Say Anything, I'm disappointed in you.

I make no secret of my unconditional love and affection for the band Say Anything.

I mean, just look at them.

I've listened to all of their albums (with the exception of the newest, and in any case I'll be getting to that soon) at least thirty times each.
Max Bemis is the reason I found what is now one of my favorite albums (Razia's Shadow: A Musical; he plays Barayas the Spider, but I won't get into that right now).
I have two Say Anything tattoos:

I'm not fantastic with pain tolerance, as evidenced by the buggy eyes.

the second one of which is the name of the song they wrote specifically for me and a huge part of why I made it through my pregnancy/adoption at all.

It's not even close to an exaggeration to say that Say Anything is my favorite band.

There are a few reasons for this, the main one being that when I listen to music, I listen to the lyrics. The way Max Bemis writes is the way I think. He talks about all the same topics, but puts his own vulgar, eloquent, self-deprecating spin on them. It's not flowery; it's a bald, in-your-face statement that the darkest part of you instantly relates to. It hits and it hurts. It's obscene and poetic at the same time. (These, incidentally, are all the same reasons why I love Stephen King.)

And a big part of it, for me, is the self-deprecation. Every song is written in the tone of someone who is incredibly insecure, but doesn't want to come off as whiny. Every angry song has an equal hit at itself. It all measures out. That's what sets them apart from your stereotypical "emo" or alternative group. It's also what I want to talk about here.

The first SA album I got into was Is A Real Boy. There's a song on there (that was in my "Favorite Songs" rotation for a couple months) called "Admit It!" that discusses a specific brand of narcissist/sociopath that I was intimately familiar with.

The real reason I liked this song is that, following this lengthy diatribe against this group, Max turns the mic on himself:

Well let me tell you this: I am shamelessly self-involved.
I spend hours in front of the mirror making my hair elegantly disheveled.
I worry about how this album will sound, because I believe it will determine the amount of sex I will have in the future.
I self-medicate with drugs and alcohol to treat my extreme social anxiety.

and everything after that, is directed at himself as well as the people he hates. Everything is doled out in equal measure. There's no elitism in it; it plainly states, I hate this, but I'm no better, and I'm certainly not immune to it. It demonstrates a self-awareness most people don't have.

Their self-titled album (the latest one before Anarchy, My Dear, which came out in March) is my favorite. Favorite songs, favorite SA album, favorite album in general. It starts off with the usual piss and vinegar, but it's more humorous than actually angry. The 6th song, "Mara and Me", stops in the middle, and Max says,

Wait a second-- I can't write the same damn song over and over again.
I can't define myself through irony and self-deprecation.
I can't deny myself being alive through my alienation.

Immediately after that, the song picks up the pace and it becomes a completely different album. It's not upbeat, but it's not angry. It explores a lot and is wildly different from anything they did before.

So, after being so completely in love with their last album, you can imagine my excitement when I found out that a new one was coming out in just a few days. The day it went on sale, David and I drove to the mall, braved the Hot Topic, and bought it. I opened it on the way out to the parking lot, because I just wanted to look at it. A new Say Anything album, full of brand new songs I'd never heard before, in my hands, about to rain its undoubtedly lovely poetry upon my eager ears.

We put it in the CD player. . .

and were almost immediately disappointed.

Disclaimer: I really, really didn't want to write this post. I did not want to write this post SO MUCH that it has been sitting, unfinished, in my post drafts since early March. I tried to be forgiving and open-minded and I thought that maybe this new album needed time to grow on me. I wanted to give it a fair chance.

Well, after six months, I think what I've given it is much more than fair. So even though it hurts me immensely, I'm going to say it.

It sucks.

It's like everything Max learned during the last album was just suddenly forgotten. He's still bitter, but all that self-awareness and eloquence is gone, and all of that completely unwarranted bile is being launched directly at you, the listener, the person who bought this CD. It's forty-five minutes of being screamed at because you have a stupid haircut and wear stupid clothes and listen to Rihanna, probably.

Does that sound pleasant? If it does, I should probably go a little bit further here. The first song, "Burn A Miracle", is a five-minute vehicle for the phrase "burn a miracle" to turn into the phrase "burn America". No reasoning, no wittiness, just screaming "burn America" over and over again. There's a song called "Sheep", which I shouldn't even really need to explain. Most of the songs AT LEAST make mention of the fact that Max was made fun of/bullied/scorned as a kid, and at most are completely about it, and all of them are delivered with the charm and wit of a child in Target throwing a fit because they're all out of the Iron Man masks and he has to get a Captain America mask instead. The songs that aren't just spite-volcanos spewing out hate lava, because there are a couple, are wooden ballads with no emotion behind them. They're like me trying to write journals now; "I'm sad. Sometimes I'm not happy. This happened today."

It's just. . . awful. Angry, empty, awful. And entitled, Jesus is it entitled. And it's being directed at the listener.

What the hell happened, Say Anything? I thought we made a breakthrough last time. You had a song about a myth, for God's sake! There was a song about how cool Max's wife was, and how she makes him feel like a little kid but in a good way! Everything was wonderful and peachy and we were all having a good time, and then somebody got dumped, or got shit kicked on their shoes, or got cut off in traffic, I don't know, and you had to go and ruin everything by making this just awful, because I can't think of another word for it, awful fucking record with little to no redeemable qualities. Here's a tip, if you're screaming at someone for forty-five minutes, it should be because you have a point to make, because you love them.

Or in the case of this post, both, because I love you guys and GODDAMNIT YOU'RE BETTER THAN THIS.

Please don't do this again, Say Anything. I can forgive you because we've got history, but please don't hurt me like this again. I don't think my little heart can take it.

Foodin' Ain't Easy (or, Masochism In The Kitchen)

When I met David, he was a reclusive nerd who ate Wendy's almost every day of the week and only left his apartment for work. And he was far, far too thin. I love food (like, really, I don't think you understand how much I love food), so I saw David's eating habits as a sort of project.

With only a few months' tutelage, David was not only leaving his apartment more, but he was actually eating three meals a day, and had gained ten pounds. We became FoodNetwork aficionados. For Valentine's Day we made Rahmschnitzel (and again for his parents only three days later). Over the next year we made French onion soup, miso soup, scallop pot pie, turkey pot pie, cherry pie, blueberry pie, all kinds of pie, raclette*, and sushi.

I turned David into a foodie. It's the best.

We're pretty much obsessed with sushi, and we've recently gotten hooked on this thing they serve at sushi places called Tuna Tataki. It's seared tuna in (depending on where you get it) a ponzu sauce, or tataki sauce, or, like in the recipe we used, soy-ginger-lime sauce.

LOOK AT THIS. IT'S BEAUTIFUL.

But it's (predictably) expensive at sushi restaurants, and in any case, they don't give you nearly enough. At least, not enough for people who eat like fat kids. So the other day, we decided to make it.

We bought a beautiful tuna steak, and while David was in class I was supposed to get the rest of the ingredients. I thought it would be boring to do alone, so I called Jon and asked if he wanted to go on a foodventure.


We went to Kroger and knocked off most of the ingredient list, even though it took forever because they hid the peanut oil and the sesame seeds. When we finally found both of them (after walking around the whole store twice saying "SOOO-SA-MEE SADS",) they were hella expensive. Jon talked me into buying the sesame seeds at the little Asian market across the street, because they would be less expensive and I'd get more of them.

Because who couldn't use more sesame seeds, am I right?

I had driven by [the store] a bunch of times, but never gone in. It really doesn't look like much; it's a really small storefront and the windows are covered by flattened boxes. "Dubious", is the word I was looking for. But I trusted Jon, so I followed him in.

[This store] is a small, badly lit, dingy, creepy place with only two shelves. The shelves are sparsely stocked with jars full of unidentifiable goos, and cardboard boxes labeled with permanent marker. There is no music, and there is only one person working there. The big bag of sesame seeds I got was indeed cheap, but it was covered in some weird sticky residue I'd rather not know the origin of. On the way out, Jon called my attention to a small green box labeled "Placenta soap". It didn't say where the placenta was from, but to be perfectly honest I don't think that detail would've swayed me much.

That pretty much did it for me.

I hustled our asses out the door, and once we were in the car, I spent a good ten minutes shouting at Jon (who thought it was extremely funny) about how I was never setting foot in that store again, and how ridiculous it was that I even had to explain to someone why I didn't want to patron a store that peddles placenta goods (of indeterminate or determinate origin, it really makes no difference to me).

In case any of you had any doubts as to the veracity of this claim.

I dropped Jon back at his house and went home to get started on the prep.

The first thing I had to do was mince a shallot. I had never touched or seen a shallot before, but I figured, they're just like, small onions, right? Can't be too difficult. Onions are my area of expertise, after all.

If you're not familiar with shallots, let me explain a shallot to you. You know how when you cut onions (and if you don't, you've seen it in pretty much every movie or show), you cry? It's because the smell that wafts out gets all up in your tear ducts and bites something fierce. Big onions are bad enough, but shallots are about six times the bite in about 1/3 of the package.

As if it wasn't bad enough to be sobbing and stinging over the counter, temporarily blind, with a very sharp knife in my hands, Mason, who loves to try and get involved in Mumma's cooking, came up and started meowling and trying to climb up me to get to what he was under the impression was some very tasty Krab (imitation crab, hence the K).

SO I CAN'T DRAW KNIVES. LIKE YOU'RE SO PERFECT YOURSELF.

This went on for several minutes (because mincing takes a little while) with Mason becoming increasingly attentive and more devious in his attempts to get TASTY TASTY KWAB, alternately taking swipes at my hands and jumping up onto the counter, and at one point sinking all of his front claws into my bottom. I wasn't pleased about that.

Finally I let him smell it.


Once that was finished (and I had spent a good five minutes in the bathroom with a wet paper towel over my eyes), I turned to the ginger. Which, as it turns out, was not as easy as I thought it would be.

Have any of you ever seen a ginger root? I feel like I've heard it called "a hand of ginger", but that could also be completely wrong. This is what ginger root looks like:

Yes, there is a plant that grows that looks like a mangled Muppet hand. And we grind it up and eat it and put it in lotions. You're rubbing mangled Muppet on yourself. How does that make you feel?

It's not fantastically easy to peel, ginger root. You might not have guessed that; conversely, you might be a person with eyes. There are all these weird, frustrating knobblies that confound your standard vegetable peeler with an infuriating sort of indifference. You have to cut the knobblies off, and if you're feeling adventurous (like I was), you can cut those down and peel them too.

And there is the stringiness, which makes it harder. You know how with, say, a potato, when you see a brown spot under the meat, you can dig it out? Forget it. Ginger roots are nothing but sub-dermal colors.

Peeling ginger roots is like playing with your first pocketknife. You think you're really smart and you know exactly what you're doing, but you don't, and you're bound to get a lot of cuts and scratches in the process, and things are probably going to get thrown. Unintentionally.

If you're as lucky as me, you'll get to pour lime juice in those cuts and scratches later! Yay!

Ginger roots are fucking obnoxious, is the core theme of what I am getting at here.

Then I got to take all that peeled ginger, and grate it with a cheese grater, which made my fingers even worse. Then I got to pour lime juice all over my raw-meat fingers, and all over those little cuts and scratches from peeling ginger and my wonderful, annoying kitten! Yay! And I'd been standing for about two hours, so my heels, accustomed to being snugged up in a blanket or kicked up on a couch, felt completely flat, and my thighs and butt hurt, and I was just a very grumpy Kelli in general.

I'm going to start using this as a reaction to things.

And then, after all these really dumb things, David showed up, and made everything better, and we made delicious delicious tuna tataki, and then we ate that delicious delicious tuna tataki, and I had a much better night watching the worst season of Top Model ever, with my wonderful foodie boyfriend.

And that is the story of Kelli's Tuna Tataki Foodventure! Thank you all for reading. :]



*Remember when I said I was getting a raclette oven? WELL I GOT ONE. FOR CHRISTMAS. IT'S EVERYTHING I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE.

Faith and Star Wars

**If religion is one of your "hot-button issues", I invite you to stay, but will certainly understand if you choose not to read further. I welcome comments!

I have never been an incredibly religious person. I grew up mostly Catholic but was born, and can't remember being, Baptist, and in middle school I started going to a Presbyterian church; but I have never identified closely with any particular sect. In high school I went through a phase where I was really into Christian rock, but that was about as deep as I got.

For a long time I was just kind of told that there was a God, that He was good and He cared about me, and all those other Sunday school cliches, and I accepted it without question. It didn't really do much to govern my life. I mean, Catholic school kids were just as bad as public school kids, only they got routine forgiveness checks. So even in a school where we started every morning with a prayer (and when we got a new principal, an assembly in the hall to hold hands and sing), God wasn't really as present as everyone tells you He is supposed to be. He just kind of floated in the background, a forgotten fact, but a fact nonetheless, at least to us kids.

I accepted it without question, up to a point in junior year when "some shit went down", as the kids say, and I went through what is routinely termed "a crisis of faith". I don't know that it was much of a crisis, but I asked all the usual questions:

Is there a God?
If there is, why does He let crappy things happen to me?
If God cares about everyone, why does everyone get hurt?
Does he get so caught up in worrying about other people's problems that He has to let some people slip through the cracks?

and one of my own:

Am I happy believing that God exists?

Because that seemed to be the biggest thing, to me. Everyone I knew who believed in God seemed to be really happy about it all the time. It made them more sure of themselves, and they emanated this happy glow when they thought about God, or talked about God. They seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and if they didn't, God would handle it. I'd never felt like that. And there were other people, who I didn't know so well, who I'd really only heard about, who were always angry, and thought that God hated everyone, and were always citing "the wrath of God". Believing in God seemed to only make these people really angry, and that just didn't hold with what I thought I knew, or felt, about God.

Whether they were happy or angry, they were stirred up about it. They were emotional; it rocked them. I never felt rocked. So maybe, by the transitive property or something, I didn't really believe in God.

I went to camp that summer feeling annoyed and disappointed, and my answer ended up finding me, in the form of my favorite camp counselor, David (total coincidence, not the same David). I told him I wasn't sure what to believe in anymore, and that I felt like kind of a faker at services, and he looked at me and said, very simply, "You don't have to believe any of this, you know. You can believe whatever you want, as long as it makes you happy and as long as it makes you a better person."

I left feeling lighter and happier. To this day, it is the best advice I have ever gotten about religion or faith or God.

Here's what I believe, at 22 and having dealt with, well, a lot of things:
1) I believe that there is a God.
2) I believe that it is more important to be a good person, or a happy person, than a godly one or even a remotely religious one; I believe that it is more important to do what is right by your own personal standards than to align yourself with any sort of side or sect or faction.
3) I believe that you should be tolerant and respectful of everyone.

My version of God, because I think everyone who thinks of God thinks of Him differently, is a lot like the Force (or that midichlorian biology BS, if you saw Phantom Menace first); it exists in everyone, if only even a tiny bit.

My views on religion, which are what I really wanted to focus on here, are related to that analogy:
Some people don't believe in the Force. Some do. Jedi and Sith are two sides of the same coin; the Force is strong in both of them and they are both given the same opportunities to use it, yet one turns out good and one turns out evil. It manifests in different ways depending on the person who uses it.

I'm not fantastic at dealing in theology (I am quite acquainted with the Bible, but somehow I never feel all that qualified to use it; not to mention, it always bothers me when people cite things rather than tell you what they're actually getting at), so I'll use another analogy here.

A few years ago, when I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons, my mom was worried. Her only experience with D&D was when my dad and his friends played it, and they got way too into it, to where it [at least looked like it] bordered on obsession.. My mom thought it was some sort of cult or Satan-worship thing, because her only point of reference wasn't a very good one. (My aunt and uncle, for the same exact reason, worried about Kirsten playing.) I talked to Mom about it, and told her it was basically just a bunch of friends sitting around a table to roll dice and eat chips (not to mention, Al's dad would be home the whole time, geez Mom), but she still worried, and didn't really understand, until we finally had a session at my house and she got to see it firsthand.

After that session I sat her down and kind of talked her through the game, and she got to see how it really worked, and why I had so much fun with it. I explained to her that D&D (like video games, or literature, or faith or religion) wasn't an inherently bad thing; it just depended on who was playing it and how they played it. It should be good, and it should be fun, but some people take it too far.

In other words, my whole piece here boils down to a very simple philosophy when it comes to religion: Hate the player, not the game.

Encyclopedia Kelli and the Problem With Boys

Most of my life I have been what my parents call (and I really hate this term, dear reader, so you better be happy) "boy-crazy".

My mother thinks that this is because my parents got divorced when I was four and my father moved to a different state when I was eight. (She likes to remind me of this particularly when something stupid happens in my love life. Which is all the time.) For the record, I do not agree with her. I think that has more to do with my narcissism than anything else.

But there's definitely a pattern, though I don't know if it's necessarily a "daddy issues" pattern (I suffered a mild form of hate-seizure from typing those words out), that's plagued me since I was first old enough to start liking boys; I start off liking/dating someone I think is a really nice guy, who over the course of our relationship is revealed to be completely screwed up.

This cycle has mercifully (seemingly) been broken by David. (I say "seemingly" because if David's going to turn out to be screwed up, having not known about it for a year is going to make it exponentially larger, like killing gardeners and keeping them in that room in his house with all the Christmas decorations (I'm sorry, sweetie, for the record, I don't think you kill gardeners, but one must be prepared for anything).)

Prior to David, this awful trend had been going on for about nine years. Exactly nine years, actually.

In eighth grade, I got my first boyfriend. He was a boy I met up at the library, which was a popular hangout for kids from my school, and he seemed perfectly nice. He even gave me my first kiss, and this really nice talking picture frame. Then I found out that he was a smoker (at thirteen years old, that's a dealbreaker), that he had failed out of ninth grade, and had an unhealthy fondness for starting fights with people. He also mooned three of the girls from my class.

(Kyle, I don't know if you read these; you're a cool guy, and I'm glad we're sort-of-friends, but you can't deny that all of the above is true.)

This continued into high school. My first high-school boyfriend (which has its own sort of significance, at least for girls) was a creepy goth kid who I didn't realize was creepy until about a month into dating, and may have actually been retarded. The one after that was George, a Korean violin player who punched trees when he was angry, who I "went out with" for a month, and who still, to this day, eight years later, pops up from time to time to ask me "where we went wrong".

After that things went downhill rather quickly.

There was Andrew, who I dated for a year and a half and turned out to be an incredibly aggressive porn addict (and who actuallywent to prison for two years long after we dated, but that's a story for. . . never, at least not on this blog).

Then there was Steve, the disappearing act,
then Ryan, the sociopath with rage issues,
then Steve (same Steve), the disappearing junkie,
then Justin, the emotionally unavailable bodybuilder,

and then Zack.
Zack doesn't need an explanation.

Like I said, this cycle has very recently been broken by a genuinely sweet guy (who turned out to be a genuinely sweet guy), but for the longest time this same story played out in front of me again, and again, and again. It was far past enough to make anyone want to throw up their hands and proclaim, "I'm done. No more dating for me."

And everyone around them would get it. They'd nod, and say, "Sure. I mean, if you don't want to get eaten by alligators, you don't dive into the alligator pit at the zoo. Makes sense."

So why, you might be asking yourself, did I keep trying? Why did I keep steadfastly convincing myself that this time would be better, this guy would be better, even after it turned out he was sleeping with my friends?

One word: normalcy.

Even as a very small child I got along better with boys than girls. I think this was because I spent what seemed like a lot of time at my dad's house, where he lived with his best friend until I was eight. I wore overalls and hung out with boys (well, men) on Tuesdays and the weekends, and even though I didn't understand much of what was going on (because I was six), I could see that maybe other little girls were different than me.

In second grade, before I moved to St. Valentine's, I had two best friends, Michael and Darnell. We had a club, and Michael was the president. He named me Secretary (my mother later told me, when I was much older, that this was because his father had had an affair with his secretary; as you can imagine, this BLEW MY MIND), and Darnell was Vice President. We felt very important, going about our club duties with an air of superiority. It was, after all, very special to have two friends on permanent reserve to help you pass out cupcakes on your birthday.

One day on the playground, another little girl in my class ran up to where I was playing under the monkey bars (under, never on: I was afraid of heights), patiently waiting for Michael and Darnell to return from being sternly lectured by a teacher about rubbing dirt on other students, and said, in a very presumptuous way, "You're friends with boys?"
"Yeah!" I said enthusiastically. I mean, we were in second grade. Surely we were all mature enough to be friends with the opposite gender. "Boys are fun."
Her nose wrinkled. "Do you like them?"
"Well, yeah. I guess." I was confused. You were supposed to like your friends, weren't you?
"No no NO," she shouted. "I mean do you want to MARRY one of them? Girls are supposed to want to get married!"
I thought about it for a minute. Marrying someone was a big deal in second grade. Almost all the girls in our class were married. It didn't really mean much except that you held hands sometimes, and gave each other your chocolate milk if you didn't want it. "Sure."
She waggled her finger in my face in a shame-on-you sort of way. "You gotta marry one of them!"
Then she ran away, and I went back to pulling up bunches of grass, thinking about what she'd said. Girls were supposed to get married to boys, and that made sense. Boys were fun. They had the coolest lunchboxes and the funnest toys. I thought very hard about which one of them had the best lunches to trade, and when Michael and Darnell came back to sit with me I said "Hey Darnell, do you want to get married?"
"Okay," he said, rubbing his nose on his sleeve.

It was so simple, so elegant, and it stuck with me when I moved to my next school. Girls were supposed to like boys. Girls were supposed to want to marry boys. As a weird, gawky little girl who preferred reading and Star Wars to makeup and dresses, it was very clear to me that if I wanted other kids to like me, I was going to have to be normal in SOME way. Boys were the obvious answer.

Most of my life, I have been operating under that idea. Even as I got older, and it got more pushed back in my head and became completely subconscious, it sort of governed the way I went about my relationships with people. If you were a girl, boys were supposed to like you; if boys didn't like you, and you didn't like boys ("or girls, or somebody, at least", as it became during high school), there was something wrong with you. You were weird.

So there you have it. It's really stupid, right? Under this cool, quirky facade has always beaten the heart of an eight-year-old girl who just didn't want people to think she was weird.

(If you made it to the end of this exceptionally long and drawn-out post, congratulations: you have won the title of **Bestest Reader Ever**, and you get a prize. Here is a picture of me in fourth grade.)

Nice, right?

**It is worth noting that Steve has cleaned up a lot and remains one of my very good friends.

The Nuclear Flaming Bees: A Kid's Story

Before I tell you this story, I need to publicly thank Matt Flynn (Big Fat Matt) for being so darn excited about my blog, and making me feel guilty for not updating more. Matt, I needed that. Thank you. :]



This is a story I have been hearing from my dad since I was old enough to properly register things I heard. I've had questions about some of the details, but my mom fully corroborates its veracity* (if not without a small sigh and a shake of the head), so I have to either believe that it's true, or that my parents have been playing a very stupid prank on me for twenty years.

I'd prefer to believe it's true, for obvious reasons.

THE STORY OF THE NUCLEAR FLAMING BEES

Way back before I was born, my parents (who were not yet my parents) and a bunch of their friends attempted to go camping on Lake Michigan. I say "attempted" because they set off really late in the day and neglected to phone ahead to any campgrounds to hold a spot (and, oh yeah, it was a weekend near the end of summer so everyone in the world was camping), and by the time they actually got to Lake Michigan at around 10:30 at night, every campground was full.

Except one, which was suspiciously empty. However, everyone was exhausted, and no one thought to point out just then how weird it was that a campground right on Lake Michigan was almost completely empty at the peak of camping season.

And honestly, if they had, someone else probably would've just told them to shut up.

Anyway, like I said, they were all really tired (20-somethings apparently didn't stay up until 5 am in those days, because there was no Internet), so they set up their tents without a second thought and drifted off to sleep. . .

. . . and were rudely awoken (probably with shouts of "F**K WHAT IS HAPPENING") at six the next morning by the soothing sounds of a blaring klaxon, and an amplified voice burbling the words: "THIS IS A . . . . . . . OF THE. . . . . . . NUCLEAR POWER FACILITY."

Yes, they had apparently parked their tents and food and frail, radioactivity-sensitive human bodies across the way from a nuclear power plant. Remember, those actually used to be a thing.

Once the initial shock wore off (and the reason they were the only people at this campground had suddenly been made perfectly clear), my parents and their friends conferred and decided that, rather than hoof it around the coast again only to be told that no, sorry, no one had packed up and left in the last six hours so they were still S.O.L., they would make the best of it here. After all, it was still a campsite, right? There was water, and there were trees, and they were still sleeping on the ground, and wasn't that what camping was all about?

Yes. I know. Like I said, you need to remember that nuclear power plants used to be a thing.

After breakfast they decided to go for a swim in the Lake. All my Michigan readers-- which is to say, with one possibly notable exception, all of you-- have you ever been in Lake Michigan? It's like, really cold, right? Like, winter-in-Michigan-and-it's-not-even-winter cold?

Well on this day, in 1980-mumble, when a nuclear power facility stood on one of its shores, Lake Michigan was as warm as a bowl of takeout Panera soup. There was a lot of skeptical toe-dipping, and after about half an hour of "You go in." "I'm not going in, you go in", the only person brave enough to wade into the water and take a decent swim was my dad's friend Nick, a great big man who has looked exactly like a lion (with a mane and scruffy beard to fit) for as far back as I can remember. This earned him the name Nuclear Nick, which stuck, but I'm sure he's okay with that.

This wasn't really a necessary part of the story, but that's how I always heard it and I like having it in there.

Later, after their swim-- or rather, Nick's swim and their spectating-- they returned to their campsite and were just beginning to scarf down on some lunch when they heard a loud angry buzzing, like a motorcycle, coming from fairly close by. They looked for the source of the noise, and down by one of their feet they saw (and my dad always tells this part the same) "a hole in the ground, and next to it, a cicada wasp as big as your thumb."

Then he holds up his thumb and waggles it, in case anyone had any doubts about the size.

With a sinking feeling, because wasps are not known to be solitary creatures, they looked around and saw dozens more of these holes, many of them with huge wasps in or around them.

Now, if this were me or almost anyone I know, I wouldn't have cared how long I'd been planning this trip, or how long it would take to find another campground or get home; my shit would be in the car and I'd be gone. There would be literally no time between seeing all those bees and me driving away. Whoever was with me could stay there and figure it out for themselves.

As you might have guessed, these guys did not fall into that camp. That night, the men hatched a plan. I don't know what the women were doing; I assume they were either asleep, or telling the men what a terrible idea this was. I can tell you that if my mom was awake she was probably rolling her eyes so hard she got permanent retinal damage, so if she was awake, shame on you, Dad, Nick, Mark, and Kurt if you were there. Shame on you for making my mom need glasses.

Anyway, they hatched a plan, and the plan went like this:

Cicada wasps make tunnels in the ground. Each hole is an entrance to one of those tunnels, which in turn leads to all other tunnels. If you did it at night, when the wasps were all drowsy and in their tunnels, you could squirt some lighter fluid into a couple holes, drop a match in one, and poof! No more bees.

The plan worked pretty well. . .

. . . up to a point.

Because this did not kill the bees. It just made them really pissed off. And on fire.

(I had a lot of fun drawing this one.)

They rose out of their holes in a fiery swarm, each giant bee made even larger by the ball of blue flame engulfing it, collectively buzzing like a gang of bikers (the bikes, not the actual bikers).

This could have ended really badly, but the fire seemed to disorient the bees just enough that they didn't go for the campers, or the tents-- they just flew up and into the night, their angered buzzing growing more distant as the distinctly Gygaxian form disappeared over the trees. As they watched the bees retreating, presumably never to return, my dad put his arm around my mom and thought,

"This is gonna be a really cool story to tell my daughter."

THE END




*In one final attempt to find out if this was in fact a true story, or if by telling this I would just be pulling the same elaborate prank on my readers that my parents played on me, I verified it with my mom before posting this. She swears it's true. Mom, I'm trusting you here; you better not tell me it was a lie when you're on your deathbed. Dad, that goes for you as well.

**If he was there. I've always heard this story with Kurt in it, and besides, I couldn't deprive you all of Kurt's hair, which is FACTUALLY ACCURATE and really fun to draw.