MY REVIEW OF PET SEMATARY 2

 [This piece was originally published many years ago on Forced Viewing.]

PET SEMATARY 2 

Directed by Mary Lambert 

1992, 100 min. 

3 stars 

 

 

“No brain, no pain. Think about it.” 

 

 

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of my non-formal “reviews,” and I think Pet Sematary 2 is a good excuse to break it out. Ordinarily I don’t mention myself in reviews, and I’ll be doing that quite a bit for this one. Also, there will be spoilers. If you give enough of a shit, you’ll want to watch the movie before reading this. 

 

A while ago one of my friends on Facebook posted a question: what are your favorite horror movie scenes? I posted something about the scene from Rawhead Rex when the monster pisses all over the priest, but then for some reason I couldn’t shake an image from Pet Sematary 2. In fact, I suspected I might have made it up in my head. I scoured the internet, looking for any reference to this scene, and I couldn’t find anything. I consulted a friend to see if he remembered it, and he said he vaguely recalled something like that. 

 

But yes, I finally got confirmation that the scene existed, that I hadn’t imagined it. There really was a dream sequence in which Anthony Edwards is fucking his wife, and her head suddenly turns into a dog’s head. Tits and all. 

 

But the real reason I’m writing this is because I found this while hunting down this scene. Go ahead and read it. It’s a bit lengthy, but it’s just about the deepest analysis of this movie anyone would ever care to do. 

 

Pet Sematary 2 gets a bad rap, and I never understood why. Is it as good as the first? No. Dear Lord, no. But I remember it today for three reasons: the aforementioned tits/dog head scene, Clancy Brown’s over the top performance as Gus Gilbert and also for the movie’s exceptional cruelty. Is it remembered as a feminist film, though? No. I’ve never known anyone who viewed it as such. 

 

I had to watch it again, just to see if everything in that essay was true. Much to my surprise, I did see a lot of these ideas on this viewing. Some of it is a bit of a stretch, but I’ll be gol-durned, I could see it. 

 

It is the story of the Matthews family, or what is left of it. Chase (Edwards) is a veterinary doctor who moves as far from LA as possible when his celebrity wife dies on set in front of their son Jeff, played by Edward Furlong. Keep in mind, this was in Furlong’s T-2 glory days. He wasn’t the joke people eventually thought him to be. He was at the pinnacle of cool back then, and his performance is actually pretty good. He gets angst down perfectly, and when he starts to lose his mind, he does unhinged pretty well. 

 

Edwards is great as the turtleneck-wearing wiener dad. Yet as the essay suggests, he is a much better and more masculine father than Gus Gilbert. 

 

Ah, Gus. This was my introduction to the awesomeness that is Clancy Brown. He’s an asshole even before he’s killed and reanimated. He dedicates his life to fucking his wife and making sure he holds dominion over her son Drew. Oh yeah, and he also breeds rabbits. Loves watching them fuck. There’s kind of an ugly moment when Gus makes it a point to tell Jeff that he used to date his mom, like he’s trying to exert dominance over a kid who isn’t even his. Or maybe he’s trying to say that if things had been different, Jeff would be Gus’s son. Gus likes to do a bit of dick waving, as you can see, and Brown plays him to the hilt. He even makes the Maine twang sound tough, which is nearly impossible to do. 

 

(As an aside, after watching this movie again, I felt the urge to start calling people “Drew-buddy.” I have so far resisted this urge. You’re all welcome.) 

 

Anyway, since Jeff is the new kid, he’s ostracized immediately by the school bully, Clyde (Jared Rushton). Drew is another outsider because he’s a fat kid, so he and Jeff bond. One thing leads to another, and Jeff soon learns from him that his house used to be owned by the Creed family (from the first movie), and he learns about the pet “sematary.” 

 

Here’s the thing that kind of bothers me about this movie, and I think it’s why it isn’t remembered very fondly. There is an insistence on connecting this movie to its predecessor, which forces a comparison to be made. There is no circumstance that #2 could have won against #1. However, as its own movie it does pretty good. Talking about how Ellie wound up in a mental institute, mad as a loon, is kind of silly and detracts from the story, I think. The biggest offender, though, is when Chase goes to visit the retired vet from whom he’d bought the practice. The vet rants and raves about the Creed family in an absolutely ridiculous way. It’s a big ol’ slab of ham, complete with an unnecessary jump scare. Chase thinks that a crow on a perch is a taxidermy job, but when the vet throws a book at it—THROWS A BOOK AT IT FOR NO REASON AT ALL—it jumps to life. Think for a second. You have a pet crow, and you have a visitor. You want to scare the visitor, for whatever reason, so what do you do? Do you throw a book at your beloved pet crow? 

 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Gus has warned Drew-buddy that he was going to shoot his dog Zowie if it didn’t leave his rabbits alone. He already has bells on the hutch to scare Zowie away. To make sure, he has electrified the fence around it—when he does so, you can see the cruel look of glee in his eyes, as if he already fantasizes about the dog getting shocked—but that’s not enough. Zowie goes for the rabbits, and Gus perfunctorily shoots it. 

 

Poor Drew. He has an abusive step-father, who makes fat jokes to his face and shoots his dog, and his mom just sorta looks the other way because she likes getting railed by Gus. Zowie was Drew’s only compatriot in this horrible mess, and now he’s dead. 

 

But . . . well, what about that old legend about the Micmac burial ground behind the pet sematary? Here’s the thing, though. Everyone loves telling stories about the people whose lives have been ruined by that burial ground, but no one ever remembers how it happened? Louis Creed burying his wife there at the end of the first movie makes sense because he’s not thinking. He’s very much insane by that point. But with legends like that, Drew doesn’t think it’s a bad idea to bury Zowie there? Doesn’t he know that anyone or thing buried there doesn’t come back as themselves? 

 

Guess not. Jeff and Drew haul Zowie out there and put him in the ground. On the way home, Drew gets caught by Gus, who chides him for not contacting home. He tells Gus that he was busy burying his dog, and what is Gus’s response? “Life’s full of lessons, Drew-buddy. No one’s above ‘em. Not you, not me.” Interesting that he includes himself in that. It’s one of the few moments he has where he shows any weakness. 

 

It doesn’t last long. That very night Zowie comes home, which angers Gus to no end. He grounds Drew, which is unfortunate because Halloween is coming up. Now he can’t go trick or treating. 

 

Well, his mom shows mercy, and while Gus isn’t home, she lets Drew dress up as Dracula and go out with Jeff, who is dressed as Jason, hockey mask and all. This leads to an illicit hangout in the pet sematary, which gets busted up by, guess who, Gus. He’s so pissed off that his law has been broken that he pulls up a grave marker and attacks Drew with it. Zowie pounces and tears out Gus’s throat in a rather gruesome way. 

 

Drew, in a moment of sheer stupidity, thinks that because Zowie’s been so good upon his return from the dead, maybe Gus will be a good guy when he comes back from the dead. So they drag Gus’s carcass up to the burial ground and go to work. In the meantime, Jeff, who constantly watches movies with his mom in them, starts to think about what this place could do for him. He starts thinking about bringing his mom up here . . . 

 

Sure enough, Gus comes back. He acts like an utter creep, though, peering through Jeff’s window in the pouring rain while emitting this horribly chilling chuckle. Yet when Drew sees him, he gets a couple of laughs out of Gus. He seems like he’s going to be all right. 

 

At least until he rapes Drew’s mom. 

 

With Gus’s resurrection, Clancy Brown really cuts loose. He comes off as a Northeastern Freddy Krueger with his dick in an electrical socket. He gets to really play with the role, like when he eats mashed potatoes and then does the ol’ see-food trick on Jeff. During that very same meal, his bandage slips, and Drew sees the food Gus has just chewed oozing out of his throat wound. 

 

And then there’s the scene where he breaks the neck of every one of his beloved rabbits so he can skin them. For said dinner. He’s got this intent look on his face, yet he’s grinning like an idiot. 

 

Later on, Clyde corners Jeff and makes like he’s going to shove Jeff’s face into the spinning spokes of his bike. When Gus intercedes, Clyde says, “I was just fucking with him.” Gus chases Jeff off, and then he picks up Clyde’s dirt bike, making like he’s going to sand Clyde’s face off with the rear wheel. Clyde screams and wants to know what Gus is doing. Gus’s response: “I’m just fucking with you!” And then he sands Clyde’s face off. 

 

But Gus’s greatest moment is probably his confrontation with Chase. Chase, who now knows how bad things are really going (with a little help from that scene I mentioned earlier, the one with the tits and the dog face), is attacked by Zowie. He’s forced to kill the dog (again), and afterward, when he asks Gus what he’s doing (a lot of that going around), Gus says, “Well, I was building a doggie door.” And that’s when they start fighting. At one point Gus has Chase pinned to a wall, and he’s aiming an electric drill at Chase’s head. “No brain, no pain. Think about it.” Brown really does have all the best lines in this movie, just as I remembered it. 

 

While all of this is going on, Jeff has dug up his mother’s corpse and has reburied her at the Micmac burial ground. And yep, it works. In the process, she winds up killing an innocent bystander, the housekeeper Chase has hired. Jeff finds pleasure in that, by the way. He viewed her as an interloper on his family. He saw her as a potential replacement for his mother, and he just could not have that. 

 

You see? That’s what I’m talking about when I mention this film’s exceptional cruelty. There’s an earlier scene in which Zowie slaughters a cardboard box full of kittens, and who discovers this? A ten-year-old girl and her mother, who wanted to adopt one of the kittens. And let’s not forget the ultimate cruelty of all: when Gus murders both his wife and Drew by forcing them into the path of an oncoming potato truck. (What is his deal with potatoes?) 

 

So now Chase has to talk sense into his son and get him away from his reanimated wife before she kills all of them. Oh yeah, and Jeff has to face off against a reanimated Clyde. This is one of the things that aggravates me most about this movie. Why the fuck did Gus bury Clyde at the Micmac burial ground? Plus, you’re supposed to bury your own. Were they somehow related? Or does that also refer to those you have killed? The filmmakers did this only because Jeff never had closure with Clyde. Gus was the one who killed him, not Jeff. For some kind of viewer satisfaction, they brought Clyde back just so Jeff could be the one to end his (un)life. 

 

All right, there’s another thing that grinds my gears: the soundtrack. It’s pretty bad, and even worse, it detracts from the story. Moments that should be powerful, like Zowie’s (first) death and when Chase dreams about fucking his wife, are ruined by really cheesy songs. The only time the soundtrack worked for me was when Gus was skinning his rabbits. It’s set to the tune of L7’s “Shitlist.” But with that exception, it blows. 

 

Okay, I think I’ve rambled on long enough about Pet Sematary 2. Before this gets longer than the essay I recommended to you, I think I should cut this off. Was my mission successful? I think it was. I always enjoyed this film, but seeing it again after reading that essay opened up a whole new way of looking at this one. Pet Sematary 2 is not a masterpiece, but I think it’s a valid use of celluloid. 

 

Say, what is Edward Furlong up to these days? I liked him in Pecker, and his Crow movie wasn’t half bad. He should do more work. 

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #321: LET THE STUPID REIGN

Those of you who have hung out with me know that I absolutely do not take myself seriously. That's a deadly poison to creative blood flow if you do. I realized a lot of these columns seem kinda serious, and they are, but I want to make sure no one thinks that I'm some asshole who thinks my shit don't stink.  That was what I attempted with the rollerskating adventure two columns back. So tonight I want to make sure that there is no one left reading these thinking I am a guy who fails to recognize my faults.

TONIGHT IS A LIST OF THE STUPID SHIT I'VE GOTTEN UP TO. Not bad decisions. That's something different, and if I were to discuss those, we'd be here all night, and I want to go to fucking bed. So we'll take a look at the stupid shit I sometimes get up to.

Let's start with today. I have a huge beard. Those of you who have hair on your upper lip know that it sometimes curls up and tickles your nose. I reached up to scratch that itch, and I accidentally misjudged the distance. I essentially chopped my own nose to the point where it fucking hurt. I shouted OW and started checking to see if my nose was bleeding.

I have nine toes. I was born with ten, but one had to be amputated due to 'Beetus reasons. I haven't had that toe for a while. Sometimes, usually when I just wake up, I go to take my morning piss and realize HOLY FUCK WHAT HAPPENED TO MY TOE?!?!?!?!?!?!?! And then I remember, oh yeah. It was amputated years ago.

It's OK. Laugh. Fuck knows we need a really good laugh right now. I offer myself as the sacrifice.

The first time I was in the hospital, I was supposed to die. I surprised doctors, who loaded me up with Dilaudid to make me comfortable until I died, by surviving. And the day after I was out of ICU, I needed to fart. But they had me on an alarm. If I got out of bed it would go off. For some reason, they always think I'm a fall risk. I was only a fall risk when I came back to myself after two weeks of alcohol withdrawals. Not that time. I figured it would be safe to fart. Whoops! It turned out to be the only time I shat myself as an adult. The alarm went off shortly after I went to the bathroom to clean myself.

I don't understand why, but my heels are super slippery. So if I get out of bed with no socks, I will slip and fall on my ass. It's just the way my feet are made, I guess.

There was the time I went through the Taco Bell drive thru, and when I was at the window, I heard someone ask if I wanted sauce. I said no. And then I realized that it was someone talking to the next guy in the drive thru. They were kind enough to not mention my faux pas.

When I was on trial for DUI I decided to break my bike out of storage and give 'er a try for the first time since I was in junior high. The very first curb I came to, I figured I was good. I was not good. I hit that curb and flew over the handlebars and face planted into the ground. There were others around, and they did not mention my stupidity.

These days I have a bad left leg. I accidentally hit it on a car tire that was turned unexpectedly out, and I almost fell. I cursed a fucking blue streak . . . and then I saw that the neighbors were walking their kids by my open garage. They were obviously nervous, but the dad asked me if I was OK. I explained what happened and showed him my brace so he wouldn't think I was just an asshole.

I remember at the job I held previous to the job I held last. I'd been away in the hospital, and I'd just returned. I said something about what I would handle, and someone said, "Dude, you've been gone for months. We got it." And that fucked me up because, well, he was right. It actually kind of hurt a bit. He apologized, but I told him not to because I had it coming.

Side note: if you have it coming, just fucking take it. Don't weasel your way out of it.

Fuck, is that enough? Let's see. What else do I have? Ah fuck it. You get the point. I'm sure there is plenty more, but the important thing is this: even if I'm posting serious shit, I'm just the court jester. I mean what I say, obviously, and I like to be taken seriously sometimes, but ultimately I'm a creature who wants to make you laugh. The people closest to me will agree. I make light of a lot of things. Not everything. If someone is having a bad day, I'll joke about it to help lighten moods. Sometimes I go too far, and it has cost me a bit, but I stand by my intent. I don't want us to suffer. I want to make people laugh and have fun.

I will never forget the time when I was a kid, maybe four years old, and I thought I was King Shit. And then I tripped and fell in front of my entire family. They all laughed. Not even my own mom tried to comfort me. But that's cool. I get it.

Because I loved that fucking spasm of laughter from a group of adults.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #320: WHAT A MOTHERFUCKER OF A DAY

The Oxford Dictionary defines the word "iconoclast" as . . . just kidding. Seriously, though, if anyone ever starts a speech, essay or whatever with the phrase, "such and such dictionary defines so and so word as blah," the person responsible is an idiot, and you should listen to the rest of what they say at your own peril.

Whoo-boy. What a motherfucker of a day. I came to the news a bit late because I needed a doctor to give my pharmacy permission to refill a prescription, and I needed comics. But when I did hear? I went blind with rage. In my mind I started composing this column with a head full of hate and bile. I went through several starts before I did something that very few people in such a mindframe do. I took a breath and stood back. I thought about things because I knew I was going off half-cocked like everyone else on the internet.

But that's it. No matter which side of the political spectrum you're on, from left to right to the fuckers in the middle with me, WE ARE ALL FUCKING ANGRY. So maybe let's think a little first.

And then I decided fuck it, I'm going to write about the ending of Vikings tonight instead. And then serendipity struck. Why not write about both? You'll see what I mean in a moment.

I think (hope) there is one thing we can ALL agree with: this country doesn't work. We have a serious problem, and we can't keep letting the right blame the left and the left blame the right. If we can admit this one fucking thing, we'll be on the right track. But let's be honest. Right now there are alcoholics in this world who are way better off than the state of our country because at least they have met the First Step. We have a problem. Do we want to do something about it? Or do we just want to keep shitting in each other's cereal bowls?

Any fucking asshole who gets elected to US President (and they're all assholes; to quote Negan, "No exceptions!") has to be the president over all of us. Not just a select few. All of us. I think we can all--ALL--agree that Trump favors the right. To those on the left, you know what I mean. To those on the right, congratulations! So this guy should have been fired a long time ago.

REGARDLESS! And stop arguing. If I see any bullshit in these comments or on social media in reaction to this post, you will be summarily ignored.

If you can accept that we have a problem, then we can possibly make the next crucial step as to figuring out what that problem is. It's unfortunate that everyone on both sides are set in their ways. Most have forgotten the difference between opinion and belief. They think everything is a belief. I liken it to the difference between hypothesis and theory. But please note: NONE OF THE FOUR MAKE A LAW OF SCIENCE. Unless the theory is proved enough, that is. And theory isn't a dumbfuck idea that you read on your cousin's asshole ring. Maybe look up the definition.

Sometimes people need to be reminded that beliefs can actually be changed. They are not written in stone.

So Vikings. I watched the final two episodes, and I was very satisfied. Through a series of events that are too long and complex to explain here, the Queen of Kattegat is Ingrid. She has Erik as her kinda-sorta co-leader. Erik asks what she has done, and she says that she sent someone to the Land of Denmark where the king has been converted to Christianity. Why? he asks. To kill him, she says.

Why? Because "we all have a duty to preserve the old ways."

To quote a great man, "Allow me to retort!" The old ways might have worked way back when, but they don't anymore. I think know what our national problem is, and it is a very unpopular opinion. Because once you understand you have a problem, you should try to figure out what that is. Here is your answer: WE ARE RELYING ON A DOCUMENT HUNDREDS OF YEARS OLD TO DICTATE MODERN LIFE. I know. I know. 95% of you are thinking the same as Luke thought in The Last Jedi: "The sacred texts!" But Yoda was right. Fuck the sacred texts. I find it mindblowingly insane that we still use the Constitution created by people who claimed all men were created equal but still owned slaves, and their immediate descendants fought a completely different war over it.

When I think of that, I think of religious texts THOUSANDS of years old. I'm mostly speaking to Christians here, since you have my country by the short and curlies, but have you even read that thing that the priest paraphrases to you on Sundays? It's fucking insane, and the New Testament makes the Old Testament null and void. That's why Jesus, if he really existed, died for your so-called sins. So if you get your Bible lessons from the Old Testament, you're doing it wrong.

Fuck. Don't get me started.

That's our problem. We rely on the old ways. We have some perverse thought that we have to save them. Bring back family values says every dickhead politician for how many years? Does that mean the family values when dudes were allowed to have a ton of wives and a bunch of concubines and even more slaves? Because that's the oldest family value in the world.

Sorry, my Irish is showing. So is my Italian, come to think of it. And fuck that. I may have the blood, but for good or ill, I'm an American. Here is another problem. This is not the first time we've gone through this. We've done it many, many times, and since history has an ugly habit of repeating itself, we will go through it again and again unless we break the cycle.

Your homework: when was the last time you watched Gangs of New York? Have you ever? WATCH THIS FILM. The third to last time I was in the hospital, I got to see it again, and it is more important now than ever. The story and most characters are fictional, but the situation they're put in really happened. The old way of winning office was not just by greasing the right palms (usually Boss Tweed's) but also by having people who would vote against you murdered, preferably en masse. Even while I was doing research for Vidal's Burr, I found all these accounts of voters being brutally murdered. Oddly enough, it was usually the Five Points involved, just like in Gangs of New York. They even had a nifty little sound byte that could have come out of any alt-righter's mouth today: "AMERICA FOR AMERICANS." That's when they were angrily against some white immigrants, and not just the immigrants Trump pisses on.

I'd planned to make a joke about how much I'd love to see the Capitol destroyed as much as the next man, but I can't. The scumbags who stormed it today were fuckheads who should have--no. To quote another great man, "I didn't come so far to sink so low."

We have a problem. Our country is dictated by a document that is so far out of date it's insane. If our country was a person, you'd throw it in the rubber room and have it shocked every once in a while. If it was your grandparent, you'd relegate it to an old folks home (where they would probably get Legionnaire's Disease if modern trends are to be followed).

We need something new. Something we can all work out. Something we can, if begrudgingly, agree on.

Speaking of Burr, he predicted the Constitution wouldn't last fifty years. Technically he was right, considering how many amendments were made. But fuck that. We don't need editor's notes. We need to start from scratch.

This is not working. If we continue down this beshitted path, what happened today will happen again. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but to quote another great man, "Your kids will love it."

OK, I almost have it out of my system. Just a little bit more, and we'll be done. Promise.

[SPOILERS FOR VIKINGS: Do not read anything from here until I post the end of spoilers if you want to enjoy the ending of this show.]

So we all know that Vikings traveled the world fairly well. On the show we saw them raid the UK, which is a matter of record. We even saw them raid France, again a matter of record. It got kind of weird when they showed up in the Sahara. Very incongruous for people used to snow, but also a matter of record. And then we saw a few of them travel the Silk Road to what is now Russia. Cool, weird and a matter of record. The same for Iceland and Greenland. When some of the Vikings, led by Ragnar's son, Ubbe, make it to America it was fucking beautiful to me. This is a matter of historical back and forth, but they definitely made it to Greenland. Why is America out of the question? It's not that far, especially if you start from Greenland. There is a fair amount of evidence to suggest they made it here almost a thousand years before England was happy to see a bunch of religious nutbags called the Pilgrims head out for the so-called New World.

Before going any further, I have to say that history is very murky at the time of the Vikings. There is so very little evidence of anything that what we think we know, we can't rely on. I can't do for Vikings what I did for Burr. But there are some things that are almost certain, and the show veered away from that. For example, King Alfred never saw Ivar the Boneless die in Wessex because Ivar died in what we now know as Dublin many years later. That's just an example. Just as we can never know if it was Ubbe who made it to America. Probably not. But we can never be too sure. It's like trying to find a specific pipe in a crack den. The size of Lake Michigan. We just don't know. Did Ragnar Lothbrok even exist? I have a sneaking suspicion he did. Vikings tended to believe their heroes and gods were human, so I also wouldn't be surprised if there was a human Viking a few centuries before who was named Thor. Or Loki. Or even Odin. And so the stories began.

The very last scene of the show focuses on Ubbe and Floki, the latter who was thought to have been murdered in Iceland. The both of them sit on the beach watching the sun rise. Ubbe says to Floki, "There is so much I need to know."

Floki says, "You don't need to know anything. Let the past go."

Considering what I planned to write tonight, I think that's the very definition of serendipity, don't you?

END OF SPOILERS.

There really isn't more for me to say. I'm sure I, too, shall be summarily ignored as wishful thinking. Fine. I did my best to convince you. I hope if you take nothing else away from this, you will remember this:

Anyone who wants to be a federal politician, from the lowliest House member to the US President, those are the people who should be kept out of office. It's a shit job, and the only reason to have it is to gain as much graft as you possibly can before someone catches you.

I leave you with this. It's my favorite of the new Korpiklaani songs from the forthcoming album. It doesn't make a lot of sense unless you know the backstory from other videos. The old man is deathly afraid of the river because it took the life of his beloved. He is scared shitless that his son will fall prey to it, too. Knowing Korpiklaani, there is probably a river spirit involved, too. So his son is the iconoclast, proving that what happened yesterday doesn't need to happen today.

PS: The saddest thing is that iconoclasts will always live long enough to become the icon until the next generation's iconoclast comes along. Put simply, per the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.

PPS: In a hundred more, I can make the usual shitty weed joke.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #319: JOHN BRUNI ON WHEELS

 Pop quiz, hotshot: is this going to be a history lesson or a depressing story? Because I feel that's all I get to write in these columns anymore. So I decided, fuck it. Let's have some laughs. In fact, let's have some laughs at my expense.

When I was in high school, we had all sorts of bizarre PE classes. Stuff that just baffled my mind. Thankfully for most I got to sit them out and lift weights instead. This time? No such luck. We were in the smaller gym, far away from the weight room.

We were going to take a class on roller skating. I barely have coordination on my feet on a regular basis, and that was before I started drinking. Before I had a fucked up left foot. My right foot, when walking, goes out to a 45-degree angle, and I have no idea why. I've tried to fix it through willpower, but it hurts to keep that foot straight. Girlfriends who want to walk arm in arm with me find it impossible because of this foot. Two of them actually got angry with me over it.

I can't imagine what they would think now that my left foot is fucked up, too.

But for some unholy reason the PE department decided to do a roller skating class. Guess who can't roller skate. That's right, me. I tried to get out of it, but the PE teacher showed less mercy than John Kreese. So I was stuck.

I remember getting roller skates that would fit me. Back then I was a size ten, so I got those and sat down to strap them on. So far, so good. And then I realized that I had no idea how to stand. I was advised that there is this wedge at the front meant to stabilize me, so I used both to get up onto the wheels. After that, I was shit out of luck. Every move I made threatened to send me down on my ass, which I could live with, or on my face, which I couldn't.

Side note. The reason I was concerned about my face was not too long before this, I fucked up on a trampoline in another PE class and fell on my face, breaking my glasses. I had to go through the rest of my day essentially blind. I never wanted to do that again.

Everyone else started doing laps like they were Olympians. Me? I moved forward very carefully with my hands pressed firmly against the walls. If I had a window into the PE coach's head, I'm sure it would have been the meme with Michael Jackson eating popcorn. But that was before we had memes. Before we had a proper internet, actually. I think Al Gore was still working on it.

Eventually, one of my few friends took pity on me. I don't know how comfortable she would be with me naming her here, so I won't. But she offered to help me. She took me by the hand, and we did a few laps together, and it worked out very well. We did a turn and she told me she was going to let go now. Was I okay with that? I thought so.

She let go, and I was doing a really good job. And then the turn came. And I had no idea how to take a turn on my own. I panicked. I tried. And I wound up like Wile E. Coyote when he slams into a rock with a tunnel painted on it. I imagine that my arms and legs were out like that, but really I just smacked into the wall like an idiot, and I fell down onto my back, stunned.

If you're reading this, and since you're on my Facebook, you might be, I don't blame you for this. I'm just an idiot. So please, don't feel guilty.

At the time, I figured the PE teacher took pity on me. Now I think that he saw me as a liability to the school. So I got to sit out the rest of these classes until we moved on to a different physical activity. But I think this is why I feel so bad for Wile E. Coyote.

So there you go. Laugh it up, fuzzball.