Common Sense…So Rare, It’s a Super Power (Other Stories From My Childhood)

So there I am standing over the kitchen sink trying desperately to fit a butane can nozzle into the intake valve on my cigar lighter. It’s not working, butane is dripping everywhere and it doesn’t smell pleasant. I guess I was missing the straw that transferred the fuel from the can to the valve but I didn’t know that yet. Butane is dripping into the kitchen sink, I’m getting frustrated. I just bought the damn thing and can’t even use it yet. So I set it down and, yes I knew I could just wash the butane fluid down the drain but what fun is that, right? So I go and get the matches and…some of you are ahead of me. I had lit lighter fluid, kerosene, gasoline, diesel, paint thinner, and even mineral spirits on fire before and it wasn’t that big of a deal, usually just a slow burn. However, none of those are like butane. Butane is like damn napalm compared to any of those. As I grab the matches I vaguely hear Chelsea say, “Don’t light that butane on fire, Hunter…” but I’m far too excited about this to care. After all, what does she know about fire, she’s a girl, right? I make toward the kitchen post-haste and (yep, you guessed it) strike a match. It didn’t even let that son of a bitch get fully lit and the fumes ignited in the kitchen, I stumble back, throw the still-lit match in the corner somewhere, attempt a silent little girl scream, and watch the 2½ foot flames in both sides of my kitchen sink dance about while they eat up the butane fumes in the air and liquid on the bottom of the sink. I quickly run over and turn the water on (I still don’t know how I reached through the fames to do that) and quickly douse the inferno that I had created. I go over and stomp out the match that is slowly burning a hole in our kitchen floor mat and try to catch my breath. This all happens in literally 3 seconds max. Chelsea walks in just as I’m counting how many patches of belly hair I’m missing from the explosion and trying to figure out exactly at which point the hair on my left hand went missing. True story.

My kitchen when i lit on fire hahaha

You may being asking the question, “Okay, Hunter, were you drunk or were you a kid?” Unfortunately, friends, I was neither. That all happened in January of this year, 2015. I’ll be the first to admit that common sense and street smarts are not my forte. You can bet your sweet ass I can tell you the temperature of absolute zero and total absence of heat is –273.15°C or –459.67°F. I can, in absolute certainty, tell you that sighting in a 30.06 Winchester Model 70 at 0 at 25 yards will make it 2” high at 100 yards. I can even tell you the opening line to the literature classic Moby Dick is “Call me Ishmael” and I’ve never read the damn book. The point is, I know a little bit about a lot of things, but common sense, to me at least, is a complete mystery. My wife, Chelsea, on the other hand literally asked me if the United States had a capital city once, but she is one of the smartest people I know when it comes to common sense, reasoning, and street smarts. Thank Jesus I ended up with her because she keeps my head on my shoulders. God knows I would jump in the ocean with an anvil shackled to my ankle, reach the bottom only to find out that I forgot the key on the dock. So thank you, Chelsea for keeping me alive once I moved out of my parents’ house.

Saved Your LIFE!!!

My mother raised two boys and is about half way through with the third one. Three boys. The story above is just about one of them, and a full grown one at that! My brother Brent and I (before Kalen was born) really didn’t get into a whole lot of trouble; not only because we were generally good kids but were also very skilled at not getting caught when we did do things that we knew we shouldn’t be doing. We usually lived under the rule of “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission”. We had a friend once who had an old barn on his property that was full of old tractors, swathers, plows, and the like and we’d go in there and play. Like little boys do, we tried to get to the highest place we could in this barn which, naturally, is the loft. All of a sudden, we get this brilliant idea: with all of that hay on the cement floor of this barn, we could jump off the 20 ft. loft into the hay! Being small, fairly uncoordinated, and having no knowledge of physics I figured, “Why not, right? I can jump from this high, land on my FEET, fall in the hay, get up and do it again!”. Me, Brent, Greg Morris and his sister Tamara line up on the edge of the loft and we jump. I’m guessing Greg and Tamara had done this before and had figured out it wasn’t a smart decision to land on their feet. However, as I said, I didn’t have a full understanding of physics and that when you’re free falling and your feet hit the ground and stop, it doesn’t mean that the rest of your body stops as well. Again, dumbassery raises its ugly head. I jump off the loft, land on my feet, my body quickly bends forward, and my eye socket and knee cap became quick friends. I guess friendships are easily made when one is embedded into the other. I fall on the floor of the barn, clutching my eye and I’m sure I was crying like any eight year old boy would. It ended up I had a huge black eye, not just a bruise under my eye or around the general area of my eye but the entire eye socket was black with a bruise, my eye lid was sliced open from the impact, I had a cut along my cheek bone. However, all of that was nothing compared to how many time I had to hear , “Wow, I’d hate to see the other guy if you look like that!”. I was 8, I had no idea what that meant, I just kind said a quiet “Yeah..okay” until they went away. Another true story.

I guess boys will be boys and mothers shouldn’t ask too many questions about things that have happens. You may not like the answers. I know there are plenty of things that my mom doesn’t know, and even more things that she doesn’t want to know about things we did when we were younger running around. Any mother of boys, especially multiple boys, should just look at her kids at the end of the day, amongst the bruises, cuts, scrapes, and black eyes, sigh, and say “Well, they’re still alive. They made it through another day. Nothing I can do about it now”. I think that’s how my mother stayed somewhat sane. She can’t remember her own name sometimes, or where her car is in the parking lot, or that chocolate chip cookies aren’t supposed to come out of the oven looking like Oreos but she understood that we could always manage to stay alive through out the day. I’m sure if my boys (yes, I know I’ll have a boy. I’ve spent years teaching my female swimmers to swim backwards) are anything like me, I’ll get what I’ve got coming to me.

Two more stories and then I’ll wrap it up. Kalen was only about two years old, maybe a little bit less and he loved to be pushed around in the wheel barrows, no matter how many times we crashed he’d get back up, get back inside, and hit the sides with his little stubby arms until either me or Brent ran as fast as we could around multiple holes, toys, and dogs in the backyard. One day another brilliant Idea pops into Brent’s head: Kalen loves the wheel barrow and he loves the slide so I’m positive he’d love the two together. Double the ride, double the fun, right? So I go and help Brent lift Kalen and the wheel barrow atop the slide and position it so that Brent could push it forward. My mother must have seen what was about to happen inside the house because just as she runs out the door and shouts (in slow motion) “NOOOOOOOO!!!”, Brent lets go of the wheel barrows and Kalen, laughing all the way, comes flying down the slide inside the wheel barrow. Well, wheel barrows aren’t built to glide with the terrain, when the wheel hits something the wheel barrow just stops instantly (if you’ve ever ran into a hole in the backyard with a wheel barrow full of dog shit you know what I’m talking about) and whatever is inside the wheel barrow flies forward…including two year old boys. The wheel barrows hits the end of the slide, catapults Kalen into the air, he does a strange flip and lands face down in the dirt about 5 feet from the wheel barrow. The whole back yard goes silent. Me and Brent are in shock that we killed our little brother and quickly looking for ways to run out of the back yard before my redheaded mother sees us and realizes she’s still young and can have more children to replace the two who “mysteriously went missing”. Then, like in Gladiator, Kalen roles over and starts just laughing hysterically. Brent and I erupt in cheers and applause! Mother is laughing and we pick Kalen up and everything went back to normal. Needless to say, we didn’t do that again…but only because my mother was outside. Kalen is one tough little kid. I’m twelve years older than him and Brent is nine years older so we put him through a bunch of stuff. Spinning him around in office chairs and watching him fall all over the place once he got out of it, fling him down the hall in the same office chair to see how many different objects it could hit until it fell over, shooting him with air-soft guns as he ran around the house through a gauntlet of small arms fire. He took it, and still does, like a champ. He also gives back just as good, or better, than he gets. The kid can dish it out.

Once again, me with fire. The year: 2005. The day: July 6^th, two days after Independence day. I go over to my friend Jake Lane’s house and he had a ton of fireworks left over. It’s July in Texas! Rain doesn’t exist in Texas during July (it might this year, dear Lord above I’m so tired of rain). However, artillery shells seem like a good idea. You know artillery shells? The ones that go up in the air, make a big explosion, and shower down a trillion sparks. His parents, to this day, think that Ernie (his now deceased dog) knocked over the shoot tube causing the artillery shell to shoot into a very dry field and start a fire. This, however, is not the case. Jake had it in his hand and tell me to the light the fuse, I swear I had no idea what he was going to do but I did it anyway (no common sense, Jake was a dumbass as a kid and I knew it). He throws it into the grassy field beside his house and we wait…more waiting…and yet more waiting until we get bored, decide it’s a dud and start to walk away. Just as we turn we hear and ear splitting explosion. I done thought the Russians had come to kill us all. I thought it was Red Dawn all over again. I’m looking for Patrick Swayze. The artillery shell had exploded sending dirt, dust, grass, and, yes, sparks in every direction including 50 feet in the air. We thought that was the most badass thing we’d ever done. We had just revolutionized fireworks…until tall flames start to rise in the next field over. Jake rips off his tee shirt and starts beating the grass, I run to get the water hose and it only reaches about ¾ of the way to the next field. I fill a small bucket and run it over there. Have you ever seen that scene in the little rascals where they fill it a bucket and start passing it down the line and it keeps spilling, by the time it gets to the fire it only has about ½ a cup of water left? I relived that scene. My water didn’t do anything but sizzle and evaporate. Long story short, we burned about three acres and half of a 200 year old oak tree. The real fire department came and put it out and we got a big talking too. He was grounded from his big New York City trip and I..well..I didn’t get any punishment at all because no one died and my parents were cool. Later we started saying, “we only have one memory of fireworks…and it went up in smoke”.

In summary, boys will be boys. I’m at my office listening to Eddy Murphy’s RAW stand-up and I can’t believe I’m 23 years old. I didn’t include so many things that we did. I got knocked out cold sledding once and Brent just went inside to get hot chocolate leaving me for dead, Brent jumped off a swing and caught himself with his bottom lip on a railroad tie (thanks to that railroad tie, Brent still has a lip that enters a room three days before he does). My dad said, right after he busted his lip for the fourth time, that we could paint Brent black and, with the help of those big lips, everybody would think we’d adopted a little black boy. However, we lived, we’re still here. Me and Brent did a lot more running around when he got to be a teenager but I can’t seem to recall any stories I can tell in public *wink wink*. Ask me and I’m sure I’ll have you rolling soon enough. By the way, I have some pictures of some of the incidents that occurred; I’ll try to post them up tomorrow if I get time. I may just put them on my Instagram. To the mother of boys, let us get into trouble, don’t ask to many questions, and don’t baby us. America is already trying to bring up a generation of wimps. Boys Scouts aren’t allowing water balloon fights and squirt guns anymore because “squirt guns promote violence and water balloons aren’t safe”. Seriously. Boy Scouts of America can shove it. Get a cut? Pour some beer on it..always worked for me.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK!!!

Until next time, keep the bugs off your glass and the bears off your ass. Be Unlimited!

-“The” Hunter Ansley