OK let’s play a little game. It should be fun. Following this brief introduction are three amazing stories about me. Two of them are true, one of them is a total lie. If you would like to play, /msg me with the one you think is a fabrication (identify it by story number if you want to keep your message brief). I wonder how many of you will get it right. It should be interesting. Winners will receive…..
- A /msg from yours truly telling you how awesome you are.
- Your awesomeness is covered in a follow-up daylog.
- AND NOTHING ELSE! Geez, we just had two babies! Lay off! What did you want, MONEY or something?! Man!
Story #1: This one is about the time I almost died. No, I have never been on Death's Door, it's not like my heart stopped and I started going into the light or anything. But something happened to me that should have killed me, but somehow didn't. It was one of those where you cringe and say "That's gonna leave a mark!" And it did. Several.
In 1989, when I was 12, pushing 13 years old, I went off bike riding with my friend Raymond and we ventured off way farther than we had permission to. I had been visiting his house so we'd left from there. Since I did not have my bicycle I had to ride his sister's. And YES it was totally a girl's bike and YES, yes it had a basket!
We ventured out onto a major highway, almost got hit by cars as we were crossing it, and made our way to Camp Skullbones, by Skullbones Creek. Ominous names, huh? It was early spring, and still quite chilly, so being the summer camp type place that it was, it was still closed. There was a steel rope across the paved road at its entrance so nobody could drive in. It was bolted into trees on either side. We tried to be hooligans and rip it from the trees, to no avail. Our combined strength couldn’t even loosen it. So we rode around it and went up a steep hill into the camp. It was boring and dead quiet so we didn’t trespass long.
We decided to have ourselves a little race, him on his dirt bike and me on his little sister’s girly bike. Yes, again, with the basket. While going down the hill steep hill near the entrance, I pulled way ahead of him. I laughed to myself, wondering why he had slowed down. I found out. Suddenly, I was yanked off of the bicycle. I was flying through the air. Something was wrapping around my neck. I became totally confused and disoriented. A second later I fell to the ground.
Ray saw this: me hitting the steel wire, ripping it from one of the trees, it wrapping around my neck and flinging me around in the air like a rag doll, and then me being thrown to the pavement below, surely dead of a broken neck. He about crapped his pants when I simply got up, unwrapped the wire from my neck, and tossed it aside. The only injury I sustained was bad markings around my neck that were difficult to explain to anybody but Ray and myself.
There's no way you would have survived that! This has to be the false one!
Maybe. But... maybe not!
Story #2: In late-fall 2001 I was selling Game Night Revues in the parking garage by the St. Louis hockey arena, which was at the time named the Kiel Center. I usually got there an hour and a half before the game to begin selling. Until you get to about a half hour or so before the game starts the groups of people only come in spurts with many dead times in between where sales slump.
During one of those slumps something kind of frightening happened. To preface this, I must tell you that I also was a cartoonist for the GNR and even though I am a die hard St. Louis Blues fan I didn't like to pull punches (and I still don't; I still do them for another mag) and I would make fun of my own team and/or its players if need be. A player (who shall remain nameless here), one of the enforcer-types, had lost a fight badly a few games before and I had skewered him in a cartoon the previous game. I mean, a player whose only job is to fight losing fights consistently is as bad as a flashy goal scorer not scoring any goals.
During one of the slumps where nobody else was around, who do I see but this player coming towards me from the other end of the parking garage. I believe he was scratched that night. Maybe that had something to do with his losing that fight, and several before that?
Anyway, this guy, who looked like he could probably bench press me, approached me. He said "Are you that cartoonist?!" and against my better judgment, I responded "Yes, yes I am!" (I always loved to boast about my being the cartoonist, as well as the GNR's web site guy, along with being a vendor. This is probably why he figured I was indeed the cartoonist.)
He said something to the effect of "Well, I didn't appreciate your fucking cartoon the other night and I'm gonna kick your fucking ass! Let's see if you fight as well as you draw - which is shitty by the way!"
Oh shit! was what I thought. Like the wuss that I usually am in situations like that, I grabbed the box of GNRs and ran off! Nearby was a St. Louis City cop who was making sure that everybody trying to drive into the garage had the proper passes to do so. I told him about the altercation and pointed behind me. The player was nowhere to be found.
The cop looked back there, shrugged, and I think kind of smiled at me. He said there was nothing he could do about it. I don't think he believed me. Anyway, he pretty much brushed me off, and that's where this story ends.
What?! A player actually threatened to kick your ass? Come on! What is this, the movies?! Were you watching Slapshot recently or something?!
Well, actually I've never seen that movie. But still, you make a good argument. But still you could be WRONG!
Story #3: In spring of 1990 I was out camping with my friend Phil in the woods behind my house in rural Missouri. We liked to camp quite often in those years we were in high school between '90 and '94 and I am remiss that we haven't gotten a chance to do so since. Anyway, it was a Saturday night, our favorite night to camp, I was collecting sticks for our campfire and Phil was relieving himself somewhere else along the trails closeby when something truly weird happened.
I just happened to be looking up at the sky for some reason, and if I hadn't I would have missed the important part. For a tiny fraction of a second I believe I saw, very high in the sky, a multi-colored triangular shape, like perhaps and upside-down pyramid. Suddenly the whole sky lit up, like it silently exploded. It was like an extended, vast lightning burst that for several seconds the deep, dark of night suddenly became daylight.
We ran up to my house straight away to see if anybody else had seen it. They had. It even made the nightly news; they were talking about it only about twenty minutes or so after it had happened. A trucker reported that he actually saw some sort of unidentifiable debris fall on the highway.
I asked a few other people I knew when we went back to school that Monday. Some say they did see that. To this day, I'm not sure how widespread the phenomenon was. Some scientist expert-type said it was a meteor exploding. That's an acceptable explanation, but there's that triangular shape I saw that keeps this one a mystery for me.
Oh, a UFO story, eh?! Puh-LEEZE! Surely this is the story you're lying about! It's an Untrue Fabricated Oration if it's a UFO!
Well you could be right there. Or, maybe you're not!
Well, review the stories again, choose wisely, and message me! Good luck!