[If you need to catch up with the #10 stupid thing I survived growing up in Texas, you can click here.] As a teenager, like any red-blooded teenager, I did my best to push my limits. Of course, at the time I didn’t think I had limits. One of the compromises my parents deemed satisfactory during the summer months was that I could stay out late as long as it didn’t interfere with me getting up at 5:30am for a long day’s work of manual labor on the ranch.
Most of you probably already see where this one is going.
It’s the summer of 1992. Depeche Mode’s Violator has been rocking my Walkman for almost two years, and I’m still trying to negotiate my own Policy of Truth with my Personal Jesus. I’m enjoying the peak of my teenage freedom having earned my driver’s license and yet to sail off to college. I’m not a popular kid. I’m by choice an outsider—part jock, part nerd, and part punk/grunge (while punk is transitioning to grunge and the Dead Milkmen are enjoying commercial success).
On any given Wednesday night my friends and I enjoy strolling through the twenty-four hour Walmart in Benbrook in order to annoy the guy at the gun counter or solicit rambling responses from nutty guys in their thirties by asking which has more recoil, the ‘91 Gen 2 Glock 19 or the classic S&W model 360. (Yes, in the early nineties you could buy a handgun at Walmart at 1am with nothing more than a [fake] driver’s license.)
After such an evening of rollicking entertainment, it was common for me to return home well after midnight. My regular home coming routine involved switching off the headlights at the base of the driveway, shutting off the engine to coast into the carport, and entering my bedroom through the window that I left open a crack before leaving. Mostly this was just to muddy the evidence in case something came up in the court of parental law later on.
Several weeks of this type of behavior begins to take its toll on the quality of my daytime performance as a ranch hand. And yet, so far, I’m pulling it off. I’m making out like a bandit. I’m doing it my way (wink wink).
Then I find myself caught off guard by the slow part of the summer. Shipping day is long past. We’ve worked all the cattle. No bull has busted through the fence to harass the heifers. No windmill needs a new check valve. I painted the pipe coral last summer. But there is always work to be done. My dad decides it’s a good day to ride the fence line and spray mesquite trees attempting to grow up through the wires.
We load the poison mix into a fifty-gallon drum and attach it to the back of the tractor. Of course my dad opts to drive while I’m assigned to ride in the bucket with the spray nozzle. Easy peasy. All I gotta do is pay enough attention to spray mesquites and locust trees as we pass by them. Land of imagination here I come.
Except after three hours of bouncing along the fire guard path plowed on our side of the fence line, it’s dreamland that beckons me home. My dad must have spaced out because its several minutes before he yells at me for missing a tree. When he stops the tractor, I nearly fall out of the bucket. I’m still a bit dazed and confused by the time he reaches me. He raises a brow, shakes his head, and returns to the driver’s seat of the tractor. “Fall asleep again, I’m dumping you out.”
That evening I made the decision to go to bed early.
At the Desk This Week
Fun stuff this week. I crashed a plane full of innocent people into the freezing waters of the Arctic Ocean! Yay! But never fear, not all of them will die. I’m planning on having some Norwegian fishing boats chug to the rescue…so they can be attacked by a bunch of evil telekinetic henchmen and most likely killed. [shrugs] It’s a rough life to be a character in any of my stories. But hey, survival is always a possibility. If I haven’t written it yet, I can’t be totally sure of how it will all play out. (I just have to stay awake at the keyboard.)
If You Wish to Start Reading The Green Ones…
[Click here to start at the beginning.]
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