I Got Tagged

A meme, a meme. Kent Gowran tagged me for this, so I will try to live up to it. Here are the rules, cut-and pasted from his blog:

• Tell up to six outrageous lies about yourself, and at least one outrageous truth – or – switch it around and tell six outrageous truths and one outrageous lie. (See below.)
• Nominate some more “Creative Writers” who might have fun coming up with outrageous lies of their own. (Check the end of this post.)
• Post links to the blogs you nominate.
• Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know that you have nominated them.

Since it doesn’t specify, I’m not going to tell which ones are true, or how many, just that it is a mixture. You decide when I’m lyin’.

1. When I was eight years old, I was in the back seat, my dad driving, while on a trip to Georgia. A young man on a motorcycle passed us at high speed going up a hill. He was unable to clear our car before the 18-wheeler came over the hill, and I witnessed him more or less disintegrating when he hit the truck head-on. We had to stay and watch the cleanup, down literally with shovels, because some of the “remains” were splattered on our car. I didn’t think it affected me much, but I’ve never been comfortable riding a motorcycle.

2. When I was 16, I was picked on by the school bully. As luck would have it, I was holding a mallet at the time. The blow to the forehead knocked him out cold, and sent me before a judge on the charge of assault with a deadly weapon.

3. My grandfather, who died long before my birth, has two graves. One in Fort Hancock, Texas dated 1911, one in Alabama dated 1951. Obviously he’s in the second one, but I’ve never been able to figure out who’s in the first one, or whether his brother is in the Texas grave beside him, as the marker says.

4. I had a distant cousin, much older than I, who died in Alcatraz before I was born.

5. In college, a friend with connections hatched a scheme for us to get rich by bringing in bales of marijuana from Mexico. We were supposed to get rich, but were left broke after I dumped the bales overboard after sighting the lights of a coast guard cruiser. The lights turned out to be a buoy.

6. As a high school junior, I had to go before Bubba Scott, the director of the state athletic association. I was pitching against our arch rivals and just didn’t have it, I was getting pounded. For some reason, the coach wouldn’t take me out even though I couldn’t get anything to break, and they were teeing off on me. So I hit three consecutive batters in the head, sparking a small riot. Bubba asked me if I meant to hurt the boys. “Bubba,” I said. “I meant to kill them, but my arm was tired.” I was suspended for six months.

7. As a college freshman, I helped construct a makeshift cannon out of the hard cardboard roll from a roll of carpet, using black powder and crushed toilet paper rolls for projectiles. We used the device to bombard a girls’ dorm one winter night from a surprising distance, enjoyed the way the flaming TP arced across the night sky. We underestimated the force at which the rolls were propelled, and a couple of them smashed through windows in the girls, dorm. I had left five minutes before campus security rounded up everyone, and everyone there was expelled.

This was fun. In turn, I’ll lay the burden on John Horner Jacobs, Jim McLeod, Rabid Fox, Doc Horror, Craig Clarke, and Wulf. Have fun, lads.
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