Television: crap for jerks.

I don't watch much TV. When I lived in a house with cable TV, I didn't watch it much, because it seemed like the only thing that was ever on was terrible shows for idiots, advertisements, and advertisements disguised as terrible shows for idiots. I liked The Daily Show and the Colbert Report and a handful of cartoons, but for the most part I found almost everything else completely intolerable. When I moved into a house without even a regular antenna on any of the TVs, I didn't miss the tard-tube at all. Being a bit of a nerd helped, because I was able to get any of the shows I liked via the internet, often without having to see any ads at all. I set up my computer to automatically download whatever shows anybody in my house wanted to see to a shared folder that anybody could access over our WiFi network. I did this until I started running really low on hard drive space, and then phased it out. It was no big deal, as we had Netflix and TV shows on the internet were getting more and more accessible to non-geeks. I watched some TV over the internet at work, both to stick it to The Man and to entertain myself, but after I quit my job in July, I pretty much stopped watching any TV at all.

That is, until recently.

I don't know if TV has gotten stupider, or if I had just forgotten how stupid it was. It seems like almost everything is insultingly patronizing, treating the viewer like they absolutely must be a complete fucking idiot. Just turning on the TV makes me lose a little more faith in humanity. Are people so stupid that they're suckered in by the advertisements? Do people genuinely enjoy watching programming that not only doesn't require you to think, but actively requires you not to? Sadly, the answer to both questions appears to be yes, otherwise it wouldn't be the shit filling up the airwaves 24-hours a day. What can be said of a culture where the average person spends four hours a day sitting in front of a screen where the most intelligent thing they can watch is a cartoon about foul-mouthed children who do a lot of on-screen pooping?

Much has been said about the offensiveness of South Park, but I honestly believe it is one of the least offensive shows on TV. Below is just a brief catalog of some of the outrageously ridiculous shit I've seen during my recent adventures back into the world of television viewing.

The Jerry Springer Show / The Steve Wilkos Show
I had a professor in college who was a very active communist. He encouraged us to come to rallies and demonstrations, and he made a communist newspaper available for free to any students who were interested. He was a firm believer in overthrowing the government, and would talk about the rise of fascism ("It's just capitalism with the gloves off," he would tell us). One of the main signs of impending fascism, he told us, was a "culture of dehumanization." Each time he'd mention this, he'd cite The Jerry Springer Show as an example. Poor people go on TV, fight and cry and make fools of themselves, and we laugh at them because they are subhuman trailer dwellers, and we are better than them. Their misery is our entertainment. I remember finding the show mildly entertaining in high school, but always thinking, Jesus Christ, what a fucking circus!

I hadn't watched it in years, and when I finally did, I was shocked. They somehow managed to make it even more of a fucking circus. They now have sideshow freaks moving randomly around the set while the poor people fight and cry and make fools of themselves. They used to have a segment towards the end of the show where audience members could verbally abuse the guests, generally making fun of them for being poor and/or unattractive. They still have it, only now chicks in the audience randomly show their boobs, often taking the stage for this activity, in exchange for Mardi Gras beads.

Even more shocking was the revelation that one of the bouncers from the show, Steve, who I remember the audience chanting for in the old days, has actually been given his own show. I wondered how this could have happened, as it certainly wasn't because he's an articulate guy who can carry a show with his wit. I watched, fascinated, trying to figure it out, when it hit me: it's got the poor people for us to feel better than, AND it has a physically intimidating guy who throws chairs, denies guests the privilege of sitting down, and then yells in their face. Awesome.

Crazy knife-hunting guy
There's a network on cable that seems to be devoted exclusively to hunting and fishing shows. It seems like this would be a niche market, and the cable companies would opt to sell it as part of a fancy package with a million channels, but around here it comes with your standard basic crap cable that doesn't have any of the channels that have anything worth watching (Comedy Central and Cartoon Network). I didn't catch the guy's name, but one show was about a guy who was going to hunt a pig. With a knife. Viewers were treated to footage of the guy training by running around in the woods, stabbing a fake pig, and ranting about what it means to be a man. Very early in the show, he gave a speech that went basically like this: "Never before in history has there been a time when more men were acting like women and more women were acting like men. I'm not trying to attack you personally, but men are not doing man things. That's why I'm going to hunt a pig. With a knife." He told us that the last time he went on a hunting-a-pig-with-a-knife trip, four of his dogs ended up getting killed. I may have missed it, but I don't think he said whether or not he ended up killing a pig that time, which leads me to believe he didn't. It seems worth it, though, four dogs for one pig. Or no pig. Whatever, as long as he's a man. He said that "anti-dog" groups were against hunting with dogs, but I don't see how that could be true. If I hated dogs enough to join a group devoted to hating them, I'd wish jerks always went hunting pigs (with knives) with their dogs. He also ranted about how people don't like his show, because it's too brutal, but that's just how nature is, so it's OK. He cited the fact that wolves were, at that moment, tearing apart a deer as a reason why hunting a pig with a knife is alright, taking care to avoid mentioning that around the globe, animals are also eating their own feces and the feces of other animals. And then he stabbed a pig.

Public access
Holy crap, why did I only now start watching public access? Public access cable channels are a source of real, honest to god, genuine fucking comedy. Where else can you go for crap like this?

• A lone hippy on the screen with the colors all mixed up, noodling aimlessly on his guitar in a boring, masturbatory jam that goes on for half an hour.
• A talentless jackass reading terrible poetry for a room full of jerks so pretentious that they don't laugh him off the stage, even when he fills the gaps between his "poems" by playing "music" on one guitar string tied to some posts and hooked up to a string of distortion pedals.
• A "performance art" piece where a young woman rambles almost incoherently, yells at some invisible, nameless person, and then wraps herself in cellophane while continuing the crazy talk. Again, for a room of pretentious jerks who find value in her art.
• A show called Forbidden Knowledge where a paranoid conspiracy theorist speaks without details about the cops trying to shut him down for spreading "forbidden knowledge," and then answers phone calls where people ask questions like, "Where can I find a kit that turns a regular bike into a gas or electric bike?" and the he gives answers like, "I don't know, exactly, but you should look on the internet."
• An ultra-feminist college professor giving a presentation on sexism in advertising, and finding extreme oppression of women in the most innocuous of things. "In this ad, the shot of the woman is cut off at the feet, so they're trying to say that women shouldn't be allowed to move around, like men, who have feet. In this ad, the women appear playful and happy, which means that all women are stupid idiots who have fun."
  
• More than half an hour of a ridiculously-dressed girl walking very, very slowly, outlining her foot with chalk after each step, and being followed by a jerk who erases her chalk lines. That's fucking ART, man!

Yes, indeed, public access is the best thing that comes with basic shitty motel-cable.

Cops 2.0 / G4
Ah, G4, the network for dweebs: people who are socially retarded and desperately want to be nerds, but simply aren't very smart. The programming that is exclusive to this network relies heavily on average-looking chicks pretending to like video games (average looking chicks + appreciation for video games = really super hot chick), and caters to viewers who like to imagine they're tech savvy, but who don't really know how to use the internet. Seriously, any time I've watched Attack of the Show!, it's just a rehash of what I read and saw on the internet the day before (although sometimes I find myself transfixed; if the female co-host had a show about making toast, I'd probably tune in occasionally).

Another show on G4, Cops 2.0, is clearly geared towards dweebs. It's exactly like Cops, except a good third of the screen is taken up by a box that makes the screen look like a website. It has tabs that look like you'd be able to click on them if it were the internet, but since it's TV, you wait for them to click themselves. The box lists random factoids of little to no value, and quizzes about what you've seen within the last 30 seconds. One of the tabs, when it reaches its rotation, displays a question like "What would you do if you got attacked with a knife?" followed by a scrolling list of answers entered by dweebs who bothered to log on to the website to answer it. They're always very bad attempts at being funny. I'm entirely convinced that the big stupid box on the bottom of the screen appeals exclusively to these jerks, because it excites them to see their internet handle displayed on a TV. Yeah, HaLo_n1nJa14, you're a famous fucking awesome guy now.

Late night TV preachers who give away free stuff
I really dig the late night TV preachers who give out free stuff. It's never particularly good stuff, and the preachers themselves are clearly unscrupulous douchebags praying upon the stupid (unlike anybody else who advertises on TV), but still, it's free stuff, and it's weird, creepy voodoo stuff. I got a green prosperity cloth that came with very specific instructions on how to put it in my wallet, FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY!!!, in all caps with exclamation points so I knew it was serious business, and then send it back to the preacher with my monetary seed that will surely grow. When I didn't send it back, I started getting phone calls from the pre-recorded preacher saying, in a very concerned tone, "I sent you the green prosperity cloth, and I haven't received it back from you. Are you OK?" He ended up sending me another one, this one cut into a weird hand shape instead of a square like the previous piece of felt. I also got a sample of holy water from none other than Leroy Jenkins. It came in a little plastic packet that looked like a sample of sexual lubricant, and also had the name "Leroy Jenkins" written on it. Awesome.

Late night TV preachers who don't give away free stuff (specifically, Jack Van Impe)
Jack Van Impe is a crazy televangelist who preaches about the coming end times, repeatedly saying things like "As seen on the history channel" when giving specific end time dates. He's crazy as hell, and entertaining on his own, but the real draw of the show is his wife: Rexella.

Rexella wears a look of constant surprise on her face, reacts with great concern to everything Jack says, and is also in charge of delivering world news. The news bits are the best part of the show. They simply display different articles, both from the web and print, and Rexella reads the headline of each without any context at all and sort of connects them with a few words in between. If you watch closely you can see how the dates of the articles are all over the place, and what she is saying doesn't make any fucking sense at all. It's something that really needs to be seen to be believed, so it's fortunate that you can catch the most recent episode at their web site.

Infomercials
I know that airtime in the middle of the night when people are asleep is the cheapest, but I always have to wonder if people get stupider during these hours. Regular commercials are bad enough, but it seems like only the stupidest of stupids would buy the crap they're peddling. It's always some basic item that has been around forever and is available everywhere, like a blender, minus much of the functionality of the original product, but plus one extra function that you will use 3 times before realizing you're a fucking idiot and you wasted your money on a grossly overpriced product, shoddily crafted from only the cheapest of shitty materials. I think they rely on people being half asleep, because they make outrageous claims that nobody in their right mind would fall for. "Are you worried this knife won't be sharp enough to filet a fish? Well watch what it does to a tomato!" Last night, I saw one that claimed you should buy from them, rather than from a store, because stores pay for advertising, and therefore have a higher overhead and have to charge you more. They always ask how much you'd pay for an item, and then have somebody give a grossly inflated price that absolutely nobody would ever consider even thinking about paying, and then they tell you it's much less than that, so it is clearly a deal.

I saw one infomercial that claimed you would pay "less than a fraction" of the original price they give. I briefly thought that nobody would ever fall for that, but after thinking about all the other shit on TV, I'm guessing that the average television viewer thinks "less than a fraction" actually means something.

So there you go, folks, a big wad of anecdotal evidence that TV is crap. For jerks. Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Don't tease the animals.

I went to a zoo a few months ago when it was still warm out. I'm opposed to zoos in a general sense, because it seems kind of douchebaggy to lock up a bunch of animals, many of them relatively intelligent, for the amusement of a bunch of mouth-breathing members of the general public. For this reason, I haven't been to a zoo in years. That, and I really don't like the general public, and tend to hate being surrounded by people who are almost inevitably a bunch of intolerable idiots.

For most of our walk around the zoo, I was pleasantly surprised. There were things that pissed me off, like assholes in the butterfly room touching the butterflies (it damages their fragile wings), and the small enclosures for animals smart enough to hate being locked up, but I enjoyed being able to see all sorts of critters up close. I was particularly fond of the reptiles, because they're too stupid to really hate their lack of freedom so much, and they're just completely awesome, like scaly science fiction monsters, here to devour your face clean off of your skull.

Everything was going relatively well, until we got to the tiger enclosure. That's when I got really pissed off.

We were watching the tigers going about their business when a family strolled up to the fence near where we were standing. The morbidly overweight matriarch of the clan began clapping and yelling at a tiger who was sitting down, facing away from us.

"Hey!" she yelled, clapping her hands. "Hey! Hey, tiger!"

I wanted to yell at her. I wanted to say, "Hey, you ugly bitch, this beautiful creature could and would eat your whole goddamn family if it wasn't imprisoned for your amusement." I wanted to tell her how disgusted I was with her. I wanted to lock her up in a cage and make her do tricks to entertain me.

I wanted to push her into the fucking cage and watch her get eaten in front of her horrified family.

I generally like animals, but I very often dislike people. Seeing an amazing animal trapped in a small space while a free-roaming, slack-jawed jackass yelled at it was an ugly contrast. For the rest of the day, I was in a pissy mood, thinking about how what I had witnessed happens all day long, every single day that the zoo is open. It seemed so totally unnecessary. What good is served by locking up a tiger so some assholes can look at it? Most of those jerks would be just as happy sitting at home eating McDonald's while watching TV commercials and rooting for their favorite American Idol contestant.

When I heard recently that some dickheads got attacked by a tiger for taunting it at a zoo, I can't say I had any sympathy for them at all. In fact, I wished that all three had been killed by the tiger instead of just one of them. They euthanized the tiger, so if you're keeping track of kills at home, the score is 1-1; everybody loses. At least she was able to maul the two that she didn't kill.

I imagine a scant few of the loudmouthed cretins who taunt animals at zoos would dare taunt a human prisoner safely locked behind correctional bars, even though any tiger can kill a person more quickly than all but the most powerful of humans. Perhaps it is the fact that these animals are locked up specifically for human amusement that emboldens people to act like shit-flinging monkeys.

There are currently more tigers in captivity in the United States than there are tigers in the wild. Sadly, this means that zoos might play a crucial role in their survival at all. For this reason I support the occasional eating of human visitors by zoo animals. If people realize the penalty for taunting a creature might be death or a severe mauling, people might be more hesitant to behave like the kind of assholes who deserve to be killed by tigers. The tiger who escaped apparently could have escaped at any time, but never felt the need to go attack people until it reached its breaking point. If there's any lesson at all to be learned from this brutal attack, it's that tiger enclosures should all be like the one at the San Francisco zoo: inescapable until the tigers have had enough of you and your fucking bullshit.

Goodbye, cat.

Shortly after I moved into the house where I live now, one of my roommates brought home a kitten. At first, he told me her name was Cassie, so I called her that. I work late and keep an odd schedule, so I don't see my roommates very often. When I saw my roommate again, and referred to the cat as Cassie, he laughed and said people just called it whatever they wanted to. I started calling her Lathie, which was short for Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. The name sort of stuck, as I heard people repeat it a few times. Mostly, though, we just called her cat.

Cat disappeared about a week ago. We'd been thinking, or maybe just hoping, that she was out getting laid, and would eventually return. Chomsky, one of the dogs at the house, chased a cat out of one of the barns, and we figured maybe they ran off somewhere else for some privacy.

I just got a text message from one of my roommates. It read as follows:

Rest in peace, cat.
10/06 - 4/23/07

Goodbye, cat.

Crack Hedger's dog.

I was in 10th grade when I met Crack Hedger. It was the first day of school, and he was one of the incoming 7th graders riding my bus for the first time. My friend John and I were trying to talk to the new kids, and giving a couple of them new names. Most of the kids were obnoxious smartasses, but Crack seemed like a cool guy. His name was Joe, but we decided it would be Crack. Our logic was that Joe was white, and crack was white, and crack was also hilarious, so it was a good name.

I turned 16 that year, and my grandpa gave me my first car, a beat-up 1988 Dodge Colt, nicknamed the Chudmobile. The car was white, chud was white, and chud was also hilarious, so it was a good name. Crack offered to fix up my car stereo, for free, so I started going over to his house and letting him work on it. He put a new tape deck in, and installed an amp and some big speakers. He even built me a big speaker box to sit in the back of the car so I could drive around, bassing people out with a deep, low-end sound that made all the loose bits in my car rattle. All the parts came from a junkyard down the road from where he lived, and he said the guy who owned all the junk cars there told him he could take whatever he wanted.

Crack lived a few minutes away from me, in a house along a gravel road, with no other houses nearby. His place had an old bomb shelter and a lot of animals. As we started hanging out more, I got used to his dogs chasing my car as I drove away. I was scared of hitting them at first, but Crack told me just to drive and they would get out of the way. With time, my fear of running over one of his dogs subsided.

One summer afternoon, my friends and I decided to take a trip to the mall. There wasn't really any reason for it, but it was something to do. Living out in the middle of nowhere, the mall was a 40 minute drive away. I picked up John, and then went to go pick up Crack, the plan being to pick up my friend Sean next.

As we pulled away from Crack's house, his dogs started chasing my car, as they usually did. Like always, I just drove as if they weren't there, knowing they would get out of the way.

And then one of Crack's dogs ran right in front of my car.

"Fuck! No!" I yelled as my car drove over the dog. There were two sickening thumps as each tire on the passenger side squished the dog.

We stopped the car and got out. The dog lay in a heap, twisted and whimpering.

"Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, man," I said. As an animal-loving vegetarian kid, I was a bit freaked-the-fuck out.

"It's alright, man," Crack told me. He calmly scooped up the dog, a decently-sized Australian Shepard, and got back in the car. As we drove back to his house, the dog bit him and then puked on him.

We got back to his house and got out of the car. His dad and his grandpa came out of the house as Crack set the dog on the ground. I saw that it was dead, and started crying.

"It's alright, man," he told me. He didn't seem to care at all.

"I killed your fucking dog, man!" I said, wiping tears from my face.

"Shhh!" he whispered, not wanting the adults to hear me say "fuck."

His grandpa grabbed a shovel, and started walking out somewhere to dig a hole to bury the dog in. As he walked, a poodle started yapping at him and following close behind.

"Shut up, you son of a bitch!" the old man yelled, causing me to stop crying and start laughing.

Crack's sister came outside and saw my wet face.

"Are you alright?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"I've never seen a punk cry," she said.

We left again, picked up Sean, and went to the mall. I didn't really feel like going anymore, but we went, anyway.

I felt like shit for a week or so. My dad told me to get Crack a new dog, so I offered to do so. Crack declined, saying, "Don't worry about it, man. That dog was stupid as hell, anyway. Nobody cares."

Crack Hedger died four years ago today in a car crash. He was 19 years old.

A jar full of salamanders.

I was playing in my front yard in second grade. We lived in a city, so our yard wasn't so much a yard as it was a bit of dirt, grass, and rocks in some concrete next to the stoop. Nevertheless, I overturned some stones and was surprised to find some salamanders under them. My mom helped me poke some holes in a jar lid, and I put a bunch of salamanders in the jar, along with some small bugs to eat and some water so they didn't dry out. She told me I could bring them to school and show my class, and I imagined myself being sort of a hero for bringing such awesome creepy crawlies to school. The teacher would love it because animals are educational, and the kids would love it because they're slimy.

When I got on the bus in the morning and showed the kids what I had found, their reactions were not at all what I expected.

"Ooooooh! You're going to get in trouble!" they told me.

When I walked into school, I held my arm carrying the jar inside my coat so nobody would see it. I tried to stealthily slip it into my desk when I sat down, but my teacher saw me.

"What is that?" she asked.

"Salamanders," I sighed, pulling them out of the desk to show her. I was fucked.

"Those are really cool," she said. My heart lifted a little. "But you can't bring animals to school." My heart sank again.

She brought me to the vice principal's office. The vice principal thought the salamanders were cool, too, but she also told me that animals weren't allowed in school, unless the animals in question were her ugly little toy poodles, of course. She told me that she would hold on to the salamanders until the end of the day, and then I could come to her office and get them.

All day, I thought about how I couldn't wait to be reunited with my jar of amphibians. Those suckers were awesome.

At the end of the day, I went to the vice principal's office. She handed me a brown paper bag.

"There was a little problem," she told me in a soft voice. Her eyes looked like she was trying to act sad.

I reached into the bag and pulled out my jar of salamanders. When I had given her the jar, there was a little bit of water in the bottom. Now, the jar was full to the brim. Floating at the top were all the salamanders, dead.

"They were trying to climb out of the water," she told me, "so I thought they needed more water."

I started crying. I put the jar back in the bag, and put the bag in my backpack.

"I'm sorry," she said as I left.

When I got home, I went to my parents.

"How'd school go?" my dad asked.

I burst into tears, threw my backpack at the wall, and yelled something unintelligible. They told me to calm down and tell them what happened, so I did my best to be coherent, and sobbed my story to them. My mom hugged me and picked up my backpack, which was now drenched with dead salamander water.

My dad told me that I could use the opportunity as a learning experience, and dissect one of the salamanders. My parents had bought me a science kit that contained, among lots of other things, a preserved frog in a jar and the tools to cut it up with. I used the tools, and cut up a salamander, but I didn't learn anything. It was stiffer than the frog was, and much smaller. It was too hard to cut, and too small to see its insides.

I've wondered for years if the vice principal was just being malicious. It's hard for me to believe anybody could be that stupid. They were climbing out of the water, so they needed more water? I guess it's likely that she actually was that stupid, but all the adults at that school left me with horrible impressions, like the sort of people who would kill a child's jar of salamanders just to teach them not to bring animals to school.

New gaping hole at the farmhouse.

Hello, kitten, what is it you are looking at?



















Is it all this garbage on the floor?



















All of this garbage?














Don't get wet, sad kitty!















You're sitting under a gaping hole in the ceiling.














It will spill insulation upon you.

Jeremiah was a fat kid.

I met Jeremiah in homeroom in eighth grade. He was a fat kid, and only friends with half of the circle of miscreants I sat with. I didn't realize this until I suggested hanging out with him after school, and my friend told me, "No, I don't like that fat kid." I sometimes called him "Buttcrack" behind his back, because his buttcrack was often visible when he sat down. On at least one occasion, I came up behind him and dropped a pencil into it. He didn't think it was funny, but I did.

Jeremiah invited me over to his house after school one time, so I rode his bus home with him. As we got closer to where he lived, I noticed that none of the houses were particularly nice, and I knew that a lot of the people who lived in that area had to be really poor. Jeremiah lived in a two-story house on the edge of a river. There was no siding on the house, and the insulation was clearly visible. I wondered if it was a temporary or permanent condition, but I didn't ask. When we got to his house, his sister, who was in the same grade as us and who had also ridden the bus home, disappeared into her room. Jeremiah's little brother was home, and wanted to hang out with us. For a while, we threw things into the river. We threw rocks at first, and then started throwing toys and half-empty aerosol cans and other assorted garbage into the water.

"Do you smoke?" Jeremiah asked.

"Sometimes," I said. I didn't, but I didn't want to sound like a square.

Jeremiah got a pack of cigarettes from inside and we walked into the woods with his brother. We each took a cigarette from the pack. I thought it was weird that Jeremiah's little brother was smoking. He was in 3rd or 4th grade.

"Don't you inhale?" Jeremiah asked.

"Yeah," I said, sucking on the cigarette and blowing the smoke out. I couldn't figure out what they were doing that I wasn't doing.

When we were finished, we went inside and Jeremiah offered me some Kool-Aid. He handed me a cup and went to the fridge to get the Kool-Aid.

"This cup is dirty," I said. The bottom was crusty and brown. Jeremiah got me another cup, but it had the same problem. I looked at more cups from the cabinet, and they were all crusty and brown in the bottom.

"It's not dirty," he said, "We drink a lot of tea."

I drank my Kool-Aid quickly, trying not to think of the bottom of the cup.

Jeremiah and I got in trouble for making fun of a kid on my bus named Jeff. I don't remember how it started, but we found ourselves in the office, being interrogated by the vice-principal. When we left the office, I suggested we drew comics about how Jeff and the vice-principal were gay lovers. We showed each other our comics at the end of the day. Mine had lots of tiny panels and was fairly graphic, despite being cartoony. Jeremiah's comic was a couple of stick-figures interacting in a couple of giant panels. I told him we should draw some more. The next time, his panels were tiny and I could tell he was doing his best to emulate my style. I thought it was cool.

In 9th grade, Jeremiah made friends with my sister, and would frequently write her notes. She told me that they were stupid, because he would make up ridiculous acronyms and expect her to know what they meant. She'd always have to ask.

"What is S.Y.A.L.A.M.T.?" she'd ask.

"You don't know? See you at lunch at my table!"

In 9th grade, I began my drift away from my obnoxious friends and began hanging out with nerdier kids. Jeremiah and I remained casual acquaintances, and he was still in my homeroom until I was reassigned in 11th grade due to my complete inability to tolerate our teacher. Jeremiah always wanted me to smell his fingers in the morning. Some guys do that to brag about getting laid. Jeremiah did it to brag about smoking cigarettes, and sometimes weed, before school.

In 10th grade, I was riding home with a group of friends, and they wanted to stop at Jeremiah's house. His mom had made up an excuse to get Jeremiah out of school early that day, because his older brother had shot a deer and they needed Jeremiah to put his name on it. His brother had already killed as many as he was legally allowed to. When we stopped at his house, we all got out of the car to look at a deer his brother had killed. It was laying in the back of his pickup truck. My friend Jason poked it in the eye with his finger until some goo came out, and then wiped his finger on me.

"He's a vegetarian," Jason told Jeremiah's brother.

"Really?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he said.

"That's what I said!" Jason said, and everybody laughed except me.

In 11th grade, Jeremiah and this other kid, Nick, were talking in homeroom about their plans to go hunting over the weekend while tripping on Jimson weed. Having done very minimal internet research on the subject, I knew this was a terrible idea.

"You can't have a good trip," I told them, "Only a bad one. You'll hallucinate and think everything you're seeing is real."

"Yeah," Jeremiah said, "It's going to be fucking awesome!"

I couldn't do anything to dissuade them, so I just worried all weekend that I would come back to school to find out that one of them had shot the other. I never heard anything more about the event, so I assumed they never went through with it. I didn't mention it, fearing that if they hadn't already done it, they might decide to give it a whirl.

Another time, Jeremiah and Nick asked if I wanted to go snipe hunting. They said all you had to do was shine a light into a bag at night, and a bird called a snipe would run into the bag. I had heard about this before, in a book of urban legends. I told them it wasn't true, but they insisted that it was.

"The best part," Jeremiah told me, "is once you get the snipe into a bag, you can bash the bag against something until it's dead."

In 12th grade, having been moved to a different homeroom, I barely talked to Jeremiah at all. He hung out with Nazi stoners who hated me. There was a rumor that a friend and I were gay lovers, which turned me into social poison. Jeremiah's little brother told my girlfriend that "your boyfriend is the gayest kid in the school." Still, Jeremiah, perhaps because he was never particularly popular, even in the shittiest of shitty social circles, was always cool with me.

One morning before class, as I sat on a bench in the hallway talking to a friend, Jeremiah stopped to say a few friendly words. He was walking with a Nazi stoner who I had never talked to, and whose last name sounded like "Sodomizer." Sodomizer's brother had called me a sand nigger, and had also professed his desire to fuck my sister. While I spoke to Jeremiah, Sodomizer glared at me.

"Fucking faggot!" he yelled, as soon as they had turned around and started walking away.

"No, he's cool," Jeremiah said.

"That's not what I heard."

Jeremiah came up to me one morning and told me he was growing weed in his basement. I was glad to hear this, because for some reason or another he owed me some. Having done minimal research on the internet, I knew a little bit on the subject. Mainly, I knew that you needed a specialized lamp if you wanted to grow indoors.

"What kind of light are you using?" I asked him.

"I'm not using one," he said.

"Um, plants need light, dude."

"Not weed !" he told me, and walked away. I asked him later how it was going and he said it never grew. I acted surprised.

I saw Jeremiah once, a few years after we had graduated. I was at our old high school, watching a football game, because my brother was involved in some school-related thing. He was a candidate for homecoming king or something. I saw Jeremiah arrive, followed closely behind by the girl who was his girlfriend as long as I can remember. He was fatter, had a shaved head, and a ridiculously long Z.Z. Top-style beard. I don't think he saw me, which was good, because I didn't want to talk to him.

Real men kill stuff.

Shortly after I moved out into the sticks in fourth grade, I came home and my dad had a surprise for me. I went into the backyard and peered into a big garbage can where my surprise waited. At the bottom of the can a small snake, probably barely longer than foot, lay passively coiled up. Having been a city kid my entire life up to that point, the sight of a wild animal thrilled me. I was excited to have a snake as a pet, but I was scared to touch it at first. I poked at it with a stick, and it flared its neck like a cobra and hissed.

I went inside and looked in a book about North American animals to figure out what kind of snake it was, and whether or not it was dangerous. I quickly learned that it was a hognose snake, which might strike if threatened, but would keep its mouth closed and not actually bite. Armed with this knowledge, I went back outside and picked it up without fear. I had a new friend.

A few weeks later I came home and my neighbor, a girl my age, told me that her dad had caught another snake. We went into my backyard with her sister, my sister, and my brother, and peered into the same garbage can. This snake was several times larger than the first, and far more aggressive, sliding up the plastic walls of the can in a desperate attempt to escape. We poked at it with a stick and it would attack, prompting us to jump back in fearful jubilance. After a few minutes of this, my dad came outside and my neighbor's mulleted dad walked over to our backyard. It was time for the spectacle to begin.

The children were told to step back, and my dad picked up the garbage can and dumped the snake out onto the ground. My neighbor's dad immediately struck at the snake with the sharp edge of a shovel. The first blow seemed to cripple the snake, bending it in the wrong direction. The second cut it cleanly in half. Both halves writhed around briefly before fully expiring.

For a year or so, I bought their rationale for killing the animal. They had said that they really had no choice, that it was under my neighbor's porch terrorizing their family and that it posed a serious threat. When it dawned on me how absurd their reasoning was, I was angry. The snake could have easily been let loose in any part of the large wooded area that surrounded our houses, and it would not have returned. What I was told was nothing more than some tough guy's excuse for killing something. I confronted my dad about it, and he maintained that it was something that had to be done. I've wondered if he really believed that, or if he was just trying to rationalize his role in it, as he had made other statements demonstrating his distaste for wantonly killing things.

Eric Candleass.

I first encountered Eric Candleass when I was in eighth grade. I was talking to a friend during a passing period before class, in the classroom where his next class was about to take place. Suddenly, somebody kicked me in the ass. I turned around and saw a tall, skinny kid leering down at me. I laughed nervously, hoping the assault was in jest. I had never seen the kid before, and thus had no reason to believe that he'd have a problem with me.

"Ha ha ha!" he said, mocking my laughter with a sneer. He shoved me, saying, "You fucking faggot!"

"Whoa, Eric, what's the problem, man?" asked another student.

"I fucking hate that little fucking faggot," he said, as I made my way to the door. "Yeah, get the fuck out of here!" he said.

I didn't know why he hated me, but he was bigger than I was and I learned to avoid him. I didn't have any more encounters with him that year, except for an occasional shout of "Hey, faggot!" as I walked down the hall.

Our school was both a junior and a senior high school. For the most part, the two groups of students were segregated for the majority of the day. In 9th grade, we began to share hallways with the older kids. Some of the older kids, mostly racist burnouts who I referred to as the Nazi stoners, made a sport out of shoving each other into smaller students or knocking the books out of their hands. One day, I was the pin in one of their human bowling games, and ended up being slammed into Eric. He started shoving my violently as the Nazi stoners laughed.

"I was pushed!" I pleaded.

"I don't care!" he shouted in my face, shoving me again, much to the delight of my tormentors. I scurried away as quickly as I could.

That same year, I started getting into zines, small photocopied magazines produced mostly by individuals and traded through the mail. Many of the zines I was receiving had poetry in them, so my friends and I somehow ended up starting a short lived routine of 'Poetry Minute' in the locker room after gym class. We would stand on a bench, read a couple poems, and then move on to our next class. I never noticed Eric at Poetry Minute, but one day after Poetry Minute he noticed me, dialing in the combination to my locker with a stack of zines in my other hand.

"What you got there?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said, knowing he wasn't being friendly.

"Doesn't look like nothing," he said, and tried to grab my zines. I resisted, and he grabbed me by the throat. My friend Aaron pulled him away from, saying, "Leave him alone."

"Fucking faggot!" Eric said as he walked away.

Every Friday in gym class we swam. One Friday, I was one of the last people to finish getting dressed, but my friend Sean was slower still and standing at his locker. The only other person in the part of the locker room we were in was Eric, who was in the other gym class that occurred at the same time as ours.

"Come on, Sean," I said as I walked towards the exit to the pool area. "What's taking you so long? Are you shaving your legs or something?"

I don't know what possessed me to say that, but it was a subtle jab at Eric. Rumor had it that he shaved his legs, because they were always really smooth. More likely it was because, despite being really tall, he hadn't fully hit puberty.

I walked to the exit to the pool area, where everybody was congregated and waiting for the teacher to unlock the door. I started talking to one of my friends, and then was shoved hard from behind. I slammed into my friend, and we both went crashing into the soda machine and then down to the floor.

"What the fuck did you say?" Eric yelled in my face as I got up from the floor. He towered over me, and I stood there, half-naked and scared, completely unsure of what to do. Fortunately, a big kid named Jeremy grabbed Eric from behind and carried him, squirming, out of that part of the locker room. "I'm going to kill that fucking faggot!" he yelled on the way out.

My friend Rick decided to fight Eric when we were in 10th grade. I don't remember exactly what his motivation was, but I think Eric had stolen something from him. When I heard about his intentions, I was jubilant, and followed the crowd down the hall as Rick attempted to start a fight. The kids who walked with us hated Eric, too, which surprised me because I thought I was the only one that had had problems with the guy. Rick would periodically shove Eric as we walked, and Eric would turn around and look at him, and then continue walking. Rick wasn't a particularly big guy, but he was a wrestler, and not nearly as skinny as I was. Apparently Eric wasn't that tough when it came to people closer to his own size.

At some point a bald kid named Jamie said, "Man, I would never shave my legs!" Eric turned around and pushed Jamie. Jamie was unfazed, saying, "Get the fuck off me!" Eric continued on his way, and we followed him, with Rick still periodically shoving him.

A short guy name Jason gently nudged Eric with his shoulder, quietly saying, "Come on, Eric." This time, Eric stopped. He grabbed Jason and put him in a headlock, and then Rick started punching Eric in the face. Before I even had time to know what was going on, Eric was on the ground, and a couple of kids were kicking him. For some reason I was carrying a plastic banana on a plastic string that I had found in the gym, and I began swinging it at him. Eric got up, and the fight went crashing into a classroom, where a bewildered teacher gasped and stood in shock for a moment before breaking up the scuffle. I noticed an older student, one of the tough-guy Nazi stoners, holding Rick by his shirt collar and telling him if he ever jumped in on a fight again, he would beat his ass.

When I walked to lunch later that day, Eric and a bunch of his big, tough-guy friends were standing outside of the cafeteria. They puffed out their chests and snickered at my friends and I as we walked by, but they didn't do anything.

Almost everybody involved in the fight was suspended for a week, including at least one kid who they claimed had encouraged the fight, even though all I remember him doing was following the crowd and waiting for something to happen. The only person who was there but wasn't kicked out was myself, and I had been physically involved, though just barely. I wondered later why I had chosen to hit him with a plastic banana, which weighed less than a pound and which he almost definitely did not feel at all. Perhaps, despite my intense hatred of the kid, I was still reluctant to actually hurt somebody. Maybe the fact that he was outnumbered and on the ground made me momentarily pity him. I don't know.

I was able to avoid Eric for the rest of the year, and then again for the next. His distaste for me no doubt never subsided, and my contempt for him never went away. I once overheard him in 11th grade bragging about how he had "fuckin' stomped a fuckin' bird" to death before school, and showing his buddies the gore leftover on his shoes.

On the first day of our senior year, I was walking around the cafeteria with a friend of mine. He stopped briefly to talk to somebody who was sitting at the same table as Eric.

"Look at this fucking faggot!" Eric said when he noticed me. I was a huge Misfits fan at the time, and wore my hair in their trademark devilock style, with my bangs combed to a point in front of my face. Eric, ever the opportunist, began making fun of my hair, saying, "You think that's fucking cool or something? It looks like you have a wad of fucking chud hanging off of your fucking face!" I stood there with my friend and didn't say anything. Eric threw some food at me, and then we walked away. For the rest of the week, I daydreamed of breaking his face with a food tray. In retrospect, I probably should have assaulted somebody who fucked with me at some point during school. Even if I had ended up getting my ass kicked, in the long run I probably would have had to endure less of that sort of bullshit.

Apparently Eric had beaten up some kid during the summer before school started, and now he felt like a huge badass. Not that huge of a badass, though, because his new target was still a scrawny kid named me. He started messing with me regularly, calling me a faggot and a spick, tripping me in the hallway, and claiming he was going to come to "Spick Town" to beat my ass. The thing is, I'm half-Filipino and half-white, not Hispanic, and I never lived in the area he referred to as "Spick Town," which didn't even really have any Hispanic people living in it, anyway. Furthermore, he was friends with a couple Mexican kids, and his skin was darker than mine. I had always assumed he was mixed himself, despite his white supremacy and pasty siblings.

Taking a cue from The Kids in the Hall movie Brain Candy, my friend Pat and I had begun a campaign of shouting, " I'm gay!" at random people, both to befuddle them and to enrage the homophobes, of which there were many.

"Hey, I'm gay!" Pat shouted at Eric one day as he walked by.

"Hey, I'll kick you!" Eric told him.

"I'll kick you in the nuts!" said Pat.

Eric turned around. He got in Pat's face. More accurately, he put his chest in Pat's face, as Pat was a small, short kid, and Eric still towered over everybody. I stepped closer, indicating that I had Pat's back if things escalated to physical violence.

"I'll kick your fucking ass!" he said, "You and your fucking little spick friend here!"

"Paul's not even Mexican," Pat said, "He's Filipino, and he doesn't live in Sumava, either."

"Oh, he's a fucking spick, alright, and I'll come to fucking spick town and I'll fucking kill all you little fuckers!" His face was contorted in rage, and little beads of white spit were forming at the corners of his mouth. He looked so ridiculous, I couldn't help laughing a little. A few people were watching to see what would happen, among them my brother, a seventh grader only recently introduced to our friendly school.

"You wear that Insane Clown Posse shirt everyday," Pat said, "and they rap about killing racist people."

"Do you see me wearing it now, you little fucking faggot? I'll fucking kill all of you little faggots!"

My friend Jeff turned to me and asked, "Did he just call you a faggot?"

"I believe he did," I told him. What happened next surprised the hell out of me, because I didn't realize that we were close enough friends for him to stick up for me the way he did. He got in Eric's face.

"Who the fuck do you think you are, fucking with people like this?" he asked, inches from Eric. Jeff wasn't a particularly big guy, but he was bigger than either Pat or myself. Eric was still taller, though.

"I'll fucking take all of you!" Eric growled through clenched teeth, his body literally shaking with rage and anticipation.

Throughout the entire confrontation, I was ready for things to get violent. I wasn't sure of the outcome, but I knew that if it came to blows Eric would be facing at least three of us. Somehow, though, the situation diffused itself and we went on to our next class. Eric continued to call me a spick and make threats, and I feared being caught by him alone, as I probably would have been doomed.

He disappeared a couple months into the school year. I think he got sent to the "alternative school," though I was never really sure of the purpose of the place. Maybe it was for assholes who couldn't behave like civilized humans, or maybe it was for kids who couldn't do their homework. Either way, I was glad never to have to see that guy again.

The rats in the walls.

I've been living in my new place for less than two weeks now, and I think I might slowly be adjusting to more of a normal human schedule. Ideally, I'd like to wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night. I've been waking up at two in the afternoon and going to bed at five or six in the morning for a few years now, but now that I'm living with people who are awake during the day and asleep when I get home, I figure it would probably be best if I was able to adjust to a somewhat similar schedule. I've been trying to go to bed much earlier, and when it works I can wake up at around noon, but usually it doesn't work and I just lay there for most of the night. Last night was one of those laying awake nights, but I think I may have gotten to sleep earlier were it not for some animal, possibly living within my walls, making a lot of noise.

I was laying in bed at around 2:30, when I heard a noise coming from the other side of the room. It sounded like it was coming from behind my dresser, or somewhere in that general area.

SCRITCH SCRITCH SRITCH SCRATCH SCRITCH SCRATCH SCRITCH SCRITCH!!!!

I listened to it for a few seconds, wondering if it might be one of my roommates doing something outside of my room. I wasn't entirely awake, so it took me a few moments to realize that it was definitely coming from the other side of the room, and it was probably some kind of animal. I figured there was no way it was something as small as a mouse, because it was fairly loud. I tried to figure out what it could be doing to make that noise, and the only thing I could think of was that it might be trying to chew through the wall, or through my dresser. I turned on the lamp next to my bed and the noise stopped. I walked over to the the dresser and looked behind it, and under it, but couldn't see anything in the dark. I moved around the guitar cases next to the dresser, but couldn't find anything there, either. I turned off the light and tried to sleep again.

SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRITCH SCRITCH SCRITCH SCRATCH SCRITCH SCRITCH!!!!!

The noise started up again a few minutes after I had turned off the light. I turned the light back on and once again the noise stopped. I walked back over to the dresser and moved my guitar cases around. I thought I heard something inside of one, but figured it was probably just the sound of the case rubbing against the wall. In truth, my fear of a bigass rat jumping out at me probably contributed to my unwillingness to open the case. I got back in bed and turned off the light.

SCRITCH SCRITCH SCRITCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRITCH SCRATCH SCRITCH!!!!

When I turned on the light the third time, the noise didn't stop. I walked back to the dresser and started moving the guitar cases again, and this time I heard something scurry up the wall. I jumped at the noise heading towards my head, but it was obviously on the other side of the wall. The sound of tiny footsteps disappeared into the ceiling above my head, which is arched to match the top of the house.

I'm really hoping that the mystery creature was actually outside of the house, and not inside of the walls. I'm hopeful that this is the case, because there is already a hole in the wall that the last guy who lived there made so he could run speakers into the next room. If the animal wanted to get into my room, it could just use that hole instead of chewing a new one. As for the sound stopping when I turn on the lights, hopefully it's because the window is only a few feet from where the sound originated, and the light emanating from it frightened the thing into silence.

I guess time may tell what the mystery creature is, and where it is, and what it's doing. I may never hear from the thing again, or I may end up devoured by vermin.

The funny looking rock.

When I was really little, I was visiting my grandpa and playing in his backyard. I liked to lift up rocks and collect the bugs crawling around underneath them. I also kept an eye out for interesting looking rocks to take home and stick in an empty cookie tin that was my "rock collection." In truth, it was mostly gravel, but I had a couple of neat looking ones. On this particular day, amidst the spiders and beetles, I found a completely awesome looking rock. It was unlike any other rock I had ever seen, but it was hard, dry, and stiff, so it was definitely a rock. I picked it up, excited about the new acquisition for my collection.

I brought it inside and showed my mom and my grandpa, who immediately made me throw it away and thoroughly wash my hands. I was still convinced that it was a rock, but they told me it was actually a dried up old dog turd.

Going ape shit.

When I was really little, my family took a trip to the zoo. I'm pretty sure my cousins were there, and my sister, who is two years younger than myself, was still in a stroller.

As we walked around, we saw these guys ahead of us who kept running back and forth in front of one of the exhibits. They seemed like adults to me, but in retrospect they were probably teenagers. When we got closer, right in front of the exhibit where they were, I saw them making funny faces at the animals, which turned out to be chimpanzees. They ran away again, right as the chimps began throwing poop. We didn't know there was about to be ape shit thrown, so my sister's stroller got poop on it.

Fear of dogs.

When I was little and still lived in a big city, my family would spend occasional weekends four hours away, in the middle of nowhere. There were seemingly endless forests full of trails to explore, bugs to catch, and some decent kids to hang out with. The place was a paradise where I could ride around on my bike all day with my friends, and ride we did. In our travels, however, there was one place that we avoided. It was a house that contained something so horrifying that we didn't dare get too close. We would ride our bikes ten minutes out of the way to circumvent it, or, if we were in a really extreme hurry, we would race past it at top speed on our bikes, never looking back. The people who owned the house supposedly had a pet, the likes of which I had never seen, though I had heard the tales. According to legend, the golden retriever that lived there once almost ripped some guy's brother's leg off.

One time I was riding my kick scooter alone on a dirt trail through a forest. I stopped to pee on some bushes, and when I finished and turned around to get back on my scooter, I felt my stomach drop below my knees.

Standing next to the scooter was a dog.

I had never seen a golden retriever, so I didn't know if it was the monster dog, but I was generally scared enough of dogs by this point that I was shaking with fear. Knowing I had little chance of escaping on my scooter, I tried to remain calm and walk with the scooter between myself and the dog, using it as some kind of entirely useless shield. The dog followed me out of the forest, panting silently and glancing at me. By the time I got back to the street, I had figured out that the tail-wagging may not have been an act of aggression, and I decided to risk riding the scooter again. The dog didn't chase me, and as I rode away I felt incredibly relieved to have not been mauled.

Another time I was riding around with one of my friends, and we decided to explore a trail we had never taken before. It turned out to be a horrible mistake.

Shortly after embarking along the dirt path, a dog barked at us from one of the houses that the trail ran behind. We stopped for a moment, wondering if we should turn around. We decided to risk it and keep going.

A few minutes later, we were being barked at again. We kept riding, and soon more dogs were barking at us. It seemed like every house had a barking dog behind it. They were mostly fenced in behind chain-link fence, but they could obviously see us, and that was terrifying enough. What if they got loose? We stopped our bikes and feebly tried hiding behind them, but the dogs kept barking.

"Should we keep going or go back?" my friend asked, tears coming down his face.

"I don't know," I sobbed, "There are dogs both ways!"

We decided to keep moving forward, walking our bikes and trying to duck low to the ground, which slowed us down immensely and did absolutely nothing to curb the noise of the ferocious house pets. We were both scared out of our minds and crying, almost positive we were going to be eaten alive.

"I have to pee," I said.

"We have to get out of here!"

"I know," I cried, "but I really have to go!"

I tried to remain in my crouched position while I peed on a tree, my friend begging me in a panic to hurry up so we could continue our escape. Sometimes you really just have to go. I finished and we kept moving.

Eventually, we got to the street, hopped on our bikes, and rode away as fast as our legs would let us. We never took that trail again.

My fear of dogs subsided as I grew older, until I was about 20. I was at a friend's house, and another friend showed up with a pit bull. I was sitting on the floor, and the dog walked over and began sniffing me.

"Wow," my friend with the dog said, "He likes you. He doesn't like anybody."

The moment he was done saying that, the dog started growling at me, inches from my face. My friend pulled him away and took him into another room. I was a little shaken, as I had heard that if a pit bull bites you, they almost have to kill it to get it to let go. I stayed in the room where I was.

When I finally left the room, the dog saw me and ran at me. It jumped up and bit my arm. It bit softly enough that it may have been playing, but my friend ran over and pulled the dog off of me, yelling at it. I was going to hang out for a while, but I decided to leave instead.

Shortly after that, I went to a girl's house with one of my friends to pick up a drum set. Her family raised rottweilers, and they barked at us ferociously from their outdoor kennels as we walked to her door. I was shaken enough by the recent pit bull incident that I was a little freaked out by the big, loud dogs. When we went into her bedroom, she had another rottweiler standing on her bed, it's head level with mine for easy access to my jugular vein. She tried to convince me that she was a friendly dog and that I should pet her, but I just wanted to get the drums and get the fuck out of there as quickly as possible.

When I first met my girlfriend, her family had a pit bull that was so dangerous and mean that it had to be chained up all the time. It would bark and growl like a maniac at everybody who didn't live there, and would even come to her window to terrorize me when I was in her bedroom. That certainly didn't help improve my opinion of the breed.

To this day, rottweilers and pit bulls both freak me out to the point of looking like a complete wuss. If I see somebody walking one of these dogs, I walk the other way.

Go play on the freeway.

When I was about 8 years old, I took a horse riding class for city kids at the park. The class met every day for a couple weeks, and it was all kids roughly my age. There was one other boy, and the rest of the class consisted of girls. There was one red-haired girl who I instantly had a crush on, probably because she looked just like the girl from The Goonies.

Having always been a shy kid, I didn't talk to anybody for the first few days. I wanted to make friends with the other boy, because he was a dude and didn't seem to have any friends either. I wanted to talk to the red-haired girl, too, but I was too scared. A few days into the class, though, she came up to me with a group of her friends.

"Hey, kid," she said.

"Hi," I said.

"Is your name Bart?" she asked me.

"No," I said, "Paul." The fact that she called me Bart was noteworthy, because this was a couple years before The Simpsons was even on TV.

"Paul?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Go play on the freeway," she told me.

"Yeah, go jump in a lake!" said another girl.

I remember thinking that the red-haired girl's comment was sort of clever in a mean way, but that the other girl's comment was just stupid in a mean way. I also remember thinking something along the lines of fuck this class, and fuck these bitches! I wandered off on my own for the rest of the day, and when my mom picked me up they told her that I had disappeared and that they couldn't find me. I didn't tell them why I had walked off, but they warned me not to do it again.

The dude and I became good friends for the duration of the class, because the girls were horrible bitches to him, too.

Jimmy Harrison kicks a toad, a girl's head.

In 7th grade, there was this kid I didn't like named Jimmy Harrison. He was a grade A jackass, prone to making cruel jokes and just generally being mean to everyone. Unfortunately for me, he was also in a few of my classes, and I had to bear his antics on numerous occasions. It was no surprise to me to find out, years later, that he was involved in the brutal beating of a girl.

Jimmy sat behind me in health class. When the teacher was telling us about the effects of AIDS, he referenced me as a random example.

"If Paul got AIDS, he would eventually die from it."

"He's probably already got it," whispered Jimmy. I didn't respond, so he said it a few more times. I didn't figure out until later that his implication was that I was gay.

Another time, our gym class went out to the football field to play soccer. On the way out there, I heard Jimmy say, "Hey, a frog," and then saw him pick something up. He held it in an outstretched arm and drop-kicked it. It went flying, and he chased it, only to do it again. He repeated this a few times, and then walked away. I walked over to object to see what it was.

It was a limp, bloody toad.

After 7th grade, I went to a different school. I never heard anything about Jimmy again until senior year of high school. A girl who had gone to school with Jimmy and I filled me in on recent events in his life.

Jimmy had humped some girl. Generally, one would consider that a good thing. In this case, however, Jimmy's girlfriend thought it was a bad thing, and Jimmy would have to make amends for his actions.

To set things right, Jimmy and his girlfriend severely beat the girl, slamming her head repeatedly in a car door. The victim had to be hospitalized, and the other two upstanding citizens had to be jailed.