I sometimes wonder if I have an addictive personality.\u00a0 In junior high, I loved tying an empty soda can to a length of string and trailing it out the window behind the school bus each morning.<\/p>\n
\nI was one of those packrat kids and always had junk on hand so, the first time I did it, I just used some junk string.\u00a0 Sitting in the back seat, watching the can ride along behind us, I knew that I had found my calling.\u00a0 So, each day, in art class, I\u2019d steal a big ball of industrial string.\u00a0 The next morning, I\u2019d see how far the can could stay with us.\u00a0 My record was 25 minutes, nearly the entire bus ride, and a length of 20 feet.<\/p>\n
The danger involved is what I loved.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always assumed that everyone is out to get me, so I played an imaginary cat and mouse game with the driver.\u00a0 I\u2019d wait for when he was making a turn, so I knew he\u2019d be watching the road and not the mirror to see me drop the can out the window.\u00a0 Once the can was out, I quickly let the string unspool so he wouldn\u2019t see it in the mirrors.<\/p>\n
Every once in a while, the can or the string would get caught when the bus made a turn and the whole thing would be viciously snapped out of my hands.\u00a0 Several times, cars behind us ran over the string and yanked it out of my hands.\u00a0 I\u2019m pretty sure, looking back, that I could have been seriously injured.\u00a0 But there\u2019s one rule in life I learned at an early age:\u00a0 Always let go.<\/p>\n
In high school, I was wearing a black trenchcoat before it was cool.\u00a0 Instead of a gun, though, I carried around a big marker.\u00a0 A seriously big marker.\u00a0 The tip was as thick as three finger tips, and it was as big around as my wrist.\u00a0 I stole it from the first Office Depot franchise in the DC area, and was infinitely proud of it.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always liked stealing petty things.\u00a0 Not shoplifting.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never stolen candy, or groceries, or clothes.\u00a0 I like to steal industrial items.\u00a0 Milk crates, lumber\u2026 I drunkenly tried to steal a boxcar in college.\u00a0 It was on an incline and I figured I could get it going with a good push.\u00a0 Of course it wouldn\u2019t budge, so I spent most of the night trying to get it rolling with levers and all sorts of MacGyver<\/em> stuff.\u00a0 Most people may tell a story like that and explain that they were high on drugs\u2026 In my case, I was slowly sobering and doing that instead of calling the platinum blonde, rail thin, sexy Phi Mu slut who had given me her number at the bar earlier in the evening.<\/p>\n Yeah.\u00a0 I know.<\/p>\n I used the marker for many acts of vandalism, mostly to promote The Boble (which I\u2019ll get to serializing here on the front page any week now).\u00a0 Various catch phrases included \u201cBOB is in your pants\u201d and the generic \u201cHail God BOB\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n Writing is an addiction.\u00a0 I don\u2019t feel that I\u2019m good at it.\u00a0 In fact, I can barely tolerate my writing.\u00a0 I go back and read it and want to burn it.\u00a0 But I\u2019ve always done it.\u00a0 My first story was \u201cThe Princess and the Dragon\u201d in 1984.\u00a0 It still exists somewhere in storage and, if we\u2019re all really lucky, I\u2019ll eventually dig it out and scan it in.\u00a0 Because that\u2019s what you do when you drink on weekday mornings.<\/p>\n I finished a sci-fi novel, and I have half finished a dozen more.\u00a0 The Boble is over 300 pages.\u00a0 Of course, the Greatsociety\/Dirtyfreaks collection is huge.\u00a0 If this were the late 70\u2019s or early 90\u2019s, I\u2019d throw everything into huge 200 page \u201czine\u201d collections like Answer Me!<\/span> and I\u2019d be famous.\u00a0 But, today, I\u2019m one of many million terrible writers blogging away on the internet because, like all those other bloggers, my destiny was decided when I spent the night fucking around with a boxcar instead of fucking a Phi Mu in the ass in a restroom stall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I sometimes wonder if I have an addictive personality.\u00a0 In junior high, I loved tying an empty soda can to a length of string and trailing it out the window behind the school bus each morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[402,127],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-books","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1120,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions\/1120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}