reading “Water Wonderland”
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Old Tweak

Re-posting from a year ago.

One Thanksgiving, when I was in my early teens, one of my Grandfather’s neighbors told him that he and his family had named a turkey and started treating it like a pet. As a result they did not have the heart to kill it for their Thanksgiving dinner. He offered it to my Grandpa. My Grandpa saw this as a great opportunity to teach us grandkids about how it used to be.

We went over to the neighbor’s yard where my Grandpa set out a block to chop on and dropped a hatchet next to the block. He told me to go into the coop and grab the turkey. There he was, “Old Tweak” was his name. With a couple of my brothers we cornered him and I grabbed his legs. I dragged him out to my grandpa who was waiting with a board in his hands. He smacked Old Tweak with the board and the bird’s eyes seemed to roll around like a dazed cartoon character. While he was stunned Grandpa told me to slap Old Tweak’s head down on the block and he handed the hatchet to my brother. I was hoping to be the one to do the chopping but I had been assigned leg holding duty. I was told to not let go at all. My brother took aim and wound up for the chop. He brought the hatchet down and chopped most of the neck. There was still a piece of skin attached. Blood was shooting out like crazy. I had always heard about something running around like a chicken with its head cut off, but had never actually seen a chicken (or related bird) running around with its head cut off. I let go of the legs. I didn’t think it could actually run anywhere, since it was lying down, but would rather just kick it’s legs a bit.

I tell you now Old Tweak acted like he still had his head attached. He stood up, with a blood fountain spewing forth and his head dangling to his side, and made a run for it. My younger brothers took off after the turkey. They chased him around for about a minute then Old Tweak dropped to the turf. One of my brothers scooted towards our main course and then poked it with a stick. Upon being poked Old Tweak jumped back up and seemed to charge at Jared like a villain in a horror movie. This chase didn’t last long and Old Tweak dropped down again and kicked his legs around for a bit. Oddly enough everyone had some blood on them except for me, the person who let Tweak go. We put our future meal on the back of Grandpas truck and drove it down the street to clean it.

Cleaning a turkey is about the most unappetizing thing you can do. We dunked the bird into warm water, which was to help us pull feathers, but that made it smell like wet dog. Then, since Old Tweak was not a white turkey he had little black marks where his feathers used to be, which did not look very delicious. This all occurred the day before Thanksgiving which gave us plenty of time to forget the smell and be in the mood to eat turkey the next day. My assessment is that buying pre-slaughtered turkey is much more appetizing than the way they did it in the old days. But the old way of doing things is a lot more exciting and made for a Thanksgiving I will never forget.

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Deaf Chat Rooms

In a college class that I was required to take called “Developing Multimedia for Accessibility”, I had a teacher that really got under my skin. He had no plan for the class at all and he would just ask us what we wanted to do for the class. The first 5 weeks of class was an endless repeat of the teacher asking us what we wanted to do for the final, which was apparently going to be our entire grade. I decided to stop going to class and come back near the end of the semester when things were solidified. I popped in for one class in the middle of the semester and was amazed at what I heard.

The teacher obviously had no idea of what to teach so he was surfing the net looking for accessibility related materials. He was talking about assistive technologies and how there are many wonderful things that help disabled people to perform many more tasks than they could normally. He came across a link to a deaf chat site and he said, “Would you look at that. That is just fantastic that we now have technology that enables deaf people to be able to chat.” You would think that shortly after making such a statement, he would realize his folly. But no, he spent the 45 minutes that remained in class talking about it. I wanted to just yell at him, “DEAF PEOPLE CAN READ AND TYPE!!!” But I was also curious as to how far he would go on the topic before he eventually realized that deaf people can chat anywhere on the internet. He went on and on about how it was great that deaf people could now have a place where they were able to communicate and that if someone hadn’t thought to start this site deaf people couldn’t chat. As time progressed I wondered what my classmates were thinking about this lesson. Were they as purely annoyed as I was? One guy sitting across the room from me seemed to be the only person that felt as I did. But he did not share my curiosity for how far the ignorance would go. He raised his hand and, in an attempt to derail the Idiot Express, said, “Deaf people can chat anywhere on the internet. I think the only special thing about this site is that deaf people can chat about issues that concern deaf people with other deaf people.” I thought, “Well, he did it. This exciting ride is over.” Just then the kid sitting in front of me proclaimed that he thought the site utilized technology that converted typed words into sign language. As he said this the teacher grew even more excited and a few students joined in the discussion with enthusiasm. I looked at the guy in front of me and drained every ounce of restraint in my body to keep from punching him in the side of his head. So now the class is running with the idea that Deaf Person #1 types in a message on their keyboard, which then is converted to moving hand gestures and seen by Deaf Person #2. Deaf Person #2 then types in a message which is converted to sign language and sent back. If they can both read and type then why would there ever be a need for the sign language conversion?

I watched in amazement as the class discussed what a wonderful idea it was. I feared for society, as it was the largest gathering of purely ignorant people I have ever beheld in real life. (I haven’t ever been to a session of Congress.) I did my final project for the class and got an A. I learned more about the power of stupidity in groups than I did about accessibility.

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What an Ingrate

Looking back, I was either a very good student and my teacher loved me or I was a loudmouthed nightmare. I am not sure what makes me behave differently in different situations but I am sure that I really bothered my high school art teacher. She was much too patient with me for how obnoxious I was. I wasn’t mean or anything I was just a super smart alec and maybe sometimes I reached a mean level. For example, We did a calligraphy section and I turned in this masterpiece:

2822b

Sorry Mrs. Haney and thanks for teaching me art.

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The Real “Lunch Lady Land”

One day when I was in the ninth grade, I was eating food from the school cafeteria. It was a tray of school nachos. It didn’t taste too horrible, just as bad as you would expect from stale chips covered with questionable beef and ultra-processed cheese product. As I progressed to the bottom of the tray I noticed something that looked a little like an olive. At first I thought, “That’s strange. It’s an olive. I have never seen an olive in a school nacho tray before.” After further inspection I came to find it was the back shell of a cockroach. At that moment I seriously considered bulimia. Needless to say, I never ate a school lunch after that again in my life.

About a year after that just after school got out for the summer, I was walking home from open gym at the school basketball court. My route took me by the front steps of the high school near the cafeteria. When I was far away from the steps, it appeared as though the sidewalk was moving up ahead. As I got closer I found that it was roaches leaving the school by the millions. I felt like I was in a scene from “The Mummy” with those bugs that swarm and eat people. I could not get past the mass migration without stepping on a few thousand of them. This experience was truly disgusting and insured that myself and none of my posterity would ever eat at a school cafeteria again. Immediately following that, I would sometimes sing Adam Sandler’s “Lunch Lady Land” with the words “Sloppy Roach, Slop-a-Sloppy Roach” in the place of “Sloppy Joes”.

At another point in time, around the end of a school year. I was in our family kitchen and saw about five roaches. We lived near the school and, as evidenced by the previous experience, the roaches have no more nachos to swim in when school is out. So they would come to their summer home which was our house. As the aforementioned five roaches scurried under the garage door, I stepped on one and killed it. Then I swung the door to the garage open to hunt down the others. They ran past our washer and dryer over to our water heater. When I saw the closet for the water heater I turned around and ran away in fear. I grabbed a giant can of Raid and my little brothers with whatever they could find to kill roaches. When we returned to the battle ground it looked worse than before. The whole closet was crawling with roaches. I started to spray and my brothers started to swing. It felt very satisfying to watch the front line of roaches drop off of the wall as I sprayed them. It was a battle royale. I used an entire can and still did not have enough to kill all of the roaches. I started kicking them off the walls and crushing them. The fumes started to get to me and I had to retreat with my brothers. I like to think that there were about a million roaches that wouldn’t make it back to school in the fall because of us. But as we cleaned up with trash bags and dust pans later it was maybe in the thousands. They must have dragged away their wounded. In Texas the roaches are pretty gigantic. Of course, growing up I just thought it was a part of life that roaches were so big, nasty and everywhere you look. Of all the places I have lived those are still the worst roaches. Actually I have only seen three roaches outside of Texas and two came in a package that came from Texas. If someone dropped a nuclear bomb on Texas all that would be left is roaches and alcoholics.

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A Day at the Lake pt.1

I had pretty low expectations for the day as I climbed into my friends beefed up mustang. It was red with a big spoiler and some ground effects panels. My friend Blake had a nice sound system in there and a very powerful engine. We were headed with a big group to Lake Colorado City in Texas to go water skiing, tubing and such. Just riding to the lake in Blake’s car was enough fun for me and could only be improved upon if he let me sit on his lap like a 4 year old and move the steering wheel back and forth while driving. We got to the lake and a group of friends loaded into the boat and went out water skiing. Those of us that rode in Blake’s car just stayed and waded out in the water a little, just hanging out.

When the boat came back my friend Clint told us a bummer of a story. He was on the other side of the lake all set up in the water with skis, holding onto the rope, when he realized that he still had his keys in his pocket. He yelled to a friend on the boat and told him to catch his keys when he threw them to him. The driver of the boat did not hear him. Clint reared back and threw the keys just as the boat took off. Our friend on the boat watched as the keys, which were headed toward him, sank into the lake. Clint found a phone and asked his mom to drive an hour and a half or so to bring him some spare keys. As Blake heard this story, he reached in his pocket for his keys but they were gone. He retraced his steps and figured that his keys swam out of his pocket while he was just wading around a little in just past waist deep water. A bunch of us lined up to search the bottom of the lake in the spot where Blake had been when he lost his keys. As we got out where the water was waist deep some guys started to give up Blake kept searching until the water was at face level. I was taller than everyone else and went a little farther. No one found anything at all. I decided to give up too.

Now what happened next is a big reason for my belief in God, as it was a miracle. As I began to walk back to the edge of the lake where Blake was I felt like someone had slapped my brain. I suddenly knew that I was going to find those keys and I turned around. I swam out well past where the water was above my head and in an instant I felt that I should dive down at the spot where I was. As I went down in the brown, snake filled lake I reached out my hand. With my hand stretched out it felt like I was diving for a minute, but it was really a couple of seconds as the water was only eight or nine feet. When my hand hit the dirt at the bottom I felt something around my middle finger that felt like, oh I don’t know, maybe a key chain. I realized that I actually had Blake’s keys and I think I yelled out for joy under the water. I pushed off of the bottom at an angle towards shore and emerged from the murky water with my arm extended over my head holding the keys yelling like a lunatic. As I was running and yelling I saw Blake on the edge of the water. He turned toward me and when he realized what was going on he ran out into the water. He jumped up and I caught him. We then jumped around like Rocky and Apollo at the end of a training montage. (By the way Carl Weathers rules so he will represent me in the video.)

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Worst Vacation Ever

I didn’t want to go. I had made it perfectly clear several times that I was not going to enjoy a family trip to Atlanta during spring break. In spite of my efforts I still had to go. The actual vacation was pretty uneventful. The only slightly enjoyable thing was going to Stone Mountain which apparently has a disturbing history.

After being lugged around town for a week, I was finally excited to go home and get back to school. But wouldn’t you know, something went wrong with our old Dodge Ram 15 seater van. We spent a good portion of our last day in Atlanta sitting next to a Pep Boys while they took a look at our battery. All they did was charge it up and send us on our way.

The next morning when we left to go home we drove for about 45 minutes and then the car died. We sat around again while we got a new battery and then went 45 more minutes down the road. Oh guess what, the alternator is bad. We played in a swampy Alabama forest while the hard working gents at Sid’s Chop Shop fixed the alternator. When they were done it was time to stop for the night.

Then again, the next morning we headed out and we made it a little further down the road. This time we weren’t as lucky in our breakdown location and had to push the Megavan about a mile up the freeway to the next town. We waited for a tow truck at the mini-mart and then had the van taken to a dealership. My Dad rented something like a Suzuki Samurai to cram 10 people into and drive around town. At this stop the car broke because the bad alternator had blown the computer chip in the van. The part wouldn’t arrive until the next day so we stayed another night in Alabama.

In the morning we made much better time and made it into Louisiana. While heading through a swamp I felt like the van was shaking from side to side as we went along. I knew that it was a sign that a tire was going bad and told my Dad and brother that we should check it out. We didn’t check it out and continued down the road. A short while later there was a loud bang and our van swerved out of control. Luckily we got over to the side of the road without rolling or hitting any other vehicles. We got out and started playing in the swamp again while my Dad tried to use a puny car jack to lift the Megavan. The jack broke and we were left without any means of changing the tire. A tow truck happened by and lifted the back end of the van so we could put a spare on. We headed into town to buy another tire but all the tire places were closed. We spent the night there and got a new tire in the morning.

After we got the new tire we headed back into Texas. It was smooth sailing until we got near Abilene. There came a very loud grumbling from under the van. Oh joy, we get to stop again. The place we stopped said it was a bad catalytic converter and we all just jumped back in and headed home with the loud noise.

Not only did the vacation take up my spring break but I missed a few days of school and had a lot of make-up work to do. If any vacation ever tops that one as my worst it will most definitely be my last vacation.