the ol' college try

So, says the storyteller, sitting on a chair on the back porch, a tumbler of Irish whiskey in his hand, did I ever tell you about the time my cousin and I went on a pub crawl one frozen December night in Fargo after I graduated college?

It was 2007. I was 22, and a newly-minted college graduate. And I do mean new: I'd been handed my diploma only two hours earlier. It was bitterly cold. December isn't even the coldest month in North Dakota, but that night was a frozen hell. My grandparents and my eldest cousin B had graciously driven eight hours from northwestern Illinois to be at my graduation ceremony. Along the way, they'd had a flat tire. It was the dark of night, somewhere in the vicinity of Wahpeton, one of the loneliest stretches of Interstate 29. The wind was howling. Snow caked the landscape and filled the air. It was easily -30 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind was something corrosive, like acid. Any exposed skin was instantaneously stung by the icy blast, and then numbed, deadened. Changing that tire was an exercise in the same kind of agony that's buggered everyone from Neanderthal man to the Donner Party. Grandpa could only stand to be outside the car for a few seconds at a time. Dad and Mom (who were themselves driving up from their home in Wyoming, and had joined my grandparents in their mutual trek along I-29) stood outside in the midst of Valhalla and changed the tire. They spent the remaining hour to Fargo trying to prevent their hands from turning black and falling off. My cousin B is tough. He's a Marine, for crying out loud—that should tell you something right there. He's four years older than I am, lean as a rail, every ounce of him either muscle or bone or sprung steel. Gimlet eyes, square jaw, warrior's courage. Even he said he'd never been anywhere so cold in his life. He couldn't figure out how I stood being up there for three winters straight.

Not even that, however, could stop me from having myself a drink on graduation night. The ceremony went well. I didn't trip leaving the stage. I waved modestly to Mom and Pop, sitting in the stands, misty-eyed. I found them in the lobby after it was all over. I shook hands with some of my classmates, and humbly accepted the congratulations of my proud parents and grandparents. We all (somehow) made our way through the blizzard to our cars parked outside the Fargodome, and got back to the Radisson Hotel.

Then we had a celebratory dinner. B and I each had a tall glass of the Michelob Amber Bock, and without even realizing it, the night's drinking had commenced. The folks and grand-folks hit the hay after dinner, leaving B and myself at the hotel bar for what we assured them would be "just a few drinks." He had a Heineken. In complete defiance of the weather, I had a Corona. With lime. That's how I roll.
Blizzard, you can go take a running jump, I thought to myself.
"So, you know anybody in town who might like to come out?" B asked me.
I did, as a matter of fact. Brad and Arthur, two fellows I'd had the privilege to share some general education classes with, and who I'd been bumming around with ever since. (Without them, I'd have spent most of my college career sober.) I couldn't think of a better pair of drinking buddies, so I gave 'em a ring and before long they were coming in, shaking the cold out of their coats.

It seemed only natural, after B & A had had their opening beers, to transition into shots. This is where my memory starts to get fuzzy. Only starts, mind you. There were three drinking establishments that we hit, all situated along Broadway in midtown Fargo. Well, there were three drinking establishments that we hit, at the time of this particular slice of debauchery at least: Dempsey's Irish Pub, Rooters, and the Old Broadway. These varied in style and patronage from dive bar to as-hip-as-North-Dakota-can-possibly-get, which ain't much.

We hit Dempsey's first. Good crowd. Standing room only. The joint's only about as wide as a walk-in closet, but somehow we fought our way to the bar and got some beers. The night was in full swing. Smoke filled the air. (Yes, real cigarette smoke; you can still smoke in bars in ND. Quaint, right?) The yells of happy drunken people, most of them in our age bracket, resounded up and down the long, low room, drowning out the jukebox. Up at the bar, teams of four were challenging the "Shot Ski," an old wooden ski slotted with four round holes. Four friends would simultaneously lift the ski and tilt it, each thereby imbibing the shots thoughtfully inserted into the aforementioned holes by the willing staff. My single greatest regret about that night is that B, Brad, Arthur and I didn't try it.

Finding Dempsey's a little packed and smoky for our taste, we ventured out into the dark, slippery streets, back into the chill wind, to sample another venue. I remember there being no shortage of other people out walking around that night, even despite the blasphemous weather. We walked and walked and walked, down to the southern boundary of Fargo nightlife, the Old Broadway. Colloquially known as the "Slut Factory," the OB was eastern North Dakota's number-one producer of freak-dancing blondes. The production line was running at full capacity that night. Blinded by strobes, deafened by insidious music, wowed by beer brands we didn't recognize, elbowing our way past members of both sexes, all clamped tightly together on the tiny dance floor, we made our way to the back corner. Flippant to the last, we sat down and ordered some Jell-O shooters. This was my first and (so far) only experience with Jell-O shots of any kind. I was too far gone by this point to remember much of anything about them. I must've found them rather forgettable, even with a BAC of 0.2%. Attempts at conversation proved futile, what with people like Usher and Ludacris exploding from the sound system. Brad's Lutheran sensibilities, admirably ingrained even after two pitchers and six shots, were offended by the number of wannabe lesbians out on the floor.

With that in mind, we adjourned to our final stop: Rooters, right in between Dempsey's and the OB, on the east side of Broadway. This place must've been around since the pioneer days. It looked exactly like one of those enormous saloon halls from the movies: a wide room with a high ceiling, and a bar a mile long. Excuse me, I mean two wide rooms with high ceilings, and bars a mile long. This was what kind of freaked me out. It was as if two bars were built right next to each other, and the proprietor's minds were connected by some strange psionic link, causing them to make their respective establishments exact mirror images of each other. And then, after discovering this salient fact, both owners just said "screw it" and knocked out the wall between the two bars, rendering them two connected rooms displaying bilateral symmetry. The bar in the southernmost room was on the south side; the bar in the northern room was on the north side. Both rooms had their mirrors, bar stools, tables, and even lights in exactly the same place, only diametrically opposed to each other. And in case you're wondering, no, I was not seeing double. We picked a table in the southernmost room after deciding the atmosphere in the northernmost wasn't quite right. (It's anyone's guess as to how we decided that.) We sat down, ordered up a few more pitchers, and just sat and talked as best we could over the noise of hundreds. I caught up with B, and he and Brad and I had some entertaining discussions about life, the universe and everything, booze-fueled. Arthur, bless him, who had remained Brad's designated driver by some Herculean effort, indulgently sat and listened to the doggerel we spouted for hours on end. It was a fine, relaxing cap to an end-all evening.

At something approaching 2:00 a.m., we staggered out of Rooters and turned our steps to the Radisson. We slithered over slush piles and ice puddles, wantonly weaving through the now-empty street. B and I took fond leave of Brad and Arthur in the lobby, called for the elevator, entered our shared room, and promptly passed out. Little did either of us realize that we would be woken up at 5:30 to go drive home. I'd rather not remember anything about that morning. I remember B raising an emphatic fist and bringing it down with all his might upon the shrieking alarm clock; I remember Mom and Dad finally jolting us out of bed at six with a thunderous knock; I remember trying to pack my clothes into my suitcase, still drunk, wondering how in the world I was going to drive my car 13 hours back home; I remember saying goodbye to Gramp and Gran and ashen-faced B in the freezing hotel parking complex in the snowy gray light of dawn; I remember the hangover kicking in somewhere between Main and 13th Avenue; I remember begging my mother to kill me and hurl my abused corpse into the icy Red River; I remember my sweet, sympathetic mother buying me some hot chocolate at the gas station; and I remember slowly, ever so slowly reviving as I downed the scalding beverage and cranked up the radio in my Ford Taurus, as our little two-car convoy clambered onto I-29 and headed south, bound for Wyoming.

It was a good night: fun, booze-filled, freezing-ass cold, and it made for some rather fond memories. B and I agreed (via e-mail, much later) that we would make it a tradition. We'd visit every one of our remaining five cousins when they graduated college and treat them to something similar. My cousin Dirk and my brother H both graduate in the spring of 2011. Oh boy, won't that be interesting...

an F-bomb in K-Land

So, says the storyteller, sitting in a chair by the fireside, a whiskey sour in his hand, did I ever tell you about the time I accidentally dropped the F-bomb in front of my students?

It was 2008. I was 22 years old, and teaching English under contract in South Korea.

Now, as much as I try to deny it, I'm rather sensitive about my image. Not in regards to my appearance or personality, oh no. Knock on my door any given day and I'm liable to greet you in a pair of stained cargo pants and a ratty old T-shirt with a stretched collar. The hand I'll extend for you to shake will likely be the one I was picking my nose with five minutes earlier. Spending time with me is a crash-course in sexual innuendo, judgmental commentary, godawful puns and (consequently) social tolerance.

I'm sensitive about my image as an American, though. One of the things I dread about traveling is being perceived as the "ugly American." You know, one of those strident, bulbous, glassy-eyed jingoists who came to Paris because they wanted to see "the LOOV-ruh," and spent the whole time complaining about how unfriendly the natives were and how weird and different everything was. These folks put up a stink if they can't find somebody who speaks English (fancy not finding an English speaker in a foreign country!). They never bother to read up on their destination's cultural and social mores, and therefore unknowingly and repeatedly commit crimes of etiquette. They mispronounce names so egregiously that passers-by are physically sickened. And they try to touch or carry away a piece of every monument or museum piece they see. These are the people who poke fun at the Queen's Guard standing outside the gates of Buckingham Palace; send sushi back and ask for it to be cooked longer; and spend their entire Mexican vacation in a deluxe resort and come away twittering about what a nice country it was. Loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless and ethnocentric, as Wikipedia puts it.

Every red-blooded American is allowed to jones for a double cheeseburger with fries while they're overseas, but jeez, people, don't harp on it. Just because the United States is the greatest country in the world doesn't mean you have to remind everybody within earshot about it. I don't want to be one of those ugly Americans. I am sometimes, but I try not to be. Americans have acquired such a stigma that I fancy I can see a little twinge of displeasure come into foreigners' eyes when I tell them where I'm from. The old "Oh-God-he's-an-American-this-is-going-to-be-just-great" kind of twinge. Not that I care, of course. I'm busy thinking I'll bet you've never fired a gun in your life, sucker. Bet you wish your country had the balls to enact a Second Amendment, don't you? This didn't happen much in Korea, I'm glad to say. When I said, "Miguk saram imnida" ("I'm an American"), people's eyes usually lit up...as long as they were under 40.

I'm not apologizing for anybody. I'm proud of the country I was born in. It's a swell place. There are a lot of intelligent, worldly, culturally-aware people here. But as usual, a tiny contingent of dimwits is mucking things up for the rest of us. Not every American tourist is ugly. And that's what I've set out to prove, no matter where I go. It's my unofficial mission, when I'm wandering the globe, to show people that Americans aren't evil, stupid, obtuse or ethnocentric. Whatever foreigners I meet are going to scratch their heads afterward and say, "Hmmm...that bloke wasn't all bad."

Well, except for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If I meet that guy on the street, I'm going to give him the wedgie of his life.

With this promise in mind, I set out to learn the Korean language almost immediately upon arriving there. No, before. I was familiarizing myself with the alphabet and basic grammar before I'd even left Wyoming. I was only a few months into my tenure at my hagwon (academy) on Geoje Island, but I was already starting to get comfortable in the lingo. I had the alphabet down, the number system was beginning to coalesce, and I even had some rudimentary sentences under my belt.

I was so proud of what I'd accomplished that I thought I'd trot out some of my skills before my students. Impress 'em, you know. Let them see that I was getting comfortable in their language, even as I was acclimatizing them to mine. Fair trade, you see. It would make 'em feel like I was making an effort, and that I wasn't some overbearing, self-centered xenophobe.

So I started calling out the page numbers of our textbook in Korean. You know, instead of "twenty" I'd say "i-ship." "O-ship-gu" for "59," etc. "Sam-baek-chil" in place of "307," and so on. Then I'd stand up there in front of the whiteboard and bask in the smiles, widened eyes, and delighted gasps of the little ebon-haired tykes.

Then it happened. The time came to turn to page eighteen.

There's a rather interesting quirk of the Korean language involving the number eighteen. It's spelled like this: 십팔. However, the pronunciation, ship-pal, is EXTRAORDINARILY similar to the Korean F-word, shi-pal (시팔). It's almost exactly the same, in fact. 십팔 is pronounced SHEEP-pal, but you don't aspirate the "p" at the end of "sheep." You can't hardly hear it. The Korean F-bomb is pronounced SHEE-pal, without any "p" at the end of "shee." Unless you're a lifelong Korean speaker, it's very, very difficult to hear—let alone pronounce—the difference between the two.

Just my rotten luck, huh?

Wondering why my entire class burst into peals of raucous laughter whenever I said "eighteen," I went to my Korean colleagues and asked them what the deal was.

Charles asked me, "How are you pronouncing it? Say it for us."

I did.

Eyes bulged. Jaws dropped. Hands clamped over mouths. A universal gasp of horror went up. Charles, who had perhaps been expecting it, was laughing. He put a friendly hand on my shoulder and said, bracingly, "You are saying the F-word."

A frayed little piece of paper went spinning through the whorls and eddies of my mind and burst into flames, disappearing forever. I suppose it was the last forlorn shred of my dignity, self-assurance, and pride. For the rest of the day, I slunk around campus with my head between my shoelaces, while Korean kids and teachers alike snickered into their sleeves.
It took me ages to live this down. Charles was a lot gentler than I deserved; he only ragged me once or twice a month for the remainder of my sojourn. The kids, however, wouldn't let it rest. Any time I paused in my lecture for more than two seconds, Arthur and Edwin would pipe up: "Teacher! Say eighteen! Eighteen!"

There were no consequences; no parents were called, no disciplinary action taken. No fire-breathing ajuma showed up at my apartment door, out for scalps. I don't even know if word got back to the school director. But me pulling the rug out from under my own attempt at cultural awareness was punishment enough. My worst nightmare had come true. Not only had I been guilty of the most grievous linguistic impropriety, but I'd also negated the pains I'd taken to disprove the theory of widespread American unworldliness. I'd done the exact opposite of my intention. My vaunted assiduousness had been thwarted by ignorance.

Oh well. It made for a good story.

treading the boards

So, says the storyteller, sitting in a chair on the back porch, a gin gimlet in his hand, did I ever tell you about the time I was in a play?
It was 1992. I was six, and in first grade. I had been tapped to perform in Oakview Elementary's Thanksgiving play. And get this: for some mysterious reason, I was picked to play an Indian.
This wasn't the most politically correct play, either. In the early 90s, political correctness hadn't evolved beyond an amorphous invertebrate thrashing its way around a primordial soup of bull-squeeze. Be it otherwise, the ACLU would've been on this play like white on rice. I don't remember much of it, unfortunately. I don't think I had any lines. My memory of the affair is almost completely gone. Most of what I know I gleaned from the videotape.
Yes, Mom rented a camcorder and taped the whole affair. Of course. I can't hardly stand to watch it, even now. It mostly consists of me, my costars and I, wearing brightly colored headbands with feathers stuck in them, dancing around in a circle in front of 300 people, kicking our legs up, flailing our hands around, and singing in little-kid voices. "Hiya, hiya ah hiya hi-ya-ya-ya Hiya, hiya ah hiya hi-ya-ya-ya!"
You honestly can't blame me for mentally suppressing this, can you?
I didn't win an Academy Award for my performance. Before and after the big dance number, my costars and I just sat around looking complacent, grinning like woodchucks and waving to our mothers. I highly doubt that Squanto would've recognized us. Even the Pilgrims would've laughed themselves sick. If there were any history teachers in the audience, I didn't see 'em. They probably excused themselves before the intermission.
That's the only play I've ever been in. I have since become afflicted with chronic stage-fright, which still hasn't wholly deserted me. Class presentations scared me stiff; standing in front of more than three people was torture; I died a thousand deaths before every piano recital. The only thing that didn't scare me was reading aloud. That's because I knew I did it a million times better than anybody else in class. It's called "inflection," people. You may have heard of it.
Since I've tagged this post with a "humor" label, I shall leave you with a joke. I went over to my buddy John's house one afternoon a while ago. His father was busy doing some landscaping. John objected to this. Why? John's father had removed a bush from the side of the driveway. John claimed that this bush provided him with a landmark vital to the act of reversing his car out of the driveway. John's father was nonplussed.
"You know," he said, "they have these things called mirrors."
"Yeah," I agreed, "you might wanna look into 'em."
Next up: a long-overdue book review. Stay tuned.

me Tarzan, you fell

So, says the storyteller, sitting in a chair by the fireside, a gin and tonic in his hand, did I ever tell you about the time I broke my arm? It was 1998. I was eleven years old, and a reluctant Boy Scout. My troop and I were camped just off the road running past Norris Dam, on the Clinch River in eastern Tennessee. It was just an inch away from car camping, really. The vehicles were parked a few hundred yards from the tents. This would prove to be fortunate. My memories of being a Boy Scout are not fond ones. I wasn't in the best of troops. I was a pretty wimpy kid, and the other guys were far from supportive or brotherly. I'd been on several outings with them already, and none were the kind I'd remember wistfully. But during this trip, I thought things were really going to turn around. The weather was beautiful (unlike Big Hump, which was negative temperatures coupled with 30 mile-an-hour winds; it was snowing sideways). Dad and my brother Harlan were along, meaning yours truly, Mommy's boy, wouldn't be left all alone (unlike Savage Gulf, where I was crying and moping and smelly all week because I'd forgotten to pack soap). Camp Jim was a marvelous place, too. It was a big, wide clearing in the woods, floored with dry brown soil, packed hard. It sloped gently upward to meet the wooded flank of a ridge. The trees surrounding and dotting the clearing seemed impossibly tall to me back then. The sunlight trickled down through the canopy and dappled the forest floor with those dancing bits of sunlight which I found (and still do find) so dazzlingly wonderful. All in all, it was a picturesque spot. But most importantly, it seemed the other guys in the troop were beginning to warm up to me. Near the center of the clearing was a particularly gigantic tree. I'm afraid I can't remember its exact dimensions. And I was so short back then that it must've been a lot smaller than it seemed. In my memory, it was gigantic, the next thing to the California redwoods. It was a towering oak, gray-barked and rough, no branches less than 30 above the ground, the trunk so wide that six of us would've had to link arms to encircle it. An enormous tree in the camp would've been awesome enough for us. But no, this one just happened to have thick brown vines hanging from it. And what's more, one of them was swingable. I was wandering around camp one golden afternoon not long after we'd arrived, a bit bored and a bit tired. (Two owls had chosen the wee hours of the morning to start having a conversation, and one of them happened to be perched in the tree right above our tent. And these owls didn't hoot, either. They screamed. Nobody in the camp got much sleep that night.) I look over and I see the guys swinging on this vine. And I think, cool. Here's the setup: the massive tree is just at the foot of the slope of the ridge. In front of it, the ground slopes gently down for a few yards, then suddenly drops fast—a steep embankment, the wall of a shallow gully running through the camp from north to south. This makes the vine-swing that much more thrilling. The guys, grabbing the vine and pushing off the trunk of the tree, swing out over the gentle slope, and then over the embankment. At the farthest outward point in their swing, they are about 15 feet above the ground or so. I make up my mind to try that swing or die in the attempt. The guys make room in the line for me, something I wasn't expecting. Surprised and gratified, I take my place and wait eagerly for my turn. I watch my predecessors take theirs, trying to pick up tips. Push off from the tree as hard as you can. Grasp the vine and climb up the side of the trunk a little to give yourself some extra height and oomph. Push to the side, making your swing wider, longer, more circular and less ovoid. I'm not the only one watching the proceedings. One of the older boys—I think his name was Lee or something—is also perusing, standing on the gentle slope below the tree. The guys are swinging directly over his head. Lee's extremely tall—must be nearing six feet. He's also quite thin and gangly, like most boys his age. My turn comes. My heart in my mouth, I grab hold of the vine, bend my knees as far as they'll go, and push with all my might. It's wonderful. I go swinging out, clutching the rough bark of the vine for all I'm worth, the sudden breeze blowing back my hair, the sunlight sparkling through the leaves high above, the ground dropping suddenly away until it seems I'm as high as a bird, I can see the whole camp and practically everybody in it, I can even see through the trees and over the hill to the road and the Clinch River beyond—and then suddenly I'm swinging back, and I pivot and kick out my legs to stop myself smashing into the other side of the tree. Breathless, I hand the vine to the next lucky bugger, and get in line again. No way one swing is enough. It seems to take ages, but eventually I'm back at the front of the line again. I grasp the vine (I'm probably grinning like a punch-drunk monkey), climb even higher up the trunk, and push off even harder. I start my outward swing— And suddenly it feels like someone clamped a ball-and-chain around my ankles. I can barely hold on. My grip is slipping, the rough bark of the vine skinning my hands. I glance down. Lee, the older boy, is hanging onto my shoes. He's swinging along with me. I look up. We're over the embankment. My head empties. My only thought now is to hold on. The ride is forgotten, except inasmuch as I really, really want to get off now. I try to hold on. If I lose it now, we're falling a long way. But I can't do it. Lee is just too heavy. Just as we reach the peak of the swing and begin to head back, I lose my grip. Those few split-seconds that I fall 15 feet and land on the slope of the embankment are a terrifying, toxic blur. WHAM. Lee rolls away, unhurt. I land on my hands and knees on the steepest part of the embankment, facing uphill. I know I'm hurt. But I've never broken a bone before, and I don't know the signs. My arm doesn't hurt yet, but there's that numb sort of feeling which precedes pain. It's in both of my arms and both my knees. How I managed to avoid planting my face in the dirt, I'll never know. Maybe it was the slope that saved me, who knows. But it does a number on my right wrist. Even after I've been picked up, dusted off and set to rights, it keeps throbbing. And in a few minutes, it starts to hurt. It starts to hurt like hell. Even sitting perfectly still, it hurts as though it's going to fall off. And if I try to move it, or even touch it, however slightly, fresh waves of raw agony shoot through my whole arm. Dad doesn't believe I've done anything serious to myself. He observes me on the floor of our tent, cradling my arm to my chest, whimpering, tears in my eyes, and says "Oh, come on. You're all right." Later, I felt rather sorry for him. Mom really tore him a new one for not believing I was hurt. In Dad's defense, I didn't fall that far, nor land that hard. It was inconceivable that I should've broken something. Pop probably just thought I was scraped up a little, and was trying to get me to toughen up. I'm glad he tried, at least. Dad and the troop leaders try various things on my arm: wrapping it in bandages; ice packs; warm water; immobilization. Nothing works. Eventually, the call is made. I'll have to be taken to the hospital. Dad calls up Mom and she comes A.S.A.P, driving our huge Ford B-Wagon van. That thing was amazingly capacious. With two seats up front and two benches in back, plus a vast amount of cargo space, it was the Post family's workhorse for nearly ten years. It chauffeured a family of four (and two dogs) on numerous picnics, transported entire soccer teams, supplied car campers with a week's rations, and was the best thing for a relaxing after-lunch nap while driving home from the restaurant. My memory blanks out here. I don't remember the ride from camp to the hospital at all. Such is my curse. I have an awful memory, and it's photographic to boot. This means that conversations, sounds, sights, and sensations are often utterly lost, and all I'm left with are images. I'm fortunate to remember as much of this incident as I have. I don't remember what explanation Lee gave for leaping up and grabbing my feet. I don't remember how the other guys reacted to our fall. I don't remember much of anything apart from what I've told you here, unfortunately. My apologies. The X-rays come back and the tall, dark-haired doctor puts it up for us to see. I have a spidery crack halfway through my radius. Nothing that needs to be set or splinted, fortunately, but enough to technically qualify as a "break." It also qualifies for a cast. Now that I've had some anesthetics put into my system and can actually move my arm without wanting to scream, I'm rather pleased. That's the way I recall feeling, anyway. I got to go home early from the Boy Scout trip and had a broken bone into the bargain. I didn't want to break a bone, mind you, but I felt it was something I needed to do at some point in my life. And have a cast. Then I could hold my eleven-year-old head up and proclaim, "I am a man of the world. I have broken a bone, and worn a cast. In your face, Herman." I don't know who Herman is. He just stands for all those bullies at recess who called me a girl or a wuss or a homo. For some unexplained reason, I picked the color orange for my cast. I don't know why. It didn't have anything to do with football. The colors of the University of Tennessee (with whom Peyton Manning was playing at the time) were orange and white, and all of Knoxville lit up with those colors every game day. But I was too young (or too wussy) to like football yet. I just liked the color orange. So they put it on. It went from my wrist up to my elbow, extending between my thumb and index finger. This made it impossible to hold a fork or a pencil, but I grinned and bore it for six long weeks. And I got all my classmates at middle school to sign it. I felt good and proud and accomplished for the first time in my life. I look back on the whole affair now with mingled amusement and shame. I'm ashamed that I couldn't have been stronger and held on to the vine as long as it took to return to the tree safely, even if I skinned my hands raw. That would've been the brave, selfless, manly thing to have done. Maybe that's what Lee was trying to teach me, I don't know. I'm just glad he didn't get hurt. I'm ashamed that I spent the rest of the afternoon moaning and groaning and writhing in the tent. That wasn't very manly, either. I'm amused at how the whole thing must've looked, though. Tiny Little Me, swinging on a vine. Tall Skinny Guy grabs my shoes. Suddenly TLM is swinging from the vine, and TSG is swinging from me. That must've been a sight. Then suddenly TLM lets go and the whole shebang plunges to earth. TLM spends the rest of the afternoon crying and whining on the floor of the tent. There was a lesson to be learned here, but it's temporarily escaped the author's mind. AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is the first of the fireside chats that I mentioned earlier. Well, not really the first. I've already told a few stories on this blog. There's the one about how I fell into a pond in fall in Ohio when I was a kid; another concerning a certain all-night party in Korea that nearly resulted in a lost watch; and a third—oh yeah, did you know that I once saved a rabbit's life? Ever wonder what living in a Buddhist temple is like? Check 'em out. There's much more to come. P.S. I've decided to postpone that award-ceremony thingy until tomorrow, and combine it with the news report I've been compiling. I've got some rather juicy tidbits for you. We have a new dog, for starters. The garbage truck got stuck in the sand up the road a couple days ago, too. HALLELUJAH, I passed the big scary test on shots yesterday! This morning I had my first flight lesson in a month and a half; I went "under the hood" for the second time. Dad has tapped me to play bartender for the dinner party he's hosting tonight. And did I mention how nice the weather's been down here lately?

fireside chat

I was reading something on Jon Paul's blog Where Sky Meets Ground about how this one blogger has surpassed 100 followers after blogging for just two months. Why? Because her content is amazing, he says. I've run across several blogs which other folks label "amazing," and I'm still not sure exactly what the common factor might be. As near as I can figure out, though, these "amazing" blogs are popular because they speak the truth. They resonate. They tell stories everyone can relate to. They showcase the human condition in some evocative way. They're simply written, intimately personal, refreshingly honest, and often eerily familiar. Jon Paul has declared his intention to begin publishing stories about the lessons he's learned during his eighteen-plus years in the military, specifically in regards to writing. That should resonate with any male between the ages of 13 and 99; plus a vast cross-section of the population who are interested in writing, or need help with some of the particularly trying aspects of it. Now, I'm not saying that I blog just to garner followers. No worthwhile blogger does. That's not the point. Having a zillion followers is good in some ways; feedback, community-building, and (for writers) literary criticism. But it's an added bonus, not the ends of the means. That being said, I wouldn't object to appealing to a wider audience. Right now, I suppose, this blog is pretty esoteric: booze, literature, aviation, travel. If you're an earthbound, jingoistic, illiterate teetotaller, the Sententious Vaunter will hold no interest for you. What am I missing? Those stories. Those relatable, resonant, intriguing vignettes. Those intimate, whimsical glimpses into people's lives that I (and many others) love to read. Dumb dogs. Vanishing passports. People who forget their gender after a few drinks. After all, people don't live on book reviews alone. Unfortunately for me, I don't get drunk often enough to tell war stories about myself and Wild Turkey. I'm not living in a foreign country, unless you consider my room the home ground and the rest of Mom and Dad's house alien territory. Nothing much ever happens in this town besides murders, rapes, gang fights, drug deals, and sexual predation. Most of the stuff I do with my friends is pretty typical: we watch movies, go to dinner parties, drink beer, go off-roading, etc. (Actually, THAT might be worth blogging about...something really interesting happened. We were driving back down Pilot Rock Road after failing to reach Fawnskin the back way due to heavy slush when a dirtbiker flagged us down, and...) But fear not! I may have failed to judiciously post current events and thus keep my blog timely, but I shall not fail in this. I hereby resolve to devote a few more posts to personal stories. I bloviate a lot, but I don't reminisce enough. So I'm going to tell you some of the funny, interesting, whimsical, didactic, touching, enlightening, enrapturing and hilarious things that have happened to me. If nothing funny, interesting, whimsical, didactic (etc.) has happened recently, I'll draw on something from previous years, college life or childhood. We'll have ourselves a little fireside chat every now and again. Should be a good time. Stay tuned. And if you like what you see, follow along. It'll probably get better.