Knee Cream

During one very unfortunate span of 8 hours, I had the disfortune of getting stuck on an up ramp at Loon Mountain parking lot, colliding with another vehicle as I slid down and flipping my car over 180 degrees, but above all, hurting my knees by falling continuously on ice; carefully disguised and camouflaged under one centimeter of snow on the trails. Once home, my knees turned from white to purple in a matter of an hour and I spent that time desperately seeking some sort of remedy. Little did I know that the thought of my knees in their current state would be my remedy later on.

Searching frantically in my medicine cabinet, I found a little tube that said “Pain Relief”. Blinded by the stinging in my soft-ball sized knees I grabbed it, undid the cap and squeezed it with an umbrella-hold onto my bruised joints. Rubbing it in softly, the placebo effect took hold and I belied I was feeling better already. I left a thick coat of pain relief gel on my knees. I closed the bottle and imagined the bliss ahead.

I was surfing Facebook for the following minutes when I felt a tingling sensation in my knees. I figured it was only the gel, fighting off the pain like a knight in white armor battling the forces of evil that kept me from walking. I dismissed it...but the feeling came back.

I realized soon enough the feeling coming from my knees was pain, hot pain! More pain than before. It got hotter and hotter until, over the course of a five minutes, I felt like there was open candle flames dancing on my knee-caps. I panicked, tried blowing on my knees, but even that offered me no relief from the inferno. I ran to my bathroom, opened the cabinet and removed the gel tube; angrily staring at it. In small print below the very attractive words of “Pain Relief” was a smaller phrase which I had overlooked.

“Capsaisin Cream.” No shit my knees were burning! I had just put the equivalent of six of the world's hottest

peppers on my black and blue. In a spit second decision, made in between internal screams of terror, I took off my Nike sweat-shorts and grabbed a towel nearby. I began vigorously rubbing the excess cream off my knees in a side to side and back to front motions. The realization of what I had done came too late, in the form of a whole new level of pain surging though my legs.

I had achieved my goal of removing the excess goo off my knees, but I had rubbed most of it into my skin and irritated it even more!

Now in complete freakage, I decided to take out the heavy artillery against this devil's cream. I took off all my clothes and sprinted to the bathroom across the hall. It was 2 am. I turned on the shower to super cold, and jumped inside with the least graceful motions you can imagine. Shivering, I took the shower head and lowered it to my knees.

To my surprise, the area that the water coming out of the shower covered was not big enough for both my knees to comfortably receive the wet relief. I spent my next fifteen minutes holding the shower head over one knee until the pain in the other was close to knocking me unconscious. Then I moved the water over to the other bruised knee.

Feeling too ridiculous and somewhat better, I shut off the shower, put on my robe and shamefully walked out of the bathroom. The pain in my knees was coming back quick (the shower was only a temporary relief) and I had to find another way to keep cool.

As I walked into my room I caught a glimpse of my green desk fan. I grabbed it off the floor, clipped it onto the side of the desk and angled it towards my knees. I touched my knees together ( a process quite uncomfortable for a guy) and sat parallel to my desk, letting the cold air blow on the bruises. Due to the small nature of the fan, my knees had to be adjacent for the air to hit both of them. Unfortunately, the weak power of a simple desk fan was not enough to cool off the conflagration. That's when I saw the final ingredient which would put an end to my suffering.

Like a godsend, the bottle of Purell sat on my desk staring me in the face like a raging bull. I uncapped it, poured some of the slimy liquid on my hands and gently slid them over my black knees. Immediately, as the cold fan air contacted the alcohol in the gel, an icy sensation filled my body and the burning was immediately gone. I had found it! But there was one final piece of the puzzle.

My legs were not meant to stay together for that long. I was tired and my muscles simply couldn’t keep my legs together for an extended period of time without them drifting apart unconsciously. This problem was solved by my red flannel shirt; whose sleeves I tied in a double knot around my thighs to keep my knees and legs together under the fan.

For the hour following, I kept the same position, tied, glazing the affected knee areas with Purell once it evaporated. I had never before felt such relief from such a horrible pain.

I went to bed pain free and with a pair of the cleanest and most bacteria free knees in the state.

Jesse Zhang and The Ski Lift of Death Based On Completely and Entirely Factual Events

It was a sunny weekend when my friend Jesse Zhang asked me to grab my board and go to the mountain with him, his brother and his dad. I was definitely up for a day of snowboarding and going with Jesse, perhaps one of the funniest and awesome people to hang out with, was definitely an opportunity I did not want to miss.

We got in the car and an hour and forty five minutes later, we were there. The mountain was called Pat's Peak; the hotspot for Asian skiing for the surrounding area. Just as in their downtown district, the merchandise at Pat's Peak (lift tickets in this case) were discounted. $35 for an entire afternoon and night of riding! I half expected to see a badly copied “Wactchyouset” logo and a “Made In China” stamp on the back when I bought my night pass but it seemed legitimate enough. We suited up and hit the trails.

Not an experienced snowboarder myself, I went down the slopes slowly, sticking my ass out as if I was about to sit on a high placed toilet seat. Whenever the speed got too fast for me, around 20 mph (the speed limit on streets with deaf and mentally ill children) I turned perpendicular to the trail and came to a full stop. Starting out is always the hardest part, physically and emotionally. In the earlier days, not only did I have to deal with hitting the ground but with people around me making noises that were a cross between an A and an E, which I took as an insult. Perhaps that's all they could formulate before the 6'5'' guy in front of them stopped suddenly causing them to swerve violently into whatever was to the side at the time.

Jesse was even worse than I was, though I pretty much had the hang of staying on the board and riding down without stopping by this trip. The following chain of affairs happened at least six times in succession. I would ride down carefully, looking at the trail in front of me when I'd notice Jesse Zhang's form come into view from my right in the periphery. He would utter a statement like “Hey look I'm almost catching up to you!” after which he would catch an edge or a bump which would send him to the ground and out of my view. I kept seeing him come next to me and in the next second he was rolling behind me.

This sequence of events would later be repeated one more time, but with a bigger audience. We were in line for the ski-lift, talking about the regular old things until it was our turn to board the lift. We slid slowly into position as the chair came behind us and we sat down; Me on the left, Jesse on my right. Before the safety bar had a chance to lower, Jesse said “I think I can clip in my other binding!”

As Jesse leaned forward to strap his other foot onto the snowboard, I turned to my left to watch a snowball fight amongst a few children. I had not even finished turning my head fully to where I wanted it to be before I heard a soft “Oh Shit!”

I turned back around to find Jesse Zhang gone and an empty seat beside me. I looked from side to side but couldn't find him. The lift came to a stop and I gazed between my legs to find where Jesse had ended up. He was face first in the snow below the lift, his body position reminiscent of Frogger...once you lose.

The lift attendants kindly helped him up and sat him down on a chair behind me. We rendezvoused at the top of the mountain where I made more fun of him for a bit before we took a run down.

To this day, Jesse's story is that I sat in the middle of the chairlift, I gave him no room (he never wanted to clip his other binding in) and because of this lack of space due to my “big ass,” he tumbled out of his seat into the snow below.

I, of course, will forever refute that claim. :)

The Museum of Contemporary Arts

On my recent trip to Canada to party and drink till the wee hours of the morning, I decided to enrich myself culturally during the day by going to the Museum of Contemporary Arts in downtown Montreal. I picked up my 20 Canadian dollars and walked down the street for twenty minutes, during which I was solicited by old men asking for change on my right, and old men beckoning me to enter their strip clubs on my left.

Upon approaching the Museum, I was greeted by a set of giant blue balls scattered around the front and side of the museum. They stood about 7 feet in diameter and emitted random sounds which I could not quite place; metal colliding together, dubious moans, groans and other ambient sounds. Little did I know that was the least weird exhibit I was going to witness.

Inside of the museum, a blonde woman at the counter told me that it was going to be only 5 dollars because they were between exhibits; however, the permanent collection was open. So I bought the ticket, walked up the stairs and was greeted by a well dressed attendant who took my ticket, ripped it and wished me a nice visit.

So I walked in and began observing the art.A picture of a thin woman clearly wearing men's clothing and wielding a large sledge hammer

greeted me first. It was a bit feminist. I was scared at the thought of a woman wielding a sledge hammer. And it had to be fake; a woman of her size could not possibly bring a sledge hammer over her head; hell, I can barely do it.

At that very moment, a peculiar sound filled the otherwise surprisingly quiet atmosphere. It sounded as though a textbook was being hit on a flat surface. The crash echoed a few times and then died down. I immediately forgot about the peculiar sound once I rounded a corner away from sledge-girl. The wall to my left was filled with small foot x foot framed photographs. At first glance the arrangement looked interesting but once I inspected the contents of the photos, I had to smile. They contained the face of the photographer, his expression as though he's about to sneeze. The camera was deliberately brought too close to his face so all the pictures were out of focus. Art?

Things only got weirder from there on. I was greeted by pictures of a normal newspaper...but folded in half, a portrait of a woman who, bent over, held a bouquet of flowers between her legs, a man who stuck thorns in his hand and filmed it and an orange on a plate. Art.

The slapping sound from earlier echoed across the rooms again. I looked around in vain.I was beckoned by a dark room with a variety of what seemed like video screens. I walked in to

observe. On one monitor showed a guy's face, filmed from below the chin. A spoon was slowly descending towards the camera, as if scooping up soup, and then ascending back to the man's mouth. The video was made in 1987. The scene slowly started spinning to the right, in a circular motion, as the man scooped more of his invisible soup. It spun faster and faster until I deemed it stupid of me to continue to watch what was in front of me. But the next screens surpassed the latter in idiocy completely.

I caught the video at the start as its title flashed across the screen: THE ROCKED HAND.What proceed was a scene of sheer lunacy and debasement of all sanity. A human hand was

placed on the ground as another hand meticulously placed ordinary rocks on top until the whole hand was covered. The screen next to it showed a man, half naked in a white room, attempting to compress a large quantity of fern leaves into his hands. Behind me, stood a video of a man staring at a red line which was moving at .003 miles per hour to his left.

I thought I had entered into a mad house. This could not possibly be real.But it was. And then I found out what the source of the echoing noise was.As I entered the next room, a small TV was placed on a stand in the middle. I looked at the

screen to see a video, but shot sideways; as if the bottom of the screen was the right edge of the TV. On the screen was a man standing on one foot, balancing. Occasionally he would hop from one foot to the other as he kept his other leg in the air. His shoes landing on what seemed like a gym floor produced the slapping noise I had heard. Dismayed, I waited to see if anything else happened in the video. I stood for ten minutes staring at the man hopping from leg to leg like he had just shat his pants or was trying to hold in a fart. I read the sign next to the TV.

“Filmed in 1979, Duration: 60 minutes.”Why anyone would spent 60 minutes out of their life hopping from one foot to the other on

camera astounds me. Its even more disturbing that the man would submit this video to an art museum. But the pinnacle of derangement was when someone said “Yes, I will accept this video into the permanent collection of my exhibition.”

In a hurry not to have any more of my time wasted by lunatics, I hurried to what seemed to be the last chamber of the museum, deemed: The Blue Room.

The Blue Room consisted of squares and rectangles of various shades of blue glued to the walls. I leaned in to get a closer look, hoping that maybe it was a clever optical illusion or a vision trick that will reveal an image in the center of one of the squares. I was completely wrong. It was just a set of blue squares painted with a solid color.

While looking at a square up close, a voice broke the silence behind me.“Excuse me sir, at least two feet away from the art work!”I had to leave.None of what I witnessed inside that establishment could be considered art. Given a free

afternoon, a 1970s camera and some water colors I could made made every single piece of “art” in that entire museum. And mine would probably turn out better because my mind would simply not allow me to create shit. Three feet away?! If I had somehow broken his blue square I could have made a new one in two minutes!

I reflected on the horrible conditions inside the exhibition rooms as I walked out. Could anyone seriously have done what I just witnessed. Perhaps it was one of those old gypsy scams where they take your money and on the next day, the building and any trace of what you have paid for are gone. And then I figured it out!

It was all a big joke, and every single Canadian native to Montreal was in on it. They created the museum as a hoax, placed it in a building commendable for its architecture and decided that they would all act as if it is an amazing thing to see. When stupid tourist Americans would cross the border, they'd be recommended the esteemed Musée des Arts Contemporains!

I smiled to myself as I walked back to the hostel, I wasn't mad I had paid 5 dollars. I had figured out their caper! As I walked into the foyer to the hostel, a young couple asked me if I knew any good placed to see around town, they were only here for a day.

“Yea, I do actually! The Contemporary Arts Museum is really cool!”

P.S. - In a recent conversation with my mom, she retold the story of a high-school friend of her's from Bulgaria. She viewed a recent advertisement for “one of the most innovative, time transgressing and still-living artists in the world today.” The man was on a world tour displaying his art work and various sculptures he had completed in his career. A big arts enthusiast, Mara marked the date on her calendar and, when the day came, rushed to the gallery to see the exhibition.

When she got there, she saw paintings that abashed her. On a while canvas, stood a single red

dot, centered. It was part of a set of paintings among which were similar canvases but with just an increased number of dots; 2, 4, 6 and so on. She felt exceedingly dumb for paying ten bills to attend this great master's expo. He was clearly an idiot!

Mara went to one of the gallery attendants in hopes of finding out how much such a painting with a single red dot costs; not because she wanted to buy it, but because she was astounded that such “craft” could even be for sale.

“We're sorry mam, but this one is already sold.” Answered the attendant, misinterpreting Mara's intentions.

“For how much?”“18,000 Levs.” The equivalent of $12,519 and thirteen cents. She was afraid to ask for the

price of paintings with more than a single dot displayed. That day, Mara went home dismayed and yet she was not so dumb after all. There was that one

guy who spent half years salary, in Bulgaria, to buy a red dot. He was the idiot, the artist was simply a clever businessman.

Unisex Bathroom Shenanigans! Episode 1/1

When I was just a young boy in 3rd grade, I lived in a strange far away land called Bulgaria. A land where we have the most delicious hot-dog stands, a mile long produce market and unisex bathrooms. At least in my school, that is.

During passing times between classes, which were weirdly ten minutes long in retrospect, my friend, Matry, and I used to play a game. The game involved chasing each other around and attempting to loose one another and hide somewhere. If you hid and were not found until class started, you won! We played this game constantly despite being warned by the teachers and the staff in the halls that it was a very dangerous activity for nine year-olds to be participating in. Dangerous in my book was playing with knives and running around with axes while wearing shoes with springs. Running around school was just kid's play.

So one day, during our routine game of Chase and Hide, I started to run out of options. We had exhausted every single nook and cranny in the entire school; behind the teachers desk, outside of the classroom window, in other classes and even behind “Big Maggie.” So I decided to head into the one place that the 2nd and 3rd grade kid's dreaded to enter: The Unisex Bathroom

The bathroom had four stalls, all enclosed with flimsy wooden doors and two rusty metal sinks. Those sinks were the water fountains of the floor. It was rumored among my class that the sink on the right, the cleaner looking one, had boogers in the water when you turned it on! No one would ever be seen using or drinking from it. It was social suicide.

Frantically, I ran inside of the bathroom looking for refuge. I bolted past the door and ran for the first stall on the left. I could hear my friend's flopping shoe soles not far behind me. Without stopping, I ran into the wooden door attempting to get inside. But something was amiss. It was a bit harder to push open than usual...and then it gave way.

I plunged straight into the lap of an upper-class man girl, kneeling on the toilet doing her business. She screamed. I screamed too. As I hurried to get back up, she shuffled to cover herself; interrupted. I ran out of the bathroom and straight into my friend who at that point had won the game. I told him about what happened; how I had literally ran into the wooden door with such force that I had broken the latch and crashed though into a girl's lap. He gave me a hi-five.

After the History class ended we decided to once again resume our game. I was being chased; I always loved being the one that he had to find, it was somehow more fun! I decided that heading into the unisex bathrooms was a good idea this time; surely he would not think to look in there after I had gone in last round.

But Zlaty was smarter and faster than me. By the time I was able to gain some distance, he was close on my tail. I ran for the bathrooms anyway because in the heat of the moment, making rational decisions is pretty hard. I stepped past the threshold into the peculiar smelling space and saw the booger sink! But that's not what caught my attention.

Leaning next to the foul washbowl was a broom. But it hardly resembled a normal broom. It was old, and used beyond belief. The hay stands were black, stiff with dirty unisex bathroom dust and they pointed in all directions. I grabbed it and positioned myself on the wall which held the door to the bathroom. I would ambush Zlaty from the left as soon as he entered with the broom and hopefully escape. It was my only chance to win this round.

I held the broom like a shovel, swinging it back and fourth, preparing myself for the assault. Zlaty was taking a bit too long considering how close he was behind me, but it was probably time

slowing down for me, like in the movies, making it easier to hit Zlaty's stomach with the broom as soon as he entered.

I heard footsteps. I swung the broom back and held it for a second until I saw Zlaty enter the bathroom. With full force, I launched the dirty broom head in his direction nailing him straight in the face. When the broom made contact however, I grew horrified. On the other end of the broom was a creature that did not resemble Zlaty at all. I had just smacked “Big Maggie” square in the face.

I tried to flee as she grabbed me and threw me against the wall. She questioned me and slapped me until I promised it was not on purpose and that I'd never do it again! Big Maggie was ugly, and she was twice as big as I was. I stood no chance. I was lucky to get out alive.

Zlaty waited triumphantly outside the bathroom, laughing at me as I walked past, red faced from the beating, to the classroom.

Right before last period that same day, we played the game again. It was the probably one of the poorest decisions I have ever made (right up there with driving to New Hampshire in a Scion XB). Despite the previous two rounds being completely unsuccessful on my part, I was determined to win at least once. Zlaty did his usual ten count before he came chasing after me. This time, I did not even debate my options for hiding. I sprinted straight to the unisex bathroom. Why you ask?

After two quite unlucky rounds, I came back to the lavatory. No one in their right mind would come back, and that's exactly why I did it. This time Zlaty would surely not look in there!

I got ahead of him and slipped into the bathroom. It was empty. I grabbed the broom again for protection, just in case, and entered the first stall and locked the door. I stood on the toilet, one leg on each side of the ceramic seat and waited. For precaution, I grabbed the broom, in a javelin orientation, and pointed it at a 45 degree angle up and over the stall. If Zlaty was to find me, Id launch the broom over the stall wall, stun him, and escape. It was a full proof plan.

And sure enough, there were the heavy foot-steps approaching. He was smart! But he would soon regret entering the unisex bathroom while I was its sole proprietor! I listened carefully; the steps were definitely not a girls! I prepared the broom from inside the stall. He entered!

I had him!I pushed the broom with all my might over the stall and watched it fly and disappear behind the

wall. I heard it impact something.“Who the fuck just did that!?” It was a woman's voice. My heart grew cold. “Get out here right now!” I did not want this to be happening, but it was true. I had sprung a

dirty old broom right on top of my teacher. I exited the stall in shame as she took me by the ear.“Who do you think you are? Is this funny to you?” she screamed.I laughed a little. I could not help it. It was crazy how the unisex bathroom had a total vendetta

against me. She yelled at me for a couple of minutes on how its totally unacceptable to throw objects at others and asked me how in the hell I had thought of this stupid method of attack. She told me to stand next to the wall as she got a drink; and then we were going back to class. She approached the right sink and began drinking from the tap.

Boastfully I smiled to myself.“The joke's on her! Doesn't she know that water is laced with boogers!”

The Tragedy of Martin

Two seats back, three rows over. That's where Martin sat. And no one wanted to sit next to Martin. He stayed on his own desk, in the socially quarantined area of classroom 314 of SOU, and for a damn good reason.

To put it bluntly, Martin was a crazy. He was nuts, cookoo, balls-to-the-wall, bonkers and totally out of his mind. Martin always

wore the same outfit: black shoes, khaki pants, a white shirt and brown vest. He also smelled of eggs, always!

Class would commence every day as students took their seats, withdrew their books and prepared to listen to what Ms. Giorgieva had to say on the lesson. But the picture perfect classroom scenario usually didn't last for long. At random times, Martin would dart up out of his chair and scream in a high pitched and whiny voice:

“Everyone to the hot pancakes!”Martin believed he was a baker and a hot-foods street vendor. Kids would even make bets on

when Martin would open his imaginary shop for business. His career was the only thing that stayed stable from day to day. Every morning, after his pancakes were all sold out, Martin would do something loony. He jumped around, laughed as loud as he could and even brought an eight inch knife to school one day. He said it was his favorite toy at home and he wanted to show it off in school...

One day the class arrived and we noticed that Martin was not in his seat. We didn't think much of it until Ms. Giorgieva told us that Martin had come to class early that morning and eagerly pulled down his pants in front of her. He was, naturally, sent to the principals office.

I excused myself to the bathroom and sprinted up two flights of stairs and slowly approached the principal's office. The door was wide open, as if they wanted me to hear everything that was being said.

“It's simply a way for him to express himself!” I heard his mother say “He's a young boy and he needs an outlet for his creativity.”

Martin's mother was not the sharpest knife in the drawer either. She was actually the dullest. Stupid definitely ran in that family blood line.

One day I walked home from school and Martin and I happened to be taking the same route. As I neared his apartment building a blouse button hit the concrete next to me. Martin looked up and waved at his mother, who was leaning over the rail on her balcony with a handful of small objects.

“Get away from my son!” she screamed at me as she threw a small AA battery my way. I started to sprint as more objects bombarded my path. I looked back once and saw Martin standing in the middle of the street doing jumping jacks. I ran even faster.

I think it's safe to say I never took that route home again.

A few weeks after, Ms. Giorgieva told us that Martin was not going to be coming to this school anymore. Apparently he had some domestic issues to be resolved. As funny as it would have been, I yearned that Martin didn't get himself catapulted from the 6th floor window because he didn't sell enough pancakes that day.

The Sheep, The Rope and The Farmer

My summer home in Bulgaria involved all of the following, old men, toothless and cursing, horses, the smell of manure and vast open lands. For two months out of each year, my parents sent me to live with my grandparents in the countryside of Bulgaria. It was a legitimate village; a perfect stereotype of a Borat like habitat, except that the houses were built like in the city.

As I walked out of my front yard, looking for something to get my hands on and someone to play with, I strolled by a long rubber cable. I took its visible end and pulled it from the ground, backing up as it became longer. In all, it was around 15 meters. Perhaps it had been a telephone or a power cable? But it on the ground and in the grass which meant I could do with it whatever I chose.

A few feet away from where I found the cable was a bridge. It wasn't any regular old country bridge built with stone and wood supports. It was a makeshift contraption built from packing dirt and sand tightly together and holding it with a large four meter pipe that allowed the small brook below the bridge to run though. It was about 6 meters wide, enough for a whole 15 cows to fit side to side with a few chickens to spare on each end. The top of the bridge was all sand, and I planned to use it in conjunction with the rubber cable.

I tied off one end of the cable to a tree directly across the bridge. Then carefully, ninja-like, I laid the cable down across the bridge until the other end was hidden in the bushes that were opposite. I covered the black cable with sand, camouflaging it with the surrounding road. I had a trap ready to spring at any moment.

Proud of my secretive workings, I ran to my friend Mitko's house and called him out. I urged him to bring as many water guns as he could because Gosho would be coming around soon.

Gosho owned the largest herd of sheep in the entire village. Every day he would take them to the fields beyond the village to graze and then around seven at night he would return with them across the sand bridge. And that is what Mitko and I waited for.

We took our posts behind the bushes, one of my hands on the rubber chord, one of my eyes on the horizon spying for Mr. Gosho. I kept telling Mitko to act cool, we didn't want to give away what we were going to spring on the old farmer.

A few minutes passed by, then a few more. Finally, after around thirty minutes of Mitko and I waiting face down in the grass and bushes, I heard the bells of the cattle. All those hundreds of sheep had no idea what was expecting them. I breathed deeply, the moment was almost upon us.

When the first few sheep came to the bridge, I got ready. I gave Mitko the ready signal; he raised his water gun and waiting for the cattle to come closer. When the herd reached the trap zone, I pulled the chord taught and all hell broke loose.

Mitko screamed at the top of his lungs as he shot water at the sheep. As soon as the chord went up, a few of the animals tripped and rolled causing their brethren behind them to do the same. A wave of chaos spread across the whole herd. Sheep baaaed and began falling into the small brook below the bridge. The farmer Gosho was screaming expletives I did not even know existed. I probably received most of my sexual education from his utterings that day. He ran after the straggling sheep, pulling them out of the water and setting them back on course. The bells on their necks all rang in dis-unison and neighbors all looked out of their windows to see what the commotion was about.

Mitko and I hid in the bushes after a few minutes. The farmer had not seen us. We laughed and tried as hard as we could to suppress it. It took a whole fifteen minutes for the farmer to round up all of his lost sheep and resume the trek back to his farm. To this day, he doesn't know what made his herd go nuts in the middle of the bridge.

I should have stopped with the cable after the sheep incident. It was dangerous and could

potentially hurt a lot of innocent beings. Mitko went home and I was left alone in the bushes. I waited for something else to pass over the bridge so I could set off the trap one more time. And then I saw lights.

A small car approached the bridge. My window of opportunity was closing fast. All the little angels on my shoulder told me not to do it. Hell, even the devils on the other shoulder were scared. But I did it anyway. As the car came to the trap point, I pulled the chord. The driver slammed on his breaks but he wasn't fast enough. The tires rolled into the rubber and it tangled itself around the axis. The car was unable to move forward. The driver backed up, and that's when I ran. I was not getting caught for doing something this stupid. My grandmother had already been informed of me dropping a rock on the neighbor's door.

I never looked back to see if the driver was chasing me. I heard no one screaming but I kept on running until I reached my house. I ran inside and as casually as possible asked my grandmother what was for dinner. The next morning, the cable and the car were gone. Someone had disposed of the evidence for me. As much as I wanted to do that again, I never found a cable that long that would do the job.

At least I learned all the different places one can “shove it” and exactly what it meant to “eбете майка си в задника.”