A Few Childhood Memories

School was kiddie jail occupied by a bunch of kids kicking the shit out of each other. Some kids weren't good at sports and the athletic kids would pick on the fat kids. After about a season of insults and practical jokes we fat kids had no choice but to go sudden and put the spines of our preserative-stinking science textbooks across their bumping gums to save further hazing. This propitiated more fighting. It didn't seem to end.

I was walking home from the park one day and I saw a black trash bag lying tied up in a ditch. The shape of it was too flat to be trash, I thought. When I gave it a kick the contents didn't scatter. My foot hit one heavy object with little give. I knew it wasn't garbage. When I lifted it up, the top knot unscrewed itself and the skinned, decapitated corpse of a dog fell out. Pebbles jumped from the dirt when it landed. It still had paws. I didn't scream and run like most kids. But I didn't pick at it, either. This memory is fuzzy. My sister may have been there, but I may have also been alone.

Later, she helped me deduce that the creepy High School senior named Miller who lived in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre House behind Bunker Hill Drive must have done the deed with his demon worshipping family. We liked to gossip about what other kids were thinking and doing. My sister had a real knack for translating people's inner monologues behind their backs. I was jealous of this talent, and began striving to match it. That certainly has had an impact on me as a writer and artist over the years.

We had a toy called a Fob that was like an 80's Furby. It had a hard plastic beak and bulging dreamless painted eyes that blinked with dark eyelids like closing warehouse doors. Someone got hit with that thing, but I can't remember who. Either I got hit or I hit someone with it. Praise the 80's. It was such a different time. Severe thrashings accompanied undone dishes and weekends were for yard work and football. That doesn't mean I grew up to be a poster boy for Budweiser. I grew up to cook food for truckers and dump 50 pound bags of cayenne pepper over peanuts.

I used to write fake tabloids and draw parodies of movies. I once wrote a series of depraved anathematic porno with another writer buddy of mine. He printed the pages and we left them all over the school for people to find. Gaining notoriety, we had to quit before the fuzz got wise. Graphic, vile, ruthless were we, and it's a wonder neither of us got expelled. I dropped out anyway, but it would have mattered big time for him, even now.

School was kiddie jail occupied by a bunch of kids kicking the shit out of each other. Some kids weren't good at sports and the athletic kids would pick on the fat kids. After about a season of insults and practical jokes we fat kids had no choice but to go sudden and put the spines of our preserative-stinking science textbooks across their bumping gums to save further hazing. This propitiated more fighting. It didn't seem to end, and in High School, some graduated to deadly weapons and dope before being spit on society as mature, initiated adults. 

I'm glad for my experiences. I used to hate them. Then I hugged them. Now life's a dance of pink elephant unicorns from the end of an old can in the back of a checkered past. The journey is working with the clay.