Chinese Fire Drills Can’t Even Kill A Bitch

(The following excerpt is taken from Ben Franklin’s personal diary)

"Today Lodi popped into my head. Summer 1979 Lodi, running chinese fire drills around a Gremlin in heavy traffic, with three dog night blasting on the radio.

It was fun but I was scared out of my mind back then, because I was one of the smaller kids and they kind of just pushed you out of the car to get you out of their way so that they could run around it, you were forced to go whether you wanted to or not, kind of like going up to get communion in church if you happened to sit on the outer most edge of the pew. If you didn’t go everyone would look at you and know you didn’t go to confession, therefore you must be hiding some terrible mortal sin, then again if you didn’t go to confession and went up to get communion God would smote you something awful, only sometimes they would pretend to not let you back in the car as the light was changing, never was I not let back in the pew at church, so you would be standing there in traffic crying for a few seconds while horns blared. Anyway, yeah it started me to thinking of all the other unsafe things I used to get to do as a kid, and it all makes sense because the guy who let us do these things, not even let us but encouraged us, is totally nuts, like full on been committed to the state mental hospital nutsification. Don’t get me wrong I still have fond memories of those days, those dangerous days, and I loved going over to his house because there were no rules and we got to watch faces of death and race around on suped up big wheels and play war kittens with real kittens and pee in the woods. I just wonder how we survived physically unscathed, and there were about 8 of us kids, and I wonder if before I had full recollection of things if there had been more, only they died when he piled 15 of them all under the age of 8 into the back of a pickup truck and then went 80 on a bumpy back road laughing all the way while they screamed in terror and tried to hold on for dear life, my cousin got a concussion once on one of our trips to Rosie’s Pizza, the kind where your eyes roll up in your head and you make moany uncoordinated zombie movements whenever someone touches you. He made him walk it off. To all those kids they never told us about who never made it under his charge I salute you because you died like heroes. I bet they are in unmarked graves under the pine trees in his yard where he buried the chihuahua that swallowed hot dogs whole."