by Michael Skinner

Created on: July 31, 2009

Remember that time you put your sleeping brother's fingers in a bowl of warm water in the hopes of making him piss himself? Or that time you short sheeted your little brother. Or that hilarious time you told your brother's girl friend that he was gay?

Good times. Good times.

The one time when you thought about giving your college roommate a Wet Willie gave you nightmares. The last thing you saw before you fell asleep was your squirrelly looking roommate picking his teeth with a Bowie knife by the light of full moon. In your dream, you woke up in a hotel bathtub full of ice missing a kidney after your roommate figured out that you had short sheeted him. You woke again, for real this time, in a cold sweat. At least you hoped it was sweat.

And so you begin to drift back to fond memories of home where you were the bully, and a damned good one. And in your good dreams you taste and smell your mother's home cooking. Or least the take out from the drive through she brought from home after work.

In the school cafeteria or the "mess hall" as the ROTC candidates have taken to calling it, they serve mystery meat on burned toast which ROTC types call SOS for some strange reason. And they serve even stranger substances like that Southern dish that had the consistency of boiled snot-okra they called it. And that bowl of tasteless white stuff they called grits. Remember when you went to put sugar in your tasteless grits and your roommate, Bowie knife at the ready threatened to skewer you if your profaned decent hominy with sugar. What are you a sissy boy he asked?

And remember the backyard where you spent so many warm, carefree evenings stripping the leaves off tree branches so that your father would have something to switch you with for being sassy or not getting bad marks in summer school? Well, maybe you don't miss that part of home.

Or remember your boyhood friends with whom you whiled away so many pleasant hours waiting to arraigned by a country magistrate for breaking and entering?

Come to think of it, that was expunged from your records. You should probably expunge it from your memory too.

Or remember the warm paneling and the books in the big mysterious office where your father's lawyer worked on the divorced settlement and in which visitation rights and custody were arranged.

Yeah, home and sick definitely go together. Quick, buckle down on your studies or the bastards might send you back there!

But seriously, if you are missing home, call and email the parents every Sunday. Write them a snail mail message on every special occasion that you can't attend. Be sure to include a thoughtful card. Tell your mom you love her cooking and ask her to send a care package full of cookies once per month. Be sure to get an extra job and save money so you can go home for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

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