The Mysterious Nights of Yesteryear

1. ...about how my father's blood was sprayed all over the face of a dead soldier in WWII.

2. ...about how my friends and I changed the beads of sweat on a woman's face from beads of worry to beads of joy and relief.

3. ...about how a woman wrote an apology note to me in tiny letters because she was so ashamed that she wanted them to be hard to read.

4. The perfectly logical reason why an NAU professor told my dad that the square root of 49 was 6.992.

5. ...about how my parents' friends found a black mamba in their bed when they were trying to go to sleep in Africa.
6. ...about how I went looking for a Texas pastor in hopes of finding him and wringing his goddamned neck!
7. ...about how my dad gave me a dead mouse to lift my spirits.

8. About the university president who would only hire Baptist preachers to teach biology.

9. ...about how a pack rat stole my key.

10. ...about how a snake bit me in the hills outside of Mexico City in 1963.

11. ...about how my dad told a women that his kids had never seen rain.

12. ...about how as a boy I was thrown out of the ocean in Mexico and through the air to land on dry land.

13. ...about how an egret stabbed a boy in the nostril.

14. ...about how I got caught trying to pass a counterfeit silver dollar.

15. ...about how the FBI launched a investigation to catch me for threatening the mayor when I was only ten!

16. ...about how my friend got himself and his three friends killed.

17. ...about how just moments before surgery I got up, furtively sneaked away, and disappeared never to return!

18. ...about how my Dad insulted an entire room full of rednecks.

19. ...about how I thought a mysterious bird call was an alien being looking to disembowel me.

20. ...about how a man's hair caught on fire in a cave in Indiana.

21. ...about how a liquor store had a monkey door.

22. ...about how a gallery of photos in a magazine lifted a blurry veil forever from my eyes.

23. ...about how my great uncle got murdered by the French mafia.

24. ...about how the RAF stole a live German bomb from my uncle in WWII.

25. ...about how I was rushed to the hospital after I fell out of a shopping cart at the age of four--and what I dreamed when I was unconscious.

26. ...about how my grandfather ate breakfast off of a dead cow's back.

27. ...about how my uncle tricked the Nazis and the US censors in WWII.

28. ...about how I found my twin brother pinned under a huge boulder that had fallen on him.

29. ...about how the Arizona Game and Fish Department said that a roadrunner was "the clown of the desert" because it chopped the head off of a rattlesnake.

30. ...about how my father spread animal feces in one of my books as a favor to me.

31. ...about how Jesus Christ himself was a member of a ship's crew.

32. ...about how to kill an alligator.

33. ...about how we by fraud, willful deceit, and bald-faced lying acquired a fishing lure that was blessed with more luck than all of our sins put together.

34. ...about how my friend put a dent in his father's car with the butt of a shotgun.

35. ...about how I told my father that I wanted a collection of pins.

36. ...about how I imagined I saw a giant pickle jar--that wasn't there!

37. ...about how President Barrack Obama awarded my mom the Gold Congressional Medal.

38. ...about how I have today in my home a dead tse-tse fly that may have been the very one that gave my parents near fatal cases of sleeping sickness.

39. ...about how my mom sold Harpo Marx a fishing pole.

40. ...about how my mom and I visited a quiet stretch of sidewalk in Rutland, Vermont, where my grand uncle blew his brains out with a shotgun.

41. ...about how no power on earth could make me do what half the people in Tucson, Arizona do.