Previously 10 Things About Me You Never Asked, with the intent that I would post 10 things at a time until I hit 100. Oh well.
- My parents used to argue about the Cherokee Indian in us. Dad would say we shouldn’t tell anyone. Mom would say the opposite of whatever Dad would say no matter what. It made for a great, but pointless fight.
- No one in My Family other than My Dad is concerned about the Cherokee in us, but the Irish in My Mom is a huge embarrassment to her. Actually, she’s Scotch-Irish, which is Scottish, not Irish, but she’s got the temper of an Irishman all the way. I got her a big Irish mug for Mother’s Day one year. She exploded, “We’re not Irish, we’re Scottish!” Sometimes I’m a bastard. I think it must be the Irish in me.
- My Mother’s wedding ring was a gift from My Dad’s Parents. Being jewelers they could get rare stones. Her ring was a 1-carat blue and pink diamond, worth a fortune. For some reason they didn’t give My Dad any papers with the ring. Years after My Dad's Parents had both died My Mom took the ring to a jeweler in Alabama to have it cleaned. He cleaned it all right. When she got it back she commented to the jeweler, “it looks different.” Then she took it home and showed My Dad. He hit the roof. It was not the same stone. It was a piece of shit diamond. She never went back to the jeweler to try to get her stone back because without papers she couldn’t prove he’d stolen it. I don’t think My Dad ever got over that.
- When I was 6 years old a young family moved in behind us. You could see their entire backyard from our house. The wife was named Maria. Maria was only 24 and absolutely beautiful. During the summertime Maria would put on a bikini and lay out to get a tan in her backyard. After she’d lain down on her stomach she’d take off her top. My Older Brother and his friends would go upstairs to his room, close the door, and pull out binoculars to watch, wait, and pray that she’d get up without her top. And sometimes she did. This made My Mom and all the other middle-aged women in the neighborhood absolutely crazy. Mom would complain about “that woman” all the time, but she would never tell me why she hated her so much. My Dad thought it was hilarious. I would be over there playing with her oldest son, Mike, while this was going on, but we were usually inside the house or out front in the street. So I myself never got to see Maria topless. I have felt cheated by this to this very day, even though I was too young to properly appreciate what I would have been seeing. If only digital cameras had existed back then.
- The reigning Miss Alabama at the time was a student teacher for my 5th grade class. Her name was Miss Nixon and she was hot, hot, hot. I think this experience caused every boy in the class to experience early puberty the following summer.
- My 6th grade homeroom teacher and my 6th grade science teacher were both militant lesbian feminists. They hated all males and made sure to fully express this hatred to us boys. They had all the doors of the boys’ bathrooms, including the door from the hallway, removed. When we asked why, they simply said they didn’t know where the doors went, as if they’d evaporated by magic. When we went to the bathroom they would walk inside with us and stand behind us, screaming at us the entire time just to harass us, as if we were in the Marines. We were only 11 and 12 years old and just starting to develop. So we would try to cover up and pee while ignoring the abuse as best we could. Because they had removed the stall doors, too, and came all the way into our bathroom, it was simply not possible to use the sit-down toilets at all.
- The lesbian feminists ran the entire middle school I was sent to from 6th to 8th grade. There were only 3 men in the entire building and the feminists ran all over them. No new teachers could be hired unless she, and it had to be a she, said she was a radical feminist, too. During the middle of my 6th grade year the feminists took all the girls, and only the girls, to a lunchroom for “special education.” The boys were taken to an alternate lunchroom and simply monitored to make sure we didn’t escape. We were held there in silence. The girls were hit with a brief sex-ed talk, which the parents hadn’t been informed about, and then indoctrinated with radical female supremacist religious views. After this they were taught martial arts techniques specifically for sexually assaulting and mutilating males. Then they were told to do this to us boys “any time you feel angry for any reason.” Yes, this is an exact quote. After this feminist indoctrination we were brought back together. The feminists then informed us boys that the girls were going to sexually assault us and even mutilate us (using their pencils, pens, whatever was handy) any time they felt angry for any reason. We protested, of course, and asked them to clarify if they meant any time the girls were angry because of something we had actually done, or just any time they were angry even if it had nothing to do with us. They confirmed that the girls were being instructed to sexually abuse and mutilate us any time they felt angry for any reason even if it had nothing to do with us. The reasoning was that all males are evil and any unhappiness felt by females is entirely the fault of males (The Patriarchy.) They further informed us boys that we were not permitted to fight back or protect ourselves from being sexually assaulted or sexually mutilated in any way, shape, or form, and that if we did the teachers would jump in and help the girls attack us. They ended the discussion, if you could call it a discussion, by saying that this was entirely justified by virtue of the ‘fact’ that “girls are sensitive, but boys aren’t.”
- When I was in the 8th grade a girl decided to make use of what the lesbian feminists had taught the girls. She picked a very small boy in her class and kneed him in the testicles as hard as she could while he was standing in front of the entire class. She said she did it just to see if it really worked like the teachers had told her it would. She kicked him so hard that while he lay screaming in the floor he peed in his pants in front of everyone. He was hurt so badly that he had lost all control of his bladder and it poured out, making a huge puddle in the floor, which he was left laying in while he cried. He had to be taken to the clinic because he was injured. The girl who had assaulted him was not punished in any way or told that she had done wrong. The boy’s mother had to be called to take him to a doctor. Nothing ever came of this incident that I know of, but when My Niece attended that same school 8 years later she said that they were no longer teaching the girls to sexually assault the boys. Other than that, nothing had changed.
- 15 years later, when I learned that my 6th grade lesbian feminist science teacher, Delores Kornman, had died of lung cancer, I celebrated.
- My Older Brother told me that while he attended the Lesbian Supremacist Middle School that I was currently attending a girl murdered a boy at the school by stabbing him in the neck with an icepick.
- Back in the early ‘70s when I was little and home with the chicken pox I saw a huge black station wagon pull into the driveway of our next door neighbor’s house. I asked my mom, who was home with me, what the black car was for. She exclaimed with alarm that it was a hearse. My neighbor’s daughter, Christine, whom I believe was about 14, had died in the middle of the night. At about 2 a.m. she had started screaming, “Mom! Mom!” and when her parents came running to see what she was screaming about she was already dead. She died of natural causes, the details of which I can’t remember, but all sorts of ugly rumors quickly spread throughout the neighborhood. The family eventually moved away. I met her younger sister, Valerie, years later when we both went to the same college. We talked only very briefly about her sister’s death and the ugly rumors people had spread. Then we never mentioned it again.
- Around the same time that Christine died suddenly in the middle of the night, another neighbors’ daughter, Debbie, also died. She died in the middle of the day. Debbie was in high school, but she had skipped school and gone out with some friends. At some point they all got really high. Then she went home. When she got home she started to notice that something was terribly wrong with this particular "trip." She called her mom at work and said “Mom, something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong!” By the time her mom got home Debbie had died of a drug overdose. She was only 18. Even though I was just a little kid I have remembered that for the rest of my life. Debbie’s car, a 1970 Barracuda, was left parked in front of their house for a long time and I’d pass it every day on my bike when I rode over to Mike’s house, who lived next door to her. The entire time Mike and I were playing in the street, while his mom, sexy Maria, was virtually naked in the backyard (dammit) we’d pass that car and I’d think about how Debbie had died. I can barely remember Debbie’s face because she was so much older than me and I only saw her a few times, but that car is burned into my memory forever.
- I have never had a sense of smell. There is some faint sense of it if the smell is incredibly strong, but beyond that there is nothing. This was a big problem in chemistry labs in college, when our instructions said to wave a heated test tube of something under our noses to detect a particular odor. It could be toxic and I could hold it under my nose all day without detecting anything. But this came in handy when the instructions said to heat to a boil, record the results, and then dump the mixture into the trash. I did exactly that and the trash exploded into flames. The resulting fire apparently stunk to high Heaven because everyone else in the lab was crying, but it didn't bother me at all. The instructor, an overworked and underpaid grad student, tried to extinguish the flames with the emergency shower that every lab had. The emergency shower did not work. So he kicked the flaming trash can into the hall and shut the door. Problem solved. On with the lab. Seriously.
- I owned and drove more different cars while in college than I have owned and driven the entire rest of my life.
You have read this article with the title 100 Things About Me You Never Asked - part II - 12 through 25. You can bookmark this page URL http://thebohemianbunny.blogspot.com/2005/04/100-things-about-me-you-never-asked.html. Thanks!