...

last night there was a fire behind my parent's house in C-town. the little Mexican girl who lives next door was the hero of the day. she alerted my mom and dad who then doused their backyard fence with water. nothing on their property was damaged. they're not sure what started it, kids from YVHS (highschool) like to hang out behind my parent's house and smoke weed, guzzle 40oz and give each other handjobs...it was probably them.

some of the things i used to do in that field having nothing to do with handjobs:

collecting hundreds of frogs and tadpoles from the creek/ flood canal storing them in giant wash buckets in my parent's garage

collecting hundres of roll'y poll'ies and storing them in my sister's empty Noxema jars

building a makeshift halfpipe on the cement flood divider out of a discarded ping pong table

skating that halfpipe all summer

scavenging for discarded porno mags (usually finding shredded pieces of Huslter here and there revealing very scary looking women with very scary protuberant body parts)

crawdad fishing in the canal with pieces of bologna hooked to string tied to a tree branch

collecting hundreds of walnuts from the field and throwing those walnuts at each other's heads usually until someone cried and then we'd all flee

digging holes, or as we called them "forts," all summer long, this was *the* project of my childhood, seeing who could dig the deepest fort in the neighborhood

sitting in the shade under a walnut tree with my best friend Brendon drafting letters in our journals to Vision, Powell Peralta, Sims, Santa Cruz, Independent, Tracker, G&S et al. inquiring about sponsorships and equipment

sitting in the shade under a walnut tree with my best friend Brendon writing out our prepubescent sexual fantasies to our dream girls, Tara and Beth, who lived in the neighborhood. an example from me might have read "i want to jump on Tara's boobs" or "i want see tara's boobs all the time"

smashing a neighbors abandoned Cadi to pieces with a hammer, a fist and a small boulder

seeing how long i could hold my breath completely sumberged in canal mud

monkeying my way out to the middle of the BART overpass, dangling about 20 feet over the canal just as the train passes holding on as hard as i could through the vibrations The Lost Boys style before i ever saw The Lost Boys

burning a cork tip with matches then rubbing our faces with it preparing to go into the "bush" to play army for the day

destroying a found carton of cigarettes and then getting beat up a little by the older boys who stashed it there

walking the field with my pappou collecting odd nicnacs like bottlecaps, coins, string, rocks and glass

etc.