Category: True Stories

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”.

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.

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.

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.