Frog Bog God Blog 🐸 🔨

I think the real beauty of carnival games might actually be their crookedness and impossibility.  It sort of equalizes us.  It’s equally unfair.  Everyone is at the same disadvantage.  These games don’t care how strong or skilled you are.  You may be an MVP on the basketball court, but I guarantee you aren’t sinking a single shot at a carny’s “Hoops” booth.  You can be a pitcher for the Blue Jays, but I promise you aren’t knocking all three milk bottles off the table.  If you don’t believe me, just go to a carnival sometime and watch all the jacked-up dudes in muscle shirts giving themselves aneurysms trying (and failing) to ring a bell by swinging a cartoon-sized hammer down on a button.  

These games are so clearly impossible, the carnival-folk who run them don’t even try to hide the fact that they know you’re going to lose.  You could be right in the middle of the wind-up for your final throw or swing or what-have-you, and before you even shoot your shot, they’ll say some shit like, “Ohhhh, thought you had that one!  Five dollars gets you another try.  Win something for your kids.”   

Come on, man!  Don’t do me like that!  I hadn’t even lost yet!!!

No.  It doesn’t matter how strong or skilled or smart we are; when we lay our money down on a carnival game counter, we are all transformed into suckers, suckers at the mercy of a carny, suckers paying money to lose a game it would take a legitimate miracle to win.  

Well, this is a story about a miracle.  

You may not know “Frog Bog” by name, but I bet you’d know it if you saw it.  It’s a pretty common game to see at carnivals and exhibitions.  There’s a little pool of water in the middle of the booth with lily pad shaped cups that rotate within it.  Around the pool, there are large frog statues grinning at you.  The object of the game is to launch a small rubber frog from the mechanical catapult in front of you by hitting the launcher with a mallet.  If the body of the rubber frog lands inside the lily pad cup, you win a prize.  Sounds pretty simple, right?  

Well, like any good carnival game, Frog Bog is just designed to look possible while actually being a strategic nightmare.  The mallets are tethered to the catapults on a criminally short cords, making it difficult to get any kind of swing, and even if you manage to launch the frog on a halfway-decent trajectory, the chances of missing the large frog statues that rim the pool and actually landing in one of the moving lily pads is next to zero.

I’ve been paying to lose at Frog Bog for approximately 35 years.  I have never come close to winning, and I’ve never found a way to get even remotely better at the game.  This past week, however, I took my children to an amusement park in PEI and introduced them to the game.  My daughter, being smarter than most, recognized right away that the mallet’s short tether made it unfair, but my son, much like me at his age, was entranced by the whirling lily pads and the weird grinning frog statues with their little sailor hats and striped shirts.  He tried over and over to land a frog, but it just wasn’t happening, a pain I know all too well.   My daughter didn’t seem to care so much, but I saw the frustration and heartbreak on my son’s face, and I looked up at that frog statue with his smirk and heartless black eyes and I was filled with a righteous anger. 

“No,” I thought, “No more. Your reign of terror ends today, you smug green bastard!”

Using my son’s last turn, I took hold of the mallet and rested it gently on the catapult launcher.  I let my mind go blank: no thoughts, no strategies, no pride, nothing.  I didn’t try to aim or time my shot at all.  I didn’t need to. I wouldn’t miss and I knew it…so did that frog. 

Overhead, the clouds drifted.  

A light breeze passed.  

The frog stared at me.  

I stared at the frog. 

I waited…I waited until I finally saw it…a shimmer of fear that passed over the frog’s eyes. 

It was time. 

*WHAM*

There was no swing.  The mallet had already been resting on the launcher.  

I was a conduit and I let divine power move up into my body through my feet, into my legs, up into my torso, and down through my arm.  

It was like Bruce Lee’s famous one-inch-punch applied to a small rubber frog catapult.  

I struck like a goddamned cobra and it echoed like a thunderclap.  

The little rubber frog shot up and towards the pool, passing over the horrified face of the frog statue, and down it came, directly into a lily pad cup.  

“You did it!” shouted my son!

“You got it!” shouted my daughter

“You won!” shouted the young carny. 

“NOOOOOOO!” screamed the frog. 

“I won,” I said, echoing the young carny, but directing my words at the frog statue I continued to hold in my gaze.

The carny was in shock, but he pulled down a little stuffed prize and gave it to my son.  My own prize was knowing what I had done, what I had become.  

As we turned to leave, one of the other carnies scurried over from the bean bag toss game.

“Did that guy just win?!” I heard him ask. 

“Yeah!  It was kind of cool actually!  I’ve only seen like 2 other people win this.”

“I’ve never seen anyone win this game.  How’d he do it. Where’d he stand?”

I left these two amazed young men to marvel at what they’d seen, to stand where I had stood, to hear the tale, and spread the word about what they’d witnessed here today: the defeat of an amphibious tyrant and the birth of a Frog Bog God.

The Snip

The following is a running journal leading up to and immediately following my recent vasectomy.


Sunday 9pm:
T minus 14 hours

While I had been relatively calm during the day, now I find myself restless, with a generalized feeling of being anxious.  Slight butterflies in my stomach make me desperate for a distraction.  I watch music videos I would not enjoy, throwing my cell phone data usage to the wind.  I pace through the house and use my phone to chat with anyone about anything; nothing helps. I discover a song I find mildly enjoyable; I listen to it 11 times.


Monday 12am:
T minus 11 hours

The world sleeps, but I remain awake.  I am laying on my couch in silence when I become aware of a sudden, strange, and growing desire to create more offspring.  Not children I would want to raise or be responsible for, mind you.  Screw that!  I am confident I want no more children in my house, but there is most definitely a voice coming from somewhere in the oldest parts of my brain telling me to step out there into the night and sire as many children as possible before the sun rises.  I choose to ignore it.  The voice in the back of my brain howls with desperate rage.


Monday 1am:
T minus 10 hours

Music brings no joy.  Food turns to ashes in my mouth.  I attempt to distract myself from this malaise by watching a Dave Chappelle Netflix comedy special; nothing is funny anymore.  Tired, I yawn, but I avoid sleeping because it would only bring the morning sooner.  Instead, I research ancient meditative breathing exercises traditionally used by warriors before entering battle.  I wonder briefly whether I might actually go insane and become violent mid-procedure. I have a vision of myself breaking free just as the doctor comes at me with his implements of torture, stampeding my way out of the hospital like a goddamned escaped circus elephant, and fleeing into the forest.  It occurs to me that this is basically the premise of the Wolverine comic where Logan escapes the Weapon X facility, and I chastise myself for having no original ideas whatsoever.  Then, I salt the wound by reminding myself that having a doctor surgically de-fuse my testicles and attach a few titanium clips to my mangled plumbing is a far cry from having indestructible metal fused to my skeleton.  I feel worse than before.


Monday 9am:
T minus 2 hours

I consider using a black Sharpie to write the words: "Please don't screw this up!" across the front of my pelvis. I figure if I have to take my pants off in front of strangers today, I want to be in charge of what they end up laughing about in their staff room later.  I'm worried I won't be able to write letters legibly while upside down and backwards, so I decide against it.  While a well-penned message might get some laughs, a series of half-written messages, one under the other, each all crossed out because of mistakes before there is no more room left and the good version has to be written sideways down the front of my thigh would just make me look crazy.  I consider asking someone to write it for me, but I can't think of a way to word the request in a way that sounds sane.


Monday 11:30am
T plus 30 min

A nurse asks me to put ridiculous clothes on, basically a trench coat she wants me to put on backwards while I'm bare-assed, followed by another to be put on the right way. I'm given a blue hair net and blue slippers.  I have to assume this is all to break your spirit so you don't fight back when the fun starts.


Monday [Time Unknown]

I'm on a table now. The nurse is talking constantly.  She knows someone I know.  Her mother was a teacher.  She taught at my elementary school. She wants to talk about things: people we may know, places we may have been at the same time.  I know she's trying to be nice, but I really wish she was a complete stranger.  Anonymity would be much more comforting to me.  I should have worn a Mexican luchador mask to this fiasco.

Going into this procedure, I told myself I was going to be the "funny guy", the kind of guy that cracks wise in the face of danger.  I want this doctor to leave here today thinking, "God, I've never laughed so much during a vasectomy before."
When the doctor comes in, I manage to make a few cracks. Not my best material, I admit, but I tell myself I'm just warming up. The whole plan for my comedy routine unravels when I see the doctor pick up a needle. My sense of humour fucking evaporates.

Yeah, there are needles. That's all I'll say about that. There are needles where you don't want them. I try to forgive the needles because I know they are delivering anesthetic, but it ain't easy.  I try to put all the internet research into pain tolerance and deep-breathing I did the night before to good use. I breathe out slowly through my mouth and really let my mind experience the feeling of the needles. What shape is the pain?  If the pain had a texture, what would it be? What colour is it?  What would the pain look like?
It's working. I'm doing okay, but then the doctor steps things up a notch.

It's difficult to explain to females the feeling of what happened next.  I'm not sure if there is an equivalent pain the female body experiences, but guys will know what I mean. I know the doctor is doing things, but luckily I am so frozen I can't tell what it is.  Foolishly, I think this is going to be a breeze, but then I feel a tugging that is very much coming from somewhere inside of my body. The problem with this is that the person doing the tugging is outside of my body.  That means that somewhere between the middle of body and that doctor standing in front of me, something is not right.

"Uh, ohh, Spaghetti-O's!" says a crazed version of my own voice inside my head, "Now we're 'inside out'!  Get it?!"

The pain that accompanies this feeling is that slow creeping sickness you get after being hit in the groin. The kind of ugly ache that hatches in your privates and then slithers its way up into your lower belly and makes you want to puke.  If I had been standing, my knees would have buckled. The real problem is that this ache doesn't pass like it normally does after getting hit in the junk. No, no. The pulling feeling remains constant, intensifies even, and the ache that crawls into my belly starts putting family photos up on the walls.

My meditative breathing goes to hell.  I officially no longer give a shit about the nurse's family summer cottage that is near where I live and maybe I've seen it with it's steep-sloped roof.  My mind shoves that woman into non-existence. I'm pulling breaths in rapid, panting bursts, and when I exhale, it's in groans.

As a last ditch effort not to freak out, I ask myself: "What shape is the pain?  What does it look like?"  My mind goes nuts:

The pain looks like the doctor placing his foot on your crotch while wearing a hockey skate, and it looks like him trying to tie it up as tight as he can using your vas deferens for laces.

The pain looks like a toy clown puppet you had as a child. It had strings coming out of the bottom of it and when you pulled on them, the puppet's arms and legs would flail around like it was in a panic.

I start to feel weak; my forehead breaks out in a cold sweat.

I realize the nurse has not stopped talking to me the entire time. God knows what I have been saying to her though because my mind has left the building.

"Are you okay?" asks the nurse.

"Oh, yeah. Heh heh. If I faint, just keep going. Do NOT stop! Seriously!"

She fetches me a cool facecloth and puts it on my forehead.  I am doing my best to hold on when the tugging/sick-in-the-gut feeling suddenly comes to an end, and the doctor steps away. Relief!

Oh, thank God it's over, I think to myself.  I almost didn't make it through that!  If I had known it was that bad I never would have done this. Oh, well. It's over and done with now, and I'll never have to do it agai---

"That's one side done," the doctor said, "Now we'll do the other side."

My heart sinks. In my mind, the doctor throws his other hockey-skated foot up onto my junk, and off we go again.

A few minutes in, and I'm not even pretending to be okay anymore.  I hate everyone who has ever told me this procedure wasn't a big deal. "It's not that bad," they all told me. Jesus, what terrible things did all those people go through in their lives to consider this "not that bad"?! What in the hell was that bad?!

I'm gripping the edges of the table, squeezing the sides of my own skull, gritting my teeth, and almost hyperventilating.

"You look pretty pale," says the nurse.

"Keep going," I manage to say through lips that feel strangely dry.

I remember the ending of Braveheart, when William Wallace put on a brave face while being drawn and quartered. It bolsters me a little.  I even considered yelling out, "FREEEDOMMM!"

The inside of my head is a bingo ball machine of thoughts, some of which only make sense as abstract associations about what's happening: kinked garden hoses, burnt fuses, people stomping grapes, broken elastics, the time I ran over an extension cord with the snowblower, flailing panic clowns having their strings pulled until they sna---

"Annnd we're all done. We just have to close you up."

My breathing settles and my mind comes back to me.

"Wow. Sorry about almost fainting there, guys. I didn't mean to be a baby about it, but I was NOT expecting that."

The doctor tries to make me feel better.

"No problem. You did seem to experience some discomfort there for a while. I'm sorry; the freezing doesn't do much for that pit of your stomach feeling. I had to search around a bit for the first side. Sometimes that can cause a feeling like you've taken a home-run swing between the legs. Some guys feel it; others don't."
[TRANSLATION: "Get out of my operating room you goddamned wimp!  I have a bunch of other people waiting to do this whole procedure without batting an eye."]

The nurse is eyeing me pretty hard and says, "You're still pretty pale."  Then she leans out the door and says, "Can someone bring me a stretcher?  I think we're going to need one in here."

I'm being taken to the recovery area when I ask the nurse if she can wheel me past my girlfriend while I play dead with the sheet over my face. She laughs but declines. Oh, well. At least I got a laugh from someone this morning.


Monday 1pm

My girlfriend buys me Sausage n Egg McMuffins and then chauffeurs me home. Once home, she hooks me up with snacks for the afternoon, downloaded copies of my favourite shows, my cell phone charger, and ice packs.  She piles everything around me so I don't have to move.  It's only after she's gone to work I realize she's left me a Fruit Crumble granola bar rather than the Rocky Road ones I prefer.  I'll mention it to her later.


Monday approx. 10pm

I master the art of walking like John Wayne. When I left the hospital earlier today I tried so hard not to walk like a guy who had just had a vasectomy, but now I've learned that you just kind of have to own it.


Tuesday 7:30am

It has stormed all night and my deck and driveway are filled in with shin-high snow. The snowplow has pushed even more into the end of my driveway.  My girlfriend gets stuck in the driveway trying to get to work. I notice this, feel bad for her, and walk away.  My neighbour ends up coming out of his house to help her shovel the end of the driveway and push her car out. Inside, I watch Star Wars: Rebels and eat a waffle.


Tuesday 11am

A friend of ours shows up in his truck to plow my driveway for me.  Normally, not being able to clear my own driveway would make me feel like less of a man, but the good news is that I am less of a man now, so I'm totally okay with it.


Tuesday 11:30am

I'm standing in front of the shower, watching the water hiss down, trying to work up the courage to get in. I can't determine whether this is going to feel good, or like pouring battery acid over my gear.

I feel nothing. Almost concerningly so.  Perhaps everything down there is dead now.


Tuesday 8pm:

Boredom finally overtakes me. My pain is tolerable at the moment, but I decide to take some Tylenol 3's anyway because it seems like such a waste to have them and not at least try them.  I sit in the living room watching The Wiggles with my son, and think, "Meh, these things aren't any different from regular Tylenol," and then the universe wraps me in a warm fuzzy blanket.  The Wiggles are suddenly very fascinating.  When my son goes to bed, I spend the next two hours laying around, yawning, and listening to a screechy techno version of Ravel's "Bolero" on repeat.


Wednesday 4am

Wake up from a series of vignette-style dreams that will require a team of psychologists and many years of therapy to help me work through.  No more Tylenol-3's for this guy.


Wednesday 2pm

My neighbour brings me food. Spaghetti pie. Score!


Wednesday 2:30pm

I find a website that allows you to custom build your own lightsaber. I spend a half an hour asking myself, "What kind of lightsaber hilt would represent my personality perfectly?" and "What colour of lightsaber crystal would call to me in the Crystal Caves of Ilum?"  I take a few online Jedi tests to be sure.  I have my credit card in my hand when I realize what a waste of money this would be. I close the website and put my credit card back in my wallet.


Wednesday 3pm

Did you know you can order customized Harry-Potter style wands online?!  Some of these are pretty cool. Hmmm... I wonder what kind of wand would represent my personality perfectly.


Wednesday 3:15pm

My hips and back are killing me from laying around so much, so while I heat heat up a piece of my neighbour's Spaghetti pie, I decide to dance to "Everywhere we go" by SonReal in the kitchen.  Now, I say "dance", but I can't dance even a little when I'm at my best, and with my John Wayne cowboy stance and general fear of making any sudden movements right now, my dance is more like a heavy nod and slight swaying side to side with my feet shoulder-width apart.  Occasionally, I gasp and yell, "Agh!" before shaking one of my legs. The end result is incredibly goddamned gangster.  I've invented a new dance. I call it "The Snip". You're welcome, world.


Thursday pm / Friday am

I attend parent-teacher meetings even though I am really not well enough to do so.  I spend several hours sitting on a hard plastic chair with beads of agony-sweat forming on my brow.  There are only two positions in which I can rest comfortably: one way involves me sitting on the edge of my seat, leaned forwards toward whoever is trying to talk to me, and the other has me completely leaned back in my chair, almost laying down.  Half of the parents who come to see me think I am a caring person and a great listener; the other half must think I'm a wannabe "cool guy" who likes to take things so easy that he has no problem being all leaned back during a professional meeting.


Wednesday 11pm

After a few harrowing days where the healing process seemed to have reversed itself, and after a few instances where I was forced to contact other vasectomy victims I know to ask them about their experiences in a blind panic, I am back on the mend.  I no longer feel as though it would be tempting fate to post a silly little blog about the whole experience.  That having been said, if this blog should suddenly disappear, you'll know things took a turn for the worse.

An x-rated log-driver

Let's talk about showers really quickly.

Let me tell you what I see when I draw back my shower curtain and look into the stall.  I see razors, cans, bottles, louffas, and contraptions that were meant to hold razors, cans, bottles, and louffas, but which have long since broken and become just another piece of trash in this junkyard of a shower stall. 

What is all this junk for?  Why do you need 4 different bottles of shampoo and 6 different bottles of conditioner?  You only have one head!  I'm not sure who designed the tiny shelves in here--what good is a 2 inch ledge?  This would be a great place to lean a package of cigarettes if it wasn't for the fact that they sloped the ledge downward ever-so-slightly so that literally nothing can rest on it.  And yet, still people try to stack all these body care products in here.  There's an irony in having such an untidy shower stall. 

A shower is a place for cleanliness.  The purpose of a bath or a shower is to get CLEAN.  That means you REMOVE dirt, sweat, grime, or whatever else might be on you.  Somewhere along the line though, the idea of what constitutes being "clean" has become corrupted and perverted.  Now, people hop into showers to smear themselves with all-purpose shower gels, moisturizer creams, and detoxifying lotions.  None of that crap comes off in a rinse!  Your body was actually cleaner BEFORE you got in that shower!  What ever happened to a simple bar of soap?  Why do we need all this other chemical garbage that just leaves a slippery film on your skin?  Corporations have convinced people that having slimy skin means your body is well-hydrated.  If having hydrated skin means I have to feel like I just crawled through a whale's sinus cavities, count me out!

Anyway, here's a short story about the DANGERS of using all this extra crap.  Hopefully it'll make some of you reconsider your shower habits.

So, I was about to hop in the shower the other day, and as I looked into the stall I saw my girlfriend had left the bath mat on the floor of the stall.  I remember her saying something about being careful when I got into the shower because it might be slippery after she laced her bathwater with Skin-So-Soft (a product with the consistency of lamp oil which is capable of both softening your skin and killing mosquitoes).  Normally I would have removed the bath mat right away because all those little suction cups on the bottom of it just remind me of octopus tentacles and creep me way the hell out, but I figured my girlfriend probably had good cause to leave it there, so I trusted her judgement.

SIDENOTE: Never trust your girlfriend's judgement.

I put one foot in on the mat without incident (but that's how bath mats get you, you see), but when I put my second foot on it, everything went to hell.  The octopus suckers let go of the super-lubricated floor of the tub, and I became Aladdin.  That's right, Aladdin.  The only difference between him and I was that I rode bright blue bath mats through the air instead of magic carpets, and, despite being surrounded by alllllll of those bloody bottles of shampoos, conditioners, cleansers, and moisturizers, not frigging one of them held a helpful genie willing to save me.

I managed to jump off the mat before it flew back to the Cave of Wonders and I man-stomped my feet onto the floor of the stall. 

BOOM-BOOM.

My knees were slightly bent, I was sort of crouched down.  Whew!  That was close. Clearly, my girlfriend wasn't joking when she said the tub was slippery.  I'd just have to be extra careful when--

Suddenly, my feet were moving on their own. You would have had to have been there to see it, but my face was set in deep concentration with just a hint of what might have been panic in my eyes.  My upper body stayed perfectly still.  My arms were out like wings, whirling in opposite directions for balance.  Below my waist, I was doing a naked breakdance at an unfathomable speed.  

It looked like Amateur Night at a really shitty male stripclub, sponsored by Red Bull. 

It looked like someone taught a gorilla to do a jig, and then fed it fistfulls of methamphetamines.

I looked like an X-rated log-driver.

I managed to get my hands on the hand-bar thingie in the stall and stop this madness for a moment, but then my feet shot out away from one another.  If I had been standing differently, my feet might have reached the rounded edges of the tub and stopped, leaving me with my legs only slightly parted; however, just because God was enjoying himself so much, he made this happen when I was standing in such a way that each of my feet were headed towards the front and back of the stall.  By the time my feet reached the far ends of the tub, I would have been doing the kind of deep-splits that Olympic gymnasts only dream about.  Knowing this would mean the end of my career as a baby-making man, I had to reach deep down inside myself for strength. 

Just like He-Man calling on the Power of Grayskull, I gathered together all the power of my buttcheeks and locked the muscles in my lower body. 

"I HAVE THE POWERRRRRRR!!!!"

Butt clenched, I managed to freeze my rogue legs, mid-splits, and slowly bring them back under my control.  Victory, yes, but at the cost of every muscle in my groin and ass. 
I took the rest of my shower with one hand on the hand-bar, both feet firmly planted against the sides of the tub, and my ass-cheeks cramping repeatedly.  It was the most exhausting shower of my life.  And why?  All because people have lost sight of what a shower stall is supposed to be.

 

The Wrong Door

“Almost ready to go?” my Mother called down the hallway to me.

We had been at my Aunt’s house for hours, and I was just about insane with boredom.  My Aunt and Uncle had three daughters, all in their teens, and their house was absolutely void of anything I could find interesting.  To make matters worse, my Mother and I we were visiting my Aunt and cousins with another one of my Aunts and her daughter. The odds were stacked against me.  I was the only dude.  I made do as best I could by playing with My Little Ponies with the girls, but secretly I was pretending they were Battle-Steeds.  If you’ve ever looked into the face of a My Little Pony, however, you’ll know how hard it is to make them seem tough.  It takes a pretty good imagination to create a Battle-Steed out of a seafoam-green Pegasus with pouty lips and little hearts tattooed on its ass.  Anyway, I played with my cousins' toys until I started to feel nauseated with myself, then I had to stop.

My mother and two Aunts had been sitting at the kitchen table, pounding back pots of tea while they talked about parenting, mortgages, banking, people who had died, and people who were about to die, and on and on with all that kind of shit that’s like Kryptonite for a little kid to have to listen to.

I wanted to go HOME.

“Well, I suppose…” said my mother.

Sweet!  That was another of my Mother’s preparing-for-departure lines.  She was getting ready to stand up.  This was it, we were totally about to leave. But then one of my Aunt’s spoke up and said something like, “Oh, did I tell you about so-and-so’s surgery?”

“Nooo,” my mother said, clearly interested and re-settling into her chair, “What happened?”

If I had been old enough to know the expression, “Oh, for fuck’s sake!”, I would have used it.  As it was, all I could do was sigh as loudly as I could and sit down on the floor right beside the table.  I sat there for a few minutes, shoes on, waiting for one of the ladies to end this torture.  Once I was certain they were doing this to me on purpose, I stood up and made a move for the door on my own.  Screw it!  I would just leave.  My Mother would have to follow me: that was the law.  I grabbed hold of the door leading outside and stepped through it.

Now, I’m not sure why the designers of this house would put two identical doors side-by-side in the kitchen, one leading outside, the other leading down the staircase into the basement.  Maybe they figured it didn’t matter.  After all, it’s not like anyone could get hurt unless someone was to, ohhh, I dunno, let’s say, remove the basement staircase altogether? 

Now, I’m not sure why my uncle would remove the basement staircase altogether.  Maybe he figured it’s not like anyone could get hurt unless the grown women who were supposed to be watching the kids were, ohhh, I dunno, let’s say, too wrapped up in their marathon-conversation and tea-drinking to notice one of them heading for the wrong door.

I stepped out of my aunt’s bright, cozy kitchen and into an abyss.

I don’t remember much of it, but I do recall that when I stepped through the door I got that stomach-drop feeling you get in an elevator when it suddenly descends.  You know that sickening feeling when you realize you’ve just become gravity’s punk?  After that, I remember laying face-down on the rough basement floor, feeling numb in the darkness, not knowing what happened.  There was a little window high up on one of the basement walls, and I remember seeing my Aunt’s little legs running past it as she came to my rescue.

I’m not sure of the details, this all went down when I was really young, but I’m pretty sure we went home, as you do after a child has a serious accident, and it wasn’t until about a week later that I started to die or something.  My parents took me to the to the hospital because I was having horrible gut pains and I was all pale and shit.  Because I was so young, I really only remember being put on a table, being surrounded by nurses and doctors and having things shoved into my butt.  Then a whole lot of pain.  It’s a cherished memory to be sure.

I’ve since been told that when I slammed my body into the basement floor that day at my Aunt’s house, I drove one section of my intestines into another.  “Intussusception” is the scary medical name for it.  Basically, I collapsed my organs down inside themselves like a closed telescope.  Just one of those horrible things you didn’t even know could happen until you do it to yourself.

In case you don’t think I had suffered enough, let me tell you about the “procedure” they came up with to fix this issue.  What they do is shove a hose up your ass and pump you up full of air until your organs inflate and pop themselves back into place.  Go ahead, take a moment.  Let that sink in.  I’m not sure what kind of doctor suggested this procedure, but my guess is that he had a big red nose, crazy-oversize shoes, and he probably carried, and frequently honked, a bicycle horn as he pedaled around the ER on a unicycle.

“You say his internal stuff's all messed up, huh? Hmmm, well, I’m near-stumped, but I’ll tell you what: we could try shoving a rubber hose up his asshole and blowing him up full of air like a goddamn balloon. I mean, it probably won’t help him at all, but it’ll be funny as fuck to see the look on his face! Am I right?! [squeezes bicycle horn, HONK-A-HONK-A]”

What kind of idea is that?  Fill someone full of air in order to pop them back into place.  I’m a little boy, you sadistic lunatic, not a cartoon!

Anyway, apparently, my parents agreed to let Dr. Butt-Balloon perform his trick on me.  So that’s where my memory of all the doctors being around me shoving things into my butt comes from (I hope, anyway).

As some form of great cosmic joke, this ridiculous procedure actually worked.   My intestines popped back into place [God squeezes a bicycle horn, HONK-A HONK-A].  No doubt people shook Dr.Butt-Balloon’s joy-buzzered hands and congratulated him on his brilliance in medicine before he had to race off on his unicycle to replace someone’s diseased lungs with rubber chickens.

Anywho, so that’s the story.  Take or leave it.  That clown-around procedure fixed my ruined insides.  My organs went back where they were supposed to be, I wasn’t dying anymore, and my Mother and Aunts got to avoid “Criminal Negligence resulting in Death” charges.

Everybody was happy.

T-U-R-T-L-E POWER

I’ve always been pretty adorable.  Ask anyone.  Well, some people might not know what the hell they're talking about, but ask most people.  I've never been good-looking in any traditional sense, but it's never really mattered.  I'm charming as shit, and because I look like a giant newborn, people naturally assume I'm a sweetheart.  That assumption is wrong though, and I'm going to tell you a story that proves it.

Back when I was about 9 or 10 years old, my then-teenage cousin (who’s always been a real sweetheart, and that's no assumption) decided that she and her friend would come out to my house and babysit my sister and I for the day.  It was during the summer.  I'm not sure what happened to our regular babysitter, but my Mom told my cousin and her friend that they were welcome to come out and take care of us for a day.

My sister was usually pretty well-behaved, so was I actually, but every now and then I would get this really strange feeling, like I had to do something crazy, silly, ridiculous, and/or just plain irritating.  [I still get this feeling actually, only now fewer people chalk it up to hyperactivity, and more people tend to lean towards it being a psychosis of some kind.]  Anyway, I could feel that weird feeling bubbling up inside me, and before anyone knew what was happening, I went fucking batshit.

Within minutes I was chewing on plastic Barbie-doll shoes while jumping rope on the couch.  I was spiking volleyballs off of the inside of the living-room windows, power-driving Frisbees at the china cabinet, and using a Skip-it (a plastic flail you could wear on your ankle) to try and footsweep my little sister.  I went on like this for a while, and because so much of what I was doing involved antagonizing my sister, she started to throw a noteworthy little tantrum all on her own.

It was a madhouse.

My cousin and her friend were completely blindsided by my peculiar little episode.  Their first little trial-run at the babysitting career they had no doubt hoped to start had failed miserably.  I tore around the house like the Tasmanian Devil for nearly an hour before I started to lose steam.  By that point, the babysitters were on their last legs as well.  When they demanded my sister and I go to our rooms and stay there until our parents got home, we did what we were told.

In a silly attempt to extend an olive branch, my cousin and her friend drew little flowers and hearts on the chalkboard that hung between my sister and I’s rooms.  They wrote “We Love You!” on it in the hopes of burying the hatchet I guess.  I snuck out of my room, wiped the board clean with my sleeve, and drew a large Satan with the words “We don’t love you!” written in a fiery font below it.

Those poor girls were sitting on the couch in the living room, probably feeling all impressed with how well they had handled me with their send-him-to-his-room technique.  No doubt they were talking about just how hard babysitting was, and then congratulating one another on how well they had done.  They hadn't even seen my chalkboard Satan yet, and what they didn't know was that I had about six-and-a-half dollars worth of penny candy in my room.  I was down there, jumping up and down on my bed, handfulling gummy candy into my face, and chanting “T-U-R-T-L-E  POWER” over and over and over while I waited for my blood-sugar levels to lift me up into another manic state.

It was about 30 minutes later when I exploded out of my room.  Those walls and that door couldn't contain me.  The girls tried to stop me in the hallway, but I used all the Turtle Power I had been building up and broke right through them.  They couldn’t stop me when I was like this, nothing could.  I ran loops through the house, dodging them, throwing things, knocking shit over, and wreaking whatever other havoc I could.  I wasn't even a child anymore.  I was like a fucking poltergeist you could see. 

I made a break for the door and managed to get out onto the front lawn.  My cousin tried to chase me down, but I made it to my bicycle and managed to pedal away from her.  It was a close call, pedaling was hard as I could barely breathe through all the hysterical laughter that was coming out of me.  My cousin and her friend stood on the lawn and screamed at me to come back, but I kept pedaling.  I went down the hill, across the stretch, and all the way to “the corner” (which was as far as I was allowed to go).  Then I kept going. 

As soon as I rounded “the corner”, I could hear the girls’ screams increase in pitch and volume.  They sounded desperate.  To listen to them, you would have thought I was pedaling into a live volcano or something.  It was kind of hard to hear them through my laughter, which I still had absolutely no control over.  I pedaled up a hill, and then disappeared into the trees as the road left my neighborhood.  Knowing I was out of sight, I got off my bike and snuck back through the trees so I could see my house.  The girls were standing on the lawn crying.  They thought I had run away.  Hilarious!

I hung out in the trees for a while, before deciding to head back home.  I got into the driveway when my cousin leaned out the door and told me to get inside.  I could see her eyes were all puffy and red, so were her friend's eyes. 

"We didn't know where you went!" my cousin yelled.

She had started to cry again, and I was almost starting to feel kind of guilty about the whole thing, but for the goddamn life of me I couldn't stop laughing!

"I'm glad you think it's so funny," she said angrily, "because I had to call my Mom and Dad, and they’re on their way here right now to look for you…annnnd they called your Mom and Dad to tell them to come home too."

Shit had gotten REAL!

"WHAT?!" I roared, "You called your parents?!  Why?  I was just joking around!"

"We didn't know that!!" the friend spat at me.

"Call them back, tell them I was just joking" I demanded.

"We tried when we seen you were coming back," her friend informed me, "they already left".

I had to think of a plan. 

I went down to my room and tidied it up, surely that would help.  I did some chores today, that's had to count for something, right? 

"Oh, and we told Mom about your little chalkboard drawing" my cousin yelled down the hallway to me.

GOD-DOUBLE-DAMMIT.  I wasn't supposed to draw the devil.  I was in so much shit!

I erased the Satan on the chalkboard, and then went around the house tidying up the mess I had made.  The girls followed me around with their arms folded, looking all smug like they had beaten me.  I just ignored them, I didn’t have time for their shit.

Once the house was tidy, I went down to my room and waited.  The anticipation was awful.  My aunt and uncle arrived, and my aunt even popped her head in my bedroom door and told me that I owed the girls an apology.  She was pissed, I could tell.  I apologized to the girls and then went back to my room.  I was in my room when I heard my father's motorcycle coming down the road. 

Jesus, even his bike sounded angry.

When he came in the house, he apologized to my aunt and uncle and my cousin and her friend and assured them he would punish me.  When I heard his boots coming down the hallway and I panicked.

"PLAY DEAD MOTHERFUCKER!" my brain screamed at me.

So I did.  I dove into bed with superhuman speed and pretended to be asleep.  To my credit, I think I did an excellent job of having that slack-faced "I'm actually asleep" look, but I guess my Dad figured there was no reason for me to be sound asleep at 2:30pm on a summer day.

"Don't you try to pull that shit with me, get out into that living room, NOW!" he said in his creepy-calm voice.

Like an asshole, I pretended to wake up.

"W-what?" I said sleepily, and followed it with a big yawn.

"Keep pushing....you just go ahead and keep pushing!" said the creepy axe-murderer wearing my Dad's body.

My sister (who was in trouble even though she was innocent of most of the charges) and I were marched out to the living room where a jury of the people I had irritated the piss out of told me how much trouble I caused.  We both apologized again, and then my aunt, uncle, cousin, and cousin's friend left.

My Dad informed me that we were both to be grounded for a month.  We would not be allowed to watch our favorite TV shows for the rest of the summer, and we would have to spend the evening scrubbing the side of the house.

Tough punishment, but when it came to scrubbing the house the joke was on him.  I still had like 3 hours worth of Turtle Power left.

It was fucking easy.

Ski-Trip

The inherent problem with skis, as I see it, is that they slide just as well backwards as they do forwards, which leaves you entirely dependent on having some previous forward motion to keep you moving in the right direction.  If you don’t have that forward motion, or any means of attaining it, you’re screwed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know there are supposed to be little techniques that keep you from sliding backwards down a hill, but they all involve clever little tricks you do with your feet, and unfortunately, when I ski, I can’t do clever little foot tricks because someone has very stupidly attached long wooden slats to each of my feet.  Oh, and the other problem with skiing is that it just really sucks.  It's like sledding, only without the sled or the fun.  I really can’t say enough bad things about skiing, but I’m going to try.  Here we go…

So this story is about the one and only ski trip I ever took in my life, and, like most of the stories on this blog, it ends with me looking like an asshole.  I was in grade school, probably grade 7 or 8, and we were going on a class trip to the nearest ski hill.  We started out early in the morning as the nearest ski hill was still quite a ways away.  The driver of the chartered school bus must have been new at her job or something because I remember she was having a hard time with the manual transmission.  She would screw up and miss a gear, or forget the clutch entirely.

"If you can't find 'er, grind 'er", we'd all yell.

Then the bus driver would get all red in the face and look like she was going to cry.  When she stalled it out on a big hill, she made everyone get off the bus because we were laughing so hard at her.  She drove the empty bus to the top of the hill and we had to walk up to re-board.  Then she gave us a big speech about not distracting her while she did her job, but our respect only lasted until she missed another gear.  Anyway, this has nothing to do with skiing, I'm just saying we worked this bus driver over pretty good the whole trip up to the mountain.

We finally got to the ski hill, and were all fitted for our big dumb ski boots and poles and skis while I'm sure the bus driver went someplace for a drink or to cry.  The ski hill people directed us to the Bunny Hill to go through some safety courses and beginner instruction.  Most of our group spent about 30 minutes on the Bunny Hill learning the basics.  I, however, spent most of the day there. 

I practiced and repeatedly failed to master the simplest of skiing techniques.  All of my friends had moved on to other more challenging hills, but I remained on the Bunny Hill with all the 4 year olds because the instructors had told us not to try the bigger hills until we were confident we could turn and stop properly.  I could do neither of these things.  What i could do, was the maneuver where you turn your knees inward and point the tips of your skis toward one another.  This slows you down or even stops you at slower speeds, but I was terrified to use that technique while coming down one of the bigger hills.  My fear was that if I tried it, the high speeds would turn my skis too far inward, twist-breaking the bones in both my ankles, and turning the skis all the way around so it looked like I had put them on backwards.

"Nope, my skis aren’t on backwards, folks, my legs are.  Call an ambulance, please."

I had mental images of me coming down one of the moderate hills like a runaway train, screaming in agony, my skis and legs on backwards, broken bones jutting out of both my legs.  

Maybe that can’t happen, I don’t know, I’m not a fucking doctor.  It was going to be the Bunny Hill for me for the rest of the day.

Now, at the foot of the Bunny Hill was a machine called a "pony-lift" that helped tow people back to the top of the hill.  The pony-lift was essentially a long loop of cable with hard plastic handles attached to it every few feet.  This loop of cable was wound around two pulleys, one at the top of the hill, one at the bottom.  You caught hold of a handle at the bottom of the hill, let the cable take you up the hill, then you let go and let the handle made its way back to the bottom.  It was a pretty slick device, and while the handles moved pretty quickly and gave your shoulders a pretty good jolt when you latched on, it sure beat the hell out of walking back up the hill after each run.

In total, I probably made about 11 runs down the Bunny Hill (I was desperate to better my skills enough to go find my friends on the other hills), but with each run it became harder to hang onto the pony-lift on the way back up.  Eventually, while halfway up the hill, my cold hands, wet mittens, and pathetic upper body strength made it impossible to hold on to the hard plastic handle any longer.  When my hands slipped, I started sliding backwards down the hill.  I slid directly into the person behind me who was also being towed up the hill.  The collision caused them to lose their grip on the handle and as they started to slide backwards, I lost my balance and fell over sideways onto the moving cables.  The sharp-eyed operator, probably having already noticed what a lemon I was, killed the motor on the lift immediately.  The cables stopped abruptly, and my weight caused them to dive towards the ground.  All the way up the hill, handles were being yanked downwards and out of peoples’ hands.  I could feel the cables beneath me vibrate and make a metallic "PUH-TOW" sound each time someone lost their grip.  While I kicked and thrashed on the cables like a fish in a net, all the way up the hill it was mayhem.  People were falling over, sliding backwards, running into one another, yelling for help.  It was awful.

"GODDAMMIT!" I heard the Pony-Lift Man say as he came marching up the hill.

He lifted me up off of the cables and set me on my feet.  He handed me my poles and put the Pony Lift handle in my hand again.

"Hang on to it!" he said ferociously before heading up the hill to help everyone else.

The lift was re-started, and though my arms shook and quivered, I managed to hang on to the handle to the top of the hill.  Once there I decided that maybe it was time to move on to one of the more challenging hills.  Not that I was ready for a bigger challenge skill-wise. God, no, even I knew I was probably leaving the ski hill on a stretcher, but I just couldn't risk pissing off the Pony-Lift Man again.

I found my best friend, and he convinced me to accompany him down one of the intermediate hills.  We made our way to the chair-lift area, and I studied how people were getting on before I got in line.  It looked easy enough, you just positioned yourself and waited for the chair-lift to pick your ass up.  Easy!  I was nervous when it was our turn to get on, but I managed to do it no problem.

The trip up the mountain in the chair-lift was intense.  I have a phobia about heights, so I tried not to look down and just joked around with my buddy.  As we approached the "landing area" though, I realized I couldn't see how people got off of the lift.  I had no example to go off of, I had no idea what to expect!

When our chair came in, I was panicked.  It came in way too fast.  When the bar was lifted I tried to be brave and just jump out, but I immediately faceplanted.  My skis tripped my friend, and the people coming in off the next chair tripped over us.  A pile-up had begun.

Ever been at a ski resort and had the chair-lift stop for no apparent reason.  You're left dangling dangerously high above the ground in the freezing cold air, and after a few minutes someone gets mad enough to yell, "What the fuck is going on?"

Well, I'm what the fuck is going on.

They had to halt the chair-lift to pull apart the puzzle of people and skis I had caused.  When my friend and I were set free, we bolted as quickly as possible because a LOT of people were really unhappy with me.  We tried to find an intermediate trail, but all we could seem to find were the terrifying "Black Diamond" trails for those with advanced skills.  My friend was more confident than I was, but there was no goddamned way I was doing one of those trails.  I told my friend to enjoy his afternoon, then I took off my skis and I started hiking down the black diamond trail on foot.

As I walked down the mountain, the wide trail funneled itself down into a much more narrow passage through the mountain.  I had been walking for a few minutes when I heard a whooshing sound, and felt a blast of wind go by me.  I heard someone say "WHAT THE FU---" before their voice disappeared down the hill. 

It turns out, being relatively stationary in the middle of a narrow black diamond trail isn't very safe. 

I tried to make my way to the edges of the trail, but it was so narrow, and the snow was too deep to walk in at the edges.  I decided to keep walking in the middle of the trail, and I just tried to keep an eye and an ear out for people coming up behind me.  It didn't work very well at all.  They were moving so fast!  More than once I stood there facing down an incoming human missile. 
 
Imagine being an expert skier, coming down a tight trail in the forest, rounding a bend at like 80km/h and coming up on a terrified fat kid standing in the middle of the trail, kind of dancing from side to side, unsure of which direction to dive out of the way.

This happened like three or four times.  I was a nervous wreck all the way down the hill.  By the time I reached the lodge, I had tears in my eyes because I was so emotionally exhausted.  What a shit day, man. 

I sat in the lodge at a table, staring out at the mountain in defeat.  It was almost time for us to leave, and I was just sitting there waiting for my friends to return from the hills when I noticed the bus driver sitting at another table.  She was sipping hot chocolate by herself.

It hadn't occurred to me that this poor woman we had tormented all the way up here had given up her entire day so that we could go skiing.  She had been sitting down in this lodge the whole time.  I started to feel really bad about having teased her about her driving earlier.  I knew what it was like to suck at something.  This woman and I, we had both had rotten days. 

I decided that I would be really nice to her to try and make her day better.  I got up, walked over to her table, and said, "Hey, thanks a lot for bringing us up here today, we really appreciate it."

"Oh," she said, clearly taken aback, "Well, you're very welcome, it was my pleasure."

Feeling awesome about myself, I sat back down and waited until the rest of the class came back to the lodge.  When we boarded the bus, the driver gave me a little smile and she was clearly in a good mood.  Both of our days had been salvaged by a simple act of kindness. 

"All aboard!" she yelled with a smile.  The kids, all in happy moods after a day of fun, laughed good-naturedly at her little joke.  She put the bus into gear, and we started for home.  We hadn't even gotten out of the parking lot when she stalled the bus again.  It was a pretty bonehead move on her part, so we gave her shit for it the whole way home.

Ghostbusters

My old elementary school used to be pretty hard up for school events.  Sometimes we would all gather in the gym and watch a cartoon, or we’d assemble to have some old guy tell us how dangerous bears were, or sometimes a dude would bring a bunch of reptiles to school, but, other than that, there really wasn’t a lot happening.  

One of the things the school did to try and spruce things up a bit was to have “Talent Shows” a few times a year.  Now, they were called Talent Shows, but nobody had any real talents.  What this assembly always turned into was a bunch of skits that weren't very funny or entertaining followed by a number of lip-sync/air-band routines where people got up and pretended to play instruments and sing to their favorite songs.  You know, exactly what people do in front of their mirrors at home with their bedroom doors closed, only in this case it was done in front of a gymnasium full of people.

Now, the skits were more just for the really little kids; the Kindergarteners and Grade One kids would come up and act out scenes or songs from their favorite cartoons.  Air-bands, on the other hand, were for the big kids, the cool kids.  Nobody from our school had ever played any instruments, so over the years we had all become air-band connoisseurs.  You couldn’t get up there and just pretend you had an instrument; that’s fucking stupid! No, no, what you did was go to the equipment room in the gym and gather up things that could stand in for instruments.  Mop handles were microphone stands, badminton-racquets were guitars, pylons were trumpets, batons were drumsticks, etc.  Everybody had to have something unless it was an all-girl air-band, in which case there might be a few dancers, but dancers were the only ones that were allowed to be up there without an “instrument”.  After an air-band had performed, it wasn’t silly in the least to say things like, “Oh, man, did you see the way Trevor totally nailed that guitar solo?!” or “Brian’s drumroll blew my mind!”  If the right song was chosen, an air-band could even get a standing ovation.  It was like the entire school suffered from a mass delusion when it came to these Talent Shows.  I couldn’t even tell you what visitors to the school must have thought when they saw the way we went nuts for imaginary musicians.  It must have looked like a rock concert in a mental hospital.

Anyway, I remember attending one of these talent shows when I was in Grade 2 or 3, and seeing an older girl I had a crush on (yeah, I had crushes in Grade 2) doing an interpretive dance routine/imaginary music video to "I Think We're Alone Now" while lip-syncing the lyrics.  She had her "boyfriend" come up and be a part of the scene too.  He sat there, slumped in a chair, looking all cool while this angel "sang" to him.  She looked like she could sound just like Tiffany.  I sat in the crowd, years younger than the two of them, fuming that this guy had the cojones to smirk and laugh and pay attention to his buddies in the crowd while this girl pretended-to-sing her heart out for him.  In my twisted young mind I thought:

"This guy doesn't understand you!  What are you doing with him? Sure, maybe he looks cool in the tight black jeans with the three parallel tears on each thigh, and that black leather jacket over the Metallica T-shirt is pretty rad, I’ll give him that, but c'mon, this guy is just a Slash-wannabe.  If you stay with this Grease-stain you’re headed down a path that that leads to unemployment, Zesty Doritos for supper, dope-smoking, and receiving nothing but cartons of cigarettes in your stocking every Christmas."

I guess she wasn’t the brightest girl around because she stayed with that dirtbag for most of the schoolyear.  It didn’t matter though, my crush only got more intense.  When the next Talent Show came up, I decided I had to get in on it.  I knew this girl was into music and performing arts and crap, so being in the Talent Show was an excellent way to get her to notice me.

Luckily for me, one of the more meek and quiet students in my class had had a sudden burst of confidence, and decided he was going to organize an air-band routine to the Ghostbusters theme-song.  It was perfect!  Everybody loved that fucking song.  Standing ovation for sure!  I asked this guy if I could be a part of the band, and he said it was no problem.  He then very stupidly went on to tell six other guys that it was also no problem for them to join either.

On the day of the talent show the eight of us were discussing our positions.  We’d have two singers with mop handles, two badminton-racquet guitar players, two tennis-racquet bass players, a baton drummer, and a pylon trumpeter.  I was to be a guitar player.  Ladies love guitar players, I was so in.  All I had to do was a real legit-looking solo, maybe play the badminton racquet with my teeth like a real guitar god, and this girl was going to flush the fucking toilet on her current boyfriend and come running to me.  Yessir, I’d be dating an older woman by recess.  A real cougar, now that would be just aces.

While I was day-dreaming about my soon-to-be girlfriend serenading me with Tiffany songs, we were called up to perform.  I was SO ready!  We went to our positions, and suddenly, something went wrong.  There was only one mop handle, so one of the singers grabbed the pylon, which meant that the pylon guy had to grab a badminton racquet, which meant that when I went to grab MY badminton racquet there were none left.  I quickly scanned around for anything I could turn into an “instrument”.  I didn’t care what, I’d turn a vacuum cleaner into a tuba at this point, but everything had been claimed.  I had banked it all on a badminton-racquet and lost.

I had just become a dancer.

Now, when I tell you that I froze with stage-fright, please understand that no one has ever frozen as badly as I did that day.  I mean I froze up goddamned solid.  I went catatonic.  I stood there like a perfect statue, mouth half-open, staring wide-eyed at the entire school staring back at me.  It didn't matter how catchy the Ghostbusters theme-song was.  It didn't matter how realistic the guys with the badminton-racquets looked.  All eyes were on the fat kid having some sort of psychological episode in front of them.  I could see some of the older boys laughing, including that Slash-wannabe motherfucker my future-wife was dating.  My eyes scanned the crowd and when I spotted her my heart split in two.  The look on her face was a mixture of horror and disgust. 

"Jesus, what's wrong with that fat kid," I could hear her thinking, “I would NEVER date anyone that uncool. I’m soooo glad I have my current shit-rat boyfriend”.

A teacher at the back was waving her arms at me, trying to get my attention.  My eyes moved to her, and I could see her pretending to dance and mouthing the words, “Dance! You have to dance!" to me.  Sorry, Ma'am.  I appreciate your attempts to help me out here, I’m sure you’ll go to heaven for that and all, but I think we both know it’s too late for me.  I've been frozen here for almost a full minute.  To unfreeze now would just be even weirder.  If I were to suddenly burst into a dance right now it would just startle these people so bad that they’d probably jump a little.  No, if the alternative to what I’m doing right now carries with it any risk of me looking even MORE crazy, then I’ll just stick with what I’m doing.

Afraid that I was ruining his chances of getting a standing ovation, the geek that arranged this whole thing tried to salvage it by doing a big Corey Hart-esque running knee-slide on the last note of the song.  What he forgot was that Corey Hart didn’t do knee-slides on waxed gymnasium floors while wearing “Where’s Waldo” jogging pants.  This dork crashed into the first row of the audience, a bunch of Grade 1 kids still congratulating themselves on a smashing rendition of that “Chim-Chim-Cher-ee” song from Mary Poppins.  This guy slams into some little kids with a running knee-slide at the end of the Ghostbusters theme-song, and somehow I was still the one remembered as being the jackass that ruined the routine. 

Whatever.

I spent the rest of the year NOT having that cougar girlfriend and hating the guts of the opportunistic arsehole who had jumped from mop-handle singer to pylon-trumpeter and thrown everything into chaos.  To this day I can’t listen to “I Think We’re Alone Now” without getting teary-eyed, and the Ghostbusters theme-song makes me have to go to the bathroom.