Snakes and Snails and Salamanders...

I just finished The Pig Man, a book written in 1968. A few references aside I quite enjoyed it. Of course it's written for young teenagers. But I didn't get into much trouble when I was a teen so it was nice to live vicariously through the wise-ass characters in the book.

Like I said I was a pretty boring teenager aside from the roman candle incident. But to my credit I really thought that the cat would move out of the way. I also blame the lack of proper adult supervision.

I got into a great deal of trouble from age 4 to 10. I have the honor of being the only child ever expelled from Noe Valley Preschool. Yes, I did take a metal chair and use it to open up this other boy's head, but he was like three months older than me and he had the nerve to roll a rollerskate at my leg. There's other stuff that I'm not particularly proud of, mostly because I was small and so I learned to fight dirty. I was a hyperactive child with some anger issues. Now I've traded that in for lethargic and jaded. I takes a lot less energy to scoff at badly made films and make sarcastic quips than it does to go leaping Super-fly Jimmy Snuka off the top of the monkey bars leveling the schoolyard bully and choking him into submission. I still feel bad about that one too. I found out later that he was in the special ed program. I suppose if I still had the unlimited energy and rapid healing ability I'd be tempted. As long as I'm getting acts of violence off my chest, I want to make a personal apology to those salamanders I dropped onto that cactus to see what would happen. Like comedy and tragedy little boys also straddle the fine line between curiousity and evil. I just pray that when I have a child that it's a girl. That way she won't be awful until she's 13 or 14 and that gives me time to save for a good Scandinavian boarding school.