History of the Blog, Part 3: Are You a Tank?

One of my all-time favorite movies is Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. It’s another one of those cult classic films that not a lot of people remember exists, but that I can recite word for word.

Yeah, I know. I can’t remember my own birthday half the time but I can remember entire movies that I haven’t watched since high school. It’s called selective memory, and mine selects “Useless”. It’s really sad, but then so am I.

Both the Bill and Ted movies are awesome, but the second one is my favorite. The guys get themselves killed by evil robot Bill and Teds from the future. It’s very complicated and I don’t have the space to explain it all. But if you haven’t seen them they are required watching before you can continue reading any more of this blog.

Seriously. Go watch them. Right now. We’ll wait.

Naturally, the boys wind up headed straight to hell. They find themselves falling down a large pit. Both of them are screaming like little girls. They keep falling and screaming. They run out of breath. They inhale and start screaming again, falling all the while.

Finally, Bill turns to Ted and says, “Dude! This is a totally deep hole!”
Ted: “Yeah. You wanna play twenty questions?”
Bill: “Are you an animal, a vegetable or a mineral?”
Ted: “Mineral”
Bill: “Are you a tank?”
Ted: “Dude! You totally guessed it!”

They high five and cheer and then they look at each other, look down, and then start screaming again. After another 5 or 10 seconds, they hit the rock hard ground with a horrible thud.

I know the feeling.

More than once since we jumped into the bottomless pit called “go back to school”, have I turned to the Boss and commented, “Dude, this is a totally deep hole.” We just keep screaming and falling. Most days, it feels less like free fall and more like when Homer Simpson tried to jump the Grand Canyon on a skate board and bounced off every rock, outcropping and ledge on the way to the floor.

Seriously, if there is an obstacle in our path to wherever it is the Lord wants us, we have usually overcome it by smashing into it at terminal velocity. It gives “Going through trials” a whole new meaning. Of course going through trials is never as easy as going around them, but you definitely find out how tough you are when you try to imitate Wile E. Coyote.

Now when I stopped the last post, the Boss and I had just jumped. I quit my job, and somehow managed to keep from using Grandpa’s “tin beak” line when I did; but it wasn’t for lack of a desire. I was trying to follow the Spirit and burning bridges didn’t seem like it would help move the process along. I know it was the right way to handle it but I regret the necessity. I even agreed to hang around and helped train my replacement, though to this day I regret it. I felt used.

To top it off, I later learned that within six months the things that were irritating me so badly were all cleared up, my replacement had been hired at more than I would have made even with a raise, and the business moved from the other side of the valley to a shop that is less than five minutes from my house. It was enough
to make me go back and ask the Lord one more time to remind me I was doing what he wanted because the lines of communication suddenly appeared a little fuzzier than they had seemed when we made our decision.

I got confirmation again that yes, I had done right. So I guess learning that my old problems had cleared was a way to tell me that something really, really good is going to come of all this and the Lord just needed a reason to push me along toward it. Otherwise, he could have told me to stay and things might have been pretty sweet. But like I've said, there were reasons for this whole experiment and I had no way to comprehend them at the time.

So now what?

One of my real passions is wrestling. I love it. When I die and find myself with a little time to kill before the Boss gets Translated, I hope to find that the Celestial Kingdom is a big building with 150 mats and everyday is a Saturday afternoon. (Football will be shown on the massive jumbotron above the mats, and they hang the newest Cubbies world championship banner between rounds. And my eyes will be good enough I can sit in the back of the gym if I want and still see everything)

In my opinion, the best thing about wrestling is that it teaches you the values and ethics you need to get your Man Card. Hard work, dedication, perseverance, self control, team work, honesty and respect. The things that most guys learn in scouts, I learned in wrestling. I spent every day of every winter from the time I was 5 until I graduated high school practicing under the greatest wrestling coach that ever picked up a whistle in the state of Utah. I knew his practice schedule by heart and I learned all the moves a champion needed, even if I didn’t personally have the ability to always perform them.

My coach was always more concerned about what kind of person you were becoming than how good a wrestler you may be. When I thought about it, the off chance I might be able to help kids as much as he helped me was enough to convince me. I wanted to be like him.

I had made attempts to get into coaching over the years and loved every minute that I got, but to have a realistic shot at becoming a wrestling coach I needed to become a teacher. This was good news for me, because teaching is one of the other things that I love to do.

I guess I finally knew what I wanted to be if I ever grew up. Good for me! It only took three decades. I could coach wrestling and teach.

I put two and two together and came up with five and decided that I better not try to teach math. I love literature and I love poetry, and surprise! I love to write. So English seemed like a pretty solid choice. I told the Boss of my brilliant plan and we prayed about it. I told the Lord I wanted to become a teacher. I figure he has a little sympathy for me as He himself was a teacher by profession and so in what was one of the strongest spiritual experiences I have ever had, we got confirmation that I should do it.

I got enrolled at SLCC and found out that I had dropped out of school only about ten credits short of an AA degree. I know. It was a sin that just keeps paying off in pain, ain’t it? I took a couple of extra semesters to get back into the flow of things and get some lower level English classes taken care of at a school where the tuition was cheaper. And also something about the three bone-head math classes that were required to just get me eligible for Math 1010 (I told you two and two was five).

To try and shorten an already very long story, one of God’s greatest miracles occurred on the day in the spring of 2006 when I passed Math 1010. I had my AA degree in English. I did my very best “Tommy Boy” impersonation running across the quad at SLCC and turned several cartwheels in the living room when I got home, much to the delight of the girls.

I next had to decide where to transfer to finish my degree. In my infamous past, I had been at the U and one of the reasons I used for dropping out was that I found myself using most of my time defending my apparently irrational decision to be a Mormon. I could write another post on all the stupidity I dealt with from professors while I was there, but suffice it to say that I came by my Hatred (yeah Max, me too) of the U honestly.

I understand if you are a Ute (Two of my sisters inexplicably married some of them) and I agree that you have your agency. I love you anyway, but I’m not changing my mind. I really Hate that place.

It may make you feel better that while I'm a fan of the sports teams, I don’t care that much for BYU as a school. I know I wouldn’t last ten minutes there. No Cokes? Thanks but no. Not to mention, the Boss was keeping us afloat; not wealthy. No way could we afford tuition at that joint.

Then I discovered Utah Valley. I loved the place from the second I went to check it out. Geographically it’s closer to Provo than Salt Lake, and philosophically it’s the same way. I could be openly Mormon in a class and not get docked grades, but I could wear a beard and swear if I felt like it. It wasn’t quite BYU but it was far from Utah. For transport, I could catch a bus at the Sandy Trax that dropped my on the front porch, and a bus pass came with tuition. Best of all, even though my eligibility was long gone, they have the only collegiate wrestling team in the state. In short, it is the perfect university. Go wolverines!

We prayed about it again to make sure, and then I enrolled for the fall semester of 2006.

And that’s when the proverbial excrement went into the rapidly rotating oscillator.

Next Up: Part 4 Worst Day of My Life