DC Next presents:

Doom Patrol

Issue Four: Movie Magic

Written by DreamerDriver

Edited by: dwright5252
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The two emerge looking at a large group of people in tight pants and weird, old looking costumes bustling about, setting a stage up behind a closed curtain. Niles and Robotman look down to see themselves dressed as 16th century French noblemen with ruffled shirts and tricorn hats. Niles rides in an old wheelchair with a large wicker seat and three wheels. Rita is dressed as a 16th century French mime. She marvels at her surroundings.
“Ah, Fandango. In this one, I play Lenore, a wealthy socialite who falls in love with a nobleman’s bastard, Noel. The two of us run away with a traveling acting troupe to escape Philippe, the Queen’s cousin, who I am meant to be married to.”
Robotman rolls his eyes. “Sounds terrific. Now why won’t you come home with us?”
“Oh Cliff, not now, one of my favorite scenes is about to happen. Just let me do this and I’ll explain everything.”
Robotman begins to say something but Niles interrupts him.
“We’d be happy to watch.”
Rita smiles as Niles backs up to watch. Robotman grudgingly follows.
A muscular, handsome man dressed as a mime, Noel, walks up to Rita.
“Lenore, we’ve almost done it. Once this performance is over, we can escape across the border, out of the Queen’s clutches.”
“Oh Noel, I was so right to trust in you. Without you, I would have been a miserable housewife, with nothing to do all day but clean the home, prepare Philippe’s meals, and take care of the many children we would inevitably have.”
“Yes, and now you get to do all of those things with me! As long as you don’t screw up tonight.”
“I’ll do my best Noel, I promise.”
Niles and Robotman exchange a look, concerned about the message this film is portraying.
Suddenly, from behind the curtain, a nobleman in the tightest pants and the most ruffled shirt, Phillippe, slices through.
“Lenore, I have come for you!”
Phillippe approaches Rita.
“You shall never have me.”
“I shall!”
Phillippe slices at Rita, cutting her face. As Noel draws his sword, Robotman and Niles rush forward.
“Rita!”
The two try to help Rita up, but she refuses their help.
“Get away, let me finish the scene.”
“But you’re hurt.”
“It’s what I have to do!”
Niles is made uncomfortable by the tone in which Rita says this.
Phillippe speaks up.
“And who are you two?”
Robotman responds.
“We’re Rita’s friends.”
“Whose Rita?”
“Oh screw off.”
“Hey, you can’t speak to me like that!”
Phillipe approaches Robotman. Noel butts in.
“Hey, you’re supposed to be fighting me, not him.”
“I will lick you in a second.”
“You will lick me now!”
The two begin to get in each other’s face right in front of Robotman. Robotman pushes them both, which causes them to go flying back. They land against the curtain, which falls against their weight, covering them. The two begin to tear at the curtain, trying to get it off.
“Well they’re not gonna be happy about that.”
Robotman turns to the others as Rita finally gets up off the floor.
“Looks like its exit stage left.”
“This would be stage right.”
“Close enough.”
The three run off again.
As Noel and Phillippe free themselves from the curtain, they look to see an old west sheriff and his posse looking down at them.
“You two pretty boys see a couple a weirdos and Annie Oakley around here?”
The three tower over a miniature city as they walk through Rita’s last major film, Gulliver’s Groove. Rita stomps away from Niles and Robotman, the three dressed in the hip 60s style of the day, with no concern for the tiny village she’s destroying. The sounds of tiny screams are heard at their feet, but they don’t pay attention to it.
Niles tries to catch up to her.
“Rita please, you can’t stay here.”
“If you don’t want to be here just leave, but I’m not going with you.”
“Rita, is this about your daughter?”
Rita stops.
She grabs the top of a skyscraper, her knuckles go white as she holds it, fighting back tears.
She crushes the top of the skyscraper.
She turns around to face Niles in a fury, but her tears stop her.
She falls to her knees.
Niles rolls up to her and embraces her. Robotman stands awkwardly to the side, but Niles nods him over, and he too joins the embrace.
“I have nothing. But here, I’m a star.”
They break the embrace and sit down on top of some flat top buildings. Niles moves next to Rita.
“How did this happen?”
“I haven’t left the house since Mia died. Her gone, and me thinking you were gone as well, Cliff, the Doom Patrol falling apart, it was all so much. I had tried to get pack into work, but the new agent I had gotten was only able to get cat food commercials and game shows. ‘The Farr brand had gone stale’. Insensitive prick. A few months ago, I was in a terrible spot, so my maid surprised me by pulling out all my old films from the garage. I tell you I did nothing but sit there and watch those over and over again. In the films, I’m safe, surrounded by happiness and people who love me. And then one day, I don’t know, I just wanted to go back. And so, I did.”
Robotman, still confused: “So you just walked into the screen, because you really wanted to? No to be insensitive but...”
Niles, not as confused: “Emotions are a powerful thing, Cliff. They have a powerful effect on your mind, your body, but the world around you as well. You hadn’t left your house in, what, years, Rita?”
Rita, trying not to let her emotions get the better of her again: “Definitely.”
“And you were miserable the whole time?”
“Yes, it’s embarrassing the things I thought.”
“And then the past couple of months, how have you felt?”
“Ecstatic.”
“And all of that was directed at the screen that was playing your movies.”
“I guess, yes.”
“With the amount of energy hanging in your house for years from your sadness, mixed with the powerful happiness you had directed at a specific point. Makes perfect sense to me.”
Robotman, trying not to let his emotions get the better of him, in the form of shaking Niles until he starts making sense: “I’m sure it does to you, Chief.”
“Whatever the case, Rita, you can’t stay here.”
Rita has come to tears again.
“But I can’t face the world out there, you won’t make me!”
Robotman steps in.
“Rita listen, I don’t want this to turn into ‘a very special Blossom’, so I’m just gonna say this. It doesn’t matter how magical emotions are or whatever, you can’t let them rule your life. It’s of course important to acknowledge them, and deal with them accordingly, but you can’t let them drive you to an unhealthy way of living. Like, living in movies from the 50’s. This has kinda gotten away from me. The point is you gotta be strong. I know you, Rita, you’re strong.”
Before Robotman could have a chance to finish the moral of this story, a bullet wizzes past his head. He looks back to see the sheriff and his posse joined by Noel and Phillippe.
“You get away from Annie.”
“Why does this dirty man keep calling Lenore Annie?”
“Hey, let’s focus on shooting first and asking questions later.”
The two men shrug at the sheriff's statement, and charge in as the cowboys start firing.
Robotman grabs Rita and Niles and throws them behind the small city skyline. In the haste Niles falls over. The three of them crouch down.
“Cliff, you take care of the swordsmen, I’ll take care of the guns. Rita…”
Niles looks at Rita, still sobbing, trying to get a hold of herself.
“Rita just stay down.”
Robotman hops over the buildings and engages with Noel and Phillipe. The two men swing at him, with Robotman blocking with his arms. The swords leave scratches, but nothing to worry about now. Robotman strikes back with a couple punches, hitting Noel, but Phillipe is able to jump back.
Meanwhile, Niles has inched himself back to his wheelchair.
“Activating combat mode.”
Niles tries to type on his button pad that isn’t there because it’s a wheelchair from the 60s.
“Oh wait, shit.”
Niles looks back at Robotman.
Phillipe has taken advantage of Robotman’s missed punch and thrusts forward with his sword. The sword isn’t able to break through the metal skin, but leaves a considerable cut. This cut is made worse by the bullet that hits it, coming from the sheriff and his men.
Robotman tries to fight back against Phillipe and Noel getting in a punch now and again, but the volley of shots and slices begin to have their toll. Swords and bullets aren’t usually a problem for the Robotman, but when it’s five guns and two swords against one out of practice robot, the odds begin to leave his favor.
Niles looks back at Rita, who looks on as Cliff is taken down to his knees by the repeated strikes. But he continues to fight.
Rita looks at Niles, scared.
“Robotman needs you, Elasti-Girl.”
Robotman, on his hands and knees, struggles to get up. Noel and Phillippe jab and swing at the helpless robot with all the joviality of an afternoon fencing match.
“I must say Phillippe, your form and talent with a sword reminds me a lot of myself.”
“You know, Noel, I was thinking the exact same thing, maybe we’re not so different you and---”
Phillippe is crushed by a giant foot.
Noel staggers back in horror, looking up to see his beloved Lenore, now dressed in a red white and purple dress, towering over him. His sword clatters to the ground as he makes a mad dash in the opposite direction.
Robotman looks up to see why everything has stopped, and sees a giant pinky outstretched to help him up. He grabs it and gets to his feet.
The sheriff’s men, who had stopped firing when they saw a 100-foot-tall Annie Oakley, begin to back away in fear. The sheriff doesn’t back down.
“Come on men, let’s take the freak down.”
The sheriff fires at Rita, and, with some reluctance, the rest of the men fire too.
Bullets begin to bounce off Elasti-Girl’s springy skin, which directs her attention away from Robotman, towards the cowboys. Elasti-Girl runs at them, each step destroying entire towns. She reaches the posse, and gives them a swift kick, knocking them into the distance, where they disappear into the darkness bordering the world.
Robotman watches the old maid run down the stairs carrying Rita’s large briefcase, impressed that she’s not only able to carry it, but run with it as well, after seeing the amount of things Rita packed in there. The maid hands the bag off to Rita. Niles shakes his head.
“Rita, you don’t need to bring all of this, your room is still completely furnished and the closet is completely stocked.”
“You kept those old rags? Niles, it’s all so last decade.”
Rita looks at the maid.
“What is your name again?”
The maid is absolutely floored by the fact that, not only is Rita talking to her, but asking her name! She takes a minute to compose, then answers.
“Gloria.”
“Gloria, thank you for taking such good care of me and the home while I was away. Now, I’m going to be gone for quite a long time again, so I will be hiring a new chef and new gardeners, but, while I’m gone, you’re in charge. Feel free to have the chef make you what you want, have friends over, and use the theatre, though be careful.”
“Oh no, Madame, you cannot do this. I cannot take your house.”
“Think of it as extended house sitting.”
Niles looks at his vibrating phone.
“That’s our car.”
The group say goodbye to Gloria and leave the house.
“Oh, it will be so good to be headquarters with all of us there.”
“One more stop before we head there, Rita.”
“And where is that Niles?”
“Indiana, we’ve got to pick up Negative Man and Negative Woman.”
Well well, looks like Elasti-Girl is back on the team. But what about the Negative Man and Negative Woman, are they ready to hop on the doom train, or is their pickle in some sort of brine? Find out in the next issue, Negative Parenting, or Focus on the Negative.
Hello darlings, this Rita Farr. Niles told me that he wants me to write a part of this... letter I guess, it’s not very clear, but whatever it is I’m happy to inform whoever you are on the history of me. My childhood was nothing too special, great in school, exceptionally at presentations, sang the national anthem at all the home games. I always knew I was destined for greatness. And I thought I’d achieved it, when my starring role as Annie Oakley had become a smash hit. My life was a dream for the next ten years, hit after hit, the world loved me. Then, in the 60’s, things changed. Films got different, and I couldn’t keep up. Soon, I was only getting roles like the aging mother, the kind neighbor. Could you imagine, America’s leading lady becoming second string? It just wouldn’t do.
And so, I left the business. I traveled the world, visited my adoring public. But as the years went on, that public turned into more of a private. That is to say, my fans started to dwindle. Without any fans, I was left to look at the world, and it wasn’t good. Pain and suffering, we had come so far from the world I had created in my pictures. And yes, I know the world wasn’t perfect in 1950, but my world was. The magic world of cinema. I had been blind, but maybe I could fix it. The only problem was, it was 1998, and I was old. I started asking around, I had become close with a lot of powerful people. There had to have been some sort of cure all, a fountain of youth. If it took money, I had it. That’s when I met Niles. Word had gotten to him about what I was looking for, and he offered it to me, free of charge. The only caveat was I would owe him a favor. I didn’t like the vagueness of the offer, but I was desperate. Niles explained the process as “a mixture of robotics, biotics, and ancient shaman medicines”. I was conscious for the whole thing and I still can’t tell you what happened. But it ended with a small injection.
After that, I felt my skin tightening, my heart starting beating stronger, I felt good. I rushed to the mirror, and my goodness, I looked 25 again. But then I didn’t. All of a sudden my skin drooped, I looked like a living skin bag. Niles explained that he had turned my skin elastic, in sense. It’s honestly all too complicated for me. The point was he had given me powers, powers that he could teach me to use, and in return I would work for him for a project he was working on. That project would go on to turn into the Doom Patrol. He showed me that, if I helped him, I could turn the world into the magical place I had always seen it as.
He was right.
And I’m so happy that we’re all back together.

Friends, will you bear with me today, for I have awakened from a dream in which a robin made with its shabby wings a kind of veil behind which it shimmied and stomped something from the south of Spain, its breast a’flare, looking me dead in the eye from the branch that grew into my window, coochie-cooing my chin, the bird shuffling its little talons left, then right, while the leaves bristled against the plaster wall, two of them drifting onto my blanket while the bird opened and closed its wings like a matador giving up on murder, jutting its beak, turning a circle, and flashing, again, the ruddy bombast of its breast by which I knew upon waking it was telling me in no uncertain terms to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones, the whole rusty brass band of gratitude not quite dormant in my belly — it said so in a human voice, “Bellow forth” — and who among us could ignore such odd and precise counsel?
Hear ye! hear ye! I am here to holler that I have hauled tons — by which I don’t mean lots, I mean tons — of cowshit and stood ankle deep in swales of maggots swirling the spent beer grains the brewery man was good enough to dump off holding his nose, for they smell very bad, though make the compost writhe giddy and lick its lips, twirling dung with my pitchfork again and again with hundreds and hundreds of other people, we dreamt an orchard this way, furrowing our brows, and hauling our wheelbarrows, and sweating through our shirts, and two years later there was a party at which trees were sunk into the well-fed earth, one of which, a liberty apple, after being watered in was tamped by a baby barefoot with a bow hanging in her hair biting her lip in her joyous work and friends this is the realest place I know, you could ride your bike there or roller skate or catch the bus there is a fence and a gate twisted by hand, there is a fig tree taller than you in Indiana, it will make you gasp. It might make you want to stay alive even, thank you;
and thank you for not taking my pal when the engine of his mind dragged him to swig fistfulls of Xanax and a bottle or two of booze, and thank you for taking my father a few years after his own father went down thank you mercy, mercy, thank you for not smoking meth with your mother oh thank you thank you for leaving and for coming back, and thank you for what inside my friends’ love bursts like a throng of roadside goldenrod gleaming into the world, likely hauling a shovel with her like one named Aralee ought, with hands big as a horse’s, and who, like one named Aralee ought, will laugh time to time til the juice runs from her nose; oh thank you for the way a small thing’s wail makes the milk or what once was milk in us gather into horses huckle-buckling across a field;
and thank you, friends, when last spring the hyacinth bells rang and the crocuses flaunted their upturned skirts, and a quiet roved the beehive which when I entered were snugged two or three dead fist-sized clutches of bees between the frames, almost clinging to one another, this one’s tiny head pushed into another’s tiny wing, one’s forelegs resting on another’s face, the translucent paper of their wings fluttering beneath my breath and when a few dropped to the frames beneath: honey; and after falling down to cry, everything’s glacial shine.
And thank you, too. And thanks for the corduroy couch I have put you on. Put your feet up. Here’s a light blanket, a pillow, dear one, for I can feel this is going to be long. I can’t stop my gratitude, which includes, dear reader, you, for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak. Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it.
And thank you the tiny bee’s shadow perusing these words as I write them. And the way my love talks quietly when in the hive, so quietly, in fact, you cannot hear her but only notice barely her lips moving in conversation. Thank you what does not scare her in me, but makes her reach my way. Thank you the love she is which hurts sometimes. And the time she misremembered elephants in one of my poems which, oh, here they come, garlanded with morning glory and wisteria blooms, trombones all the way down to the river. Thank you the quiet in which the river bends around the elephant’s solemn trunk, polishing stones, floating on its gentle back the flock of geese flying overhead.
And to the quick and gentle flocking of men to the old lady falling down on the corner of Fairmount and 18th, holding patiently with the softest parts of their hands her cane and purple hat, gathering for her the contents of her purse and touching her shoulder and elbow; thank you the cockeyed court on which in a half-court 3 v 3 we oldheads made of some runny-nosed kids a shambles, and the 61-year-old after flipping a reverse lay-up off a back door cut from my no-look pass to seal the game ripped off his shirt and threw punches at the gods and hollered at the kids to admire the pacemaker’s scar grinning across his chest; thank you the glad accordion’s wheeze in the chest; thank you the bagpipes.
Thank you to the woman barefoot in a gaudy dress for stopping her car in the middle of the road and the tractor trailer behind her, and the van behind it, whisking a turtle off the road. Thank you god of gaudy. Thank you paisley panties. Thank you the organ up my dress. Thank you the sheer dress you wore kneeling in my dream at the creek’s edge and the light swimming through it. The koi kissing halos into the glassy air. The room in my mind with the blinds drawn where we nearly injure each other crawling into the shawl of the other’s body. Thank you say it plain: fuck each other dumb.
And you, again, you, for the true kindness it has been for you to remain awake with me like this, nodding time to time and making that noise which I take to mean yes, or, I understand, or, please go on but not too long, or, why are you spitting so much, or, easy Tiger hands to yourself. I am excitable. I am sorry. I am grateful. I just want us to be friends now, forever. Take this bowl of blackberries from the garden. The sun has made them warm. I picked them just for you. I promise I will try to stay on my side of the couch.
And thank you the baggie of dreadlocks I found in a drawer while washing and folding the clothes of our murdered friend; the photo in which his arm slung around the sign to “the trail of silences”; thank you the way before he died he held his hands open to us; for coming back in a waft of incense or in the shape of a boy in another city looking from between his mother’s legs, or disappearing into the stacks after brushing by; for moseying back in dreams where, seeing us lost and scared he put his hand on our shoulders and pointed us to the temple across town;
and thank you to the man all night long hosing a mist on his early-bloomed peach tree so that the hard frost not waste the crop, the ice in his beard and the ghosts lifting from him when the warming sun told him sleep now; thank you the ancestor who loved you before she knew you by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long journey, who loved you before he knew you by putting a walnut tree in the ground, who loved you before she knew you by not slaughtering the land; thank you who did not bulldoze the ancient grove of dates and olives, who sailed his keys into the ocean and walked softly home; who did not fire, who did not plunge the head into the toilet, who said stop, don’t do that; who lifted some broken someone up; who volunteered the way a plant birthed of the reseeding plant is called a volunteer, like the plum tree that marched beside the raised bed in my garden, like the arugula that marched itself between the blueberries, nary a bayonette, nary an army, nary a nation, which usage of the word volunteer familiar to gardeners the wide world made my pal shout “Oh!” and dance and plunge his knuckles into the lush soil before gobbling two strawberries and digging a song from his guitar made of wood from a tree someone planted, thank you;
thank you zinnia, and gooseberry, rudbeckia and pawpaw, Ashmead’s kernel, cockscomb and scarlet runner, feverfew and lemonbalm; thank you knitbone and sweetgrass and sunchoke and false indigo whose petals stammered apart by bumblebees good lord please give me a minute; and moonglow and catkin and crookneck and painted tongue and seedpod and johnny jump-up; thank you what in us rackets glad what gladrackets us;
and thank you, too, this knuckleheaded heart, this pelican heart, this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw to the sky, oh clumsy, oh bumblefucked, oh giddy, oh dumbstruck, oh rickshaw, oh goat twisting its head at me from my peach tree’s highest branch, balanced impossibly gobbling the last fruit, its tongue working like an engine, a lone sweet drop tumbling by some miracle into my mouth like the smell of someone I’ve loved; heart like an elephant screaming at the bones of its dead; heart like the lady on the bus dressed head to toe in gold, the sun shivering her shiny boots, singing Erykah Badu to herself leaning her head against the window;
and thank you the way my father one time came back in a dream by plucking the two cables beneath my chin like a bass fiddle’s strings and played me until I woke singing, no kidding, singing, smiling, thank you, thank you, stumbling into the garden where the Juneberry’s flowers had burst open like the bells of French horns, the lily my mother and I planted oozed into the air, the bazillion ants labored in their earthen workshops below, the collard greens waved in the wind like the sails of ships, and the wasps swam in the mint bloom’s viscous swill;
and you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend. I know I can be long winded sometimes. I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward, the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over,
which is precisely what the child in my dream said, holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky hurtling our way like so many buffalo, who said it’s much worse than we think, and sooner; to whom I said no duh child in my dreams, what do you think this singing and shuddering is, what this screaming and reaching and dancing and crying is, other than loving what every second goes away? Goodbye, I mean to say. And thank you. Every day.

The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias As so-called intentional communities proliferate across the country, a subset of Americans is discovering the value of opting out of contemporary society.
Ransom (a pseudonym) Heath, 42, and Eric Johnson, 36, on their way to feed the pigs at the East Wind intentional community in the Ozarks. Ransom (a pseudonym) Heath, 42, and Eric Johnson, 36, on their way to feed the pigs at the East Wind intentional community in the Ozarks.Credit...George Etheredge By Mike Mariani Jan. 16, 2020
THE EAST WIND COMMUNITY is hidden deep in the Ozarks of southern Missouri, less than 10 miles from the Arkansas border, surrounded by jagged hills and tawny fields. Getting there requires traversing country roads that rise, dip and twist through chicken-wire-fenced farmsteads and grazing pastures cluttered with rusty agricultural equipment until you reach 1,145 acres of largely undeveloped highland forest, where cedar, oak, pine and mulberry create a dense canopy. Beneath that are 27 buildings and structures, including four large dormitories, nine personal shelters, a kitchen and dining facility, an automobile shop, a nut butter manufacturing plant and a cold-storage warehouse, all built over the years by the community since its founding in 1974. Outside, farm animals — six piglets, 50 chickens, several dozen brown-and-white cows — crunch through the carpet of winter leaves.
Nearby, a pair of women make their way down a muddy field, one pushing a wheelbarrow, to a weathered-gray wooden barn where they’ll draw gallons of milk from their dairy cows. A reedy man with a long, sandy mullet presses a chain saw to the base of a tree trunk. People stop each other on the dirt paths, asking about the understaffed forestry program, or recounting anecdotes about going into town to sort through credit card charges. Everyone has somewhere to be, yet no one is hurried. There are no smartphones in sight. The collective feels like a farm, a work exchange and a bustling household rolled into one, with much work to be done but many hands to be lent.
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Continue reading the main story Image Aubrey DeLone, 31, harvests kale from a community garden.Credit...George Etheredge Image Milk drips onto a dairy cow's hoof.Credit...George Etheredge East Wind is what its 72 residents call an intentional community, a modern descendant of the utopian colonies and communes of centuries past where individuals share everything from meals, chores and living space to work, income, domestic responsibilities and the burden of self-governance. The term intentional community dates to the late 1940s, when the Inter-Community Exchange — an organization formed in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the wake of World War II to help promote peaceful, cooperative living arrangements (in the hope of eradicating war altogether) — changed its name to the Fellowship of Intentional Communities; the founders felt the new title better conveyed the deliberateness with which these groups were assembling. The members of East Wind, for example, range in age from infancy to 76: Some have lived here for more than three decades, but around half of the population is part of a new wave, people in their late 20s and early 30s who joined in the last four years. These newer residents moved to East Wind to wean themselves off fossil fuels, grow their own food, have a greater say in how their society is run and live in less precarious financial circumstances.
According to Sky Blue, the 39-year-old executive director of the Foundation for Intentional Community and a former member of the Virginia-based commune Twin Oaks, which was founded in 1967, the number of intentional communities listed in the FIC’s directory nearly doubled between 2010 and 2016 (the last year the directory was published), to roughly 1,200. Although the number of people living in these communities is hard to pin down — the demographic is often deliberately off the grid — Blue estimates that there are currently around 100,000 individuals residing in them. “There’s an obvious growth trend that you can chart,” he said; millennials “get this intentional community thing more than people in the past.”
Image The road winds through open prairie en route to East Wind.Credit...George Etheredge Image Chris Turner, 27, walks the community’s vast property, which encompasses 1,200 acres.Credit...George Etheredge Image Don Rust, 69, assembles a rope sandal for East Wind’s sandal company, Utopian. Rust has lived in the community for more than 30 years.Credit...George Etheredge Image Austin, 24, blends in with the Ozarks’ autumn leaves.Credit...George Etheredge THE UNITED STATES HAS been a laboratory for experiments in alternative living since its founding. The English Puritans and Pilgrims who, wishing to escape the oppression and persecution of the Church of England, fled to America in the early 17th century to create smaller societies where they could live according to their faith were followed, notably, by the Transcendentalists in 1830s New England, who sought to distance themselves from the ruthlessness of the Industrial Revolution and instead lead a life driven by Romantic ideals.
In 1841, George and Sophia Ripley, Unitarians inspired by that Transcendentalist ethos, bought a 188-acre parcel of hills and pinewood forests in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, where they started one of the country’s earliest and most influential utopian communities, called Brook Farm. To fund the project, the couple created a joint stock company with 10 other initial investors; they sold shares for $500, promising investors 5 percent of annual profits, which they hoped to earn by selling handmade clothing, collecting tuition from a private school run by Sophia and offering tours to curious outsiders for a small fee. George even wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the founder of Transcendentalism, in 1840, in hopes that the movement’s putative leader might join or otherwise invest in his social experiment, arguing that, at Brook Farm, “thought would preside over the operations of labor, and labor would contribute to the expansion of thought” in order to achieve “industry without drudgery.”
Because Brook Farm aspired to so many goals — abolishing the class system, promoting gender parity, dividing labor equitably, privileging intellectual and leisure pursuits, promoting self-improvement — it attracted social reformers and early feminists, theologians and authors (Nathaniel Hawthorne was a founding member). Though it peaked at just 32 people and was officially shuttered in 1847 after being devastated by debt, smallpox and a fire, it became an American model for subsequent utopian projects. Over the following decades, more communities, including the Amana Colonies in Iowa and the Oneida Colony in upstate New York, served as sanctuaries from materialism and modernity. By the early 1900s, though, many of these had collapsed under the weight of financial pressures, ideological strife and tensions between the fantasy of social enlightenment and the realities of manual labor and working-class living conditions.
It wasn’t until the decades after World War II, when large numbers of Americans began questioning their nation’s sociopolitical and environmental policies, that the desire to create alternative societies was renewed, leading to the “hippie communes” that would become indelible features of the 20th-century cultural landscape. Places like Strawberry Fields in Southern California, The Farm in central Tennessee and Drop City in rural Colorado encapsulated the radical freedom, social experimentation and consciousness expansion that came to define the 1960s and 1970s. By borrowing openly from the psychedelic movement, artist collectives such as Ant Farm, Fluxus and Art Workers’ Coalition, as well as subcultures like the Merry Pranksters, the Nature Boys and, too, the rising environmentalist movement — some of which had emerged in response to the Vietnam War — these new communes tapped into an iconoclastic strain of society that embraced socialist ideals and Eastern philosophical tenets (including detachment, spontaneity and pacifism), rejecting many of the prevailing middle-class values of the time, including the primacy of the nuclear family and the zeal for conspicuous consumption (upon joining The Farm, for instance, all members took vows of poverty). Many of these communes, lacking any codified organizational structure and struggling to cultivate steady income, eventually faltered, but they had already achieved a kind of dubious cultural immortality, ultimately becoming the nation’s measure for the alternative living arrangements and utopian enterprises that followed.
Image Mardock, 38, puts his hand on the head of a recently slaughtered cow at FooPin, East Wind’s processing facility.Credit...George Etheredge Image Mariah Figgs, 20, and her partner Kris Gilstrap, 29, stand in front of their personal shelter.Credit...George Etheredge
WHILE HIPPIE COMMUNES have become a cliché, their DNA has nevertheless been passed down to some of today’s intentional communities. Consider Cedar Moon, tucked inside a state park on seven acres of farmland near the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. Up until 2004, the property was rented out to a rotating cast of free-spirited artists, activists and musicians, who lived in two old-growth timber-frame houses. When a developer offered the owner $1.5 million to convert the land into a housing development, longtime residents banded together to save it from a fate that would not only have left them homeless, but was antithetical to their values. In February 2005, 16 residents raised $125,000 in a month to buy the developer’s option contract — effectively removing the immediate threat — and then scrambled to secure the $1.5 million required to buy the property (nearly half of which, ironically, came from bank loans) over the next year.
In addition to the two original houses and a ramshackle barn, the property now consists of a sauna, yurt, outdoor kitchen, performance stage, composting-toilet outhouse and elaborate, brightly-painted gazebo that the 20 residents, who built everything themselves, call the T-Whale. Several of the structures are made of cob, a composite of clay, sand and straw that was popularized in England in the late Middle Ages and is extremely energy-efficient because of its high thermal mass. Almost everyone earns income outside of the community — Cedar Moon is not technically a commune according to the FIC definition — and current members, primarily people in their 30s and 40s and their children, include several teachers, a therapist, a director at a nonprofit and an accountant. While everyone keeps their finances separate, they share groceries, appliances (there’s one washer and dryer) and operate based on consensus. “It’s such an anticapitalist thing, just to share,” said Brenna Bell, an environmental lawyer who lives there. “Our economy relies on growth. It relies on people consuming. And we are going very intentionally in the opposite direction.”
Members must contribute 10 hours of labor each week, which might include tending the apple orchard, milking the herd of goats or cooking for the community (living expenses total around $600 a month). Cedar Moon isn’t off the power grid, but its residents have a dramatically smaller carbon footprint than the average American because they share resources, grow much of their own produce, use composting toilets and heat their homes with wood-burning stoves. Vinnie Inzano, a 30-year-old graduate student in marriage and family therapy, moved to Cedar Moon a year and a half ago because he didn’t want to be “plugged into systems that are causing collapse,” he said; he feels the community offers a better way of coexisting with the environment, “combating the story of extraction.”
Earthaven, which consists of 329 densely forested acres within North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, and was founded in 1994 by 18 people in their 30s and 40s, takes sustainability even more seriously. The community of roughly 100 people, which member Chris Farmer described as “overeducated suburban refugees,” is entirely off the grid. Several solar panels, a micro-hydropower system and smaller photovoltaic installations scattered throughout the property’s hills provide all the necessary energy for residents, who are divided into 11 smaller neighborhoods, each with anywhere from one to 14 homes made of earthen plaster, straw bale and lumber felled on the land. Rachel Fee, a 39-year-old herbalist, moved to Earthaven in 2017 after five years living outside Asheville, N.C. She wanted a more communal lifestyle that fit her ideals and didn’t push her to work relentlessly; here, she’s no longer “inundated with the idea that productivity is your self-worth,” she said. But Fee was also clear that her living arrangement was uniquely challenging, requiring a willingness to fully cohabit with others. Her 800-square-foot, reddish-brown straw-bale home sits on a gently sloping hill that she shares with 20 people living in nine structures huddled closely together. The residents get their water from the same spring and bathe in the same bathhouse. “This is not an idealistic situation,” she said. “It’s not running away from the world and sticking our head in the sand — it’s reinventing the wheel.”
Image Tom Bailey, 62, has lived at East Wind for nearly 38 years.Credit...George Etheredge Image Angelo Goodreau, 16 months, stands in front of an East Wind building.Credit...George Etheredge Image Channel Salmons, 30, with her Alembic Hydro cell.Credit...George Etheredge Image Maddie sits on top of a woodpile.Credit...George Etheredge IN 2017 BJORN GRINDE and Ranghild Bang Nes, researchers with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, co-authored a paper on the quality of life among North Americans living in intentional communities. Along with David Sloan Wilson, director of the evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, and Ian MacDonald, a graduate assistant, they contacted more than 1,000 people living in 174 communities across the U.S. and Canada and asked them to rate their happiness level on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a globally recognized measurement tool. They compared these results to a widely cited 2008 study by the psychologists William Pavot and Ed Diener, which surveyed past studies that used the scale to analyze 31 disparate populations — including Dutch adults, French-Canadian university students and the Inuit of northern Greenland — and discovered that members of intentional communities scored higher than 30 of the 31 groups. Living in an intentional community, the authors concluded, “appears to offer a life less in discord with the nature of being human compared to mainstream society.” They then hypothesized why that might be: “One, social connections; two, sense of meaning; and three, closeness to nature.”
Though many residents of intentional communities are undoubtedly frustrated by climate inaction and mounting economic inequality, others are joining primarily to form stronger social bonds. According to a study published last year by researchers at the University of California San Diego, more than three-quarters of American adults now experience moderate to high levels of loneliness — rates that have more than doubled over the last 50 years. Despite rising housing costs across the country, more Americans are living alone today than ever before. As Boone Wheeler, a 33-year-old member of East Wind, told me, “There are literal health consequences to loneliness: Your quality of life goes down due to lack of community — you will die sooner.”
Last February, Sumner Nichols, a 29-year-old who grew up in Pennsylvania and moved to East Wind four years ago, invited me to visit the community, which was originally established by a group of men and women who had been living at Twin Oaks and decided they wanted to use the knowledge and experience they accumulated to start their own commune. After amassing a handful of followers during stops in Vermont and Massachusetts, the fledgling group eventually settled in the Ozarks because the land was cheap and adjacent to water. The residents, whose commitment to industry has helped ensure East Wind’s longevity, crafted rope hammocks by hand in partnership with Twin Oaks in the 1970s before launching their own jarred nut-butter business in the early 1980s; their products, which are mainly sold across the Midwest, typically gross between $2 million and $3 million annually. All adult members of East Wind must work 35 hours per week in various capacities, whether cooking, gardening, milling lumber, maintaining infrastructure, looking after the animals or working in the manufacturing plant. Because it’s a relatively modest schedule, residents have enough free time to cultivate personal passions: Nichols practices wildlife photography, while other members produce and record music, study herbal medicine and create ceramics using the community kiln.
Even in the dead of winter, the property is stunning, with its undulating textures of ridges, glades and limestone escarpments. It was obvious how living here could reconnect people to the land, letting them hike, climb, swim and harvest in a way that is beyond reach for most Americans. As we passed a three-story dormitory painted Egyptian blue, Nichols told me that, as a college student in the late 2000s, he tumbled down what he calls the “climate change research hole,” reading websites that pored over grim scientific projections about an increasingly warmer planet. He’d joined the Bloomington, Indiana, chapter of the Occupy movement for a while, but saw the blaze of indignation dwindle to fumes without any lasting political victories. Afterward, Nichols felt wholly disillusioned by the corporations and government organizations that he felt had a stranglehold on his life. “It’s going to go how it goes,” he recalled thinking, so “how do you want to live in it?” After discovering several intentional communities online — many find East Wind and others through simple Google searches — he concluded that joining one was “just a more comfortable way of living right now.”
Image Richard “Boone” Wheeler, 33, stands in front of Lick Creek.Credit...George Etheredge Image East Wind Nut Butters’s almond butter.Credit...George Etheredge Image Kendra knitting.Credit...George Etheredge Image Chris Incorvia, 36, sits on a bucket in the community’s auto body shop.Credit...George Etheredge As evening approached, we met several residents who had decided to take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather by gathering at one of East Wind’s “swimming holes” — sandbanks that run alongside Lick Creek and provide easy swimming access. As the setting sun glinted off the gently rippling water, one 31-year-old resident, who goes by the mononym Indo and who had been at East Wind for five and a half years, discussed what brought him to the community: “When I was in Babylon,” he said, using the term members of East Wind half-sarcastically deploy to refer to mainstream society, “all I did was follow economics.” While the residents have similar issues and problems as people outside of an intentional community, he added, here they were free from the cutthroat hierarchies that dominated the broader culture. “Instead of your boss telling you what to do, it turns into a social relationship,” he said. “We’re just reframing it from a different perspective.” Indeed, if there is any sense of romanticism running through the community — one that harks back to Brook Farm’s belief in a daily life in which individual freedoms are more fully realized and moral convictions more faithfully observed — it lies in the notion that none of us, actually, have to be complicit to political, social and economic forces with which we don’t agree.
But unless people are raised in an intentional community or something closely resembling one, they must still find a way to relinquish whatever perch they’ve already carved out for themselves before moving to one of these places. The choice is reminiscent of a line from Henry Thoreau’s “Walden” (1854), in which the Transcendentalist author assures the reader that if he were to follow a more intrepid path, he “will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense…. He will live with the license of a higher order of beings.” There will always, however, be the daunting task of letting go.

You are lost in the back-roads of Indiana when you drive past a lonely diner. Inside you find it packed with people, all seemingly from different time periods. You quickly realize that this diner exists independent of time.
I was heading southwest from the amusingly named town of French Lick, winding my way through the back roads that crossed the forested hills of the Hoosier National Forest. I was hungry and was annoyed that I hadn't bothered to eat breakfast back at the motel. I had given it some serious thought, but after four days in a row of desultory and pathetic looking continental breakfasts, I had decided that I couldn't bear the thought of looking at a sad, pathetic cheese danish on a tiny, cheap plastic plate with the cheapest and most terrible coffee imaginable in a slightly dirty mug to drink. So, I left early and hit the road. This was, I thought at the time, a good plan. I had to make my rendezvous near Uniontown by sunset and my contact had been very clear: the boat wouldn't wait forever.
But here's the thing: driving always makes you hungry. Your mind can only take in so much scenery before you start trying to distract yourself from the hunger gnawing at your belly and despite the rolling hills and the wooded forest around me, I found myself thinking of the perfect hot breakfast. Eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns, toast and really really good coffee. Man, I thought, hash browns would be so good right now- and then, just like that, almost in response to my musings, a sign appeared on the side of the road:
HOOSIER DINER, it read. 500 FEET AHEAD.
Weird, I thought, but I was hungry and I figured 'roadside diner' would have exactly the kind of breakfast I was looking for. Soon enough, it came into view and I slowed down and, flipping on my indicator, pulled into the gravel parking lot. The diner was set at the edge of a valley that ran back into the heart of the hills. It was early morning, so the valley was still full of mist that seemed to creep to the edge of the back of the parking lot of the diner. I didn't think anything of it as I pulled into a parking space and turned my car off. I stepped out of the car and, shutting the door behind me, headed toward the front entrance. As I walked past the windows to the front door, I saw that the place was absolutely packed, which should have alerted me to something unusual about the place, given how empty the parking lot was. I paid it no mind however and merely walked to the front door, opened it and stepped in.
"Ah good sir," a booming bass voice echoed from the corner of the diner. "Welcome, you may seat yourself." I turned to see an old man with silver hair and a beard beaming at me from the corner where he was giving some customers their breakfast. "I shall be with you momentarily." Feeling a bit bemused at his formality, I found an empty table toward the far end of the diner and sat down. I grabbed a menu from where they were wedged in between the napkin holder and the ketchup and glanced over it. Sure enough, they had what I was looking for: "Hoosier Diner Breakfast," I said aloud. Eggs, sausage, hash browns, toast and coffee. Then I kept looking down the menu. Scrapple, hasty pudding and something called sofkee were all there along with an impressive selection of beers and ciders- though the cider was spelled 'cidre' and not the usual way. I opened it up and was surprised again: sapan, nokake, bird brain stew and something called akutaq were listed. Along with the traditional lunchtime sandwiches like the Reuben, the BLT and the Hoosier Trencher and the Belegde Broodje, whatever that was.
I looked around, somewhat confused as the man who had welcomed me came bustling over to my table. "Welcome good sir, my name is Benjamin Harrison and I am the owner and proprietor of this fine eating establishment, What may I get you today?"
"Benjamin Harrison," I asked. "Like the President?"
"No," he replied, a knowing smile on his face. "I was the President once upon a time. Until that bastard Cleveland beat me for re-election in 1892."
"That's not possible," I said. "It's not 1892. It's... 2018. You're... well, you're dead."
He sighed. "A long time ago, I would have agreed with you," he said. "I'm still not entirely sure how or why this place exists, but I do know that it exists outside of time. I thought I was on my deathbed you see and then suddenly... I was here."
"Does that mean I'm dead?" Looking around I could see that maybe he was right. There were a lot of different people crowded into the diner. There were Native Americans, tucking into bowls of what seemed like porridge. A man and a woman in colonial dress were eating what looked like a souffle. Harrison laughed. "Goodness know," he said. "People come and people go all the time." He pointed to the pictures behind the counter. "I've had all kinds of people come eat here. The funnyman, Red Skelton, Kurt Vonnegut, and hell, even Wendell Wilkie- in fact," Harrison pointed. "There is right over there." He raised his voice slightly. "How are you Wendell?"
"I'm on the wrong end of an electoral ass-kicking, Harrison," the man replied. "Roosevelt took thirty eight out of the forty eight states." He raised a stein of beer. "I managed to win good old Indiana though, bless her."
"You'll be wanting steak then?"
"You read my mind, Harrison."
"Coming up right up, Wendell," Harrison replied. "Right after I help this gentlemen."
"How is this possible?" I said again, knowing that I probably sounded incredibly stupid doing so.
"Never mind how it's possible," Harrison replied. "Just know that it is." He looked around and sighed. "I'll admit, I thought this was a bit of a step down from the Presidency and my law career, but after awhile, it began to grow on me. There's nothing quite like meeting people and feeding them and making sure they go on their way well fed and happy. It's almost relaxing after being President."
I wrestled with everything he had told me for an moment more and then shrugged my shoulders and just decided to go with it. Maybe I had gone off the road and I was actually dead. Maybe this was some kind of weird hallucination. Maybe I'd gone insane and just hadn't realized it yet. None of it really mattered, because when it came right down to it, I was still hungry.
"Is the food good?"
"You better believe it," Harrison replied.
"Well, in that case, I'll take The Hoosier Breakfast with rye toast and eggs sunny side up. And a pot of your best coffee."
Harrison scribbled it all down on his pad and then gave me a broad grin. "Coming right up!"

Living in a small town, one of my favorite things to do is cruising the back roads and exploring. I've always been fascinated to see where the drive takes me, checking out scenery and happening upon houses that I wouldn't normally see on the main roads. And sometimes I like to travel some of the roads I have previously discovered after dark. Sometimes.
When I was around 13 or 14, one of my adventures led me to a little church named Apple Chapel (at this age I was still too young to be driving, but my uncle the antique dealer shared this passion with me). It's in the middle of nowhere in southern Indiana. Attached to the church is a small, quaint graveyard to the right. On the left is a gravel parking lot. It is surrounded by woods. To see this place in broad daylight, most people wouldn't bat an eye. It's actually not spooky looking. (Youngs Creek, IN.)
On the day of discovering the small lane that led to the church, I got spooked nearly a mile before passing Apple Chapel. Didn't even see it yet, let alone know it was there. I remember feeling strange, got goosebumps, the whole 9 yards. So did my uncle. He turned the music off and slowed the car. (This is still in daylight.)
My uncle asked me, "Do you feel that?"
"Yup. It feels like we shouldn't be here for some reason," was my response. Or something similar.
"What do you think is...", he slammed the brakes, nearly choking me with the seatbelt.
At first I was looking at him, but I instantly followed his gaze. There it was: the church with its tombstones. (I seen the graveyard first because it was on my right side, nearly 15 feet away or so.)
My breath caught and I thought I was too young for a heart attack. It was instant bad vibes. Although it didn't look creepy, it felt creepy. (We later confided with each other that it was almost as if we could feel vibrations, actual, physical vibrations, emanating from all around us.)
So, my uncle pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car. I hesitantly followed. We didn't say much at this point but I could tell he was shaken by this place, to the extent that I could see his hands slightly tremble when he lit a cigarette. We didn't stay long; just walked through the cemetery, looking at different headstones. Then left.
It was eerie, the way we both felt something ominous, out of place, at the same time. Really fucking weird.
That was the beginning of several more visits to Apple Chapel. What frightened us also fascinated us.
(When at school I asked around to see if anyone had any information about the place. Nope. Checked the local library and found nothing. Basically, could not find anything about the little church in the remote location. To this day I have not encountered anyone who has had bad feelings, ghost stories, anything unusual happen to them from Apple Chapel.)
The first time my uncle and I went there after nightfall was nothing to brag about really. But we still felt an evil presence, and the creep factor was through the roof! If I remember correctly, there might have been a security light on the parking lot side of the building but not the graveyard side. Seems like that was the case. We drove by crawling at a snail's pace, it being on the passenger side of the car. (Go figure, right next to me if the dead suddenly sprang to life! Not that I believe in that, but it was part of the creep factor.) I remember the moon being out but not bright. Heard twigs breaking from the woods nearby, probably a deer. But other than that it was too quiet. No other sounds period: no frogs, or owls, or crickets, or even noise from the wind. Dead silent except the twigs and the sound of the tires on the pavement. We left. (After leaving it took us both several miles to shake the uneasiness. Hell, I still felt it after arriving back home.)
Now, this was not a nightly occurrence. We knew better than to take a midnight cruise out there very often.
Occasionally, though, we would take someone with us. One time, on an after-dark cruise, I brought one of my friends along for the ride. We were having fun jamming to music and talking and whatnot. My uncle made it a point to avoid Apple Chapel that night, driving 25 miles south of it on the highway. On the return trip home he decided to use his GPS and take some country roads back. (This was not in the vicinity of the Chapel.) About 45 minutes later, traveling roads we have never been on before, his GPS suddenly goes bonkers and croaks! It just started going fuzzy-like, and died. (Which it shouldn't have because it was wired through the car and used the car's battery.)
So now we were lost, in an unfamiliar neck of the woods, with a little less than half a tank of gas. Fuck me running! About 5-6 minutes later there's the damn church! (Two notes here: 1. We were familiar with the area surrounding the church, even after midnight, and we didn't notice anything we recognized before seeing the church. 2. My uncle didn't plan for this as he intentionally wanted to avoid it that particular night.) My uncle's face went from trying to joke about being lost to oh shit real quick. Needless to say I informed my buddy of finding Apple Chapel by accident and how it freaked me out, yet still felt compelled to check it out every so often. Like drawn to it. He laughed it off and joked around, blah blah blah. We made it back home safely.
I will never forget this. We should have stayed far away from Apple Chapel...but we did not. On a school night, after talking with my uncle and reminiscing about our ghostly experiences (for some reason we had quite a lot of encounters together), he asks me if I wanted to take a short cruise. As the next day I had school, I was reluctant but agreed. Our destination was, of course, Apple Chapel. This was around 9:30, 9:45 pm. From where I lived it took about 20, 25 minutes to get there. We would be gone for an hour tops. Okay, sure, let's go.
We're almost there. The hairs on my arms stand on end. Chills travel my spine. I can feel it in my bones. Suddenly, my teeth chatter. Feels like the temperature dropped 15°. The car thermometer read 40° F. Pretty sure the temp did in fact drop. The church comes into view with the headlights. Pitch black tonight. No moon. Also no security light. My uncle pulls the car slightly off the road and comes to a stop.
"I just want to look around for a few then we will head back home," he says.
I shrugged and said, "Ok."
(We have done this before. Just parked next to the graveyard, got out and walked a bit...just seeing if anything weird would happen.)
He shut the car off. Extinguished the headlights. Got out and to the front of the car, just to my side of the vehicle. No more than a minute had passed. I was ready to get my ass to bed.
"Uncle James, I have school tomorrow. Nothing is happening tonight. It's too dark to really see anything anyway and I'm freezing. Let's go!" That's all I said.
"Yeah, you're right. Let's boogie back," he replied.
(This all happened with a minute or 2 of him shutting the car off.)
So, he gets in the car and turns the key over. Click-click-click-click-click. Nothing! Tries again. Click-click-click-click. Still nothing! Tries a 3rd time to no avail!! (You can hear the starter grow weaker through each attempt.)
Keep in mind that the car is in pretty good shape. He's had no problems with it besides the GPS going out, and now this. (He even had the GPS looked at but never had it fixed.) No signs of any trouble whatsoever.
I'm freaking the hell out! "James, this can't be happening! What the fuck do we do!? I've got school tomorrow! We don't have a cell phone! Why tonight!?"
I literally sounded like a frantic girl lol! (Thanks puberty and sheer terror! I'm a guy, btw.)
The more we tried to start the car, the weaker it got. I tried jumping the solonoid. Nope. Tried everything we could possibly think of with the car. Nothing worked.
We had to stay the fucking night. Definitely were not going to walk several miles in either direction at this time of night. Not way out in the sticks. We could be food for coyotes or other creatures of the night. We could wander onto someone's property and be shot at. Anything was possible.
It seemed like hours passed, and there we sat in the cold ass car, trying to survive for the night. I'd say the temperature was in the mid 30s at this point. I finally got the nerve to check the trunk. Maybe there was something there we could use for warmth. My uncle got out with my scared-ass.
That's when we heard it. A sharp crack, such as an axe splitting wood or something similar. It came from the opposite side of the road down in the woods a little ways. And at the exact same moment we heard what sounded like deep, quiet chuckling in the woods behind the cemetery.
My uncle, "What the fuck was that?"
Me, "I dunno. And hope we don't find out."
I called out to see if I would get a response. Nothing...then we seen what looked like the faint glow of an old lantern about 20 to 30 feet behind the treeline of the graveyard. It swung lightly, and only got a brief glimpse of it before disappeared.
(This took place while I did indeed find a flimsy, thin blanket in the trunk. Something my uncle used to wrap around antiques that he forgot about.)
"Fuck this, help me push the car past the church and next to the gravel lot on the other side," I told my uncle.
We managed to do so, too.
By this time it was past midnight and the entire time of being stranded not a single car had went by us. By 2 a.m. our fear had subsided slightly. Around 2:30 we heard what sounded like a baby crying behind us, further up the road beyond the cemetery. I'm pretty sure it was a coyote, but it still put me on edge again. Around 3 a.m. I heard something that I couldn't distinguish, and when I looked at the graveyard behind us, I swore I seen blackness moving in the darkness. (Like shadows.) It's likely it could have been tree limbs moving, but I don't believe that. My uncle seen the movement as well, and we thought it was some dark entity. Who knows? I finally crashed from my adrenaline rush shortly after that.
When I woke up it was turning daylight. My uncle said someone went by but didn't stop. So we put the car at an angle in the road, forcing whoever was next to come to our rescue. It was a school bus. The driver said he radioed it in. We moved the car so he could be on his way. 2 more vehicles passed. We put the car back at an angle and finally a DNR guy helped us. We didn't tell him exactly what happened, only that the car died and wouldn't restart as we were passing through.
The very next day my uncle was in front of a prestigious hotel in our area. (French Lick, IN.) He was stopping to get gas. Before he turned into the gas station, the car caught on fire. He left it sit at the intersection, and before he reached the gas pumps, the car literally exploded!
We always said that a demon got into the car that night. It's hard to say that for sure, but I'm a true believer in the paranormal.

The troposphere and stratosphere were completely cloudless one summer day; this example of clear weather allowed the sun to shine on the town on Muncie, Indiana without anything getting in its way. A tiny hole in the ozone layer, though, made this day excruciatingly scorching for the Muncie residents. Said residents included a thirty-something-year-old man who was the proud owner of a fat, orange cat and a stupid, yellow dog (whose former owner ditched him without any warning many, many years ago).
Sweat ran down Garfield's entire body as he lay motionless on the table. Odie, panting much harder than usual, also climbed onto the tabletop and began to sniff Garfield's sweaty foot.
"Odie...no," moaned Jon Arbuckle, also uncomfortable by the heat. "We don't lick sweat off other people." Odie did anyway, much to the annoyance of Garfield.
Jon sighed heavily. "That's it, Odie." He was not really all that angry because he was suffering from the extreme heat— in fact, the heat made him nearly apathetic about everything— but bad dogs must be punished. However, Odie managed to get in one lick of Garfield's sweat before Jon forcefully grabbed him and took him away to be spanked for misbehaving. This left just Garfield.
"I hate this. It's too freakin' hot. If it were any hotter, I'd seriously consider taking off my fur, going outside, and dancing around naked. But it wouldn't be a good dance. It would be a stupid dance that would probably get me driven to the vet if Jon saw it. But in this heat, that wouldn't be so bad."
His inner monologue was interrupted by the doorbell ringing. He jumped off the table to answer the door.
He immediately yelped and recoiled a little.
It was him.
Why did it have to be him?
"Is anything the matter, Garfield? It's just me, the world's cutest and dankest kitty cat!"
The elder cat rubbed the tears of 'oh dear God I can't do this anymore I'm going to kill myself right now' out of his eyes. Thankfully, Nermal didn't notice this.
"Aren't you going to say anything to me?" asked Nermal as he barged in before Garfield could slam the door on him.
"How do you keep your fur so tidy in this awful heatwave?" was the only question Garfield could think of. He envied how Nermal didn't have sweat running down his body and matting his fur at the moment.
"That's a dumb question! It's obviously becau—"
Garfield stopped him. "Yes, I know. It's because you're sooooo cute. Know what? No, Nermal, you're not cute." He grabbed him by the neck and lifted him up so they were seeing eye-to-eye. "In fact, you are an ugly, smelly, annoying, stupid, retarded, uncute little rat. Your mother should have aborted you as soon as she saw the ultrasound. Now stop pestering me, get the HELL out of my house, AND NEVER COME VISIT ME EVER AGAIN! You are BANNED from here, you pathetic little twerp!" He pushed Nermal outside as hard as he could. He then slammed the door. As he was about to go take a cold shower, Garfield realized the sharp pain coursing throughout his body, and happened to glance down and see his fingers trapped in the door.
There was a loud shriek from inside.
Nermal stood on the stoop, facing the closed front door, and was completely frozen in shock. After a few minutes, he started shaking, barely noticeable at first, but gradually becoming harder and more violent until Nermal turned around and ran as fast as he could down the street, screeching at the top of his lungs as "Crawling" by Linkin Park played in the background.
He kept running until he noticed a car in the distance, growing bigger and bigger. "I'll show Garfield!" poor Nermal sniffled. "Yeah, I'll show him!" He went into a sprint, straight towards the car and its unaware driver.
As the gap began to close between them, a giant, demented, toothy smile contorted onto Nermal's face.
"GOODBYE, WORLD!"
...
Garfield was still trying to get his fingers out of the door. The thought of simply opening the door never crossed his mind, so he just kept pulling and straining. He tugged one final time, as hard as he could, and was thrown backward into a wall. He did it. Unfortunately, his fingers suffered from having their blood circulation cut off, and pressure built up inside them as a result. When Garfield got his hand loose, the resulting waves of blood coming to his fingers was too much for his body to handle. His fingers swelled up for a second, and then popped, subsequently flooding the house with hundreds and hundreds of gallons of dark red blood.
The house got so full of blood that it exploded, and Garfield flew out of the chimney on a flying Pop-Tart. His paw was still squirting blood, so it looked sort of like Nyan Cat but with Garfield, and blood.
...
The sound of muffled rap music disturbed the peace of the neighborhood. It got so loud that some of the animals living in the woods behind the neighborhood cut their wrists and shot themselves. The offending noise was coming from a 1979 Pontiac Bonneville sedan cruising down the road— at about 10 miles an hour, to be more precise— and the rear bumper was covered with Westboro Baptist Church inspired bumper stickers, saying things like "GOD HATES YOUR TEARS," "TOO LATE TO PRAY," "NO REST FOR THE WICKED," and most shockingly, "THANK GOD FOR DEAD CHILDREN". A giant outlined trollface decal took up the whole rear window, implying that the bumper stickers did not reflect the driver's actual beliefs, but were put there as a joke to troll other drivers. The custom plate read "AYYMATE".
Most interestingly, the front grille had a small grey cat plastered on it. As Nyanfield flew over the city, he lowered in altitude just enough to make out a grey blob on the front of a car that was entering the drive-thru for Hardee's. "Oh noez!" he articulated internally. "I must save Nermal!" But his fingers started spraying blood even more than they already were, and he started to feel a little bit weak from the blood loss. "Screw this..." he decided. "I must save ME!" Losing the Pop-Tart and gaining a blue cape for some reason, he raised a bloody finger into the air and said, "To Muncie Veterinary Clinic! The Caped Avenger... away!" He then flew off in the opposite direction.
Down below...
"THNKYUFCHUZINGHARDYSWTCANIGTFRYUTDAY," blared the drive-thru worker through the old distorted drive-thru speaker.
The Bonneville driver, whose name was Swizzle C, was a morbidly obese, ugly African-American man who was wearing cringey "bling". He sighed. "Dey really need ta git dat goddamn thang fixed," he muttered. He had a very deep voice, between baritone and bass, but closer to bass. Neglecting to turn down the volume on the radio, the fat-arse started to take his order. "Yo, man, can I git a #2 with extra mizzle, hold da fliboppityrizzle? N'hurry da mothafuc—"
"SURKYNYUPLEZTRNDARADYODWNSIKANHERBTTR?" the employee asked.
After pausing to decipher the garbled sentence from the speaker, Swizzle replied, "Ya want me ta turn down my dopeass tunes? Please, you ugly anyway." He floored the gas and hightailed the Pontiac out of Hardee's, flipping off the 70-something lady at the first window as he went around. After which he rear-ended the car waiting at the second window at 54 miles an hour.
An angry white man stepped out of his 2013 Chevrolet Sonic LT and knocked on the driver's side window of the car behind him. Swizzle C pressed the power window switch (you had to special-order the power windows on cars back in 1979) to roll down the window. "You smash up my car?" growled the man quietly. It was none other than Jon Arbuckle.
"AWWW HELLLL NAAAWWW, cracka," scoffed Swizzle C, as if the whole thing was no big deal. "You let it git smashed up yourself by sittin' in da middle of da damn parkin' lot."
"For your information, I was waiting for them to hand me my food," Jon retorted. "You know how hard you hit my car?"
Continuing to wave off the incident as if it was nothing, Swizzle replied, "Ahh, I di'in't hit it dat hard."
"Oh, really? Well, look at what you did to my trunk!" Swizzle got out to see what he did. Jon's trunk was all crumpled up.
"Ha! You cereal, sonnnn? I compacted yo' trunk, playa!"
"You know how much money I have to pay to get this fixed?!"
"Ah dun give a fuuuuuuuuck! Look at my ride!" Swizzle C pointed to the damage on his own car. "LOOK AT DA HEADLIGHT!" He was more upset about the slightly cracked headlight than the messed-up bumper or the bent, contorted hood lid. Or the cat on his grille, for that matter.
"You know what? That's your own problem." said Jon calmly. "Know why? You are an asshole. A self-centered, narcissistic asshole who cares about nobody but yourself. You're also a fat, bloated, tub of lard who probably sits at home all day on welfare because you're too lazy to go out and find a job and work for a living. Your gold dollar-sign earrings are not cool; neither is your "SWAG" necklace or your outdated afro. You are a sick bastard and I hope you rot in Hell. Have a horrible day! Good! Bye!" Swizzle C stood there unfazed throughout the whole speech, until he heard the brunette Caucasian man say "I knew the racists were right when they said blacks were bad news!" under his breath as he turned to get back into his Chevy.
"DAT'S IT! FULL NIGGAAAA!" he shouted, as if he were powering up. Then he screamed, "IMMA BUST A CAP IN YO AAAASSSS!" With that, he pulled out a machine gun and opened fire on innocent Jon, who skillfully dodged the streams of bullets, snatched Swizzle's gun, snapped it in half on his knee, and struck Swizzle across the head with one half of it. Now weaponless, the black fatso punched Jon right in the nose. A fistfight broke up, stirring up a cartoon... dust cloud...
...
The scene cut to the vet's office, where Garfield had finished getting stitches in his fingers. "There you go," cooed Liz sweetly as she finished wrapping gauze around his paw. She kissed him and gave him a sucker. It was blue raspberry, Garfield's favorite. After sending him on his way with a pat on the head, Liz sighed, "Oh, it's so nice to see Garfield without seeing Jon." She frowned. "Stupid Jon and his flirting. Yecch!"
...
Both men, by this time, were bruised and bloody. Jon even had a black eye. They just stood there panting heavily.
"I give up, man," Jon sighed, pulling out his phone. "I'm just gonna call the police and let them sort it out."
"Wait! What's dat in da sky?!" gasped Swizzle C, pointing upward.
"Hmph. You can't fool me, that's the oldest trick in the..." But Jon's voice trailed off as he saw an orange object zooming toward them out of the corner of his eye. "...book?"
Garfield landed so hard his ankles nearly snapped. "Nevah feahh! Da Caped Avenger iz heaahh!" he bellowed in a weird voice.
"Who da..." started a very perplexed Swizzle C.
Jon rolled his eyes. "Don't worry, it's just my cat, Garfield, being crazy again."
Using his super strength, Garfield the Caped Avenger started to push the two smashed-up cars apart so he could access Nermal. Except Garfield didn't have super strength, and his arms popped off his body like they were Mr. Potato Head limbs. So instead he kicked Jon's car up into the sky toward outer space. Jon was so pissed he couldn't see straight, and yelled out, "GAAAAARRRFIIIELD!"
"Hey, I guess all those years of kicking Odie actually paid off," remarked Garfield, using his mouth to insert one fallen arm back into its socket, and then using that arm to attach the other arm. "Now to rescue Nermal! The Caped Avenger... away!" He ran about two or three feet to the front grille of Swizzle's automobile, not really having to go that far. "Oh, there you are, Nermal... Nermal?" Peeling Nermal's body off, he noticed he didn't seem to be breathing. Garfield then checked for a pulse. There was none.
"Sheeiiiittt," Garfield shrugged.
...
Horns honked and beeped as traffic slowed to a standstill on southbound Indiana Hwy. 67, the jam starting from an accident at the Macedonia Avenue off-ramp and stretching all the way to Memorial Drive—
"Oh, my God, do you EVER shut the hell up?!" interrupted Garfield, putting his face in his hands. "Nermal's in critical condition here! We don't have time for your unnecessary details!"
sigh...
Anyway, Swizzle C was driving Jon, Garfield, and a still-unconscious Nermal to the vet's office, since Jon no longer had a car. Odie didn't come with them because he was off somewhere touching himself or something.
"Thanks again for driving us to the vet, Mr., uh..." said Jon.
The fat middle-aged black man chuckled. "Call me Swizzle. An' it's mah pleasure; it's da least I could do since you gun call the po-po on me after dis."
"I just hope we make it in time for our appointment." Jon looked in the back seat. "Garfield, are you still doing the chest compressions like I showed you?"
"Yep," answered Garfield, rhythmically sending blows to Nermal's chest with his fists. He turned to the camera. "Wow, they're letting me punch Nermal for a change! This is freaking awesome! Usually when I hit him I get screamed at!"
After a few minutes, traffic slowly began to clear up. "All right, we're moving again!" Jon exclaimed.
"Hell, yeaaah!" added Swizzle C, fist-pumping with both arms. However, after a few minutes of running full blast in the traffic jam, the old A/C unit in the car couldn't take anymore and gave out. "Ugh, dat thang always needs to be fixed."
"Eh, we'll just roll down the windows since we're moving," Jon said. So everyone rolled down their windows. Buuuut it turned out the traffic jam wasn't over after all and the car stopped once again. Wind stopping blowing into the car, and Garfield's fur quickly became matted with sweat again.
"Curse you, Jon Arbuckleeeeeeeeeee...!" he cried out skywardly.
...
Everyone was crowded around Nermal's limp body in the examination room at the Muncie Veterinary Clinic, just staring at him.
After a few minutes of nothing happening, Jon opened his big fat mouth. "Hey, Liz." He winked at her. "Wanna go over to my house and do some hanky-panky after this?" He then took off his shirt, revealing his hairy, flabby manboobs, and started twerking and dabbing unsexily all around the room in a failed attempt to turn Liz on, while going, "Unh. Unh. I'm simply ir-re-sis-ti-ble. Unh. Unh."
Liz cringed and managed to look away from Jon's disgusting body in time; however, the others weren't so lucky. "Oh, my Gooooooo..." Garfield started, before suddenly fainting and faceplanting on the floor. Swizzle C started barfing uncontrollably. Nermal, despite being nearly vegetative at this point, rolled over and grunted weakly with an unpleasant expression on his face.
Liz rooted around in a drawer until she found what she was looking for: a box of tranquilizer darts. "Nighty-night, Jon!" she laughed slightly, stabbing the dart into Jon's arm without even needing a tranquilizer gun.
"Unh, unh, I'm so sexy, unh— oh, nighty-night, Mommy. Can you tuck me in and bring me a glass of waaaaaaa..." Jon stumbled around for a few seconds and then collapsed.
...
Garfield regained consciousness a few minutes later, with puke splatters scattered all over him. He sat up woozily, rubbing his forehead. "Ohhhhh..." he moaned. "What happened?"
"Well, Garfield, I see you're up!" Liz observed aloud in a perky voice. She was writing something on her clipboard.
Looking around from the floor, Garfield couldn't help but notice that an oxygen-mask-clad Nermal had been hooked to several large machines during the time he was out. A rhythmic beeping noise now resonated throughout the room, which was previously silent. Jon and Swizzle C were standing next to each other on the other side of the table, staring solemnly at the gray kitten.
"Well, Garfield, I've got some good news and some bad news, and also some really bad news," stated Liz. "The good news is that Jon has promised to stop acting embarrassing. Jon, tell Garfield you're sorry."
"UuuuhhhhhhhI'msorry," Jon apologized insincerely.
"Da bad news is, we've hadta hook yo li'l friend here up on life support," continued Swizzle.
Garfield's eyes widened and the others waited for a moment to see how Garfield would react to this news.
"Life support?" Garfield chuckled. "THAT'S the 'bad' news? You know what? Just humor me. Tell me the really bad news!"
"Well, the really bad news is that Swizzle C threw up all over you after you fainted," Liz said, her eyes once again focused on her clipboard.
Garfield gasped loudly, putting his paws on his cheeks. "No...NOOOHOHOOO!" he screamed dramatically. He started speed-pacing while hyperventilating. "What am I gonna do? My fur is RUINED and it'll never come out ever and Odie'll make fun of me and thenoohhhh yeah I'm a cat." He skidded to a stop. "I can just clean MYSELF up." He started licking his fur clean, with no regards for the others in the room.
Swizzle C vomited once more.
...
Garfield was leaning over the table staring at Nermal, as the heart monitor beeped. And beeped. And beeped.
Bored, he began patting on the table in time with the heart monitor, then began drumming more complex rhythms while still being in sync with the beeping. Then he started beatboxing as well. Eventually, he started singing to himself in his head, "That's called bein' a cat! Lie around, get fat! That's what it takes to be a cat!"
"There's no use in keeping him alive anymore," said Liz to Swizzle and Jon with a heavy sigh. "I'm just going to pull the plug and let nature take its course." She sadly unhooked the life support, causing Nermal to flatline.
"You'll be sittin' pretty, kitty ca—" Garfield stopped drumming and beatboxing and looked annoyed. "Hey! Who turned my beat off?!"
Jon ran up and put his arm on his cat's shoulder. "Garfield, I'm..." He cleared his throat. "Well, I'm not quite sure how to t-tell you this..." He stammered for a long time, trying to find the right words.
Eventually Swizzle C had had enough of Jon's stuttering and hollered out, "NERMAL'S DEAD! OKAAAAAY?!"
After recovering from the initial startle, a very creeped out Garfield replied, "Dude, he's not dead. He's just not alive is all."
Liz, even though she lacked telepathy like everybody, noticed Garfield's face and body language and calmly told him, "We've done all we can do for him here, Garfield." She stifled a little sob. She hated seeing cute animals die. "I'm sorry, but we just can't keep him alive anymore."
"You still have Odie at home to play with," Jon smiled.
There was a long silence, then Garfield nodded his head blankly. He hated Odie with a burning passion. "Yeah, whatever. Forget Nermal. Let's get out of here." He turned toward the door.
"You know, I really didn't expect him to take it so well," whispered Jon to Liz.
"I know, it's weird! We should get him a family-sized Stouffer's lasagna for being so brave today," Liz whispered back.
"That sounds like a gre..."
Their conversation was interrupted by water filling the entire volume of the room and hitting the ceiling in half a second before draining by shooting out the windows and seeping out into the hall. When it was all drained, the two found that the source of the sudden flooding was from Garfield, who was kneeled on Nermal's table with him, wailing intensely and loudly. It was an ugly cry, the kind with wrinkles and giant tears that roll down your neck and under your shirt, even though Garfield never really wore shirts.
"Oh, Nermal! I'm so sorry!" sobbed the fat land barge, pounding his fist on the table. "I said all those mean things to you and made you die! What have I done? I've been such a fooooool!"
"Aw, dammit," Jon grumbled, rolling his eyes at seeing his cat being overly-dramatic again. He was always like this. For example, one time, Pooky needed to be put on to wash. Garfield had followed Jon into the laundry room, and was waving handkerchiefs and throwing confetti as if Pooky were boarding a cruise ship and he was watching from the docks. "You have no idea how much pressure I'm under," Jon had said on that day.
But this time was different. Jon couldn't help but feel sorry for the little guy as he watched him bitterly mourn the death of his old pal, Nermal. It didn't help that Jon had to make the dreaded phone call to his parents later about the passing of their cat.
As Garfield cried, he thought he heard Desireé Goyette's voice singing ever so sweetly:
"So long, old friend, I wish that I could see you once again... I never knew the time would come when I'd be losing you..."
Garfield looked up slowly, seeing a record player in the corner. He got off the table, ran up to it and smashed it as hard as he could.
"I hope you know I never—" "SHUT UUUPPPPP!" shrieked Garfield furiously.
He returned to Nermal and resumed his wild fit of sorrow. "There's no time for music! I just killed someone! Oh, WHY did I kick you out of my house, Nermal? Why did I make you suicidal? Come back, Nermal! Come back! I LOOOOOVE YOU!" He was absolutely crestfallen.
"Dude, chill. You're going practically nuts over me, and, to be honest, it's getting on my nerves a little," said Nermal, sitting upright.
Garfield was angry at this sudden turn of events. "What the hell's the matter with you?! You're supposed to be dead! Go back to being dead!" he sniveled, still heaving with sobs.
"I... am?" Nermal was puzzled. "Well, okay, then." He lied back down and closed his eyes, trying his best to re-die.
"Good. Now, where was I?" After a pause, Garfield burst into hysterical tears again for several minutes until his mind finally put two and two together. "Duh... wait a minute... NERMAL!" He embraced Nermal, whom he now considered to be a person he was okay with, and laughed in relief and overjoy as the last few tears rolled down his face. "Nermal! Nermal, Nermal, Nermal, Nermal, Nermal!" He repeated his name over and over rapidly as he squeezed him and cuddled him. "Oh, Nermal! I was so worried about you! You had no idea!"
"Actually, I did kind of... have an idea..." Nermal grunted, squirming against the weight of the overweight orange cat's hugs and hoping not to get sucked into his fat rolls.
"I don't understand it!" Liz gasped, shaking her head in disbelief. "He didn't die at all?!"
"I guess not," chuckled Jon. "Maybe he was just 'not alive' for a while, is all."
Liz expressed further flabbergast upon reading Nermal's oxygen and heart monitors. "On top of that, his vital signs are looking quite good for someone whose heart stopped for a few minutes."
"It's uh miiiracle!" Swizzle C cried, sounding like a black preacher. "Haaallelujah, baby!" He jumped in the air.
"That, or maybe Garfield's love for Nermal saved his life," Jon suggested. "We could solve so many problems in our society today if we were more loving to people."
"Yeah!" agreed Liz. "There would be less war, less fighting, less bigotry and prejudice against Arabs and asexuals."
"Speaking of love," said Jon to Swizzle C, "I'm going to do something loving to you and not call the police on you for wrecking my car and being rude to me earlier, as well as trying to shoot me."
"Wow, thanks! I wuz worried I wuz gon go ta jail."
Back to Garfield and Nermal.
"Daaaammn, what a sappy conversation!" Garfield whispered loudly to Nermal as they looked on. "Anyway..." They started hugging and stuff again. "Oh, Nermal! Nermal! I love you, Nermal! I love you! Oh, Nermal! Ohhh, I love you so much, I could just..."
There was no way anyone could predict what occurred after that. Garfield started to give Nermal little kisses all over his face. Nermal giggled because it tickled. At first he was kissing him innocently and platonically, but suddenly Garfield felt strange new feelings for Nermal and the kisses slowly grew hotter and more intense. Finally he couldn't take it anymore and grabbed Nermal's head, pulling it towards him while pressing his lips against his as dramatic yet romantic orchestral soap opera music played.
Initially, the smaller cat kicked and resisted, trying to escape, but actually began to like the feeling a little. When Garfield pulled back, he wanted more. So, Nermal pulled Garfield's head towards his own and they kissed once more, making little smooching sounds as they did. Then Nermal pushed his tongue between Garfield's lips. Garfield's eyes widened at Nermal's sudden enthusiasm, but realized that he loved the feeling of French kissing and began to squirm his own tongue around the inside of Nermal's mouth.
They wrapped their arms around each other, their tongues exploring their now-connected mouths. Each cat stared at the other through dreamy, half-lidded eyes as their tongues waltzed and tangoed, swirling around and wrapping around each other as the two made out. Their lips were moistened with each other's dripping salivation. It was the best feeling and they both felt tingly all over as they each savored the moment. Then Garfield decided to try something different. As they continued kissing, he lightly bit down on Nermal's tongue, causing him to yelp out in pain. And yet, it felt good, the pleasure being much stronger than the pain. In response, without stopping the kissing, Nermal bit down on Garfield's tongue hard, making him moan in pleasure. They continued making out as the other three just watched and stared with their jaws open wide.
"Nermal's a kitten, right?" Liz said to Jon with the most disgusted expression ever.
"How can a cat born in 1979 still be a kitten?" responded Jon. "He just looks like a kitten because he's so cute!"
"Good point." Liz wiped her brow. "Whew!"
"You... you know, this story's over 4,500 words long now..." Jon chuckled, blushing a deep pink.
"Yeah, dis iz makin' me sick ta mah stomach," whimpered Swizzle C.
"So, end the story?" Jon asked.
"HELL YEAH!" shouted the other two.
"Odie! Here, boy!" called Jon.
Odie skidded into the room, holding a sign that he had hand-painted himself. "Ruff, ruff!" he barked proudly, emphasizing and pointing to each word individually. "THE" "END."

Even
“You don’t belong here.” An old woman said as Even paused on the side of the street to consult his map, “Go home, foreigner!”
Even didn’t bother looking up to justify that with an answer. It wasn’t the first time someone spat that at him since he arrived in Greece, and it sure as hell probably wasn’t going to be the last. He adjusted his headphones and snapped his bubble gum before he figured out where he was, folded his map, and pocketed it to move around the old woman blocking his path – when she went to smack him with her cane, he grabbed it, tilting his head down to glare at her over the rims of his sunglasses. She screamed at him in Greek and he shoved the cane back toward her, moving to rejoin the movement in the streets.
It was a real shitty way for everyone to remember the summer of ’97, that was for sure.
Earthquakes were not uncommon to this area, Even was informed almost every hour on the hour by the news, but the frequency, as well as the magnitude of them, was unusual. Since the earthquakes started two weeks ago, there had been four earthquakes larger than magnitude seven, one nearly an eight, all centered roughly in the Olympus Range. It was leveling towns and villages, knocking buildings over. It was a crisis that was taking worldwide involvement to deal with. People were flying from all over to help with the rescue efforts-
But Even wasn’t one of them.
He was here for a very different reason.
After the third earthquake, a landslide uncovered an opening on Mt. Olympus, and shortly thereafter, gold was found. The government had yet to put any claim onto it, which the news noted as being incredibly odd, but chalked up to attention being centered on trying to rescue trapped victims and restoring power to the affected areas. Any minute now, though, they figured the claim would be placed.
So Even didn’t have much time to be dealing with hostile locals.
It was pure coincidence that he was in Turkey when the first earthquake happened. He had won a raffle at work which bought him an all-expense paid weekend in Latvia, of all places, but the plane had been diverted to Istanbul, and while sitting in the airport dozing off, everything began to shake. After that he decided to get out into the streets and help, which he did for the first couple days, but as they earthquakes kept coming, the locals stopped being so friendly as emergency aid – food and water especially - was spread too thin across too many areas. Desperation could do awful things to people, as Even found out pretty quickly.
And then he heard about the cave, and decided – why not? He had nothing to lose. All he had to his name was a rather ugly and desolate plot of land back in Quebec and about three months worth of rent money in his account, a resource he had hoarded in case he had ever wanted to get out of dodge fast. He didn’t have any connections to his hometown anymore – not that he really had them in the first place, but losing his sweetheart, Angela, to fucking cancer last spring pretty much severed the last of his connections to it.
He never thought he’d be looking to do some treasure hunting, though. It anyone else even suggested it to him before now, he’d call them a dumbass, but here he was, loaded down with caving gear. Was that what it was called? Caving gear? Spelunking stuff? He hadn’t the slightest fucking clue. He’d never been caving, but something about this felt like fate or something like it. Maybe he was crazy. A couple months ago, he tried to hang himself, and now here he was with a similar string of rope getting ready to hike up a mountain and look for gold.
As the mass of people in the street diverged, some going right toward a church while othered continued forward, Even considered his options before he veered right as well, going to where people were laid out wherever there was a spot in the courtyard, medical personnel scurrying about to try and do what could be done. Someone nearby, there was a pit a bit off, just within eyesight, where bodies were being blessed by priest before they were disposed of by fire surrounded by wailing onlookers. Back in Turkey, Even had been part of the volunteers that had been digging the holes. It was frightening, how fast they reached the point where there was too much death for a major city to handle.
Several people gave him disapproving looks as he passed – glaring at his equipment - but he ignored them, shuffling along in line to make his way up to the altar.
When he got to the front he prayed for the people, for the earthquakes to stop, and then only then did he pray real hard to get lucky in the caves and hit the jackpot. He didn’t think he was asking for all that much. Just a couple really nice necklaces or something like that, something that meant he could afford to do whatever the fuck he wanted with his life. Go to school and get a business degree. Buy a house in city overlooking the ocean. Disappear into a forest somewhere and be a hermit with a pair of wolf-dogs.
He didn’t know if God was listening though. He imagined He was pissed at him or, at the very least, incredibly disappointed in him. Even might not have been raised right, but he had enough of a moral compass to know he should be helping the injured, not looking to take advantage of the situation and raid their caves. It was a real shitty thing to do, he knew that.
And yet here he was, head bowed asking for some good fortune.
He asked Angela how she was doing, though he only got silence as a reply. Maybe she was pissed as well. Maybe she just wasn’t there. He suspected she wouldn’t be surprised. She didn’t see him with rose colored glasses, but she still loved him. He liked to think she would have enjoyed the adventure. She loved the Indiana Jones trilogy, used to say he had a smile like Harrison Ford, boyish, a bit bashful. He hadn't smiled a real smile in months.
When he finished he exited the church to spare the chaos a passing glance. It was pretty quiet now, a hush having fallen over the land. With nerves as raw as they were, you were almost able to sense danger similar to how the animals did. He could sense it - the force of something strange, deadly. They all could, but no one seemed to know where it was coming from. Everyone just looked around with gazes that were part fearful, part suspicious, talking with heightened emotions and praying way harder than they were used to praying. Even chalked it up to the earthquakes, but something in his gut told him it was something else entirely.
He just didn’t know what.
But it was out there, somewhere. Something big, big enough to penetrate through to the animal in them all to remind them that they could bleed.
Just as Even was leaving the church grounds, the ground rumbled and everyone paused in what they were doing, some looking toward the useable coast, to where it was over several hills, others to the mountain. He braced himself against the feet of a large statue of Christ and looked out toward the general direction of the coast, where the sun was rising into a blood red sky over hilltops. There had been some tsunamis, but nothing large enough to require evacuations, but everyone held their breath in wait. They were quite a bit inland here, so he doubted it would reach them, but still, the thought of the ocean moving in toward you alone was enough to have people panicking.
Even waited for the ground to stop jerking before he started back toward the mountain.
The hike wasn’t bad at all. There weren’t many people on the path this early, fewer that were going toward his destination. Shortly after five pm and he saw the cave across the large valley, where a pair of military trucks were situated outside. About ten minutes after that, the sky opened up and torrential rain had him trying to see further than his nose and failing.
When a break appeared in the storm he was properly lost, and at the sound of thunder, he figured he needed to find shelter.
Several minutes of running down the path and he saw a tiny chapel, a sad looking little building that looked like it was old enough to be built by Christ himself. It was enough to provide shelter, though, so he hurried over it to open the doorway and look in.
The single room inside was poorly lit, the light from outside choked by the cloud and the trees, weak candles toward the back providing little relief from the shadows. An old man sat by the candles, staring at him with a weary look from under the brim of his ratty hat. Across from him was a young man bowing at the altar, a third standing with his arms over his chest and glaring at Even with a dark gaze. Even then noticed the two men were carrying swords, a third sword resting on the ground by the one bowing repeatedly. He snorted at the ridiculous sight as he stepped in fully, brushing off the rain.
“Quite a storm.” Even said in Greek, one of four languages he was proficient in. The others were French, English and Russian. He couldn’t do math worth a damn, but as Angela put it, he had a very gifted tongue. It was one of few things he prided himself on.
“It will pour off the mountains, more landslides.” The standing man said in a hard, accented tone that Even was able to identify as a Turkish accent, having heard it enough over the past few days. “Many in the towns still trapped will drown.” The way he said it, Even almost thought he was being accused of causing the rain. Even didn’t appreciate the accusatory tone and let that be known with a hard look directed toward the sword carrying stranger.
“How goes the rescue efforts?” The sitting man asked in clear Greek. Even noted the large cross hanging from his neck, swinging over the top of the blade he had in his lap.
“They go.” Even said simply as the bowing man slowly sat up, turning on the floor to look toward Even with a youthful face. The Star of David hung from around his neck and he touched it as he looked Even over, glancing nervously to the Christian before to the other man. “Mind if I wait out the rain here?”
“Depends,” The third man said shortly, raising his blade. “Dare to touch my steel?”
Even gave him a funny look. “Your sword?” The man nodded shortly, the Jewish boy scrambling to put on his glasses before he stood and held a blade of his own. “You want me to touch your sword?”
“It’s as simple as that. Touch it and you may stay.” The third man said, bowing his head in challenge. “Unless you are afraid.” Even snorted and dropped his bag, moving to him - “Slowly!” The man barked, Even pausing in his steps to give him a suspicious look.
Even looked between the three men and saw that they were all on guard. The young one looked about to piss himself, the eldest more composed but definitely restless. The third, however, looked about ready to cut him down. Even snorted at him before he slowly reached forward to touch the blade, holding the palm of his hand against the top of the tip.
All eyes dropped to eyeball where his flesh touched steel and all three visibly relaxed. The third man let out a huff of breath before he fell back into his seat against the wall, holding his face in his hand as the younger man turned back to start bowing at the altar again, his glasses clattering noisily to the ground.
The older man sighed. “I didn’t think so. This one isn’t nearly skittish enough to be him.” He motioned to the table along the wall. “Please, take some food. Rest. The rain will be here for a while, I think. Do not stray out of our sight, though. You might hurt yourself or one of us might accidentally hurt you.” He motioned then to their swords.
Even scowled at them. “The fuck is wrong with you people?” He was promptly smacked in the leg with the third man’s sword, who barked at him in another language before telling him in Geek to respect their holy place. When Even held his glare, the third man growled before he haughtily set his sword aside to fish a pocket book, a Quran, from his coat to flip through it and begin muttering.
“You must forgive us, young man. The Devil is in these hills.” The old man said carefully, “We have met him twice already and know the third time he comes, he will try and take what we guard with force.”
Even gave the old man a skeptical look before he glanced at the others. At their expressions, he figured they were being completely serious. He had to shake himself, checking to see if he was asleep. This was like some bad episode of the Twilight Zone. And he fucking hated that series. “And just what are you guarding?”
“That is not of your concern.” The third man growled.
“Cetin, please.” The older man said, raising a hand toward the third man, Cetin. “He knows not of the situation,” Cetin growled and turned a little in his seat to focus harder on his reading. The old man turned to the younger man. “Nadav-“ The younger man flinched before he turned to look at the older man, “Why don’t you fetch this young man a towel?”
The young man winced and nodded before he turned toward the door behind the older man, turning this way and that indecisively before he decided to set his sword down to scamper off- Cetin barked at him to not leave his weapon unattended and Nadav came back in a hurry, grabbing his sword to hurry off again. When Cetin shouted at him not to run with sharp objects, the old man waved him off and Cetin returned to his reading with a hard look, glancing up occasionally to glare at Even.
The old man seemed far less bothered by Even and gave him a once over before chuckling. “Where are you from, young man?”
“America.” Cetin said under his breath.
Even probably shouldn’t be offended. Most assumed the same thing – but it still kind of pissed him off. “Quebec.” Even growled. Cetin gave him a funny look. Even's expression soured further. “Canada?” Cetin’s eyebrows flickered up in recognition before he returned his gaze to his book.
“Canada is a beautiful place.” The old man said, “You are far from home, though. What brings you here?” The old man just smiled demurely at Cetin when the other man gave him a withering look before rolling his eyes.
“I won a trip to Latvia at work.” Even explained as Nadav hurried back to hand him a towel before going to sit on the floor between the two other sword bearers, adjusting his coat before he settled to listen. “Flight got diverted to Turkey...I was at the airport when everything started up.” He saw Cetin glance up at him at this. He noticed then how tired the three of them looked – so many people looked exhausted right now, but these three were on a different level. “Helped there for a while. Don’t have an education and I can’t speak the language, so I was sent to help digging ditches for burial. Came this way when the quakes got worse and they just started cremating them.”
“That must have been horrible.” The old man said.
“I’m used to dealing with unpleasant things.” Even said plainly, refusing to elaborate.
The old man nodded slowly. “So I assume you’re here for the gold.” He said with a little smile, tired, like he already knew Even’s answer even if the gear he carried in didn’t give it away.
Even shrugged a shoulder. “Sounded like an adventure.”
Cetin clicked his tongue and gave the old man a hard look. “Adventure, he says.” He said mockingly, then directed his gaze to Even. “I think you mean opportunity, you grave robber.”
Even turned and went over to where there was bread, a bowl of fruit, and a jug of water on the table against the wall. Pears, apples, figs, grapes - he picked up a plum and took a bite, licking the juices of his hand as he glanced up to the depiction of the apostles on the ceiling, Christ at the center, his face faded save for a stern pair of lips. “You don’t actually believe the Devil is here, do you?” He said to Christ’s mouth before he looked to Paul, the persecutor, whose face was the only one not peeled away in any place. He reached to blindly pick up a loaf of bread then as well, staring into Paul's look of judgment.
“Yes.” Cetin growled. “Who do you think is causing all of this?”
Even looked over his shoulder at the other man, chewing his fruit for a minute before he swallowed with narrowed eyes. “You think the Devil caused these earthquakes?”
“He is capable of many things.” Cetin said quickly.
“But…a natural phenomenon?” Even asked skeptically as he poured himself a glass of water, carrying it over to where the old man was waving to an empty chair beside him.
“The Devil is capable of many things.” Cetin said again, harsher this time, more insistent. “The key is to be able to tell when it is him, and when it is not. Once you know what he is capable of, you can see where it is he treads and be prepared for his arrival.”
“And you think this is him?” Even asked, trying not to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. “How can you possibly know that?”
The three men looked between themselves before the old man answered. “Because the cave has been exposed.” He said very simply, a bead of sweat dragging down the side of his temple. “That could only be his work.”
“The cave was exposed after an earthquake.” Even replied before taking a sip of his water, smacking his lips at the stale taste. He debated sticking the cup out the window behind him to collect rainwater. Anything would be better than this. He shouldn’t be picky, though. Water was hard to come by at the moment.
“Why are you wasting your breath on him?” Cetin argued to the old man, “He isn’t worth it. Let him find out for himself, let the cave take him.” The old man waved at him and told him to return to his studying, which Cetin did with a scowl.
“Those who enter the cave do not return.” Nadav piped from the floor. “None of them.”
“Save for the ones with the gold.” Even pointed out.
“Save for the one.” Cetin corrected, lifting a finger to point it at Even. “The Devil.” The said with hard emphasis.
Even gave him an unbelieving look. “I’m pretty sure it was four different people. Their pictures had been in the paper, four different men of different ages and ethnicities. Can’t say it was the same guy in different makeup.” Even said, knowing that was what the other was going to say next.
“It was the same creature. He can change his appearance.” Cetin argued. “There were never any pictures of them all together, was there?” Even responded by taking another bit of his plum. “That’s what I thought.” Cetin said triumphantly, wagging a finger at the old man. “Proof he can’t change. Same -” Cetin jumped up suddenly to leave the room, coming back in with four newspaper clippings of the thusly mentioned people to wave them about. “Same smile! Look!” He showed Even before showing Nadav, then the old man with wild, eager look. “It’s the same smile! They’re all biting their bottom lip between their teeth! Same demon!”
“They look happy.” Even said in a breezy, dismissive tone around his fruit, swallowing another bite. “If I found a bunch of gold, I’d be smiling as well. Probably just as cheeky.”
“NO!” Cetin roared. “It’s him! It’s the Devil! He has created an opportunity to show how selfish and self-centered humans are! That is his purpose!”
“If by chance this is the Devil, I doubt that’s why he would do this.” Even said flatly.
Cetin narrowed his eyes at him. “Oh? Are you not here to take advantage of the situation?” Cetin argued as he tucked the photos into his jacket, “Tell me, how many bodies did you have to step over to get here?” Even sat back in his chair and sipped at his water, refusing to answer. Cetin looked to the old man then. “See? I told you. That is why he is here. To do this to men. To give them an opportunity to look like fools to our Heavenly Father.” He looked to Nadav. “Look at what he is doing to the people down there – some are helping, others are acting like animals.”
“It’s a test.” Nadav agreed, “The cave especially is a test.” He looked to Even then with big, pleading eyes. “You must not go in there, friend!” Thunder roared and he jumped to his feet with his sword, sitting back down when the old man gently told him to do so.
Even finished his fruit before he positioned his hands to throw it to the trash bin by the table, landing his throw perfectly. “So, what," He said, slowly turning his gaze back to the three of them. "You three just sit up here in the mountains….waiting for the day the Devil comes for the cave?”
“No.” Cetin said, “We do not wait here.” He pointed a thumb to the old man. “He waits here, as his master before him. We-” He motioned between himself and Nadav, “Were sent when the alarm was raised. We are representatives, the most capable of any to step up to this noble task.”
“Capable. Right.” Even eyed Nadav. “I’m sorry, how old are you?”
Nadav gave him a proud smile. “Fourteen.”
Even stuck his tongue in his cheek and looked to Cetin. “The best they could send was a fourteen-year-old?” Even said, unconvinced.
“I am a man, just the same as you.” Nedav chirped happily.
“He is also very talented exorcist.” The old man said, “He comes from a long line of holy men, very capable holy men.” Cetin didn’t look so impressed, but he nodded all the same at the old man’s words before he rolled his eyes to the ceiling in thought. “And the Devil didn’t come for the cave.” Cetin corrected.
“He came from the cave.” Cetin said firmly.
“It is the entrance to Hell.” The old man said, Cetin nodding hard in agreement while Nedav dropped his chin slightly. “Or wherever evil resides in wait.” He finished with a pat to Nedav’s shoulder, the boy - young man - quirking a smile.
“So…let me get this straight.” Even frowned in thought. “The cave that’s been opened by these earthquakes…was closed for thousands of years and opened up now – by the Devil. Why?”
Cetin and Nadav looked to the old man with a frown. The old man sighed slowly. “We do not know his true intentions, but…we know he will come here for what we have.”
“Why?”
“Because even the Devil needs directions sometimes,” Cetin said pointedly.
“I don’t think that’s how it works.” Even said with a frown.
The door to the chapel was thrown opened then, revealing a rain-soaked man, middle aged, with choppy looking hair and crooked teeth. He looked around with a relieved sigh. “Sanctuary!” He cried out with a burst of borderline crazed laughter, finishing with a relieved sigh as he stepped in to shake the rain out of his hair.
Even looked unimpressed at him. The other three men returned to their defensive stance.
“Where’s your gear?” Cetin growled.
The man frowned as he brushed off his pants. “I-I’m sorry?”
Cetin rose from his seat, gripping his sword. “I asked where your gear was. Where is it?” He shot at him.
The man looked between them, eyeing Even’s gear before he slowly looked to Even, then to Cetin. “What do you mean?”
“Why are you here in the mountains if you do not have gear?” Cetin asked sharply.
The man laughed uneasily, saying “Can’t a guy just wander aimlessly around a mountain without getting the third degree?” American, Even noted. He sounded like the valley girls in Clueless, Angela's favorite movie. The stranger shook out his hair, looking between the four of them before his eyes landed on Nadav. His eyes narrowed and he lifted his nose slightly, pointedly sniffing the air as his eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. “I smell-bread!” He laughed merrily and turned to point toward the table. “Gee, I’m starving! Mind if I have a nibble?”
“Touch my sword first.” Cetin growled at him.
“Wow, that’s forward.” The newcomer said, holding up a hand. “I’m hungry, but not that hungry – oh, look, you have an actual sword!” He put his hands on his hips and hummed in thought. “I feel like, though, touching that would mean an automatic case of tetanus, and I'm, like, waaaay behind on my shots.” He said with another little laugh, looking to Even. “Did you have to touch his sword?”
“That I did.” Even said. He tossed the man the bread loaf in his hand and the man scrambled to catch it. The man gave him a thumbs up with his free hand before he took a bit. “Just do it. It'll get them off your back.”
“Mmm,” The man said, swallowing the bread to narrow his eyes and looked up at Christ with a twinkling gaze. “I was taught though, not to follow crowds, you know – don’t jump off the cliff, yata, yata, so I’m gonna have to pass!”
“Then leave.” Cetin said, thunder roaring loud enough to make them all jump.
“You would,” The stranger frowned at him, “Send me out into this storm!?” He said with a gasp.
“I will throw you out, yes.” Cetin growled.
The stranger blinked at him slowly, taking a tiny bit of his bread to take his sweet time chewing it. “That’s not nice.” He said, eyes wide, but face otherwise blank.
The ground quivered and the man leaned easily against the door frame as he chewed off another bite, dust from the ceiling raining down on their heads as the shaking grew in intensity.
The stranger kept eye contact with Cetin as the shaking increased, the building nearly bouncing off the foundation as all held their ground. Slowly the stranger’s gaze traveled up to where a crack was dragging along the ceiling between Christ’s lips, opening a gape that poured water into the church, soaking the bread on the table.
Nadav moved first and the stranger dropped his gaze to him, watching as the younger boy moved to block the altar.
The shaking stopped abruptly. “What a pretty golden box behind you!” The stranger commented in a cheery tone. “I love gold.” He looked eagerly to Even. “I’m here for the cave!”
Even, back pressed against the wall as he waited for an aftershock to what he was sure had to of been an eight pointer at least, ignored the stranger completely to focus on not panicking.
The stranger looked back to Nadav. “What’s in the box, kiddo?”
Nadav lifted his sword, as did Cetin. The old man rose slowly to raise his as well.
Even swallowed thickly and began shuffling along the wall toward the door. These people were crazy. He wasn’t going to let a building come down and risk being stuck under it with the three of them.
“Leave this place, Devil!” Cetin cried, the stranger holding a hand to his chest in a very ‘who, me?’ sort of manner.
“The manners on your people!” the Stranger said, stunned. “I just can’t believe it. All the travel guides said Greece was a nice place, but everyone’s just been so rude to me- hey, where are you going?” He said, suddenly noticing Even creeping closer.
“I’m getting the fuck out of here.” Even growled at him, “I’m not with these people.”
The stranger gave him a little smile. “Oh. Okay. Here, let me-“ He sidestepped to make room for Even, who thanked him with a grunt of acknowledgment.
Even grabbed his gear and left the chapel, entering the downpour to brave the blinding sheets of rain and leave behind the crazy people. He shouted back “Thanks for the shelter!” Before adding “Fucking psychos.” Under his breath, scowling as he trudged along the path toward the general direction of the cave.

First off, Thanks For The Great Feedback!
Here a list of some Larry Bird stories I found throughout the internet. Feel free to share any I did not include.
Horace Grant
"I started talking a little trash to him," Horace Grant recalled, when the Celtics were the defending champions. "I'm saying, 'You're not going to score. You're not getting this basket. I remember him then telling me exactly what he was going to do to me. He says he's going to fake me left and then he's going to shoot a right-hand hook over me. And then he goes and does it and scores."
Ted Davis
Longtime NBA radio announcer Ted Davis, now the voice of the Milwaukee Bucks, told the Milwaukee Journal the best trash talker he had seen was Larry Bird. "You never knew it because you couldn't see his lips move," he said. "He had no lips."
1986 Three-Point Contest
That was Larry’s game. He famously said to the other participants before the 1986 contest, “I want all of you to know I am winning this thing. Who’s playing for second?” The image of Larry that may be most ingrained in my head is him, with his warm-up jacket still on, in the three-point contest.
In the final round of the ’88 contest, Bird made eight of his final 10 shots. With two shots to go, he trailed by one point. Hits the first, then, throws up the money ball. With the red, white, and blue ball still spinning through the air, Bird sticks his crooked right index finger straight into the air and walks off the court. He knew it was in before it even got there.
Reggie Miller (so-cal_kid)
My rookie year, we played the Celtics at Market Square. It was a close game, but we could never beat them. It came down to free throws. There were about twenty seconds left, and we fouled Bird. We were down by 3 points. Bird went to the line to shoot two. I was standing on the line - and being a rookie dumbass and not realizing this was one of the best free throw shooters to ever the play the game, I tried to throw off his timing. As he went to shoot, I kind of said out the side of my mouth, "Hey! Hey!" He stopped right before he shot, looked at me, and said, "You got to be kidding me. Rook you got to be kidding me." He shot one. Boom. We are down 4 now. Bird gets the ball again, and before he shot, he said, "Rook, I'm the best shooter in the league right now. In the league. Understand? And you're up here trying to say something?" Boom. We were down by 5. What made it worse was that Kevin McHale and Danny Ainge were laughing their asses off. I was thinking, "What a dumbass I am. You're up here talking shit to Larry Bird. He's at the free throw line." I felt so stupid.
Clyde Drexler (so-cal_kid) I was guarding him my rookie year. He looks at me and he goes, "You can't stop me." I looked at him and I said, "Gosh. Boy you're so confident." He goes, "Confident? You're a rookie. You don't know anything." He proceeded to score like 10 straight points on me. Coach took me out the game, and he walks by and he's laughing at me.
Pat Riley (timesnewboston) "If I had to choose a player to take a shot to save a game I'd choose Michael Jordan; If I had to choose a player to take a shot to save my life...I'd take Larry Bird."
Bird's Coaches
Bill Fitch
Bird arrives in Boston
When he first came to Boston, people would come out to watch this kid that was so highly touted practice and he was just milk toast, vanilla, nothing fancy because he was learning his assignments, learning where he should be in certain defensive situations and what his role was offensively. After about two weeks, all of a sudden here comes this kid throwing it behind his back, making blind passes, hitting teammates in spots and really bringing it out. Up until then it had been the old Peggy Lee story – Is that all there is? And then all of a sudden he comes with the real ticket.
A Moment from Birds Rookie Season
He made some great plays and the one I’ll always remember, we were playing Phoenix at Phoenix. We’re down about five points with less than a minute to go. His rookie year was the first year we could have the three point play. Bird pops in a three pointer. Now we’re down two and we get an out of bounds in front of the Phoenix bench and we’re going in that direction and we have a timeout with two seconds left on the clock. We run a sideline out of bounds play which you’re not going to get a great shot in that situation, but you’re going to get a shot and everybody is going to be riding Bird pretty hard. Max took the ball out of bounds and makes a great sideline pass just down so Larry could grab it with one foot in and go. He was right in front of the Phoenix bench when he popped it. The ball goes in. We win the ballgame by one and the whole Phoenix bench, the guys at the end of the bench, jumped up and were patting Larry on the back because it was such a great shot. I have never seen anything like that in all the years I coached. That’s the way his career started and he manufactured more greatness going along.
Trash Talking Reputation
You know, they go back and say Bird was a trash talker. I never thought it was trash talking. He was whispering needles. We were playing at Worchester. I don’t even know who was guarding him. Larry supposedly poked him before they started and said, “Hey, what’s the scoring record in this building?” The guy asks why. And he says, “Well you’re guarding me aren’t you?”
Robert Reid and the Rockets vs. Bird
Robert Reid, who I later coached and was a good defender, made the statement that he was going to stop Bird and Moses said that he and four guys from his hometown could beat Bird and the Celtics. That kind of spurred him on and Larry used that for jokes and so forth and for the whispering needles during the course of the game. I remember Game 6, May 14, 1981, we were sitting on a game that could go either way and it was a clincher for us if we could win it and Larry went on a one man rampage in the last three minutes of the ballgame. And I remember the one shot, he made a three pointer out of the left corner right in front of the Houston bench, and that was the ticket to the championship.
K.C. Jones
Bird and Xavier McDaniel share a moment
We are playing in Seattle. Five seconds left on the clock and the score is tied and it is our timeout. In the huddle, I am thinking Xavier McDaniel is guarding Larry. So I said, “Now Kevin, you take the ball out and get it to Dennis and Dennis you can finish that.” Larry said, “Why don’t you just give me the ball and tell everybody else to get the hell out of the way?” So I said, “Larry you play, and I’ll coach.” And he said, “All right.” So I said, “Dennis, you take it out and you get it to Kevin. Kevin you get it to Larry and everybody else get the hell out of the way.” That is communication. Before the timeout was over, he leaves the huddle, and I said to myself, where is he going? And Xavier was right there and Bird said, “Xavier, I’m getting the ball. I’m going to take two dribbles to the left. I’m going to step back behind the three point line and stick it.” And that is what he did. So when he stepped back behind the line and released the ball, as soon as he released it, his arm was still in the air going to the dressing room. Game over.
Jimmy Rodgers
Bird seizes the moment and saves the day
I remember one practice, I don’t know if I was head coaching or not, but we had a pretty tough period of our schedule. We had a lot of games, the team was a little bit tired. We had practice planned out at a little seminary out there in Boston where we used to play and practice and we decided let’s give these guys an opportunity. These guys look a little tired, we said. If anyone can make a half court shot, practice is off for the day, you guys can all go home. So Larry said, “Give me the ball.” So he steps up to half court, throws one and it’s immediately nothing but net. Everybody is hollering and hooting and that was the end of the day. He could do stuff like that. The thing you say, oh that’s impossible, no one is going to do that, he said give me the ball. Probably in his heart and soul he knew this team needed a rest, I’ll take it on myself. Like I said, whatever was needed, he would step forward and do whatever it took to get the job done.
Bird’s Work Ethic
I had an opportunity to go out and spend a little time with him in Indiana one year. He said, “Why don’t you come out, we’ll do some fishing.” He loved to fish. He had some great spots out there around the French Lick area. This was during the middle of the summer, and I know because I was staying in another room, and he would be up before the sun rose. He would be out either running, getting on his bicycle. He did all of his work. He was very methodical, a planner. He would do all of his physical work, all his conditioning before the sun was up very high in the sky. He’d get all that done and then went on with his day, whether it was fishing or whatever he had to do. I saw that and that kind of registered in my mind. Well this was what this guy does. This was why he comes back every year and is a little better player, because he’s doing something. He’s not sitting there knowing that he is a great player. He’s trying to become a greater player and that to me was very impressive.
Chris Ford
Shot that sent Boston coaching staff to 1985 All-Star Game
We were in the Garden playing Portland and it was the deciding night. The team that had the best record in the East, the coach and the staff would be the coaching team for the All-Star game. We were trailing Portland. Larry came down and hit a shot from the deep left corner, from on the baseline behind the backboard almost, and just beat them. I was very happy and thrilled because that sent us to the All-Star game. My wife was very happy because she got to spend a little more money.
Larry’s Competitive Nature
Our oldest son Chris, who was probably nine or ten at the time, would go out and shoot before games and be an honorary ball boy at the Garden. Larry would get in a little shooting contest with him and never lose to anyone. He would do his best, but Larry would beat him. Chris was competitive, but Larry wasn’t going to lose.
Chuck Daly: ’92 Olympics
We practiced prior to going to get a spot in the medals in Portland, and then we went overseas and went to Monaco before we went to Barcelona to train. He actually wanted more work even though he was suffering, I thought, with the back. Nevertheless, any time that they threw up a zone, I moved him and Mullin into the game on the wing. Basically that was the end of the zone. But he worked just as hard in a short period there. Actually we didn’t practice because we played every other night at 10:30 and he still wanted to work out, even at that stage.
Trash Talk Section (Get Ready)
#1 Craig Hodges
After Craig Hodges won the NBA All-Star Game Three-Point contest in Bird's absence, Hodges was asked if the victory was tainted because Bird hadn't participated. "He knows where he can find me," was Hodges retort. Told of Hodges' challenge, Bird replied, "Yeah, at the end of the Bulls bench."
#2 Chuck Daly
After Bird made four straight baskets with Rodman guarding him, he ran over to Chuck Daly and asked "who's guarding me, Chuck? Is anyone guarding me? You better get someone on me or I'm gonna go for 60." Then he'd continue the banter the next time he got the ball with Rodman inches away.
#3 Julius Erving
Bird even precipitated a fight with Julius Erving by repeating a single phrase over and over. The phrase? 42-5, or the number of points each had scored during an easy Boston victory.
#5 Shawn Kemp
Shawn Kemp was guarding Larry Bird one night. On the last three-pointer, Larry Shot in Kemp's face and he said, "I'm the best damn player from Indiana."
#6 Glen Rice
Heat forward Glen Rice said, "When Bird started lighting you up and talking trash, that's hard on you. It's like driving a stake through your heart."
#7 Charles Smith
Knicks' forward Charles Smith remembers when Bird barked "Sorry, Charlie," as he released a long, last-second shot to win a game. "That kind of a thing makes you want to jump on a guy," said Smith.
#8 George McCloud
When the Indiana Pacers put rookie George McCloud on Bird in the closing minutes of a game, Bird yelled over to the Pacers bench, "Hey, I know you guys are desperate, but can't you find someone who at least has prayer?"
#9 1986 Mavericks Bench
On a West Coast trip in 1986, Bird told the entire Dallas Mavericks bench that after the time out, Ainge would inbounds the pass to DJ, who would hit Bird in the corner where Bird would step back and take a three. "So you got that?" Bird queried the bench. "I'm gonna stand right here. I'm not going to move. They'll pass me the ball, and the next sound you here will be the ball hitting the bottom of the net." And that's exactly what happened. Bird winked at the Mavericks before heading back down to the other end of the court.
#10 Dennis Rodman
Dennis Rodman on Larry Bird: "I would be all over him, trying to deny him the ball, and all Larry was doing was yelling at his teammates, I'm open! Hurry up before they notice nobody is guarding me!" then he would stick an elbow in my jaw and stick the jumper in my face, then he would start in on my coach "Coach you better get this guy out and send in somebody who's going to D me up, because its too easy when I'm wide open like this"
Anecdotes
–Like that one time Larry described the reason he and Dr. J infamously came to blows in the 1984 playoffs
–Or James Worthy saying he would rather face Michael Jordan than Larry Bird
–Or when he bust Jerome Kersey’s ass in Portland…left handed…not because he was hurt, but instead, he needed something to pass time
–Or that time he hit a game winner in Washington only to have KC Jones call timeout before the shot. So upset, he told the Bullets he would shoot it from the same spot and win it. And he did.
–Or that one time he kicked Michael Jordan’s ball over the fence before a scrimmage in 1984 against the Olympic team

Hello, and welcome to the Civ 5 Rap Battle Royale, the tournament that always tries to start with 'Hello and welcome to the Civ 5 Rap Battle Royale'! We are now well into the competition, and with Round 2 coming to a close, 16 will become 8 as we progress to Round 3!
If you want to see previous rap battles, recordings and other stuff, head on over to civrapbattleroyale! It's great how you guys are supporting this event, and I hope you stick around to see who our winner is! After this round I need the Judges to send me who they thought won their battles, and by tomorrow hopefully I have the Final 8 posted her on civbattleroyale!
Anyway, on with the show!:
Chile (Atlas_Schmatlas) vs buccaneers (MillinerJones)
Texas (SabyZ) vs Blackfoot (Gresskarpai)
Iceland (Wigmaster999) vs England (admiral_ifan)
Norway (Nestourai) vs Babylon (Mista_Ginger)
Sparta (CAPSSMOCK) vs Ayyubids (Luigiatl)
Persia (JCPoly) vs Yakutia (Funhau5)
Mongolia (wasgoodlilma) vs China (Protroid)
Burma (EmeraldRange) vs Australia (RailroadRider)
JUDGES: Mob_cleaner , Night_Man_ , TPangolin , silence_in_samarkand , Kropenfuer
CHILE VS BUCCANEERS
"Three fucking cheers for the trucking Buccaneers"
Say their loyal pirate fans, but alas, they hold back tears,
Stuck in gears? Have no fear, Chile's here, now have a beer
Hold the rum and spears and listen while we ruin your careers!
You might catch a cold if you're fightin' 'gainst our empire
Stuck in the mud, and you bloody suck, vampire!
Your verses aren't exactly ones that inspire,
And while you want to be a great, your dreams have already expired.
It's safe to say subscriber overboard 'cause Morgan knows--
That loyalty can't be bought with a pirate hat and dough!
Your smarts are wearing thin, but I think you know,
We'll have landships by the time you get your ships to land, ho,
Snap out of MK I, and come back to the present!
I've got a suggestion Mr. Morgan, and I'll try to pleasant:
Listen to Bernardo O'Higgins: e. g. the main event,
And prepare for the winter of your discontent!
Your response to my rap did help ease the tension,
4 days to prepare, and NOT ONE WORD mentioned!
Empty phrases don't faze us -- soldiers, stand at attention!
Now, to set the facts straight, and do away with your pretension.
Your catchphrase is "arrr" but that's a Hollywood invention,
And "lmao" is just a modern convention
Growl and grumble all you want, but I think I should mention
That you're laughing your ass right out of contention!
Most of your subscribers joined your camp on a whim,
But your numbers will dim, 'cause your soldiers can't swim!
Chile's ships are supreme, and your navy is slim
Knockin' on your backdoor, 'cause your chances are grim.
You're never a real contender in any AI game,
It's not TPang's fault -- you've got only yourself to blame
Now I've painted you a picture, this painting needs a name:
Red, White, and Blue, (we've steamrolled you) for Chile's won the game.
TEXAS VS BLACKFOOT
Um, Houston, we have a problem:
Who’s gonna clean this mess up when we’re all done?
Are you Black or a Crow
cuz I really don’t know,
but it really doesn’t matter because this is MY show!
Seriously what’s up with your name?
This is Texas’ rise to fame, but there’s only you to blame
When y’all get struck out of this ballgame!
So don’t mess with Texas, that’s a fact
Any fight with us is completely stacked
Because against Sam Houston, you’ll get out rapped!
When a war is fought against the Texan Nation
we come out on top with the highest population
so y’all better think twice cuz for us this is a vacation
and when this day is told, it’ll be a Texan narration.
Like a little crow you take flight because you don’t wanna lose this fight
but I’ll tell you how it is when you pick a fight with me: unless y’all wanna die you best run and flee!
This battle isn’t fair; no enemies anywhere, but when it comes to blow you really couldn’t bear
the might of the Lone-Star, we go far, we’ll kick your ass on our way to the bar!
My people are fucking like rabbits, you’ve got bad breeding habits:
y’all dropped from the top ten in population like some starving reservation
just not even a nation that’s worth taking note!
You beat our army by 5000 men, but every Texan counts more than ten
and when we defend your rank will descend further than your Mexican friend!
So come at me with all you’ve got, everything that you’ve done we’ve already forgot
so you’ll rot in the north under the Inuit’s weight, so make like the Australians and
“fuck off, mate!”
ICELAND VS ENGLAND
ay yo Iceland
I'm coming to the land of the ice and snowmen,
Army? What army? You've got like no men,
I'll hit you from Scotland with my longbowmen,
You're even more irrelevant than the Romans,
I'm firaxis, sucka, you're not fighting a mod now,
I'm attacking, fucker, I'm not fighting for cod now,
I'm not diplomatic, asking for trade agreements
My tactic is to inflict major bereavements,
You better believe it, I'm a fucking lunatic,
I'm not a little Arctic bitch like Ekheunik
I've got no liking for Vikings, my pikes'll be striking
Whilst you're pathetically fighting with...what? Ice picks?
You'll be the second Atlantic island that I've whipped,
And you know what I did to Ireland was tragic
Rather be crushed now, or later? Take your pick,
But choose quick, before my boys hit Reykjavik,
Greetings Queen ‘Lizbeth, I am your friendly neighbor
It’s about time you come to face the greatest Viking raider
Perhaps you’ll remember in your long lost past
How my Viking fleet left your country thoroughly trashed
For hundreds of years your empire hobbled to survive
While on our spoils we grew rich and started to thrive
What’s that you say? That this is a different situation?
You seem to forget you’re up against a Viking nation
We control Greenland, Iceland, and a killer navy
And everyone knows that 2 more movement doesn’t beat Icelandic bravery
While your people sip tea and mumble posh phrases
A cloud of doom shall rain down on your fancy quivering faces
Once again, we shall leave your towns as piles of rubble
Fight me or not, killing you either way will be no trouble
Seriously 'friendly' Iceland, you want to talk navy?
You want a sea battle with me, are you fucking crazy?
You're happy to take the time to try to diss my rhymes,
You'll pipe down once I arrive with my ships of the line,
They'll soon make your islands mine, they're so bloody elite,
Maybe you should think about just admitting defeat,
Go home, have a sauna, read a saga, relax,
Perhaps you won't notice Reykjavik getting sacked,
I admit you've got a lot of towns, but on the other hand,
You've only got so many cities because no-one wants that land,
Just wait, you'll soon become a minor Arctic rump state,
You'll collapse like your banking sector back in '08,
You want to lord it over Jorvik? Ha, Come and get it,
I'm not even concerned with you, you're so pathetic,
Threatened by France, Ireland, Portugal, but you know what, son?
I've got ninety nine problems but Iceland ain't one.
So here you are again Elizabeth, are you ready for round two?
Because even fanboys saying “remember 1066” isn’t enough to save you
Judging by your first verse you can barely create a rhyme
While each of my verses flows smoothly and perfectly sublime
You say you’ll hit me from Scotland with your puny archer’s bows?
The Irish own more of the isles than you, ya couldn’t hit me if you chose
You may have the small advantage of getting to go first
But that’ll only ensure that your punishment will be the worst
As it stands now, our city count is more than twice yours
And you’re already split in half by the channel, of course
At least you admit that you’re a tea-crazed raving lunatic
So that when I crush you I don’t have to be apologetic
Your pikes and bows have nothing on a whirling battleaxe
And some Robin Hood gear won’t help you face the facts:
Even the French are doing better than your so-called monarchy
And as soon as we set foot on the your isles, it’ll be true anarchy
To save you now, you’d need the aide of TPangolin or some magic trick
But as it stands right now, your lands belong to the great Reykjavik
NORWAY VS BABYLON
Yo Babylon! Get your battle on
‘Cause all you do is watch and prattle on
You’ve hype! We get it; let’s move along
Talk a little bit ‘bout your meta-con
You say you’re big; you say you’re strong
But all you really do is make me yawn
Trapped in a lake in the ice all along,
at the Ass end of the world, where you belong
Nuke sub you say? ‘Kay; let’s discuss
The special circumstances that made it thus
The foundational truss that started this fuss:
You only exist in this game to watch us!
What do you do? Ugh; where to begin
All you got’s an underwater looney bin
We fight and write; slick licks we spin
All you do is watch — so watch us win.
Seems that you’ve quit yammerin’
But then again you quit battlin’
The fans want a rap; they’re clamorin’
So lemme spin a tale ‘bout the Pangolin:
Ever stop and wonder how it came to be
That you got picked to be ‘neath the sea
By grand decree of our referee —
“Babs’ll be the eyes of the bourgeoisie!”
Sixty-three civs and he chose the one
Whom nobody’d miss, to miss out on the fun
While we’re all in bliss, fightin’ under the sun
Go sail your abyss, ‘cause Nebby, you’re done.
Huh? What was that?
Sorry, I was asleep because its just... (Starts rapping)
Too easy to igNorway you,
This battle you will rue.
No way to win,
Lying to yourself 's still a sin.
(Yawns Sorry, still a little sleepy...)
Cause I just took a nap,
Trying to get ready to rap.
Took a little too long,
Your name, Snoreway, ain't wrong.
So far you've done little,
But sit and whittle,
Away my time.
Not even one good rhyme.
Babylon is here to play,
You winning? No way.
So I say bring the Battle,
These lines like a gun I can gattle.
SPARTA VS AYYUBIDS
Hey Ayy, this is mayday
cuz it seems you drew a fuckin' playdate
with a cray jay, whose gon' sautee
your fucking ass, burn it like an ashtray.
So you stay way from my clay, kay?
Vaporize your ass like hair-spray
Imma knock you down like childs-play
like a snow-dame on a hot day!
So vrin vrinn! I gotta engine
in this horse I borrowed from the Trojans
and I'm gonna drive it down to Dvin
and slay the women children and men!
So beep beep! You can't stop me
gotta tight read on this hot beat
in the front seat of this big tree
that I'm drivin' round the fucking red sea!
Face it, you are not an MC
armies softer than fucking brie cheese
and with rhymes to match, so don't you agree
That you'll never be a match for me?
Here before me I find a “King Leo the Young”,
Yet your mere existence was a slip of the tongue.
You spend your days picking flowers,
And yet you think you’re one of the “world powers.”
Your pretend “empire” is doomed to fail,
And the land we’ll conquer from you will be put up for sale.
You conquered land from the Byzantine State,
But you’ve just sped up your attrition rate.
We’ll take your African colony, your coastal lands,
For all of your empire is about to change hands.
With the nations of Rome, Armenia, and the strong Ayyubid Nation,
We’ll give your oppressed people some much-needed liberation.
This battle, you’ve already lost.
We’ll stop your mistake of a “nation” at any cost.
How dare you call me weak? How dare you insult ME?!
I'll crush you, little sheikh, like I did Thermopylae!
Never ever would I ever think a thing you say is clever
Put me up against whomever and I'll smash their hopes forever!
Ranks on ranks of hardened men will crush your precious fighters then
Be home in time to pen some rhymes and crush you weaklings yet again!
You think I'm fucking playing, friend!?
I do not break, I do not bend,
Let's not pretend you can contend,
You're out of time, you're at your end!
These rhymes I've penned transcend the trend
You can't hold on, you can't defend,
So you best close your eyes and bend
And prepare your fat rear end!
I don’t even know how you got to this level,
Since after this victory I’m going to revel.
You do know that Sparta didn’t even exist during the Trojan War?
But no, back then your King Leo was taking his time in a flower store.
This alleged “army” of yours is clearly fake,
Otherwise we wouldn’t be eating through your cities like cake.
We’re coming for the Aegean, the Adriatic,
And I’m sorry to say this loss for you will be quite traumatic.
The trumpets of war sound,
And the Ayyubid Empire will span the world around.
We’ll march from Cairo to Greece,
Then we’ll sack your cities and take your mythical “Golden Fleece”.
You haven’t even touched my home land,
And I think you’ll agree your losses are getting out of hand.
This is the last verse you’ll write,
But your chances of winning weren’t even all right.
You never were a serious contender,
And now it’s time for you to surrender.
PERSIA VS YAKUTIA
The Persians are hot, while the yaks are just cold.
Just face it now, guys, we're the empire of gold.
What's the matter you yaks?
Are you all snowed in?
Cuz your AI is as crippled
As if I kicked it in the shin
The Yakuts are just brutes
Who haven't done shit
They're digging themselves into a bottomless pit.
There's one picture of you in every single album
But from what I've seen and heard, there's never an outcome.
You're just kinda there, not doin anything soon
The only time you're productive is once in a blue moon!
Now learn from round 1, I always finish strong,
So enjoy yourself now, no worry, it won't be long.
What's up, JCPoly? My name is Funhau5, of the Yaks,
And you're about to suffer from my next verbal attacks.
Round 1 against Japan was just me testing the water,
But, now, I'm gonna hit you with some lyrical manslaughter.
Or how about man's laughter? Cuz that's what I'll be hearing after
You declare a war and it becomes your own disaster.
Darius is slacking. He really needs to start attacking,
and if he doesn't do it soon, it'll be his fudge that they're packing.
You're out-teched, incompetent, and starting to look like China.
How many more immortals can you pull out of your vagina?
Why don't you ask the Trung Sisters if they have any tips
On how to fight a war with your fat pussy lips?
Yes, that was vulgar. It was pretty damn rude,
And I have some other things that I would like to exude,
But friendship with Persians is definitely not one of them,
Cuz Darius has five cities, and all I do is make fun of him.
Nah man, our pussy's pretty big, but it ain't as big as yours,
It goes so deep you should start giving tours!
Based on the fact that your only a faction,
It would probably be the ALL the Khans biggest attraction. (+2tourisim)
Hey turtle, bro, don't take it too hard,
You've dug your self too deep, you need a Saint Bernard.
And even that might not work, it's just too late to recover
Even with Indiana Jones, you'd never be discovered.
You live in tundra, where people never sweat
We be chillin in the sand while you accumulating debt
We got the gold, the mountains, and the immortals so sweet
Guy, just Give up now, we got you beat
The whole goal of the game is to stand the test of time,
Where as you, poor yaks, can't even stand my sick rhyme.
"The Persians are hot, while the Yaks are just cold?"
Dude, what are you, like, six-years-old?
If anything, I would think the Persians are mild,
Because it seems like their first verse was made by a child.
You do, for some reason, have something to say,
About how our empire chooses to play.
You make it sound like we can only delay,
But you'll have to speak up; there's a Great Wall in the way.
When's the last time you read back to Part 5?
I stumbled upon it in my Great Library's archives,
And, ever since then, you've been mentioned just thrice,
You captured one, shitty city, and now you're giving advice?
Well, here's a news flash: you're success is not gonna last,
I can't wait for Afghanistan to munch on that ass.
And, if you come at me again with something Dr. Seuss shitted,
Be aware that I already have your fucking noose fitted.
MONGOLIA VS CHINA
NOWHERE LEFT TO RUN, KHAN
HORSEMAN I GOT YOU CORNERED
SPITTING THE SICKEST NEW SHIT
ITS A GREAT RAPPING LEAP FORWARD
BARBARIAN HORDES AT MY GATE
HORSES SHITTING ON MY LAWN
DIDN'T YOU SEE THE WALL?
YOU STEPPED TO THE WRONG HAN
YOU THINK YOU KNOW STRENGTH
BUT THIS IS BRAINS OVER BRAWN
I'M MORE SISKO THAN KIRK
YOU WON'T CATCH ME SCREAMING KHAN!
NOW WE MARCH TO YOUR CITIES
MEET WITH A WARM RECEPTION
I GOT RESPECT FOR ALL MY FOES
BUT YOU'RE THE EXCEPTION
BURMA VS AUSTRALIA
Hah! Burma? We gonna burn ya,
Gonna leave this battle in an urn, ya.
You got no room to expand! Go and start a band,
With Vietnam, Champa, Sri Lanka, set up in Bagan!
Soon, When we roll through Rangoon,
All we gonna leave is runes.
We'll need our diggers, To dig the graves Of you
Burmese Piggers, when we roll through.
In what little land You have,
looks like you got Thailand!
Soon to be My Land, When we get there,
Gonna take no prisoners, Don't need no Khmer.
Coz that's just what this country needs,
A peacock, In a frock, On a rock.
If your rap was supposed to bring me pain
I think Australia's gone a little insane
You're a RailroadRider with no hype train
Cuz your ancestors came to 'straya in chains
Call yourself a continent? You're just a big fat island
Watch us conquer you like we conquered Thailand
I use complex references with a hint of appropriate banter
Your culture's an utter failure, according to Burmese standards
We have our own measurements, fuck the imperial and the metric systems
Watch your words when you rap against the stronkest Indochinese kingdom
You're a pussy 'Straya, tried to break off from Britain throgh diplomacy
We fought four wars, they only won one and we still drove out the Japanese
Then we banned the use of English, but that's still your official language
Why's the Union Jack in your flag, let go of your colonial heritage
Even useless Cham pirates come to Sydney to plunder
Your hype train has sunk, it's gone down and under
So unimportant, mob_cleaner put you out in the comments
'Straya has many fans compensating for its incompetence
You may second in the rankings, but you're losing to the First Nation
Your city placements are wacky, Parkes needs more concentration
Before you chide us for being turtles, utilise the mirror and look at yourself
It's gauranteed, the Kimberley will be fighting for their continental shelf
Please call me Peacock, cuz you'll make me Burmese Royalty
Australia are you kidding me with that measly attack on the Philippines?
This is domination only and Anawratha's the great general
An average writer, Parkes died before 'Straya became federal
In these parts, Parkes parked in the parks
And missed out on Uluru cuz you were all bark.
Your rap is long but devoid of meaning
There's simply something wrong with your rhyme scheming
Don't use these words if you don't know how to pronounce them
Khmer and "you lie" rhyme. Your lie simply denounced them
You're all bark and no bite; politicians can't win this fight
Grab a torchlight; we fight through the night 'till you're out of sight
We'll squeeze you tight and expand borders beyond the Burmese kite.
Our fans easy to excite. Fear our military might cuz it delivers you strife
Burma's culture whoring is Australian tourism's kryptonite