THE SHRUBRAG: 3 Things I Learned the Hard Way

My response to a blog taggging event. I was tagged by lonnie bruner.

Protect your siblings, at all costs and regardless of awareness. When I was 6, my sister Gillian, who was about 4, and I were playing alone in one of the back bedrooms of our house. At one point, I remember standing in the middle of the room and calmly watching her start to fiddle with this full length mirror that was hanging on the wall. Next thing I know, the mirror comes crashing down, right on her foot. Of course the caucphony of screams brought the parents racing to the scene. My father, a practicing doctor, was able to determine that several of her toes were broken. Being the big brother, it was apparently, considering the vehement condemnation I recieved for not keeping a proper watchful eye on her, my assumed charge to protect my sister from these disasters and to also have known that the mirror weighed about 50 lbs. At the time, I never quite understood why I got into trouble, but the lesson learned had a far reaching scope: protect your younger brothers and sisters at all times and consider all outside influence a danger to mind and body. For the next week, Gillian had to be carried around by my parents while she uttered the mantra, "Poor foot, poor foot" continually.

Never set sail prior to an impending thunder storm. My parents used to have a pool, and with owning a pool comes owning pool toys. At one time, we had several real tire inner tubes, big ones, like industrial sized. These things were the best pool toys of all time. We could jump on 'em, jump off of 'em, sit in 'em, or dive through 'em. They were soft and ultra comfortable. What I am trying to convey here is how prized they were amongst the kids. Now normally, we would just leave outside, in the pool. One particular day, Trumbauer, and I think his brother, came over to play with me and my brother. A storm was brewing over the river, and I mean one of those storms where the sky turns an ultra dark gray and day becomes night. You can feel it in your bones that shelter must be found fast or you might be blown away. The wind was tearing through our backyard. Branches were falling like rain. So windy, in fact, as to lift our treasured inner tubes right out of the pool and blown int o the adjacent reeds. Except, one of them, the best one, was blown into the river, and it was speeding away with due haste away from shore. I had a moment of brilliance and decided to that I would use my sailing prowess to retrieve the ill-fated tube and return triumphant with our blessed pool play thing. The tube was a good 100 yards away. I just figured I would pick it up and fly back in a jiffy with the wind that was blowing. By the time I got to the tube, I was 200 yards downstream. The wind has pushed me down the river. I frantically tried to tact back to shore, but any headway I made on the tact was doubly reveresed by the wind and water I was fighting against. I quickly decided that I had no choice but to head to Trumbauer's house, which was down stream a couple miles. Once I made that decision, making progress was easy. I fully let loose the sheet line and cruised at a nice pace to his house. Thankfully I got indoors before the brunt of the storm hit, but it was still a scary ride. My parents picked me up and I returned home with the inner tube in hand.

If it hurts going in, it hurts coming out. Dateline....Pittsburgh, 1995. I was on a road trip with some college friends and we were all fans of buffalo wings. We had heard of a place called Fathead's, which claimed to have the best wings around. There was also a rumor that the hottest wings on the menu required your signing of a disclaimer of some kind. This we had to see. The 3 of us decided to order these wings, 10 of them. Sure enough, our waitress returned with disclaimers for each of us, each one essentially stating that we would not hold Fathead's responsible for any intestinal discomfort or injury. Wow, how hot would these things be? The moment arrived and we dug in, living up to the stereotype of dumb young males. Painful does not quite describe the sensation, more like 1000's of red hot needles barbing every bit of mucous membrane found in your mouth. There was no chicken essentially, only the bright orange red sauce, as if glowing with heat, which caked each wing with numerous chunks of habaneros and burned our insides with that painful ecstasy fed by a swell of endorphins. We slugged our way through each wing, with tears streaming down our cheeks and blissful pain rushing in our bloodstream, making our extremeties tingle. Being the men we were, we finished every last one and celebrated our victory with copious amounts of beer. The funny thing about mucous membranes, is that the mouth isn't the only one exposed to the external environment, and as it turned out, those membranes can be much more sensitive to lethal doses of capsaicin. If you can't take a hint, in plain words, our asses were on fire the next day.