Making a fireball of a sled when I was a kid - a gas can I punched a hole in and let it leak gas on the ground - and then put it on a sled and sent it down the hill to light the trail of gas to watch a sled go on fire down the hill....
Seeing just how far a compound bow could shoot an arrow straight up in the air.....in the middle of urban Oregon City......and then suddenly having the light click on that "what goes up must come down" and realizing I couldn't see the damned thing and where it was going to come down on me at.....and all of us idiot teenage kids racing into the house wondering how long we needed to wait before it was safe and hoping I hadn't killed one of the neighborhood kids with an arrow through the skull......
Lighting a road flare in the middle of the front room and trying to get it outside while it dripped hot phosphorous across the BRAND NEW (1 day old) carpet and linoleum that mom and dad just had put in and trying to cover it with the vacume cleaner on it....I was lucky I survived dad on that one.....
Putting an ice-cube into a vat of molten lead and having it explode all over my chest while I wasn't wearing a shirt.....yes....molten lead on your skin is an interesting sensation.....
Making an improvised cannon in the garage out of a pipe and match heads ground up and made into gunpowder to launch my version of shrapnel.....think it's a good thing that one didn't go off.....
Taking moms car for a drive illegally without a license one night while she was out on a date and not supposed to be back till super late and I was left unsupervised....I don't know that would have killed me but...ahem...yeah.....I sped home in neutral on that one.....
Of course the police car I sank into the ocean and went down with is a chart topper all the time.....nothing like being underwater in a car calling for help over the radio and wondering how you're going to explain this IF you get out alive....
Having volunteered to take up the ultralight we had just built to test pilot it on the first run only getting ousted from it by the senior guy who crashed on a left turn and crushed his skull and nearly died.....
Racing my friend's BMW through downtown Nagasaki on my motorcycle to see who could get back to base faster and nearly taking out a brick wall that lined the parkway doing 80mph in a 25mph curve....
Nearly flipping my bronco doing 60mph down the long beach peninsula when I hit what looked like a patch of water but turned out to be a good three foot hole / dip filled with water that launched me and my girlfriend up in the air a good I don't know how many feet and coming down like something out of the Dukes of Hazard and not flipping the thing end over end while she screamed at me and hit me in the arm while I laughed that we just happened to be alive....and survived.....
Seeing how fast the GMC Jimmy my aunt lent me would go in reverse....at night.....on a two lane road.......with my girlfriend in it and spinning it around at 60mph on a country road and avoiding the ditch.....
Daring each other to light the empty butane canisters in boy scouts which one of us did essentially creating a
flaming bomb on the picnic table....
Oh - and yes - pissing off the Japanese Mafia and getting into a one-on-five fight unarmed in the middle of an intersection after a hella-sweet car chase that spanned some 12 miles at speeds up to 110mph through Nagasaki Perfecture and had the trappings of "Gone in 60 Seconds" and then trying to decapitate the guy who was the leader of the bunch between my car and his van because he was stupid enough to get out and threaten the wrong guy with a crow bar and leave his sorry ass open and defenseless and being headed for Japanese Prison - but a quick change of plans put me head on with a bus and then running a motorcycle or something head on into the bus instead of me.....actually it was more they pissed me off.....I bet they still talk about that one in hushed tones about how they scrambled like little girls to get out of my way before they were killed......and don't talk about it with their girlfriends...
Driving my motorcycle at 100mph across an unlit unfinished freeway system across Nagasaki in the middle of the night that was being built just for bragging rights to say an American was the first to be on it and then realizing I was headed off a bridge and into a neighborhood from a few stories up if I didn't slow down and pay attention because it wasn't finished yet.......
Doing 130mph on 26 inbound in my acura after a crotch rocketwho was trying to impress his girlfriend and waking up a few hundred people during their early morning commutes while driving in BETWEEN cars trying to merge in the morning traffic.....
Tearing through another city at 80mph in a 25mph zone and nearly taking out some old lady with a cane crossing a crosswalk on an early beautiful morning.....who suddenly found the ability to RUN - yes RUN - to get out of my way.....that would have killed her but I'd have been in prison again....
I've had a few "weapons malfunctions" that have happened in my bedroom as a kid - always interesting trying to pass that one off to the parents as "slamming the door" and lucky I didn't take my foot off....or my face....or my hand.....or my face......
Flipping over my handlebars on my bike and knocking myself out and nearly braking my neck and tearing my face off while showing off for the lovely ladies next door as a teenager.....my face healed thanks to the prayers of my mother.....
Facing off against a car full of teenage punks on my mission that tried to hit me and stepping into the street with my arms out and telling them they missed and come to hit me again and standing there refusing to move while they turned around and revved the engine and came at me head on in their stupid gay-rod low-rider and hit my shirt sleeves with their antenna as they swerved and were chicken to hit me while I was walking in the street and dared them to hit me again.....
Facing off with the german shepherd some guy sicked on me and I caught it with a right hook in mid air as in the face (spattering a nice blood and snot concoction across the guy's house as it spun the dog in mid-air) as it went for my neck and then chasing it down to finish it off and break its neck before I remembered I was a missionary and stood back up and introduced myself to the guy......(You learn how to kill dogs as a K-9 officer)......
A really nice car chase across Portland with someone tailing me right off my bumper that I dragged into the interchange median where 405 turns into 5 south and 405 north.....that was a nice one - nobody could follow me through that - oh yeah - wife and kids in the car......I think we were only doing ~90 in a 50 on that one though.....that was pretty intense.....
Running down the thieves who robbed my car in front of my mother's house....of course they were just stupid and not really dangerous....still.....that was a nice piece of work....
Facing off with the however many hooligans in front of my house....actually they were lucky on that one - they were about to end up face-down on the pavement outside their car in front of their girlfriends and learn some manners on that one.....that wouldn't have been me that got hurt unless they were armed but I was looking for it....they had common sense enough to get back in their cars and drive along slowly and pipe down.....
I don't know how many I faced off with on shipboarding operations in the navy......
Surviving a drive-by (or two) on my mission in Baton Rouge (Yes...I recognized gunshots and had cleared two picnic tables from a sitting position while everyone else was trying to figure out what was going on...)
I seem to remember going head to head with a semi or two with very little passing room in my camero a time or twenty as well......
There's a reason why I sit with a loaded .45 by my keyboard while I blog or do homework most days....ya NEVER KNOW what could come to the door.....
And yet - here I am.
I wonder what for at times. To what end?
Suck me....I gotta go to work in the morning....yes....that's what for....so I can do payroll in the morning.....oh and get bitched at for trying to improve the company and make things better and whined at for not doing people's jobs for them while I do other people's jobs for them....
Maybe its so I can tell my kids stories.....is my life epic? I don't know. If I am still alive in the future - it's definitely not epic enough. Yes. More epic-ness is needed. I must increase the epicishness of my life about seven fold.
How will I do it?
Do you really go through all that and just say....never mind? My best stories are a bunch of stories about a bunch of stupidity as a kid or lucky escapes with vehicles where I was ballsier than the other guy and just let it go at that with nothing to show for it?
What should my epic life look like?
No.....I think this is what I avoided........hmmmmm how else could my epic life look?
Makes a better story and is less scary and more impressive than a "train wreck" of a life....
Hmmmm....fun....but something about being referred to as an "Epic Boob" and my life turning women into lesbians doesn't sound like much of an accomplishment I want to brag about.....
There we go - this is very nice! Much more epic.....but how will I be memorialized?
Okay - nice - but - I don't know what the Romans or Greeks valued in terms of manhood - while it'd be cool to get my own statue and all I think this would be a bit embarrassing on the ahem...manhood side (IT WAS COLD OUT DARNIT! YEAH! THAT'S WHY I WAS RUNNING AROUND NAKED!)....I'm thinking maybe the reason they shot his heel was because he was running around naked and they were all "GAH! MY EYES! WHAT IN THE NAME OF JOVE IS THAT???" and shot low hitting his heel....maybe he died of embarrassment....
YES! This is more like it. Some info-babe reporting on me while I wreak destruction in the form of shock-and-awe in the background and overthrow some establishment....somewhere.....
Still haven't got it quite planned out yet - but going out like some old geezer who's best stories are again ones of stupidity and luck as a kid.....not me.
Yes...that sounds much better....LOOKS better too!
Not only that - since I'm the first in my family to NOT have a purple heart...I like to think we're evolving....of course if I gave up that would be DEvolution....can't do that...its not in the rules....not in the genes....
Sorry for the anticlimactic ending. So to make up for it - I will give my readers a SPANKING!At the hands of Sir Galahad.....the CHASTE.