A Letter to Bewildered Friends Concerning the Slow Decline to Sudden Danger

Dear the soon to be judgmental,

A few years ago I needed new brake pads.  I had an older Buick.  That purple wine colored model with the huge trunk.  I'm sure you've seen a few around your town.  Good enough cars but not the height of fashion or performance.  It got the job done for longer than it probably should have and I actually ended up really missing it when it finally died.

Anyway, I'm not talking about when it died.  I'm talking about when I needed new brake pads once.  I had heard the tell tale signs of squeaking and squealing.  I'm not ignorant to a car's needs and knew exactly what I had to do.  I needed to take it in and get the brake pads replaced.  Just take it in.  I even had a place I liked to go.  They recognized me and everything.  So, all I had to do was take it in.  Just take it in, Stephen.  Take it in, Stephen.  Stephen, take it in!  Stephen!  Ste-goddamnit take it to the place to get the thing done!

But I didn't.

I don't want you to get the wrong impression about that statement.  It's not like I waited until they were really squealing loud before I finally gave in.  Nor did I industriously decide to change them myself as a self reliant member of society.  No, see, I rode them, as is, until they were destroyed.  Let me share with you a little bit about what that's like.

At first there was an air splintering squeal that would mellow into a low metallic shutter.  It was the shutter of what was left of the pads and the mount they sat on, also the metal clips that hold the brake pads in place, pushing raw against the metal rotor.  Have you ever heard a train stop?  It's like that.  It's JUST like that.  It's not a single screech, but a few separate pitches of screech all at once.  It was actually a screech NOTE being played from the undercarriage of my car, and oddly enough, not entirely unpleasant.  It was like a loud flute.

When I first set out from a cold start the car actually stopped better than it ever had before.  Cold metal hitting cold metal doesn't give very well and the car would practically stun to a halt.  Then, friction would take hold of the situation and start creating heat.  And more heat.  If slow moving cold metal stunned to a stop, fast moving hot metal sort of glided to a roll, until it slowed, then caught and stopped.  So, the faster I was going the further back I would have to start applying the break.  Remember how I said it sounded like a train stopping?  Well, it kind of felt like a train stopping too.

This "honeymoon" phase of not having break pads lasted a month or so.  I could get around pretty much the same as I always did, but with a lot of forethought.  It actually kept my mind focused on driving like never before because I had to watch for every little subtle change in the traffic to plan that far ahead.  I found that paying attention more meant I had to stop less, and for a while everything was just fine.  Then that heat and friction did what they always do and started to eat away at the metal that was being used to stop about a ton of steel going sometimes upwards of 70 miles an hour.

Yeah, 70 miles an hour.  Don't worry, I'm going to address that, just let me get this out first.

The grinding came next.  At first it was relatively smooth considering what was happening.  It was even and consistent like an axe being sharpened on a stone wheel.  But applying the brakes was starting to mean less and less to the performance of the car.  I rolled faster and for longer, even when pushing the pedal completely to the floor.  I started taking mostly side roads and avoiding long trips.  I started doing things other than applying the brake to slow the car down.  Swerving a little side to side to bleed off speed.  Letting off the gas when going up hills.  Even pulling the car into the grass a little to let the rough terrain kill my momentum.  All the while the grinding got worse, vibrating the car with such a low, sick growl that I couldn't tell if it was the car groaning at the effort, or my stomach from the experience.

Let's take a quick breath.

This is crazy right?  This is the story of a crazy person.  Yeah, I agree.  At no point when this was happening did I think I was doing something good.  At the time we were having financial trouble, and I was convinced that there was no way to afford break pads, and that this was the only option I had left.  I kept the severity of it from everyone.  If I had let slip even a hint of what was happening to any friend or family member they would have instantly it fixed.  I can't even explain where my head was at and why I had practically invented this cross for myself to bear.  Something deep inside told me to endure my situation and that I was doing what I had to to keep us afloat.

Which is crazy as hell.  Don't ever let your car get like that, like ever.  Seriously, someone will help you.  Hell, if you know me, I'll help you.  If anything this is a cautionary tale about being a stupid person that doesn't ask for help.  Ok, anyway, let's hop back in.

The grind quickly turned into what I can only describe as what it was.  The sound of a piece of machinery SCOOPING metal from a trench made in another piece of machinery.  The mounts where all but destroyed and the calipers, which hold the pads around the rotor and are involved in the "squeeze" to slow down, were starting to take the hit.  What remained only acted as a shield to allow the calipers themselves to dig into the rotors as they spun hot dust into the air.  It must have been the reverse of making a clay ashtray on a potter's wheel.  Or like a metal lathe shaving away all the unwanted layers of the only surface that can be manipulated on a motor vehicle to directly slow it's momentum.

Using the brakes had become a supplemental step in how I drove that car.  The brakes were something that kept the car stopped after I had already managed to slow it down through all my previously stated means.  I dreaded driving.  Absolutely dreaded it.  The back roads weren't so bad but I had to navigate downtown traffic on a daily basis, including getting into and back out of a parking garage.

The posts of metal that were digging into the rotors on a daily basis had started to groove the plates and wear down little pot holes in their path so when applied forcefully the car would buck and jerk and rattle and roar until finally the groove was deep enough and I was slow enough that the brakes would hard lock and the car would kind of skip to a stop.

Imagine dealing with that long enough that you started to get good at it.  My dread of driving started to melt away with the routine of successfully driving.  The new way I had to adapt to was becoming all but habit.  I could shoot up, yes SHOOT up, the ramps in the parking garage, accelerating as I went higher and then whip around two corners jerk through a gap between floors, twist the wheel at an empty space, jam on the "brakes", and ride my rodeo horse of a car right into the cavity, lurching to a stop inches from the concrete wall.

During this, I don't know, episode, of my life we bought a house and moved in.  I know this because the first time I turned down the road to view the house before buying it it took me forever to drive the .2 miles I needed to go because I hadn't seen the house yet and didn't know how far back I need to start taking evasive maneuvers.

Driving home, to that house, via the interstate, going 80 miles an hour, is when the robust system of luck and fairy dust finally broke down and 50% of the pedals in my car became absolutely useless.  I was about a mile away from my exit so I jammed down on the break to start my descent.  There was a brief moment that the car pulled back and then it shot forward again with an anti-climactic pop.  The last of the metal had been scoop out and as  the calipers were hydraulically pressed inward.  Now they only rested comfortably in a perfectly shaped trough of their making.  Happy little hermit crabs, snug in their homes.

Queue my life instantly halting as the full situation dawns on me like the beginning of a Road Runner cartoon. I queried my mind, my trusted companion for years, for suggestions and it returned nothing.  I could have, scratch that, SHOULD have put on my emergency lights, pulled off the road, and let the car slow down.  Then I should have called a tow truck and had my wife come get me from the mechanic.  That sounds reasonable and sane doesn't it?  I bet you all would do that thing.  It's nice and human.

No, the lever was jerked down on the one armed bandit in my mind I call "stress related solutions" and the reels came up, "go, for, it."  So, it was decided, by me, that my best option was to try and get home, with NO FUCKING BRAKES AT ALL, GOING 80 MILES AN HOUR!

My exit was coming up, but score, there's a hill right before it and it's long and curved.  I took the exit, and viewed my first obstacle: an almost 270 degree left turn through a red light.  Couldn't do that, but there's a way to slide off to the right.  I had to take it even though it lead away from my house.  To the right does, however, lead straight into train tracks which were thankfully devoid of an actual train that day. I took a little hop over the raised tracks and looked down the road at the few driveways I could see.  Cruising down past the houses I had one goal: steep driveway.  And, as if queued from off stage, one almost immediately appeared.  A perfect specimen that was about 40 degrees up.

I jerked the wheel into the empty drive way.  The sudden turn bled a lot of speed and the incline took the rest.  I let the car glide up the driveway and it hung comically at the top for a second and then I started to fall backwards.  I used the momentum to complete my three point turn and got pointed back in the direction of my house.  I then had to use the gas to push myself towards home which felt ludicrous after I'd just had to use GRAVITY to stop myself.  So, I push back the way I came and I got across the tracks again, and got through the light that had thwarted me the first time and start up one side of the overpass.  The hill slowed me down again a good bit, but my heart sank when I crested the apex and saw not only a red light at where I needed to turn left, but cars stacked behind it and traffic flowing freely on the crossroad.

I said before I'm not completely ignorant about cars, and that's true.  I know all sorts of little bits of trivia about how it all works together, I just don't have much experience with repair and upkeep other than topping off fluids and replacing burned out lights or clogged air filters and replacing what feels like over a hundred tires in my life time.  Something I do know, and also knew back then, was that when you put your car in park an actual physical pin is pushed between the teeth of the gears so that they are completely restricted from spinning.  It's called a pawl and it looks about the size of a big key.  Your brakes are just gripping the wheels but there's not obstruction, only friction, but with the parking break a piece of metal has been laid down between other pieces of metal and it locks the whole system.

I was rolling uncontrollably towards a group of cars.  There was no fancy little driveway trick here, I just needed to stop.  There was only one other thing I could think of that would stop the car from moving forward.  There was a slight hesitation as my mind played out the picture of a thin piece of metal breaking off and getting twisted around in the churning fluid of my transmission.  I pulled onto the grass to my right, and I through the car into park at about 35 mph.

Jee-zuz Christ.

It sounded like I was dry firing a Gatling gun.  I thought the brakes had been making a racket.  No sir, THIS was a noise to write home about.  I was SURE I was listening to my transmission act as a circular saw as it cut deftly through the tiny, insignificant parking pin.  Or worse, the pin was made of some kind of undestructium and was shearing the teeth off the gear.  I could only hope that it slowed me enough to keep me off the road.  The buzz was blasting away my sanity as I watched the ditch (my LITERAL last ditch effort to stop) get closer and closer.  And then the car stalled and locked and skid to a quick stop in the muddy grass.

At that moment I didn't pray, because I don't pray, but I did apologize profusely to my poor Buick Century. I should never have let it get this far, I knew that now, and if she could just limp home, just 1.3 miles, I would take care of her.  I promised.

She started back up with the first turn of the key.  I waited for a giant lull in traffic and I pulled out and drove down the road.  I took the corner onto my street and I coasted home under the power of the idling engine.  I rolled to an exhausted stop in our gravel driveway.  I put her back in park (it still worked!), and I turned her off.

Silence.  Just pure silence.  The silence of space.  The silence of calm.  The silence of a baby after it's cried itself to sleep.

The car sat right there where it had rolled to a stop for a while before a friend of ours came out and swapped our the rotors and calipers (actually just one caliper if you can believe it), and put fresh break pads on.  He also calibrated the rear brakes so that they were actually catching the inside of the drum instead of doing absolutely nothing, as they had been the entire time this was going on.

"Oh, right," I said.  "I'm supposed to have four of these."  He gave me that look that men give one another when they know someone has survived something IN SPITE of themselves.  And, he only charged us for parts.  He's a really good guy.

So, why?  Right?  Just why any of it.  I don't know.  I honestly don't know why I went through that.  Was there a part of me that was terrified of being the reason we had to spend money?  Was there a part of me that was just THAT lazy?  Dear god, was there a part of me that was just curious to see what would happen?  How far I could take it?

All of the above, I think.  I could have gotten the money somewhere.  I'm lazy but not THAT lazy.  I had to have known that eventually I was going to end up in a situation exactly like the one that happened.  I've tried to distill down a reason or a thought process and there just isn't one.  The recorders were turned off for this one.  I remember actions completely devoid of intent.  It's like when people describe being possessed.  I could see myself being a complete idiot, but I couldn't do anything about it.

Also, I would be lying if I said I didn't look back on all that happened, the exciting climax especially, with a sense of adventure.  I've been of the mind for a while that for an adventure to count there has to be at least a small risk of danger.  Well, then a huge risk of danger should do it, right?

It's something out of a pulp novel or a bad movie.  The brakes are out?  Are you serious?  But, I mean, I DID that.  Something happened to me in real life that is considered a movie cliche'.

I'm sorry if I sound excited by that, because it was actually pretty awful.  It was stupid and dangerous and irresponsible to myself, my family, and the other people on the road.  It was all around a pretty dipshit thing to do, and the fact it took MONTHS to get to that point is just, well, we can start with embarrassing and work through the worse ones as we go.

But.

But, at the same time, it is a priceless and irreplaceable experience in my life.  I could have wrecked my car. I could have been arrested.  I could have hurt myself.  I could have died.  But NONE of that happened.  I made it home.

I made it home.

God, just breathe in that air.  Breathe in that air of a planet where stupidity and triumph can live together in harmony.  Where things can go to hell and you can survive.  Where it can even be your fault and you can still survive.  Where you can make mistakes and still make it home.  That's the electric, rarefied that air gusts past you, only for a moment, after you've had an adventure, no matter how ridiculous the circumstance.

Sincerely,
Chiggie Von Richthofen

A Letter to The Wilderness Concerning Hypersleep

Dear vast, untapped thicket of my near and distant future,

I'm 29.  Right now when I'm writing this, I'm 29.  I feel older, but then how the hell could someone know what they feel like when they've only ever felt younger?  So, I guess I DON'T feel younger than 29.  I can say that with confidence.

I want to talk to you about how I've been having to use a machine to breath at night for the last few months.

I'm not severely injured or even really sick.  I suffer from the "don't work rights" which plague so many hard working Americans.  When I go to sleep my "stuff" doesn't "work right" and I stop breathing.  Like, a lot.  Like, enough that when the doctor looked at the sleep study results she furrowed her brow and said, "I'm going to call the medical supply place myself.  Right now.  And, you need to go today."

It's interesting isn't it?  You're alive almost 30 years, thinking that you function more or less the way you should, and then someone in a lab coat, younger than you, says, oh yeah, you'll be needing a sleep robot right away!  Can't be trusting you to stay alive just with the use of your own body can we?

Suddenly.  A little computerized compressor, a water tank, a hose, a mask with neoprene straps and I look like I'm ready for a bacta-tank every night.  It's not as big of an ordeal as the sleep study setup was.  That was a bigger mask (it actually rubbed the skin off my nose), a larger unit, wires coming off of my head and chest, a two way com system, and the inability to stop what was happening.  No hopping up to take a leak or get a drink of water.  The study was like, well, being studied, I guess.  Also, my CPAP ebbs and flows with my breathing, while the one at the study just pushed constantly so I had to fight to breath out, which was not pleasant.

All in all the little CPAP unit is not that bad.  I even took it with me on a trip and it wasn't a huge pain in the ass to travel with.  They even have special rules about assisted breathing apparati at the airport to make it LESS of a hassle to have it with you.  It's easy to clean.  It's easy to use and adjust. The mask is relatively comfortable and everyone involved has been very helpful.  Most of it was even covered by insurance.

So, why am I unhappy with the change?  Don't I feel better?  I suppose I do.  I can feel myself a little less on edge lately and I don't nod off at bad times like I've done my whole life.  Aren't I glad that my heart isn't under stress?  Sure, that's good to know.  I've been a little more health conscious lately, so this is one less thing to worry about.  So, what's the big deal?

The big deal is that I need a robot to sleep!

Having a robot do something for you is great.  I delight in robotic things.  I even still enjoy using our electric can opener.  It evokes such deep, thought out quotes from me as, "isn't this thing nuts?  I opens cans!"  I love robots; I know this about myself.  Something else I know is that I get a kick out of robots, mostly, because the ones I deal with on a daily basis are not required for me to function.  They are a luxury or a novelty.  I do have an electric can opener, but 9 times out of 10 when I need to open a can in my kitchen I use my Leatherman.  It's there with me all the time and I don't have to hunt for the right thing or worry about where it goes.  It goes in my pocket.

That's how I like to live.  I have a few things I carry with me all the time that I consider needed and that frees me up to consider just about everything else a convenience.  Now, obviously this has a limit.  I need a place to live.  I need something to keep my food cold.  I need something to heat my water up.  These are not luxuries, and I can't put them in my pocket, but deep in the back of my mind I know that those items are so common that I'll surely make due along the way, and if need be, I could fashion what I needed from things I found.  Make a fire, build a bivy, what have you.  Making ice would be tricky, but if you walk far enough North it just falls from the sky.

Is this kind of an extreme way to look at the world?  Who's to say?  No, that's an expression.  It means nobody knows.  No, I know you think you know, but--OK it just means shut the hell up!  It's fine.  Anyway.

There's a part of me, a big part, that likes knowing that in the case that I lost everything, and was left with bare hands on bare earth, that I could still make it.  That I could fashion an existence out of what was around me.  It's a romantic day dream I like to get lost in from time to time, and also a mental toolbox I like to work on when the mood strikes.  Learning how to live with as little as possible, even going out and trying it, can be a deeply rewarding experience.  I also don't mind what it's done for my perspective on most things in life.

Remember Crocodile Dundee?  Remember how lame you thought he was?  Yeah, well I'm not you, and I friggin' loved that guy, and wanted to be him for a good part of my young life.  I'm sure you all know someone, or ARE someone, who shares the idea that if you needed to drop everything and go play Jeremiah Johnson, after a bit of fumbling around, you'd eventually be able to.

Enter: THE ROBOT THAT I NEED TO SLEEP.

What an antithesis to the romance of the Undiscovered Country.  I'll be perfectly healthy out in the bush.  I just need distilled water.  Oh, and air filters.  Oh, and anti-bacterial soap.  Oh, and fucking electricity! Also, I need a flat bed that keeps my spine straight, and a pillow, but not like a big pillow because I have to be able to align my head right to allow my throat to open, but not like a super small one either otherwise--STOP!  Just, for the love of Jesus, stop.  I know.  I know I need all this bullshit.

It's an anchor, you see.  It's not fun, or novel, or convenient.  It's required.  Now, even taking a nap entails an equipment check.  When I fantasize about a life free of the unnecessary I never thought to leave a little space in my dream for the continuous positive airway pressure machine.  Rocking chairs and a wood pile, sure, but the Darth Vader mask never felt like it needed to be added to the dramatization.

I even tried to make a game out of it.  If it was ruining one fantasy I thought maybe it could enhance another.  Since I was a little boy I've wanted to travel the stars on a spaceship.  It's pretty standard procedure now to describe most of those flights through suspended animation.  Every sci-fi hero starts their story with a breathing mask on in a deep hypersleep.  So, I lay back and take in the cool, moist air and think about how when I wake up I'll be a trillion miles away.  Will I be awoken by a distress beacon?  Will the on board computer go insane?  Will a small asteroid pierce the hull in mid flight and cause the remaining, surviving crew to have to fight monsters on an uncharted planet?  What is that noise?

No, seriously.  What is that noise?  It sounds like scratching.  Is it scratching?  I sit up, throwing my blankets askew and creaking my twin bed (the sound of the machine and my constant fiddling with it at night was, ironically, destroying my wife's sleep rhythm).  I look over at the hole in the closet where a pipe burst last year and I haven't fixed the drywall yet.  Are there mice again?  God, it's going to be that nightmare all over again isn't it?  But, then I see a piece of wrapping paper from this Christmas.  Unused and forgotten it gently flutters from the breeze of the fan and lightly taps on the bookshelf.

I take in a deep breath of relief and my "hypersleep gear" overcompensates and jams a gulp of air down my throat causing me to cough, which jams more air, and I just have to rip the whole thing off to get my bearings so I can reattach it and start all over.

It really is an anchor.  As I let my imagination drift off, which I am especially want to do during the last few blinking moments before sleep, I can't slide too far down river before I have to make an adjustment to a strap or tinker with the humidifier settings and I feel the chain go taught and snap me back to the dock of my actual life.

A life full of complication and stress and hard decisions and consequences.  A life where you can't fix every problem with a multi-tool or a bit of cord.  A life out of reach of adventures in the stars.

I don't know.  Maybe it's all a good thing.  Maybe it's good to remember that you're not a wilderness man or a space marine.  Maybe it's good to be reminded that you have a mortgage and chores and you like to play video games and watch Netflix.  That's what I've been telling myself, lately.

That this machine isn't ruining who I want to be, but it's just bringing sharper definition to who I am already.  At want point does my legitimate fear just become incessant whining?  I hem and haw about the burden of it, but I don't even put it on sometimes.  I've snuck a few naps on the couch since I've gotten it.  I could go camping without it if I wanted.  It would be just like when I went before I even knew I needed it.  The only burden is the knowledge of why I have to have it.

I think what I might not like about it is how coldly honest owning the thing has turned out to be.  I didn't go out and get the newest iPhone.  I can't grow as a person and realize I don't need it.  I just need it.

I have severe sleep apnea and I need a CPAP device to make sure that my heart isn't overtaxed during sleep and to make sure that my brain goes through the proper sleep cycles to recover for the next day.  It's just...damn, that's a hell of a thing.  That belongs with sentences like "I am currently making under industry standard for my position and profession," or "My dog needs prescription food that is three times the cost of store bought because of a recurring bladder condition."  Just one of those very plain, unfun things that you have to say when you reach the ripe old age of, oh I don't know, say 29.

Now that I actually sit down and think about it, it makes a lot of sense for me to have it.  It didn't interrupt a playboy lifestyle.  Yesterday I wasn't feeling well so I went and used a bow saw to cut up tree limbs and burned them.  That's what I did as a pick-me-up.  After that I ate a subway sandwich and drank a hard cider while I watched Parks and Recreation.  An episode I had seen at least three times.  Even today I had two separate people ask how I was doing, and after listening to me say my piece, suggested I should start wearing suspenders.  The suggestions weren't given as a joke, and I took them to heart.

That's just who I am.  So, as much as I hate what this means for me becoming Sheriff Longmire in the future, it actually is probably right on track with exactly how my life is going.

I don't regret much.  I've had good friends.  I've caused my fair share of trouble, and when I got older I fixed my fair share of it too.  I've been to Paris with the woman I love.  I could have done a lot worse, and I probably won't do a lot worse in the future.  I guess a CPR computer isn't the end of the world.

Oh, hey.  Maybe it could run off of a solar panel.  And, I should learn what I need to distill my own water.  Just in case.

Sincerely,
Chiggie Von Richthofen

A Letter to Joshua Concerning Understanding

Dear WOPR,

When I was in junior high I was conscripted into a highly structured and regimented branch of French life steeped in tradition and commanded by regulation and fear.  The Junior Cotillion.  Like the Boyscouts my involvement in this was not voluntary.  Unlike the Boyscouts, though, I did not come to enjoy this new, exciting society I'd been thrust into.

It was held at a local country club.  The first one I had ever been in.  A building that reeked of the seventies with tall wooden paneling and flat, hard carpet.  Although, after spit balling the average age of the people there I would imagine the building looked like a spaceship to them.  The women seemed to be running the show for the most part and they talked with that deep Southern drawl that sounds like an old guitar announcing the winners of a cat fashion show.

I've lived in the south full time since I was 5 and have an accent that wavers between west coast television and northeast Louisianian (which is just Texan.  Get over it everyone!  We basically live in Texas.  I can almost see Texas from my house.  Accept it!), but anyone down here knows of that sickly sweet speaking pattern that these plantation era, rich old bags use to communicate with other people.  You hear that come out of someone and you have a pretty good idea where you are: surrounded by money and paintings of Jesus.

They started us out with the basics like how to set a table for serving 800 people.  Then they went on to things like the proper technique for bullwhipping your "staff", how to yell at the chefs for cooking exactly what you asked them to, and also how to properly bow.  Please, I saw Rising Son, I know how to bow, move on.

The entire thing was like a Monty Python sketch.  Boot Camp for Twits.  The severity of the execution juxtaposed starkly with the silliness of the activity.  Always place the forks in this order. ALWAYS. ALWAYS!!  Don't you DARE put that fucking fork next to that spoon!  Why is your left foot turned towards the door?  You can't use your left foot for your door foot!  Don't smile after your third drink, savage!  BUURAAAAAGHH!  That's a slight exaggeration but it captures the spirit of the truly bizarre people that ran this, this, I don't know how you'd describe it.  Let's say, cult for dish worshiping ghouls.

It wasn't all bad.  Well, no, IT was all bad, but some good things came from the experience as a result.  When I was stolen from my crib in the night and given to these perfumed, pearl wearing practitioners of the impractical, I was joined by two friends whose parents also thought that the foxtrot would bring them success and riches when they went to the Governor's court after the harvest.  With these particular two gentlemen our friendship had always been in its beginning phases, and this horrible waste of time we had to endure became a kind of bonding experience.  Tittering behind old women's backs and purposely rearranging silverware became, in a sense, a show of solidarity.  As much solidarity as boys that are all of about twelve can have with one another anyway.  It also helped me crawl out of a shell a little bit.

I had always been a shy boy around girls.  So, the Cotillion also brought something new into my life: close proximity with girls my age.  As we learned how to dance in a way as to not tread on our debutante's sword scabbard all the steps and rules did have the one thing in common which is that you had to do them WITH someone.  For a boy that hadn't so much as bumped into a girl in the hallway at school, all of a sudden I was hands-on-hips familiar with a number of pretty "young ladies."  I would guess that I cultivated up to 6 new intense crushes in the course of my service in the Junior Cotillion (which felt like years but I'm sure was all of 4 weekends in July).

I can still remember that first sensation of warmth as I felt their skin through their impossibly ruffled and pinned dresses.  I remember the same sensation of their hand on my shoulder.  I remember noticing the moisture of their breath and that stale, but not totally unpleasant smell of CO2 as they exhaled.  I could smell their mother's perfume and was close enough to see that they were wearing makeup (the dance floor was always hot and brightly lit transforming the carefully applied blush and concealer into something like a sidewalk chalk drawing in a rainstorm).  The entire dance experience had a very humanizing effect on creatures previously viewed as totally forbidden.  It was intensely pleasant.

Of course afterwards I was still extremely nervous around girls, but at least now I knew that I really liked them and WANTED to be with them, but just didn't have the balls to do anything about it, so you know, THANKS Junior Cotillion!

More important and lasting than any other result of this experience was what it reinforced in my view of the world: the suspicion that I actually new better than most people.  As we stood through lessons about where things go, what color they should be, the order in which you should use your individual teeth, and how much of a tablecloth you can let touch your leg before you are deemed "pregnant", it wasn't hard for me and my friends to look at each other and just say, "no.  This doesn't matter."  It's almost thrilling to have a realization like that when you're barely in your double digits of age, and it can be a very powerful tool for a young person to acquire.

It is a frame of mind that was a real core pillar of my personality.  The idea that something isn't important just because it has been labeled so.  That all things deserve to be examined, understood, and judged by us as individuals before being taken seriously.  And that's not to say that that process has to be long and drawn out.  Examination, understanding, and judgement can be very quick depending on where you are.  If I'm in the ocean and I look over and say, "that looks like a shark.  Shit that IS a shark!  Fuck that shark!" well then there's all three in the space of about half a second.  The Cotillion was one of the first big events that solidified my resistance to established ideas.

Fast forward about four or five years to the middle of high school and we settle into yet another summer where I had been recruited into an institution of learning.  This time it was a summer school where I had been charged to make up a semester of English from the school year that had just ended.  This wasn't the first time I had found myself in summer school.  That specific summer school, even.  And just like the Cotillion, again I was being taught what the majority viewed as proper and, again, I was with friends (not the same friends, but some of my closest at the time) that shared my disgust and mockery of our situation.  This was a make up class I was having to take as a result of my evaluative approach to life partly started by those classes at that weird club.  Having put public school to the test many times and found it lacking in my own personal court of law, I deemed my participation in the activity pointless to the state, and even damaging to me, so I whenever I could miss class I would.

I missed 21 days in a single semester and learned that the truancy department will send you multiple letters asking why your kids aren't in school, but never seemed to follow up after the postage was stamped.  This, of course, caused me to evaluate and subsequently dismiss the truancy department as pointless.  It was a magical time of naivete where the only things I took seriously were the things that made sense to me.

When I was told that because I hadn't lived up to the school's standards I would be going to more school, my reaction was, "fine.  It will probably be bullshit, and I'll ignore that too."  And, my god, the summer school did not disappoint.  That semester we had been required to watch and digest a movie version of West Side Story.  So, for this class, that was the task we were to repeat.  Watch a video and fill in some bubbles on a test.  That's all we had to do.  The teacher turned off the lights, popped the tape in, pushed play, and then proceeded to thumb through a magazine before the FBI warning had left the screen.

When the opening credits to Blade Runner started we spoke up pretty quickly.  It's not that we wanted to watch West Side Story, it's just that we didn't want to be tested on something we hadn't seen.  Here's where it gets good.  She had to have known that the movie on the screen, the futuristic cityscape with flaming towers, Vangelis loudly playing, and half the people speaking something closely resembling Chinese, was NOT what we were supposed to be watching.  I can't imagine a dimension where that wouldn't have been painfully obvious.

But, she was the teacher.  She was the teacher that had given up her summer to educate us, the slackers.  We were telling her she was wrong and that is NOT how it works, boys and girls.  So, she looked out at the classroom (the FULL classroom, I'd like to add).  She gazed at us: the uneducated, the impolite, the interlopers.  She looked us right in the eyes, told us WE were wrong, and sat back down.

We broke for lunch right after Deckard shot Pris in J.F. Sebastian's apartment.  I don't know if you've ever seen Blade Runner, but that scene is not quiet.  Gunshots, screaming, writhing on the floor WHILE screaming, it's a big to do.  We thought for sure that when we came back from the courtyard that the jig would be up and we'd have to go back to coloring maps of the United States with crayons (that's not a joke,  I actually did that in summer school the year before.  The coloring was pass/fail.).  But no, we were still on Earth and pride was still stronger than correctness, so on with the exciting finale of Blade Runner!

After the movie was over she started passing out tests to West Side Story.  There was some protest.  At first it looked like we were going to get the same "fuck you" style of education we had gotten when we protested the first time, but now something was different.  Now, her screw up would effect her instead of just us.  We reminded her that when we all failed that test, and we'd make sure we did, that there would be questions as to why, and we would happily inform the school officials of all the details they needed to know.

She had us hand the tests back, threw them in the garbage, and we all got A's.

This is exactly what I had wanted summer school to be.  I thought school (not education, but the institution that we call public school) was bullshit, and that means that summer school should just be summer bullshit, which is exactly what it was.  The whole thing gave me that old thrill I could remember from the Cotillion and a hundred other things before and after.  It was all reinforcement of the idea that I knew better.  That I had figured it out.  And, that everything from this point on was just going to be me reasoning my way down easy street.

But it's not like that, is it?

One of the greatest disservices I ever did to myself was how I interpreted all those events in my life where I played Russian Roulette with "the system."  I viewed them as "I was right."  What I should have done was viewed them as "they were wrong."  It's a subtle yet powerful difference that I didn't have a real firm grasp on until maybe even as little as five years ago.

I had hit on one concept that's important, which is people don't know a lot about a lot.  What I didn't consider was that I was included in that figure.  When you're smart, but not a genius, there's a tendency to rely on your natural problem solving to kick in whenever you get into a pickle.  What you don't realize as a child in a middle class family is that you never really actually had any problems to solve when you were growing up.  So, when you move out and become an actual person and an actual problem comes up like, say, we only have enough money for food OR gasoline, things go tits up.

You draw your gun, pull the trigger, the hammer clicks, and nothing happens.  Then you call Mom and she tells you that you need bullets.  You tell her you don't know where to get them, and she takes you to the store and shows you.  Also, she buys you a laundry hamper because you forgot that.  Also, you need detergent.  And, more clothes, for Pete's sake what have you been doing, taking a shower with them on and just driving to work with the windows down?  Yes, Mom, that's what we've been doing.  It doesn't take long to realize that the end of your childhood is just another way of saying the beginning of your life.

That's the moment that humiliation turns to humility.  I don't care if your 60 or 12, if you screw up and get called on it and put your hands up and say, "that was my fault.  I didn't even realize I was doing that," then you're a grown up in a very important way.  You realize that you can't just figure your way out of stuff and that there are going to be times when there is just no right answer, like when it's gas or food.  Or, our personal favorite from the last few years, car or house.

I've probably said stuff like this before, but I think even then it was me congratulating myself on how clever I was that I figured out another aspect of life.  This time it feels more real, more rooted in how I make decisions.  I still evaluate everything and make my best call, but now there is an often used option for admitting that I'm probably going to choose wrong a lot of the time and that my decisions, along with my dilemmas, fall under that evaluation process too.

It's a scary thought, to realize that I am probably going to make more mistakes than right choices in my life.  But, it makes me pay attention more.  It makes me back off and think about where I am.  And, in a way it can be a good thing.  I miss the thrill of knowing I'm right, but when I assume that I'm wrong, there's a calming effect to the process I hadn't known before.  There's a problem, I try solution A, it doesn't work. Before it would be instant frustration.  Why doesn't it work?  That doesn't make sense!  I figured it out ahead of time!  Now when A doesn't work, well hey, I didn't really expect it to anyway.  Let's see what I missed.

All that fuss and worry earlier in my life over achieving some kind of peace or zen, thinking that it would come from a place of understanding, that all I had to do was understand and the universe would come to me, is just moot.  Now, for the first time in my life I'm feeling the edge of that vast event horizon to some kind of calm, and it's after I've decided that part of understanding things is accepting that sometimes, or most times, I won't.

Sometimes the only winning move, really, is not to play.  I swear the older I get the more that movie speaks to me in a way that was probably never intended.

Sincerely,
Chiggie Von Richthofen

A Letter to Our Yellow Sun Concerning My Place

Dear People in Tall Buildings or Travelling on a Locomotive,

When I was a boy, I'd say probably 7 or 8, one of the things I loved most was going to a local water park that was called Water Town USA.  As far as water parks go it was small, but when compared to a grass filled wading pool in the back yard with a hose in it, Water Town was a veritable Atlantis.  It had slides and an obstacle course and a giant wave pool that was like a second home.  I loved swimming under the waves and turning around and looking up at all the people floating on the undulating water above me as I drifted in serene calmness below.

I could drift like that, suspended in water, because when my mother found out she was pregnant she got it in her head that she never wanted a child of hers to die by drowning.  My swimming lessons started at 18 months and continued every year until I found myself drifting around in that wave pool.  I couldn't go to classes at the YMCA anymore because the only thing beyond the level I was at was life guard training and you had to be 18 to go into that.  So, I was released into Water Town with our season passes, with just enough training to feel like I had mastery over the very water itself.

No, not like Aquaman.  Someone better, like Namor.  You don't know him.  Don't worry about it, he's cool.

I spent as much time as I possibly could underwater.  When I dove I pushed the air out of my lungs to keep water from going up my nose and to keep from having to fight the extra buoyancy of a deep breath.  The water was like a cold womb.  I sat on the bottom of pools and leaned against the sides wishing I could just drift off to sleep, and when I felt that human need for oxygen I just stood and pushed myself into the heavens, soaring towards the waterline like Superman, sometimes breaking the water so fast I would come out to my waist and fall backwards into the water like a dolphin on display.  Even now, as I think about it, it fills me with a pure calming joy.

The reason I'm prattling on about how comfortable I was in the water is to give context to the last great summer at Water Town USA and how, even though I don't feel responsible for it, I know I could have prevented it.

One day when I, as I said, was about 7 or 8 (I'm awful with the particulars of my own life), I had had enough of the wave pool and decided to go fire out of the "Cannonball" a few times.  The Cannonball was a short, steep water slide with a little lip at the end.  It was all acceleration and could hurl you parallel to the Earth until wind resistance overcame you and you plunged into the deep pool.  The deep pool was deep in contrast to the shallow pool that, naturally, was shallow and had no slides.

I didn't go in the deep pool much because it was dangerous to dive in, again, because of the high speed slides.  This area, for me, was for adrenaline boosting and not so much for the gentle embrace of Mother Ocean.  It certainly wasn't for milling around in like some of the half drunk, over sun exposed adults thought it was.  So, order of operations for the Cannonball slide was simple and to the point: climb latter, wait for "go" from lifegaurd, blast through that sumbitch like cold Schnapps through a virgin, hit the water at four million miles an hour, and beeline for the latter to get out and repeat.

About the only thing that is repeatedly noticeable when doing this process is the color of the sky and the color of the water.  Blue and blue.  You fly out and catch some rotation and it's just bright blue, dark blue, bright blue, darSPLASH.  Every time.  Blue.

So, on this day, on that series of Cannonball runs, something caught my eye.  Not extremely out of place, but a definite discrepancy.  I would come out of the slide, start to rotate, see light blue, see dark blue, see light blue, and then see greSPLASH.

I would come up for air and look down and yeah.  Green.  What's green doing here?

And not like an algae green.  There wasn't a sanitation problem.  I mean, the water practically gave you chemical burns.  By the kids eyes you'd think they'd been up all night preparing for court.  No this was another kind of green.  It showed up deep under the water.  It was bright, Nickelodeon slime green.

I didn't dwell on it a lot.  Like I said, we children had to keep the Cannonball mechanism going.  No time for hanging out on the latter and staring down at your feet.  You're on slide time, buddy, let's go.  So I shuffled on.  Again, and again, and again, each time noticing that green.  Each time trying another snap guess at what it was.  Did someone put that down there for the lifeguards to have a reference point?  Did someone drop a piece of the water vacuum?  Was it some replacement tile they had hanging around?

The water was in constant turbulence and the only thing I could ever get was the color.

Eventually the other part of the park, a shack filled with arcade machines on a sopping wet carpet, drew my attention and I decided to dry off a little with some Off-Road and a little Robocop pinball.  I got a drink, went to the bathroom, got some ice cream, and decided it was time to drift in the abyss once more.  To get to the wave pool you had to go past the deep pool with the fast slides and the near heat stroke adults.

As I rounded a corner I noticed that I wasn't getting to the wave pool any time soon as a giant crowd had formed on the path to get there.  It wasn't extremely unusual.  The park did things like this sometimes.  The X-Men cartoon was pretty popular back then so they'd have some poor guy dressed as Wolverine come by or maybe throw out t-shirts or something like that.  But these people weren't cheering.  These people weren't holding their damp arms out and jumping.  These people were completely still, and completely silent.

The only sound was the awful wailing of that woman as she held that dead boy in her arms, and rocked him back and forth in his bright neon green swim trunks.

I don't know who the boy was or where he was from.  I think I heard later that he was part of a church group on a field trip.  I'm not sure if that woman was his mother or his caretaker or what.  Maybe she was just some lady.

Some people murmured about paramedics and lifeguards.  I honestly don't know for sure if he was completely dead, but I do know that the kid was black, but he had also turned a shade of blue.  They wondered how long he had been down there.  I didn't say anything, but I had a pretty good idea of a possible time frame as I realized we had been swimming over that kid's body for at least half an hour.

Later that night when I was home something hit me...no that's not right, I'm not going to say it like that.  A hit is sudden and decisive.  This was very, very subtle.  I wasn't horrified, really.  I didn't feel guilty.  I was sad but only as sad as you can be for a total stranger.  I just remember thinking, damn man, what was that kid, twelve feet down?  You've gone twelve feet on your own.  There was even a ladder to kick off of.  He was half your size.  It would have been easy.

You could have pulled that kid straight off the ground and flown up to the top like Superman and he might be alive now.

Again, I didn't feel guilty that I hadn't done it.  We didn't know.  Nobody knew.  I mean the lifeguards didn't grab him for Christ's sake.  It was just the dawning realization that I COULD have saved someone.  That there wasn't anything special about that act.  I had the tools.  If I had known, if it had dawned on me, I would have just gotten him.  It was almost--empowering-- to realize that the ONLY obstacle that had been in the was was KNOWING that someone was in trouble.

After that incident the water park was never the same.  They turned down the pressure on the slides.  They had stricter rules about what you could do and when and how old and how tall.  They slowed down the wave pool, and then turned it off altogether.  I knew it wasn't my fault that the park seemed to be permanently at half mast, but I also knew that there's a good chance that had I just been a little bit more aware, looked just a little closer, I could have prevented it.

Let's take a giant leap forward through time and settle on a drive home one afternoon.  I was piloting my Mother's big blue Ford conversion van.  This thing was like the C-130 of cars, but man was it comfortable.  I was coming back from picking up my sister from school.  I was in college and since my mom taught classes late, I was in charge of grabbing my sis and ferrying her home before I went back for my evening shift as a lab tech at the college.

The route I chose to take home was not one that was approved of by my mother.  She preferred a lone highway that had no lights or traffic.  I preferred the more direct way home that was lined with little shops.  This would later be a contentious point between us because of what happened next.

I was driving along, going the speed limit (which was rare) when I saw a long, white sedan fly out of a beauty parlor parking lot.  Right. At me.  I jerked the wheel to the left.  I was in the far right lane and all my fields of view were clear so I went for it.  I got into the left lane, she kept coming, I got into the turn lane, she kept coming.  I considered pushing into oncoming and boom.  Captain Nemo sank another one of Her Majesty's Ships.

I got a jolt to the right and my view was filled with beads of glass as our lower case "L" turned into a capital "C". The impact of the broadside was so great that the side of the van actually caught her car like a baseball glove, but we were still going forward so it then just tore the front of her car right off.  The hood and front tires spun off into the side of the road and she was left with her car ending at the windshield like a Laurel and Hardy sketch.

The van stuttered to a halt and I put everything into park and brake and off.  It hadn't occurred to me that this was pointless as the van wasn't ever going to go anywhere on it's own again.  I know, because I asked later, that I checked on my sister.  She liked sitting in the very back bench, and I was in the front seat, so the car slammed into us the only place a person WASN'T.  Dumb luck.  But I asked later and she told me that I had made sure she was ok.  I had to ask because I didn't remember.

What I do remember is sprinting back across the road towards half a car.  I saw red all over the road and smoke filling the interior.  A man that had seen it happen got there at the same time.  We wrenched the door open and pulled the terrified teenage girl out of the car, carried her a away from the wreckage, and sat her down gently on the grass so she could shake and weep.

The man bent down to comfort her and I turned to look at the car.  Blood and smoke was replaced with transmission fluid and a white cloud from the airbag deploying.  She wasn't ever in any real danger, just bruised.  I had rushed over to save a perfectly healthy teenage girl from her benignly disabled Nissan Altima.  Big fuckin' hero.

AND I HAD FORGOTTEN MY SISTER!

"Shit!" was all I remember saying to the pirate that had attempted to board me as I sprinted, again, back into the road and ran to our bashed van.  I brushed the glass away and climbed into the passengers side.  I helped her climb out as she cried.  I was the only one not crying, but in my defense, this had been the FOURTH time I had been in a car totalling wreck.  I apologized for running off and she said it was OK, even though I could kind of tell it wasn't.  She was pretty shaken up.  Again, big fuckin' hero, right?

Later the police said there was nothing I could have done.  She came out of that parking lot at something like 35 miles an hour.  She never even saw me.  My mother asked me why I didn't honk and I tried to explain that the horn wasn't a device that was in charge of escaping from a cruise missile so it hadn't dawned on me to deploy it.

A couple weeks after that we got a letter asking if we wanted to sue the girl for damages.  I took it from my mother and tore it up.

Sometimes I wonder if part of the reason I jumped out of my smashed van and ran across traffic was because of that kid at Water Town.  I don't feel like there is a direct correlation.  It's not like I looked over at the smashed car and had a pool flash back.  There wasn't any thought process at all, painfully evident by me running into traffic.

There was one thing that was common between the two incidents, though.  After all was said and done, and I was sitting at home thinking about that wreck, somewhere I knew that even though the situation hadn't been dangerous and I had, at best, fumbled through the act of walking a stranger across 10 feet of grass, I knew that I had seen what I thought was a burning car and I had run TOWARDS it.  I had sprinted, without thinking, on mechanical reflex towards someone that I thought was in trouble.

Did I help at all?  Debatable.  Probably not.  But all the proper protocols came online at the right time.  And just like how I had felt empowered by the idea that I COULD save someone when I wondered about the drowned boy, I felt that same empowerment at the fact that I TRIED to save someone when I got in that wreck.  It made me feel less useless and less helpless.

I think most people have a nagging question inside of them.  If something goes wrong, really wrong, will the fear grip me?  Will the indecision paralyze me?  Will I be the reason someone is hurt?

In Vietnam my grandfather was the tail gunner of a B-52.  The gunner back then was also the bombardier.  One day they went on an 18 hour bombing run and their landing gear malfunctioned.  He climbed down to where the gear was, in flight, and manually deployed it.  He volunteered to do it.  He probably saved his fellow crewmen from some injuries and he certainly saved that plane.  Fear grips that man about as well as a greased pig.  He doesn't have to worry about what will happen in one of the big pinches.

I know I still do.  But, through the water park and the car wreck and many more incidents like them throughout a lifetime of accidents and mistakes, I feel a little more confident in myself and a little more sure of where I stand.

I didn't enroll in the police academy, I didn't become a fireman or a soldier or join the Coast Guard.  But, I think that I try to do right, and I feel like for maybe every 99 parts Clark Kent I might have at least 1 part Superman.  And, if that confidence is enough for me to do whatever I have to do to keep myself and my family safe, and to help my friends or anyone else that I have the ability to help, then I think I'm at least where I should be as far as being a human being.

Sincerely,
Chiggie Von Richthofen

A Letter to the Willfully Ignorant Concerning Their Hindrance of Progress

Dear those of you that have checked out,

This is a coupon for a free ice cream cone from any restaurant, ever, but you have to read it out loud at the place or they won't honor it.

I've never really enjoyed being called smart.  As a child I heard it all the time, and I'll admit it, I was a smart kid.  We moved around a little bit when I was very young and at the age of 4 I found myself enrolled in school in Norfolk, England.  I started my education in the country of my Father.  While, as a 4 year old, I was in school I remember doing arithmetic. I remember changing every day for gym, out of my sweater, button up shirt, and tie, and into little red shorts and a t-shirt.  I remember not only reading and writing but getting graded on handwriting.  I even remember my teacher showing my mother how my handwriting was improving (something that would never be uttered by a teacher again).

Then when I was 5 we moved again.  We moved back to my Mother's (and now my own) country: The United States.  Specifically, Northern Louisiana.  When we came home my mother, of course, wanted to keep my education as uninterrupted as possible so she tried to enroll me in public school.  She was denied.  The reason was that I was too young to be in school (the minimum for Kindergarten at that time was 6) and that I wouldn't be able to keep up with the other children.  I'm going to skip the part where she gave them evidence as to why that reasoning was idiotic and go right into how the first three years of school were so incredibly boring that I still get a pit in my stomach to this day when I think about it.

But, this isn't what you might think.  This isn't a story about how I was so bored because the American education system is so upside down.  I mean it is, but I don't want to talk about it.  No, I was bored for another reason.  I was bored because I absolutely love to learn new things.  It really gets my coffee brewing, and it always has.  Learning something brand new and then learning how that relates to the things I already know about is an actual physical rush for me.  I grin like an idiot and want to tell everyone the great news.  And, after a lot of thought I think that's why I hated school so much.  It's because I don't think a lot of people actually love to learn things like that.  I don't think the majority of people get that intense burst inside of them when they understand something new, no matter what it is.

I was in a system that wanted me to KNOW things, but really didn't care if I LEARNED things, and even at a very young age I decided that just knowing things was for assholes.  I didn't want to know that the gears turned I wanted to know WHY they turned and WHEN they turned and WHAT they did when you turned them.  It's a passion I still carry with me today, probably because of some kind of gently screwed wiring in my brain (family history of weird brain stuff, we'll talk later), and it's a passion/crippling obsession that serves me well in my job.  Being a guy in a small IT shop for a very big place means that I need to know, as well as possible, how everything fits together and it just so happens, total coinkydink, that I LOVE knowing how everything fits together.

That's not to say everything comes naturally.  When I was very young I thought that learning was a piece of cake, or maybe I was some kind of genius because everything seemed to make sense instantly.  This is NOT an ability that has followed me into adulthood.  Yes, if I know SOMETHING about a system then understanding the rest of it isn't a huge deal, but learning something new kind can take a lot of work for me.  I hate to use this word, I mean I really hate it, but a good amount of my free time as an adult is spent, well, studying.  And, I don't mean watching a History Channel special, I mean actual study like reading multiple articles about a subject, making notes, writing tiny little conclusions about what I've learned like miniature research papers.  I check sources and seek out dissenting opinions to balance the conclusions.  I work harder on gaining knowledge now then I did in all my years at any kind of school.  But it's all work.  I read Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feinman a little while back and it wasn't like a casual Sunday.  It was weeks of me reading and re-reading and making notes and talking to my much smarter friends to confirm my suspicions, and I'd like to think that by the end I understood most of it.  And, with that understanding came a kind of satisfaction.

The bizarre part is that there's no rhyme or reason to the subject matter I work on.  One week it might be the circulatory system, the next month it could be physics, after that I'll want to know about colonial politics, maybe something about dinosaurs will catch my eye, and how DO they make marshmallows, and where ARE memories stored, and on, and on, hurtling randomly through the internet and, now, multiple magazine subscriptions.

My only hang up with the whole process is that there isn't really any end goal.  My job doesn't get easier with most of this new knowledge.  My finances aren't sparkling.  My dog can't drive a car or mend my clothes.  I mean other than the knowledge itself I really have nothing to show for it.  The line I feed myself to justify it is that as I understand ANYTHING better I understand EVERYTHING better, but that was something I came up with when I was a Buddhist.  I have since LEARNED that I am most certainly not a Buddhist, although I do still like some of the ideas.  Nowadays I've just accepted that this is something I want to do.  Just like some people love to play tennis or play bingo.  It's not FOR anything, it's just what they like.  I like to learn about stuff, and now that I'm an adult and don't have to attend classes, I can learn all I want.

I know that I'm certainly not the only one who feels this way.  Most of my friends have this same instant attraction to fresh ideas, even if it's completely useless to them.  So, I'm thinking maybe I'm just going through a regular routine that lots of us go through.  The best I can figure it, I'm currently on stage 3 of a system I call the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Timeline of Personal Growth.

First, there is the adolescent/young adult.  I call this the Michelangelo stage of growth.  He is impulsive, carefree, fun seeking.  To him nothing really matters and consequences are few and far between, and he knows that if he ever does get into trouble that there is a support system there ready to catch him.  He is a party dude.

Second, there is the newly independent individual.  This would be the Raphael stage of growth.  He has started to realize that all actions have a reaction and that most of the time that reaction is negative.  He realizes that a lot of the decisions and opportunities that were available to him when he was young and dumb are not gone as a result of his actions and the only thing left to do is be angry about it.  His rage is fueled be entry level jobs and bills and flaky, young friends that might still be Michelangelos themselves.  Either way he's pissed, a lot.  You could say he's cool but rude.

Third, and where I think I am currently, we have the full adult.  This is the Donatello stage of growth.  At this point the individual realizes that life isn't just about lost opportunities and slights against him, real or imagined.  His life is a life of discovery.  A life of trying new things and making sure that what he's working for really matters.  It's a time when problems require solutions instead of sulking and realizing the best way to solve a problem is to get in there and figure out how to fix it himself.  He also "does machines."

Fourth, and what I think I'm heading towards, is the seasoned adult.  The Leonardo stage of Growth.  He leads.  This is the time in a man's life when he's been through a lot, and he knows how to deal with it, and everyone thinks he is a complete tool for it.  In an alternate list I'm making this is also called "Cyclopsing".  I can already feel myself starting to drift into this stage.  I've had a few Leonardo moments with younger people (I'm only 28 for Pete's sake, but it's happening).  I hear myself saying things like, "you need to pay attention, I already know how to do this so this lesson isn't for my benefit," or, "fine, don't take my advice.  It should only take you about 3 hours longer to do it that way."  This is where knowledge ends up at the end: freely available to people that don't want it.  I think those of us that are eager to learn are also eager to dispense but there doesn't seem to be a real interest in it.

I'm becoming a young Leonardo in a crowd of adult Michalangelos.

Lately, the people around me at work or on the street or in the shops have been, well, let's just say one shamble away from just being stupid zombies.  And, I'm not talking about undead zombies, I'm talking like Dahmer zombies.  Someone has injected acid into these peoples' brains and they have just completely lost the ability to use their words.  I know that everyone has IT stories and oh look how dumb so and so is not realizing that you can't get on the network if you TCP/IP stack is corrupted, blah blah.  This isn't it.  This shit is mind boggling.

The other day someone asked me if he needed to capitalize the numbers in his password.  I told him no and he asked me if I was sure.  I told him yes, because you can't capitalize numbers.  He let me know that you in fact can because it would just be the large version of the numbers.  I asked him how he would go about doing that and he said just hit shift and the number, just like with the letters.  I then asked him how he makes parenthesis.  He died.

It's been happening all over.  A lady called me and told me that the computer was making a funny noise.  I asked her what kind of noise and she said, "I don't know."  You don't know?  You don't know what it sounds like?  You called me!  You called me because it made a sound that you KNEW wasn't a computer sound.  Something in your head classified that noise, I'm just asking you to do it again.  In fact, I'm pretty sure you're still doing it, what with that being an involuntary brain function and you just don't want to take on the titanic responsibility of telling me whether something is going beep like a microwave or buzzing like a bee!

What about the temperature.  Is it hot?  You don't know?  How can you not know?  Did you forget what warm feels like?  Let's try it another way.  Touch the computer for me.  OK, now how do you feel about the computer?  Do you trust it?  Because if you do then you should probably shut it off and let it sit for a while.

Even that joke required an effort of personal education on my part.

People are rebelling in some sort of odd, destructive way against having to know anything.  They refuse to learn even the smallest bit of new information and I can only imagine it's because they're afraid of what all information inevitably does, which is change something.  Information is the power to repair or redirect with facts and logic.  Information can heal the sick and defeat evil.  It is truly a source of power, but what with you all being fucking terrified of any kind of responsibility outside of a job a robot DOG could do, that's just not something you're going to pursue.

Well fuck you.  Fuck you for REFUSING to assimilate ANYTHING.  Because as much as you like to bitch to the rafters when you have to learn something super hard like a color or someone's name, you sure as hell expect me to know about 10x the volume of that in the form of complex technical knowledge.  Where do you think that comes from?  How do you think I came to know the things that I learned?

It's not like I gleaned them from the special crystals in my shuttle craft as I escaped from my exploding home planet as a baby.  Although, I can see in your faces that you aren't ready to completely rule that out yet.  No, I read books, I found examples, I did the work, and now I am learn'ed.  No one came by and stabbed me in the back of the head with a rod and then all of a sudden I knew kung fu.  Although, to be fair, if I am ever actually stabbed in the back of the head then it will probably be because I don't know kung fu.  And if you think that this makes me view myself as better than you, my thirst for knowledge and my drive to understand the systems of the world, well you damn well better believe that it does.  Because you know what?  If I, as a human being, at least TRY to understand something then I am working towards the overall betterment of what we are as a species, and you could do that too, with so little effort, but you just don't.  You're all just sitting on the boat while the scary man lets you know that there's no earthly way of knowing, which direction we are going.  All because you're fine with being stupid.


I hate the word stupid.  I hate it, because it's always ascribed to those that do NOT deserve it.  When someone wants to learn and they try and it doesn't work, but they keep that fire inside them of WANTING to know the why's and the how's well then they will never be stupid.  It's impossible.  Stupid is an end result and they are forever in the process of learning.

No.  You.  You people are stupid.  The people that give up or decide that knowledge is a burden that you have to sit through as a child and with the freedom of adulthood comes the freedom from learning anything ever again.  You are the people that I can not stand to be around.  The people that shrug.  The people that say, "Iontknow."  The people that just roll their eyes and shut off when they even THINK that something new is coming their way.  They say we use 10% of our brains, but you guys must have a hefty cluster of neurons in your ass because I'm not seeing any lights on in the penthouse.

You are, in the purest sense I can mean it, degenerates.

I want to be clear that this isn't just a work rant, this is a life rant.  I understand that the country is in the toilet, but I'm in the toilet too and I can not fathom how "remain an idiot" makes it to the tops of peoples' "to do" lists.  Animals don't even do this.  I'm a squirrel, there's a noise, was it a predator, Iontnkow.  EATEN.

This looking at your shoes and shrugging bullshit has got to stop, at least in my immediate area if you can help it.  For fuck's sake it's like being surrounded by the "bad kids" in every after school special, ever.  Hey you want to go to the library?  No way man, I stole half a cigarette and I'm totally going to smoke it while listening to a walkman.

Yeah, well, OK Judd Nelson.  You go ahead and do that.  The rest of us will be over here trying not to contribute negatively to the global wide fuck up that is the 21st century.

I don't really like to ever say I believe in anything because one thing that stuck with me from that pesky Buddha was that people who attach themselves to an idea are then destined to suffer through the failures of that idea.  But, one idea I'll say I'm quite fond of is the idea that the ability to learn about the world and ourselves is a privilege and a responsibility.  Knowing more than other people can be a point of pride, it can be a basis for competition, hell it can even be a turn on, but one thing it always is is a duty to everyone with the ability to learn.

One of the things that makes me feel truly happy in this world is when my wife asks me a question.  I know that might not be the most sane thing a husband has ever said but hear me out.  It's not just that she's asking me but it's the way that she asks me.  When she asks me a question it is blunt, spur of the moment, and can be about absolutely anything in existence.  It's the way a kid asks a parent a question, with that complete trust that they will get an answer.

She doesn't think about what I like or where I've been or who I've met.  There's no check, there's no filter.  It's just BAM what determines when it rains, BAM what temperature does water boil in Celsius, BAM how many guys are on a hockey team.  She asks me questions like she asks Google questions, and I have to tell you that I am absolutely honored by that, every time.  Not because I always have the answer and I get to show off.  My average for being able to tell her what she's asking for would be awesome, if I were on a baseball card.  It's just that she knows that I like to poke around in everything and no matter what she wants to know about there's a chance that I've learned a little bit about it.

I try to extend this honor to my friends I was talking about before.  The ones that would drill my ass into the dirt in a "who knows more about stuff" competition.  I hope that they also feel that warmth of being that one can get when one is recognized as a source of information.

That's a warmth you'll probably never know.

But it doesn't have to be that way.  You can change at any time in any way.  If for nothing else than selfish hubris, learn something knew.  Even if it's to lord it over your fellow troglodytes, just do it.  Maybe the rest of us will get lucky and something inside of you will start to wake up and I won't have to scream at you anymore because you can't figure out that your username on your profile is just your name.

It's just your name!  Just type your fucking name in!  I hate you so much!

Sincerely,
Chiggie Von Richthofen

P.S.  I lied, this isn't actually a coupon.  I just didn't think you'd read it otherwise.

A Letter to My Foes Concerning Their Standing

Dear those that would wrong me,

I have come to a conclusion. The most useless thing a man can possess is an enemy. Deciding to have an enemy is like volunteering for cancer. Opting into the idea of having a constant, terrible drain on all of your mental and emotional resources. An Enemy steals everything from you. They take your peace of mind, your finite time, your comfort, and your very important pursuit of happiness. And the worst part is that all of this theft is with your own permission. Because when you enter into that pointless death spiral with someone, you have no one to blame for your misery but yourself.

Deciding to hate someone is the same as taking the first swing. Hate is an act of active aggression as a response to some kind of affront to your person. So, what else can we call someone’s reaction to hate, whether deserved or not, but self defense? People can always create adversity that’s out of your control. Something you have to deal with that may not be fair to you. That’s just life, and there’s no shame in protesting how you are being mistreated. But, no one in existence can elicit your malcontent, experience your venom, or become you nemesis without your explicit consent. Vowing hatred on someone, regardless of how secret or concealed, is the first voluntary step to conflict. You’re “starting it,” if you want another way of saying it. You might as well swing a glove against their face.

Of the three or four things I’ve come to learn in my “feels like an eternity but is actually barely a blip” lifetime, none have come into so stark a view so abruptly as that one over the last six months. It’s an idea that I’ve thought a lot about for years but never had the, I don’t know, maybe courage or confidence to put into real practice. It was too laid back, too naïve, too laissez-faire for me to really take it seriously. The boy in me always won the internal argument that there must be better, manlier ways to deal with the dirty, ass-faced transgressors in my life. But, as that boy in me was ground, meticulously, to a thick, gooey pulp by living real life objective observation and rational reasoning were allowed back in the captain’s chair again. And that same observation and reason kept leading me to the idea of an enemy free existence.

Before I continue I want to be clear that when I say “enemy free” I don’t mean conflict free. People are going to fuck with me. Whether the mean to or not, it’s going to happen, and happen often. So, I don’t expect to just get along famously with everyone at all times. On top of that, aspiring towards a life of harmony with all thins sounds incredibly boring to me. Boring and frustrating. I think people, myself included, need conflict and contradiction and complication. It makes us solve problems. It makes us think and question and work things out. A life without conflict, a passive life, sounds like a life without purpose or innovation. Stagnant. My point isn’t that we shouldn’t have problems, but that it isn’t necessary to assign a personal villain to them. Even if the problem IS a person, it can be solved without hatred getting involved.

Maybe I was right the first time. Maybe I am being naïve in thinking that the world can be thought of in terms of problems and solution. But, it just feels like the only guaranteed result of having sworn enemies, whether on the playground, work, or the world stage, is endless, petty bullshit. Frankly, I’ve had all the bullshit I can take. In a way I’m not surprised it took me so long to work my way around to that simple conclusion. I grew up in the same vindictive, resource hungry society as the rest of us. Sure, on the surface it feels like I hate Mark because he called me an asshole behind my back, but on some deep level, buried back behind the prefrontal cortex, I’m probably just worried that he’s going to steal my mate or find my hollowed out tree full of corn.

For the record, Mark is a shithead, but that’s really beside the greater point I’m trying to make.

Enemies are wholly and completely useless. Not only useless, but actively counter productive to getting anything of any substance accomplished. Enemies take our focus from meaningful pursuits and redirect our energy at a single, arbitrary purpose that in a best case scenario only puts us back at the same state we were before we started.

About a year or so ago my wife and I were going through a rough time. Rough on top of our already daily kick between the cheeks that was arriving promptly each morning for the last few years. But these particular few weeks were especially craptastic because of a few people deciding, for whatever reason, that I and my wife were their enemies. Simply because we wanted to do what was right, try to do it that way every time, and asked that they make a little effort to do their part. I guess that’s what passes for an unforgivable sin these days.

At first I was delighted. Someone declaring enemiship on me used to ring my dinner bell. You want to actively hate me? Well, hey. Fuck yeah. Let’s hate each other. I can’t wait. I’m super good at hating people. And thing. And ideas. And systems. And just about anything, really. At that point in my life my hate was like a fine scotch, aged to perfection in filled fill oak barrels. It was an exquisite statue of down trodden hellfire, cut and chiseled for years by the leers and jeers of my peers. I was a master of hate. A master hater if you will. I master hated all the time. Mostly when I was alone, but sometimes with a partner. You know, if they were cool about it. The point is that in the past I’ve been so eager to battle with someone that them deciding to hate me first was like a gift. A free pass to act against them without any moral fallout. Hatred and revenge were leisure activities and I loved them.

But now, not so much. Now I just can’t get exited like I used to. The fire in my belly has dimmed to a bed of warm ash. It’s been too long since I’ve climbed for the high fruit, and it has grown bitter and rotten on the vine. I don’t want to hate anyone anymore. I just want to try and focus on the things that matter to me.

So, I’m saying goodbye to all of the old enemies of my past. Goodbye ghosts of horrible bosses. Goodbye shitty teachers. Goodbye heartless bitches with your humiliating public displays of rejection. Goodbye lazy co-workers. And even goodbye to one specific person. On “man” that I’ve hated for years even though I never even see him anymore. You’ve probably noticed him around town if you live near me. He looks kind of like a cross between a Jim Henson puppet and a baboon shitting rotten blood. Can’t picture him? Ok, you’ve seen him. He’s like my height, brown eyes, white teeth, kind of walks like he’s a circus clown forcefully fucking a small child. Or, maybe not a circus clown, per se. But SOME kind of entertainer/pedophile/rapist. He’s a real piece of work. It’s like he is a machine sent from the future to turn any fun thing into pure horseshit. Also I heard he fucked a cow once. Not on a dare or anything; he just wanted to. Anyway, I think I got a little off topic again. Back to not hating people.

One thing that is eye opening to me, even as I write this, is that most of those vague examples I just listed about people I hate are over ten years old. The fighting that rages between them and me is a perpetual inner struggle that now only exists in my head, scratching and scarring the inside of my skull. Most of the people I have hated don’t even exist in that form anymore. Not as they existed when I despised them. I’m left with just the biased memories of our encounters. Their ghosts living inside my psyche, twisted by time, and boiled together into a dark soup to really just cover up the things I hate about myself. At one time I knew them as people, but now they exist to me as the avatars of my own failures.

So, like I said, these people from a few months ago decided that my wife and I were their enemies, and we were getting ready for the chore of getting back at them, and then we just didn’t. We decided that moving on was more important than entrenched revenge. We just didn’t feel up to it. I mean in the course of my day when can I pencil in “fuck with asshole?” I’ve got work, sleep, quality time with my wife (sex or tv or both if I’m lucky), dinner, exercise, reading, friends, maybe a game or two in there, writing egotistically asinine letters. Hell, I can’t squeeze it all in as it is. I can no longer justify the time and energy it takes to declare war on someone anymore. Even mentally.

Especially mentally.

The stress of just trying to maintain a good life may have turned me peaceful at long last. Or, if not completely peaceful, perhaps just introduced the idea of peace as a preferred option.

Sincerely,
Couldn't give a shit about what you think of me

A Letter to Those Just Out of the Nest Concerning the Iron Age

Dear fresh, unscarred faces of youth,

Ironing is a very unique experience. Of all the things in my life I've learned to do, nothing else really has held the dual nature of being so simple a concept, yet, so complicated a practice. It's all fine and good on paper. Just apply hot surface to wrinkled clothing. But, what those directions should stress is that you should apply the hot surface ONLY to wrinkled clothing. It's a subtle yet important variation of the standard ironing instructions, but, could have saved me some grief in the long run. I found that the mystical properties of dispelling wrinkles with this "magic handle" were so profound to me in the beginning, that I would forget that there are many objects and surfaces on Earth, and specifically in my home, that react quite adversely to having searing hot metal applied to them. Things like the door the ironing board is attached to, or the seat of an exercise bike, or my arm.

For some reason cotton, the result of a sharp and brittle PLANT, seemed to take the surface-of-Mercury heat in stride with no problem. But, the side of my nylon duffel bag? Shit. You'd think a tiny dragon had been held captive in it and decided its only means of escape was to make a hole in the side with its magical sulfur breath. I'm talking seconds and I'm holding the bag up, looking confusedly through a smoldering gash to the wall across the room, like I'm in a scene from Home Alone.

All I wanted to do was to iron on a patch over a part of the bag that had become frayed and weak. It wasn't until the smell hit my nostrils that I noticed the comical iron shaped hole that had been flame broiled right through the side of my favorite bag. I had a thought that was probably something like, "Christ, I've vaporized my poor yellow sack." Oh, if only the nylon had vaporized.

Deciding that the yellow plastic that had melted off my bag had, I don't know, teleported to another dimension, I guess, I tossed the bag aside and decided to iron something else. Luckily, before I pressed the iron down to my pants, I noticed where the nylon had actually got to. A golden brown film was hardening to the still hot surface of my little white bag murderer. Peeling it off was not unlike scraping the burnt cheese from a plate of nachos fresh from the microwave. That brought up a very good question that had never occurred to me in my entire life up to that point. How in the fuck to you clean an iron?

I was 22 years old. Up until a regular American male is 20, it never even really registers to him that he is going to USE an iron in his lifetime. So, with only a month or two into the journey of learning the mysteries of this strange device, now I had to figure out how to clean it up like new. I considered just buying a new one, but, I decided that the nylon bag incident was my typical M.O. when it came to being domestic, so, learning how to service and care for the tiny nuclear reactor was probably best.

I went and got a wet rag from the kitchen (the "only damp with tap water kitchen rag" being the grand champion of "cleaning shit" when you're just out of your teens) but when I got back to the iron I paused. I had just brought slightly warm water contained in cloth to clean a thing that injects "hell steam" straight through other kinds of cloth. It kind of felt like using a lead bar to clean a gun. So, I stood there, tilting my head in contemplation like my, then, young dog would tilt it's head and stare at the tree frogs on the other side of our sliding door. Probably wondering why a frog's ass feels exactly like smooth glass.

My mother was eventually called on the telephone.

"Mom, how does a mortal human clean an 'I Yurn'." I spoke as if reading "iron" off the side of the box in an attempt to subconsciously communicate to her that I was in way over my head. She politely responded that a human being can clean an iron with something called iron cleaner.

"Well, Christ," I said. "Why don't they name it something obvious?" Iron cleaner was purchased.

When I got home and opened it, I was greeted by a substance that I thought was what maybe toothpaste used to be like. In other words, it was just a beige paste. I don't know WHY I thought that it being beige meant that it was what olden times toothpaste looked like. Maybe, I just thought that everything used before I was born was sepia toned. I'm not proud of the way thoughts used to form in my brain.

So, now I had paste. But, do I slather it on the iron? Should the iron be cold? Surely, it should be cold. Although, heat is often an ingredient in cleaning things, and this thing sure gets pretty fucking hot. Maybe, I'm supposed to mix it with water first, or vinegar. Vinegar does stuff right? But, we didn't have any vinegar. Maybe, I spread it on the plate and let it set, then peel it off. Like it traps all the dirt in a crust.

Now, at this point, some of you might be thinking, "what did it say to do on the side of the tube?" Those people haven't been a 22 year old guy. Let's just say that this, what's happening above me, the process I went through years ago, if Jane Goodall had studied guys that had just gotten their first grown up job instead of chimps, there would be a chapter in her book called "Adult Males Disregard for Assistance in Simple Tasks". Some guy is standing in front of an ironing board right now, in his boxers, burnt tie in the garbage can, squirting iron cleaner out into his hands and forgetting that he hasn't unplugged it as his palm moves towards the sole plate.

Eventually, I came up with an idea that I thought was pure genius. I wouldn't put the cleaner ON the iron and scrub it with a cloth. I'd put the cleaner on a cloth, and scrub the cloth WITH the iron. I'd IRON the fucking thing clean! I squished out a heap of paste on an old towel and spread it around with my fingers a little bit. Then, I got the iron hot enough to go back in fucking time. It was full of water because I wanted lots of steam. The light went off letting me know that I had successfully preheated the device, and I pressed it into the goo on the towel.

Oh, what hissing! I jammed the button over and over again and steam filled the room as a metallic taste filled my mouth. I leaned into the iron and really scrubbed it against the towel, causing the ironing board to creak in disappointment. When I finally lifted it up, the towel was a horrid black smear, with a twinge of yellow and green to it. But, the bottom of the iron was pretty damn near cleaned. More paste squished, more hissing, more worry that I can taste pennies, but after a few rounds of that, I had a clean iron. All it cost me was one whole towel. Success!

Incidentally, this is STILL the method I use to clean irons.

Of course, all these trials an tribulations are just the natural process of young people learning how to get along in life as adults. Unfamiliarity with common household devices is going to cause some learning experiments with anyone. Especially when that device is a molten hot skillet they need to learn how to use in order to fit in with an adult world and workplace. Up until that point I had been relying on the dryer to get my clothes to a state where I might fool people into thinking I belonged in the office with them. All of those first mistakes where just that. Innocent, harmless mistakes.

It's not until that awkward period of domestication puberty passes that one really starts to realize that irons aren't just unwieldy, they're fucking evil little bastards. Tiny imps that live in your closet, waiting for you to become complacent with they're usefulness. Waiting. Until the perfect time to shatter the very fabric of your mind.

The first time I realized I had been double crossed by my little eggshell-white sadist was when I tried ironing a pair of jeans with fashionable rivets embedded in the corners of the pockets. All was five by five with the legs, as I had been ridding pant legs of wrinkles for a while by then, and I chose to go all out and iron the top as well. This is a move I would have never tried as a mere ironing beginner, but, that day I was feeling lucky and decided that my wife had been good to me over the years and she deserved crisp, flat pockets like everyone else.

There's something important to note about being burned by an iron. Half the time it isn't the iron itself doing the burning, but, the heat being transferred vicariously through an intermediary. The iron acts as a tiny godfather getting some out of luck and desperate stooge, like say a metal rivet, to do his dirty work for him so he's not directly culpable. So then when you get burned, and you WILL get burned, the surprise you experience from both the unlikely source, and the sudden intensity of the attack, will hot wire your brain so that your id and speech center, for a brief moment, are one in the same.

The usual patterns of speech that have gotten you through life as a social animal will revert into a state that will make you sound like a preschool teacher suffering from Tourette's. As soon as that freshly ironed denim decoration touched my skin the only thing I could force out of my mouth was, "son of a jelly donut cockbitchmotherfucker!"

When I looked down at my throbbing forearm I expected to see half of it missing, but instead, there was just a single, tiny, red dot. A Scarlett Letter for idiots. It felt so bad that I would have sworn the rivet was still against my flesh, branding me as property of the Levi Strauss corporation. Never did I think in a million years that the technology existed to condition a grown man to fear pants, but by golly, the iron is just that versatile. For weeks after the incident when wearing jeans I would physically cringe when I felt the metal from the pockets or buckle touch my bare skin. I was convinced that the slightest contact would cause my entire body to burst into flame, not unlike the fear a mouse holds that one of the feeder bars will give him a painful shock.

A month or so passed and I became complacent again. Convinced that the "roasting on a stick under the 30 foot flames of a thousand burning corpses in hell" style pain I experienced would subconsciously keep me from ever casually brushing a hot rivet again. I began to resume my friendly relationship with the iron. After all, he didn't burn me, the pants did. Just as he planned me to think all along. And, I wasn't that far off the mark when I thought that I'd never brush against hot metal again. That turned out to be mostly true. What I didn't take into account is that solid objects weren't the only thing these little shithead appliances can super heat.

The chosen battlefield for our next altercation was a pair of khaki cargo pants whose pockets had the tendency to get bent out of shape in the dryer. I laid the pants down on the board, delicately flattening them with the palm of my hand, and then proceeded to iron the flaps down against the pockets, like I had done a hundred times. That time one of the flaps was particularly mangled, no doubt paid to do so by little mister iron as a key element to my assassination attempt, and I had to use my index finger and thumb to hold the flap down while I ran the edge of the five thousand degree plate against it.

What the biggest bitch about this whole thing ended up being was that when I held that pocket down and started to push my Black and Decker killamajig towards my fingers, I was just SURE that I was going to be ironing a substantial part of my flesh into my pants. I just knew I was about to fuck up. But, I didn't. That part of the operation went perfect. The metal never made it to my fingers. But, the steam that built up between the folds of the pocket and then exited into my fingertips, THAT sure as hell hit its mark.

At first, I didn't even register the sensation of my hand being pressurized into vapor. I probably came around when the stump that was left of my arm thudded against the ironing board, I really can't remember. But, after a few seconds I was waving my hand like a beauty pageant winner with a head full of cocaine screaming such gems as, "Thomas Jefferson ditryhorseballhairs!" and "how to get to Sesame Street on icemothercockingdickbeards!"

If my wife hadn't been in the shower for the grand performance, I'm sure she would have thought that I was being possessed by a being of pure psychotic heat. As it worked out all she noticed was my trembling red fingers as I handed her a towel after her shower. She looked up at me and I nodded and managed to quietly whimper out the words, "god damn iron." Then she gave me a look like a park ranger gives a camper that has been feeding the bears. A look that says, "I'm sorry you got maimed, but, at the same time I'm not surprised."

Only having two major attacks on my person by the iron doesn't mean that those are the only times that that crazy bitch has made a play for my life. There have been plenty of attempted manslaughters that just weren't planned through enough by the arrow shaped fucker to be successful. There have been countless tip overs, more than a few cords wrapped around my legs, and a few times when the steam would just shut off forcing me to try different, dangerous methods of checking to make sure the fucking thing was still on.

This level of pure evil might be puzzling until you realize just what an iron is. They are devices filled with unholy incantations that some how mix elements that would normally be fatal together and make them useful. They mix water, metal, and electricity, and end up with something that's a tool instead of a trick used by someone to cause you to instantly explode when you touch it. They remove all the death part of the transaction on only leave moist heat and, on occasion, unimaginable pain.

The only reason I don't toss its sorry ass out in the garbage is that from my experiences in other homes and countless hotel rooms I've learned that all irons are the same or worse than mine. They are just spiteful, mean objects. They should sell them with a tiny riding crop and handcuffs, because, they don't only iron the pants, they make it abundantly clear that when you are using them, they are wearing the pants too.

Sincerely,
Chiggie Von Richthofen

P.S.
"This is a place where eternally
Fire is applied to the body
Teeth are extruded and bones are ground
Then baked into cakes which are passed around."
-Hell, Squirrel Nut Zippers