Offshoot of Jackknife’s thread about hitting life’s low points…
What was the lowest point in your life?
Mine was in 1992. I was twenty and had moved in with my then girlfriend to an abandoned house in Bellingham Washington with two of her friends. Bellingham is the coldest, rainiest, most constantly overcast part of the whole miserable cold, rainy, overcast state.
The house was abandoned because the hillside it was on was slowly washing away from decades of constant rain, and the house itself had a fifteen degree tilt to it. I could roll a baseball from one end to the other. After bieng trapped in the crooked house for nearly two weeks because of a spring storm, I found I couldn’t adjust to the normal world, for days I walked around town slightly veering at an angle.
We shared our house with a couple of raccoons who lived under the foundations, and constantly kept us awake with their noisy fighting and noisier lovemaking. We called them Archie and Edith after the bickering family from that show “All in the family”. Eventually we smoked them out with three whole boxes of sandlewood incence and chased them off with brooms.
We lived mostly on rice, beans, dried peas, the local “funky” mushrooms, and anything we could shoplift. Once we got so desperate for protein that my friends and I, ninjalike, dressed all in black and snuck over to a cemetary reflecting pond, where there lived the biggest, fattest, Wonder bread and Cheetos fed flock of geese in existance. Now, geese are fucking noisy things, so we had to hunker down and sneak around the stones and willows like this: Sneak, sneak, sneak, HONK! Crouch (Heart: Kathunk! Kathunk! Kathunk!) Sneak, sneak, HONK!..
These geese were so used to humans feeding them we could get pretty close after tossing them some Crackers. We picked out the biggest of the lot, lulled it close with a handfull of cheez-itz, pointed the bb gun point blank at its head, and fired. Now, this was not a pellet gun mind you, but one of those pathetic one-pump Daisy bb-guns that can barely knock over a half-full coke can. Needless to say it diddn’t die immiedatly. It thrashed around desperatly, flapping and hissing and honking and tossing mud around. I continued to pump the gun and (somewhat randomly) fire at it. It gave an inhuman shriek, the girls screamed and ran in random directions. I almost had a heart attack. Finally my friend Bob pulled his boot off and finished the job.
Anyway, we stuffed it in a pillowcase and ran home. None of us had ANY idea how to cook a poptart, let alone a goose. We just kind of, you know, looked at the thing thinking “Well NOW what do we do!?”. The girls wouldn’t touch it, so we dipped it in boiling water, plucked it, and using a hillarously inappropriate “Rambo” type combat knife we managed to gut and cook it in an oversized stainless steel dog dish. It actually wasn’t that bad.
Finally, after eight months I had had enough and went back home to California and enrolled in school. So I suppose there is a happy ending.
Well, can you beat that?
