The Halloween Event that Changed Venice.

The Halloween Event      
that Changed the Face of Venice forever                  (according to me―of course). 

If you are from Venice, or grew up in Santa Monica, Mar Vista, Culver City and parts nearby there is a great likely-hood that you’re pretty familiar with the famous Halloween haunted house tradition on Harding Avenue. Odds are: you might have been among the thousands of people who packed our street on one of those spooky Halloween nights to watch the shows put on by the Lennon family.

 *

It was a haunting portrayal that included Frankenstein, Dracula, a damsel in distress, along with eerie organ music played by a monster on the front balcony, drapes that blew from howling wind, flashes of lightening and peels of thunder.   Were you there?  Do you remember?

The Lennons were competitive, so I'm going to tell you the true story of how their famous Venice haunted house really began ―the single event that started it all. 

This was way back (early 60’s) before the long hair, before the Veloci-Rooster, before the alligator, before the Mexican tomato plants, before the Vietnam War protest and before landing on the moon and before painting Venice yellow.

Before all this... before the Ooze ... before the Ouija Board

...THERE was a time when good Catholics were not allowed to celebrate the Devil’s high holy-day of Halloween. It was our duty to avoid anything that smacked of demons and goblins, witches and ghost. Good Catholic parents celebrated All Saints Day instead. Kids dressed as saints and angels―sometimes even went begging for candy the day after Halloween.  It was awkward for everyone. This, however, is the true story of the watershed event that changed everything.

We lived across the street from the Lennons. The four oldest girls appeared on TV every week on the Lawrence Welk Show. 

How could our mom hope to compare to that?!
  
Her only hope was to hold fast to the long held tradition of sending her darling children out trick or treating as angels and saints. 

Year after year our mother, Joan Dahlin, held out as the last bastion of Catholic hope in the world―not giving in to the Devil's holiday by fighting back against the forces of darkness.

Year after year she spent endless nights sewing elaborate costumes that not even the Lennons could match (that's hard to image, but true)!  

Good for you Mrs. Dahlin -- We better than the Lennons.  

She sewed one costume for Tony (He was Saint Anthony - the patron saint of lost causes)

Then another costume for Karl (The first Pope-pictured to left) 

Then another  (Saint Christopher)             

And another   (Saint George the dragon slayer)

Then another. Year after year: satin embellishments, vestment undergarments, sewing… planning…dreaming and creating magnificent costumes with a special accessory for each one.

8 years of costumes ―8 years of sewing ―8 years of creative imagination―then a girl. Finally a girl. Ahhhhhhh―since she was the angel of the family, mom transformed her into an the cutest little angel you ever saw!

        Mary as a baby angel 

4 years later, she was old enough to be the Blessed Virgin Mary

9 years of costume making... then 10 years… then 11 years… and 12…and 13…and 14 years and now it was finally my turn.  I was 5 and was licking my chops in excited expectation of my elaborate Christian costume. This was a rite of passage―I would join the rest of the saints in trick and treating and be included in this special family tradition for the very first time.  

ME! Yes, me, I would join the saints. 

Then it happened 

Before I came along, mom invested a lot of time into sewing, a lot of energy, and years of careful planning of those costumes. And now it was my turn, but was nervous that I didn’t see the usually buzz of activity. The bright light of my saintly mother's energetic buzz had dimmed.  

It was October 31 and I eagerly tugged on mom’s skirt-hem. Because there was an obvious lack of enterprise I nervously asked about my costume. Maybe she had spent many nights creating me something special while I was sleeping―I hoped against hope.

Calmly leading me down a hall to a room that had been piled full of stuff, she pointed to the corner of a room and told me to climb toward an old, musty-smelling steamer-trunk that had been buried.

JOY! A treasure hunt, this was even more exciting. Opening it, she instructed me to pull out the old mink stoles that had been placed there years before. 

These smelly mink stoles still had the little paws and heads with tiny glass eyes that ominously stared at you. Don’t ask me why but ladies had considered these dead animals very elegant in their day for some reason. 

ANYWAY…My mother placed the hideous thing over my shoulders and said, “There.”

I didn’t get it “There… what?”  I said stuttering in disbelief, asking what saint I was supposed to be.

She said, “This will make you Saint John the Baptist, of course.”

I was confused by the furs, knowing that John the Baptist wore camel skins. Biting my lip. I held back my initial disappointment holding out whatever glimmer of hope for the really cool accessory like all the other kids had―at least. 

 With pleading eyes, I asked, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well…am I…am I going to get a cool thing to hold like all the other guys?”

“Follow me downstairs” she said without skipping a beat.

Taking a paper plate, she stuck a toothpick through the center of it and then perched the head from one of my sister’s dolls on top of the toothpick. 

To top it off she glopped ketchup around the beheaded doll’s neck.

 

More confused than with the furs, I had no idea how holding a paper plate with a decapitated doll-head made me John the Baptist.

Being "Swedish Strong" I fought back tears and asked her to explain.

“Because, he had his head cut off!” She said lifting an eyebrow as though that explained everything to a confused five-year-old.

That was the end of our conversation. Instead of looking like a saint, I walked outside in bare feet with two dead animals over my shoulders, holding a paper plate with a bloody head. The shocked neighbors thought I was a child werewolf from some horror movie.  Wolf-Boy!

The grouch nextdoor called the police. The nuns around the corner fainted. My oldest brother was jealous that I got to Trick or Treat as the spawn of Charles Manson while he, at 14, had to be Saint Anthony.        

As it turns out―I won! 

The older boys wanted to have costumes as scary as mine next year. They wanted to be goblins and ghost, and if possible, make the nuns faint!

(Pictured: Getting pinched from behind - look at the excitement in the older boy's faces).

This was the watershed event. I think (as least the way I imagineer the story), that when I went by the Lennon house, Mr. Lennon was waiting on the porch to scare the kids and I think I scared him. 

When the the rest of the family saw my inglorious costume―the bloody son of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre it was right there-and-then that they decided that someday they would put on a haunted mansion show to the thrill spectators for the next 20 years–on every all-hallows-eve  (a tradition that began in 1970). 

Actually Video Footage of transforming the house on Halloween 

Whenever I tell this story―my mother shall be immortalized as the one who changed Venice by inspiring those resourceful and imaginative Lennons (at least this is the way I tell the story).

Thank you Mrs. D

P.S. Did I say that I won? YES!

(Picture of Lennons on the gridiron: by Donny Blaser). 

(*Picture of makeup at Lennon house by Kathy Daris Facebook). 
(opening and closing pictures credit: Joey Lennon) 

If you want to hear me tell the story click here.  

Bill Gates and the Naked Zombies part 2

Star Date: July 18 1969    2 more days until the Apollo 11 lands on the moon and four hours from the time eight naked boys are loosed at Boy Scout National Jamboree.

(Continued).

Last time, the brainiac nerd from Troop 186 named Billy, gave me the high grades on his tracking skills course, and so, I couldn't hate him...right? He got all excited and started telling me how this tracking thing was like some-kind of logic flow chart - the kind of code they use for programming computers.  I didn't even know what a computer was and had no idea what he was talking about - but he was passionate about it.

I liked the little nerd, but unfortunately their troop from Seattle had incited the Flaming Arrow Patrol (of my Troop) which has by now become known throughout the Jamboree as the notorious KYBO Patrol (KYBO: was a military term that meant Keep Your Bowels Open, which had evolved into a derogatory slur against our less-than-illustrious patrol that had requested to be near the outhouses because poor Cockerel was still working through a bad case of "prune induced" diarrhea. In my best guesstimation he still had about 12 pounds of pasty spaghetti he had to pass through the lower part of his intestines - NO, but seriously!).

"Not gonna lie" These guys in the KYBO Patrol were loud, they smelled and they were filthy dirty. The hoity-toity types from Seattle who set up camp right next to us resented our Troop from Venice and got into a verbal sparring match. THIS WAS NOT GOING TO END WELL.  Later that night after the speech from Jesse Owens and the message from Neil Armstrong aboard the Apollo 11 from outer space, the KYBO patrol had big plans for Troop 186 - when I use the word big - it is not a metaphor - I mean "BIG!"  

During the wee hours of late muggy night the KYBO Patrol decided on a raid. Only, they thought that instead of dressing up and disguising themselves they wanted to do that raid as what they called the "NAKED ANGLES." I heard all the whispering in their tent and I quietly sneaked out of mine to see what they were up to.

I pulled back the flap of their tent to see 8 naked bodies putting tape on each other. I knew it was going to hurt coming off - but more power to them...right! This would be the first time ever in the history of the known boy scout universe for a naked raid at a Jamboree. Troop 32 was about to go down in infamy!  I tried to talk them out of the naked part for the sake of our Scout Masters and managed to get them to concede to what I called the "White Angels" and to at least - go in their "Tightie-Whities." Then everyone scrambled and borrowed skin-tight skivvies, if they didn't have any, and went on the 3:00 am raiding party. You talk about the Living Dead or attack of the Zombies this was it! The time had finally come; an event that inspired many a horror movie to come. (Only Chronister read something in an encyclopedia about pixies and wanted the Flaming Arrows to go marauding as something he called "Manic Pixies" everyone thought it was stupid and shot that idea down) "Manic Pixie Hot Mess" I thought that idea would never fly!

First things first! The "White Angels"decided to mess up the Indian Tracking course. By that - all of the kids thought it meant destroying tracks, adding new ones and littering the course with trash and other stuff you can find at 3 am in the morning... all except for "Dego."  When his patrol set off to mess up the course... somehow what got stuck in his brain was "to mess on the course." Now that our stools (except for Cockerel's) had some firm consistency to them, Dego threw the owl scat into some bushes and replaced it with the biggest stinkiest pile of human byproduct imaginable.

Next, the practically naked boy-scouts (if you could call us that) cut the ropes of the tent stakes and pulled Billy from his tent. They pants'd him and gave him a "pink-belly." Pretending to be Zombies, they said they were going to eat his brains and poop them out in the morning. After what Dego did, the boys from Troop 186 thought it just might be true.

As the baby boy of the"Wolf Pack" and perpetual underdog to my older brothers torturous shenanigans there shouldn't be any question in anyone's mind as to why I had this felt need to stand up for the underdog.

It was almost psychotic and my PTSD adrenaline addiction didn't help things either - when incited, I was always like that mother you hear about who could lift a car off her baby. I let them have their fun, but when they began to drag the poor kid over to Dego's "leaning tower of Dooh-Dooh," I Intersected their path and tried my best to derail their plans (this is what I would have wanted from a parent or a neighbor or anyone who I felt cared)...so I cared - sue me! I lied to them and told them that the MP's were on the way and punctuated that by telling the hairless Zombies that, "The nerd was safe.. because...How can you eat his brains... WHEN HE DOESN"T HAVE ANY!"  Then I laughed  in hopes of priming the pump and began howling in laughter, believing they had gotten the best of Troop 186 and scattering in victory.  I watched as eight pair of white-clad buns scurried back into the tent of the KYBO Patrol.

I checked on Billy to see if he was okay, but didn't want to say much because I could see he was embarrassed. The poor guy. I don't think he's got what it takes to become an Eagle Scout and knew that this Boy Scout thing just wasn't for him. I helped him up as he mumbled under breath that, he'll get even. That somehow he would show those guys. I knew exactly what he had felt like mainly because of what I had waiting for me when i got back to my house.

He said something about computers again and about making a bazillion dollars and about taking over the world. "I'll show them" he said... I wasn't too sure about that...(to be honest, I wasn't too sure about the future for computers). Then I saw the look in his eye and figured that it might be good to keep his signed piece of paper.  Who Knows!  Maybe someday, we will all have giant super-computers in the basement of our homes.  Right! Pshaw!  That would be like portable phones you could carry around with you... like that will ever happen. What are you going to do strap a phone booth on the top of your car!  - Not very likely.

Time to write another letter home I guess...

for you Android People Shocking Blue Write Me a Post Card

Hello Muddah.. Hello Faddah... "When I get home remind me to tell you about the White Angels some time and if you see Tommy Blaser and Jeffery and Kippy and Michael and Kevin Lennon running around the neighborhood, tell them it was better that they weren't here. I think the trip would have changed their outlook on world.

Jesus. Venice. And Night of the Living Dead!

Venice was not just a place, but an identity - something that is inescapable part of you. Good or bad, being from Venice gave you both pride and cringe.  Though only 12, by 1969 I had been across the country and back 3 times and seen my fair share of the "Purple Mountain Majesty and Fruited Plains."  Everywhere we went, "tourist" (we called them, derogatorily), were the people living in their own towns who look at the long hair of my brothers and invariable asked if we were from Venice. I learned early on of the stigma of being from Venice that gave my brothers such pride.  It was like that part in the Bible where it talked about Jesus being from Nazareth that said, "Can anything good come for Nazareth?"

Every time someone looked at my family and asked if we were from Venice, it was as if  they were saying, "Can anything other than hippies, free love, drugs Flower Power and Jim Morrison come from Venice?" We thought that was good, but it appeared they didn't share that sentiment. They might well have said to our face, "Can anything good come from Venice?"  So I guess I understood how Jesus felt when he heard those words.

The once glamorous Canals that hadn't been filled-in, began to rot and stink and the formerly cute bungalows of Abbot Kinney's dream were now run down shacks full of pot smoking hippies, unemployed artist, and raucous parties of the flower children of the sixties.

Several weeks after I broke my arm playing football in the street, I had been outside in my cast. Although it had Andrea's treasured signature, as well as some other seventh graders, it smelled and was pretty disgusting already. I was didn't give much thought to that fact that I had only been wearing one shoe when an older couple slowed down to a stop in front of our house and gawked. The old geezer cracked his window a couple inches, as if the air on Harding avenue was unsafe to breathe, and called me over.







His wife was holding some kind of Hollywood, or Beverly Hills, or Celebrity map or something and stared at our house - eyes wide in disbelief and mouth hanging open in shock.




















With cars and boats and more broken down cars and broken down boats and creaky stairs and hippie brothers hanging out on the porch, the couple from Nebraska carefully whispered through the cracked window asking if my house was a hippie commune?



I said, "No, I live here!"

"With your Parents?" they asked, incredulously.

"Yeah!" I said.

"Poor parents" the man muttered.

"Where's your other shoe" the lady asked.

"What other shoe? I asked

"The one your missing" she snarled, thinking I was being a disrespectful smart-aleck.

I informed her, "I'm not missing one."

"Then why are you only wearing one shoe?" her husband barked at me as he took over.

"Oh, this old thing isn't my shoe. I came outside barefooted and found this decroded thing in the flowerbed."

I looked inside the window to see if our house was on the tourist map as a place of interest for being a hippie commune as they rolled up the window and sped away - only to screech to a halt in front of the Lennon Sister's home two houses up the street. I ran down the street towards them in my older brother's size 11 shoe and frightened the poor couple like I was one of the dead bodies in "Night of the Living Dead."

I can't really say with certainty whether our house was on  that map or not, but certainly this couple went back to where they came from telling their neighbors about what they saw on Harding Avenue and wondering if anything good could come from Venice?"






Pshaw... "fer sure" We have the Famous Lennon Sisters across the street and right behind us was Cheryl Arnold who was Miss Venice, and Miss Santa Monica, and Miss LA...SO TAKE THAT... tourist!

Ha! Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

With all that said, I guess the thing I want to share next with the world is that fact that my Boy Scout Troop from Venice - Troop 32, had been in steep decline by the time I had been recruited by my Eagle Scout brother and was not the best thing Venice exported: something me and my fellow hoodlum scouts took great pride in.

We raided camporees at night, causing havoc on Troop 34, cutting the ropes on tents and making life as miserable as we could at Camp Slauson in Malibu in the Santa Monica mountains.

Here is a picture of our (converted moving truck) i.e. Troop 32 Boy Scout Truck - that was a not a whole lot more than "cage wresting" on wheels.

You can take the Boy Scouts out of Venice, but you cant' take the Venice out of Troop 32!

Next time: National Jamboree and "Diarrhea 'till Easters"

Last Supper, Jalapenos and The Creature!

Last Supper and Jalapenos Pt 2

I have a lot of Superpowers, but most of them are in my imagination! Whenever I am buried in a pit, dropped out of a window, shot with needle-tipped arrows, electrocuted, tied up in a rope, or shoved in a hamper, those circumstances provide the opportunity to pretend!  I pretend that I am Superman or Spider Man... and in this latest adventure of the diabolical scheming by older brothers (AKA the Wolf Pack) I wished I could have been the new action hero - Iron Man - mainly because he doesn't feel anything. In the times when I'm been tortured and I receive the gift of adrenalin that pulses through my body and I get the strength of about 3 or 4 boys my size...like the mom who has the superhuman strength to lift up a car to free a trapped baby, I have to be reminded that I am only human. DANG IT! I come to the painful realization that I am like most mere mortals.

Anyway, getting back to the story about the Hawaiian, Luau themed party in the backyard. Everyone was having a good time outside at the party until it came to a screeching halt when they heard the piercing shriek of horror coming out of my mother's bedroom window.

Mr. and Mrs. Nargie heard it
Mr. and Mrs. Blaser heard it
All of those at the (now ruined and infamous) Luau in the backyard heard it!

The Steadmans across the street
The Lennons down at the corner

The Nuns at the convent around the corner
The old grouch next door- and her drunk brother, Hutch, heard it!
The Tripps
John Gillemonster on Naples

and Mrs. Gass over on Crestmore Ave
the Grants down on Angelus Place heard it
The Vasquez'
and Bobby Manriquez  - they all heard it!

I'm sure some heard the terrible screams of the 7-year-old all the way to the Venice canals... and if you were alive back then, it is possible that if you think really hard you might just remember hearing this awful screaming no matter where you might have been in the world at that time.

If you didn't hear me screaming in pain, then you heard my mom, shouting out furiously for Roy (that's what she called my dad) to do something!  That was nice I thought. It was good thing to know that she still cared and still went a little berserk from time to time when bad things were happening.

I don't know exactly why they did it...or whose idea it was to cut open all the left over jalapenos and smear the skins and the juice all over my tender little body. They took off my shirt, held me down and wanted to see what the hot chili peppers would do to human tissue when rubbed over its entirety! By that, I mean everything that was exposed - like arms, legs, upper torso, both arm pits, face and lips.  Everything turned red and swelled, I looked like a red Pillsbury-Dough-Boy that had caught on fire.

I was burning up and wanted to jump from the window, but they held me down until they heard the rushing footsteps of Mr. D tromping up the stairs, then they vaporized into the four corners of the globe (i.e. cluttered bedrooms on the third floor).

Dad picked me up and began running down the stairs and mom began shouting for him to take me to the emergency hospital...she thought I was going to die. My eyes burned and were swelled shut, but I could tell he turned right instead of left. This was not the way to the front - instead he was headed for the backyard!

The pain was too great...I screamed...She screamed and had begun to shout down curses on the older boys and said stuff about "Pain of Mortal Sin" and about how they would never see their way out of Purgatory!

Embarrassed, people left the party quickly yet somber like it was a funeral dirge... as they cleared a path for my dad who was holding an unrecognizable hideous red creature in his arms. Instead, of the hospital, he flung me into the pool! More screaming by Mrs. D...which launched Jerry LaFountaine on a rampage in a search and destroy mission through the the house for the boys. Boy, did he enjoy that! Poor Jerry, however,was sorely disappointed because he could not find a single soul to punish as my clever siblings hid in the secret crawl space behind the walls up in the third story across from the rattlesnake cages.

After recovering from the shock of being tossed into the pool, I emerged from the water CHANGED! Something happened in the chemical reaction to the burns that interacted with the chemicals that had been release by the adrenal glands located in the cortex on top of my kidneys.

I emerged from the water as if i were The Creature from the Black Lagoon bent on revenge. Frightening the remaining guest away, I went on a pillaging rampage... and ate all the cowardly older brothers, drinking all of their blood and letting the helpless reptiles out of their cages (seeing that now, I was related to the scaled reptiles).

I walked the earth all the rest of my days alone and hunted, a reptilian fugitive surviving off the flesh of humans and yearning to drink blood.

Okay, so the last part - the part after I was thrown into the pool and went around eating everybody was only something conjured up in my puny brain while I had been intoxicated with drugs to numb the pain.

Though I was a hideous little red creature for the next couple days and looked like an actual relative to the monster from the Black Lagoon - or something that lived in the snake cages upstairs, I laid in bed, draped in damp towels having weird thoughts and mostly thankful that I hadn't eaten any family members or drank their blood.

A week later, however, I did manage to sneak up stairs when no one was home and opened the door to a rattlesnake cage.  Hehehehe...  

Someone sounded the rattlesnake escape-alarm and raised the flag to alert the neighbors.  Havoc reigned and neighbors complained... but it was just another regular day on Harding avenue...where we all survived - not perfectly unscathed, but enough to share the infamous and crazy stories that made life worth living.







 

 

Free Floating Apparition and the Living Dead!

 At 6:30 am the next morning Mrs. D let out a blood curdling scream...

“Royyyyyyy! 

Startled from mom's screeching, dad woke up from a sound sleep, grabbed the broom next to his bed and began beating the ceiling.  "Up and at 'em...Time of the harvest moon!" he began yelling in his staccato staff sergeant cadence. Meanwhile, mom continued to scream in fright at the piercing red eyes from the black apparition of the living-dead zombie that stood at the end of her bed.  Woken up abruptly to mom's screaming, Mr. D forgot it was Saturday, which was his only day to sleep-in, and thought he urgently needed to wake up the tribe for the Viking "Street Cleaning" ritual (must see blog post 7/13/13). 

The hippie Wolf Pack on the floor above groaned and moaned and cursed and burped and farted and stomped on the floor in mutinous rebellion. "Mr. D its not Wednesday" Puke-Breath yelled back at dad, but unable to overcome feverish pitch the frightened Mrs. D.  When Dad's sleepy eyes finally focused he turned the wrath of his broom handle onto the scabby burnt ghost and chased the demonic phantasm from the room in his underwear.

The free floating apparition sprang from the foot of the bed with the speed of light and escaped up to the third floor to the long rear bedroom. The scabbified-black poltergeist startled the Wolf Pack along with the rattlesnakes and nasty looking iguana that resided in cages built into the side of the room.

 Mayhem broke out. "Fright or Flight." The hair on the rat's spine stood up, rattlesnakes defensively coiled, the iguana from hell (blog post 8/1/13) thew itself against the glass and Ulrich clenched his fist ready to take on the repulsive manifestation. Dooh-Dooh Pants pulled the covers over his head and Puke-Breath cussed out the disgusting creature. Chewbacca, on the other hand recognized it for what it was!

A MIRACLE!

It was not something to be feared or loathed, but something to be venerated and loved. Chewbacca gave the creature its new name. "Lazarus" he affectionately cried, in an emotional embrace. The room was silent - it was not a ghost! NO, the dead calico cat (that was in a small shoe-box coffin out back at Wall Drug) had risen from the dead!

Apparently the cat had cashed in all nine lives and had cheated death itself.



When Chewbacca was a small child; before The Beatles, before all the hair, he used to fall over all the time and bonk his head. Mr. and Mrs D felt they needed to protect him from brain damage and made him wear a green hockey helmet as an exoskeletal brain bucket.  My vote was that - it didn't fully work and he had some serious issues... either that or it was the hippie weed that had affected his perception of the world.



It wasn't like things weren't bad enough with the veloci-rooster, the chickens, "grampa" the chicken-eating-frog, the alligator, the escaping rattlesnakes, and the dozens of hippies that lived at our house - NOW, the smelly burn victim of the Fraternity Fire (see previous blogs) was considered one of our numbers.





And the rest of us had to contend with the place of honor in which Chewbacca placed the gross looking cat. History turned a new chapter in the Dahlin house as none of us dared to take back our chair from the reviled demon CAT or kick him off the countertop when it dropped scabs and licked the butter - lest we face the wrath of Chewbacca.

   

Why...Chewbacca...Why?

I really don't understand a lot of stuff... i.e. here we are in the middle of a terrible fire that is consuming a grand old home with the daring rescue effort by my hippie brothers and a neighbor in underwear and two of the most bizarre things happen.  Let me set the stage:  Not only were there firemen and policemen that you would normally expect to find at a typical 3 alarm fire, but this particular event also drew the special interest of these mystery Men In Black - members of the President's Secret Service detail who had been staying in the Lennon house for their protection. These Men in Black began sniffing around like bloodhounds for information and asking questions about Chet Young and were concerned that this Molotov Cocktail bombing might have had something to do with Charles Manson.  The crazy-man, Chet Young, had made assassination threats against the President and Charles Manson was plastered on the front page of every newspaper in America for the gruesome Tate and La Bianca murders.


With the ensuing chaos of fire and smoke and firemen, and police, and paramedics, and anxious Secret Service, and my hippie brothers, and my dad and my near-naked neighbor rescuing half-clad college drop-outs - who were now homeless and walking around like dazed Zombies - it was totally crazy right! Picture - cars blowing up - people screaming, smoke hovering and flaming ashes falling... imagine if you will -  Night of the Living Dead, conspiracy - threats and big things to worry about - which in light of that brings me to the two things that I don't get:

Number 1) At a time like this, in the middle of all of this chaos with everything that is at stake - why would my second oldest brother, affectionately known as, Chewbacca, feel compelled, at this moment to make some type of emotional connection to a dead feral-cat that nobody in the neighborhood cared for anyway.                  

                           WHY?                   Weird?  Right!

He had lots of hair and the charred cat had lots of hair at one time I suppose - was that it?  Was it some strange hippie thing that I didn't know about? Did it have to do with some form of Arrested Development? Did it have something to do with those funny cigarettes and those hidden "Mexican Tomato Plants" the older boys were meticulously taking care of in our backyard.







I understand that I'm only 12 and in seventh grade, so I guess I have a lot to  figure out...but I just didn't get it.


Okay, now with all that said, why this next part?  Take your stupid dead cat that the cosmos has directed you to fall in love with and leave me out of this.    This leads me to number 2).

Number 2). Why on earth did Chewbacca feel he had to bring that char-broiled cat which had stunk like burnt hair and that had looked like some 4000-year-old thing buried in a pyramid in Egypt alongside of Tutankhamen...AND SHOVE IT IN MY FACE?  

Why Chewbacca?   Why?   What did I ever do to you? What did I do to deserve the 732 titty-twisters, a year of being squeezed to unconsciousness(blog post 6/26/13), 532 wedges, 321 monkey bumps to the leg...and now a dead, stinky, burnt corpse of a despised cat shoved in my face?  

CAN ANYONE TELL ME?   He could have taken that cat to the backyard and happily had some kind of hippie ritual for all I care, but why did he feel it was necessary to torment me on the way?  I was watching the show minding my own business and out of nowhere he shoved that disgusting thing in my face and you know what happened!   That's right - my superpowers kicked in - I bent over gagging and heaving and threw up 13 times on the Blaser's front lawn... and before everyone could clear the blast zone - Tommy, Ricky and even one of the escaping Lennon brothers had puke all over them.

There I stood despised by everyone - making matters worst, I was in my hand me down shirt, my holey jeans, my miss-matched socks - looking like a complete moron...besides all that, I knew that Mr. Blaser was sure to be mad at me in the morning - as if this was all my fault.

Later the next day, Mr. Blaser made me wash the puke off of his lawn and it was there that I determined to find out who started this whole thing. That's why I felt like I had to take investigative matters into my own hands and find out who started this thing in the first place - and why I figured that the Secret Service and the Fire Marshal needed my help is solving this terrible arson case.  

It turns out that it was neither Charles or Chet, which meant that my list of suspects was dwindling.

To my shame, I am not happy to report the next incident, which turned out to be an unbelievable miracle of epic proportions and the beginning of a new saga at the Harding House!