All I’m Losing is Me

I’ve been thinking a lot about my high school days lately. Not only because a lot of crazy things happened back then, but hot damn, I was all over the place. I mean, that picture right there was freshman year.
Oh and here’s a picture of me photobombing the cool kids at youth group:

I guess I dyed my hair green at some point and thought I was cool?!?
What I do remember is having a couple favorite T-shirts and apparently I really dug this hat:

More hat time:


I think at some point I wanted to print my pictures on the camera I had, but I had 3 or 4 photos left to take on one of those disposable cameras. So I asked mom to take a few picture of me. I have at least a few of me dancing:

And then I really wanted to proudly show off my potato gun:

At some point during the summer back from my freshman year in college my friends and I were pretty bored one night. We had this brilliant idea that we should take my potato gun and take my newly-bought 1980 Dodge Ram cargo van (Brown Sugar was her name) and sneak onto the football field to shoot a potato through the goal posts. We thought the 50 yard line would be sufficient to launch the potato.
Of course, this is the middle of the night and there was no chance in hell we were going to see this potato fly through the air. But we were feeling the moment, so yeah, hell with logic. We got to the field, stuffed the potato into the cannon, lit up the chamber and I squeezed the trigger and we watched that potato fly. Or at least we tried to watch.
What seemed like an eternity later we hear a loud CRASH and we all came down from the high we were on from “breaking the law”, as some of us put it. We scrambled to get back to the van and drove through what I assumed was some sort of corn field and decided to lay low for the rest of the week.
We had no idea what we hit. There was the field house directly behind the goalpost, but it was a brick building. We were freaking out that we broke a window or something that really could get us into trouble. We woke up late next morning thinking we were cool, no cops were pounding at the door.
Then one of our friend’s mom came back on her lunch break from the church she worked at across the street from the field house. She told us it was really curious, but there was a broken window in the front of the church and a potato lying in the lobby.
Complete silence. Casually trying to sound amazed at how weird that was, we all just looked at each other with such guilty eyes.
But Mrs. S. couldn’t keep a straight face for too long. She told us there was a shredded potato in the parking lot and bits and pieces of it hanging from the awning in front of the door. She knew exactly what happened. And she told us to never shoot that gun again. You couldn’t get anything past Mrs. S.
Well, I’m sure we did shoot that gun, but we definitely did not try to do it in populated areas or where the holy spirit was present.
I remember feeling all these feelings in high school and being awkward. When you’re in high school you think things are the worst. Looking back, I had a lot of fun. I think I just was enjoying my life. I still do.
I don’t wake up every day thinking about how lucky I am. I am constantly thinking about how much I’m enjoying my life though. It’s been fun.
Speaking of fun (yes, this is possibly the worst seque you’ll ever find) , if y’all have the stomach for it, here are some fun pictures of my tumor.
(NOTE: This whole post was built around the idea to post photos of my tumor, but you can’t just lead with that. And I don’t need my tumor popping up in people’s feeds. Hence the worst possible way to transition into gory pictures)
I’m especially proud of the last picture because it’s just a photo of my surgery and you can see my liver in it (that brown spot in the middle).
Oh, you’re wondering why I have pictures of my tumor? Well, my doctor seemed really excited about them when he showed them to us after the surgery. And then he asked, after one of the most grueling photo viewing sessions in the history of mankind, if I wanted copies. He seemed so excited about this that I couldn’t say no. I’m glad I didn’t because I have proof of spitting in death’s face.



