Memories of Bible Camp And Smoking Things…Also, God Finds Poop Funny.

No dreams to report from this weekend. Shame. I know there were a few good ones. They were there in vivid detail when I woke, but as the sleepy haze cleared, the dream images faded. Happens sometimes.

But, this weekend wasn’t without its noteworthy moments. On Saturday there was a gathering of old family friends. Friends that stuck with us thick and thin, that were there during the best of times and the worst of times in the nightmare that was called the International Church of Christ. ICOC for short. Also known as the cult.  

Anyway, it was a day of reminiscing all the horrible and funny things within that cult experience. It brought me back to being fifteen, when I was fighting my inevitable fate to join the cult through copious amounts of pot and boys. As much as I resented the cult, I knew our fates were as entangled as the hair on my head. A stray one might fly away, but its trail will always lead right back to where it started.

So, fifteen, summer, what better to do than Bible camp? I went because some of my other friends from church were going. Plus, a friend from school was coming with me, so it seemed like it would be a fun time, despite the Jesus stuff.

The night before, a few friends spent the night at my house, so we could all travel together in the morning. That night, we all headed down to the baseball fields – Carlson Field off of Louisiana Avenue in St. Louis Park to be exact – and smoked lots of pot. Out of a pop can, nonetheless.

As we made the fourteen hour drive or whatever to the camp in Michigan, we alternated music between the occupants of the car. The teen leader preferred the likes of Celine Dion, which was so painful. I preferred the likes of Alice in Chains. Dirt just happened to be my favorite album at the time (and still is one of my favs to this day). The teen leader told me years later she was scared of me then. Scary music, scary attitude.

Awesome and proud of that, actually.

When we arrived at camp, all I could think about was how I hadn’t gotten the chance to procure a stash of smokes before leaving.  And I had cashed my pot stash the night before. I immediately decided this was going to be the shittiest four days of my entire life. Even shittier than that time I was grounded for three weeks for shoplifting.

But, in a stroke of luck, I discovered one of the fellow Minneapolis attendees was a smoker. He was slightly younger than me. We’d never really been friends, but we’d been in Sunday school together growing up. So dude and I would sneak off into the woods to share a Marlboro Red. How awesome that he smoked my brand, too?

So, random memories from Bible camp:

• Terrible food.
• Drinking Kool-Aid from metal cups that tasted like copper.
• Somebody’s poop clogging one of the toilets in the girl’s bathroom. Trust me, it was one of the biggest poops I’ve ever seen. Totally worthy of remembrance.
• During one of the group games, some girl took off her sweatshirt without realizing she was taking off ALL shirts with it. The boys had an emergency meeting to ensure they were not thinking naughty thoughts. And that last bit is absolutely true.
• Trying not to giggle during evening prayer when some girl started crying while praying. I know this makes me sound awful, but trust me when I say it was just weird.  
• Girls had to wear t-shirts over their bathing suits during swim time.
• Being pissed off when my group leader would wake me up at 7am to read the Bible with her.
• Refusing to go horseback riding, because I’m afraid of horses.
• A fellow teen in my group with the last name Nagel. “Pronounced like bagel, only with an N,” as he would say.
• A fellow teen named Grant that I wished hadn’t yet taken the vow of chastity. Such a shame.
• My friend’s Rolling Stones t-shirt – she told me she still wears it to this day.
• Sitting on a picnic table at the beach, watching other teens that were crazy for Christ and thinking, “Fuck. This is my destiny, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter if I want it or not, it has to be this way.”

The last two days of Bible camp, I gave in. I let them have me. I was tired of fighting expectation. I was the oldest daughter of a pair of revered ICOC members. They were pillars in the congregation. Everybody and their brother expected me to do this. Was it better to do this now? Get it over with? Sigh. Yes, best to just get it out of the way.  

So, the last couple of days at Bible camp, I stopped meeting dude in the woods for smokes. Even stopped lusting after the luscious Grant. That was harder than not smoking, by the way.  And when we got back from Bible camp, I told my parents that I was ready to take the plunge.

There’s more to the story, but it’s an emotional and exhausting story that isn’t quite ready to be told. But, little tidbit, shortly after this trip my mom was helping me clean my room. She was grabbing all the crap I shoved under my bed. She lifted a partially crushed pop can with crude holes smothered in sooty ash.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Um, nothing,” I quickly said. “You can throw it away.”

To my relief, she did so without looking at the thing any closer.

And for the record, I never stopped finding the massive poop that clogged the girls’ toilet as funny. If there is a God, apparently He finds it funny, too. After all, He created poop. And farts. Let not forget those.

Beth Stern Has To Use The Bathroom...Oh, And I Believe In Werewolves.

Okay, before I roll into last night’s dream, I have a confession to make: I believe in werewolves. At least I did for a few brief moments.

Sunday night I spent the greater portion of my evening reading (big surprise) about werewolves. What exactly was I reading, you ask? Well, I’m glad you ask. It was the second book, Howling Legion, in Marcus Pelegrimas’ Skinner series. If you recall, I recommended the first one in a previous blog.

Excuse me? You haven’t rushed to your local bookstore and bought that one, yet? You are no friend of mine. Stop reading this and leave.

Actually, don’t. If there’s anything I like more than people following my book recommendations it would be people reading my blog. You can stay…for now.

So. Werewolves. I was reading about werewolves. Mean, viscous, and savage werewolves.

At 11:30pm that night, I was roused awake by my husband.

“Hey, there’s some kind of weird animal outside.”

Oh shit! I thought to myself. The werewolves are here!

But then the haze of drug induced sleep (prescription, guys) cleared and I took comfort in remembering there are no such things as werewolves. Which, actually, is kind of a shame. I mean, I don’t want the savage werewolves. But if they could all look like Hugh Jackman or Joe Manganiello, then it really is kind of a shame they don’t exist. Ladies, am I right? Guys, feel free to cast your vote, too. This is 2011, after all. Don’t be shy.

Okay, enough with the wolves.

Last night I dreamed I was back in high school. Horrible, I know. This dream scenario happens entirely too often for me. But, alas, there I was in high school. I was even wearing torn jeans and a flannel. Oh wait, that came back in style, didn’t it?

Goddamn it. Has it been that long? Sigh.

Anyway, I’m sitting outside of my high school at a picnic table. Howard Stern rolls up on a motorcycle with his lovely wife, Beth. She’s wearing pajamas. Silk pants, matching button down shirt. Howard looks disgusted to be there.

“This is no place for you,” he says to Beth. “Let’s go.”

“But I really have to go to the bathroom,” she pleads.

“I can take you,” I offer, a little too eagerly to look cool. “I mean, the bathrooms are just inside. I can show you.”

“It’ll just take a second,” she assures Howard.

So I take Beth by the hand and we push through the glass double doors. As soon as I’m inside the building, I realize I’ve never, ever seen this place before.

“Um,” I hesitate, looking right and then looking left. I decide the left looks as good as any other direction and tug Beth’s hand. “This way.”

We end up in shop class. Beth trips over some scrap wood on the floor. The entire class laughs. Beth cries. I feel like an asshole. And on top of it all, we never find the stupid bathroom. We just walk a big circle and end up back at the picnic table with Howard.

“What is wrong with you?!” he yells at me. “Don’t you know how mean high school kids can be?”

Actually, I do. But I don’t say this. I just slump to my seat, dejected.

“Damn it,” Howard sighs. “Now you’re making me feel bad. If I let you sit in on a show, will that make you feel better?”

“During cupcake Wednesday?” I lift my head and ask hopefully.

“Sure,” he smiles.

“Deal!”

Hey, listen, can we go back to the thought of werewolves looking like Hugh Jackman or Joe Manganiello…?

Movies That Genuinely Scared The Pants Off Of Me

My first memory of movie terror was at the tender age of five or six. “You’ll like it,” my mom assured me with a huge smile. “It’s a scary movie about aliens.”

No, Mom. It was not just a scary movie about aliens. It was the scary movie about aliens. It was ALIEN and it terrified me on so many levels I couldn’t even entertain the idea of watching that movie, or any of its sequels, until my mid twenties. Kane seemed fine, my ass! The second that thing burst from his chest at the dinner table, five year old Boo screamed and ran from the room in tears.

I am glad I manned up and watched the film later in life though. It is a fantastic flick, a true horror/sci-fi classic.

Before I divulge the title of the next movie that genuinely scared the pants off of me, I must tell you all a secret. As a child, I had this very bizarre fear that somebody was always watching me. It was a fear that made me close every curtain in the house as soon as it was too dark to see outside.

When I was six, I was positive things lurked outside my bedroom window. The fluffy clouds and rainbows curtains were only a brittle illusion and failed to distract me from the terrors that lay just beyond. For a long time that imagined terror was in the form of rabid dogs, black hellhounds with frothing mouths and red eyes. As I grew older, rabid dogs became rabid men, bedraggled and sinister with gaunt faces and rotted teeth.

No, I wasn’t abused as a child. If anything, I was abused by my morbid imagination, which has always been too vivid for my own good.

But I digress.

When I was about ten or eleven, my cousin told me to read this book called Watcher in the Woods by Florence Engel Randall. I loved this book. It was a ghost story and that’s totally my thing. And then Disney made the movie. My cousin and I decided to watch it at my grandma’s. In the woods. Where there isn’t another soul for miles. In the dark.

The next day, my cousin and I were traipsing through the seventeen acres of wooded land of my grandma’s property. After a while, we both stopped and faced each other. The only sound, wind rustling the leaves. The occasional creak of a swaying tree limb. He looked as scared as I felt.

“Um, I’m kind of creeped out. Go back to the house?” I asked. My cousin nodded emphatically. So we ran as fast as our little legs would carry us, too terrified to look behind us and see that there was nothing there.

Yes, all from a Disney movie.

When I was about thirteen, I stayed at my cousin’s (the same one as before) for a week that summer. He and my aunt lived in this old, brick Victorian in Marshfield, Wisconsin. And we had recently discovered the house was once a funeral home. Great. It was here my cousin introduced me to a little ol’ film called Evil Dead. My cousin, clearly not the scared little boy he was in the woods years ago, howled with laughter through the entire thing. I just desperately wanted that crazy bitch to stop giggling.

Afterwards, I made my cousin sit outside the bathroom door while I peed. I mean, you know, just in case the former funeral home had some demonic spirits or something. And that night, I slept with my head under the covers despite the summer heat, too afraid I’d see those milky white eyes and deranged smile if I removed them.  

And I’ll admit – to this day, I still can’t watch that movie alone.

The Exorcist. Need I say more?

The first Saw. I haven’t watched any of the others. Nor have I watched the original again. I had to sleep with the closet light on after watching that movie. I don’t like creepy shit in my closet. And I definitely don’t like creepy little hospital orderlies sneaking around in there, either.

The Descent. Theater screams. Dudes in front of me couldn’t stop laughing, because I was screaming every ten seconds.

Paranormal Activity. I slept with the lights on for a few nights in a row after watching this movie. Finally, my husband was like, “Hey, you keep leaving lights on at night. What gives?”

“Don’t judge,” I pleaded. “I got scared, okay?”

Dead Silence is another movie that touches my primal fear. It might be the sickeningly creepy ventriloquist dummy. Or it might just be the terrifying amount of absolute and utter genius contained within that wonderful little gem of a movie. The sheer brilliance, let alone the suspense, makes me shriek when I watch that movie.

James Wan and Leigh Whannell should feel honored. Not only have they genuinely scared the pants off of me with Saw and Dead Silence, they hold the crème de la crème of ghost stories: Insidious. Not only did this movie elicit a series of legendary theater screams, one of which was SO loud I was positive one of the other theatergoers would throw something at me, it made my post-movie bathroom trip a harrowing experience.

I was alone. Washing my hands. One of the stall doors groans as is it swayed shut. I bolted without even bothering to grab a paper towel to dry my hands. As I barrel out of the bathroom, my husband gives me a WTF-are-you-doing kind of look.  “I don’t want to be in there alone!” was all I could say.

Even though I saw that move a week ago, it still gets to me. I woke up at three this morning, thought about that movie, and was too scared to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. Instead, I tossed the blankets over my head, assured myself that my bladder wasn’t going to explode, and tried to think of fluffy clouds and rainbows instead.

Sans the rabid things behind them, of course.