Special Ingredients: We Are Manly Men

And this tradition more or less stands to this day, except we’ve added significant portions of setting things on fire and dart guns. Earlier this month, C took some leave from his post because, having failed to acknowledge a tiny little clause when he signed up for the Army, they decided they were going to ship him overseas again. Thankfully, he’s only going to be sent to Egypt instead of the original plan of Afghanistan, which is comparable in danger as sleeping naked in the middle of the street in our hometown and New York City, respectively.

We decided to head up to the cottage for a manly men weekend, consisting of nothing more than being lazy blights on society. As I implied, this isn’t a huge change from the other times we’ve hung out at the cottage, and is a testament to the strength of old friendships. Either that or two young men in their twenties recognizing the fact that they’re getting old and will die someday.

I’d like to take some time to share a few of the memories from our years at the cottage that created fond memories that will last a lifetime, by which I mean we’ll be mocking each other about these things until we’re old men and can’t remember the names of our own children, but will always remember the stupid stuff we did as kids.

The first time I remember having C up to the cottage was when we were in middle school, and my mother let me invite C along, which turned out to be a big mistake for her. If it hasn’t been made evidently apparent in his contributions to this site, C has a bit of an ego about him, but it was much worse back when he was a kid, when he was ravaged by ADD and his mother refused to supply him with Ritalin because she hated us. He was also hyper, a dangerous combination. He could be found swinging from our still-grounded pontoon boat, unthinkingly refusing to pay for a meal at a restaurant or help with the dishes, or not wanting to go on a boat ride (in all fairness, I didn’t want to do the last one either). This caused my mother to fly into a few rages, one of which led to an amusing story wherein we thought she ran away from home.

When we made it clear we didn’t want to go on a boat ride, she stormed off. She apparently decided to try and go off in the canoe by herself, just to spite us. If you have any experience with canoes, you know they’re basically big, metal banana peels that are designed to allow fish to tap the side and flip you over. Combine this with the fact that my mother isn’t the most graceful person in the world, and you have a recipe for one drenched parent.

At the time, neither of us knew what was going on, since we were inside playing video games. I eventually wondered where my mother had gotten to, so I went out and found her sitting quietly on the dock. I naively walked out there and asked her what she was doing, and she replied in a huff, yelling about how she fell out of the canoe when she tried to get in and claimed she was screaming for help, but no one came because, and I remember this specifically, we didn’t love her enough.

I decided the best course of action would be to go back inside, where I told C what had happened. He was dumbfounded, because we sincerely didn’t hear her calling for help. We joked that she was calling for help in a below conversation level voice without any enthusiasm, and then went on to conclude no one would help her, so she just decide to sulk on the dock. This incident established the phrase “sulk on the dock,” which I use on rare occasions because it speaks volumes.

Anyway, I looked out at the dock to check up on my mother, and was astonished to find that she had disappeared. All of the boats were still there, so she didn’t go out on the water, and the car was still in the driveway, so she didn’t decide to just leave us there, so I became concerned. I pried the controller out of C’s hands and we walked down the street a ways, calling her name, because our childish minds couldn't grasp any other conclusions than she had run away from home. We gave up quickly and went back to the cottage, where I heard voices coming from the neighbor’s house, and I decided to investigate. There, I found my mother chatting with the neighbor, and thus the mystery of where my mother ran away from home to was solved.

That’s not to say it was all bad, and we did have a lot of fun. Perhaps the warmest, and most bizarre memory was when C, my mother, and I just laid around, staring at each other, trying not to laugh, at which point we would all start giggling like idiots for no reason. Really, the simplest things are the best.

Fortunately, C’s subsequent cottage trips proved to be less traumatic. After our Freshman year in high school, C and I took some of our school papers, mostly those from our Tech Prep class, and threw them into a giant bonfire, laughing at the idiocy of the assignments or confessing ways we cheated or lied on them. We then took halves of a cardboard idol of an infernal god named Marvin and cast it into the flames in defiance of a primitive race of people known as the Tech Prepians, who we were forced to endure the previous school year. I’m not making this up, but I’m not going to provide any more details about this for now. That is a whole different article, believe me.

There really weren’t any more cottage trips after that, until 2004, when C was on leave and we decided to have a male bonding trip. It was a great time, consisting of nerdy affairs such as reading comic books and watching movies, and more macho affairs, like setting really big fires. The bonfire we had that year inspired the story Wish by the Fire, which C started that weekend as a self-imposed writing exercise and I ended up finishing, thanks to egotistical inspiration.

Perhaps the most memorable story of the weekend occurred when we were driving around, and I saw another car driven by pretty girls. I let C know, and he immediately spun around, and, in a random act of manliness, passed them while we were going around a long, sharp curve that was a “no pass” zone for a damn good reason. Seriously, if there was a car coming the other way, we would not have seen it and would have definitely hit it and died.

The girls were so impressed, they told us about a party around the area that they were looking for, and C asked them to come get us at the cottage when they found it. Needless to say, they never showed, which was for the best, because I spent the next fifteen minutes whining about (Christy, take note) being faithful to my girlfriend.

That weekend, we went back up to the cottage with Christy and another misfit friend named Kevin, and from there went on to the Jafax anime convention, where we won first place in the cosplay contest for our skit. Other highlights of the weekend include C climbing on top of a sleeping Kevin and “pretending” to smooch him, and later during the weekend, the two getting into a wrestling match over possession of steel pipe that resulted in Kevin receiving a hearty twisted ankle. I’m not making any of this up, a fact that makes me a strong candidate for being the normal one of the group.

Sadly, the tradition seemed to fade away again until July of 2007, when C decided to take some leave, and we opted to head up to the cottage once again. Upon arriving, he set the tone for the trip by opening fire on me with a pair of foam dart guns he brought along, and from that point, we spent the remainder of our single night trip listening to Lewis Black, going to Jackson’s Ice Cream Parlor, mocking a DVD of Bibleman that I had just purchased, and mounting each other (this was because C was showing me some disabling moves he learned during a recent training exercise, or at least this is what we’re telling our families).

But the true call to the past came when we had a bonfire. I hadn’t been particularly keen on having one for a couple of years, since none of my other pyro-minded friends made it up with me, so an inordinate amount of brush and debris had been gathering on the fire pit. As if this weren’t enough, I added a healthy dose of old diesel fuel (with approximately the same level of combustion as bottled water) and a cup of fresh gasoline, and we had a fire that grew about two stories and made good work of the tree above us. C expressed great concern when the branch caught on fire, and believed the entire state of Michigan was going to catch on fire because of us. This didn’t stop him from ceremoniously tossing a list of idiotic orders his commanding officer had giving him into the flames, so an old custom came out again that night. Check out the video of our fiery exploits.

Later on, I spent a nice time with his family at a Fourth of July lunch, and of course we had it out with the dart guns, after which we parted ways. Not for long, since he had junk to haul back into Ohio before he left for Egypt, but so far, there are no plans for another cottage trip in the foreseeable future.

If you take anything from this article, it’s hopefully a renewed appreciation for the good things in life. I’m not suggesting you keep your head in the past. This is something I’ve tried to do for a few years, and it’s something that can get really unhealthy. Good memories are always good, but there’s no point in resisting the opportunity to make more.

As for me, I will always fondly remember my trip with C, when he mounted me. Yaa.