u/Faerie-Footman-442

I’ve lived in an apartment building since going back to school last year. It’s a pretty big building, but it’s also pretty old--I think it must have been built before whatever technology was invented to stop sounds from going through the walls.

There’s a gay couple that lives in the apartment above me. At least I think they’re a couple; they might just be banging on the reg, tbh…

One of them is named “Daddy.” He has a super loud voice. If Daddy has never done theater, then he missed his calling, because his voice can travel like nothing else. If I have my window open at the same time he does, or if I’m in the bathroom (which has a vent on the ceiling that is pretty much a speaker box to the upstairs apartment), then I can hear just about every word that he says. I can sometimes hear him telling “Puppy” to come here, or give him a kiss, or bring him a pillow, etc. And Daddy always says thank you.

Puppy has a low, airy voice, and I can never really make out what he is saying the way I can with Daddy. (Although, I did hear Puppy gasp Daddy’s name loudly on one occasion….)

I’m honestly not trying to spy on their lives, but there’s only so much I can do when Daddy’s voice comes booming down from above. I could put my fingers in my ears and say “la la la,” but that’s pretty pointless at this point--I already know Daddy and Puppy’s whole dynamic. And honestly, I kind of love having a healthy gay relationship flourishing above my head. It’s not like I’m sitting there perving with my ear against the ceiling, listening to them have sex (which they must do pretty quietly, btw--I barely ever hear it). I’m just passively overhearing them live their happy, healthy lives.

I think Daddy must live in the apartment alone. I only hear Puppy on the weekends. During the week, I can sometimes hear Daddy talking on the phone. He sounds very professional and confident. He might be a boss somewhere.

Last weekend, I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom, when I suddenly heard Daddy’s voice yell “ARGHH!!!” from above. I stopped and stared at the vent.

Then I heard Daddy yell “What the fuck Puppy?!?!”

There was silence. I stood there, perfectly still.

Then Daddy yelled, “How long has this booger been hanging out of my nose??”

I heard Puppy mutter something.

“Has this booger been hanging out of my nose the whole time???” Daddy inquired.

Puppy muttered again. Then I heard Daddy loudly going off on Puppy, telling him he was disgusting for getting banged by a guy with a booger hanging out of his nose. This must have been the funniest thing that Puppy ever heard, because he started laughing uncontrollably. I finished brushing my teeth and left the bathroom, and then later I heard some muffled rough-housing.

I think Daddy has gotten over the whole booger incident, because today I heard him patiently teaching Puppy how to slide a pizza from a cutting board onto a pizza stone. The whole thing made Puppy very anxious, and Daddy had to finish the job himself.

I’m moving out in a couple of weeks (there’s something seriously wrong with my plumbing, and the building owner recently offered to let me move to another one of his buildings down the street).

I’m going to miss Daddy and Puppy. I hope everything goes well for them. Maybe I’ll bake them a farewell cake or something…

I decided to join the Air Force when I was thirty years old. I had been working as a waiter in restaurants for about a decade, and my feet were starting to get tired, so I just wanted to try something new.

When I got to basic training, I realized that I was basically a grandpa compared to everyone else there. There were a few guys in their mid-twenties, but the vast majority of the young men there were 18- and 19-year-old kids straight out of high school.

When you show up at Air Force basic training, they immediately start screaming at you and shuffling you around in every direction, and eventually they toss you into a group of about 50 other new recruits called a “flight.” The people who make up your flight are the people you will be marching, eating, and sleeping next to for eight weeks.

The first few days were an effing shitshow. They were making us get into lines and march to places, and we were never able to do it fast enough. We were constantly getting screamed at. Sometimes we would get close to doing something fast enough, but it only took one airman to screw it up for everyone by turning right when they should have turned left, or standing with their arms crossed instead of at their sides or something.

One of the people who could usually be relied on to screw it up for us was a guy named Thompson. His brain just took a little longer to process things…

One of the most difficult tasks for us to accomplish as a group was “getting on the wall” in the morning. We would wake up at 5:45, go do PT with all of the other flights at the track, and then come back to shower and put our uniforms on.

The moment we all shuffled back into the barracks, we had exactly 15 minutes to all shower, put our military uniforms on properly, tie our shoes, put on our backpacks, and line up on the wall in order by height.

I had more life experience than many of the young gentlemen there, so I was able to get my time down to 10 minutes after just a few days. The trick was to basically just pretend to take a shower and then put a ton of deodorant on. You could always take a more thorough shower later that night.

But some of these kids thought they were at the effing Roman baths—waiting for the water to get hot and then standing under the showerhead, daydreaming until they only had 30 seconds left.

Over time, we started getting better at it, but, like most of the other things we did, there was always one person who screwed it up for the rest of us. Our drill instructor was female, so she wasn’t allowed to enter the barracks until we were all dressed and on the wall (for legal reasons), but she would stand outside the door and start absolutely pounding on the door at the 15-minute mark. Two weeks in, and we were still getting screamed at every morning for not getting on the wall in time.

But then one day, everything seemed to be going right. I was always the first one in the showers, so I had gotten into the habit of turning on every tap to appease the hot water divas in our flight, and it seemed to be having the desired effect. We were all out of the shower at about the 8-minute mark, and we had gotten pretty used to putting our uniforms on, so that wasn’t going to take us too long either. At about the 13-minute mark, we were all frantically ordering ourselves by height on the wall.

There was a real sense of excitement in the air. Everyone was wide-eyed and whispering frantically. It looked like we were finally going to be able to open the barracks door before the fifteen-minute mark!

But then I heard a dismayed voice cry out: “What the fuck, Thompson?!?!”

I looked over, and Thompson was way down at the end of the line of beds, standing next to his locker. He had a confused look on his face. And he was butt naked.

It turns out he couldn’t find his underpants, and he was too dizzy from all the activity around him to think to ask anyone else for help.

We all started groaning, and someone went over to help Thompson. They lent him a pair of their own underpants, and then helped him tie his shoes and put on his backpack. Ten minutes later, we invited our enraged drill sergeant in to start screaming at us once again…

My grandmother is 85 years old, and she has two sisters: Nancy and Ellen. Ellen is the youngest, but she acts like she's the oldest.

Sixty-five years ago, my grandmother decided to marry a police officer when everyone preferred that she would marry a businessman. Ellen, for her part, has been sneering about it ever since. Her sneer grew wider and wider as my grandparents had children, and their children had children.

She's really not a very pleasant lady...

I see my Aunt Ellen a couple of times a year, and every time it feels like she's making eye contact with me before I even enter the room. My mom usually reminds us in the car ride there to be on our best behavior around her.

My cousin Jill hosted a Labor Day party this past weekend at her house down the Cape. It was a little chilly, so people stayed mostly inside. Aunt Ellen was in the little book room behind the kitchen with some of my other relatives. She had a glass of white wine in her hand, and there was an ice cube floating in it.

I said hello to my uncle, and he asked me how law school is going. I've been in law school for two years at this point. I'm 38 years old.

"When are you finally going to settle down!" Ellen yelled over my uncle's shoulder, while rolling her eyes.

I went over and kissed her on the temple, and I said: never.

She threw her head back and started cackling. I did too.

"Never??" she said, grimacing up at me.

I tickled her chin and said it again: never.

This morning, I walked down the street to Dunkin Donuts to get my coffee, like I always do. I've been noticing that it's getting a little bit darker every day. By the time it's fully winter, I'll be feeling my way to Dunks in the pitch black.

It was beautifully windy this morning, and there was an elusive buzz in the air. I must have been distracted, because at one point, the wind picked up and carried me off across the street. I don't even remember deciding to cross the street. And honestly, I don't think I remembered to look both ways.

My friend "Ben" got married to his girlfriend "Val" about 6 months ago. Val is terrible, and constantly belittles Ben for being shy. Me and the other guys tried to have a mini intervention for Ben to try to get him not to marry her, but he wouldn't listen to us. Now we all just pretend like the intervention never happened. Anyway, that's a story for another time...

The wedding was actually very nice. Val was on her best behavior, and Ben got to eat a 6-pound lobster, which he had been talking about for months.

Their wedding song was that Hawaiian ukulele version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." The new couple kissed and smiled while they danced...

Fast forward to a few days ago, when Ben, Val, and I (along with some other people) were hanging out on our other friend's deck, drinking beers. Someone had their Spotify plugged in, and the Hawaiian ukule version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" came on. But it wasn't the normal version. It had like this weird, orchestral music being played over it, and it made it sound sickly sweet.

After listening for a minute or two, I said "Ugh! This version of this song is terrible!!"

Ben and Val frowned at me, and Ben said "This was our wedding song...

I said "oh...no...like, not the original version, I mean this version."

Ben said "yes, this version was our wedding song, the Hawaiian version."

I said "no...I mean this flowy, gentle version..."

Ben and Val looked at me, still frowning.

I said "this weird version with the...nice...happy things..."

Val rolled her eyes and said "Yup! THIS VERSION was our wedding song! Not the one from Wizard of Oz, the Hawaiian one!!"

I was forced to just drop it, since my stupid fat beer-soaked skull couldn't find the adequate vocabulary to describe music.

Val mean-mugged me for the rest of the night.

Tl;dr I insulted a friend's mean wife by describing a song inadequately.

I live in an apartment in Boston. The closet where I keep my trash is located immediately adjacent to my front door. If there is anything smelly in my trash, I can smell it immediately when I come in through the door. It's an infuriating way to arrive home after a long day of work, especially for a sensitive-nosed person like me.

I got in the habit of just leaving empty food and drink containers in my fridge, rather than adding them to the trash right away. I figured that it would help cut down on the trash smell if I just added them to the trash when it was time to bring the trash out. And it worked!

...But sometimes I forget to add the fridge trash to the regular trash, and it starts to add up...

My friend Jiho recently stayed at my place for a few days. Jiho is from Korea, and he is OBSESSED with saving money. He has no qualms about inviting himself to stay with me. I don't mind-- he's a great cook.

I was driving Jiho to the train station after his stay, and he was quiet. I looked over at him, and noticed him furtively looking at me. He looked away quickly.

A few minutes later, he murmured, carefully: "Lots of people use their refrigerators for food... but I think your refrigerator is a trash can..."

I was forced to admit to Jiho that yes, my refrigerator is in fact a trash can.

I went to high school with a girl named Britney. Britney would wear big sweatshirts and sleep all during class.

This kid David who sat next to me in English told me once that Britney looked like a question mark, because she had super skinny legs and a large upper body. This was a very mean thing to say, but once he pointed it out, I couldn't unsee it...she did look like a question mark. Plus, she tended to act the way one would imagine a question mark might act, wandering through the halls all aimlessly, always being the last one to laugh...

Plus, she was always late to class. One would think a punctuation mark would be punctual, but Britney was not.

My high school was a vocational high school, so every other week was spent in our various "shop" classes. Britney was in cosmetology. There was a joke in the cosmetology shop that there must be "something in the water," because so many of the cosmetology girls ended up getting pregnant.

Well, Britney must have drank the water senior year, because she got pregant. I asked her why it happened, and she just laughed.

For several months, I watched that question grow and grow, and I worried how it all might end. Britney didn't seem to have a plan...

We ended up graduating before she gave birth, and I didn't have her number or anything, so we lost touch.

About 12 years later, I found Britney on Facebook. There were all these pictures of her and her daughter at dance competitions. Her daughter seemed to be really talented; half the pictures were of her accepting trophies.

There were some pictures of her daughter doing her dance routine. Someone else must have taken them, because I saw Britney on the sidelines. Her face was focused and sharp--nothing like the slow-eyed girl I used to know. She was dedicated to her daughter's success.

It turns out that question mark gave birth to her answer...

I've watched the series through a few times now, and I catch my self irrationally hoping that Oscar is going to catch on to the scam and get out while he still can.

It's easy to think he was a greedy fool, and bad with finances, and it's probably true. But, if I'm being honest, the first time I watched the series through, I was definitely fooled by the scam and Maud Beaton too. I think the writers did a good job of making it a pretty believable scam, instead of making it look totally obvious.

Were any of you fooled by the scam on first watch, too?

Oh, how did I get saddled with this twink?
He thinks that I'm his daddy. And he thinks
That when I notice that he's on the app,
It's down to jealousy. He tells me that
He goes there out of boredom--that he likes
To flirt, and that is it. "I promise, I
don't meet these guys..." I tell him, once again:
We're not a couple. I'll be happy when
He finds his fish out in the sea... I'd like
To tell him: Please! Oh God, please please go find
A boyfriend! Leave my bed! And leave my head!
And when you leave, take all your shit as well!
I have to sweep the place before he goes.
Always, there's some small object that he's stowed
To make returns assured: a sock behind
The couch; a ring next to the soap dish... I
Shove them into his hands, and then he sulks
Away. He said he loves me... God, I'm fucked...\

My friend recently got married, and he and his new wife are obsessed with doing dinner parties. It's so cute because they haven't gotten sick of the idea yet, and so I always attend happily.

They have two small dogs: Bunny and Malloy. Malloy is very tender-hearted and shy, while Bunny is the most hell-stricken dog I've ever met in life. Bunny is the effing boss, and poor Malloy knows it all too well...

Unfortunately, Bunny hates me. She decided this the first day she met me. Even though I always say hi and smile at her, there is just something about me that Bunny finds absolutely intolerable. She is cool with the other guests, but she snarls at me.

At the last dinner party, Bunny was being a real bully to Malloy. Malloy was playing with a yellow, rubber gardening glove, and Bunny freaked the eff out when she saw it. My friend told me that there had been dog drama regarding the glove for about a week now. The climax of the evening happened when my friend's wife made a grand display of "punishing" Bunny by throwing the glove away.

Later, when I went into the kitchen to mix a drink, I covertly retrieved the glove from the trash and stuffed it in my pocket. I had a plan...

I put the glove in my car, and for about a month I dreamed of my friends' next dinner party. I dreamed of returning unto Bunny her long-lost glove, and seeing joy explode upon her face. I dreamed of Bunny hopping into my lap and looking up at me with love in her eyes...

My friend and his wife had another dinner party last night, and I brought the glove. The second I walked into the house, I rushed over to Bunny (who was on the couch), I got down on my knees, and I presented her with the glove.

Bunny seemed perturbed by the fact that I would even deign to acknowledge her. But she magnanimously sniffed at the glove anyway. I witnessed recognition dawn on her stupid little dog face...

And then Bunny effing exploded. It seems that the realization that I been in possession of her lost glove was an intolerable prospect to her. The only choice for Bunny was to go blind with wild rage.

Everyone at the dinner party stood around awkwardly while my friend and his wife kept the twisting, snarling Bunny at bay with a couple of brooms. Eventually my friend managed to lock Bunny into their bedroom.

Everyone pretended to have fun for a little while, but we were all keenly aware of the harrowing dog-screams that were coming from the other room, and the pounding as Bunny threw herself repeatedly into the door.

I left after about 30 minutes of this.

Tl;dr: I thought a long-lost glove would make a judgmental dog love me, but it had the opposite effect.

Every year they announce a new "World's Ugliest Dog," and every year it's some dog with its tongue sticking out. This comes down to laziness. Having a stuck-out tongue is a very effective way for a dog to be ugly, but it's not the *only* way. The judges should commit to finding dogs that are ugly in new, interesting ways.

My brother left one of his marijuana vapes at my house about a year ago. I don't usually smoke marijuana, because it makes me think the universe is judging me, but I had a very tiring day yesterday, and I found that vape in my junk drawer when i got home, and one thing led to another...

I started watching that episode of Futurama where Bender delivers a package to the robot planet, and it was so effing funny. I ate a banana, and after I ate it, I could actually feel the nutrients seeping into my bloodstream, and the jolt of life I got from those nutrients made the show even funnier. I ate a second banana, and the same thing happened. I was laughing and laughing and laughing.

I ended up eating like 6 bananas.

I woke up in the middle of the night and I felt like I was going to die. I raced to the bathroom and threw up a huge, disgusting banana log. I can't believe I let myself eat so many bananas.

Tl;dr: eating bananas made show funnier, but not good for digestion.

My brother left one of his marijuana vapes at my house about a year ago. I don't usually smoke marijuana, because it makes me think the universe is judging me, but I had a very tiring day the other day, and I found that vape in my junk drawer when i got home, and one thing led to another...

I started watching that episode of Futurama where Bender delivers a package to the robot planet, and it was so effing funny. I ate a banana, and after I ate it, I could actually feel the nutrients seeping into my bloodstream, and the jolt of life I got from those nutrients made the show even funnier. I ate a second banana, and the same thing happened. I was laughing and laughing and laughing.

I ended up eating like 6 bananas.

I woke up in the middle of the night and I felt like I was going to die. I raced to the bathroom and threw up a huge, disgusting banana log. I can't believe I let myself eat so many bananas.

I'm sure that some of you guys are all fully aware that chips (crisps) are one of the best snacks for hiking. They keep your sweat nice and salty. Plus, when you go to a new country, there are tons of wild, crazy new chip flavors to try. Eating tons of interesting new chips is honestly one of my favorite parts about hiking.

I go on a few hiking vacations a year, and I recently took one to the island of Menorca. Menorca is a fun place for hiking because it has a designated trail that circles the entire island. It takes about a week to do the whole thing.

I stopped at a little food mart on Menorca to grab a snack, and I started looking through the chips. There was a local-looking chip brand that I had never seen before. Like many other chip brands, it featured pictures of its flavors on the bag. One of the bags featured a flavor that appeared to be just a grey chunk of meat in a puddle of...something. It was the most unappetizing flavor I had ever seen. Just a picture of some old, forgotten piece of meat just sitting in a puddle. And I swear to effing goodness gracious there was a little fly drawn into the picture too.

I stared at this strange bag of chips for a few minutes, and then I realized I was going to have to try them. I couldn't not try these chips...

Anyway, long story short, these chips were effing divine. The strangest, most pungent flavor of aged, warm meat that felt like a miracle on my tongue. Just decadent bouquets of rotting flavor.

I was obsessed, I started looking for these chips in every new shop I stopped in along the way. They were quite rare too, you couldn't find them everywhere. One shop owner caught me looking frantically through the racks, and asked me, in English, if I needed help finding anything. I didn't even try to explain that I was digging around for the wet meat chips...

I spent a lovely seven days on the island of Menorca, hiking and eating my new favorite chips every chance I got, and then I flew home.

I've looked for those chips since, but I can't find them anywhere, and I can't remember the brand. I wish I had taken a picture. I tried typing "wet meat chips" into Google, to no avail...

I guess those beautiful chips will just have to live in my memory.

Edit: *crisps

I'm not a normal traveler—I usually just wing it. I like to hike, so I'll find the cheapest flight I can to a city I've never been to before, and then just start meandering around with my backpack, staying at a new hotel every night and getting as lost as I possibly can for seven or eight days.

I can hike pretty far in a day, usually about 25-30 kilometers. I eat a TON while hiking, and I never feel bad about it at all because I'm burning through the calories as I go. The eating is honestly my favorite part. Just stopping at every little food mart along the way and gorging on whatever foreign treats they have...

Chips are one of the best snacks for hiking, because they are salty. And when you go to a new country, there are tons of wild, crazy new chip flavors to try.

Chip bags are all pretty much the same-- they want to make sure you know what the chip is supposed to taste like. If it's a fajitas-flavored chip, they'll show a little picture of a sizzling steak sliced up with peppers and onions. They are very convincing, the pictures on these chip bags. They actually make me believe that I might be enjoying a food that is something other than salty potatoes...

On a recent vacation, I got so well lost that I ended up on the island of Menorca. Menorca is a Spanish island, and it's a fun place for a hiker like me because it has a designated trail that circles the entire island.

I stopped at a little food mart on Menorca to grab a snack, and I started looking through the chips. There was a local-looking chip brand that I had never seen before. Like the other brands, it featured pictures of its flavors. One of the bags featured a flavor that appeared to be just a grey chunk of meat in a puddle of...something. It was the most unappetizing flavor I had ever seen. Just a picture of some old, forgotten piece of meat just sitting in a puddle. And I swear to effing goodness gracious there was a little fly drawn into the picture too.

I stared at this strange bag of chips for a few minutes, and then I realized I was going to have to try them. I couldn't not try these chips...

Anyway, long story short, these chips were effing phenomenal. The strangest, most pungent flavor of aged, warm meat that felt like a miracle on my tongue. Just decadent bouquets of rotting flavor.

I was obsessed, I started looking for these chips in every new shop I stopped in. They were quite rare too, you couldn't find them everywhere. One shop owner caught me looking frantically for them, and asked me, in English, if I needed help finding anything. I didn't even try to explain that I was digging around for the wet meat chips...

I spent a lovely seven days on the island of Menorca, hiking and eating my new favorite chips every chance I got, and then I flew home.

I've looked for those chips since, but I can't find them anywhere. I tried typing "wet meat chips" into Google, to no avail...

If any of you know of my chips, or of any other fun chips you've encountered on your travels, please let me know.

Edit: *crisps

I'm not a normal traveler—I usually just wing it. I like to hike, so I'll fly into a city I've never been to before, and then just start meandering around with my backpack, staying at a new hotel every night and getting as lost as I possibly can for seven or eight days.

I can hike pretty far in a day, usually about 25-30 kilometers. I eat a TON while hiking, and I never feel bad about it at all because I'm burning through the calories as I go. The eating is honestly my favorite part. Just stopping at every little food mart along the way and gorging on whatever foreign treats they have...

Chips are one of the best snacks for hiking, because they are salty. And when you go to a new country, there are tons of wild, crazy new chip flavors to try.

Chip bags are all pretty much the same-- they want to make sure you know what the chip is supposed to taste like. If it's a fajitas-flavored chip, they'll show a little picture of a sizzling steak sliced up with peppers and onions. They are very convincing, the pictures on these chip bags. They actually make me believe that I might be enjoying a food that is something other than salty potatoes...

On a recent vacation, I got so well lost that I ended up on the island of Menorca. Menorca is a Spanish island, and it's a fun place for a hiker like me because it has a designated trail that circles the entire island.

I stopped at a little food mart on Menorca to grab a snack, and I started looking through the chips. There was a local-looking chip brand that I had never seen before. Like the other brands, it featured pictures of its flavors. One of the bags featured a flavor that appeared to be just a grey chunk of meat in a puddle of...something. It was the most unappetizing flavor I had ever seen. Just a picture of some old, forgotten piece of meat just sitting in a puddle. And I swear to effing goodness gracious there was a little fly drawn into the picture too.

I stared at this strange bag of chips for a few minutes, and then I realized I was going to have to try them. I couldn't not try these chips...

Anyway, long story short, these chips were effing phenomenal. The strangest, most pungent flavor of aged, warm meat that felt like a miracle on my tongue. Just decadent bouquets of rotting flavor.

I was obsessed, I started looking for these chips in every new shop I stopped in. They were quite rare too, you couldn't find them everywhere. One shop owner caught me looking frantically for them, and asked me, in English, if I needed help finding anything. I didn't even try to explain that I was digging around for the wet meat chips...

I spent a lovely seven days on the island of Menorca, hiking and eating my new favorite chips every chance I got, and then I flew home.

I've looked for those chips since, but I can't find them anywhere. I tried typing "wet meat chips" into Google, to no avail...

If any of you know of my chips, or of any other fun chips you've encountered on your travels, please let me know.

Obviously you shouldn't take a medication if you're straight up allergic to it! They know people are going to scoff at their phrasing, which is why they started doing it on purpose. They want you to think they're being way too overcautious in the "potential side effects" section, so that you'll laugh off all the other side effects too.

But it's not like some weird pain fetish or anything. I don't want to be stung by bees...

I want a man dressed in a bee costume to come and find me. Ideally, the costume would be made of super luxurious materials—silk, lambskin, anything buttery to the touch. And the costume should have no stinger. This man-bee has found me after he has already stung someone, and left his sting behind to rot in their flesh...

I want to canoodle on a fancy couch and drink martinis with this bee who only has a few hours left to live. We'll keep thinking of new things to cheers to, and get sloppy drunk. I'll be real cute and flirty, since it's his last hurrah. And in exchange, he can let me in on all the queen's filthy secrets. He owes no allegiance to her anymore...

When I was 13 years old, I asked my parents if I could be a paperboy. They agreed, and they seemed super proud that their son was so determined, that he had so much work ethic...

But the truth was that I was in a real jam. I had developed a crippling candy addiction, and the measly 75 cents they were giving me for allowance every week was no longer cutting it. It was only getting me through to Tuesday or Wednesday, and then I was stuck licking the insides of Snickers wrappers until the weekend. I needed to start making my own money fast.

Delivering papers sucked. The houses on my route were so far apart, and they were full of deadbeats. If every customer was paying on time, I should have been earning about twelve dollars a week. But every customer was NOT paying on time, or sometimes even at all. And when they didn't pay, that money was coming out of my bottom line.

A weekly newspaper subscription was a dollar fifty-five, which meant that just a handful of deadbeats could ensure that I was earning practically nothing.

It was bullshit. I had gotten this paper route so that I could buy candy, and now I was going fucking hungry while these assholes were at home reading their free papers.

I had grown up a nice, polite little Catholic boy, but my circumstances had changed. I was forced to become a hardened leg-breaker...

One of the worst offenders on my route was Mrs. Litro. She was probably ninety years old, and she had a little patio attached to the side of her house. She was always "forgetting" to pay, and I was always having to beat her effing door down.

The biggest problem was that she insisted on hiding her payment so nobody else would find it and take it. She had this large, hardcover bird book on her patio table, and she hid the money in there.

This bird book made no sense. Every time you turned a page, the left and right pages would be dedicated to a different type of bird, with dozens of black and white pictures of that bird. But there was no rational order to the pages at all. The page of turkeys was followed by the page of flamingos, which was followed by the page of penguins, etc. I looked once, and there was no glossary or index at all--just a random smattering of artless bird pages.

Mrs. Litro hid her dollar fifty-five on the crow page, which I still remember was page 78.

That crow page was the straw that broke the camel's back, for me at least. It was proof, beyond all other proof, that the author of this stupid bird book was just in it for a quick buck, and had absolutely no pride in their work at all.

The crow page was dedicated to murders of crows. The caption boasted that "murders of crows could number in the hundreds of thousands" and the pictures attempted to show these murders, but they were just blurry little clouds of black dots. Nobody would ever know that those were supposed to be pictures of crows if you didn't tell them.

I had witnessed an actual murder of crows a few summers before, and it had been breathtaking. It had been at my grandmothers house: huge clusters of screaming black crows had come swooping down into every tree, and they just kept coming and coming. All of my grandmother's neighbors had come out onto their porches, and we all stood there, wide-eyed, watching the crows and watching each other...

No self respecting bird expert would have ever authored a bird book with such a lackluster crow page; not if they had known how marvelous a murder could actually be...

Anyway, Mrs. Litro's money was only in the book about 30% of the time, so I was constantly having to kick down her door.

It would take her like 5 minutes to hobble to the door. Then she would ask me if I checked the murder page, and I would say yes, but she wouldn't believe me, so she would hobble over to the book and check for herself. When it wasn't in there, she would look at me suspiciously for a few moments, and then she would covertly check some of the other untold hiding places within her little patio, like behind the heater and under the rug. I assumed these were the secret patio payment spots that long-dead paperboys had once known...

Eventually she would shuffle back into her house and then re-emerge with the dollar fifty-five. She would count it out, red faced and angry, and then she'd shove it into my hand and look at me like I was a greedy little bug.

One day I started pounding on Mrs. Litro's door for my money, and some new lady answered the door. It was Mrs. Litro's daughter. She told me that she had moved in "to help her mom." I asked her about my money, and she apologized and went out to the kitchen to get it for me. The whole time the door was open, I could hear Mrs. Litro's shrill voice roaring from within the bowels of the house, screaming for her daughter to check the murders...

This went on for a few months. Mrs. Litro's daughter was much more reliable than her mother, but she still forgot from time to time. One day, probably six months after I had first met her, I knocked on the door and asked the younger Litro for my money, and she went to the kitchen to get it for me. But this time, the depths of the house were quiet...

I listened, and I heard some coins being counted out in the kitchen. And then I heard some grunting that seemed to be coming from elsewhere in the house. I saw a little movement in the shadows of a doorway way back in the house. I squinted my eyes and adjusted them to the darkness, and then I saw the dull figure of Mrs. Litro pulling herself by her walker into the doorway.

Her face emerged partially into the hallway light, and it seemed strangely younger, almost ironed of the wrinkles that had blanketed it before, and her eyes were too wide. I witnessed that same exact expression, years later, on my own grandmother's face, in the months before she died, when I had had to explain to her on every visit who I was and how she knew me.

Mrs. Litro looked down the hall at me, and then her mouth closed tight and started working hard. She slowly held up her hand. I thought I could see that she was holding something out to me. It was long and knobbly. It looked like some sort of ancient, dusty artifact.

I stepped a little bit into the house to better see what Mrs. Litro was trying to give me. And when my eyes finally adjusted, I saw what it was: It was a finger...

It was a middle finger.

Mrs. Litro's daughter came back. "Mother!" she said, embarassed. Mrs. Litro shuddered and fell back into the shadows.

The daughter paid me, and then I got the hell out of there. I finished my route and I stopped at thd gas station to grab some much needed candy...

For me it was Jurassic Park. My parents rented the VHS and watched it with me when I was way too young…

I must have been seven or eight. But really, it wasn't how young I was that was the problem, it was that I was just old enough to understand the rules. When Doctor Grant said that the T-Rex couldn't see you if you didn't move, I knew that that meant that I shouldn't move either. And so I sat there, paralyzed with fear on the floor in front of the TV, not daring to touch my pizza or my glass of milk, not even daring to close my eyelids…

But it wasn't the T-Rex that scared me the most. It was the velociraptors. When the T-Rex tried to eat the children, she was just doing it out of dumb, blunt savagery. She was eating everything in sight, and if the children were in sight she was going to eat them too. The velociraptors, by contrast, seemed to be hunting the children for fun. Getting the children was like a puzzle for them, and they were determined to solve it.

I had always understood, as most children do, that I was perfectly safe in my house and in my bed. Sure, there were some scary animals, like tigers and sharks, but those animals couldn't get me inside. My innate sense of safety was the product of thousands of years of human domination. Thousands of years of our ancestors making every single wild entity on Earth understand that we are in charge, and that we call the shots. There's not a single animal left that doesn't fear man.

But velociraptors had missed all that. They had been asleep the whole time… They had never been informed that opening doors and stealing children was just not something that animals do, and so they did it.

I'm embarrassed to say it, but I still have nightmares about velociraptors to this day. It's always the same: me trying to barricade myself inside, and them figuring out a way to open the door.

Do any of you have a movie that scarred you when you were young?