Technology Is Not My Strong Point

Ladies and gentlemen of my (mostly) imaginary audience, technology hates me. At one time, I was like many of you and believed that technology was nothing more than a classifying term for fields of study, or a broad term used to describe certain advancements. Or maybe even just a collection of gadgetry that permeates our lives every day. But now, I have seen the light. Now, like many schizophrenics and eccentric conspiracy theorists before me, I believe that technology is in fact, an entity. And this entity hates me with the fiery, white-hot intensity of a thousand burning suns. Its hatred of me is so deep-seated and loathing that I'm fairly sure that on Cybertron, there are sects of Transformers who are dedicated to the hatred of my very existence. And one day, I will be suddenly abducted by a band of them and dragged back to Cybertron where I will be crucified on a cross of Energon, and the Autobots and Decepticons will be united by their mutual loathing for me. Yes. Technology hates me so much that Optimus Prime wishes I was dead.

What I'm trying to say here folks is simply that if it's a gizmo, gadget, or widget, it will not work for me the way it's intended to work, and works for everyone else on the planet.

Before I go on, I'm gonna stop and just reiterate that you can direct all of your hate mail care of "ssoul.dmsdiscretion@gmail.com" where I will gladly take note that you took the time to email me, and then delete your message. I say this because I know at this point, at least one person in the world is scoffing to himself and composing an angry letter that's something to the effect of "Dear Sarcastic Soul, I am writing to notify you of several grievous errors you made in your depiction of Cybertron. First of all, you cannot construct a cross out of Energon, as it is incredibly rare and valuable. Second of all, Optimus Prime cannot possibly hate you, because he is the greatest hero of the Autobots who, by the way, would NEVER accept peace with the Decepticons over the death of-" and then I would cut you off. Because if this is in fact anything similar to what you're currently pondering, I'm just gonna take a shot in the dark here and guess that natural light and relationships with women aren't your strong points. By the way, spoiler alert for every Transformers plot ever: Optimus dies at least once. Every time. Look it up.

The reason I bring all this up, believe it or not, isn't just to enrage Transformers lore nerdlings. It's because lately, I have been reminded of this fact in more ways than I care to count and it's making me sad.

Take my car, for instance. Please. Take it. I mean, pay me for it first, but just take it. When I got it, I called it the Strawberry Fields Forever Mobile because the previous owner smoked like a chimney. In order to fix this issue, the dealer equipped it with a very, very strong black cherry air freshener. Problem was, it didn't smell like black cherry, it smelled like strawberries. For a very long time, even after I removed the air freshener. The scent eventually faded, of course, and over time it's earned a new nickname. The Duralast Kevorkian. Why? Because it helps ailing batteries to their deaths. Slowly. Through the equivalent of electrical strangulation. Except that the batteries aren't ailing until it's had a few days alone with them, so it's really more like regular murder instead of assisted suicide. It destroys a battery at least once every two weeks, and sometimes as much as twice in one week in the winter. Fortunately, the warranty on the batteries lasts a whole lot longer, so I get a free one every single time it happens! Autozone hates me too.

Then you have my computer. Oh sweet baby Jesus do you have my computer. I have never had any luck with computers. The first computer I ever bought was a Dell Dimension E310 desktop computer which was basically Dell code for "some crap we found in the warehouse and threw together one drunken evening." That thing caused me more grief than a funeral, and I hated it. In fact, I hated it so much that when I finally put it out of its misery and decided it was time for a new computer, I decided I was going to get the best computer money could buy. I wanted THE best, because I had been dealing so long with the WORST. So I saved for a little over a full year (in my unemployed pre-college years) and bought myself an Alienware Area 51 m9750 performance gaming laptop. $2000 for one laptop, but it was so worth it. Or so I thought. It ran wonderfully for about the first year that I had it, but then a dark truth began to emerge; about a year or so before I bought the laptop, the Alienware company had been bought out. By Dell. For those of you who have never owned a Dell computer, where the hell have you been since the early 2000's? But seriously, there's a little rule that exists with Dell computers. They will die. Within two years. And it will be catastrophic. Because Dell builds computers to die within two years. And my Alienware was no exception. This thing has had more hard drive failures, bluescreen crashes and catastrophic failures in the past four years I've owned it than any other computer I've seen.

Why do I bring all this up, you ask? Well, according to the angry Facebook messages on my timeline yesterday I'd say it's safe to wager that some of my more observant readers noticed a distinct lack of update. The reason for this is because I had an update written out earlier in the week, and decided to set the Blogger schedule option to auto-post it on Wednesday. Thinking I was being all clever with my making use of the technology available to me, I didn't bother to check the damn thing until I figured I would have a good number of views. By the time I realized it hadn't updated, it was late in the afternoon and I had absolutely no inspiration or motivation to write anything, and I couldn't remember enough of what I'd written the day before to re-write it. So it went unwritten. And for that, I apologize.

To tell the truth, I have no idea why I thought even for an instant that the auto-updater was going to work for me. That kind of thing never works for me. It's not any fault of Blogger's, it's just that technology is forever conspiring against me to make everything I touch turn on me in some kind of horrible fashion. This is the reason I don't ever plan to own a smartphone. I'm fairly sure that it would eventually transform into a little monster machine and murder me in my sleep.

I think one of the best examples of technology doing its damnedest to destroy my life comes from last semester at the end of finals week. I had been taking a creative writing course and I had two revised short stories I needed to turn in by a five o'clock deadline. I went to print them out, but my printer decided it was going to pick that day to run out of ink, so I did the next logical thing and tried to upload them to Google Documents. I had been using this service for the entire semester with no issues, so I expected things to go smoothly when I tried to use it again. Except this time, the damn thing was ready for me. Instead of uploading my document files, it actually destroyed the save backups for both of my short stories. I was able to recover one of them, but the other was completely gone. The only version of it I had left was the completely unedited one, and I had no time left to try and edit it again. I was starting to panic at that point, so I threw the unedited version onto a flash drive with my other story and booked it to the campus. I figured I'd just use the computer lab in the English complex to print them off, and then hand them in to the office. Except that the computer lab was locked. Along with every other computer lab. I had to frantically search the entire campus from the English complex to Narnia, sprinting from building to building until I finally found a functioning computer in the library computer lab. Which then took its sweet time booting up and logging me in, so that I'd already lost another twenty minutes on my clock by the time they were printed. And the printer smeared every page with gigantic black ink burns. Every single page looked as if the Satan of technology himself had scarred each page with some kind of dark omen in the form of a malfunctioning printer. As I looked around, nobody else's papers looked like this. Just mine. And because it was the only printer left that was still printing, I just ran with what I had. I went to grab the only stapler in the entire building and opened it. One single staple remained inside. Breathing a sigh of relief, I clamped it down on the corner of my partially destroyed packet. And the staple promptly bent, folded, and slid off the page. There were no other staples to be found. So I sprinted back across campus, up the stairs to the top floor and made it to the English office... Seventeen minutes late. Every employee in that office had packed up and left at exactly five o'clock, and I was standing outside of a dark, locked office at 5:17. So I slid my unstapled, ink-smeared, wind-creased, unedited story under my professor's desk and walked home.

Fortunately, I still made a B in the class because I've had that professor before, and she understands that technology hates me and took pity on me.

This is the reason I don't ever take online courses. I would fail every single one of them. My lecture videos and project files wouldn't download correctly. My finished assignments wouldn't save or upload. Exam time would come around and I would open the page only to get a window that said something like "Error 404 - Exam Not Found. P.S. We're watching you, asshole. Sincerely, Definitely Not Optimus Prime." And it might be just me, but I'm fairly sure that "my computer hates me and I'm receiving death threats from Cybertron" won't hold up very well when I'm trying to explain to the Dean why I have an F in an online art appreciation class.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Ice Skating - An Episode From My Childhood

I know it probably seems like I've been doing a lot of these childhood bits lately, and that's because I have. And there's a good reason for it. My life has been fairly uneventful lately. I really do try to keep my blog posts current and cover topics that are more to do with my daily life and observations, but sometimes there's just no material to work with. And since I seriously doubt anyone who reads this wants to read a tirade over internet trolls and stupid n00b Brazilian League of Legends players, here's another one.

I have a cool party trick. When you hear most people say that, the images that come to mind are probably some involving contortionists, beer guzzling or bad impersonations of famous people, but mine is far more mundane than all that. My party trick is that my left front tooth glows under a black light. And while it doesn't really involve any effort on my part, for whatever reason it's really entertaining to other people.

Believe it or not, the glowing tooth isn't actually a result of spectacular oral hygiene. Not that I don't have spectacular oral hygiene, but that's not the point. The point is, the tooth glows because it's not real. It's an implant.

So now you're probably thinking, "Wow. You're twenty-two years old and you've already had a tooth replaced with an implant? Your oral hygiene must suck, dude" but that's not the case at all, and how dare you insult my oral hygiene. It's actually because when I was younger, I broke the real one. In half. And here's how that happened.

I don't really remember how old I was when this happened. It's probably because the excruciating pain, mortifying embarrassment and overall traumatizing nature of the event have probably reduced certain details into a partially repressed mush, which I'd imagine is a consistency akin to scrambled eggs. What I do remember though, is that I was young and it was my church's youth group trip to the Galleria to go ice skating. Most places in the United States and definitely Canada will probably be thinking, "Big deal. Ice skating. Where's the excitement in that?" But you have to remember, I lived in South Texas on the Gulf of Mexico, or as I liked to call it, the giant humidity bubble of don't snow here. Actually, the weather hardly changed at all down there. It basically operated on three different degrees of hot. There was mostly tolerable hot for most of the year, not quite so hot for the colder months, and dear sweet baby Jesus why the hell is it so hot out here for the Summer months. In South Texas summers, you really could fry an egg on a manhole cover. We tested it. You wouldn't want to then eat that egg, of course, because it'd probably taste like seven kinds of dog piss, cigarette butts and sewage fumes, but it would definitely fry all the same. So given that the only ice we'd ever seen was either floating in a glass of water or the extremely rare occasion that a shallow puddle froze over some night in December, the concept of getting to go ice skating was extremely exciting for us.

I was confident that I could do it. My dad, who'd lived in Michigan for a time, had tried to explain to me that ice skating was difficult and I shouldn't just assume that I was gonna be perfect at it the first time I tried it, but what did he know? I bet Link could ice skate the first time he tried. And besides, I knew how to in-line skate, and roller skate. Not very well, of course, but when your only means of practice were to try and keep up with your much more athletically inclined younger brother and cousin in the aforementioned sweet baby Jesus why heat, it's enough that I knew how. We did have a skating rink, of course, but it was expensive and smelled like cigarette smoke and sweat. Also, the only times I really got to go there were the occasional school skate parties. They'd open the place up to the elementary school on some given Friday and we'd all play silly, stupid games between periods of free skate time. One of those games was a lovely relic of a time when safety and the fragility of children were viewed more as "loose guidelines." It was called "Bat Tag," and it was exactly what it sounded like. One child was given a florescent orange plastic whiffle bat and set loose on the skating floor to chase down and bludgeon their fleeing classmates while the Chicken Dance was played loudly over the building's speakers. I can see how this might have been a good idea in a more controlled environment, but when you put an entire grade or two of elementary school kids on wheels and arm one of them, it becomes Lord of the Flies rather quickly. Plus they always fed us Zebra Cakes and coke, and while that's fine for most children, I had an allergy to corn syrup that caused me to become something that required an exorcism anytime I ingested it. So given the nature of the thing, it was only natural that after a while, my parents were mysteriously too busy on every given evening that was supposed to be a skate party.

There would be no bat tag at the ice skating rink, though. Just me, some friends from church, and an experience that the bipolar south Texas weather had denied us for our entire childhoods up until that point.

When we arrived, after everyone had their wristbands and ice skates and waivers signed (should have been a big red flag right there, but whatever) we were released onto the ice. The spectacle that followed was a sight that would have probably been familiar to anyone who's ever introduced a number of new kittens to an unfamiliar house. Some of them go right on about their business, playing and exploring and zooming around at top speed, while others immediately gravitate to the nearest wall which they cling to for dear life while they look for something to hide under. It was exactly the same on the ice. Half of us took to it like nothing, and the others did their parts to hold up the walls. I was one of the adventurous ones who actually set about learning to skate, but I did end up using the walls. To stop. Because how else are you going to do that? I had always used the walls to stop before at the roller skating rink, after all. I suppose it would have behooved me to learn to stop without them, but you try learning to stop moving while somebody behind you has a bat and is trying to reach you as fast as they can. I found it was just easier to use the wall, or in the case of ice skating, do a baseball slide to see how far you could get before you lost momentum.

I skated until my heels were blistered from my ill-fitted ice skates and I was clumsily tottering around, and it wasn't really a big surprise when I slipped, fell backwards and smashed the back of my head against the ice so hard that I saw nothing but blackness and flittering stars for a while. So I decided that I needed to take a break and escorted myself off the ice. It was well enough that I did anyway, because the Zamboni was released right afterwards to clean the ice and everyone had to leave anyway. After a while, it retreated back into its little box and the ice was left with a slick wet sheen that told me it was at least twice as slippery as it had been before.

Now, I've made note before of the grasp I had on common sense as a child. And that very common sense was telling me loud and clear that I should probably not go back out on the ice anymore for a while because I already smacked the back of my head, and now it's twice as slick. But for reasons I can't explain, I did anyway. And it was fine for a while. Just business as usual, tearing larger holes into the flesh of my heels and trying to pretend it didn't hurt like hell and that I really was still having fun zipping around in circles until I smashed into a wall to stop.

And it was one of those times that I smashed into a wall that some passing skater decided to teach me how to stop. I already knew how to stop, I tried to explain. I just crashed into walls. It worked well enough. But he wanted to show me how to stop the right way, which was evidently to drag one skate behind the other to slow your momentum. So I tried it. I'm still not sure if it was a bad patch of ice I hit, or if I did it wrong, or if the possible concussion I'd given myself was throwing off my sense of balance, but for whatever the reason, I failed his stopping technique spectacularly. And landed flat on my face.

I don't actually remember hitting the ice. I just remember popping back up from the impact and doing the initial systems check to make sure that everything was still functioning the way it should be. Which went fine, until I ran my tongue along my top row of teeth, and where my front one used to be I found only a small squishy thing which tasted like excruciating pain and blood. And then I started freaking out. I screamed bloody murder and then promptly closed my mouth because it hurt like hell when the air hit the exposed nerve, and I quickly skated back over to the seating area to get off the ice. The adults who were present kept asking what had happened, and in response I spit out a mouthful of blood and dignity and proceeded to bawl my eyes out from the pain. And it was at this point that all hell broke loose among the adult leaders. One of them attempted to pacify my hysterical state by giving me a cell phone to play games on, which actually worked for a short time because I wasn't allowed to have a cell phone and never got to play games on them. But after losing at Snake for the third time, my attention for the game was replaced by the sensation of screaming exposed nerve in my mouth, and I was hysterical again.

Ultimately, I was escorted out of the area (probably both because I needed medical attention and because I was causing a massive scene which I'm sure was costing the skating rink money in customers who didn't want to destroy their own teeth) and into the church van to go home. My best friend Ben gave up the rest of his own skate time to come with me, which I was highly appreciative of not only for the company, but because he had a copy of Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons on his gameboy color which I hadn't gotten to play yet, and he let me play it on the way home. I've compared his loyalty and behavior to a golden retriever before, but however accurate it may be I was glad for it at that point. By the time we were halfway back to home, the nerve had stopped hurting quite so badly. I still don't really know if that was just something exposed nerves do, or if the pain had caused my brain to fall into sort of a state of shock in order to cope with it.

We did actually find the other half of the tooth on the ice, which is kind of amusing in and of itself, but the break was so high and so much of the nerve was exposed that there was really no way to save the tooth. As a result, the rest of the tooth was pulled and a root canal was performed (which was a traumatic story all its own) and I was landed with a nice replacement tooth, and a neat stupid party trick.

I have gone ice skating several times since then, and I haven't broken anything since. In fact, the last time I skated at the galleria I was with my (now ex) girlfriend, and the only challenge I had to face then was resisting the urge to clothesline the irritating children who insisted on skating between us while we were holding hands. Had it not been for the fact that she thought they were cute and that it probably would have been not quite socially acceptable, I might have introduced them to a game called Bat Tag...

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Animals are not my strong point.

After devoting seven years of my life to the Boy Scouts of America program, spending countless nights camping and hiking, and earning my Eagle Scout award, pop-culture and disney-production logic dictate that I should have developed some kind of magical empathy with woodland creatures. However, I can assure you that this is not the case. I have actually recently come to the conclusion that I hate animals. Almost all of them. With a passion.

I came to this realization this week when it was Monday of my dog and house sitting week, and I was already wishing it were Saturday. Not because of the house-sitting part; I actually don't mind the cleaning and maintenance and the broken shower in the bathroom or anything else like that. What I don't like is the dogs. We have two of them, and they're approximately two halves of one idiot. And that's putting it nicely. Our female dog actually functions at a mental capacity that's somewhere between a lemming and an aluminum bucket. Which really isn't fair to the lemming. Their names are Scottie and Tillie, and they're Tibetan Spaniels. We got them from a breeder, and they have pedigrees and paperwork and thick contracts we had to sign agreeing that we would/would not do certain things to them. A common misconception with dogs, I gather, is that pure-bred breeder dogs are typically better, smarter dogs than your common ASPCA mutt. Well, after living with Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Bitch for these past few years, I can safely put that myth in the busted pile because it's a load of crap.

Scottie is a small black and white dog with an attitude problem that could rival most rebellious teenagers. We've never gotten along because he's been convinced that he's alpha over me since day one, and our relationship has never improved. We're not friends, and neither of us is willing to remedy that. It's not for lack of trying, mind you. I taught the little ass over half the tricks he knows, and we still hate each other. He's also got an irritating habit of claiming ownership of the house anytime my dad leaves for a while by crapping all over the place. Though, as long as we've been at war, he isn't the major problem.

Tillie is a blonde creature that was once a small dog. She's about 35 pounds of brainless dog fat (or more), and that's saying something for a dog that stands not even a foot off the ground. I'm fairly sure I've seen seagulls with more brain power than this dog. Unlike Scottie, she's impossible to train because she's just too stupid to understand basic commands. I'm fairly convinced she doesn't even know her own name. If you call Tillie she'll come, but she'll also come to "Scottie," "Dumb," any of the cats' names, and "Turkey Sandwich." I know this because I've tested all of them. Her special quirks include barking loudly and incessantly at everyone who walks in through the door (including people she already knows well) and somehow managing to give herself dreadlocks in her tail and her stomach fur.

Now, to be clear, I've never understood the logical reasoning behind owning a dog for a pet. Any dog lover will be quick to tell you that dogs are as intelligent as human children. They understand a small vocabulary of commands and function at a mental level which is similar to a three-year-old. From one standpoint, I suppose, this is kind of impressive to them. I mean, humans are technically the most intelligent beings on the planet. But then you have to look at it from the "did you listen to what you just said?" standpoint. Dogs are like three-year-olds. Perpetual three-year-olds. That live for about twelve to fourteen years or more. As three-year-olds. Have you ever lived with a three-year-old? Most people have, but in case you haven't, let me break down exactly what that entails. You have a small, noisy, messy creature who understands roughly a fourth of what you say, tends to ignore the commands it does understand, gets into everything, eats everything, and generally makes your life revolve around making sure it doesn't find some new and creative way to kill itself. It's almost like dogs and human children are programmed to be self-destructive and suicidal. The primary differences between the two is that a dog probably won't cause a screaming tantrum scene in the middle of Walmart or make the other passengers want to hijack the plane you're sharing and toss them out of the emergency exit just so they can stop the crying. Also, it tends not to be such a big deal if dogs eat Christmas tinsel as opposed to the child eating it.

As I write all this, I can already hear the dog lovers charging in to defend their beloved brainless beasts. "But you're just biased!" They'll say. "Dogs are so much smarter than that! You can teach them to do so many things, and they'll protect the family, and they're just so ADOWABLE!"

Yep. I'm biased because I hate dogs. You know who else is biased? People who love dogs. Why? Because they will willingly invite a halfwit creature who does nothing but make unnecessary noise, cause property damage, generate unbelievable amounts of crap and piss, add hundreds of dollars in food and vet bills to the family financial burden, and shed mountains of fur, into their homes. And why? Because dogs love their owners and they're adorable and fun to play with.

So let's weigh the pros and cons of this arrangement, shall we?

Cons: Stupid creature, noisy, breaks things, craps and pees everywhere (yard or house, doesn't matter, you still have to deal with it), expensive to maintain, makes your house look and smell like a wreck.

Pros: They're fun and cute.

You know what else is loyal, adorable and fun to play with and teach tricks to? A Tamagotchi. A plastic handheld egg with a screen and a little digital pet inside. And when the Tamagotchi craps on the floor, you can clean it with the press of a button and then beat it mercilessly to punish it and nobody calls the police. When it makes too much noise, you can mute it. And when it gets old and it isn't fun anymore and you want a new one, you don't have to wait around and watch the old one degrade slowly until it's a crippled sack of fur and bones that's just miserably waiting to die. You just take a needle and poke the reset button. Voila, new Tamagotchi.

Now, I'm sure the question on everyone's mind is, "So you're a cat person, then?" And the answer is yes. My cat is the only animal I have ever felt any kind of attachment to, and I love her to death. And I know. Dog lovers will argue with me until the cows come home about whether cats or dogs are smarter. And you know what? I don't care. Scientifically, dogs and cats are of a fairly similar intelligence. So similar in fact that it's not worth distinguishing between the two. However, I will say this: I have never seen my cat take off running at full speed, snarling and growling, to slam head-first into the door so hard the walls shake, just because the mailman put something in the slot. But I have seen the dog do that. And I have never seen my cat sit and rip chunks of its own fur out until it had a massive mangy bald spot on its butt. But I have seen the dog do that. Just sayin'.

I honestly think that, in preparation for owning a dog, somebody should modify a Roomba-type robot to wander aimlessly, replay the same three barking sounds over and over again incessantly, pause every now and then to leave puddles of some foul liquid or goo on the ground, leave a trail of fur as it motors around, and generate the oh-so-lovely odor of stinky dog so that it clings to every surface and piece of furniture in the house. And if the would-be owners can endure that for a few weeks without shutting the robot off or getting rid of it, they'll have a better understanding of what it's really like to own a dog.

And as for the people shouting "You can't just base all dogs on your experience because it depends on the breed of dog!" Okay. Fine. Show me a breed of dog that doesn't smell, bark, shed, drool, lick, slobber, eat, crap, urinate, dig, or require shots or vet bills, and I'll show you a potted plant.

Ultimately, if you're planning to get a pet, here's some advice. It's the 21st century. We have advanced technology now. There is literally no reason you should feel compelled to purchase and own an animal. So get an iPod app. Seriously. It's all the joy of owning a pet with none of the cleanup, house destruction, feces or foul odors. And when you leave to go someplace, you don't need to hire a dogsitter. Just close the app. If you're really deadset on getting a real physical pet though, I would suggest a pet rock. It's been a thing for years. Nobody's going to judge you. I promise.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

The Gang - An Episode From My Childhood

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, my childhood, particularly my elementary school years, was a gigantic collection of poor choices, stupid mistakes and memories I'd really just like to repress. However, as I have been as of yet unable to do so, I figured I'd share another lovely memory from my elementary school days with you.

As a child, I attended school at A.P. Beutel (pronounced boy-tel) elementary. The way the classes are arranged at Beutel, kindergarten, first grade and second grade classes are taught in the main building, while third and fourth grades are taught in a separate wing known as the Tally building. Naturally, in the mind of a new third grader, it was something of a major life achievement to move from the little kids building to the Tally building. You get new classrooms, new playgrounds, and a new hall. Actually, the Tally building was exactly that. One long hallway with several classrooms, one boys bathroom, and one girls bathroom. Both bathrooms were at the very front end of the hall, with a fairly large gap between them and the first set of classrooms. So it was only natural that a bunch of stupid stuff would go on in those bathrooms. Like using the brown paper towels and half the soap in the dispenser to make the ceiling look like a bat cave, or skipping class to mess around with friends. Or that one time a particularly stupid classmate ran screaming hysterically from the bathroom and all the way down the hall after scaring the piss out of himself playing "I believe in Bloody Mary." One particular oddity in the bathrooms, however, was that in the larger handicap stall at the back of the row was a door. The door was a thin piece of plywood painted to match the colors of the walls, and was kept locked by a simple lock. There were often stories and rumors and the like about what was behind the door, but to my knowledge, nobody ever bothered to open it and see.

...Until my third grade year.

One thing you have to understand before I go on with this story is that I was never a popular child in school. I was something of a strange child, due to my astonishing naivete, sheltered home life and complete and utter lack of social skills. As such, I had only a very small group of friends, most of whom were also outcasts. There was a boy named Cameron, a girl named Sarah, and another boy in a wheelchair named Neil who was only part of our misadventures some of the time. I was undoubtedly the leader, though, in my own mind at least. We would spend our lunchtimes sitting at the far end of the table with a sizable gap between us and the rest of our classmates so that we could talk about nerdy outcast things and not be bothered. At recess, we'd go to the same spot every day that was far away from the regular play equipment and we'd play Pokemon. Not the video game, mind you, we weren't allowed to bring gameboys or trading cards to school. Instead, we'd play real Pokemon. I was always Ash, Sarah was always Misty, and Cameron was Brock on the days he cooperated. Cameron really always wanted to be Agumon, but we weren't playing Digimon, God damn it, we were playing Pokemon. We tried to let him play Agumon once or twice, but it never really worked out because digimon and pokemon don't fight the same way. Especially when it was Cameron Agumon versus our invisible make-believe pokemon.

With the way our little merry band of outcasts functioned, it was no wonder that when we caught word of a gang hanging around the school, our little brains took it too far. Lord only knows how or why we ended up with this knowledge, and to tell you the truth I don't remember the particulars of the story. I simply remember overhearing a teacher saying something about a gang on the school grounds. I think she was talking to another teacher, but it didn't matter. All I heard was "gang hanging around on school grounds" and it was too late. Aside from being an outcast, another important fact you need to know about third grade me is that because I had so few friends and such a naive idea of how the world really worked, my brain was programmed to function in terms of video games. I spent the vast majority of my time playing them as a child. I probably spent all the time I should have been spending making friends, playing outside and learning how to function playing video games instead. My favorite game by far, however, was Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was fun, and I thought Link was the coolest guy ever. Ten year old kid suddenly learns he has this epic destiny, takes up a sword and charges off to battle the forces of evil? Hell yeah. I wanted to be that guy. In my mind, I was that guy. So upon catching wind of this alleged gang activity at the elementary school, naturally I couldn't just let it go and ignore what I'd heard. Would Link let these evildoers go unpunished? Of course not. He'd grab his Kokiri sword, hunt them down and smite their asses. Which is exactly what I suddenly felt inclined to do. I was the only one entrusted with this knowledge I was granted by eavesdropping in a hallway. It was my destiny. I didn't have a sword but a stick would work, and I didn't have a slingshot because Mom wouldn't let me have one, but I'd have to do without.

So off I went to tell my secret destiny to my outcast friends. Naturally they believed me. I mean, I heard a teacher say it. How could that possibly not be true? So that day at the lunch table, we became the A.P. Beutel equivalent of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. We spent our recess periods scouring the playgrounds for clues and signs of gang activity. Ultimately, we ended up with a collection of paper scraps, a pile of Bud Lite crown bottle caps, and a mountain of cigarette butts. (Because y'know, smoking and drinking beer were only things that gang members did. You can thank the Chicken Club and other anti-drug, anti-gang organizations for drilling that particular message into my naive little third grader head.) Once we'd gathered our little collection of trash, we were convinced. The gang was not only using the playground for their illicit activities and villainy, but they were in the school. They had obviously infiltrated the school and were using it as a base of operations, and we were the only ones who could stop it.

So we told our teacher. And we got laughed at. Not directly, of course, but still. And then she told us to go sit down, and that we shouldn't worry about things like that, and no gangs were at the school. Which was of course entirely accurate, but I wasn't going to be stopped by the ignorance of grown-ups. Obviously she hadn't paid enough attention to the clues. It was enough, of course, to stop Sarah and Cameron who gave up the chase then and there, but they didn't have a destiny. So as I sat at my desk, brooding and wondering how next to pursue this evil gang now that the teacher had ignored my warnings, I decided I needed a place to mull this over without the distractions of the classroom. Off to the bathroom I went.

And that's when I discovered the secret door in the fourth stall.

It had been there, all along. Staring me blind in the face, and I just hadn't made the connection. If a gang were in the school, where else could they possibly be? It was so obvious! Nobody ever went into this door. Nobody even knew what was behind it, or why it was there. So I decided to find out. For the sake of my classmates, my disbelieving teachers, and my destiny. So the next day, I brought a paperclip with me on my bathroom trip. And after a while, I tripped the latch and the mystery door opened.

The inside was not exactly what I was expecting. It kind of looked like my grandparents' attic, with plywood on the floor and walls. There was a bucket and a mop in there, and a folding card chair. There was a hanging light with a pull chain, and a bunch of other miscellaneous junk. I climbed inside tentatively, and to my surprise, the door actually led straight to an identical secret door directly in front of me. I crept over and opened that one, and promptly found myself in the girls bathroom. Fortunately, I was still weirded out by most girls at the time and their bathroom was a forbidden zone, so I quickly retreated. More fortunate than that, the stall I emerged into was unoccupied at the time, though I can only imagine what might have happened had that not been the case. It was dark in the little room behind the secret door, and I was afraid of the dark, so I quickly retreated back into the boys bathroom. However, as I closed the door to latch it back, I thought I caught a glimpse of a brown bottle... It had to have been a beer bottle. That was it. That was all the proof I needed. I immediately ran to the one person I knew I could trust with this information: the principal. Mrs. Vickers and I were very well acquainted. I spent part of almost every single day in her office when my teachers needed a break from my emotional outbursts and other disruptive antics. I even had my own special chair where I could sit and do my work and play with her Magic 8-Ball. That chair would have to wait today, though, because I had a special mission. I burst in and told her everything I'd gathered like a good little sleuth. I told her about the beer bottle caps and cigarette butts on the playground, and about hearing about the gang, and most importantly, I told her how I picked the lock on the secret door in the bathroom and found a beer bottle in there. The look on her face was one of concern and confusion, so she told me very reassuringly that she would look into it and sent me back to class. Satisfied with my job, I marched back down the hall and back to class, which I'd been gone from for a very long time by that point.

Now, looking back on this incident with my adult mind, I can only imagine what must have been going through my principal's head at the time. Here is this kid who's notorious for telling exaggerated, mostly untrue tales which could probably be called delusions of grandeur. He spends every day in this office for distracting behavior, refusal to do work, breaking pencils, crying, etc. And yet, despite the story and the delusions and all the nonsense, he claims to have found an empty beer bottle in the school. The only thing she could have done was to actually look into it.

I made a couple more excursions into the secret room after that, but the following week I found the door fitted with a shiny new deadbolt lock which required a key- an obstacle that exceeded my lock picking skill at the time. There was no more mention of the gang, and for all I knew, I had been victorious. In reality, I had seen a bottle. Of chemical cleanser. It was brown, but it was also plastic. There actually had been a conversation about a gang at the playgrounds, but there was never really a gang. Just a bunch of hooligan middle-schoolers hanging around on the playgrounds when school was out.

So that's the story of how I eavesdropped on a teacher, blew things out of proportion, hunted down a non-existent gang, made the faculty unnecessarily nervous, and had the janitor placed under investigation for alcohol use on an elementary school property.

I am so sorry.

-The Sarcastic Soul-