Look@Book
Little snippets (without much introduction) from the book “Recovering Idiot.” Sentences and paragraphs are combined in the interest of space.
- 50 mph downwind Mooney takeoff on a dare…Clipping along at 130 mph ground speed and I still couldn’t lift off. My airplane had never gone this fast while still anchored by gravity to terra firma. It started shaking like the wheels were going to come off and quickly I realized both me and my airship were in uncharted and very dangerous territory. There was a ditch, fence, pasture, grazing cows and a few trees filling my windscreen…
- Exploding school bus…The air around us exploded with flames. It lasted just a couple of seconds but hung around long enough to singe our hair and eyebrows. Actually, a couple of seconds is all any good explosion takes. It also provided the oncoming high school students with a panoramic view of the back end of their very own school bus totally engulfed in flames. They started screaming and exiting en masse via the stampede method…
- 18 cop cars vs Brian and I…The highway stretched down a long hill in the darkness from the Kennewick Highlands. Brian took full advantage of the grade to build up steam to distance ourselves from the cops who were hellbent on giving us a ticket for shooting up a phone booth. I believe we were in the neighborhood of 120-130 miles per hour by the time we reached the bottom of the slope where the highway started curving toward a couple of overpasses, the Blue Bridge and the Columbia River. We reached the end of the straight stretch and Brian stomped hard on the brakes as that was his only choice. We were going way too fast to negotiate the curve. The car started sliding out of control. After skidding some 600 feet, our race car station wagon originally built for families flew off the 395 overpass down on to Columbia Avenue. Like it was yesterday, I remember the seemingly eternal screeching of tires followed by liftoff, complete blackness, and then a terrible crash followed by massive pain…
- Feeding my buddy’s pie hole with a cow pie…As it left my hand, I sensed it was a good pitch. Each of us knew that if it by some chance found it’s target, it was richly deserved and delivered by karma. It began it’s desired trajectory like it had been thrown by a major leaguer. Scot and I stood there, itching to even the score and beginning to marvel at the green cow pie’s ability to stay in one piece as it sailed along. A couple of seconds later we were marveling at my Olympian ability to chuck the soft stinky substance so accurately. It flew toward Kevin and his laughing, open mouth. Splatttt! The entire ball of excrement smacked him just below his nose and right above his chin. Most of the fecal matter lodged inside his mouth and he instantly realized that the tables had turned. He had made a big mistake! He stopped laughing, stopped running, skidded to a halt and started choking. Our laughter threw us completely out of control, even before we saw the large green ring encircling his mouth!…
- Two years of romance-gone-wrong… The second night after our first, but not only engagement, we went to a Chuck Mangione concert. Just before we left for the concert she gave me the word that the deal was off. My entire life had led up to this pivotal moment. I was committed, in fact, set in concrete, and now I was finding out that she was skating out of my la la land and I didn’t have a pair of skates. Chuck Mangione plays a great flugelhorn, but I still remember how off-key he was that night. In fact, his whole band stunk. I could not understand why the crowd kept clapping and cheering…