Monday, and I’m feeling pretty good. Looks like it tried to rain today…there was a little wet cement on the roads but not enough to actually say “hey, it’s raining”.

Now Michigan rain!!! THAT IS RAIN…Thunder, Lightening…Factory chemicals burned into smokey clouds would rain down and melt our skins. Okay, it’s not that bad, I’m just trying to make it sound like I had a tough childhood and to prove how tough we were to survive that rain I actually miss a nice loud Midwestern thunderstorm–counting the seconds between each clash of thunder to see if the storm was getting closer. Did you all have Tornado drills in school as I did? Boy those were fun

It’s funny to think of all the crazy stuff we survived as kids. I look back on all that stuff and think “what the hell were we thinking?!?!?!”
Here’s a funny example of what silliness we did as teens(and I’m sure we all have stories like this):

At about 14 years old, my friend (and “Detroit” Moisture Bass Player) Mike and I were hanging out near this corner store. In the blacktop parking lot, there was a steel pole of some sort that was sticking out of the ground. This steel pole looked like it had already been broken. Needless to say, it was hard for people driving vehicles to see. Well…what happened was…we were there, and a car backed into this pole and it cut open the gas tank and about 5 or 6 gallons of gas leaked out onto the parking lot. Pretty much the whole parking lot was covered in gasoline. The car ended up driving off and I’m guessing the poor guy ran out of gas about a mile down the road. [ok...that's the set up]

And so, what do 14 year old boys do in a parking lot filled with gasoline? Well…we starting running and sliding on the black tar topped lot to see who could slide the farthest(meanwhile, we were spreading the gas not even realizing it). Now THIS was GREAT fun…We created our own game of “slip and slide“. After about 15 minutes of sliding around on the gas…i started to think “damn, these are new tennis shoes“–keep in mind, back then…the cooler the tennis shoe, the cooler you were

Ok…here’s the “banger”… I lift up my shoe to see if the bottom’s were totally ruined and at that same moment, Mike took out his lighter and SET MY FOOT ON FIRE! So now my right foot is ON FIRE and I’m trying to put it out. WHAT BETTER WAY TO PUT OUT THE FIRE THAN STOMPING MY FOOT DOWN IN A PARKING LOT FILLED WITH GASOLINE?

The whole lot caught fire with us in the middle of it. We ran as fast as we could- the fire chased us (as well as the car from which the gas came from). We made it out of the puddle of flames without a scratch, but the entire parking lot had about 7 foot flames. It stopped traffic driving by.

As CRAZY as this sounds, 2 minutes after the flames started IT STARTED TO RAIN and either the rain put out the flames or the gasoline just burned itself out. Either way, we were relieved as hell.

We always look back on that day and laugh about it but the truth is, things could have turned out much worse. One thing’s for sure, i certainly won’t forget it and either will Mike. Mike, you still owe me a new pair of Tennis shoes