This happened years ago, and it brought much mirth to my friends and family at the time. I'd thought it lost to the ages, but my friend Heidi found an old copy. So without further ado:

If anyone had been watching this, I could have led into it with, "Hey, y'all watch this!", but alas I was alone... but the gods heard my reckless thoughts, and they trained their mischief on me with the accuracy of a sniper rifle.

OK, so to set the scene: there's this huge yellowjacket nest in Mary's backyard, right under the edge of the deck. And for a while, I've been telling myself that one fine dusky evening, I was going out there with some gasoline, and was going to get rid of them.

Well, the other night, I did so. About 8 o'clock, I went out with about 8 oz. of gasoline and poured it down the hole and ran. In between the pourin' and the runnin', though, I plugged the hole up not with a brick, nor a rock, nor anything that would have provided a good seal, but with ... a loose clump of border grass that Mary had dug up earlier.

Basically, I built the little buggers a fort. And a mighty fine one at that -- a far cry from the airtight seal I though would trap them in their nest.

I get home tonight at about 9:30, and it's dark. Mary tells me that she noticed quite a few yellowjackets around the hole when she was outside. So I figure, hey, it's dark, they must all be in the nest now. I'll go back out there with some more gasoline to finish the job. A safe and clean kill.

So I go out with a flashlight held firmly in my mouth, some more gasoline, and go over to the nest. I reach to pull up the clump of border grass, and before I know it, I've dropped the flashlight, spilled the gasoline, and am running across the yard screaming like a little girl before the screaming transforms itself into some salty language. My hand has several welts on it - it was a trap! They were in the border grass, and my mind was slow to realize that they were stinging my hand over and over. But at least they didn't follow me.

After a while, I go back, regaining the flashlight through the use of a long stick, and shine it on the nest. There must be two hundred yellow jackets crawling all over the thing. They start coming towards the light, and I valiantly flee. But no matter where I go, they come at me again, and over and over, I flee mightily. Finally, I figure that I should turn the flashlight off. That seems to help.

So do I give up? No, I decide that death from above is the appropriate response. So I stand on the deck, again with the flashlight in my mouth, and dump gasoline on the mound again from about ten feet up. Naturally, I run away, envisioning a vortex of yellow jackets spiraling up and forming one of those arrow formations like in your finer cartoons. Thankfully, this didn't happen, and at this point, I did give up and went inside.

Thinking better of another assault, I decide that, knowing my luck, tomorrow morning will probably be like some scene from The Swarm, with yellowjackets covering every square inch of my car as I creep up the road.

As it turns out, that final attack did the job. Any surivors, though, took up residence in the walls of the house -- a situation that I was never able to take care of. After I told my sister this story, she promptly hit the Internet and told me that my first big mistake was holding the flashlight in my mouth -- yellowjackets just love light and go straight to it. She also told me that I should have used a lot more gasoline the first time around -- yellowjacket nests can be as large as a basketball, and can contain hundreds of yellowjackets. So just about everything I could do wrong, I did wrong.

But at least I didn't have to deal with this. Can you imagine?

07/19/2006 -- 9:50 p.m.

I'm a little late to link to this, but I was reading a friend's blog and it triggered the memory of a nice piece of wisdom. It's Stephen Colbert's 2006 commencement speech from Knox College.

Colbert plays a bit of a goofball, a high-class doofus, on his show, but he's also highly intelligent. It shows in the end of his address, after some high-class doofusness, when he says:

Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying "yes" begins things. Saying "yes" is how things grow. Saying "yes" leads to knowledge. "Yes" is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say "yes."

As someone who has his cynical moments, I think that's worth remembering.

07/07/2006 -- 10:58 p.m.

New column up today on PopMatters, on the perils of putting twangy songs on my mix CDs. Pretty happy with it, overall.

07/06/2006 -- 9:27 a.m.

Last night was my first time catching Th' Legendary Shack Shakers in concert. Hoo boy!

The night didn't start out with much promise. July 5th is apparently a universally sucky night to play in a band, since everyone's always partied out and not interested in coming to a show. When I arrived at the club at the listed starting time, I may have been the only regular customer there. Everyone else eating at the bar was a member of one of the bands.

At any rate, things filled out to a whopping 30 people for the show, which has to be disappointing for a band even on the 5th of July. But my area doesn't have much of a music scene, and as good a radio station as WNCW is, I'm pretty sure you have to be up at 3 a.m. to hear a DJ put on the Shack Shakers. They were nothing short of mindblowing, especially due to frontman Colonel J.D. Wilkes. Careening around the stage, contorting his body into bizarre poses, putting the microphone against his throat while he growled lyrics full of Southern Gothic shadows. He had the fire of a Pentecostal preacher who'd been possessed by the Devil. And that fiery, bluesy harmonica playing -- at some crossroads somewhere, the Devil's kicking at some dust, thinking that maybe he taught Wilkes a little too well.

You try to think of words to describe Wilkes, and you just come up empty or with words that don't do him justice. My friend Ward came up with:

"[He] lies somewhere between a 7th-grade class clown with Tourette's disorder, and the offspring of a Holiness preacher and one of the serpents he handles."

He struck me as what you'd get if Conan O'Brien's twin brother had been lost at birth, only to be raised by lizards. When he emerged from the trees as an adult, he possessed no filter in his brain to stop his body from doing whatever the music commanded. And the music commanded constant motion.

In short, Wilkes is a fire-breathing, harp-blasting force of nature! Whether he's truly a maniac or it's a big schtick, I'll leave to those who know more about the band. But Wilkes and the rest of the Shack Shakers tore it up.

I probably took my eyes off Wilkes once or twice -- and usually to watch guitarist David Lee, who was fun to watch. I got a plastic water bottle, courtesy of Wilkes, upside my head. Wilkes has a rep for throwing things into the crowd, and considering what some of those things are, I got off lucky just getting a piece of flying plastic. When my sister found out I'd seen them, she asked, "How was the show? You didn't get hit in the head with anything, did you? The girl who did my tattoo got hit in the head with a See and Say toy when she saw them. A stool flew past me but no damage."

One of the bandmembers, after the show, confessed that they had phoned it in, but Ward and I hadn't noticed any such thing. We were blown away, and that confession simply made us fear what the Shack Shakers would be like when they were giving it their all. We agreed that it was one of the few concerts where, while we enjoyed ourselves, we felt uncomfortable. Wilkes and the Shakers are such a primal force that you feel like one of them might leap off the stage and beat you for your seeming lack of enthusiasm. I was bobbing my head and tapping my head vigorously, which for an introvert like me is like swinging from the rafters, and I could feel Wilkes, in the midst of some stab at Russian dancing or hillbilly voguing, judging us and finding us wanting.

I'll definitely be catching those guys again.

07/05/2006 -- 12:53 a.m.

Well, reports have filtered in from distant parts that various friends and family had varying levels of enjoyment on their 4th of July vacations. A friend learning life wisdom and tales of "sparkling deaths" from the homeless of San Francisco. A father wandering the waters under fireworks-laden skies, with a plastic blow-up doll on the front of his bass boat like it's the figurehead on some ancient ship of plunder. My mother teaching my wife and me to can green beans, wondering if I'm indeed the same son who once couldn't put food back in the fridge after he was done making a sandwich.

And me, sick as a dog for half of the vacation. Oh well, at least I got to watch The Big Lebowski just now. That may well become my new all-purpose holiday tradition -- it does bring a smile to my face.

"The Dude abides." Not a bad philosophy, all in all.

"No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of" isn't bad, either.