I always lie about my childhood. There was enough turmoil and drama in it that it's easy for things to slip into the vast chasms on the kicks that riddle my brain. There are fleeting, incomplete images that appear from time to time (did we really have a cat with a perpetual hole in its head?) like Lovecraftian ghosts that exist in an imaginary space somewhere between embellishment and truth. Part of this, no doubt, comes from my father's work in experimental cinema. Fortunately, while my memory may not be the sharpest, the relatively objective documentation that exists confirms that an episode did in fact occur. I was already a little different from many of the other children at the private school where my mother had enrolled me, and where I would be a student from age 2 1/2 through fifth grade. While their parents were generally still married, mine had divorced around the time I started kindergarten. My family was by no means destitute, but we seemed to be in a lower income bracket than most of my peers. And their parents certainly didn't celebrate like mine did. My mother, ever the conscientious parent, would invite her firecracker of a drinking buddy over and drink Cuba Libres late into the night while my sister and I entertained ourselves by watching Animal House. My father was an active marijuana user, which he never attempted to hide from his children. He lived in the house he and my mother had built together; and a stately log cabin on the most remote 63 acres they could find. He had chosen to decorate the long driveway (more than a mile from the road, with a winding path and devastating craters dotting the path) with bleached animal skulls, rusted chainsaw blades, and car hoods labeled with… middle of paper ......ter; to quote Flipper “life is the only thing worth living for”. You are your own master and you create the world in your image every day, so live your life to be remembered and let your death be forgotten. You can create your own narrative, and if you don't like the one that's surrounded you, send it to hell while surrounded by your friends and family. Was it something I knew at the time? Of course not, at that moment I was just happy to spend another weekend with my dad. I didn't know what was going on around me, except that I was having fun, and it was hands down better than anything the other kids at school were doing. The fact is that this was not such an anomalous event, it simply remains one of the few for which there is concrete documentation. The tape, the entire half hour, was sent to the MTV network. I don't think he received a response.