Equal and Opposite Reaction: Deadly Missile

I know this isn't the best photo in the world, but the picture above gives you a glimpse of what life was like at my house on just about any day of the week.  
   Chaos and Mayhem! 


On the very left (of the picture above) is one of our tribe members who had been knighted with the nickname, "Pinky." He joined our family when he was about 12 - that's when I was only about 6.  When he was in the 7th grade he followed one of my brothers home from school and just ended up staying - like forever. He had been around ever since I had a memory and so I figured he was part of our tribe, but I could tell there was something different about Pinky from the rest of us. Besides the obvious fact that Pinky had dark hair, he was also was about the size of three of us Dahlins put together.  I don't want to say anything that would hurt anyone's feelings, but the guy was...ummmm...large!  One of my brothers said that "Pinky was so big he could kick-start a 747-Jumbo jet."


All that to say, that Pinky and the usual amount of chaos prominently figure into the death story of McIlliot's Pool which started with something very much like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when Ulrich launched the nuclear warhead of loogie onto American territory down my throat.

The conflict escalted into a full on nuclear retaliation of my own with a puke counter-launch that sprayed everything in a 20 foot radius. I figure it was probably jsut like something between the United States and the Soviet Union. 

This was all very much  like a Dr. Strangelove - if you know what I mean. 
 
I promise there wasn't much in the pool at all, but everyone made a "such a big deal" about it and climbed out of the water as if they would get Diphtheria or Diarrhea from the nuclear fallout of Fish-Stick particles that floated on the surface of the pool.

 Little babies!

I could see Tommy and Kjersten and Annie fussing, but Ralph was a 12-year-old with a mustache. He acted like the biggest baby of them all.
 
I might also be over-reacting, because it hurt my feelings that Ulrich had launch a precision laser-guided warhead of mass destruction and everyone was mad at me for some reason. I felt that someone should have taken my side and been mad at Ulrich with me, BUT NO!  Now, I'm the bad guy.  All I heard for the next 12 minutes is, "Markie D this and Markie D that... Barf-O-Bits this and Barf-O-Bits that... Oil spill this and Oil spill that...ha ha ha ha!"   "Ha ha yourself... I'm rubber and your glue"

How do you tell a little nine year old girl she just hurt your feelings without sounding like a girl yourself. So I just kept it all in while they watched me clean up the concrete pool deck all by myself.

We had about 50 cents between the 5 of us, so I told them to walk down to the corner liquor store and get some candy they could share, while I finished up the duty commensurate with Catholic guilt and penance.  I scrubbed the vomit off the sidewalk next to the pool, saying a couple "Hail Marys" and several "Our Fathers."




When the victorious troops arrived back... Tommy had already eaten the entire Chick-O-Stick without saving me one bite - Ralph was flaunting his candy cigarettes.. and Kjersten and Annie licked the necklace and candy dots they were sharing - knowing that I wouldn't want any.

( I wonder who thought of that one? Candy Cigarettes for kids!) 

Anyway, I figured that I would have the last laugh.

The filter had been running and the pool was clean, but no one in our rambunctious outfit was too interested in jumping into the cool water.

It became one of those games where... we challenged each other to dive in, but that didn't work. Then we tried the game where we could try to fake each other out... "Okay everyone, let's all go in on the count of three. Okay ready, One...Two...Three" we shouted in unison as Ralph and I get an Academy Award for pretending to jump while Kjersten and Annie leapt fool-hardheartedly into the deep end. Tommy didn't fall for it and the three of us boys laughed at the gullible girls.

It felt good for a change to be on the laughing end of something. Still demanding justice and a little hurt, I pushed in Tommy and then Ralph into the water.

I was King of the Universe... at least king of the McElliot pool universe standing all by myself as if I had just won another Olympic Gold Medal in the "king of the hill" competition.  It felt good for about 8 seconds and then it felt like a pretty empty victory after that.

Hang on I'm getting to the "Rat Killer" and to Joan and to the phone call and to the chaos and to the "Pinky" part!

Ralph ended up furious... more than any 12-year-old kid should be - for being pushed into a pool. My goodness, I was going to join him in a second, but he freaked out! He can after me with fire in his eyes that the cold water couldn't put out.

Around and around and around and around we ran. He just wouldn't give up!  He was the oldest boy in his family and had a bunch of older sisters. Maybe he felt like a neutered alpha-male at home and had something to do with his ridiculous rage. This thing was never going to end and I knew that he was never going to catch me! Didn't he know that I spend the greater part of my life running from brothers - EVERY SINGLE DAY?  Doesn't he know that I have learned to fight like a junk yard dog?  Doesn't he remember the infamous "Sour-Dough Toast Fight" of 1966 (blog post 6/29/13). 

There was just no way he was going to win, but I guess wounded pride and ego is a psychological force to be reckoned with. Although he was never going to catch me, I could tell he had no intention of giving up. I needed to offer him a sense of victory to settle things in his mind- the poor fella.  I shifted directions and dodged him for like the umpteenth billionth time, but this time I pretended to not to see him coming the other way and gave myself to him as a ransom.

He was so smug and so happy... but it wasn't real and now I felt guilty (either that or my own sense of evil pride kicked in)!  Kids have weird wiring, right?  I thought "You know what Markie D.. I'll let him push me in, but he'll have to earn it first." I pulled away easily the first time just to show that I may be small, but was a force myself to be reckoned with.  Yawn.. I let him grab me again...and was too squirrely for him to push me into the pool - there was just no way. If I was going to go in just to make him happy then he would have to pull me into the pool. The way I looked at it, if I had to go in, then both of us were going!

He turned and with feet planted on the edge of the pool, he leaned out over the water with the 50 pounds of extra weight he had on me...but I was Markie D!  I thought, "You know what...I'll show him one last time who is boss of this situation." I dug deep into the reservoir of my superhuman adrenaline strength (The kind a mother gets when she lifts up a car to save her baby), and made the decision to break his grip one more time!

My plan was to slip out of his grip,watch him fly backwards into the pool and then join him in the water by swan diving like one of those Acapulco Cliff divers. I wrote myself  to be the hero of this plot.

The only thing I failed to consider - was the fact that as he pulled me into the pool... I was pulling in the opposite direction - directly towards the glass wall of the adjacent pool room.

Do you know that thing about Sir Issac Newton's Third Law of physics, about how every action has an equal and opposite reaction?  Sister Edith said this was very important to space flight and I found out the hard way just how true this really was.

When Ralph took flight and shot backwards into the pool, it also sent me with the equal amount of force in the opposite direction.

Well, the second I left the launching pad with that much force and flying towards that stationary glass wall I knew I was in trouble

"Have you ever noticed sometimes that when you win - you lose"
                                                                                  Markie D

Wolf Pack and Trouble in Outer Space.

(Sing this humming and snapping your fingers to the Addams Family theme song - it'll make more sense that way).   

"They're Hairy and they're kooky,

Mischievous and spooky,
They're altogether ooky,
The Dahlin Family."

Du, du, du, du..snap snap

"Their house is an Aslyum
When people come to see 'em
The inmates are a screa-um.
The Dahlin Family." 

That's just my family by the way, add to those numbers the Harding Avenue Gang and the Wolf Pack had numbers to be reckoned with.  On one hand, think of the damage that could come from assembling an unruly crowd of that size. Entire small countries have been toppled by less. On the other hand (on a more positive note) - the vast number of hippies in our Venice Tribe also lent itself to the possibility of...say...putting out a fire - should something go awfully wrong. I said "positive" not "realistic"!


Q. And what is "Murphy's Law?"
A. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong!

Problem was, that chaos always seemed to reign over order, and boy, did we cause a lot of problems.

While everyone in the neighborhood was gathered in our dining room (the room with the hospital-bed and bumper-pool table), Gustav my oldest brother and the oldest Blaser-boy from next door came up with a brilliant plan. What you have to remember is, that during this time in the sixties, everyone was all jacked-up and excited about exploring outer space and landing on the moon to gather green-cheese.

As I mentioned before, a new TV show came out two nights ago called Star Trek "Going where no man has ever gone before" add that to a couple TV shows which had already been out now for about a year, 
My Favorite Martin and Lost in Space, it was plain to see that rockets-to-the-moon and space travel were indeed on the forefront of everyone's mind.   

Every stupid fifth-grade-boy in the world already had the twisted theme song from Lost in Space memorized, so they could they could inflict silly grammar-school torment on a smaller kid. They would sing, "It's about time, it's about space, it's about time to..." SMACK "...slap your face" slapping their latest victim in the face at the opportune moment - then laugh at them for falling for it, and then running away in order to avoid adolescent retribution.  I probably don't have to tell you that the Wolf Pack (though, far too old for this kind of thing), was particularly fond of the ending part. The part where they slapped a younger sibling (like me) in the face.

300 slaps! You'd think, I would have caught on, right?   Duh!

Anyway... we were in the middle of the "SPACE RACE" with the Russians and they were winning. They had already landed a spacecraft on the moon and the United States seemed to be falling behind - landing on the moon seemed to be light-years off at a distance at our snail's pace!  This was all part of the Cold War and we were losing!

When we were still using monkeys, I wrote a letter to Washington asking if they wouldn't mind using any of my brothers in their rocket experiments. I told them it would be okay since they weren't a whole bunch smarter then chimpanzees (Oh, I made no mention about letting the monkeys out of the zoo). 

When we started to use real-live human-beings, I wrote another letter asking again - if they wouldn't mind using any of my brothers. I told President Johnson that they wouldn't have to feel too sad if we lost one of them should something bad happened, since I had like 28 big brothers. My dad said we had plenty to go around if something should ever happen to one of us (that's why I didn't think they cared if  they had left me at Salton Sea - I'm the second from the right in this picture - Oh and that was about a third of the group that were crammed in the station wagon and trailer, also pictured in the background. Blog Post: May 13, 2013). 

I never got a letter back from the President or from NASA. That was a disappointment!

Anyway, at this time we were sure there was life on Mars and it seemed like every week some hick-couple in an old Ford pick-up, out in the middle of the boondocks, saw a flying saucer - we called 'em UFO's - that's short for Unidentified Flying Objects.

It was always down an old, dark, two-lane highway,  far outside the city boundaries with no witnesses, where the aliens always seemed to abduct poor Clem in his jump-overalls or his wife Ethyl.

In pictures printed in the front page of the newspapers the UFO's looked like Frisbees, blurry footballs, a hat and one even looked like a cigar, but everyone was sure Martins had antennas and lived among us.

The Viking Tribe leader figured out a way to venture smack dab into the middle the UFO craze. They got dad's Polaroid camera, gathered up all of the necessary equipment and were destined to make local newspaper history.  This was one story, that we hoped would make it on  the front page of the paper, unlike all of the other times we ended up there, only to the embarrassment of my poor mom and dad.

Sending Donny next door to borrow a dry-cleaner bag from his dad's closet, the Dahlin's put all the other necessary stuff in a pile on the front sidewalk now officially deemed "Area 51"

McDonald straws, birthday candles and of course a Style Queen, hot-air, hair-blower for the initial lift off.

Although the original plan did involve UFO's, it didn't originally include a fiery crash landing on the roof of the Lennon house. We took our extensive resources and laid them out in  "Area 51." Little did we know, however, that in the very next hour or so we would have a "Roswell Incident" on our hands that endangered the entire Lennon family.  


Kids NEVER TRY THIS! EVER EVER EVER.

Until Next...

God Bless

上帝，造物主。

Gud velsigne

God zegene

Dieu vous

Бог благословит

Gud välsigne

Dios te  bendiga!