A Big Rock is not a Saw

Thor: The year is 1973 and I'm a preteen boy who likes dirt and forts and rickety bike ramps. My two best friends and I discovered a large pit at the end of a corn field. (It was an unused irrigation reclamation pond.) What bliss! We could ride our bikes around the inside slope (and we soon had a track pounded into the dirt.) We dug holes here and there, shot arrows at critters, and, as is inevitable, conceived a large permanent structure to serve as our impenetrable fortress. The nearby junk pile was a source of some weathered planks and refridgerator doors and wire (pretty much everything you need for a good fort.)

We didn't have any tools, but we managed to dig a 10 by 10 foot hole about a foot deep using short boards. We dragged wall material over and began construction. One board was unusable because it was about twice too long for our purposes. I came up with the clever idea of laying the board over an old hole of ours. (About 2 feet in diameter, I think we made this hole as a test pit for one of our many attempts at making gun powder.) So the middle of this board is spanning the hole, and my idea is to get the biggest rock I can carry and drop it on the middle of the board. I'll guess the rock weighed about 50 pounds.

OK, the idea worked. The board snapped nicely in the middle, so I don't really understand why my two ex-friends needed to fall over laughing and gasping for breath. They didn't think of any clever ideas and my clever idea worked as predicted. The tiny, little, insignificant flaw in my plan is that my head was directly above the hole when I let go of the rock. The far ends of the board shot up and smacked me me both temples. Nothing will ruin a good friendship like someone laughing their ass off while you're experiencing incredible pain.

The fort was never finished, and I don't know what happened to our Playboy stash.

Tyr: Too bad camcorders hadn't been invented yet. Then your buddies would have won 10 grand on AFV. At this point in our culture, martial arts was starting to trickle into our consciousness. David Carridine had his Kung Fu show on, and we'd all watched Batman and Robin doing some moves that looked vaguely karate-like. We knew that the double slap to the temples was a common and deadly karate move.

I doubt, however, that any of us had ever seen someone do it to himself.

Every little town has its "dirty family". Usually they have lots of kids, and they use their bathtub only for storing dirty clothes. Steve was the family member in our class. His older sister got a new pair of 70's flower print denim bell-bottoms and wore them for two weeks, so that they were noticably dirty. Then Steve wore them, unwased, for at least two weeks after that. It was amusing that he thought his hippy pants made him look cool.

In 7th grade a new kid named Danny moved to town. He was pretty obnoxious, even for a new kid. He tried to bully all of us and he pretended that he used drugs and that he was some kind of bad boy. We weren't fooled. We just ignored him. As he worked his way down the pecking order trying to find someone he could impress, he eventually got down to the very bottom: Steve. Heh. Not even Steve was that stupid or that desparate for a friend.

Danny, realizing that Steve was his last chance to recruit a groupie, pressed his non-advantage, until Steve got angry. The verbal battle ended with the agreement that the two of them would meet behind the school at 3 p.m. We turned out to watch, of course. Danny peeled off his shirt and took off his socks and shoes. Steve just stood there. Danny warmed up with some showy karate-like stretches and kicks. Steve just stood there. Finally Danny was ready and closed with his foe. His first move was a sort of flying side kick to Steve's face. As his foot was in the air, Steve, with his hands still in his pockets, kicked him square in the groin. End of fight.

Every kid, regardless of hygene, should get to be a hero for a day. A couple years later, Danny's sisters tried their best to become sluts, but couldn't get any takers. The family eventually moved away, but no one really noticed.

In summary: The chief value in the marial arts has been as a source of humor. Hooray for Jackie Chan.

Tyr and Thor