You'd think beating the shit out of a retarded girl was a serious crime or something.

Alright, I'm not as callous as all that. However. Wonderful experiment to intermingle brain damaged youths with moderately normal kids like myself. Especially when the damaged youths in question are hulking behemoths without the sense of right and wrong. Or even understand the tensile strength weilded in their rusty fists. More failures of the limp liberal movement. Please, by all means, fund the shit out of the special school districts. Get them as prepared and adjusted for life as humanly possible. So they don't eat their own fingers or chase cars in traffic cause they're shiny.

Set them loose on unexpecting kids with functioning intelligences and the results will suck roadkilled amphibians on an Alabama freeway. Will never accept the mentality that I should egregiously adjust my life to accomodate the deficient. If a tard wants to hit me every day without intervention from the administration, I'll take matters into my own hands eventually. Make sure the memory of the day I decided to end the torments sticks inside that gooey brain.

So I was asked to leave and never come back. Hooray. Break out the streamers and the party hats. Spanky goes to private school.

Apparently the whole, slapping the snot out of an enormous retarded girl, labelled me with a troubled kid distinction. Troubled kids are even more fun than retards. Sank me right into a classroom jam packed with troubled goodness.

Part of our therapy disguised as education was to be marched out into the wilderness of the Ozarks for two weeks every year. Roughin it style. Rough like eating a bowl of chopped up pine cones and twigs with no milk. Implanted some serious long lasting memories though.

We had to carry all our survival on our backs. Tents, sleeping bags, pots, pans, canned food, all foisted upon our skeletal systems. Hiking from camp site to camp site. On occasion, I thought if I had to take just one more step my legs would rip and flail apart. I'd collapse and roll limply off the path, and left for the critters to snack on.

The first year's theme was ropes courses and rock climbing/rappelling. The ropes course consisted of a high and a low one.

The low one drove me insane. More of the granola motivational team building banality that I hate. I understand the whole point was to break my trust shell. To allow myself to depend on others. Great for getting everyone over a twelve foot wood plank wall, or having everyone pass through a Goodyear tire suspended in the air between two trees without touching the sides or knocking a rock off the top. Once you plop back in the real world, people bite, and slacker leeches make other's lives with strong work ethics more difficult. All these low ropes course teamwork lessons would be super if corporations would pay to have people fall blindly backwards off a six foot high platform into the interlocking arms of others.

One part cracked my brain. The concrete tube. Ugh. It was about as long as three stretch limos. The diameter of a small manhole. We were forced to travel through it, one after the other, from both ends. Meaning, this claustrophobic freak had to shimmy past other kids coming the other direction, in a cramped dark and cold space. Somewhere around the middle of the tube an exasperated wailing quote from yours truly was repeated mockingly more than I liked. "Suck it in you fucking heifer!"

We also got caught smoking joints and eating smuggled in candy bars. The nature boy camp specialist who was directing the whole event unzipped our tent to be blasted with a cloud of pungent smoke. Faces smeared with chocolate, squinty lazy eyes looking as shocked as druggily possible.

One kid, was rewarded special consideration. Not only was he part of the herb posse. He also constructed a makeshift blowtorch out of a Bic lighter and an aerosol can of bug spray. Toasting the daddy long legs dangling from his tent. Burnt a hole right through the mesh of it. He was nature boy's buddy for the rest of the trip.

The second year was a canoeing/spelunking adventure.

We had to paddle our way across Devil's Lake. Supposedly named for all the trees this flooded valley used to have. Now waters barely covered the severed tops of forgotten trees. These "horns" would snag any passing nautical vessel that came by. Quite a few campers got stranded and needed occasional rescuing by nature boy.

The spelunking part was cool for the most part. Except when we had to traverse a low passageway on our bellies, painfully biting cold water filling it halfway up. Helmet scraping against the jagged rock of the ceiling. Another delightful test for my claustrophobia center.

This was also a year of the cicadae. A cycle of every fourteen years a huge swarming population of cicadae makes a migrant move across the land. The insect creeking noise was deafening. Look out your tent in the pitch black and all you could see was the thousand glowing alien orange pairs of eyes. Looked like Lite-Brite braille.

The following day we had cicadae races. Easy enough to pick them up from the clamoring swarm on the ground. Pinch them by the wings, hold em high and release. Track the buzzing sound of their wings. Whomever's bug flew the farthest won. A couple nailed shrieking girls in the head, ensnared in their hair.

It seemed also to be monsoon season in Missouri. Unbeknownst to us kids until after the fact, we were rushed out of our riverside campgrounds since surging floods were moments from washing us out to the Mississippi. Apparently, we were very close to being trapped in a muddy tomb.

Back to the whole smuggling point. We were not allowed to bring any outside food or toilet paper to the experience. Course, the resourceful and naughty faction disobeyed and snuck in supplies. One good girl who didn't, probably wished she had. We were instructed to find large flat leaves to wipe our asses with after laying down cable behind some bushes. Poor lass rubbed poison sumac all in her ass crack. She had an anal emergency the following day.

I don't believe the living off the fat of the land excursions did anything to allieviate my troubled status. It certainly didn't change my mind about putting down possible future rampaging mongoloids looking to "pet" my head if necessary. It did teach me how to hide my stash and puff on the sly better.