Penguin Stories, Incorporated

Guest Post: Father is Struck By Lightning

2011-04-04T18:10:00.002-04:00

Oh, hello.

The boy asked me to tell y’all about the time God himself reached down and gave me a tap on the shoulder, and I suppose it isn’t too much trouble to oblige.

I happen to be a lover of all things related to nature. The forest is a magical, mystical place full of quiet wonder and beauty, and I just love to take a peaceful walk through its splendor whenever I’m able. Just me, my dog, and my rifle, hunting along through the old trails the trees have lined up for us.

(ed note: Father was an avid hunter and would go out into the woods to hunt several times a week. He could also sleep through just about anything, and did just that on a regular basis. He once fell asleep behind the wheel of a VW Bus, drove it into a ditch, flipped and rolled it twice and came to a stop upside down, facing in the opposite direction of his original travel, still belted into his seat. He didn’t wake up until someone knocked on the window to ask if he was okay. It’s not like he was knocked out cold or anything - he was just napping.)

So y’all will naturally understand why, as a younger man, I was happy to take a job as a fire watcher in a nature preserve in Oregon. The thought of being all by my lonesome up in a high tower in the beautiful woods with nothing to do but meditate on their majesty sent shivers right up my old bones.

I got out to Oregon that summer and was introduced to my post, where I found it was everything I had hoped for and more. My watch tower was as unassuming as it gets: tall and stately above the trees, but with only a small platform at the top. There was just enough room for my chair, my radio and I to experience all nature had to offer. It was one of the old wooden towers, maybe thirty or forty feet high, with a metal roof to shield me from the sun and elements.

My job was climb up that tower each and every day and look out over the trees, searching for any sign of smoke or flame. If I was to see such a thing, I was to radio it in and let the firefighters take over from there. It was a comfortable chair, though, in a quiet forest, and more often than not I found myself meditating in quiet repose on the scenery before me.

(ed. note: “Meditating” was what Father called it when he fell asleep looking at a rock or a tree or whatever. There was no deep spiritual reflection on the nature of the universe happening here; he’d kick back and in thirty seconds he’d start snoring loudly enough to scare off any wildlife in a mile radius. This is why, despite the fact that he went three or four times a week, he was an awful hunter - he’d immediately fall asleep every time he got into his tree stand. By the time he woke up, any nearby animals were terrified of what must surely be a poorly tuned chainsaw operating in his vicinity - in reality, his godawful snoring - and had run for the hills.)

On one warm summer afternoon I found myself yet again in my tower, all of God’s creation spread out beneath me. There was a light rain falling, playing a lullaby on the tin roof of my station, and before you know it I had slipped off to dream about the serenity of the whole situation.

I calculate it must have been hours later by the time I woke up, and I was just about as confused as I’ve ever been.

First off, I was no longer in my tower. In point of fact, there was no tower from what I could tell. The ground around me was blackened in spots and there were bits of treated wood littered about, but not nearly enough to reconstruct what had once been my post.

I was still in my chair, but instead of being thirty feet high and looking out over the treetops, I was on the ground. Twenty feet or so away there was a black little lump; upon closer inspection, I deduced I was looking at what had once been my radio.

I didn’t have the faintest idea how the heck I had gotten to where I was, or who had done what to my tower, but I figured I wasn’t doing anybody any good sitting there like a toad on a log so I set to walking.

The ranger station was only a mile or so away from where my tower used to be, so I hiked through the light rain to see if anyone there could shed some light on what was going on. I was a bit stiff in the joints, I reckoned from whatever travel I had taken from up high to back down to the ground, so the walk took a bit of effort. Eventually, I made it to the station.

When I opened the door, I was right shocked at the scene presented to me. A ranger and two other watchers, all good friends of mine, were seated around a desk crying like their horse had just lost the Derby. In the middle of their sad little circle was a bottle of whiskey and a few shot glasses. There wasn’t a whole lot of whiskey left, which was a shame because I was right soaked through and could have used the warmth.

I also saw, in the mirror over the unlit fireplace, my own reflection. As if I wasn’t confused enough already, the man staring back at me wasn’t anyone I could recognize. I was sure I’d had eyebrows, a beard and a full head of hair when I came in to watch the forest that day. Now I was lacking in all three departments and, frankly, I was wearing a face that’d make a freight train turn right around and take a dirt road.

When my buddies saw that I had walked in, they all turned whiter than a Klansman’s best sheet. None of them said anything, just stared at me with their mouths flapping like hungry guppies.

“Oh, hello. Where’d my tower go?” I asked.

After a few more moments of silence, it was finally explained to me that they were all sitting around drunk and crying because they thought I was dead. Turns out my tower had met with a bolt of lightning and came out on the losing end. Blew the whole thing to Kingdom Come, believe it or not. I don’t rightly know how I managed to stay in my chair the whole way back down to God’s green earth, but that sure did go a long way towards explaining why I was so durn sore in my joints and rear.

After that, I was relieved of my duty as a fire watcher. Wasn’t my wish, no sir - I loved that job and I’d be happy to be doing it to this day. But, it was a small preserve and as there would be a tower for me to sit in for another few weeks, there just wasn’t much point in me staying. So, with a heavy heart, I packed up my bags and bid farewell to my forest friends. I reckon that’ll wrap it up.

(ed. note: I did not believe this story when it was told to me, but it was eventually corroborated by one of the rangers in the aforementioned drinking circle. I have no earthly idea how he survived any aspect of that - I imagine if it’d been one of the newer steel watch towers he’d have bought the farm right then and there. He really could sleep through anything.)

The Church Incident

2011-02-01T18:05:00.002-05:00

As a child, I hated going to church. I hated getting up early on a weekend, wearing stuffy clothes, listening to a boring old man read from a boring old book, pretending to like all the smelly old people, and listening to my dad pretend he could sing hymns. I thought it was the biggest, most boring waste of time ever invented by man - and worse, if I didn’t go and pretend to like it, then Jesus would get mad at me and send me to hell. Ugh. Lucky me, after this incident we didn’t go to church all that often anymore. This happened when I was very young; it was well before I was in school, but I don’t remember my precise age at the time.

It should come as no surprise, then, that while I was at church I would try to find anything - anything - to keep myself amused. I figured if I was physically inside the church and keeping myself entertained then I could trick Jesus into thinking I was actually entertained by church itself, thereby saving my soul.

That sounds crazy until you consider the fact that the church had two large clocks just over the pulpit - one with the correct time, and one that was set totally incorrectly. That way, it was once explained to me, the devil wouldn’t know what time it was inside the church and would never be able to show up on time to one of our services to steal all of our souls. After hearing this explanation, I concluded that it must not be too hard to fool all of these Bible people, so if I sat under the pew during the service tearing the program into tiny bits and then pretending the tiny bits were movie tickets and now I could pick out any movie in the whole world I wanted to watch, Jesus would think that I was actually being entertained by hearing about Abraham instead of being amused by internally debating the merits of Fern Gully vs. The Little Mermaid.

That was all well and good until one day I ran out of programs to tear up and got bored again. From my seat underneath the pew, I started tugging on my mother’s skirt, asking if church was almost done yet or maybe how about now or maybe how about now??

In order to better control me, she pulled me up onto her lap to listen to the choir sing. That was my least favorite part of the service, because the outfits the choir wore combined with the strange way they were lit caused all of the choir members to have this weird purple glow around them. My tiny child brain interpreted this as their souls being pulled up to Jesus by the glory of their singing, but I liked my soul and didn’t want it sucked out so this completely terrified me. Later, we would discover that I badly needed glasses.

Since I didn’t want to watch the choir’s souls floating away, I turned around and buried my face in the shoulder pads of my mother’s blouse (it was the late 80’s, and that was the height of fashion). Then I realized that her blouse had these delightful buttons down the front that would be perfect for playing spaceship. I began trying to remove them.

My mother didn’t notice what I was doing until it was too late. I completely unbuttoned her blouse and, in an attempt to remove the topmost button, flung it wide open. She pushed me back in horror as she realized what I had done, which only served to expose herself more completely.

The choir stopped mid-hymn and gasped, then started laughing. Turns out my mother wasn’t wearing a bra.

Furious, my mother buttoned up her blouse, flung me over her shoulder, and stormed out of the church. She pushed open the massive double doors at the entrance to take me outside and administer The Spanking to End All Spankings. Unfortunately for her, the doors didn’t have a mechanism to automatically shut, so everyone inside was privy to what happened next. My mother dropped me forcefully onto the grass just outside the church and calmly explained what I had done wrong.

“WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!?! YOU JUST FLASHED MY BREASTS TO THE WHOLE DAMN CONGREGATION!! GOD HAVE MERCY, I AM GOING TO BEAT THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF YOU!!”

To which I replied:

“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE GOING TO BEAT ME IN FRONT OF JESUS’S HOUSE!”

The church service had completely stopped by this point, and I could hear the congregation inside laughing hysterically. I didn’t find anything funny about the situation, though - from the look in my mother’s eyes, the devil had cracked the two-clock mystery and was about to use her to end my life. She bent down to grab me for a spanking, but I was too quick for her and ran into a bush to hide. I knew I was small and nimble, and could therefore easily dash underneath the low branches. She, on the other hand, was tall and slow and would have great trouble pursuing me there.

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF THAT FUCKING BUSH!!” I feel it’s necessary to note here that my mother actually wasn’t a completely batshit insane child abuser and was actually a relatively nice person, but I had just totally pushed her over the edge here.

She got down on her hands and knees to get under the bush and to me, completely ruining her expensive linen pantsuit. She couldn’t reach, however - I had been too clever.

Or so I thought. As I looked around to scout a path should I need to run further, I saw it: a bee.

“OH GOD BEEEEEEEEEEES!” I screamed as I ran full speed out of the bush and into my mother, knocking her over and sending both of us rolling down to the sidewalk where she made good on her promise to “beat the living shit out of me.”

We looked like hell. My mother’s hair was going in every direction, her clothes were ruined, her makeup was streaked, and most of the people at that morning’s service had seen her ta-ta’s. I didn’t look much better, but at least nobody had seen me half naked that day. Still, I was indignant that I had been spanked when all I had wanted to do was play spaceship and didn’t she understand how bored I was?

She carried me back into the church. You could tell that everyone was trying their hardest not to break up into laughter again, but a few snickers here and there were escaping. The preacher had tears running down his face from laughing so hard, and the poor guy still had another half hour of services left.

Our pew was fairly close to the front, so we got to make a long and very embarrassing walk back up. As we did, a very nice lady pulled a coloring book and crayons out of her purse and offered them to me to keep myself entertained for the rest of the service. I was so furious at the situation that I did the only thing I could think of: I growled at her and bared my teeth like a rabid dog. The preacher saw this and burst into laughter again, followed shortly by the rest of the crowd.

Sufficiently humiliated, my mother quickly went back to her seat with her head down. I did not join her. Instead, I stood right where I was with my arms crossed and continued growling at this nice lady who, I would later discover, was actually my mother’s boss. After a few minutes of this, the laughter died down and the congregation seemed to go from thinking “this is uproariously hilarious” to “that child is weird and should maybe be in some kind of muzzle.” When it became obvious that I had no intention of moving, the preacher just chuckled to himself and started up the sermon again.

And so I stood there, arms crossed, snarling like a tiny angry beast for half an hour while the preacher told us all about how much God loves us. Traditionally, when the sermon ended the preacher would leave the pulpit and go to the back of the church (where the large double-doors from earlier were) and give one last prayer. That week, he gave his final prayer from the middle of the aisle because I refused to allow him to pass.

The next week, I got to sleep in on Sunday.

Oh God BEES

2011-01-30T12:39:00.003-05:00

I am petrified of bees.

In fact, petrified doesn’t begin to explain it. I am a big guy, 6’2” and around 250 pounds. I spent four hours a day, six days a week in the gym while in college, and while I no longer adhere to that workout regimen I still have a good deal of muscle on my frame. Other people have told me that I can come across as physically imposing when I want to.

But if I see a bee, I will flip out, flail my arms, screech like a little girl who just saw a chainsaw murderer coming towards her and everything she loves, and run.

I’m fairly certain this is all my mother’s fault.

Growing up out in the country, we didn’t have some of the luxuries I now enjoy as a city dweller. Amongst those missing comforts was a dryer - for the first decade or so of my life, we hung all of our clothes outside on the line to dry. When you do this, it’s vitally important that you shake the clothes out before you fold them and bring them back into the house. Otherwise, little bits of nature may that have fallen or crawled into your clothes may find their way back inside with you.

Our house was situated at the end of a very long dirt and gravel driveway, about three hundred yards away from the paved road that took you “downtown” to the one traffic light in my hometown. Once you turned off that paved road and down the driveway, you could almost hear the banjo music playing. We were so deep in the woods we had to pipe sunlight in, but even I’ll admit, the home had a very natural charm to it.

One day, my mother decided it was necessary for us to go to the bank together. Normally I didn’t mind going to the bank because the nice teller there always gave me a piece of Bazooka Joe gum, but for whatever reason I strongly objected to accompanying her that day. She was having none of it and, as she informed me that she most certainly did NOT care that I had a very important video game to play, stuffed me into a shirt she had just brought in from drying outside.

As soon as she got me into that shirt, my objection to going increased tenfold. Whereas before I had simply been putting up the normal small-child “But moooooooom!” resistance, I now began screaming my head off like a demon had clamped its teeth into my very soul. This served only to infuriate my mother further. She herded me into the car, told me to stop screaming, and pulled down the driveway.

Not only did I not stop screaming, but I began inflating. My mother was so angry already at my behavior that she refused to even look at me until we got to the end of the driveway. Thankfully, when she looked over to the right to check and see if any cars or horses were coming, she noticed that I was bright red and approximately double my normal size. It was then that she considered that my screaming might not be entirely related to traveling to the bank.

While it’s funny in retrospect, at the time this was pretty serious. I was severely asthmatic as a child, was starting to have trouble breathing, and we were at least thirty minutes from the nearest hospital (and at least forty-five minutes from the nearest decent hospital). My mother got out of the car, ran to my side, pulled me out and ripped my shirt off over my head.

Immediately, eight angry bees flew out of the shirt and buzzed off to die, their stingers spent. Although I wasn’t allergic to bee stings, if you jam eight of them into a five year old kid at once it’s still going to cause some problems. Impressively, we made the thirty minute drive to the hospital in less than fifteen, my mother no doubt spurred along by my helpful cries of “Why did you make bees attack me?!” and “Wheeeeeeezeeee...your...fault...”

I was a very melodramatic child. This incident stuck me with a lifelong fear of bees and, eventually, would come back to haunt my mother in during The Church Incident. I was alright, of course, but never have let her live it down.

Chemical Warfare

2011-01-29T12:33:00.001-05:00

Senator, from The Toilet Story, is one of my oldest friends - we've known each other since middle school. When he and I were in high school, we were both very active in our student government and both held an office. This meant that anytime there was an event for students, like a dance or a social, he and I were there and had a hand in planning and executing the event.

Senator and I did a huge amount of work for homecoming our senior year. We wanted that night to be spectacular, and we were determined that everyone would know that we were responsible for it. Looking back, I can't believe how important we thought this was - but in our high school minds, it was absolutely vital to our social standing and professional futures that we put on a great evening.

Of course, I remember precisely nothing about the event itself. All I can recall now is what happened just before and just after the homecoming dance began, and how lucky we were not to be hospitalized with a terminal case of stupidity.

The homecoming dance was to be held in the cafeteria. Our high school was very large, with about 2,500 students altogether (keep in mind that the town I lived in at the time, twenty miles away, had only 1,000 people living there - the school was two and a half times larger than the hellhole I lived in for eighteen years), so the cafeteria was accordingly massive. The ceilings were something like twenty-five feet high, which is an important detail for later.

We wanted balloons. Tons and tons of balloons. Senator and I spent probably an hour at the nearby Winn-Dixie (if you're unfamiliar with Winn-Dixie, it's a grocery store for people with ten teeth or less) draining two of their helium tanks to fill all of the balloons we insisted we needed for the dance. We had, of course, given no thought to how we were going to get hundreds of inflated balloons four miles down the road back to the school. I think we ended up stuffing both of our cars full and then tying the rest to our roofs. We were a huge traffic hazard, but damn it, there were going to be so many balloons and everyone would love them.

When we got back to the cafeteria, our student government advisor was mightily impressed with the number of balloons we had acquired (and slightly worried as to how we had gotten them back without being able to see out of any side of either car). Our advisor told us to let them go to float up to the ceiling, and then she ran off on some errand. We released all of the balloons to float up to the ceiling. It was pretty.

When she came back, with two fistfuls of thin ribbons, she was pissed. It then occurred to us that maybe we had misunderstood her, and she quickly confirmed that suspicion. Instead of tying ribbon to each balloon, as it turned out she had actually said we should do, we had just released them to the high ceiling above with no way to get them back down. A couple of very angry janitors echoed her sentiments and we were ordered to retrieve the balloons somehow.

So, instead of going to the homecoming game, Senator and I spent a couple hours trying to get the damn balloons back down. We each taped three yardsticks end-to-end and put a wad of tape on the far side of each. Then we found a pair of ladders and started picking the balloons off of the ceiling one by one.

By the time we finished, people were starting to arrive for the dance. Senator and I were sulking at this point over having to destroy our decorations and went outside to collect money for the dance's entry fee.

It's kind of funny how we were dead set on having the perfect dance, and now I remember absolutely nothing about it. I guess it must have gone okay. Eventually, things died down and everyone left. Senator and I stayed behind to clean up.

For a bunch of high school kids, the dance attendees hadn't really made much of a mess - a fact for which we were very thankful. The cleanup process went fairly smoothly and very quickly. Soon, there was just one last thing to clean out before we could go home: the ice bowl.

Senator and I took the giant bowl filled with ice cubes and dumped it into a toilet normally reserved for the cafeteria staff. The ice, of course, just sat there and didn't move.

In retrospect, this was not actually a problem. So what if the ice was just sitting there? It was Friday, nobody would be there until Monday, so the ice could just melt over the weekend. There was no issue there whatsoever.

That's not how our little high school brains worked, though. In our minds, we had seriously messed that toilet up and needed to get the ice out right now. Senator and I took turns peeing on it, but that only made a tiny dent. We tried to flush it a couple of times, but nothing happened. We started, inexplicably, to panic.

It was then we noticed a few cleaning supplies nearby. Immediately, we each picked up a bottle and poured the contents over the ice. Yet again, nothing happened.

Now we were truly stumped. How the hell were we going to get this ice down the toilet? Nothing we had tried up to that point had worked, and we had emptied the only two bottles nearby with no effect.

"Maybe we could break it up with a stick."

"Let's find some more stuff to pour on it."

"What if we layered toilet paper on top of it and set it on fire to melt the ice underneath?"

As we bounced ideas back and forth off of one another, each one getting progressively stupider, we each started coughing a bit. Not only that, but our eyes were starting to water. Senator looked at the newly empty bottle I was holding: Clorox bleach. I looked at his: ammonia.

I'm not sure what it says about us that we were too stupid to realize that the ice would have melted on its own over the course of the next two days, but that we knew enough chemistry to immediately realize we had just mixed up a batch of very toxic chlorine gas.

The ice suddenly seemed like much less of a concern, and we got the hell out of there as quickly as we could. Looking back, I can't believe how idiotic we were and how dangerous that was. Not only is chlorine gas deadly, but mixing ammonia and bleach in unequal portions can potentially create nitrogen trichloride or hydrazine, both of which are highly explosive. I'm not sure if either one is really all that volatile while inside a toilet, but still, it wasn't a good idea by any stretch.

After Senator and I got outside and got some fresh air, we agreed that it'd probably be a good idea to keep what had happened to ourselves. And, believe it or not, the ice melted all by itself over the weekend and the toilet was just fine. Sparkling clean, too, I bet.

The Toilet Story

2011-01-28T23:14:00.000-05:00

(ed. note: Very few posts on PSI will contain truly adult content. This is one. If you are easily offended, skip over this one.)

When I was in college, I had a nickname: "The Legend Himself." I always thought this was a bit over the top, but come on, who wouldn't love being called that? I certainly did; this is the story of how I earned that nickname.

I had a very close-knit group of friends in college. By coincidence, three of us had our birthdays together - two of us on the same day, one two days before. At a huge party school like ours, this was a dream come true: an excuse to throw a massive kegger.

It got better, though. The three of us had a mutual friend who was very well known for the quality and size of his parties. At our college, being known campus-wide for your ability to throw a party while not being in a fraternity was unheard of - this guy, who we'll call Beamer, was a legend in his own right.

It continued getting better. Beamer had just moved into a new apartment with a perfect layout for a party. Not only that, but his apartment was up a gently sloped hill from the apartment of another mutual friend (Red) whose apartment had an identical layout to Beamer's. The grassy area between the two apartments also had a pool bordering the right side.

In short, we had the perfect layout for a party thrown by someone who really, really knew what they were doing.

The two other birthday guys (Walrus and Senator) and I wanted to do everything we could to make the party a great one. When we told Beamer this, he waved us off and told us not to worry about it - just throw him some money and show up an hour early. We trusted him to know what he was doing, so we got out of his way. All we needed to do was show up and he'd handle the rest.

The night of the party, Walrus, Senator and I went over to Red's apartment. I brought along the girl I was dating at the time, EatBeast. Red happens to be an excellent cook, so for our birthday gift she prepared a wonderful dinner for all of us: chicken parmesan with pasta and some vegetable I've long since forgotten. After we polished off the meal, I decided to trek up the hill to Beamer's apartment. It was still about two hours before anyone was due to show up, so I wanted to see if I could help with any last minute preparations.

As soon as I walked in, I immediately turned around and walked back out. I felt like a toddler with a jar of finger paint asking Rembrandt if I could draw on his picture, too. Clearly, Beamer had this well under control; it was perfect in every way:

1. All of the furniture had been pushed to the walls, and more furniture had appeared from nowhere to form a second, broken circle facing outward. The result was a huge open area to socialize with ample seating arranged in a way that people could sit and face each other.

2. There was liquor everywhere. Literally every horizontal surface that wasn't designed to accommodate a human ass had booze on it. There were buckets of ice filled with beer everywhere, liquor bottles on top of liquor bottles, and just few enough mixers to guarantee that the drinks would get plenty strong as the evening grew late. It was so well stocked that I briefly wondered if we should have gotten a liquor license or some kind of permit.

3. Beamer and his roommate, Took, had even cleared out their bedrooms for their guests as "hookup rooms," should the need arise. That redefines generous: allowing unfettered physical relations all over their home just for the sake of a good party. Too bad they only had the two bedrooms.

4. This one's important: there were two coolers like this:

These were labeled "Sex Facilitator #1" and "Sex Facilitator #2." One was filled with hunch punch, and the other with electric lemonade. If you're unfamiliar with these drinks, don't worry: they're simple and easy to make. Just take some red Kool-Aid mix (for the punch) or some powdered lemonade mix (for the electric lemonade) and, instead of adding water, add Everclear until the cooler is full.

If you're not familiar with Everclear, it's 190 proof grain alcohol that will make you forget where your legs are attached to your body.

I sprinted back down the hill and told everyone what I had seen. We were all so excited that we could hardly stand it, so we started lubricating ourselves for the upcoming event.

As we drank, we heard people gradually arriving at Beamer's. Since we wanted to be fashionably late, we continued warming up at Red's for a little longer before walking over.

When we eventually got there, we were amazed. There were easily a hundred people there with another seventy-five or a hundred outside and at the pool. Everyone had at least one drink in their hand and things were already very loud and everyone was already clearly having a great time. Walrus, Senator and I entered the apartment and were immediately cheered as the guests of honor. More drinks were given to us and we began rocketing towards back-out or blackout time.

While the party itself was tremendously fun, it was in most ways just a very amplified version of your standard college party. If you've ever been around a couple hundred drunk early-twentysomethings, you know exactly what was going on. As the night wore on, people from neighboring apartments came down to complain about the noise and ended up joining the party themselves, and so the crowd grew ever larger.

After a few hours, Walrus, Senator and I ended up sitting in a corner together discussing the evening in loudly slurred speech. As we did so, EatBeast began rumbling her way towards us. She was so drunk by this point that she couldn't walk a straight line unless there was a buffet at the end. When she finally weaved into our general area, she crashed down next to me, flopped over into my lap like a breathless manatee and gurgled something along the lines of "Let's have sex."

While this was possibly the most unattractive thing I'd ever witnessed in my young life, including the time I walked in on my dad peeing when I was a child, I was drunk enough to copulate with most anything at that point.

"Excuse me, gentlemen - I'm going to go mate with her."

With a good deal of difficulty, I got to my feet and directed EatBeast towards Took's bedroom. No dice - it was already occupied. The trek back across the apartment seemed like it took forever; I was having a hard time staying vertical, EatBeast was lurching into everyone, and the tightly-packed crowd made it necessary to carefully pick our way through. I was frustrated to discover that the effort was wasted: Beamer's bedroom was occupied as well, by no less than three couples.

Undeterred, we made our way over to the laundry closet (which was only big enough to contain a washer and a dryer). We were beaten to the punch again, however, as a couple had already laid claim to the only private, flat surface left in the apartment.

Now I was frustrated. EatBeast was gnawing at my ear and muttering about getting laid, but there seemed to be nowhere to do the deed. That is, until I realized that there'd be one room where, even if it was occupied now, would surely be vacant shortly.

Taking EatBeast by the hand, I drug her to Beamer's bathroom, pushed past the line and herded her in. The people who had been patiently waiting their turn to get in were loudly upset over this turn of events, but I wasn't up for waiting any longer. As I entered and locked the door behind me, the indignant people behind us suddenly realized what was going on and thought it was just the best thing ever. Immediately, at least fifteen people started pounding on the door and walls.

"Stick it in!"

"Are you sure about this, Nic?"

"DO SEX ON HER!"

EatBeast plopped down on the toilet and unceremoniously exposed herself. It was here that we realized we had a problem of geometry: at 6'2"I was too tall to simply bend over and go at it. I was too drunk to keep my balance while kneeling, and I was absolutely too drunk to attempt any sort of crouch or inventive positioning. EatBeast, for her part, was using up all of her remaining cognitive ability to keep from falling off of the toilet, so she was no help at all.

As the banging from the crowd outside reached a fever pitch, I realized that I had to make something happen - in my mind, I was letting down my fans by not performing. I tried every angle I could think of and nothing would work. I was too tall, the toilet too low to the ground, and that's all there was to it.

There are two distinct times in a man's life when he will do something very stupid: when he's drunk, and when he's sexually frustrated. I was experiencing both at once here, and my frustration was palpable. It's a testament to the amount of liquor I had consumed that the following thought ever crossed my mind:

"I bet if I just thrust hard enough it'll work."

Firmly believing that this problem was the result of an inadequate application of force, and not just the simple fact that my bones would not bend in such a way as to allow me to dock with her port, I mustered all of my strength and thrust my crotch at EatBeast as hard as I could.

I missed.

I am not sure what part of her I hit, but it wasn't anything I was interested in. What I am sure of is that I hit her with enough force to drive her upper torso backwards and shatter both the tank and lid of the toilet into a hundred tiny pieces. It sounded like someone had set off a bomb in a china shop - the tinkling of porcelain, the battle cry of my thrust, the pained grunt of EatBeast and the sudden splush of water hitting the floor momentarily stunned the audience outside into silence.

As EatBeast stared up at me, glassy-eyed, I couldn't immediately process what had just happened. The floor was covered in shrapnel and water - and the fill pipe that once resided in the tank was now furiously pumping even more water onto the floor. Even though the bathroom was rapidly flooding, all I could think was "Hah, I just broke a toilet with my dick. I am the man."

I was pulled back to reality when the audience outside broke their silence. Instead of the cheering and pounding from before, I was now hearing panicked cries.

"What was that?"

"Where is all of this water coming from?"

"BEAMER! Get in here! Nic has fucked something up big time!"

It was hearing my name that really did it. I realized all of a sudden that there was a serious problem that needed immediate attention - preferably, someone else's attention. I looked down and saw EatBeast's underwear literally floating past my feet, bent over to grab it, took her by the wrist and informed her that we were leaving right now. She did not understand why we had to leave the party. Realizing that explaining the situation was futile - if she couldn't see what the problem was already, then there was nothing I could do - I took her by the wrist and hauled her towards the bathroom door.

When I opened the door, some of the more curious audience members poked their heads in to see what we had done. Their reactions ranged from uncontrolled laughter to silent, stunned horror at the carnage they saw. Suddenly feeling a lot more sober, I pulled EatBeast towards the front door.

Beamer didn't know what was going on, but he knew something was wrong - there were a lot of people shouting in the part of his apartment from which I was rapidly retreating. I patted him on the shoulder, said "Great party, gotta run!" and bolted out the front door. Later, I would hear that the last thing most people remembered about me that evening was me chasing EatBeast down the hill shouting "Damn it, woman, put your panties back on!"

There was no way I was getting behind the wheel of a car, and I doubted EatBeast could even identify a car at that point, so we ran into Red's apartment.

To this day, I don't know what the hell happened for the first twenty minutes we were in there. My next clear memory was seeing Red laying on the floor with her head in her friend Coke's lap. Coke was covered in vomit and had that thousand-yard stare that you usually only see in WWI documentaries, while EatBeast had somehow found a ton of cooked spaghetti noodles and was throwing handfuls at both of them, singing "Linguini for everyone" over and over like a fucking lunatic.

Shortly after taking in this surreal tableau, I heard Beamer roaring over the din of the nearby party. I immediately hid behind a sofa and promptly blacked out again. Beamer later told me that he came in, found me (I had not hidden behind a sofa as I had thought - I had actually just curled up in a ball in front of the open front door) and demanded to know what in hell I had done. According to him, I denied any knowledge of the incident and insisted I had been behind my imaginary sofa all night long.

I guess Beamer realized that talking to me was pointless, so he left. EatBeast was still throwing pasta at Coke and Red, who somehow seemed to remain completely unaware that they were rapidly being buried in the stuff.

Not wanting to become unwelcome in two apartments in the same night, I drug EatBeast out of Red's apartment into the parking lot where she promptly sat on the sidewalk and peed everywhere.

That's my last clear memory of the evening. Later, I would discover that I had drunkenly called a guy I barely knew - he lived two doors down from me in the dorm a year earlier and I honestly have no clue why I had his phone number. Considering it was three in the morning, we hadn't spoken to or seen one another in about a year, and we were barely acquaintances even then, he would have been totally justified in telling me to go take a long walk off of a short pier. Instead, he rolled out of bed (I woke him up when I called), got dressed, drove twenty minutes to the apartment complex, loaded the pee-stained EatBeast into his backseat, helped me into the front and drove us both home.

If you're reading this, White Knight, you should know that you coming to pick us up that night still stands out in my mind as one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

The next day, I called Beamer to get the holes in my memory filled in. He refused to tell me anything - instead, he just told me to "get over here" over and over.

In the sober light of day, the carnage was truly a sight to behold. Porcelain shrapnel had been flown a good eight feet away from ground zero, a fact which made me a little proud. The carpet just outside the bathroom door was still damp in a semicircle that extended three or four feet away from the door itself. When I told Beamer how all of this had happened, he was at a loss for words. All he could say was "Thank God someone else was in my bed."

I gave Beamer a blank check to have the necessary repairs made, but it was never needed. The apartment's maintenance crew came in two days later while Beamer was in class and installed a brand-new toilet at no charge. Even more astonishingly, Beamer and Took eventually got their deposit back when they moved out.

A few days later, I went to class and overheard a couple of girls in the corner talking and giggling to one another. When I realized that they were recounting the story of what had happened at the party, I couldn't help but burst out laughing.

As I laughed like a moron, they gave me a bit of a funny look and I felt it necessary to explain that I wasn't actually crazy - I was the guy they were talking about. I'll never forget the wide-eyed look of admiration those two girls gave me. One of them, acting like they were meeting a celebrity in the flesh, blurted out "Ohmigod, it's the legend himself!"

And the nickname stuck for the next three years.

Guest Post by Father: Introducing Myself

2011-01-28T16:53:00.000-05:00

Oh, hello.

It's my distinct pleasure to introduce myself to all y'all - I'm Father, and from my loins sprang Nicolai.

(ed. note: You're going to be confused if you don't click here before continuing)

Nicolai asked me to write a chapter for his internet book here, but hand to Himself I'm at a loss as to why. I don't know who's going to read some internet book when there's real ones sitting just across the way, but I'll humor my boy.

I reckon if y'all are set on reading what I put down, y'all ought to have some perspective on the area from where I'm coming. I'm not young like the boy - in fact, I was fifty years old by the time little Nicolai popped up. Why'd I wait so long to have my son? Ah, well there's a big world out there, full of mystery and wonder. I wanted to see it all, experience life to its fullest so that when I brought another life into this here world I'd have enough wisdom to impart to make that life a good one.

(ed. note: Whatever. Father ran a bike into a tree when he was a kid and crushed his testicles. He didn't have a kid until he was fifty because it took that long for his sperm to find its way out of his mashed up labyrinth of tubes.)

Being as I was born back in '36, I've seen a thing or two. I remember sitting in front of the radio listening to the Lone Ranger as a child, wishing for a horse of my own. Hell, I even remember the hate that welled up in me the day them Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor - I was too young for patriotic fervor, but they interrupted the Ranger's adventures to tell us about it. Horsefeathers, that's what that was.

I've had a job or two, too. I taught school for a few decades, fought fire itself, acted as watchman and warden for the forests, dredged the seas for their riches and taught others to do the same. These days, I'm considered the foremost computer expert in the tri-county area and spend my time diagnosing all sorts of technical problems.

(ed. note: Okay, no. He taught school for thirty-something years, yes. He was a volunteer fireman, but had to quit after he fell off of a roof. For a while, he had a job sitting in a tower and looking at trees, periodically radioing someone in another tower to tell them whether or not those trees were on fire. He owned a shrimp boat for a while and was a shrimper for a year, during which time he caught three shrimp and consumed enough alcohol to drown the entire cast of Jersey Shore. He worked as a SCUBA diving instructor for a while; the very brief time in which he tried to teach me to dive is still marked as one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.

As far as being a computer expert, okay, fine. His job title was "Technology Specialist," but his actual job was making copies and sometimes replacing the toner cartridge in the machine. He liked to tell people that he kept "the whole durn school system's computer systems running," but he slipped up once and confessed to me that mostly he just napped all day.)

I'm durn lucky to have lived in the same town all my life, just a few blocks down the street from where I was born. There's only about a thousand people that live here - well, 999 now that the boy's moved away - but it's nice and quiet, just like I like it.

Heck, I don't know much else. I reckon that'll wrap up Chapter One.

(ed. note: Father didn't come up with a very entertaining post here, but that's okay. Some of the most hilarious moments in my life involve him, but without knowing him a little they'll all fall flat. Now that you've "met" him, you'll understand just why I find some of the Father stories that will follow so great.)

Why My Job Rocks

2011-01-28T15:50:00.001-05:00

As I've noted several times on this blog, my name is not really Nicolai Carter. I've adopted a pseudonym because of the industry I'm in. What I do isn't really important - what is important is that I work 100% from home.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of working from home, let me assure you: it's everything that it's cracked up to be and much more. I used to have a traditional 8:00 - 5:00 job, where I sat behind someone else's desk and made someone else money.

Here's a day in my life while I was still at that hell:

1. Wake up at 5:30 in the morning. Wipe away tears.

2. Get cleaned up and dressed. Make and consume coffee. Question all choices that have led to this stage in my life.

3. Trek out to my car, now that it's the late hour of 5:50 in the damn morning. Depending on what time of year it is, I may be greeted by 100% humidity or a windchill in the single digits.

4. Begin the commute. Commuting through Atlanta traffic is the sort of hell that even Dante was afraid to consider. The next two hours of my life will be spent staring at the backside of cars driven by people I hate. If you haven't been to Atlanta during rush hour then there is just simply no way you'll understand the vitriol coursing through my veins at this step. I've driven in rush hour traffic in Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, and Miami - Atlanta takes the worst aspects of them all and smashes them together.

Look at this:

That is the sort of city planning that can only be done while on acid. I have lived in this city for years and still haven't figured out where some of those ramps go. When a couple thousand confused, sleepy, disgruntled drivers descend on this abortion of an intersection at fuck-thirty in the morning it's a recipe for disaster. I worked that desk job for less than a year and was hit by other insane drivers three times on my commute.

5. At 7:45 or so, I arrive at work. I go clock in early to rack up extra overtime, then go sit in the bathroom and nap until someone knocks on the door. I usually actually make it to my desk at 8:30 or so.

6. I start working. Let's be very clear: this job is easy. Easy easy easy. The workload is fairly light as well, so it's an absolute cakewalk.

Well, it would be, except there are three people in the office doing this job. Theoretically, we're supposed to split the workload into thirds. In practice, I finish my third by 10:00 and spend the rest of the day fixing what the other two have messed up. They are older women, both crazy rednecks, and think the computer is a technological devil. Instead of using the mouse and keyboard as input devices, they shout suggestions at the screen and then pout until I do their jobs, too. I am still done at 11:00.

7. We take lunch in shifts. At 11:00, my two coworkers go to graze. Basking in my sudden solitude, I play around on the internet until they return at 12:00.

8. Now that it's noon, I'm supposed to clock out and go get lunch. Instead, I go take a nap in my car because I've been up for almost seven consecutive hours.

9. I clock back in at 12:45 (fifteen minutes early!) and stare at the clock until 4:30.

10. I complete my most important task of the day: attaching a blue piece of paper to a yellow piece of paper, then repeating 100 times. This cannot be done until 4:30 because the blue papers just now finished printing. They would have been done earlier, but Redneck #1 broke the printer. She somehow does this every day.

11. At 5:00, I walk up to the front desk and drop off my attached papers. I am congratulated on again completing this task perfectly. I wonder what mental deficiency my predecessor must have had for this to be considered an accomplishment.

12. I sit in the bathroom by myself for half an hour. Since I clocked in ten minutes early, took a 45 minute lunch instead of an hour, and finished the day by hiding for another half hour, I've racked up 55 minutes of overtime today. Doing this every day nets me an extra $100 a week. I usually take the last half hour to convince myself that this isn't unethical - I am poor and deserve a reward for not stuffing anyone's head in the toilet all day.

13. I clock out at 5:30 and go to my car. Three or four days a week, someone in the office will try to intercept me to go get drinks at the Chili's across the street. There is only one person in the office I can stand and she's never the one that asks. I tell them I probably left my dog on or something and speed away. I do not have a dog.

14. I get home at about 7:30. I have now spent four hours driving to and from work today in addition to the nine hours I spent at work. I will make less than $23,000 a year for doing this. When I get home, I look in the mirror and see if my eyes still have a soul in them. They do not.

15. My girlfriend (now wife) and I spend two hours together before I am too tired to function anymore. I lie in bed and wait for sleep. I am 23 and dead inside.

After working there for a few months, they offered me a "promotion." When they told me that this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for advancement up the corporate hierarchy meant I'd be working more hours for less pay, I quit and opened my first business.

That business and two others are thriving today. Let's take a look at how my daily schedule has changed:

1. I wake up at 9:00. Noticing that we are still in single-digit hours, I roll back over and fall asleep.

2. I roll out of bed at 10:30. I shower and dress, then go sit in my giant fluffy recliner in the living room with my laptop.

3. At 11:00, I turn on the Price is Right. I berate the ignorant contestants, win all the games in my head and wish Bob Barker was still the host.

4. For the next few hours I work. My work time is interspersed with playing on the internet and watching crappy daytime TV, which I secretly love. I'll write and return emails, manage the three businesses I run or co-run, talk to clients and vendors on the phone, and generally get stuff done. Nobody I speak to during the day realizes that while they are in their office and their suffocating necktie, I am in my recliner watching According to Jim in a bathrobe.

5. Since my wife works from home too, we hang out and trade funny articles on the internet throughout the day. We used to have a scheduled nap from 3:00 to 4:00, but things got a little hectic for that.

6. I usually wrap things up around 6:00 or 7:00. The wife and I go out to dinner or something.

7. We entertain one another until midnight or so when we go to bed. I have accomplished easily 10x as much here as I would in a single day at my old job. When I brush my teeth before going to bed, I glance in the mirror and notice that my soul has grown back.

In other words, working from home is pretty much the most incredible thing imaginable.