I have always been somewhat of a troublemaker. I like to push buttons, stir the pot, see what happens next. Especially when I was younger, but not so much these days. Every now and then I feel a little bit bad about some of the stuff that happened to other people when I was, coincidentally, around.
When I look back upon my life, it’s always with a sense of shame. I’ve always been the one to blame.
Pet Shop Boys
It’s not like I have ever deliberately killed anyone. Sure, consequentially, as collateral to an epic prank, but it’s not my fault that they were too slow to get out of the way.
For instance, there was that time in the fifth grade when I thought it would be funny to cut the brake lines on the field trip bus. What could be more hilarious than a bus full of ten year olds screaming in terror, fearing for their lives? Right? The comedy writes itself!
Sweet teas are made from leaves. Who am I to disagree? I traveled the world in the seventies.
Eurythmics
The main brakes aren’t the only way a bus has to stop. There are also emergency brakes. At least that’s what I thought at the time. I imagined the bus would get going really fast down a big hill, everyone would start screaming in fear of imminent death, and then the emergency brakes would activate, like in a falling elevator, and the bus would come to an uneventful stop. Relieved at surviving the ordeal, we would all share a chuckle of relief. Wooh! I thought we were done for! Ha hah. Glad that’s over with.
You might as well face it, you’re addicted to drugs.
Robert Palmer
As it turns out, emergency brakes are there to prevent incipient emergencies, not to stop pending or in progress tragedies, but I didn’t know that when I was ten. The guy on the news explained it pretty well to everyone, afterwards.
Also, how was I supposed to know that the first big corner was sided with a 300 foot cliff and a lot of trees. There was a guardrail! It was supposed to guard against stuff like that, but it did nothing! It just broke, like the weak, sorry-ass handles of a Trader Joe’s paper bag.
37 kids died that day. Not me, though. I refused to get on the bus. For some strange reason only the universe can explain, I had a weird premonition something bad was going to happen.
—DG
Inside Doug's Head 