For Camie: Icy Roads, Human Evil

Yes, Camie, the field I just described for baseball purposes was in fact the land where much winter meyhem took place. Let me share this mayhem now with the world.

Rather than launch into a Garrison Keiler-like narrative filled with nostalgic syrup, let me lay it on straight. It was a land of much evil. This was a Westinghouse warehouse (now a mental institution!) which had a narrow road which ended in a downward sloping loop, between two warehouses near a railroad track. The trucks would come down and back into the receiving dock of a warehouse and off they would go after they unloaded. Except of course in winter where packs of weasly street rats would grab buckets of water and throw them on the downslopes, with the intention of creating a glare ice surface. This would be done after daytime work hours, so that in the morning, we would hide and wait for the fools who would try and brake on that ice, with our goal being their skidding into the train tracks, and, if we were especially lucky, perhaps a toppling over of some semi truck! I never saw this event, but heard rumors of it being seen, which was good enough to fill us full of delighted mallace.

This was not the worst of the Winter Follies; not as long as our games of "Crack The Whip" were being played on the very same road. It was the dumbest of ideas: we all skate down in a line, (no one had actually skates, just worn-out shoes) and somehow, the "winners" would be the persons who could skate back up the hill on the other side of the loop. This was basically impossible, so for those kids who actually figured it out, they knew the real goal was to get your enemies careening into each other with as much billiard-ball like violence as possible. Injuries? Good! Blood? Very Good! Something broken? Ah...that's just the best! And yet...everyone played in it!

Have I gotten to the bad part yet? Nope! Snowball Fights...from hell. Kids would form cliques based on the dumbest of reasons. I remember joining up with kids all wearing blue, and I was in red, which, by kid logic, entitled me to be 'captain', which everyone agreed with! Throwing the snow around that was nice, but then people sought protection which led to the creation of Snow Forts from which produced an upspiral of technological horror! The Snow Catapults and Snow Mortars didn't work so well, but dunking the snowballs in water, and giving them enough time...these kinetic penetrators did a pretty good job of chopping off the turrets of the Snow Forts, but upon seeing a kid or two wacked with essentially a Snow Hardball, some clever tyke thought that....if you packed ball bearings in the snowballs, even more violence would take place, and sure as shootin', that was true! Which in turn led to the Mark III SnowBall With Ball Bearings Dunked In Water, for an even more sublime understanding of the fragmentation weapon principle.

But the Wonder Weapon that was built but never used? Snow, Ball Bearings and...fishhooks, dunked in water briefly. Yikes, you'd rip off a kids face with one of those! Well, yeah, I think that was the idea! The little degenerate who made like 20 of these things got caught by his mom when he tried to hide them in the freezer! All hell broke loose after that and even our lackadaisical parents got involved in saying that they would put an end to the Snowball War that ended all Snowball Wars. Which they did.

People ask me, "How can we Bomb a Dresden? or Rape a Nanking? or Build a Gulag?"

I never wonder about such questions; I learned the answers at a very young age, on a snowy field in Detroit.