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  My father fancied himself an outdoorsman. In fact, he was awarded the rare rank of Eagle Scout, though this was back in the days when the Scoutmasters drank a lot. Our first major outing into the woods as a family with my father leading the way would set the tone for every camping trip we all would take with the man for the rest of his life: somehow a lovely and relaxing “Getting Back To Nature” trip turned into a wildly desperate test of human survival. I was 7 years old; my sister was 6, and my brother had just turned four. My father decided to take his young family to the State Park in Ely, Minnesota. Of course, as was his style, getting there was a chore in itself: My Dad was one of those “Get-There-Or-Die-Trying” kind of Dads. I remember lots of sleeping in the back seat in a sibling sandwich while Dad would work the radio, trying to tune in SOMETHING that would keep him awake…I can’t tell you how many times I heard “King Of The Road” that summer. There were frequent...

Hottentots came into being the Wednesday before the Stone Age began when a bridge troll and his wife were hit by lightning and were transformed into a new human sub-species. The name ‘Hottentot’ is taken from the word “Khoehoheha” in the Khoekhoe language meaning “Hottentot”. The Hottentot people prefer to wear the name proudly in honor of the first Hottentot, whose name is unpronounceable in their language but which translates into American English as ‘Joe’. Joe Hottentot and his wife (Hazel) had a bunch of kids who grew up to mate with bridge trolls, gremlins, Munchkins, and curiously, the French. In time, their numbers constituted a vast army bursting the seams of the Hottentots two bedroom home in the suburbs just outside the ancient city of Damascus. At noon on March 5th of some random year in the Bronze Age, Hottentots became an invading horde who used japes, puns, sarcasm, and extreme violence to conquer the vast majority of the world, an empire the Hottentots held onto until 18...

Trees were an important part of my childhood in West Wilted. Our old village had many huge trees lining the streets. We could play hide-and-go-seek, shoot-‘em-up cowboys, and we could jump out and scare the be-jeesus out of anyone coming down the sidewalk. But one of my best friends was an apple tree in my neighbor’s side yard. We kids wandered around the neighborhood yards at will. No one chased us out. So…I spent a lot of time in the top of that apple tree, It helped me develop into the knowledgeable upstanding person I am today.   The only yard we got chased out of was old Mrs. Grismer’s. Her big black dog Pepper scared me half to death before I even got a good start on living! He was even kept on a chain. Mrs. Grismer was an old grump and so was Pepper. I always thought she should be a better role model for him. My mom said she was just a disappointed old lady and I was to be nice. I never did find out what disappointed her. But I had to be nice so I was….at a distance.   ...

  It was eerily quiet sitting in our rolling rattle-trap in the parking lot behind a convenience store in the small town five miles north of the gravel pit where the wild and rockin’ KKK rally was being held. I was still coughing from all the dust the truck threw up into the opening where the passenger door should have been as we roared away from the ignorant rabble. My brother was sitting in the driver seat, deeply sucking on a cigarette and spitting out the window. The truck was almost dead. The tailpipe had fallen off just as we tore out on the dirt road leading away from the gravel pit. Two of the tires were in the process of going flat. The transmission had only two gears left: reverse and fourth gear, and the engine was smoking badly and dripping oil. I still had no idea where I was. There was a lot of flat farmland, and the town could be anyone of thousands of small towns throughout the Midwest: decent, lower middle-class houses, a dying downtown full of antiques and w...