True Stories – Page 4 – Everyday Normal

January 26, 2009

Millennium Falcon

One night I was driving our family’s 1988 Honda Civic Wagon, which at that moment was packed to the gills with people. There were a bunch of my friends as well as my brother and his friend. My brother was in the very back where there was no seat. A truck pulled up very close behind us and the next thing I knew was that they were opening their doors and getting out to head for us. As the car in front of me drove away I quickly pulled ahead. The people from the truck got back into the truck and followed us onto a larger busy street. I made a quick left turn, in front of a group of oncoming cars, off of the busy street onto a side street. (Yes we could have gotten out and beat the people up, but I have always enjoyed a good car chase.)The oncoming cars gave us a chance to put some distance between us and the truck. I made another quick right turn down a residential street and when we got near a place to turn off of that street, we saw the truck come onto the other end of the street. I turned left off of that street and then immediately left again down the alley for that street. I got about 40 yards down the alley, took my foot off the brake after stopping and turned off the lights. As we watched to see if the truck would turn behind us I said, “I feel like Han Solo hiding in the cave that was actually a giant worm.” We saw the truck drive by the end of the alley and all felt relieved. Someone said that my brother had flipped off the people in the truck from the very back of the car.

Just after this was proposed as the reason for the chase one of my friends yelled out, “They’re coming down the alley!!!” I took off as fast as a fully weighed down Honda Civic wagon could. About half way down the alley there was what appeared to be a turn for an intersecting alley. I took the right turn and was surprised to find us traveling through a city park. There was a house near the edge of the park and I headed straight for it in hopes that I could use the driveway. But the park was on the opposite side of the house from the driveway. The front yard for this home consisted of some diamond shaped openings for trees cut out of cobblestone. I ran over two of these diamonds and then headed for the curb. It seemed like the highest curb that had ever been crafted. As the Honda flew off of it I got a very sick feeling in my stomach as did everyone else in the car did I am sure. While in flight I thought of the scene in Ferris Bueller’s day off when the car attendants caught air in Cameron’s Father’s car with the Star Wars soundtrack playing over it. We hit the street with a loud crash and scrape followed by the sound of a muffler dragging on the ground.

We drove down the street a little and pulled over to inspect the damage. There really wasn’t any new damage. The muffler had never been properly attached as long as I had driven the car but rather, was held up from the ground by a rubber strap. I reattached the strap and we headed out. From then on, we called that car the Millennium Falcon and I would make Chewbacca noises randomly while driving.

January 16, 2009April 11, 2024

My Brother Jared, The Hero – Setting the Record Straight

When Jared was younger, in addition to keeping me awake at night, he would enjoy playing with fire. He started a fire in the garage, burned a good amount of money, started a giant tumble weed on fire under a power line and many, many more. One day I told him to hold his hands out in a cupping shape. Then I filled his hands with Off insect repellent. I took a lighter to it and told him to hold still. I had done this trick to myself and thought it was cool. The pool of spray would burn down to your hands and get warmer till the spray had burned off, then you just hold your hands on the floor and snuff out the fire. When I lit Jared up he flipped out. He jumped up and let the spray out of it’s pool and it ran down his arms a bit and all over the back of his hands. He ran around flailing his arms like a madman with fire blazing from his limbs. I grabbed a blanket and told him to run back to me. We put the blanket around his arms and stopped the fire. No harm done. He was shaken up for a while and nothing seemed to catch fire around our house after that. Jared did not fear fire at all and after the Off experience he had a respect for fire.

Let’s move forward a few years. Jared was now in high school and I was visiting my family. I was sitting in a chair when Jared came home from school. He ran through the front door very quickly and headed back to hide in the bathroom. As he passed me he said, “If any reporters or anything come to the door, they want to talk about a fire, tell them I am not here.” A couple of minutes later, lo and behold, some reporters found their way to our house with notepads and a couple of cameras. In my mind I thought, “Did Jared light the school on fire?” After the reporters had gone I went back to talk to Jared. He told me that he had been in Chemistry class when his teacher was teaching about chemicals and such, when something someone was using caught on fire and spread like, well, like a wildfire. There was one girl who was near to the flames who was engulfed. Jared said he got a hold of the emergency blanket and ran to her. He bundled her up and took her out of the class. When he got out of the class where everyone had run to, he saw another student named David who had taken his shirt off, because it caught fire, and was stomping around the hall cussing his head off. Jared left the girl and took the blanket back in to put out the fire. He told me that the fire had gotten pretty huge and he threw the blanket down on part of it, but it just swirled around the blanket and almost got him. He said the smoke was really unbearable and he decided to head out of there. (I seem to recall that he put out fires on other students as well.) When I saw Jared, he had no hair on his forearms and the hairs higher up his arm had curled ends. He said that he went to the football field house when the reporters came for him. He told the coaches to get rid of them. Then he bolted out of there to come home. He never took any recognition for what he had done. The guy named David that was cussing in the hallway was recognized as the hero of the incident for some reason. I think he was given some scholarship stuff and named as the honoree in some annual local award. I think he even got the key to the city. I have always wished that Jared had talked to the reporters. But I can’t say that I personally would have wanted any attention if I were in his shoes. It is easier to tell him to do it. Jared should have been in item number four on this list. I always thought Jared would be a firefighter or some kind of crocodile hunter. With this incident he pushed me more towards believing the former.

So now, almost a decade late, I give Jared a semi-public piece of recognition. He saved a girl’s life and took no credit. If you see him, shower him with praise. He is a hero.

Full Text

December 8, 2008

Bad Boss

At one point I wanted to do construction for work. I enjoyed shop class in high school and I liked the drafting section so much that the teacher had to make extra assignments for me to keep me busy. While in college I was at talking to a man who owned a construction company when he asked me how much I was making at the telephone survey place I was working at. I told him $7.35 an hour and he started to laugh with another man who was with us. They talked for a little about many people starting at $14 an hour and the like. He told me to come by his office and he would give me a job and he said, with the laugh slightly reappearing, “Oh we can beat $7.35.” I was interested for sure. So I quit my other job and went on down. He gave me the initial talking to about construction and such then he sent me out on my first day of work. I came back and asked him, “What am I going to be paid?” He seemed to not remember laughing at my old wage at all and he asked me again how much I had been making. I told him $7.35 and he came back with “Well, we can put you at $8.00.” $8.00???? I had been a supervisor at a telephone survey company for $7.35. At that job I was inside all day, no manual labor, I got to associate with people all day and it was generally an enjoyable experience at the company for someone who doesn’t have to make phone calls. Now I was going to be working like a dog, sweating and hurting, outdoors many times and in many strange and dangerous places for an extra $0.65 an hour. Remember he laughed at my old wage. $0.65 does not warrant a laughable difference in wage. Especially with the difference in workload.

Well, I kept working for him for peanuts. I learned a few things that everyone should know about how to build and repair things. After working for him for a while he sent me to do a job at an Air Force base. On the base workers must get paid Davis and Bacon wages which is just a minimum that the government requires people building stuff for them get. I was excited as I was to get about $13.00 an hour. I also had to drive a couple of hours to get there everyday. My boss would only give me gas money for half of my trips. I took the early morning drive many times across ice and snow which slowed me down even more. The first paycheck did not include a gas reimbursement and I was told it would be added up near the end of the project. For the last two weeks of the project I put in 15 hours of overtime and was really excited for my check. When I got my check there was no gas reimbursment and my overtime hours had been taken off. I brought it up with my boss and he said I was going to have to talk to the guy who he had put in charge of the project. Like a sucker I just waited till I saw the other guy, which didn’t really happen unless it was a bad time to talk. Then I got laid off because the company had no more projects. I was soured on the construction business because my boss was an idiot and a liar.

November 25, 2008

Work Work Work

My Grandpa taught my siblings and I what a good days work was. When I was thirteen we lived with our Grandparents for a bit and I cannot remember a Saturday when we did not have some project that we were assigned to do. Our tasks included helping Grandpa fix up a car for our Aunt, building a fence, helping to move an old shack to be used as a barber shop and of course, the usual mowing and caring for the yard. I appreciate the lessons learned now, but at the time it felt pretty brutal.

Flash forward a few years when I had moved closer to my grandparents to go to school. My brother Cole and I went down to our Grandparents house for Thanksgiving. We brought along our friend Dave and spent the night in the basement. In the morning we went out to throw a football around. We went to the front yard which had some snow in it. We were tossing the old pigskin around when my Grandpa came out and said, “You should go to the backyard where there is less snow.” We all thought, “Yeah that makes sense.” But there was still something in the back of our minds that didn’t seem right. Dave can smell manual labor from 10 miles away and disappeared into the house without saying anything. Cole and I went around to the back and hadn’t even thrown a pass when Grandpa said, “Hey, while you’re back here, come give me a hand with this.” We dropped the ball and went to help. It seemed like a 2 minute task. He wanted us to load an old fridge onto a trailer. We loaded it up easily enough then Grandpa asked us to drive it over to his shed and unload it. We got to the shed and we had to reorganize the shed with him. You can see how things just snowball.

Well, after we were done we went back into the house to find Dave. He was in the basement playing Grandma’s video games. Dave said he knew what was coming so he got out of there. That’s just fine, especially since he was a guest and shouldn’t have to work, it’s just funny that he disappeared so quickly.

We wouldn’t really remember just throwing a football around, but we definitely remember the time Grandpa tricked us into working on Thanksgiving morning.

October 28, 2008

I Don’t Golf Anymore

I used to like to go golfing every now and then, but now, for me, it has lost its luster and any enjoyment that I may have once had is gone. This desire to hit a ball and then walk in the direction that it went didn’t slowly wither away, but rather was killed inside of me one day as I was starting a round with a friend. Come along and I will tell you the tale.

I wasn’t an extremely frequent golfer and as such, I did not see any real reason to purchase my own set of clubs. It would have been nice to have clubs that would work better for someone with a 6 foot 7 inch frame but I thought that borrowing a set of clubs from my friend was fine. He had one driver that was longer than the others which was my weapon of choice when whacking balls in various directions. For some reason, that I will not tell now, his long driver was missing on the day in question when I began this round with another friend.

I watched my friend tee off with great ease and then his brother-in-law, who came along with us, hit a good ball as well. I set up my ball and chose the longest driver that my friend had remaining in his bag when I borrowed it. I squared up and got in my usual not-so-confident stance. I felt like I was really bending over to reach the ball though. I reared back and swung a mighty swing. WHIFF!!! Nothing but air. Ouch, that’s embarrassing.

Oh well, it happens sometimes. I bent my knees a little more to really get down there and lined up for another shot. As I did this, two sweet old ladies pulled up behind us in their golf cart. I pulled back for my redemption shot and let her rip. I could have sworn that the ball went flying for about a mile, but when I looked down at my feet, there it was.

My friend and his brother-in-law had a good little laugh at that one and I think I heard one of the old ladies chuckle a little. At this moment I swore that I would not strike out. I tried to realign my chakra and calm down for a good solid hit. I swung again and missed.

Both of the old ladies laughed out loud at this miss which just encouraged my friend’s laughter more. After this I gave up on good form and control over where the ball goes. I decided, it was better to go after a stray ball than to look the fool again. I went down for a sloppy fourth swing and missed completely.

The laughter from the third miss had not died down yet and so only continued and grew louder with this fourth. I grew more frantic. I had to get that ball out of there so I could get away from these once sweet old ladies and away from the evil laughter.

With my heart rate raised and all my confidence crushed and murdered, I took an even more sloppy and hurried swing. It should be no surprise that I missed again a fifth time. Was I going to strike out twice? Through the roaring laughter I took a one armed swing which was once again errant.

I had struck out, not only once, but twice. For my seventh try I decided to settle down and maybe get a real hit in, but to no avail. Both of the old ladies had fallen out of their cart and were rolling on the ground with tears pouring from their eyes (At least I felt like they had.) I am certain that my friend and his brother-in-law really did have tears from laughing. It felt like I was at Def Comedy Jam but there were no comedians.

This was it, my eighth try. I was determined to not fail again. When you put your mind and will to it you can do anything. I pulled back and pushed all of the scorn and shame that I had felt down my arms to the end of the short club I was using. It swung like a wrecking ball towards a gigantic building that could not be missed. I was swinging for every starving child in the world, every abused woman and anyone who had ever been trodden down in this life. There was a special power in this swing that was going to solve all the world’s problems when it hit that little dimpled representation of all that is evil in this world. As you can tell, by the fact that you still have problems, I missed. I picked up the ball, threw it as far as I could and quickly walked away from the howling laughter and searing cackles.

I don’t golf anymore.

October 22, 2008

Jumping Phase

As someone who was once a young boy I must say I am guilty as charged in this article.

It was an exciting time in life. Everything in the world was up. I had discovered that I could jump and actually touch things located higher than my usual reach. I must also bring attention to the fact that this stage also included, for me, the desire to brace my body between two walls in hallways and climb upward. This joyful and wondrous time came quickly to a close when I one day hit my head on the ceiling fan.

I saw two of my brothers fighting in the living room on the other side of the coffee table. In an effort to get to the other side of the table as quickly as possible to break up the fight, I jumped over the table which was below the fan. The fan was on and spinning at top speed and after my forehead hit the blade I fell to the ground hitting my head on the corner of the coffee table on the way down. This did break up the fight as my brothers were startled by all the ruckus and then began to laugh at me.

October 21, 2008

Company Policies #4 and 5

Dry Ice Bombs

A few years back I was a huge fan of dry ice bombs. My friends and I would go around putting them in all kinds of strange places just for fun. The first time we did it, for some strange reason , we went to the local duck pond to set them off. We packed in the dry ice and threw the bottle out in to the pond. When we threw it we threw it to a clear area, but the ducks quickly gathered around the bottle. I guess if people are throwing things in the water it is usually bread. The ducks were hanging out around the bottle and we were waiting for it to explode. It seemed to take 20 minutes but it eventually blew sending ducks flapping and quacking in all directions. I still wonder how many we killed or if they all survived the blast.

We then went on to try several more things. We buried bombs in playground sandboxes and watched as they exploded with a muffled sound and sent dirt flying into the air. We got some helium balloons and floated them over peoples houses. We exploded the contents of a port-a-potty all over its walls. We would leave them on peoples doorsteps in the middle of the night.

This was all done pre-9/11 and I would hate to know what kind of huge massive trouble you could get in doing this after 2001. We almost got caught a couple of times. Once we were using hydrochloric acid bombs at a park late at night. We buried a 3 liter bomb under the sand and waited for a really long time. It never went off so my friend Rambo pulled it out of the sand and it was huge. It looked like it would hold 6 liters of fluid now. Rambo decided to throw it down at the ground next to him. I thought he had gone insane and that he was going to be seriously injured. Somebody up there likes him though because when he threw it there was no explosion, but rather the bottle sprung a leak that sent it flying into the air spewing a mist of acid behind it. It disappeared above the level of the lights and it felt like it was in the air for a solid minute. It was really probably only up for 10 or 12 seconds which is still impressive. For that time my two friends and I were looking alertly upward waiting for the bottle to hit one of us on the head. It came down a few feet behind Rambo and we looked at the deformed bottle and laughed about Rambo’s death wish.

We decided to give a glass bottle a try. We put in all the stuff, closed the bottle and then took cover in my friends car. After another long unfruitful wait we decided to shoot my friends pellet gun at it. He went back by his trunk and was taking aim to shoot when I saw a police car driving up from the other side of the park. I yelled at him that the cops were coming and he threw his gun back in the trunk and jumped back in the car. The police turned on their lights and we didn’t even move an inch. They had us get out of the car one at a time. They had me put my hands behind my head and they grabbed my hands with a fistful of hair then asked if I had anything in my pockets. I told them about my pocket knife and was anticipating getting my face slammed into the ground as had happened before with police. They set me down in a row next to my friends. We were all pretty close to the glass bottle that hadn’t exploded yet. We began to hear a hissing noise from pressure being released and I was just praying that the bottle would not explode with the police right there. The hissing continued for a couple of minutes and then stopped. Inside the car I had 2 bottles full of acid that we hadn’t mixed yet and when the cops let us back in the car after everything there was only one bottle.

The other close call we had was when we vandalized someones house and left a couple of bombs on their doorstep. We drove away and waited for the bombs to go off. The first one went off but we never heard the second one. We drove away in a hurry. We passed by a while later and saw police cars and an ambulance out in front of the house. Our imaginations ran wild with thoughts of someone getting burned by acid or picking up the bomb and blowing off a finger. We later found out that nothing happened. We were very lucky and very stupid.

October 10, 2008

There Goes the Neighborhood

Yesterday at lunch time, my wife informed me that a police officer came to the door and told her to stay in the house and that they “wouldn’t have to evacuate, yet.” And the SWAT team was coming in. Apparently some guys had broken into a house at 2 in the morning and cracked the residents over their heads with a bat. Then they dragged them to the living room and demanded drugs and money while pointing a gun at them. They took a bunch of electronics and told them not to call the cops or they would comeback and kill them. When the perps left the family called the cops. The suspects saw a police car and turned into a trailer park where they got a flat tire. They abandoned the vehicle with everything they had stolen and hid in a backyard. They then got away from there and went to the house of one of their brothers which happens to be in my neck of the woods. That’s where the SWAT team came in. I went home to find my street blocked off and tons of cops and reporters everywhere. I parked down another street and went and asked one of our local newsmen how I could get up to my house. He said he had no idea so I just jumped my neighbors back fence and ran through their backyard to get to mine. (My back fence is a big sound-proof wall so I can’t climb it.) I got in my house and started filming and photographing stuff.

This really makes me want to play counter-strike.

October 9, 2008

Company Policy #3

More from my first job at a CD Warehouse:

In the store we had what we called the “Crap Bin”. It was our 99¢ bin. It was full of CD’s that were from really bad artists, CD’s that we had too many of, or ones that were just in bad condition. There was a lot of Hootie and the Blowfish, Snow, Green Day, Soul Asylum and other stuff like that. The crap bin just filled up, always waiting for that moment of exhilarating joy when someone would want to hear Colour Me Badd again.

Now as the crap bin continually accumulated more CD’s we needed to find a way to reduce the size of the crap bin. We thought of implementing a buy one get one 99 cent CD free promotion, and we tried improving the appearance of the bin and more prominently displaying them but nothing worked. The CD’s in that bin kept growing. One day John was inspired as he remembered the store across town that also buys CD’s. It was a store called Hastings and they had a relatively small collection of used CD’s. They didn’t generally offer as much money as we did for used CD’s. They were known for giving 3 dollars for the good stuff and we usually gave 5 bucks a pop for good material. John and my friend, Rob, who worked there too, loaded up about 30 CD’s and headed over to Hastings. Rob went up to the counter and John went inconspicuously over to the magazines and hid himself, as the Hastings management knew who he was. Rob went over to the counter and offered his stack of crappy CD’s to the girl at the counter. The girl instantly turned around and asked the manager for help. The manager began grilling Rob about the origin of so many CD’s that were from such a wide range of genres. Rob explained that he was very eclectic in his musical taste and that some of the CD’s were his sisters. After filling out an information form Rob looked around for John and saw him hiding his face behind a magazine. The girl told Rob that she could only give him 30 dollars for the entire stack of CD’s. They left with the satisfaction of getting 1 dollar for each of those CD’s from the 99 cent bin. Upon their return they relayed the whole story to me and we all laughed our heads off. I said that I wished I could have been there, John said, “Oh, you’ll get your turn.”

One week later we picked out another stack of about 30 CD’s and carefully positioned them in the stack so as to have the recognizable artists in strategic places. I walked into Hastings with my stack of CD’s and John came in a minute after me. I went to the counter to find one girl behind it and I looked around for a manager only to not find one in sight. I began commenting to the girl on how cool her job was and trying to make small talk. I had to fill out an information slip to make sure they could find me if it turned out that the CD’s were stolen. After I did that the girl handed me 60 bucks. I almost started laughing out loud. I kept my composure until I got outside and met John at his car. After that we just referred to our trips as “The Hastings Scandal”.

Isn’t it a real shame that no one will probably ever know the excitement of selling CD’s to a competitor?