Atomictumor

I’m turning into my mother.

Well, without the boobies, I guess (and there go the internet filters).

No, I hate prefabricated holidays.  Halloween, to me as a youngster, was a great time to go out and cause mischief.  And the mischief we did cause.

Lemme tell you a story.

Halloween, 1992-3ish:

Me and me mates were out at their house in East Brainard, and bored, on halloween, so we got the idea that we were going to go try and get some candy by singing christmas carols (yeah, I know, edgy).  We were all punk rockers, with the hair, and the safety pins, and torn T shirts with slogans like “Be Warned: The Nature of Your Oppression is the Aesthetic of Our Anger!” (which I still don’t really understand, but it looked cool) all over them, so we really didn’t NEED to wear a halloween costume.  We were ready to roll.

And roll we did, son.  We headed right over to the apartments, and sung bad christmas carols, and some people were amused.  Some people weren’t.  Kids were scared.

Well, we got sick of that REALLY quick.  Isn’t it funny how an idea that seems really great sitting around with your friends turns really sour once implemented?  So, we turned to that old standby when we’re bored, petty vandalism.

I mean, really petty.  See, there was this one guy in the neighborhood who was one of those lawn nazis.  He yelled at the little kids if they edged his yard to avoid walking around the block to get home.  He watched like a hawk the hired foreigners who did the lawn, while standing on the back porch.  He was an ass.

Let me stop here, and tell you about the car we used.  My friend (who I won’t name, just in case he’s trying to recover from knowing me in the past) had a POS Tercel, but the car tended to accumulate the oddest things.  Once, we got pulled over for erratic driving in Downtown Chattanooga, the officer walked up to the car, and this is what he saw scattered about the floorboards:

1 large bag confectioners sugar in ziploc bag
2 baseball bats, aluminum
1 mini chainsaw
1 air pistol
3 high power mortar style fireworks
1 pair nunchaku
1 knife, butterfly style
5 plastic dart guns
1 lifesized plastic baby Jesus doll (it was hard to find)
1 roll garden bags, black
1 short handled shovel
3 cans of mace
assorted wrappers, drink containers, empty cigarette boxes.
So he shines his flashlight around the debris, in the faces of the 4 hoodlums in the car, back around the debris, and waves us along.  Didn’t even get a ticket.
Good think he didn’t look in the trunk…

So anyway, the Tercel was home of all sorts of stuff, and on this particular day, for what reason I’ll never know, it had 4 of those large garbage bags full of leaves.

Now, the lawn nazi’s house was next to a parking lot which was attached to a Subway.  I didn’t care a lot of Subway then, but beggars won’t be choosers, so we stopped by there to get some dinner.

The guy behind the counter was a jerk.  I don’t remember what the circumstances were, but I concluded that the problem could be solved with explosives.  So, we left Subway, walked out to the car, and I grabbed a handful of M-80s that the car provided me with.

We had a precision plan.  I was going to light the M-80s on the back door of Subway (it sounded like a good idea at the time), while Jon, the car’s owners little brother, was going to drop the leaves in the yard of the Nazi.  Yes, this will show the world.

This is one of those moments that stretch 5 or 6 seconds into 10 minutes or so…

The plan went wrong.  I lit the fuses too late, he tossed the leaves too early, the fuse was too short, and BANG went the M-80s.

Walking back to the car, there was another BANG, which was the owner of the jewelry store kicking the door open with the biggest shotgun I’ve ever seen pointing in my direction.  Somehow, in my hindsight, I’m able to see both the shop owner, and the faces of my colleagues in the car, and their mouths look as round and big as the hole at the end of that freaking shotgun.

I leap into the car as it peeled out of the parking lot (and out of shotgun range).  I don’t think the shopkeeper ever got off a shot, and I doubt that he would, but it still made for an interesting halloween.

Now, I’ve gone completely backwards and forgotten what the hell any of this has to do with my mother.  I don’t think she ever got a shotgun pulled on her.

Furthermore, I don’t think she’s heard that story…

Squirrels don’t like me.

Back in the day, I’d hang out at my buddies house in Chattanooga being generally thuggish and troublesome, but I stayed away from one particular tree in a neighboring house, because The Squirrel lived there.

Now, I don’t know what I did to the squirrel to piss it off, but lemme tell you, it was pissed. Maybe it was some kind of reincarnation thing, where I smote it in a past life or something, or maybe it just didn’t like the cut of my gib, but that bastard would shoot to kill whenever I approached. My little brother, my friends, anybody else were OK, but if I got within 20 or so feet of the mother tree, I’d get a warning chirp, then an attack cry (like a squirrelly ululation), then a high velocity walnut to the temple.

That bastard had some accuracy and range to go with that super-throwing-death arm that it possessed. Once I heard the cry, I’d know I came too close. There’d be no outrunning The Squirrel, because it’d clip you with at least two nuts before you got out of range. You never quite knew where they were coming from either, on account of the uncanny camouflage of The Squirrel.

Since then, squirrel activity seems to have become more and more aggressive. The hickory nut tree in my back yard only seems to drop nuts when I’m outside, leaving me to think they’re dropbombing me. I’m now almost certain they were responsible for the crack in the windshield that the poor Volvo received last year.

To that end, I was dismayed by two events.

First, I found this report from Mountain View, CA, indicating that guerilla squirrels are aggressively attacking 4 year olds and others this summer, indicating that the philosophy of The Squirrel has moved westward, as all philosophies inevitably do, in preparation of worldwide adoption. This is a problem, because while the government has been sure to work up laws authorizing torture and wiretapping, this is only effective against human opponents. In fact, as the American intelligence organizations are loathe to admit, the squirrels series of chirps, in the .01 and 10 KHZ range, has been found to be uncrackable thus far.

Theres no way to know what they’re planning in our back yards, but you can bet its going to be ugly, and probably nutty, as well.

Second, and more importantly, is that I crushed one of the bastards to death on Laboratory Road while driving to pick up the paycheck yesterday. Of course it was accidental, one of those moments when the beast is in the median of the road, not sure whether to zig or zag, and darts out. It cleared 3 of the wheels, but that rear passenger wheel came out of nowhere and nailed the poor bastard.

I can say its accidental all day long, but it won’t make a difference. They’re going to want vengeance.

Too often, the news reads like some disutopian novel.

The other day NPR reported on the activities of the Minutemen. No, I don’t mean that great punk band from back in the eighties. This is the vigilante boarder patrol keeping watch over our boarder with Mexico, if you have not already heard of them.

Accordind to the NPR report they have begun to see a need here in the interior of the country. Now they are recruiting citizens as close as North Carolina and Alabama. It seems they want to keep an eye on who businesses hire, where supposed illegal immigrants live, and various Emergency Rooms.

Watch out.

AT and I made a run to Staples the other night.  He opted to wait in the car.  A few seconds after I walked into the store, he saw a woman in a bright blue truck back into a parking spot.  She did an A+ job, except she backed into the maroon sports car behind her. Her kid got out of the truck, ran around to the back and began freaking out. The mom saw what she did, yelled at the kid to come on, and entered the store.

When I came out, AT told me what had happened, described the woman and pointed out the truck in question. The rear bumper was sitting completely on top of the front bumper of the sports car.  So I, being the tattle-tale that I am, went into the store to tell the manager.  The woman AT described was at the register, checking out.  I went to the next register over, where the manager was, and told her loudly what had happened.  The manager was less than thrilled about having to do something about it and told me to call mall security.  I told her that the driver was currently in Staples and would be gone by the time mall security got there, so I’d just get the make and model of both cars for her.

As I started out of the store, the driver looks at me all innocent-like and says, “Did you say a blue truck?”  I assented and she said, “Oh, my, that must be me.”

So I told her she did a crap job of parking and needed to find the person she backed into.  As there were about 8 witnesses to this conversation, I hope she didn’t just jump in her truck and leave.

Another case of people thinking they can get away with shit.