The Infamous "Tuna Canyon" Story part 1: The Quest to Belong

This next part is the lead into one of the classic Dahlin stories which happens to include just about every hippie in Venice and every twenty-something aged person on Harding Avenue. It is a story that is told over and over and over again at every Dahlin function... like the Salton Sea Story.. or the LA Zoo monkey story... or the Good Friday story... or the Fire Escape Pole story... or the Del Diablo story... or the Edna and the Whiffle Ball story... the UFO Story... the Albino Camp stories... McElliot's Pool or of being electrocuted or the story of electrocuting a nun...       

Every man who came back from the military had a nickname. And so it was part of the DNA of my parents generation to give nicknames to friends and to those who fought with you in the trenches.  I never knew my dad's military nickname, but he was the best at dishing out inventive pseudonyms to just about every person he had come in contact with. Jack Underwood, for example, became "Underwater."
Every person who had the last name of McClain or McCelland or McCarthy was called "Mac." Every Ferguson was "Fergy." 

Dad had christened the people in his real estate office after some personality trait or character flaw... "Slim," "Bubbles," and "Liver Lips."  

For the hippies in our neighborhood who hung around our house he gave them names like... "Hercamer Skeeziks," "Kleghorn," "Freeloader," "Sleepy," Girly-Man," "Quaker," "Spongecake" and list goes on and on.  

It was the normative cultural practice at the time. 

And so, this is why all of our friends had a tag-line as a nickname: "Primo," "Sleezy," "Booty" "Pinky," "Monkey boy," "Face," and why my brothers had given each one of us a childhood nickname. This endearing practice quickly degenerated in our house from and were tossed around like hand grenades - meant to inflict harm.  

You could probably figure out the meaning of the insult behind each of  these new names launched by my older brothers (this part doesn't take rocket science).  

In order, our nicknames looked something like this...

Brothers:

            "Zit King"

            "Girly-Man" (BTW, this has nothing to do with being effeminate - only the length of hair). In the                                         early years he was affectionately called, "The Crip." The Crip was the shortened                                         form of The Cripple, because of all the broken bones he had together at one time.                                         Later he was just called "Chewbacca." 

            "Mad-Dog"   

            "Puke-Breath" (if not self-explanatory - he wore a retainer and had the world's worst breath)        

            "Dooh-Dooh-Pants" My 4th or 5th oldest brother(depending on if you counted "Mad-Dog or not)                                                     began early on with this name (because he was always cutting the cheese                                                       and smelled like he had poop in his pants ). This made it easy to find when                                                     we were playing Hide N Seek. 

                                       Then he was called "Lardo" at about 13, because he may have been a                                                               whole 10 pounds over weight! "Lardo" was the shortened form of                                                                "Tub of Lard"(The crueler the better)!    

            "Flea-Bait" (making fun of his short stature). 

Sister: 

             "TQOTW"  (poking fun of her sense of self-importance).

Me: 

          "Marky Sparky" the mailman across the street, Frank                          Nargie, called me this, ( I wished that one had stuck).  

                   My brothers however, has a long list... 

           "Hyper-Boy" "Mosquito-Bait" "Rubber-Band Man"            "Retard... aka 'Tard" (that's the short list...but you get                                                         the idea).

Baby Sister: 

                 She was so far down the food-chain, that she didn't get                    a proper derogatory nick-name...the poor thing. She                        was the only person in our family called by their real                        name ... 

          "Karin." 

   

Following suit (since the Boys Scouts of America was a para-military organization), every kid in our troop had a nick name. Only, most of them had been corrupted by the same viral infection of our human nature (I don't know - maybe it had something to do with the creeping influences of the black ooze) that always seemed to make things flow downhill.

After the infamous camping trip at Camp Slauson we called our skewered and dangling, Senior Patrol Leader, Ray, "Lucky." "Lucky" was intended as a ironic jab and was more sardonic than it was sarcastic, employed in a way to make fun of the poor guy... who was indeed the unluckiest person in the world.

Behind his back, we called our Scout Master, Mr. Degotbee.  Degotbee was the phonetic pronunciation of the acronym, D G O T B, which means "Don't Go Over The Bridge" (which he did). 

Here I am, a 13-year-old late-bloomer and easy target. Not only do I feel insecure in my place in the world, but feel like an outsider in own family desperately trying to fit in.

I'm short for my age...don't have one strand of hair under my arm pits... I'm not a dope-smoking hippie and just don't fit in with the older boys...ie. The Wolf Pack. 

I am not welcome in hippie hooch-hut out back... I am too young to be invited to the hippie parties on Hollister ave in Santa Monica. 

I am not old enough, big enough or good enough to be part of the Venice Pinners softball team.

                       And... I didn't surf! 

I don't have my scuba certification like the rest of the older  boys and just don't belong! 

One time they took me on a scuba trip and tied me to the inner-tube they floated offshore as a marker (I made it "more visible"- they said laughing and "if carried away by a swell or wind, then it would be no loss. We tried to get rid of you at Salton Sea, but that didn't work - remember?"). 

They said things they thought were funny... and used cruel nicknames that deeply cut the heart of a little kid, who had longed for a sense of belonging in his own tribe.           THEY DIDN'T KNOW ME.

They told the Salton Sea story as a joke and laughed at each embellished rendition around family gatherings... to newcomers. I laughed too. But it made me feel like the biggest crisis in a life a nine-year-old was of no concern to them - it hurt! 

Here's the weird thing... the more I felt like I didn't belong - the more I felt like I needed to belong. 

That's why I said, "yes" to everything. "Yes, I'll go into the hamper."  "Yes, you can bury me in a pit."

"Yes, I'll hold this wire."  "Yes' I'll stick my finger in this hole." "Yes, I'll do underwater laps." 

And..."ARE YOU KIDDING ME? OF COURSE, I'LL GO ON A HIPPIE HIKE TO MALIBU CANYON WITH YOU GUYS! And the desperate (maybe even psychotic) 13-year-old said, "YES, I'LL GLADLY FIND A ROPE AND BRING IT."

Which brings me to another infamous story, a Dahlin classic. A story I pretend to laugh at and is used as a from of subtle torture at family gatherings!

Here is how it Began...   

Poochie laid out on the warmth of the soft, tar street as cars began assembling on the driveway and on the front lawn on a perfect Saturday morning.  

Hippies! Hundreds and thousands of them.  Maybe not hundreds and thousands... but 30 or 40 would be no exaggeration... gathered on the front lawn of the Harding House...  

     AND Markie D  WAS INVITED!  

 ....and I was even called by my real name...   

They liked me... everything was good in the world.  

                                            I Belonged!  

                                                                                                                                                              At least I thought so... 

                 

How Not to Exact Revenge

(Continued from last time: The Kingdom Hall, the Hypothetical Hippie and the old Venice train)

PLAN: "XYZ"

After getting rolled in the dirt and being embarrassed, I'm not too sure that Tommy had much of an interest in being a member of the Troop 32 ruffians.  Jeffery, on the other hand, was looking for something that pushed the edge of the envelop and was a little beyond the pay-grade of being a Lennon. He could wet his appetite for dangerous living by hanging out with me at my house, "Hotel Crazy," and cut his teeth on adventure by joining The sickness of this rowdy troop from Venice.

BUT FOR NOW - it was all about PAYBACK! My older brother, Chewbacca, had drawn all over my body with a Marks-a-Lot and derailed my chances of finding out about love: HE HAD TO PAY and I had a plan!

When Jeffery sneaked over to my house, he was as giddy as a little kid the night before Christmas with the thought about handling snakes and dead things that were being preserved in our freezer.

The house was quiet because hippie Wolf Pack was out back in the ivy cave smoking it up and mom was locked in her bedroom. Like paleontologists, the first thing we had to do was chip out one of the two dead Diamondback rattlesnakes that were frozen in the glacier of the refrigerator frost (that we had found at Leo Carrillo state park in Malibu) .

Picking away at the thick ice crystals with an ice pick and a heavy metal spoon we scooped out loads of the snow and began eating the stuff.  Chipping away at the snake skins, Jeffery and I shoved gobs of the delicious fluffy white refrigerator snow in our mouths...gobs and gobs of it ...and even made snow balls and threw them at Chewbacca's gross pigeon that lived on top of the refrigerator.

Jeffery was in heaven - nothing like this would ever take place at his house.  We threw freezer snow balls at the flying one-eye'd" parasite carrier and shoved more of the fluffy frost into our mouths UNTIL...

...UNTIL I got a bite that tasted like it had made contact with the dead rattler... I guess it could just have been tainted with the rancid blood of old chicken but my overactive mind conjured up snake guts that incited my superpowers; heaving and gagging I ran to the vomitorium.  Jeffery laughed and continued to dislodge the old rattler carcass from the freezer as he listened to me throw up my guts in the bathroom.  I was a hot mess





So much for payback. Chewbacca, was already winning and he was out back getting high with Bob Dylan and friends - It's not like Bob Dylan was out in our backyard. It's just that they were just doing what Bob said, "Everybody must get stoned." They were smoking the infamous "Mexican tomato plants" which gave us time to lay our devious little trap.






















In order for our plan to work we had to thaw the thing, so I made Jeffery put the snake under his shirt - he loved it and thought it was groovy - but I put a rubber band about the mouth of the snake so the fangs wouldn't accidentally poison him with deadly venom.  

With the snake warming under his shirt, we headed up stairs to the third floor bedrooms of the Wolf Pack and to the (not so secure) snake cages!  I didn't want to kill any one really...just put the fear of God into Chewbacca, so I didn't mess with the rattlesnake cages. I did however make a nice soft warm nest right in the middle of Chewbacca's bed.  Pulling back the covers, I carefully placed one garter snake at a time in a pile of snakes I would leave for Chewbacca to discover when he came stumbling to bed.

Where Plan XYZ gets really good is that we were going to take the thawing rattlesnake and place it among the living ones.  My hope is that with all the slithering and movement from the real snakes he would think that the rattler was alive and have a complete conniption fit and go crazy!

When Jeffery put the warm rattlesnake in the mix the other snakes freaked out - and wouldn't you know it - in the panic - one bit me in the arm!             DANG IT!             This payback better be worth it!

I was hoping the Wolf Pack would turn on each other and that a ruckus would break out on the third floor. In the middle of the night I expected to hear the the sweet sounds of this delicious payback!

I climbed into my loft bed near the place where the ooze was released from the pit of hell and smiled as I fell asleep.

And it happened just as I planned!  I heard a screech that sounded just like the girls did when the older boys took them to the Albino camp... I heard the boys yell at Chewbacca...I heard a  wrestling match break out on the third floor. YES!  PERFECT! All was right and good in the world (only Jeffery was home and missing all the fun)... UNTIL...

...UNTIL...I heard my name!  "MARKKKKKKKKKKKKK!" came the bitter sounding screech from the third floor.  "I'm going to kill you. You little twerp!"

Footsteps!  Lots of them coming down the stairs and heading my direction. I was trapped!

The boys grabbed me, stripped me down to my tightie-whities, tied a stand of Christmas lights around my ankles and hung me out the second story window!

Luckily it wasn't long, but there I hung until morning. Mom walked under me and mumbled something about the "pain of mortal sin" and when Jeffery stepped outside his house and saw me hanging nearly naked he knew that PLAN XYZ was an epic fail and that being a Lennon wasn't so bad after all.

When the mom who drove the Saint Mark's advanced-math kids to Saint Monica's in the morning pulled up and saw me hanging there she - burned rubber and sped away to Santa Monica as fast as she could!

My only hope was to pull some kind of Houdini and escape before Andrea would see me in my underwear on her way to school.        This was certainly not the way to exact revenge.            
                                                 YOU WON THIS ONE CHEWBACCA!



I guess it was a good thing My dad and mom had prepared me for this when I was young.

   
So you know what, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" or something...

  ...or SOMETHING!

All I know was that I was still trying to figure out what this love word was all about.  Clueless in Venice!

Grumpy Cat started it all!

Continued...(Christmas lights and three things I feared most)

Believe it or not, when we weren't in training to kill each other....(see pictures below) we really were angels at one time.

Look at how cute we were... sometimes we were even saints...

But with the advent of The Beatles, long hair, marijuana plants and the Ooze- those days are long gone. 

Because my mother has locked herself in her room and refuses to come out... my older brothers are meaner than junkyard dogs with mange, and this time it was the stupid grumpy cat that had riled them up. The "Law" in our house was that boys could not pick on girls and since I was the youngest boy... all sibling torture fell on my plate - it was a tough job, but somebody had to do it. 

In the last episode, Lazarus, "The Miracle Cat," had lost the rat which upset the older boys to no end... that caused a riot to brake out in the living room when one of them caught a glimpse of me climbing out the window. With an old smelly rope slung over my shoulder that I had pulled out of the murky bottom of one of the two sailboats on the front lawn, I tried to sneak onto the carport roof without being seen. My job was to scale the steep pitch of the old turn-of-the-century house so that I could pull up the Christmas lights that Karin, Pinky and I had laid out earlier on the front lawn (lawn is a loose translation- but go with it). 

Those little stinkers - Tommy Blaser and Jeffery Lennon and Michael Lennon kept breaking our Christmas lights and I was content to have a good third of them working when we tested them while the boys were betting inside.

After the wrestling match inside, older boys had retreated to the hippie-hut out back and I had gotten to the tippy-top peak of the old house without incident. 

                                           

I figured that with 38.2% of our light bulbs working and the fact that I had made it to the top of the house without being spotted by my big brothers (the Wolf Pack)...                                                                                                                                     ...THIS WAS GOING TO BE A GREAT FINISH to a hard year.    

In order to pull off this Christmas light project every year, it meant that I had to face three of my greatest fears. The first: Fear of the dark. I had to climb into the dark cluttered basement - home of the portal to hell in order to retrieve the lights. As usual, I threatened my little 9-year-old sister, Karin, that Santa would not bring any toys if she did not go into the basement with me and lead the way. I told her that I didn't want her to trip over all the junk down there, that I needed to go second to "have her back" and that I needed to hold her hand so that I could protect her...(all lies).

I was thirteen, but was smarter than her and knew the boogie man lived down there.

I had overcome my first fear with the help of my little sister - but I'm not going to admit that to anyone.

My second fear was heights.

My job was to climb to the top - shimmy out along the peak (hurting my boy parts) as I straddled the high roof and lean out over the edge to lower the rope down to Pinky who would tie a boy scout approved square-knot to the middle section of the enormous string of lights.

Not gonna lie - this freaked me out! I had to sit there leaning out over the edge of the roof some 900 feet up in the air... (okay 35 feet or something like that) but I couldn't show negative pheromones because as soon as the Wolf Pack were to discover this weakness they would certainly exploit it.

The third thing I was afraid of was being discovered by the Wolf Pack with a rope... To me, it was like sending up the bat-signal into the sky showing the Wolf Pack my location as though it were a beacon that invited them to come and torture me. It reminded me of the story in the Bible with Abraham and Isaac. Isaac was told to carry the wood to the top of the hill...the very wood he was to be sacrificed with...gulp!

There I sat on top of the roof with the potential that all of the negative stars in the universe could line up against me.

But with the hippies out back smoking it up - everything was groovy - "all copacetic" as Bruce Grant would say.

With the ropes clearing the third-floor window I nearly had it all finished when I heard the clamor of Santa's Reindeer right behind me - it was a Christmas miracle!

Hearing the commotion of all of the reindeer hooves and panting and the noise of the sleigh settling on top of roof behind me, I turned around expecting to see Santa himself. Actually, I turned around praying it would be Santa...for I had a foreboding feeling in my gut.

YES, Kids never...ever...ever climb to the top of a very tall building with a long rope slung over your shoulder in the presence of older brothers or near the edge of a cliff or near a tree or near an abandoned well... if you happen to be the baby brother - LET ME JUST SAY THIS NOW - you are only asking for trouble.

The Bat-signal was up.. I had sealed my fate. The Wolf Pack plotted revenge on me for laughing at them when the retarded grumpy cat attacked them.  Somehow it was all my fault and now I was tied up by the ankles and being dangled over the top and swung back and forth by half of the motley crew who were on the ground racing back and forth across the lawn with the strand of Christmas lights.

Okay so... we weren't normal...but who has ever seen a kid hanging by his ankles from a rope off of the top of a giant three story house swinging back and forth? The Blasers might have had the straightest Christmas lights, but by golly who could top this show - not even the Lennons (who were in show-business) down the street...The rest of the world- eat your heart out!

All of this to say - I guess it is good that my parents had especially trained me in advance for such occasions...

The grumpy, mean O' cat came out of the house, as if to see, if I could land on my feet if the rope broke...and wouldn't take his eyes off me as if betting against me.
I stared the sucker down as if to show the dumb cat that I had more lives than it did and was thankful that Kris and Donny didn't bring out the BB guns and use me for target practice...

So you see in the end, it wasn't all that bad - it could have been worse!  

I'm sure my homeroom teacher, Sister Schultz, would tell me that, "I shouldn't have put yourself in that position."  

I'm wondering if she would have told that to poor Issac!

Merry Christmas

Hygiene and the Psychotic Hot Mess

At three hundred and some-odd pounds I couldn't blame Pinky for not wanting to take a bath; he was too big for the bathtub and he didn't want to touch his feet the moldy mushroom stuff we were growing at the bottom of our shower. Besides that, the bathroom door to the shower on the second floor didn't close all the way and there was a small opening that anyone could peer into - if they decided to invade his privacy. Pinky wasn't about to let anyone see him naked - in all of his glory and was determined not to take a shower. The older boys had already tortured him mercilessly with horrible name-calling about his weight and wasn't about to give the Wolf Pack one more thing that they could make fun of him about. His simple hygiene regime was to douse himself in cheap Pick and Save cologne to overpower his odoriferous mass. I was at least glad to have some help and tried my 13-year-old best to be kind to Pinky.


For me, hygiene became a psychotic game of epic proportions. I quit taking baths since the Alligator incident i.e. the Reptile Dysfunction , and as a 13-year-old boy desperately waiting for puberty to set in, I was deathly afraid of being caught naked in the shower by my callous older brothers. Even greater than the fear of being spied on by a member of the wily Wolf Pack was the fear that they would try to humiliate me by dragging me outside naked... or tying me to a tree or shoving me back into that Hamper naked and intentionally leaving under a random car to be discovered by a neighbor.   NO WAY!

I wouldn't put it past any of them and was desperately terrified. I had to strategically pick my moments, when no one was home and the times I thought it was safe to use the shower in the same bathroom that had the broken door.

I don't exactly know why my brothers felt that the baby brother had to be ridiculed, made fun of...or tormented to no end? I do believe the dark, spiritual matter of the universe (i.e the Ouija Board and the Paranormal Ooze) had something to do with it. I think that same invisible substance was like a pandemic plague that was the cause of hate and racism and bullying of any kind. Though, I might like to say things like "it was us who opened the portal to the underworld with our seances" this darkness had already existed and was everywhere!

I liked everything about my family, the loudness, the fun, the craziness - all of it.. it was the dysfunction that made us so special with which we derived our identity as much as we did from our Viking heritage. My dad was funny and my Mom even dressed up like Phyllis Diller and did a comedy routine at Saint Marks every year.

As I said before, my house being exactly in the middle of our block on Harding Avenue was the perfect metaphor for our family being the center of all the hippie craziness that existed in the universe- this part I liked! I like the fun and laughter. I had a bunch of great stories that not many other people on the planet could even begin to relate to... like, letting monkeys out of the zoo.. illegal trailer rides... high-speed police chases... the veloci-rooster... electrocutions... Milk Wars... alligator wrestling... rattlesnake escapes... Albino hikes... Ouija board and secret room discovery... and our UFO Madness where we nearly burned down the Lennon Sister's house at the corner!














I even had some Dahlin Pride about the MEXICAN TOMATO PLANTS that gave us celebrity renown in Venice.

The only thing I didn't like, was being made to feel like I was an outsider. I really don't think there was some evil conspiracy to make me feel like I was an expendable object at their disposal to be played with like a cheap child's toy.

It's just that all of my brothers were older and as they continued to evolved more and more into hippies - their world was a world in which I didn't fit. There was no coherent plan put into place to torture me or to make me feel like I didn't belong, it is just that at 13 - I didn't belong to their hippie, refer madness, draft card burning world yet. I was an outsider and at this point - the perpetual underdog.



One thing that I learned from these feelings of  being singled out and excluded was that everyone liked to be treated with some measure of kindness. I did. I didn't want to be punched with fist of fury but touched instead with tenderness and kindness...an occasional hug would be nice and some edifying words of encouragement -  welcomed.

Love!

I guess?

I never heard the word, but knew this lofty and evasive concept had to be true somewhere out there in the universe.

Even though I was a goof ball at school, I tried especially hard to treat the underdogs kindly (the kids who were easy targets for the bullies). I felt deep down inside my psychotic hot mess - that it was my duty to stick up for them - even at personal risk.


Being the perpetual underdog, I had a real soft spot for the those who were being treated poorly or unjust. Peter Parker's uncle told him that, "with great power comes great responsibility" and I knew that with my heightened justice sensors and fighting for "the least of these" could get me into trouble and often did (like the time I tried to protect Bill Gates from the Naked Zombies) and Harry from Terry's evil Prank).

Though I felt like a loner in a big family, I did not feel alone! I did not wallow in self-pity or in misery because of either my "retardation" (my brother's called it) -  or because I had this secret knowing that I was being prepared for a very special destiny. Somewhere deep inside I had this intrinsic knowing that I would find the meaning of love someday and that everything I was going through now was a part of the process in shaping me for that day!

There was no need to feel sorry for me - I figured that if evil could exist than so must the corresponding antithesis of perfect good!

I had a dream of a bright future!  In the meantime Wolf Pack do your worst - little do you know you are preparing me for an "extraordinary destiny!" Shushhhhhhh...this will be our secret!

Next time putting up the Christmas lights!  



 

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.