One particularly vivid olfactory memory I have of childhood is waking up each school day to the heavy smell of my dad's shit and cigarette smoke. The bathroom he used to get ready in the morning was across the hall from my bedroom. There, he situated himself on the toilet, puffing away on a Winston and uncoiled a smoky grump without shame, door wide open.

For as many striking similarities as I find between my late dad and me in my adult life, we clearly have never seen eye to eye on the issue of openly pooping. Sure, I talk freely and gleefully about pooping, but I want solitude when I'm milling mahogany. Unless I'm in the house by myself, even if it's just Ang and me, I close the door. We pee around each other (in the toilet while in the presence of each other, not like in a circle on the floor while the other sits there Indian style), but pooping is a different animal entirely. Pooping is a time for quiet contemplation and sometimes for struggling with your inner demons in physical, gaseous, and spiritual forms. That's Jeremy time.

Dad did eventually quit smoking, so the smoke disappeared from my mornings when I was in junior high. Eventually the shit smell was gone, too. What I wouldn't give to smell them both again.

May your costume not be too cold on the way to the car and between houses. And while we're at it, may it not snow.

May your costume not rip, your greasy makeup not run into your eyes.

May you not be assaulted and viciously robbed of your candied treats.

May your candy be all chocolate and non-gummy, non-fructose, and non-gelatinous. And God have mercy on the motherfucker who puts a painted nickel, pencil, or toothbrush in your bag.

May you not be pulled into a van and touched inappropriately by a bearded man who said he had candy.

May your bags of poo burn on the doorsteps like the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

May you have a happy Halloween comma motherfucker period

Project "Throw Shit Away" continues at the Eagan facility, and I'm coming up with gems from the past several times an hour. This one is from 1993, the beginning of my senior year in high school. My satirical skills are highlighted in this delightful romp titled, "You Bet Jurassic!" There is no scientifically possible way I could have been more clever. Now if you'll excuse me, I still have about a decade worth of gas station receipts and Playboy renewal notices to go through. I think I found a sock full of dried jism, too. I'm not sure if it's mine, but it's a keeper.

Click an image to make it all big n stuff.

Remember Chewels? Chewels were pieces of gum with a liquid center that squirted in your mouth when you bit into them. I'm not sure what the thought process was in releasing Chewels and similar products, but if you want a piece of gum to squirt fruit-flavored jizz in your mouth so badly, you might as well get it over with and suck a dick dipped in cranberry juice and pectin.

I have little to hide and shame is a foreign concept to me. After mentioning that I saw a former coworker working at Fantasy Gifts recently, I was asked the inevitable, slyly intoned question, "Oh? Well, what were YOU doing there?" Without missing a beat, my truthful response was, "I was buying lube."

There are certain actions and behaviors from my youth which I do have a small amount of guilt over, however. Throughout high school, I spent countless hours drawing a comic strip based on the character Corky from the series Life Goes On. Corky, as you may remember, was a kid with Down Syndrome. The comics' plotlines typically parodied stories from the series and usually ended in Corky eating poop, splashing around in poop, or pooping on or otherwise getting poop all over someone else (try to contain your shock). I would also sneak my Corky character into other drawings, even featuring him prominently on a t-shirt I designed for a children's event sponsored by my employer in college.

Actually, now that I think about it, that's still pretty funny. Though I promise not to make fun of Corky anymore. Or at least try not to.

Obviously our grandparents grew up in a completely different era with a different vernacular. Certain words and attitudes were acceptable when they were growing up, words and attitudes that today are outdated and, in some cases, downright offensive to modern sensibilities.

I grew up in North Dakota near a town of about 1,200 people. In rural North Dakota, African American people were far and few between. They were such a rarity that once my grandmother looked out the window and was heard to proclaim with amazement, "There's a NEGRO walking down the street!" I'm sure I rolled my eyes, perhaps even mildly chastised her, but she's Grandma. What can you do? You love her and try to gently correct her, despite knowing that you aren't going to change an attitude built over the long, winding course of seven decades.

Grandma's eyesight wasn't the best in her winter years. She'd had cataract surgery. That and her less than latent racism led her to believe that every person of color on television was one of two people. When a younger person would come on TV, she would squint her eyes and ask, "Is that Urkel?" When an older person would make an appearance, she would do the same squint and ask, "Is that... Flip Wilson?" I would let out an exasperated sigh and either ask who Flip Wilson was or respond, "No, Grandma, that's not Flip Wilson, that's Danny Glover."

If Grandma were still alive today, I would be far more patient with her than I was in my surly teenage years. I would still try to gently correct her when she called people "Negroes" or said things like "If Jesse Jackson ever became president, he'd have us all out in the fields picking cotton." Really, she actually said that. I also probably would have long since given up trying to correct her when she thought she saw Urkel or Flip Wilson. I think part of it is because they were both people who made her laugh. If the thought of Flip Wilson gave her a moment of joy, then my response should have been, "Yes, Grandma, that's Flip Wilson. And see that kid walking down the street in the background? It's totally Urkel!"

Grandpa Art and I (left) in 1982. Visible through the window, a garage full of dynamiteA couple of summers after my maternal grandfather died of cancer, Dad and I loaded up the pickup for a very special father-son road trip. We were men on a dangerous mission. For decades, Grandpa Art had stored 30 gallon drums of arsenic in a dirt floor pole barn on his farm near Hettinger, North Dakota. Now the state of North Dakota was holding an amnesty collection of hazardous chemicals in Bismarck, and the time was right to properly dispose of the drums without legal or financial headaches. We just had to fetch them ourselves.

Arsenic is a poison that was widely used as an insecticide on crops well into the last century. Once the dangerous effects on human health were made public, Grandpa heeded conventional wisdom and the rule of law and stopped applying the poison to his crops. The proper storage and disposal of his arsenic, however, were apparently of little concern to him.

Dad was one of the most safety-conscious farmers you'll ever meet. No piece of machinery or container of chemical on our farm was to be touched by the uninitiated until every technical detail and horrible result of neglectful operation and handling had been described in lurid detail. Once he had completed his lecture, he would often give specific example of people who had paid horrible prices for failing to follow proper safety procedures on other farms. "You know old Coot Simonson who worked a couple seasons on the Miller farm? The guy with two half-arms and a glass eye. Well, he got that way when took the safety guard off one of these augers and got a sleeve caught in it. Now he eats his sandwiches with two metal claws and a lack of depth perception. THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS, GOD DAMMIT!!" Grandpa Art's far more relaxed style of farm safety practices, which included keeping old, nitroglycerine-oozing dynamite in a garage a few dozen feet from the house, drove Dad up a tall tree.

Including stops for lunch and fuel, the drive to Hettinger, situated in rolling ranch country in southwestern North Dakota, took about 8 hours (Mr Safety was also a stickler for the speed limit). We pulled into town in the early evening. Since the farm house had been rented out, we stayed at the fleabag hotel next to the nursing home. After a big, greasy dinner at the cafe downtown, we watched some television at the hotel and went to bed early. Temperatures were going to be in the triple digits the next day, and we needed to get an early start to beat the heat.

At dawn, dad roused me from a deep slumber. I was so groggy that I barely knew who or where I was. When I said we went to bed early, I really meant that he fell asleep early while I laid awake for hours listening to him snore like a pissed off mountain gorilla running a leaf blower. This was going to be a long fucking day.

After breakfast, we drove out to the farm and announced our presence to the renters so they wouldn't become unnecessarily concerned over who was dicking around out in the barn. The temperature had already climbed into the 90's, and you could practically see the steam in the air. We backed the pickup into the barn, and immediately spotted the notorious barrels sitting in the corner. It was worse than Dad had remembered. The barrels sat with the lids loosely propped on top. Piles of spilled powdered arsenic sat on the dirt floor surrounding the barrels. This shit had probably been seeping into the groundwater for 30 years. We couldn't just leave that crap behind on the ground. It wasn't until then that I started to have questions over why my presence was necessary for retrieving these barrels. We only had one Level C hazmat suit and mask between the two of us, and there was no way Safety Dad would ever allow someone without proper protection near the arsenic.

"Ok, son, why don't you throw that suit on and move those barrels. You're going to have to dig up that dirt." Oh. Now I get it.

Inside the sun-baked aluminum pole barn, the temperatures were a good 10 to 20 degrees warmer than it was outside. And I was covered head to toe in a heavy disposable hazmat suit with a spade in my hand. The moment I pulled the hood and mask over my head, sweat gushed from every pore. I gingerly moved the heavy metal drums, trying not to spill more poison in the process. My mask was fogged with sweat, so Dad had to guide me by voice. "No, no. A little to the left. More. More. There you go. Just scoop that into the barrel. What are you doing, god dammit? You spilled half of it on the ground again!"

Finally I finished shoveling up as much as was feasible, but I needed a break. "Dad, I don't feel so good. I gotta sit down."

"Ok, ok. Let's get that mask off and get some water into you."

I felt a little faint. I felt like I'd just sweated off 20 pounds of water into my boots. They squished as I walked to the pickup. I took the mask off and WOOOOSH! The muggy 90 degree air felt like a blast from the Arctic Circle. I already felt better, and the water was an added godsend. After a brief rest, I cursed under my breath and pulled the mask back on. With tightly sealed lids and copious layers of trash bags and duct tape for good measure, the drums were as ready for transport as a couple of saps like us were ever going to get them. Using the edge of the pickup's tailgate as leverage, I pushed, grunted, lifted, and strained to get the barrels into the back. At long last, I had everything loaded, and I desperately stripped off my stifling shackles of safety and sealed them in another trash bag.

I fumed quietly for the entire ride to Bismarck to drop the drums off. I felt like I had been suckered into coming on this trip to act as slave labor. This was total bullshit, man! The outrage!

It wasn't until many years later, years after my dad had died, that I realized the true purpose of dragging me to Hettinger that summer. Dad just wanted some quality one-on-one bonding time with his increasingly temperamental teenage son, the son he was slowly losing to hormonal outbursts and moodiness. Sure, having me do all the work and avoiding exposure to toxic powder was a bonus for him, but he also knew that I was a lazy, shiftless bastard who could use a little extra hard work under his belt. I've lived over a third of my life without him now, but he's still here, yelling his god-dammit-peppered expectations at me when I can't see through the steam of my own sweat.

My brother hates cats. Maybe it's because one died in our ceiling once when we were growing up (for the record, the girl mentioned in that linked post is long gone, vanished into the dating ether). Me, I like cats, but I don't own one because I don't want to be responsible for one on my own. Yeah, they're low maintenance, but I'm all about reducing my responsibility load. Sometimes I sprinkle my responsibility load onto others. It's gritty and gets in your shoes and socks. You'll probably be picking my responsibility load out of your nice wool socks for the next several months.

If you are a hot girl and own cats, don't worry, it's cool. You can live with me and bring your one to two cats (but no more than that). I'll enjoy your cats and help care for them as long as I can bang you one to five times a day (but possibly a lot more than that). And you have to let my friend Rocko bust a nut in your eye on St Patrick's day. It's tradition. We'll talk about the Veteran's Day tradition later. I can only tell you that it involves Sriracha and a Brazilian.

Save the dead, stinky ceiling cat in his face, I don't recall our dad having much of an opinion of cats one way or another. I'm sure he enjoyed our roving band of farm felines because they kept the buildings free of mice and rats. Plus every once in a while, they'd inbreed and you'd end up with a litter of funny little bastards that walked backwards and shat vanilla soft serve and miniature paper clips. Hilarious!

Dad often told us stories of how they disposed unwanted kittens and puppies on our farm when he was growing up. The more humane sounding method involved putting them into a barrel, running a tube from a car's exhaust pipe in the barrel, sealing it shut, and firing up the engine. G'night, sweet kitties! The other method was to fill up a burlap sack full of writhing, mewing kittens, throw in a rock, tie the sack shut, and throw it into the coulee (it's like a creek) that ran through our property. The least humane method wasn't really so much as a way of getting rid of them as kids fucking around. They'd climb to the top of the windmill, probably a good 4 stories high, tie handkerchiefs to the kittens like little parachutes, and toss them into the air. The chutes never opened. There were no survivors.

During my formative junior high and high school years, one of my great joys was watching Saturday Night Live. This was during one of its rare upswing periods where it usually was more funny than not. I remember many a dateless, friendless (aw, poor Jeremy!) Saturday evening snickering quietly at Dana Carvey, Dennis Miller, Adam Sandler, et al so as not to alert my parents in the other room. It wasn't that I would get in trouble for watching it, but I certainly would be mortified to have them walk into the room to find me laughing out loud at the "penis sketch."

In the late 80's, my grandmother caught wind of my love of SNL and informed me that we were related by marriage to one of the cast members. "PleaseletitbeDanaCarvey PleaseletitbeDanaCarvey" No, she informed me, it was Phil Hartman. Who?? At the time I had no fucking clue who Phil Hartman was, as he hadn't yet really risen to any level of prominence on the show. But apparently his mother-in-law was my grandfather's first cousin. Oh.

During the Christmas season that year, Grandma produced a handwritten card from Grandpa's cousin in Thief River Falls, MN. Nestled snugly with the typical family blah de blah was a paragraph cooing about how much Phil and Brynn (her daughter, his wife) loved living in New York, how much Phil enjoyed working on SNL, and that they were estatic to have just had birth to their first child, Sean. Meh. I found it mildly interesting but for the most part, was unimpressed. Send me X-Rays of Phil Hartman paddling Jon Lovitz's balls with a cricket bat, then I might raise an eyebrow of intrigue.

As Phil Hartman proved his talent and rose in the ranks on SNL and especially after he left to do movies, voices for some of the most hilarious characters in the history of The Simpsons, and his hilariously assholish character on NewsRadio, he easily became one of my favorite comedic actors. So when a coworker at my on campus job during the waning days of my senior year at UND told me that "Troy McClure died today," I didn't quite process it right away.

"Huh? Troy McClure? So they're killing that character off on The Simpsons?"

"No, the dude that did his voice got shot today. What's his name?"

"Phil Hartman died?!?" I was incredulous.

"Yeah, that's it! Phil Hartman. Somebody shot him I guess."

From that description, I pictured him walking down the street, being accosted by a mugger, and catching one in the chest when the transaction went sour. Then it came out that this was in his home. A home invasion? A crazed fan? Finally came the crucial details that his wife had shot him and hours later killed herself. So my grandpa's cousin's daughter murdered one of the best comedic minds of our generation. Fuck 'sup with that?

Until I was 7 years old, my family lived in a trailer house on my grandparents' farm right next to their house (not a trailer house). During the day, while dad farmed away out in the field and mom slept after working the graveyard shift at the hospital, Grandma would keep an eye on my brother and me (Grandpa also farmed and was out in the field during the day). My brother and I were extremely close with our grandparents, so even after we moved into an actual house of our own a few miles from the next town over, we frequently visited Grandma and Grandpa, often staying overnight for a day or two.

Grandma had had one those yippy little dogs, which I believe was a pomeranian and poodle mix. Mitzi the yipping dog was rather skittish, didn't much care for kids, and went absolutely Vietnam flashback apeshit at any hint of a loud noise. Mitzi also liked to sleep under Grandpa's well worn easy chair with the squeaky springs. During one of our regular overnight stays, Grandpa popped a massive bowl of popcorn in the air popper for everyone to munch on, plopped down in his chair, and unleashed the most massive fart God has ever bestowed upon a humble servant's colon. The fart left the springs in the old chair vibrating violently at a low E flat, which scared the unleavened shit out of the dog. She rocketed out from under that chair as if she'd been launched from a t-shirt cannon.

I've spent my life trying to recreate that fart. But no manner of popcorn, bean, or taco meat has ever resulted in that perfect pitch and timbre let loose on that warm summer evening. So far I only scare women away, and the tiny little dogs stay around to hump my leg. How I wish it were the other way around.

Third grade was a big year for me. I drove a school bus, got hit by a car, and and had my balls sliced open. Literally. One gray, cloudy day, I was playing with toy cars during noon recess with Kenny, the son of the owner of our little town's only remaining grocery store, when I felt a pain in one of my testicles. Was I having a special, tingly feeling about Kenny? No, it was definitely pain. Sharp, throbbing ball pain. At first, I didn't think much of it. Maybe I'd mildly chung-kinged my seeds while rolling around on the hard ground. The pain soon subsided, and I returned my focus to perfectly timing my "VRRROOOOOOM!" and "SCREEEEEECH!" noises to the movement of the tiny diecast cars.

Throughout that afternoon, the pain in my nutsack rose and ebbed. One minute, I felt fine, and the next minute, I felt like I'd been thwacked in the groin with a length of Hot Wheel track. Each time the pain returned, it was more intense and longer in duration. By the bus dropped us off at home, the pain was intensely sharp, relieved only by brief periods of dull aching. I informed my mom, a registered nurse, of my dilemma. She was concerned enough that she called to make an appointment with our family doctor for the following morning.

Morning wasn't going to come fast enough. By the time 7 pm came around, the pain in my man sack was searing hot and relentless. My testicle had swollen to twice its normal size, and I was in absolute agony. Mom was used to medical emergencies, but when your firstborn son is rolling around on the floor screaming and flopping around a grotesquely swollen elephant man testicle, you're probably going to have a hard time keeping your cool (my brother and dad probably just wished I'd shut the hell up so they could watch Who's the Boss or whatever was on that night. But Mom kept it together and called the hospital. They connected her to our doctor, and he advised putting an ice bag on my nut bag and bringing me into the emegency room ASAP. Done and done!

I don't care how modest of a person you are, when your genitals are in searing pain, swollen, and red, you don't even wait for the doctor to tell you to drop trou. You practically take your pants off in the ER waiting room and slap your business on the counter next to the insurance forms. "Look at this shit! This is not right! FIX IT!!" Fortunately that was not necessary. The doctor assessed the problem in the privacy of an exam room and soon concluded this was beyond what our little hospital was equipped to deal with. I was given some painkillers and was told to continue with the ice treatment. He called to make an appointment with a specialist in Grand Forks, a little more than a 2 hour drive from our farm, for the next day.

I slept fitfully that night. The pain meds helped, but it's hard to find a comfortable position to sleep in when there's a plastic bag full of ice cubes strapped to your balls. By the time we got to the clinic in Grand Forks, the swelling had gone down, and the dose of pain pills I took that morning were wearing off. The doctor, a soft-spoken, kindly gentleman of Asian descent, rolled my tender testicle around in his hands like he was examining a kiwifruit for bruises. I winced and shed a few tears, but I didn't want to look like a bitch in front of this doctor (which is funny considering he was freely manhandling my tackle in its entirety) , so I stifled my sobs and whimpers until he wasn't looking.

I don't recall how the news was delivered to me, whether it was from the doctor himself or my parents after meeting with him privately, but it put my heart into my throat. I had a testicular torsion, also known as a strangulated testicle, which means that my testicle had become rotated inside the scrotum, cutting off proper blood flow. If left untreated, it could mean losing the testicle entirely. I would have to have emergency surgery that very day if I didn't want to be known as Jimmy Half Sack. At the tender age of 8, I had never had any sort of surgery before, so the fear of the unknown and my active imagination evoked images of being poked with needles the size of traffic cones and having my nuts torn open with a dull, rusty hacksaw. I was terrified.

We had a bit of time before I had to check in at the hospital, and my parents tried to reassure me. But short of knocking me out with an ether rag, there's nothing they could of said or done to calm me. Since I was having surgery, I wasn't allowed to eat anything for lunch, but it didn't matter. My stomach bounced around like a Florida-bound inflatable raft from Cuba. If I had eaten anything, I probably would have thrown it up anyway.

We checked in at the hospital, and I was taken to my room where I put on the stereotypical ass-baring hospital gown and crawled into bed. I tried in vain to nap as my parents fidgeted and watched tv. It was in those moments of relative calm that my focus returned to the shooting, burning pain in my testicle. I had been so overcome with fear of the cloudy notion of surgery itself that I had completely forgotten about why I had to have it. Right, the ball thing.

Finally they came to put me on a gurney and wheel me to the operating room. A man's voice said, "Jeremy, you're going to feel a little sting in your arm when we put the needle in." Voices, getting fainter, heavy eyelids, fading, blackness. The next thing I knew, I awoke in a haze and was immediately hit with horrible waves of nausea -- I would later find out this was a reaction to the anesthesia. I felt like bed was adrift in choppy waters off of Nantucket. It was unbearable, but I fell asleep again and next awoke back in my room. The nausea was still there, but had subsided a little. This time, however, I noticed my throat was raw. Since I had eaten breakfast that morning, unaware that I would end up having to have surgery, they had to put a tube down my throat to drain my stomach contents before surgery. All of that pain didn't seem worth a small bowl of Rice Krispies and cup of hot chocolate. I should have gone for the tall stack at IHOP or eaten a sundae topped with a pizza.

The next day, the doctor came in to check on my condition and the incision. You would have thought that the sight of my stitched-up, blood-encrusted, purple, mottled, and swollen testicle would be too much for me handle, but my curiosity as too overpowering not to look. Everything was fine, and I'd be able to go home in a couple more days or so.

Up until that afternoon, I'd had the room to myself. But then they wheeled in another kid who would be my roomie until I was released. I don't remember much about him other than that he was kind of a tubby kid with smelly, lingering farts, and he whined constantly whenever the nurses tried to do their jobs. Putting in an IV needle resulted in drama worthy of General Hospital. "Ow!! Oh!! I think you hit a nerve! I'm paralyzed. PARALYZED!!!" The best part was him rolling around and wildly flailing his arms and legs to put emphasis on the word "paralyzed." Somebody get this kid a medical dictionary and some matches.

Thankfully the stitches they used were the kind that would fall out on their own, and I would not have to go through the added torture of having threads snipped and pulled from my man business later on. I healed nicely, and I'm happy to report that not only are both of my testicles in completely operational order to this day, I have had a third testicle added as good measure (the involuntary donor was a guy who picked the wrong night to fall asleep on a bench in Loring Park). Think of it like an extra bottle of iodine in a first aid kit. Except it's an extra testicle, and the first aid kit is in my pants. Who needs first aid, ladies?

Yesterday it was a record 81 degrees here in the Twin Cities. The average high for this time of year is around 45, so that means there were more people running and walking around our myriad lakes than aimlessly milling about all of the world's Old Navy stores combined. That factoid sounds suspicious, but I got it from my dog-eared copy of The Asshole's Almanac, so it has to be true.

Reports from my dear mother indicate that it's even been unseasonably mild back home in the topography-free hinterlands of North Dakota. This sounds nothing like the arctic seasons of yore (I know using that word makes me sound like I should be wearing a tunic while playing a lute and singing songs about dragons and stout bridge trolls, but I like it, so piss off). It was not uncommon for school to be canceled due to roads blocked with snow drifts several feet in height, winds that could blow over a Ford Escort, or temperatures that could freeze urine solid while it was still in your bladder.

Our farm was near the start of the hour long school bus route, so we had to be up bright and early every morning to hop on when it pulled up around 6:30. Since we could see it barreling down the road from several miles away, we would wait in the warmth of the house, then bolt outside as soon as stopped just a few dozen feet from the front door. We were particularly thankful for this curbside service when the brutal winds whipped stinging snow across open fields, but getting on the bus so early had its disadvantages. Ignore the obvious factor of having to get up so early, because when you're 7 or 8, you tend to keep more respectable hours. In bed by 8, up before 6, catching early worms, all that jazz. And it's easy to do at that age when you never stay up all night banging a "vulnerable adult" you picked up at a church rummage sale or freebasing a mixture of crystal meth, cumin, and airbag powder from a late model Honda.

Once in a while, if the weather was borderline, the buses were halfway through their route before the superintendent finally decided to shutter the school. So you had to get up obscenely early, clean up (with soap even!), put on 15 layers of clothing, and inhale diesel exhaust on a loud, rattling deathtrap with no seat belts doing 60 down a rutted gravel road, only to have the driver get the call to take everyone back home because they decided to close the school. In other words, they decided that the weather conditions were so dangerous, that it wouldn't be safe for kids in town to walk to school or for vehicles of any sort to be on the road. Thanks for not waking up early enough to make that decision about an hour ago, jaggoff. "Hmm... I should probably get up to ensure the safety of all children in the district, including farm kids, but I need another solid 30. [wipes burned airbag powder residue from cheek and falls back to sleep]"

One abysmal winter day when I was 8, the bus pulled up amidst blinding, swirling, wind-blown snow. We were the third family on the route that winter. My brother went to afternoon kindergarten and didn't ride in the morning, so until the next stop many miles away, it was just me, the mustachioed bus driver, and two morning kindergarteners. The driver powered through one hardened snow drift after another, launching our tiny, seat beltless bodies into the air like shuttlecocks in a badminton match.

Over the next several miles, the drifts grew both higher and longer. Eventually even the inertial energy of a 12 ton bus couldn't power us through the packed snow. Wheels spinning and kicking up a white cloud, we slowed to a crawl and soon stopped dead. We were stuck but good. The driver muttered in disgust under his breath and sat quiet for several minutes. He was likely thinking of how he could get out of this jam himself without radioing into the school for a tow, thus exposing how stupid he was for not turning back and reporting the road conditions. In a pure moment of genius and inspiration, he turned to me, the oldest and clearly wisest child on the bus, and asked, "Jeremy, can you drive stick?"

Can I drive a stick? CAN I DRIVE A STICK?!? Motherfucker, I could drive a stick before my feet could reach the clutch. That's how we roll in North Da-cocksucking-kota, fool! That's all he needed to know. "Ok, you put it into reverse, and we'll get out and push on the front of the bus." He was prepared to put some heavy duty muscle into this mission. When you are willing to yank a couple of 5 year old children off of a bus to push on the front of it in the middle of a blizzard, you are not messing around, my friend. "Roll those sleeves up and PUSH, or you only get the 16 pack of Crayolas instead of 64. Heave, you stubby-legged little bastards, HEAVE!!!" So there we were, miles and miles from a single other soul, a skinny, mop-lipped bus driver and a couple kids barely old enough to no longer be categorized as toddlers pushing away, and me gunning the engine like a jet before takeoff.

I learned a lot about myself that day. Despite my tender age of 8, the driver didn't need me to prove that I knew how to drive a stick. He just took me at my word. Sure, for all he knew, I was a boastful little prick who didn't know a clutch from a parking brake, and I could have easily accidentally thrown it into 1st and mowed him and the Kool-Aid gang down like meat-filled candlepins. But he trusted me implicitly and showed me where inner strength comes from. It comes from blindly putting the lives of you and two 5 year old children into the hands of an uncoordinated, overeager third grader. That shit's pure balls and heart, guy. Balls and heart.

Epilogue

It may be difficult to believe, but all of the pushing by all of the kindergarteners in the world couldn't have freed that bus. The driver had to give in and radio in for a tow. When Jeremy giddily reported his bus driving adventure to his parents after school that day, they were super pissed and called the superintendent. The driver was temporarily suspended from his job and had to live down the embarrassment in our tiny community for years afterward.

This driver was just one of many characters to haul the precious children of our town over the years. Let's not forget the guy who got pulled over for a DUI with kids still on the bus, the dude who drove with his legs while playing cards with the kids in the front seat, and the old man who's coveralls quite obviously were never laundered, as they were perpetually covered in stains from snot and spit impressively launched onto his back by a kid sitting in the back row. Some of those drivers are dead now, and most of them should be. God bless them, every one.