When I was a kid (Jr. High or High School, hard to remember) Super Lemons candy were all the rage. Everyone wanted to suck on them and it led to shortages in town. A friend of mine (or rather his father) purchased a large container of them, the kind you would see as a display on the counter at the store. He suddenly wielded great power over the other children. Want a handful of Super Lemons? Do this assignment for me. Or maybe wash the smashed ginko fruit off my shoes, do it with your bare hands, peasant! Now smell your hands…ahaha the dog poop berry is all over your fingers so here’s some unwrapped candy! Once he convinced two boys to fight over the last dozen and the bloodied winner was rewarded with a sour treat to suck on in the Principal’s office. Later he said it was totally worth it. The loser also won a free trip there but could only suck on his tears of failure coupled with the sadness of no rare candy in his pockets, just dirt and a few dirty pennies the other kids threw at him.

I’m a grown man quickly approaching 40 who has been hearing snippets of this album coming from my teenage daughters bedroom for months now. I finally gave the album a listen after seeing this post. It gave me goosebumps. The mark of a good song writer is someone who can write a story that speaks the truth. She captured the stories of a lot of young women in this album. Absolutely remarkable. Might have to keep an ear out to what my daughter is listening to. She clearly has good taste and the content might give a quick look at what she’s going through. I guess it’s more “brutal out here” than I thought.

In 1998 I was 26 years old already divorced and a new dad. I was working as a server at the Malt Shop a local restaurant and was residing in a basement apartment. I had a friend who sold pot and asked me if I wanted to make $20 thousand dollars by driving 300 lbs. of weed from Bellingham Washington on the Canadian border to Minnesota. Without clearly thinking it through, I said yes. I quit my job and a couple days later I drove with him to Washington with two black duffle bags containing $720,000 in cash. When we arrived in Washington the only vehicle, we could find to rent was a 28ft U-Haul (I had never driven a truck before) They loaded 6 black hockey equipment bags into the back of the otherwise empty U-Haul, and I was off. For some reason I came up with an idea to buy a couple plants and put them in the cab with me, I would try to explain the logic but it’s so bad it’s not worth the time. For some context, It was January, and while I had a cell phone let’s just say it wasn’t 5G dare I say it wasn’t even a G. Cell phones didn’t have navigation aps at that time so for those of you under the age of 30 we had these things called maps. A map was this gigantic piece of paper you unfolded and would never fold back the same way ever again. This “Map” had millions of different colored lines that told you where to go. I drove over mountain passes in Idaho, across the vast nothing of Montana until eventually I made it to North Dakota where I ran into a terrible snowstorm with temperatures dipping to negative 14 below zero. It was then that I noticed that my gas was hovering around a quarter tank, I had remembered passing a gas station maybe 30 or 40 miles back from where I had come. I was in the middle of nowhere and was torn over doubling back vs. the thought of running out of fuel before I got to anything resembling civilization. I pulled over on the side of what at that point was quite literally a two-lane highway and put on my hazards. I pulled my paper map out of the glove box and began trying to determine if I had enough fuel to make it or if I was going to need to turn around. As I am sitting in the cab of my empty 28-foot U-Haul minus the 300 lbs of Canadian weed, I heard a knock on my window. A state trooper was staring back at me looking like he is out of the movie Fargo. Sporting an oversized beige jacket with a giant furry hat atop his head. He calmly made the roll down the window sign at me. “Everything alright?” For the record everything was not alright, it wasn’t close to alright. I looked back at him and said, “I just realized I’m getting close to being out of gas and I wanted to make sure I would make it to the next gas station” He leans in and looks at my gas gauge, then over at my plants sitting on the green vinyl bench seat next to me and says, “NO CHANCE, you need to turn around there is a gas station about 35 miles back from where you came.” I said yeah, I saw that, I’ll turn around.” And with the snow and wind blowing past his face he looks at me and says “Good idea, you don’t want to be running out of gas It’s brutal out here, lets get you turned around”

Super cool!

When she played at the Masonic a few weeks ago, it was also the same day that Miguel Cabrera was anticipated to get his 3000th hit.
At 10 AM that day, the line to get into the show went all the wat down Cass to Peterboro. It took me 45 minutes to drive from Founders to to Cass & Columbia where I purchased a parking pass the night before.

Was lucky enough to take my 5 year old daughter to that game and we got to our seats right as Miggy went up to bat. I honestly thought we were going to miss it, that would have been brutal and left me a little sour ;)

But it was very cool to see so many Gen Z’ers lined up 8 hours before the doors opened to see her!

My neighbor’s dad in high school grew habanero peppers in his garden. None of us kids had ever tried anything like that before and a sort of legend formed around the contents of that garden. None of us were brave enough to go pick one and eat it.

I sure wasn’t.

A new kid moved to town. Of course we dared him to eat one. It was a win win. He gets to prove himself to his new friends and we get to see how hot they really are without having to take the chance. A friend and I picked one on our way to school and gave it to him while waiting outside to be let in.

He hesitated a minute but a few goading comments from the crowd finally made him pop the whole thing in his mouth and start chewing. His face metamorphosed into a contortion of tears, pain, red skin, and heavy breathing. He was really struggling with it and the rest of us were getting nervous. One of us had the idea to go to the cafeteria and ask the lunch lady for a milk.

We ran there and pushed the still struggling new kid in front and pleaded for a milk. We were all starting to really worry about this kid. He looked like he may die. The lunch lady denied us his milk and potential anti venom to that stinging plant. Eventually, the pain subsided and after a long few minutes of sweat and cursing the heartless lunch lady he looked up us and sai:

“That was brutal!”

I want to say this first, I’m a pacifist.

Warheads. Warheads. Warheads.
You have Warheads? You were cool enough to sit in “the circle.” The nerds payed up, the cool kids got free Warheads.
We all suffered together. Some said it was the powder that made them nuclear, some tried to wipe them off before eating.

The day before I joined the circle, my little sister told me some boy in her class wouldn’t leave her alone.
My parents told me to do my brotherly duty and make sure he didn’t bother her again.
That night I played the scenerio in my head. Find that kid… Then my mind went blank, my brain wouldn’t let me take the next step.
The next day I offered my circle currency to the sour kids. They accepted.
I chose Black Cherry. The least lethal. I was playing it safe, I needed the circle.

I spot the kid bothering my little sister.
The Black Cherry kicks in. I break the Circle. The kid sees me running at him full tilt, lips and eyes puckered.
I deck him in a puddle.
With sour tears in my eyes, I tell him to never look at her again.

When he came to, he looked up at me and said, “damn, its brutal out here.”

He knew I was a pacifist.

I left my currency in the circle. I never went back.