Okay, today is one of my favorite holidays. I adore practical jokes. Probably my favorite TV show of all time after WKRP is Candid Camera.
So I gave myself the latest executive hairdo. Em thought I was kidding. I asked Mo is she wanted a haircut, and she almost choked getting the air to say 'no!' fast enough.
Later, when me and Mo were launching rockets in the park, a guy asked me some questions about rocketry. He turned out to be a Cub Scout troop leader, and was looking at doing a rocketry project with his troop. Which got us on the fact that rocketry was one of the few positive experiences I had the whole time I was in Cub Scouts.
Which was a long time. My folks wouldn't let me quit until I made Webelo, and I hated the merit badge projects so much, I was shaving before I made Webelo.
I tried to explain that the problem wasn't so much with Scouts as with me being an outcast of a kid, so that Scouts was just a place for the kids who hated me at school to hate me outside school hours.
I mean, it was the same group of boys who tormented me the year I foolishly signed up to play baseball. The year of the zero batting average. I signed up for these things, I think, with the fantasy that after a whole day at school of being a total reject, I'd somehow fit in on the team or in the troop or whatever.
Which is not how it works.
My parents even transferred me when I hit junior high, to give me a fresh start. Which did get me away from the kids who were bullying me, but I quickly learned that no start is fresh enough to make up for the reasons I was an outcast to begin with. I promptly alienated a whole new school.
Then I realized, how does this sound coming from a Dad sporting a mohawk, who's launching rockets from the trunk of an '88 Buick with a coffee mug and a cell phone (and some money) glued to it?
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