My life so far
Chapter 4
I purposely distanced myself from Rockford following high school. I went so far as to move to Vancouver to train for the Canadian Mounted Police. It was fun, and I was having some success, but when they made me buy my own red jacket (the Canadians got them for free?!) I took my watered down drink and tossed it in their fat What-the-fuck-is-Boxing-Day faces. Also I hate horses. But while there I got involved in ecological activism. I was hanging out in this coffee shop and met this smelly hippie named bil (no last name, no capitals, only one L). He convinced me that I had found my calling and so in 1992 I moved to Seattle to save the Wooded Land Owls. It’s just so sad how all those trees are getting cut down leaving those wise old owls without homes. Save the Owls On Land (STOOL) is well organized in Seattle and is therefore pretty competitive. They seemed to like me but before they would take me in I had to embrace Patchouli and do something to prove my stripes. All the good trees already had people hand-cuffed to them, so I took a different route and started the Save The Owl free paper. I rented a storefront next to STOOL’s HQ and from there published several thousand copies twice a week. When people refused to read it I turned it into a daily and doubled the print run. It had articles about owls and comics about owls and we had a picture of an owl that we ran on every front page. Sometimes we would run articles about how much we hated the people who hated owls, but mostly it was about owls. I had this one journalism almost-major working for me as head writer and he smoked a lot of dope. So when he hadn’t come up with anything new, we’d just run old articles. Once when The Dead was coming through town, we ran the exact same paper for four days in a row, just with a different date line. Well, it's probably my fault that no one was reading it and back issues began to pile up. And you can’t very well be a "save the forests" paper while wasting all that paper. I didn’t know what to do with all of them so I just kept bringing them back to the office and stacking them up. Stack after stack they piled up. At one point I had one slacker-dude hired to deliver the new papers and two slacker-dudes hired to pick up the unread ones. When we started we had lots of extra space, but after a few months we were filled, floor to ceiling front to back. We left ourselves just a narrow path from the front door, to the printing press, to the john, and to Wally's desk (Wally is the baked writer). Imagine an 18 inch wide gorge in a 12 foot mountain of paper and you’ll get the idea. Well, when it seemed like nothing more would fit, Wally had an accident trying to light his bong with one of those kitchen torches you use for caramelizing sugar on the top of a crème brulee (he was dating a pastry chef) and all hell broke out. Wally got out OK, but the whole place burned down taking the Save The Owls On Land headquarters with it. Unfortunately STOOL was (in violation of zoning laws) harboring the last 20 Wooded Land Owls known to exist in their office and none of them survived the fire. Following this, I realized my activist idols probably weren’t going to accept me no matter how hard I worked. But I was also beginning to question the value of an organization dedicated to the continuation of a now extinct species. And so I set off south in search of a new cause...