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Category: General Cerebral Leakage (Page 3 of 26)

When all other categories fail (or absentmindedly forget to be assigned), General Cerebral Leakage, fresh off his third tour of duty in the war against wise insurance providers, steps in to save the day!

C’mon, People, There’s No Need To Be Sniffing Out That Mysterious Toxic Energy

23 June 2024 / / 0 Comments
4 Min Read

Some rooms just have a bad vibe in them, and it’s just a fact.

You need to accept there’s nothing we can do about it, and that’s that…

“Mr. Eiland! Do we have to keep practicing?” my fellow percussionist, Carrie, stuck her head out the door and desperately hollered at our band teacher.

Mr. E. had been contentedly working with the rest of the student-musicians in the main part of the Rolla High School band room, while those of us in the drum section had been sequestered in his office to work out our sh*t on our own.

“No, you can’t come out and join the rest of us just yet,” he hollered back. “Something is, uh, how do I put this? Something is ‘off’ in the rhythm department, and I can’t have it throwing the rest of the band off.”

“Okay, fine, but do we have to do it in your office? Whatever is off is even worse in that confined space,” Carrie protested.

“Yeah!” I said, popping my head out the office door behind Carrie. “The acoustics are terrible in here!”

Carrie looked back at me with one of those looks that say, “What in the ----- are you talking about?”

“What?” I shot back at her. “You accidentally hit an extra beat and it seems to bounce around forever in there.”

“Things do tend to linger uncomfortably long in there…” she said as she shook her dang head.

“What are you two jabbering on about?” Mr. E. chided us, still from across the other side of the band room. “Get back in there and get back to work–and don’t forget to shut the door behind you!”

Carrie and I groaned in unison, knowing that we had failed our other drummers in our quest to get our practice session relocated to a different, preferably more spacious, locale.

“I was really hoping he was going to let us jam out outside,” Carrie sighed nasally as we both trotted back into Mr. E’s office.

“I take it were still stuck in here?” asked Iris–percussionist 3 of 4–as she waltzed1Damn straight was time-signature based pun…ya konw, 3/4…waltz…you get it right? back in after a suspiciously long trip to the water fountain just outside in the hall.

“Dammit, one of us is —-ed up, and it’s not me!” said beater #4, good ol’ Double-B of 21-Trap infamy. He could be a prick sometimes, so his feisty attitude didn’t particular surprise me.

“Don’t you mean ‘is —-ing up’, Double-B?” I interjected.

“I know what I said.” Double-B glared at me.

“Yeah,” I said, wiping some sweat from my brow. “Ah, ’tis a real mystery. It could be any one of us,” my eyes darted around the room furtively. “But we may never know who…”

“Thwack! Thump…thump…thump.” The familiar crack of a pool stick hitting a cue ball was followed by the sound of billiard balls bouncing off the felt sides of the pool table…but conspicuously absent was the satisfying sound of any of them balls actually dropping into the table’s pockets.

My cousin, Rene,2I’m actually fuzzy as to which female cousin this was…it might have been Lisa, or perhaps Jennifer–either way I almost never hung out with them otherwise. sighed in mild exasperation after yet another fruitless turn on my part.

“This game is taking forever,” she muttered.

But it wasn’t like it was all my fault that it was dragging on endlessly; she wasn’t exactly droppin’ balls in pockets either.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I can’t put my finger on it, but for some reason I’m just not on my game today,” I noted.

“Me, too,” Rene agreed. “I’m usually a regular pool shark, but something is amiss around here, and it’s really messing with me.”

“It must be this musty old school building,” I said gesturing around to the repurposed Richfield Grade School classroom which, up until the building had recently been turned into a modest community center, hadn’t been regular used since our mothers were 8th grade students there in the 60’s.

She looked around the otherwise empty room. On this particularly lazy Sunday, we appeared to be the only ones not just in the billiards room, but in the entire building.

“Yeah, something sure is off in here,” she concurred. “What say we just call this game a draw and jam outta here?”

“It is indeed a beautiful spring day outside, and the casual stroll back to Grandma’s house does sound rather pleasant,” I responded.

As we (rather loudly) racked the balls and put away the pool sticks, Rene all of a sudden paused and made a scrunched up face.

“There’s that smell again…” she noted.

“Yeah, let’s go on and get outta this confined space,” I said reinforcing our newly-laid plan.

“I need fresh air–NOW!” she said as she suddenly made a break for the exit.

Once outside, we both drew in two huge lungfuls of the crisp Kansas spring breeze.

With our heads cleared, I couldn’t help but muse aloud.

“That was really odd. I wonder if they have a mold problem that needs remediation…”

Rene just gave me a sideway glance.

“Mold? Here in Southwest Kansas? You know that we are technically in a desert climate, right?”

“Ah, ’tis a real mystery. It could be any one of many endless possibilities, then,” my eyes darted furtively back to the building we had just escaped. “But we may never know what…”

“Hold my beer…” is most definitely what Frito-Lay told Nabisco back in the mid-90’s when they saw the massively successful nonsense the latter had found in their well-intentioned-but-tragically-misguided non-fat Snackwell’s cookies.

With Proctor & Gamble’s recent food-science breakthrough, Olestra, in hand, those wily bastards took nutritionally dubious “healthy” snacking to a whole ‘nother level with the release of their Olean sub-brand of completely fat-free chips. I mean, this was revolutionary. Fat-free, yet they did not compromise the taste or texture of all of Frito-Lay’s greatest hits in the least–they were virtually indistinguishable for all intents and purposes. You see, the miracle lied within the fact that these Olestra oil-substitute would pass completely through one’s GI system without ever being absorbed…

Would this result in explosive diarrhea and unbearably horrific farts in large quantities that were nearly impossible to control?

Would anybody you know be so intent on living an extreme ‘healthy’ low-fat lifestyle that they would continue to regularly consume such a product having experienced such dire consequences after the first go-round?

Is it possible that any human could be so inconsiderate of their fellow man and woman that they would knowingly subject them to such inhumanities, just for their own personal benefit?

Can you conceive of such a self-focused psychopath that would inflict such suffering on others, then proceed to give a whole new meaning to the term ‘gaslighting’ by pretending that if anything was ‘off’ about the experience, that it must be the environment and surely not their own stank ass?

Ah, ’tis a real mystery.

*eyes dart furtively around the room*

But we may never know the answers to such questions…

Content created on: 22/23 June 2024 (Sat/Sun)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Behold: The Magic Jell-O Keeping You Out Of Jail, Bro!

9 June 2024 / / 0 Comments
5 Min Read

When you hear ‘pudding’, you’re bound to ask “Yum! What flavor?”

This time, though, you best not ask (and you’re welcome for the favor…)

“The sign of a true friend is…’pudding on a condom for Phillip’?!? Um…I have so many questions that I’m not sure I want the answer to.”

My beautiful bride looked up from my phone, wide-eyed and side-eyeing me at the same time. She had been poking around my Notes app looking for my grocery list, and instead she apparently found my reminder where I keep a short list of potential stories to blog about in the coming weeks.

“That doesn’t sound quite right…lemme see that!”

I took a quick glance at it then got my eyes back on the road like the safe driver that I was.

“Ahh, I see, it’s just a typo,” I reassured her.

“Whew! No condoms were involved. That’s a relief,” she demurred.

“Oh, no, there was a condom alright.”

“So, it’s supposed to be ‘putting’? ‘Putting on a condom’ for your male friend is any better?!? Is there something you need to get off your chest, my dear hubby? You been keeping any skeletons in the ol’ proverbial closet?”

“What? No, no, no. I meant that the it was supposed to in, not on,” I clarified.

“Hold up, mister! ‘Pudding on a condom’ was a gross enough mental picture, and you mean to tell me what you wanted to describe was ‘pudding in a condom’?!? You’re one sick puppy” she deftly passed judgement on me.

“No, no–“

“Wait just one sec,” she interrupted my rebuttal and proceeded to open up the car door and wretch lightly.

“You’re lucky we’re at a stoplight,” I said in an attempt to implicitly reassure the Reader that I didn’t marry a woman who would have such poor executive function as to open the door while in a moving vehicle.

“Are you done ye–“

She held up her hand to stop me as she went for one last round:

*gaaaaaaag!*

“You’re such a drama queen,” I commented once she was done with her over-the-top expression of disgust. “And for the record, ‘pudding’ was a typo, too. I guess I got double autocorrected when I hastily made that note.”

“Oh great,” she said as she rolled her eyes. “Lemme guess: I’m going to have to wait in suspense to find out what you really meant while you regale whoever will listen with another one of your trademark ‘short-story-long’ tales…”

“Hey, man, can you come over? I’m kinda in a pickle and really was hoping you could do me a favor.”

A little over a year after my ol’ buddy, Phillip K. Ballz, tried to sabotage my post-college career, I got a somewhat desperate sounding phone call from him. We had hung out on occasion since that particular incident–we both still lived in Manhattan after graduating from Kansas State–so it wasn’t completely abnormal for him to blow up my phone. However, I could tell from his voice that he wasn’t his usual laid-back self.

“Yeah, sure thing, amigo. I’ll be right over,” I said, blindly agreeing to whatever.

On the drive over, I mused to myself about the possible nature of his request.

“I probably better stretch my back first thing–it’s still a little tweaked from that one reckless round of disc golf, and I bet he needs my help moving a piano or some other heavy object.”

“Or maybe he needs my help giving Da Vinci, his cat with 6 fingers on each paw, a bath?”

“Oh, the possibilities are endless–but the truth is probably something completely asinine,” I thought as I got out of the car, somehow switching gears from bright-eyed imaginative optimism to overly-honest cynicism in the same mental breath.

“Jeez, there you are! Did you get lost on the way over here? Took you long enough!” PKB greeted me, clearly in the early stages of panic mode.

“I mean, I got a little lost in thought, maybe, but I otherwise came straight over here. What’s up?” I quipped, then inquired.

“Dude, so you know how I’m on probation, right?”

“Yeah, I’m mildly aware that you got into trouble with the law over some stupid recreational drug-related incident. So what about it?” I asked.

“Well, I have to take a certain test every couple months, if you know what I mean.”

“Really? That’s a condition of your parole?”

“My probation, not parole, you jackass. And yes, if I don’t keep my nose clean, then I’ll actually have to serve some time in the county jail,” he said with all seriousness.

“Well, good thing you know they’re going to test you in advance, right?”

His lack of response was starting to unsettle me.

“Right?”

The look on his face said it all.

“You really are a proper dipshit, aren’t you? You mean to tell me that your dumb ass knew that you would get thrown in the can if you done and went and smoked a fat blunt…and then you done went and smoked a fat blunt? Un-effing-believable.”

“Look, it was several weeks ago, and it should have been out of my system by now, but when I took a home version of the test, it still showed up. You gotta help a brother out, man!” he begged of me.

“Uh, I don’t know what I could possibly do to help you out of this j–“

“You can pass the test for me, that’s what!” he said, interrupting me.

“Wait, what? Oh. I see…Well, you’re not going make me complicit in your illicit activities! I’m a man of honor and integrity! You can get one of your other heathen buddies to do it, and leave me out of this!”

PKB looked at me like I was dumb as a rock.

“All my other friends are potheads like me–you’re the only friend I have around these parts that hasn’t gotten high in the last two weeks!”

“Oh,” was all I could muster.

You can’t argue with airtight logic like that.

“So…what do you need me to do?” I asked resignedly. I couldn’t stand by and let one of my oldest friends go to jail for a crime he did commit.

“Here you go. And you know where the bathroom is,” he said.

I looked down at the box he had just handed me.

“You gotta be ----- kidding me,” I muttered.1See the note at the end about the alternate ending that splits off at this point. “You could have at least got me some Magnums–I’m a ‘bigger’ guy, if you know what I mean.”

“Dammit, I got my test in less than 40 minutes, so forgive me if I don’t have time for your weird flex. Just go take care of business, will ya?” PKB said impatiently.

I didn’t bother shutting the bathroom door behind me to make sure he could hear everything.

“You know what they say really is true: size does matter…” I hollered across the house.

“Just shut your pie-hole and keep pissing in the condom!” PKB so rudely interrupted my punchline.

Nevertheless, I persisted: “…and you’re in luck cuz’ this big boy’s got a big ol’ bladder…”2As promised, here’s the original/alternate ending before I changed it at the last second.:

“Here you go. And you know where the bathroom is,” he said.

I looked down at the box he had just handed me.

“You gotta be ----- kidding me,” I muttered.

“Make it snappy though–I got my test in 45 minutes.”

“What the hell, Phillip? Cutting it kinda close, aren’t we?” I said somewhat incredulously, as I had no idea how close his head was to the chopping block. “Dammit, last thing I needed was pressure–you know I’m bladder-shy!” I said.

“Just go take care of business, will ya?” PKB said impatiently.

I skulked off to the bathroom, but intentionally left the door open so he could hear me when I loudly proclaimed, “I feel like this is a good time force some of The Jesus on you–and I quote: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life be pissing in a condom for his friends.’ This is literally What Jesus Would Do.”

“So, what’s your point, my dude?” he hollered back at me.

“Well,” I yelled, leaning back so my head was poking out the open bathroom door, “as The Jesus always says: ‘You’re welcome, you ----- dirty hippie…’ “

Content created on: 6/8/9 June 2024 (Thurs/Sat/Sun)

Footnotes & References:[+]

How To Be An Unhelpful Friend To An Unemployed Man

26 May 2024 / / 0 Comments
4 Min Read

When you’re down on your luck, a helping hand should sound great.

But when your pal’s a dipshit, you have to worry about what you just ate…

“Would you like a cookie or two before you go, my hard-working amigo?”

Phil–not his real name, but not not his real name–proffered me a pair of mealy-looking cookies.

“Sure, why not? I did break a bit of a cold sweat this afternoon, and I sure do love me an…um…oatmeal, maybe?…cookie or two on occasion,” I said, graciously accepting.

Ol’ Phillip K. Ballz (or PKB, as I like to call him in these parts) and I had been good buddies back in high school, but for the most part had lived our own separate college lives–despite going to the same prestigious land-grant university. At this particular point in time, I had just graduated a month or so earlier (sorta), and was in the middle of “finding my way as an adult”. And by “finding my way as an adult,” I mean that I had no idea what kind of career I wanted to pursue, and was in the middle of job hunting just so I could pay my rent and put food in my mouth.

So when we randomly ran into each other and he discovered that I was hard-up for cash, he mentioned that his roommate and landlord, John–a guy I remembered from my freshman year as that one slightly strange hippie dude in the dorm that always wore a train engineer’s hat–was doing some landscaping in their backyard, and would be more than happy to pay me $70 for an afternoon of labor.

Of course I jumped on that meal wagon gravy train in an instant. I mean, what a deal: I would be getting exercise, some late-January sunshine, a wad of cash worth at least 5 weeks of groceries, and–best of all–get to hang out and reconnect with one of my oldest, most trustworthy pals. It was a win-win-win-win situation all around!

And now, after our hard day’s work, he was throwing in some bonus cookies?!? Heck, yes, this day couldn’t get much better!

As I started to chow down, it dawned on me that the baked goods weren’t oatmeal as I had previously surmised.

“Mmmm, say, Phil, what kind of cookies are these?” I said in between bites. “They’re not bad, per se, they just have an interesting texture I just can’t quite place. Somewhere on the spectrum between coconut and papier-mâché, if I had to guess…”

“Oh, those are John’s creation–and they’re full of exactly what you would expect a groovy dude like him to put in there.”

“So…dirt? Leaves? Is this nature-lovin’ mother ----- just collecting random items on the forest floor and throwing it in the oven or what?” I fancied a guess, knowing that it was slightly ridiculous–but that theory couldn’t quite be automatically ruled out, either.

“Nah, man, nothing like that, though he likes to sticky with ingredients on the more ‘natural’ side. You know, honey…seeds…nuts…plant fibers. Granola shit like that.”

“Oh. Ok. Yeah, I guess that tracks. And that is good enough for me. ‘Don’t look a gift house in the mouth’ and what-not, right?”

“Yup,” PKB agreed and then sat and watched intently as I polished off the second cookie along with two more that seemed to magically appear on my plate. “Now, where we? Let’s get back to regaling John and the others with the tales of our shenanigans from our youth…”

“You notice anything different?” PKB asked after getting lost in nostalgia for at least a good 45 minutes.

The question kind of came out of nowhere and caught me by surprise a little bit.

“Ummm…can’t say I really do. Anything different about what, exactly?” I replied, lightly confused.

A slight squeal came out of his lips–which I found rather quite odd–before clarifying.

“Like, do you feel any different, man?”

“Well, I am kinda full for once. You didn’t really have to offer me those 3 extra cookies–though I do immensely appreciate the generosity of you and John,” I said, taking care to express gratitude to my hosts for the 7 cookies had consumed in my state of hunger.

“No, not your stomach–does your head feel any different?” he queried with a cryptic grin.

“Alright, dude, what is up? You’re acting a little suspicious,” I said, cocking an eyebrow.

“They…*snort*…were,” he blurted out in between school-girl-like giggles, “POT COOKIES!”

He then bust out in a full-on fit of laughter after making his big reveal.

“WHAT?!?” I was slightly shocked. “So that’s why they felt like muddy straw in my mouth and had that odd after taste.”

“Ha, hah! I got you high-igh! I got you high-igh!” PKB reveled in having pulled a fast one on me.

“NO. Not funny. Bad friend. Bad friend!” I chastised my favorite dipshit.

“C’mon, you needed to relax and take your mind off of being broke. I’m doing you a favor.”
“Yeah, except that I’m in the middle of job-hunting. And now, if I finally land a job, what am I going to do if they make me take a drug test, huh? DAMMIT, you idiot. I can’t tell them ‘so sorry, but my so-called friend loaded me up on marijuana cookies and was too ----- naive to catch on in time. Please let me have this job anyways.’ Jeez, you’ve really screwed me over on this one, you fricking moron!”

Saying that I was displeased with his little stunt would be a gross understatement.

“Nah, man, you’ll be fine. Plus, there’s nothing you can do about it now anyways, so you might as well sit back and enjoy it.”

I sighed a sigh of resignation. He was right–at least about the fact that I couldn’t ‘un-high’ myself at this point–so I should soak in the time we had together.

“Ok, fine, whatever. But I can only stick around for another 15 minutes or so, and then I’m off to–oh for fuck’s sake, that’s where I have to go tonight?”

“What? What’s tonight?”

“You jackass, you better hope that I don’t say any incredibly stupid shit at Bible study…”

Content created on: 23/25 May 2024 (Thurs/Sat)

Legendary Myths Of Kansas: The Most Wanted Man On Campus

12 May 2024 / / 2 Comments
5 Min Read

I knew I was doing something right when a University big-wig asked to meet one-on-one.

Problem was, I had no idea what good deed I had done…

“The Dean of Engineering would like to personally meet with you.”

It was a voicemail from the Dean’s secretary, and I was pretty sure this message was a bearer of good news.

I couldn’t help but wonder what I had done already that would have made me stick out in the mind of the guy who basically ran Kansas State’s entire Engineering program. I was merely a sophomore in college–in the thick of my third semester to be exact–and I had only taken ~1-1/2 classes in the actual Engineering Department.

But, yeah, a glaring dearth of evidence aside, I would say that I was no stranger to being recognized for my bright mind and plucky personality. My proverbial belt was notched with countless scholarships and other such trappings of a high-achieving academic such as myself. A plethora of articles in the local SW Kansan newspapers had been written about me during my high school years. And once at college, I quickly made a name for myself based on, uh…my “drinking” ability. Oh, and of course there was what I was probably most well-known for: my hair.

Yeah, it most definitely had to be the hair. By that point in time I had been rocking bright blue on the left side, neon pink on the right, and purple up top with a classic ‘Jesus fish'1Also know as the ‘Ichthus fish’, which is actually kinda redundant, since ‘ichthus’ just means ‘fish’ in ancient Greek. So it’s a fish-fish, I guess? in green running from front to back on the peak of my dome.

Ya know, the kind of hair that screams to upper administrators, “This kid is really going to go places in the field of mechanical engineering–you better ingratiate yourself to him and hitch your wagon to his star while you can!”

The more I thought about it, the clearer it become that of course the Dean of Engineering wants to see me–who wouldn’t want to rub shoulders with one of the coolest cats on campus?

I just hoped he didn’t get greedy and ask for my autograph or anything…

“On as scale of one to ten…” the Dean paused for dramatic effect, “how would you rate the job you did as an Engineering Mentor?”

The Dean had been so eager to meet me that he had actually stepped out of an important departmental meeting…to ask me that?

I had almost totally forgotten about that, though I had completed my duties as a Mentor only a few weeks earlier. Concordantly, I had to refresh myself on that experience, and I might as well bring you, Dear Reader, along for the ride.

The Engineering Mentorship program recruited rising-star Sophomores such as yours truly to meet with incoming Freshmen/women Engineering majors for a couple evenings early in their first semester on campus. These somewhat informal meetings gave us the chance to show the them the ropes and help prepare them for the 5-6 years ahead of them. At least that was the ‘official’ purpose of the program. But all us Mentors knew that it was really just a chance for us to show off to these youngsters how cool and hip we were, and to really let our flaming personalities shine (did I mention my awesome hair already?).

For example, on my résumé–my first chance to impress upon their malleable minds how absolutely ----- cool I was–I put something along the lines of ‘1998 Morton County Speling Be Champ-ye-uhn’. Now, I didn’t really win any local spelling bee two years earlier, but I looked super-cool claiming to have done so while simultaneously misspelling almost every word in the title. Pretty clever, huh?

And then there were other real accolades that I truly did earn…ya know, like Twinkie-But-Actually-Swiss-Cake-Rolls-Because-I-Shit-You-Not-There-Was-For-Realz-A-Twinkie-Shortage-That-Year Eating Champion.

Real classy stuff, I tell ya.

And let’s not forget the fact that I was desperately seeking their approval and validation–oh, sh*t, wait…did I just say that out loud?–and so really tried my best to be a ‘cool’ teacher. Like the ones in high school whose class every student so desperately hoped to land in: the ones that mingled with us little people, always began class with a short stand-up routine, graded super-easy, and would let just about anything slide. The kind that would never send a kid to the principal’s office, no matter the offense, and would instead high-five the offender for having the courage to ‘stick it to the Man’.

So, given all that, let me think…did I totally kick ass as an Engineering Mentor, the likes of which had never been seen before or since?

Indubitably. (Though being I’ve one to toot their own horn was never in my nature…)

“Hmm…good question. I would say maybe a solid five or a six, perhaps?”

Like I said, I was the type of guy/mentor/teacher that knew he was cool and never felt the need to brag about it.

“Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahh! Just let me stop you there, Arthur Fonzarelli. Try ‘one’ or ‘two’. In fact, I would probably give you a negative rating if I could, but I’m being nice and respecting the 1-to-10 range that I set forth to begin with.”

Needless to say, the Dean was sorely displeased with me, and in fact, was not meeting me to tell me how rad my hair was.

“Oh,” was about all I could quietly muster, as I realized that I had just walked into the trap he had so carefully set for me. Dammit, I should have known that whole ‘rate yourself’ was a trick question.

“So it turns out,” the Dean continued, “that one of your students came to my secretary trying to figure out where to turn in the work you had allegedly assigned him. Well, what we found mighty odd is that you had officially recorded this guy as having faithfully turned in every last one of his assignments. Yet, in a written affidavit, he swears that you never asked any of them to turn anything in.”

“Oh. We were serious when we gave them that work? Really?” I eeked out.

“YES WE WERE SERIOUS. Why, you realize that what you have done constitutes academic fraud, and the only reason why you haven’t been kicked out of the School of Engineering altogether is because my secretary talked me into giving you a second chance. We barely have any tolerance for slacker punks like you around here.”

Damn. ‘Punks’, eh? This mf’er was going after the hair? For realz?

“Ummm…thanks for taking mercy on my poor soul?”

“You’ve wasted enough of my precious time, and I need to get back to my meeting. Now get your ugly face out of my sight before I change my mind!”

“Yes, sir,” I said quietly and very, very humbly (this time I didn’t have to fake my humility), as a slinked away with my tail between my legs.

*a few weeks later*

Having quickly realized that my talents were going to be unsung and underappreciated in the engineering world, I changed my major to…education.

In retrospect, that was a bold move, given that I had just about got kicked out of my department for being a sh*t teacher. But of course the irony of situations like this aren’t apparent until 20 or so years later.

Anyways….The point of the story is, kids, it’s always cool to follow the rules. And if the rules you have to follow suck the life out of your soul, then go find yourself another piece of proverbial land in a far-off place where the rules are actually cool…

Content created on: 8 & 10 May 2024 (Weds/Fri)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Never Again Shall We Worry About The Great Text-Replacement Theory

21 April 2024 / / 0 Comments
5 Min Read

It was the greatest prank–hah! I summed it up in less than 2 sentences!

But I bragged about it, and now? Oh the never-ending consequences…

“Oh, crap. Not again!”

Just a few weeks ago, I had regaled y’all with one of the best pranks I’ve ever come up with, The Great Text Replacement Theory. That was pretty good, right?

And of course I followed that up with how Karma gave me a proper swift kick in the ass a few years later when my own progeny weaponized my greatest creation against me.

If you haven’t read all about those shenanigans, go ahead and take a quick minute or two to follow the links above and catch up. As always, I’ll patiently wait for you to absorb the proper context for what comes next…

…

…

…

Alright, ya back and well informed? Great! Let’s get on with the show then.

So, the problem is, you see, that in order to visually demonstrate how I pulled the stunt off, I had to go back and change the settings on my phone in the same manner I had done to my dear mother’s phone.

“So…what’s the problem with that?” you may be asking no one in particular.

Well–fun fact–the time that I typically find myself composing these masterpieces (such as the one you’re reading now) is around 1 am on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, and once I’ve put the finishing touches on it–witty and optimized title with my trademark cadence, stupid little graphic with googly eyes and my caricaturized luscious lips, opening blurb comprised of two rhyming lines and ending with an ellipsis, and similarly structured FaceBook promo ending with aforementioned title1This is a dead-on accurate description of my workflow once I’ve finished writing the main text–and takes up at least half of my time invested in each post.–I’m dead-ass tired and just want to pass out in bed.

Therefore, you can imagine how I might forget to, um…”undo” any changes that I might have made in the process of researching and producing the latest post.

And it’s always fun to discover such minor oversights well after it’s too late.

For example, the day after dropping the f-bomb post, I had to go pick up my dear ol’ mom from my sister’s, where she had been enjoying Spring Break. Naturally, with it being Spring Break and what-not, she went buck-wild…and somehow ended up with 75 pounds of salt that she needed to transport home. Seriously…it’s best not to ask any follow-up questions about that situation.

Anyways, I get this text from Mama that morning:

As you can see, I was well-justified in exclaiming aloud to myself, “Oh, crap! Not again!” It seems it’s always at the most inconvenient times, like going to pickup my online grocery order, when I realize that I’ve once again forgotten to dispose of the deceased sex workers in my trunk.

…

Just kidding. The ‘again’ is of course referring to having my ‘Xo’ involuntarily replaced a split microsecond before sending an otherwise clean and sincere text to my momma.

So what else could I do? I had to go into Cleaneup Mode:

Hopefully, she would naturally understand my predicament and automatically censor out my potty-words as she read the errant text. Or maybe not…

Welp, there’s not really much more profuse apologizing one can do–I mean, I’ve included the pinnacle of digital apologies: the Double Embarassed Emoji Face. What else could be expected of a son?

Oh, yeah, I guess I better reassure her that there wouldn’t be any hookers taking up her precious salt cargo space:

Having put that to bed, I promptly went and reverted my settings so that I would never accidentally cuss at my mother in my texts again…

“Oh, crap. Not again!”

Sunday morning was not the time to be making such an unpleasant discover.

A few good weeks after the previously described (and corrected) snafu, Dear Mother had absconded off to church with our younger daughter when this message from her pops up on my laptop’s Message app:

Honestly, I prefer when I get messages from other Apple users when I’m on my laptop; it’s just so much easier to type out a reply on a keyboard rather than my tiny little phone screen, amiright? Lemme just tap out a reply lickity-split and hit send!

EGADS! Unfortunately, I was little too lickity on that split and didn’t catch that tiny text at the end before I hit “send”. That’s right: on my laptop, the whole “There’s-no-better-way-to-say-Xo-than-oh-holy-f**k!” setting somehow persisted, though I had clearly turned that off on my phone (which is where I had turned it on in the first place!). And yes, I of course hit send before realizing what was happening.

Welp…time to go into full-on recover mode. Fortunately (maybe), I discovered that I could right-click and choose to “unsend” the message:

I could only pray to the Southern Baptist gods that that foul message got properly aborted before she had the chance to read it while sitting in the house of the Lord…

“Oh, crap. Not again!”

Yes, again. And the worst part is that this just happened. That’s right, in the middle of composing this very missive, I get this message–on my laptop, of course–from my maternal figure in regards to dropping off my elder daughter off at a friend’s house:

Good lord, will I ever learn my lesson? (For the record, I still can’t find any settings on my laptop where this little booger might be lurking about).

Well, at least I’ve learned that if I’m quick enough, I can unsend the message! As you can see, I corrected my mistake:

Wait–again?!? Jeez, I guess there’s only one phrase that’s appropriate for this situation: “Xo”.

(And by ‘Xo’, I mean…well, you know what I mean, wink wink…)

Content created on: 19 April 2024 (Friday)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Remember, Kids, The Best Practical Jokes Aren’t Just For Old Folks

7 April 2024 / / 0 Comments
5 Min Read

One might argue that all the best pranks indubitably involve, well, poo.

But it’s not nearly as funny when that sh*t is pulled on you…

“Hey, it’s getting close to dinner time, why don’t you text your mom and let her know what to fix for our babies?” My Beautiful Bride asked me, just as she had done a million other times when we had gone out and about later in the day while leaving our daughters at home with Grandma.

“Man oh man, this half-assed search for a new mini-van has drained the life out of me–I ain’t got no energy left for such decisions. How about corn dogs? Simple enough, right?” I lazily suggested.

“Good enough for me,” she replied. “You better send off that text before you forget though.”

I was so exhausted that I barely had enough in me to tap out the most basic of messages.

“You…can…fix…the..girls…corndogs…for…dinner….Thanks,” I mumbled along with the tapping of my fingers.

“Oh wait! I better sign off so she knows it’s really me and not someone who has kidnapped us and is just trying to lull her into thinking everything is alright on our end: ‘Xo’…and done!” I declared as I put the finishing touches on my masterpiece of a matriarchal missive.

Meanwhile, my life partner just stared straight ahead as she diligently drove us to the last car lot on our list before it closed for the day.

I sat there for a full 5 seconds trying to figure out why my subconscious was screaming at me that something was amiss.

“Wait, what?!? What did I just text my mom?!?”

I looked up from my phone to see My Beautiful Bride still looking straight ahead but desperately trying not to laugh.

l pulled my phone back out of my pocket and quickly flipped to my messages to find this:

“Fartypants?!? Why would I say such a horrible thing to my dear mother?? Especially since this beloved woman, as far as I know, never broke wind once before she was 50. (And those are laurels that no one is ever guaranteed to be able to rest upon in their golden years.)” I demurred in horror.

I turned to the person I was supposedly supposed to trust more than anyone else in the world.

“What do you know about this?? Hmm?? First, all my socks go missing out of my sock drawer this morning, then somehow the Saran Wrap I put on the toilet in the girls’ bathroom mysteriously goes AWOL before anyone used it, and now this?” I didn’t explicitly make any allegations, but I sure implied the hell out of them.

“Huh? Is something wrong? What are you going on about over there?” my personal Brutus did a poor job of feigning ignorance.

“My April Fool’s prank war with our older child has been abnormally tilted in her favor all day–methinks there’s a traitor–a spy! A mole!–in our midst!” I said as I glared at the Benedict Arnold in the car with me. “And let’s see…’Fartypants’? Oh, that’s definitely the work of a 10-year-old–but only you knew the fully story of the ultimate Oh Holy ----- prank I pulled on Mom a few years ago!”

My future first-wife howled in laughter and had to pull the car over because she couldn’t safely drive with all the tears of delight streaming down her face.

“Dammit, now I have to fix this!” I said as I tapped out an explanation to my poor mother.

“Oh, sh*t…literally! You just couldn’t stop at replacing ‘Xo’ with ‘Fartypants’? You had to go and let the kid have it automatically replace ‘and’ with ‘poopoo’? I caught it in time in the first text to Mom, but damned if it didn’t bite my ass on the second one!”

“What the crap are you talking about, Willis?” she quipped, obviously unable to resist the siren call of an excrement-based pun. “Welp! Looks like we’re here at the Toyota place–we better go look at vans we can’t afford before they shut their doors!”

I just shook my dang head in disgust as I got out of the car.

“I’ll deal with all y’all’s foolishness later…”

“We probably should get some food to-go for your mom–especially after you called her Fartypants,” snickered the butthead I was stuck with for the evening.

I sighed.

“Yes, we should show her some thanks for spending her Saturday afternoon with our little rascals. I’ll text her the menu and see what she wants.”

I face-palmed myself.

“Agggggh! Dammit I did it again!”

And Mom wasn’t slow to point that out.

To be fair to her though, this one was kinda on me for either not changing or omitting it.

But it was time to move on from all this non-sense. I was temporarily pausing my vegan moral code for some spit-roasted South American bird, and I by golly, I was going to focus on enjoying it!

I was so intent on savoring the moment, in fact, that I pulled the dagger out of my back, sat down at a restaurant table with the woman who had put it there, and acted like it had never happened. With that temporarily suspended disbelief, I truly felt like I was living in one of those “good food, good drink, good company” moments (also known as an “Olive Garden commercial”).

Unfortunately, we got so caught up in the moment that we lost track of time, necessitating me to send a quick text to our child care to let them know we would be late:

The point of the story is…you know, you should really be careful how you treat your parents. You’re just a ----- fool if you don’t think Laws of Karma won’t apply to you: everyone and their brother knows that your kids are bound to treat you in all the ways you exasperated your own parents.

No matter how clever you think you are, Fartypants…

Content created on: 6/7 April 2024 (Sat/Sun)

How To Fool Your Mom Into Dropping Ye Old F-Bomb

31 March 2024 / / 0 Comments
4 Min Read

Have you ever caught yourself daydreaming about your clean-cut mom or dad suddenly cussing like a sailor?

Then today’s your lucky day, sir…

“Are you sick and tired of waiting around for your prim and proper elderly parent to start cussing? Well, today’s your lucky day…”

Yes, I know it sounds like the beginning of your archetypical 90’s late-night infomercial, but unlike those scams, you’ll see soon enough that I’ll actually deliver on my promises.

You see, if you’re anything like me, you can relate to the adult children in this Onion news article, in which their mother seems to have taken up swearing in her elderly years. I remember reading this article back in the day and thinking to myself, “Hmmm…maybe it’s possible that one day my mother will drop a cuss word or two. That would be a decent consolation prize, seeing as how getting her intoxicated is pretty much out of the question.”

Now, this thought was all mirthful and cheeky until it was pointed out to me–by my mom, nonetheless–that this is actually quite common…in loved ones suffering from dementia.

*gulp!*

Umm…on second thought, maybe having a neophyte cussing mother wouldn’t be the unexpected delight that I had always dreamt it to be. And if you, Dear Reader, have any type of soul at all, you, too, will agree that we need a Plan B…

This April Fool’s Day, have I got just the prank for which you’ve been waiting most of your adult life!

Now, this prank is not for everybody, but that is because of logistics and not morality or taste in humor or any nonsense like that. This, my friend, is objectively funny, guaranteed. Let’s review the key ingredients needed to successfully pull this off:

  • A parent with an iPhone. This might work for other phones, but that exercise is left to the reader.
  • A parent who uses that phone to text. They need to text, and not just text you–that’s not nearly as fun.
  • Ideally, they end all their texts with a ‘sign-off’ phrase. In absence of this, other common phrases can be substituted.
  • Access to said phone. Sadly, this requires geographic proximity to your target–er, I mean ‘parent’. Also, if you don’t know their PIN, you better get on figuring out how to acquire that info. Alternatively, you might be able to unlock their phone with FaceID while they sleep.

Okay, so hopefully you’ve been able to go ‘check…check…check…CHECK!” right on down that list. Perhaps, though, you got a little stuck on the 3rd item, the ‘sign-off’ phrase. It could be something as basic as, ‘Love, your dad’ or (if you’re extremely lucky) ‘In Christ’. In my case…well, I’ll let you take a look at this recent sample conversation with my dear mum:

Did you perhaps notice anything overly consistent about that conversation? Ding ding ding! That is correct: every thought must be ended with ‘Xo’:

Fun fact: the ‘Xo’ also serves as a way to tell whether the other is in distress and/or a kidnapper or other bad actor has the phone and sending the texts: “If there’s no ‘Xo’, then we’re calling the po-po!”

Anyways, so now that you understand what kind of common and recurring phrase we’re after–ideally tacked onto the end of their texts–we can now proceed to fulfilling our profane April Fool’s fantasy.

Step One: After successfully stealing a few moments with the phone and getting into it, go to Settings.

Step Two: Tap on the General sub-menu.

Step Three: Tap on Keyboard.

Step Four: Go to Text Replacement.

Step Five: Tap on the ‘+’ icon to add a new entry.

Step Six: In the Shortcut field, type their beloved sign-off phrase, or any other bit of text you want to auto-magically turn in to potty words. In the Phrase field, type the profanity-laden phrase of your choice. Feel free to be as subtle or as offensive as you desire. In my case, I was inspired by the ‘o’ in ‘Xo’, and felt that it naturally lent itself to ‘Oh, holy fuck!’

Step Seven: Be sure to hit Save, exit out of the Settings app, and return the phone to its original location.

Step Eight: Sit back and enjoy the show! Here’s an example of what might transpire between your parent, and say, another one of your siblings (note: this is a dramatic recreation, as sadly, the original texts have long been deleted for obvious reasons):

You get the idea.

Anyways, the point of the story is:

Content created on: 29/30 March 2024 (Fri/Sat)

Never Trust An Innovative Tool Made By A Damned Fool

24 March 2024 / / 0 Comments
3 Min Read

Thinking of helping ol’ Dim-Witted Daryl fudge on his geography test? Don’t be such a dumbass!

Don’t forget: he’s also really bad at math…..

“Dude, my dude! Let me sit next to you during the geography test, and, uh, ‘borrow’ some of your answers.”

I looked at my eighth grade classmate Daryl with wary eyes.

“Hey man,” I said, “I know you would love to get out of taking freshman geography next year, but if I let you cheat off of me during this opt-out test, they’re bound to get suspicious when we turn in identical answers. And then I could end up having to waste my precious freshman time on stuff I already know because of your dumb ass.”

In fairness, Daryl wasn’t a complete and utter dumbass, but he probably would actually benefit from taking freshman geography. And, besides, he was stretching the truth a little bit when he called me “my dude”–we were solid acquaintances, but actually hang-out-level friends? I think not. And I don’t put my academic career on the line for somebody I’ve never spent a moment with outside of the walls of Ocean View Junior High (or the school the buses that serviced such a fine academic institution).

“Nah, amigo, I wouldn’t dare think of asking you to take such risks on my behalf. But that’s okay, I got a fool-proof plan: I’ll change enough of them so as to not raise any red flags,” he assured me.

I sighed a heavy sigh.

“What the hell, I’ll throw a bone. Maybe at least that’ll be one less class that you’ll inevitably flunk out of…”

“What’s that?” Daryl hadn’t quite caught my snarky under-my-breath comment.

“Ummm…nothing. Anyways, at least give me plausible deniability. You can sit next to me during the test, but what you do with your beady little eyes is up to you. I know nothing of this stupid little scheme of yours, and this conversation never happened.”

“Aww, bro, you’re the best! I promise I won’t funk this up…”

“Well, if I don’t end up moving back to Kansas for high school, it looks like I at least won’t have to take the geography class mandated by the State of California for all you other mortals–er, I mean ‘freshman’, hehe,” said somebody that most definitely wasn’t Daryl.

“Daryl,” continued this same non-Daryl person, “how did your plan work out?”

Daryl peeked at the his results from the test for the first time, then looked up at me with eyes that were waaaay sadder than the occasion could ever possibly call for.

“They’re putting me in Remedial Geography. I won’t even be taking regular freshman geography.”

I about choked on the gum I was illicitly chewing in class.

“Damn, dude, exactly how many of my answers did you end up changing?”

“I don’t know, maybe 10 or 15?”

“What the actual funk, man? There were only 25 questions on the test! You mean to tell me your big plan to get out of freshman geography was to take 40% to 60% of the answers that were almost for sure right–I mean, we’re talking about me here–and then change them to be almost for sure wrong?”

I planted my face firmly in my hand.

“Yeah, well it worked didn’t it? No one ever suspected us of cheating, did they?” he somehow thought he was defending his plan.

“Dude it worked too well, and in all the wrong ways. Though technically, you did get out of freshman geography, so I dunno, maybe I’m unknowingly standing in the presence of a genius…”

I stared at Daryl for good half a minute as he stared back at me blankly.

“Nope, that’s definitely not the case. Welp, I think I’ll go have a talk with Principal Anderson. She desperately needs to pass on the message to the high school to put you in remedial math as well. No offense, man, but you might be as dumb as a rock.”

“So? What’s your point?”

“The point of my story is that normally most people cheat to gain an advantage, but yet somehow you defied all odds and found a way to cheat such that you’re almost guaranteed to lose. I’m honestly amazed by your ability to elevate the art of dumbassery.”

“Still not following…”

Oh, poor Daryl, bless his soul.

“Dude, if you would have just taken the test all on your own, you probably would at least be placed in regular freshman geography–heck, you would have had a non-zero chance of actually getting it out of it all together!”

“Whatever you say, man.”

“Well, at I hope you at least learned a couple of important life lessons: first, who the hell cheats on geography?!? If you ever thinking to yourself ‘maybe I should cheat on my geography test…’ then you probably should seek immediate mental help. And, second, of course is the obvious: if you’re going to cheat, Daryl, cheat to win, man, cheat to win…”

Content created on: 23/24 March 2024 (Sat/Sun)

Your Homeboy’s Little Hack For Getting That Hi-Q Edge Back

10 March 2024 / / 1 Comment
6 Min Read

You swear you weren’t meaning to get a leg up on the competition.

But now you gotta fix the situation without drawing too much attention…

“Hello, old man! Hi there, old woman!” I said in my head as I tipped my proverbial hat to the elderly couple sitting at the table at the front of the relatively small room. “Don’t mind me,” I said aloud. “I’m just killing time until my old teammates show up for their turn.”

Back in December of ’99 I was a freshman in college, so I was still tight with my younger homies from the Rolla High School Scholars’ Bowl team–especially Jerome1Okay, so his real name is Jeremy–and yes, it’s true, I’m pretty much half-assing this whole ‘protecting the innocent’ schtick., the current senior and captain of the team. So when they traveled to Wichita right before Christmas break to try out for Hi-Q, you bet your sweet ass I hopped in ye’ olde Taurus SHO and drove the 2 hours from my college town to show them my full-throated support.

And maybe, just maybe, relive my glory days just a well bit. Have I ever mentioned that during my time at RHS I was a 3-time State Champion, was on the only Rolla team to take first place at every tournament in a season,2Unless the 2023 tea managed to accomplish this feat… and made the Sante Fe Trail All-League all 4 years of my career (sorta)? What? No, I haven’t? *stifles laugh*

Anyways…sorry, I forgot to explain what Hi-Q was…it was basically a Jeopardy-style tournament for 16 of the finest academic teams in Kansas. This was different than our regular quiz bowl business in two respects: first, it was televised. Sure, it may have came on at 7 am on Sunday mornings, but it was televised nonetheless. And secondly, they held open tryouts and invited any and all high schools to send a team, regardless of size.

Sure, Rolla could smack around other Division 1A schools all day long. When we would pick on someone our own size–specifically schools with an entire Freshman-to-Senior student body of 69 students or less–it was not uncommon for us to p*mp slap up ’em up side the cranium. Being a big fish in a little pond is nothing particularly special. But Hi-Q? That was our chance to take down some of the biggest dogs in the state. The year before I started high school, the Rolla team got runner-up, and ever since then the following iterations had been chasing that achievement…but sadly, the furthest any team I was on only made it to the second round. Even though I had never been able to take care of unfinished business, I would have been almost equally as content to vicariously bask in any victories Jerome, et al. might attain at this year’s Hi-Q. I may have not been officially on the team that year, but I definitely was full-fledged member in spirit.

And apparently I was a little over-eager, as I had showed up to the Community College that was hosting the tryouts for the morning session, unaware that Rolla wasn’t due to give it a whirl until the afternoon session.

“Ah, what the hell, I might as well see what kinds of questions they’re asking this year,” I muttered to myself as I sat down to watch some random school do their best to field the set of 50 or so morning-session questions this particular elderly couple was about to lob at ’em. Unlike regular competition, the tryouts only featured a single team at a time in a room with two moderators–and the top 16 scores throughout the day got the privilege of partaking in the real tournament held at a later date.

“Eh, not too many of us here in the audience,” I noted as I looked around to see what appeared to be a total of 6 or 7 other random-school supporters sitting with me. “Not that it matters…”

“Oh, I’ve been here since 9 am. Where the ----- have you slackers been?” I razzed Jerome when they finally showed up. “In fact, I sat in on one of the morning tryouts…y’know trying to get a feel for what kind of questions are on the docket this year.”

“No sh*t? So what was your take?” Jerome replied. “Was it all stuff we know like the back of our hands? Or was it obscure, fancy big-city type of stuff we can expect people from Wichita to come up with?”

It was pretty clear that he was carrying on the tradition of carrying a small-school chip on his shoulder.

“Mostly stuff that we practice regularly, and you better get those questions right lest I beat yo’ ass otherwise, I simultaneously assured and threatened him.

“That’s good to hear, good to hear…”

“Oh But there were at least 2 or 3 that I had never heard before today.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jerome looked at me inquisitively. “Such as?”

“Well, since you’ll get a totally different set of questions in the afternoon session, you might as well know that Margery Williams wrote The Velveteen Rabbit,” I intimated freely.

“Really? I never had a clue who had written that children’s classic. Heck, I barely recognize the name of that book, now that you mention it.”

“Yeah, I know right? What kind of snooty left-coast question is that? Anyways, um, lemme see. Here’s a few other bits of trivia I picked up today. Did you know that…?”

“Good afternoon, Ma’am. Good afternoon, Sir,” I greeted the elderly couple as nonchalantly as I could manage.

I turned to Jerome right before I took my not-so-randomly chosen seat.

“What the ----- are they doing here?” I half-joked through gritted teeth.

“Who?” he asked with a confused look on his face.

“This old couple, man…ha, ha…what a coincidence: this is the same room I was in earlier today. With the same elderly man and woman as moderators, too.”
“Hah. That’s mirthful,” Jeremy flirted with patronizing me. “Now if you excuse me, I gots me a Hi-Q to qualify for…

“Attaboy! Go get ’em, Tiger!” I straight-up patronized him back.

We all took our seats and let the proceedings get under way. I, for one, was eager to see what the set of afternoon session questions looked like.

About 3 questions in, an internal monologue started up in my head.

“Hmm…why am I getting a sense of deja vu? Ah! Maybe it’s because the answer to this question is…”

Right about then Jerome buzzed in. In unison, we said, “The movie Groundhog Day.”

Ah, yes, already it was the classic deja-vu-themed point of cultural reference.

“Wait a minute, now this next question seems oddly…familiar,” I thought to myself about Q #4. “That’s probably because the question asked what the term was for a vampire’s assistant. So that makes sense.”

Question Five was a different story altogether.

“What British author is best known for her work…” the elderly woman paused dramatically, “The Velveteen Rabbit?”

Jeremy looked back at me chuckling in mild disbelief with a look that clearly said “You gotta be ----- kidding me!”

I kinda shrugged back at him, with the expression on my face indubitably communicating, “How was I supposed to know they were going to ask the exact same set of questions during both sessions?!?”

To which he silently replied, “Well, I can’t unknow anything I may or may not have learned in the 30 minutes before I entered this room…”

“Wait!” I mentally reached out to him like Nic Cage trying to retrieve a loose ball of bio-toxins in the movie The Rock. “Don’t answer that! That contraband information can be traced directly back to me!”

But it was too late; he had already buzzed in.

“Margery Williams…I suppose,” he said, doing his best to pretend that this was foreknown factoid for him.

He looked back at me with something of a sheepish grin, implying “What’s a guy to do?”

I just planted my face in my palm, though I quickly looked back up at him with piercing eyes in order to send him a very clear message: “We’re in this together now, you cheating mother fucker.”

He kinda nodded. “We take this to our graves?” he said only with his eyes.

I nodded back. “To our graves.”

He then looked at the elderly couple then back to me. “And the eyewitnesses?” This time there was a certain sadness in his eyes.

We were long past the point of no return by now: we were no longer the two upstanding citizens that had walked into that room. I wiped a nascent tear from my eye–they were a precious and kind old couple, after all–and steeled my resolve.

With the slightest of nods and the gaze of a man who no longer had a soul, I telegraphed to Jerome those fateful words:

“To their graves as well…”

Which was a real shame, seeing as how, despite our bumbling cheating scheme and the ensuing cover-up, in the end Rolla didn’t even qualif for Hi-Q that year…

Content created on: 9/10 March 2024 (Sat/Sun)

Footnotes & References:[+]

The Confidential Tale Of The Know It All Going To Hell

25 February 2024 / / 0 Comments
6 Min Read

Just cuz somebody is a real smarty-pants doesn’t mean they don’t make dumb decisions on occasion.

And, no, I’m not returning my medal, man…

“And in fourth place…”

I held my breath. There were only five spots on the All-League team, and three out of my four teammates already had had their names called. I was but a lowly freshman, and I could merely hope to land a spot behind Ryan, the junior on our team, who was still aspiring to make the cut himself.

“…well, it looks like we have a three-way tie! All earning the honors as co-fourth-seats on the team are Ryan H. and BJ A. from Rolla High School (no surprise there), and Hanston High School’s very own, Local Kid! Come on up and get your medals–you earned them!”

I was slightly in shock. As a freshman, not only had I pulled it off, but I tied with the big-headed junior on our team!

The three of us walked to the front of the lunch room where the awards ceremony was being held. It didn’t take much more than that short walk for us whiz kids to quickly realize that the math didn’t add up here.

“Uh…I’m sorry, Local Kid, but we’ll have to send you your fourth place medal later in the mail,” the Hanston principal, who was emceeing the show, looked as compassionately at his student as he could, hoping not to kill the buzz of the dude’s modest victory…

Back in the day when I was attending Rolla High School, I had the great pleasure of partaking in the one activity in which our humble little school from Kansas was consistently a powerhouse: Scholars’ Bowl (aka Quiz Bowl, aka Jeopardy Light, etc). ‘Twas my freshman year, and at the time I was the runt of the proverbial litter, usually just relegated to watching the four upperclassfolk on my team kick intellectual ass. If I was lucky, I would get to sub in a late round once the tournament was already well in hand and I couldn’t possibly screw us over.

But at long last, here at the Santa Fe Trail League tournament–hosted by perennial football rival and now-defunct Hanston High School–I finally had the chance to prove myself and give the world a glimpse of the 100% Grade-A Quiz Bowl stud that would soon rise to state-wide domination over the next 3 years. Making the All-League Quiz Bowl team was an honor that any scholar could attain strictly on their own merits, even if they had 4 other mental dead-weights dragging them down.

Conversely, even if your other 4 teammates were frickin’ brainiacs–as was my case–you had to punch your own dang ticket onto the team.

And unlike most other Scholar Bowl activities which were oral-based and relied on one having speedy reaction times, admission into the exclusive All-League team featured a written test as it’s bouncer. Halfway through the tournament, the academic administrators running the show would herd all 35 or so of us youths into the Hanston lunch room and let us sit wherever we wanted. It should go without saying that they would precede to hand out pencils and sheets with roughly 20-30 questions,1The typical quiz bowl round consisted of 16 questions, so maybe that’s how many questions were on the test…but it seems like they should have given us more in that situation. Hell, I don’t remember. It’s been almost 30 years! set a timer for 15 minutes or so, and let us go to town.

Apparently, it was just the right conditions for my species to thrive…

“Ah, crap, a trigonometry question!” I muttered under my breath. “I won’t take trig until next year…I have no chance of getting this one right.”

Up until that point on the written test, I had been doing fairly well, but for some reason, not being able to throw out a wild guess and thus having a non-zero chance of getting this one right seemed to stick in my craw. It was only one of many questions, so I should have just counted my losses and moved on, right?

Wrong.

I simply could not bear the horror of that lone blank spot on my paper staring back at me.

I looked up from my test and locked eyes with David, the sophomore on our team and young man of noble character, who was sitting two feet away from me on the adjacent side of the lunch table. Yes, you heard me right–the dumbasses running the show haphazardly let us all sit together as a team. With my eyes, I drew his attention to the sad little empty spot on my sheet.

“I got you covered, my man,” he replied only with his eyes, as he slightly angled his answers just enough so I could see his chicken scratch scrawled at the bottom of the page.

“Tangent!” I proclaimed in my head as if I had just had an epiphany. “Hah! I knew it was something I would have never guessed on account of my complete lack of acquaintance with the topic of trigonometry. But now I will always and forever know that the tangent is ‘the ratio of the vertical leg of a right triangle to its horizontal counterpart.’ Done and done!”

I gave David a nod of appreciation and proceeded to jot it down, finally feeling at peace about turning in my test–all of which I had otherwise answered all on my own with my little freshman mind…

“Sorry, Local Kid, but we’ll have to send you your fourth place medal later…”

Those words hit a little differently now, don’t they? Now that you, Dear Reader, know that it should have been a two-way tie for fourth place and, ergo, enough medals to go around. Poor Local Kid.

“Sh*t. Had I known that one question would end up being so significant, I wouldn’t have even cheated on that singular occasion,” I thought to myself, acknowledging that I hadn’t really thought about how my error in judgement might possibly play out–it was only one question for crying out loud! I hadn’t done it to win, I had done it to avoid the wounded pride and shame that comes along with leaving one question blank. But whether premeditated or not, I was in this predicament either way.

“Welp, looks like I’m in too deep now,” I thought as I accepted my medal, still stunned not only by making the team as a freshman, but under the circumspect circumstances which it had happened.

“Guess I’m taking this one to the grave with me…”

“Why come clean now?” you may be indubitably asking.

Well, Dear Reader, that is a fantastic question. After all, I’m not dead…yet.2I do have some unresolved health issues indubitably related to officially becoming middle-aged over the last year, so my longevity actually can’t be taken for granted. Well, if nothing else I’m honest, and honestly it was never that big of a secret. I’m sure I’ve told some people over the years, including past girlfriends and current wives.

Heck, I figured I would just toss it out there for sh*ts ‘n giggles…and, in the spirit of Primary Season during an election year, I thought that just in case I ever want to run for President, I might as well get out in front of this scandal. Control the narrative and what-not. And I do want to point out that at least on the bright side, I hadn’t robbed anyone of a rightful spot on the All-League Team–had I let the tangent question go, Ryan and Local Kid would have filled the last two spots on the team, and I would have been left with the bragging rights of “making All-League 3 out of my 4 years of high school…”

So basically the point of the story is that if you’re going to cheat, you better be prepared to win–and all the emotional baggage that comes with carrying that unwelcome weight around until the statutes of limitations expires or you die, whichever comes first.

Anyways…I almost forgot the coda to the story: the following year when it came time to head to the host lunch room and take the All-League written test?
“This year we’re making a slight change,” they announced. “We’re randomly assigning you to a table, children, as no two of you from the same team are allowed to sit together…”

Okay, now I can’t confirm that the little stunt that David and I pulled was the cause for this much-needed ----- common-sense rule to be put in place–as far as I know that secret stayed between the two of us well into our college years–but a part of me can’t help be just a wee bit proud for perhaps making the world a tiny bit better place.

Of course, leaving an ass-backwards legacy was already kinda my thing by then.

What’s that? You don’t know what I’m talking about?

Oh, my friend, just listen: the answer is Blowin’ In The Wind…

Content created on: 23/24 February 2024 (Fri/Sat)

Footnotes & References:[+]

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