A Funny Mental Image

Last week I had a stream of consciousness conversation (not unusual, most conversations I'm involved in tend to wander hither and yon) that eventually led to a memory from my own very early childhood that creates and amusing mental image.

I could skip straight to the mental image, but where's the fun in that.

The conversation started with piledrivers--the famous wrestling move wherein the inflicter picks up the victim, spins him around so his head is between the inflicter's legs and his legs are shooting up over the inflicter's shoulders, and the inflicter drops down to his knees. Clearly, the weight of both wrestlers should smash the victim's head and destroy his spine, but, somehow, that doesn't happen. Wrestlers are just that tough, I guess, because I KNOW there isn't any sort of fakery going on.

At one point in my distant past, a friend and I came up with a Piledriver System. Based on what we knew of wrestling, it was pretty obvious that a handful of piledrivers really wasn't that harmful to a person. We'd seen them inflicted on the same person multiple times in a single match and every time he got up and kept on fighting. So we worked up how many piledrivers it would take to actually do serious damage to a person--starting around the 10th one since any before that could clearly be shaken off easily.

I can't really remember any of them from 10-18, but I do remember that 18 was Unconsciousness with irreparable spinal damage, 19 was Death, and 20 was Death and Stealing the Victim's Soul. So, for quite some time, one of our favorite threats to make was "Don't make me piledrive you 20 times." And this was a pretty effective threat because none of us thought the others very good stewards for our eternal souls.

This last story is relevant in no way to anything. I just like the idea of piledriving someone twenty times. It makes me laugh that there wouldn't really be any serious harm until the upper teens.

So, the other day, a friend was having trouble with a co-worker. I suggested piledriving this co-worker as a way to solve the problem and presented the friend with a handy template that could be used to determine if, in fact, a piledriver was deserved. Despite the fact that the piledriver can be easily shaken off for quite some time, it's still a pretty serious invasion of personal space, so it shouldn't be undertaken lightly.

Nonetheless, it was decided that, if three good reasons could be presented, then that person deserved a piledriver. Thus: "_______ deserves a piledriver because _______, ________, and ________. "

Then, a minute of introspection led me to realize that quite often in my life I resort to a kind of fill-in-the-blank approach to the world. It's difficult to explain, but that example above is pretty close to an actual mental cross-checking system that I might use in my head to justify or explain something. Tracing this back through my development, I decided that I did it because Mad Libs played such a major role in my entertainment for several years while growing up.

This trip down memory lane led me to remember the times my younger cousin and I would sit in my room filling in Mad Libs with bad words. It was our first real experimentation with bad words, and we felt giddily empowered and dangerously exposed all at the same time. We kept looking over our shoulders to make sure my mom wasn't coming into my room, and we kept the pad near my bed so we could quickly throw it under there and look like we were doing something else in case she walked in. When we were finished, we read the stories back to ourselves quietly and tittered at all the bad words we used (which, more often than not, were of the "fart" severity, but we thought we were pretty bad ass all the same). After that, we carefully hid the pad in my room somewhere my mom wouldn't find it. Every once in awhile, we'd pull it back out and laugh anew at our cleverness.

This story is also not relevant to anything, except to show the strangely circuitous way my brain works. Is this really the best use of my memory capacity? At this stage in my life, I'm lucky if I can remember someone's name or face by the third or fourth meeting, and forget about remembering an address or directions without writing them down. Last week, we ran out of ketchup, which is a pretty big deal because Gabe likes ketchup on most things. So it came up many times during the week. When I went to do the grocery shopping yesterday, I forgot my list and was just going off what I remembered being out of. Yet, despite the frequency it came up and the relative severity in terms of my child's happiness, guess what I forgot and had to make a second trip back to the store to pick up? Is it really more important that I remember my cousin and I writing "crap" a dozen times in blank spaces than daily, functional things?

This memory of me sitting in my room doing something naughty led me to another memory of me doing something that I wasn't supposed to as a child (keep in mind, this took the span of about a minute--FAR less time than you and I have wasted here so far on all this nonsense).

Around age six or seven, I learned how to flip the bird. I don't remember who I saw doing it, but it was a pretty popular gesture back on the farm, so any of a number of people probably could have been blamed. I had no real idea what it ACTUALLY meant, but I understood that it was a sign of dislike for something, and one day I decided to try it out myself.

Mom told me to do something, I don't remember what, but I do remember not wanting to do it. So I flipped her off as a response to her order.

Not surprisingly, she didn't take it very well. There was much repercussing. But before things progressed to the spanking and crying phase, I guess Mom must have realized that I really didn't have any idea what I was doing or what the bird stood for. So she calmed down and explained to me that it was an entirely inappropriate thing for me to be doing, and that it was NEVER appropriate to flip someone off.

Because my brain works the way it does, I countered by asking, "What about the devil?" Clearly, if anyone deserves to be flipped off, the devil does. He's a dick--always and forever. And flipping him the bird would be both an act of righteous indignation and a deserved reaction for his many misdeeds. Granted, I didn't make quite such a clear case, but that was basically my train of thought (well, at least that was my surface train of thought--underlying all of it was "I hope she falls for this because then I have someone that I can flip off so I can still make this cool gesture SOMETIME at least).

Faced with my flawless logic, she relented. I mean, how could she not? It's the devil! Not only did he deserve to be flipped off, he NEEDED to be flipped off. But she set a few conditions. I could ONLY flip off the devil, and I could ONLY flip off the devil somewhere that nobody, including my mother, could see it.

This cheered me greatly. I could still practice my shiny new gesture--which I then knew to be a pretty severe gesture considering the considerable restrictions put on my using it. I just needed to find a good place to practice it. So I went back to my room and considered my options.

The devil, I knew, lived in hell. Hell, I knew, was underground and very hot. I knew this because I had at least once before tried to dig to it, just to see what it was like. I figured, once I broke through the "roof" of hell, I'd be able to sit from the top of my hole and peer down on the goings-on below, passing judgment and scoffing at all the sinners as their skin was baked from their bodies and wild beasts defecated in the eye sockets they had just pulled and eaten the eyeballs from. It's no wonder hell was a kind of obsession with me for awhile. It was such a colorful place.

Strangely, I was never able to dig that far, though.

But I did know the basic rules of hell, so I had to think of the best "access point" to apply my new gesturing skills at. I had to hope that the devil would be paying attention and see me doing it--but, really, it didn't matter if he did or didn't, I just wanted to flip something off.

There was only one logical point in my room: the heat register. It made perfect sense. It blew out hot air. It went below the house. Strange noises came out of it from time to time. Clearly this was a portal to the nether world.

So I plopped down on the floor of my room. I wrapped my legs up Indian style and peered down into the heat register. I couldn't SEE hell, but it had to be there somewhere. So, with some deliberation, I folded down my fingers and held them into place with my thumb and I flipped off Satan. And I continued to flip him off for the better part of the next hour. I don't know if he ever fully recovered from such a sound, symbolic thumping from me, but I do know that I nearly perfected the act of giving the bird--and that is a skill that has served me quite well over the years.