Flashback Friday # 154

Venting

Welcome back to more minutia from the archives of my brain.

How do you let off steam? Are you a screamer? A thrower? Crawl into your shell? Assault people? When I was a young teen, I was quite the passive aggressive individual (still am, for the most part). I came up with a way to release aggression toward everyone I did liked without anyone knowing about it (almost).

My cousin Skeeter (one of Aunt Shelly's kids) and I were playing around with my cassette recorder one day. We had been discussing our mutual enemies at school. He grabbed the microphone and hollered out "(enemy's name here) eats piles of (use your imagination)." That started the ball rolling. Every slimebag we knew got pasted on that tape.

There were three things that were really nice about this. 1.Since we were up in my room, we had the privacy to include as many folks as we wanted. 2. My parents weren't there. Since Skeeter's vocabulary in public & private was saltier than mine. 3. Dad's friend Chuck had come over and was mowing our grass, further insulating our ventings from prying ears.

After we finished venting, we came up with several skits that we recorded. Some were from comedy records that I had (Cheech & Chong, Bill Cosby, Shel Silverstein) and some were just made up. We recorded these on battery power. By the time we got to the end of the tape, the batteries were pretty worn out. Playing it back using the power cord just made it all that much funnier because it sped everything up and made us sound like chipmunks. We titled the tape "The Nutsos".

Every time Skeeter was over after that, I have to get the tape out and play it.