12/04/2005: "Random Acts of Vandalism"

Hi All,

I thought that, in addition to my occassional posts about the beatings I've absorbed along the way in this topsy-turvy life of mine, I would also add a new twist: silly acts of vandalism me and my friends have committed over the years. Now I know a lot of you---hell, maybe MOST of you---might not be interested in hearing about these willful acts of destruction; perhaps you think me a kindhearted, evenminded sort and don't want to sully your beatific image of me. Well, that's all well and good; lord knows I'm a damned beatific bloke. But if you're not interested...well, all I can say is the world Wide Web is a sprawling behemoth of useless information, so I'm sure there's something else to interest you out there if tales of vandalism fail to light your fire---I know for a fact this site is fun for about 30 seconds: www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/tetka.html. Look at the poor lass fall over those wacky bubbles! Otherwise there's always porn.

Anyway. Why vandalism? I can't say I know for certain, other than to blame it on modern society, like I tend to blame everything on modern society---mainly because modern society can't argue with me, or fight back:

MODERN SOCIETY: Hey, Davidson, why are you hassling me? What have I ever done?

ME: Shut up Modern Society or so help me I'll wallop you!

MODERN SOCIETY: What is it? Is it the weight loss crazes? Those Segwey scooter things? The deadening sense of aimlessness and ennui?

ME: I said shut your gob!

Hohohohoho! Me having a conversation with Modern Society, how very postmodern. Eat your heart out, David Foster Wallace!

Anyway, I do think that since kids, adults, all of us, don't have to worry so much about the simple day-to-day act of survival, what with all those modern day soda fountains and pizzas with cheese-filled crusts and televisions with cheese-filled crusts and GPS navigation and mechanized cow milkers and cellular telephones with cheese-filled crusts and suchall, all the things that make our lives so manageable and effortless...well, as the saying goes, idle hands are the devil's workshop (or, as principal Seymour Skinner would say, "A curvy spine is the devil's rollercoaster," which really doesn't at all relate to my point). All I'm saying is that if I had to get up every morning as a kid and chop wood and get water from the well and milk the cows and protect myself against hungry wolves and raise barns and so forth I would have had no interest or energy left to head out at night and slash my neighbors' garbage bags---or loosen the bolts on my neighbor's horse-drawn carriage or lay Saran Wrap over my neighbor's outhouse toilet, as the case may have been in those days. But since I led the proverbial Life of Reilly and could eat as many Pop Tarts I wanted I was usually full of energy and on an nasty sugar high by the time the sun set.

{continued in MORE...}

Now I cannot say I was alone in these acts. No, unlike robbing graves and masturbation, vandalism is much better when you've got a partner in crime. My partner in the early days was a fellow by the name of Darren Carly. I don't know where ole Darren is now, but man, that guy could really wreak havoc. Truth be told, I was more his understudy. I just didn't have a mindset at the time in my life that could see virtually any object and envision its potential value insofar as it might cut or bash or otherwise mangle another object. It was Darren who once showed up at my front door with a shoebox full of rusty old tablesaw blades---"Look!" he cried. "Some idiot just THREW THEM AWAY!" Well of course not more than five minutes had passed before we were on our bikes riding down to Fish Creek park (a nature preserve running through Calgary) to toss those very sharp, tetanus-rife old sawblades at trees or fenceposts or just as far as we possibly could, thinking we were Sho Kosugi in ENTER THE NINJA and hacking deep gouges into the sensitive web of skin between our thumbs and pointer fingers.

I think the first time me and Darren hung out (we were maybe 12 at the time) we played a game of Darren's devising called "darts" where we each stood along Darren's backyard fence and threw darts at one another. This was idiotic and thrilling, but at the time I only thought it was thrilling. He was the first to show me that if you held a match up to a can of Pledge or WD-40 you could shoot a respectable 5-foot flame.

Probably Darren's crowning feat was when he found a six-foot length of thick, flat, two-inch wide steel at the local dump. As I said, Darren's mind was naturally attuned to such things, but even I could've seen that bit of steel and thought one thing: swords. But as neither of our dads was particuarly handy and we didn't figure they'd let us crafts swords in their workshops like a couple adolescent blacksmiths anyway, we went to our junior high school and asked our shop teacher.

US: Uh, Mr. Krupa, we were wondering if we could use your grinder after school today.

Mr. KRUPA [looking up from his lunch and removing his plastic goggles]: Well now boys that would depend. You planning on making birdhouses? A shelf unit? A birdhouse shelf unit?

US: No, we were thinking...swords.

Mr. KRUPA: Wellnow let's just see. I don't need the ginder after school, so okay. Just sweep up after you're done and wear goggles for safety.

Looking back, it was wildly irresponsible for him to let us to that, but at the time I would've submitted his name for deification. Anyway, we made these wicked sharp swords with nasty tips. We wrapped the hilts with hockey tape. They must've weighed five pounds and were really, seriously, nasty things.

But anyway, that all came later.

As I said, we loved swords. We'd watched CONAN THE BARBARIAN, like, twenty times, and we loved the first bit, while the credits rolled, where this big hulking barbarian in a bear pelt crafts this wicked sword; he got it all hot and glowing, bashed at it with a hammer, then went outside and cooled it off in a snowbank. Kick ASS.

This was before Darren found that magic strip of steel in the dump so we had to find something else to make swords out of. We tried wood, but those sucked and broke after one good crack on the cement (why did we hit cement? Because the cement HAD IT COMING!). We tried a few other things until one day we were down in Darren's basement and he spied his dad's golf clubs. He pulled a five iron out of the bag and his eyes lit up. Like I said, Darren had that eye for things.

His parents weren't home. He went over to his dad's workbench, grabbed a 5-pound sledge, lay the club down on the unfinished cement of the basement and whacked the club head off. Two or three whacks and the head went skittering across the floor. Presto: a 80-dollar golf club turned into a wicked garbage-bag-slashing sword with a few swings of a sledge!

But we wanted the sword to be flat and sharp like a rapier so we too our swords---Darren lopped the head off a 3-wood for mine---and went upstairs to the fireplace. It was a gas fireplace so we just switched it on and stuck the golf club shafts in. It was great: we were like that bear-pelted barbarian at the forge. When the shafts glowed red we pulled them out and started bashing away at them.

Of course, there is a difference between high-tensile sword steel and hollow golf club shafts: the main difference seems to be that while steel will stay flat when hammered, golf club shafts curl up like a chameleon's tongue. In the end we were left with what looked like a pair of rolled-up noisemakers, the type you get at kid's birthday parties.

This was no problem: Darren's dad had a whole bag full of golf clubs! By the time we got things just right we'd lopped the heads off all the woods and most of the irons. After our sword-making euphoria passed we were left with the damning evidence: seven or eight golf club heads scattered across the basement floor.

We didn't want to get in trouble---and, even though we were total idiots we knew, short of buying new clubs we were going to get caught soon enough; our only hope was to delay the inevitable awhile---so it was me who came up with the great idea of taping bamboo sticks to the heads and putting them all back in the bag. You know the sticks I'm talking about: they're green, skinny, bamboo, people use them in the garden to tie their tomato plants to. Anyway, we got some hockey tape and taped the golf club heads to the bamboo then stuck them all back in the bag.

Of course we were discovered a few weeks later---but amazingly, Mr. Carly drove all the way to the driving range before discovering what we'd done.

Mr. Carly [at the range, limbering up, setting a range ball on the tee]: Alright, time to swing a few wrenches! What do you feel like today, Dan? (Mr. Carly's name was Dan). Want to take the big dog out, uh? Let the big dog eat? Okay, you're the boss!

Then he pulls out his driver only to find it's taped to a skinny green stick of bamboo. Oh, man, he must've been so PISSED! Anyway, it's karma; I expect my kids to do the same to me one day.

So anyway, me and DArren would head out on Thursday nights (Friday was garbage day) and slash garbage bags. We lived in a neighborhood where it was all alleys and people left their bags out back so we'd dress up in black and go all ninja-style down the alleys, slashing open bags with our golf-club swords. Man, we were lame. But I'll tell you, when we had to cross the street from one alley to another, through that pool of streetlight, man, my tubby little legs were pumping and my tubby ol' heart was a-pounding.

Then we went out one night with this nutso guy named Lesley and he brought a baseball bat and bashed the garbage CANS, bashed them practically FLAT, and me and Darren felt pretty emasculated and poor because here we were slashing thin black bags and Lesley was bashing whole cans. I think our Thursday night forays ended shortly after that.

---Craig.