Stories of Mikistory

Holidays. They're fun times with friends and families. There's food, celebration, laughter...and in my case injury. Take Easter Sunday of my senior year. Instead of eating a metric ton of Easter food, I got to go to the emergency room because I wrecked the shit out of my car. Snapped my collar bone in three places. They gave me a hefty dose on pain killers and gave me the orders to take it easy, and stay in bed, to try to let the bone heal. This also being the Easter sunday that started spring break. Of my senior year. yaaaaay. So, needless to say, holidays and I have a bit of a history. It was Christmas Eve. I want to say that I was 11 or 12. I was giving the marching orders by my mother to take out a bag of trash. It was unusually warm that year, so I was wearing shorts. So, this entry gets credited to God tagteaming with my Mother. I took the trash bag outside, and started swinging it to get some motion to throw over the wall and into the bed of my dad's truck. I felt a ...

Hard facts time people. Some folks are not good at sports. I happen to be one of those people. I know, its hard to swallow. Its not that I didn't try. Its that my hands and feet do not operate together that one playing active sports needs. I can run. I can catch a ball. I can not run and catch a ball. My dad really wanted me to play sports though, and I had to make a choice. Football was out of the question, as I didn't want to get the crap kicked out of me anymore than what happened on a non-football basis. Basketball wasn't happening either...walking/running and dribbling a basketball...HA! My only other option was Baseball. Seeing as how I was absolutely horrible, and every kid was guaranteed to play at least one inning, I was sent out to right field. Which suited me fine. The ball never came my way, so I never had to be alert. I just had to pretend I was. Unfortunately, even in the smallest of roles that I played on my team, there was still almost daily practice. I hate...

I've never liked heights. Never. Ever. When I rode in a cable car that takes you from one side of a theme park to another, I grip the pole, and close my eyes, and pray the cable doesn't snap. When my dad made me go to the top of the faux Eiffel Tower at Kings Dominion in Virgina, I dug my fingers in to the walls of the elevator. I just don't do well with heights. So naturally, I don't like roller coasters either. I had managed to never get on a roller coaster for many years, dodging them at every turn. That was until a class trip when I was in the 6th grade. Dad was a chaperon for this trip, and he loves to ride roller coasters. My friends that were on the trip loved to ride roller coasters. So, they would ride while I waited. Safely on the ground below. In what may have been Dad trying to get me into a "man-up" moment, he decided that he was going to goad me into riding one. Seeing as calling me out in front of my friends would probably work, that...

God bless my Dad. He tried so hard to ensure that I could grow up and work with cows and horses. I reckon God had other plans. As mentioned before, Dad had taken up the hobby of Team Roping. This is a sport that is usually showcased in rodeos. It involves two cowboys, two horses and one steer. (A steer is a male bull that has been castrated...usually at the hands of my dad. Who would then eat the stolen testicles. And would try to fake them off on me by disguising the name to make it sound more like chicken fried steak. Seriously, if you heard "bull fries", would you think they were battered pieces of steak, or battered testicles?) The header or cowboy who ropes the head would nod his head, and let the person controlling the chute that the steer is located in, to release the steer, at which point the team ropers would rope said steer. To keep this going, you had to have a continual stream of steer to come to the chute. Dad had me run the steer one time. He told me to get the ...

After my family moved from Mississippi to Alabama, we didn't live on a farm anymore, but we did still have some farm animals. Mostly just horses and cows, as Dad had taken up the hobby of Team Roping, which required both animals. One of my chores around the house was to keep the horses clean and kept up, which meant bathing them, cleaning their hoofs and brushing their hair. I was a pretty short kid, so when brushing the mane, I would either have to climb up on a bucket, or on top of the horse. Normally, I would want to tie the horses off, but it was a huge pain in the ass to get a bridle on. There was one horse in particular who's name was Scratch. His name was Scratch because he had a penchant for not stopping when running full tilt at a barb wire fence. As per my duties, I had shimmied myself on Scratch's back to comb his mane. Unfortunately for me, Scratch had spotted a female horse in the neighbors' field, and as he is want to do...took off...with me on his back. O...

Growing up with my Dad was an interesting thing. He used to ride Bulls in rodeos. Even did it at Madison Square Garden. When he wasn't doing that he was on a roof in redonkeylous heat, or facing down an aligator while he was drunk duck hunting. In other words, Dad is tough. More tough than I'll ever be. Dude falls off the roof, dislocates his hip, pops it back in, and goes back to work. He's managed to drill a nail in his hand, and fixed it with electrical tape. So, needless to say, I had a hard time not being tough as a child. Say if I were crawling through a barbed wire fence, and it got caught in my back, and I freaked out a little bit, I wouldn't get "Are you O.K?" I got "Quit being a girl, its only barbed wire." When dad and I were on horse back, tearing through the woods, and he manages to successfully duck a low lying tree, and i can't in time, due to the speed of my horse chasing his, and my face eats it, I didn't get "Are you O....

This is my ongoing attempts to make internet folks laugh, by telling them absolutely true stories of things that have happened to me. If you've read the last two entries, you know by now that I used to live out in the country in Greenwood, Mississippi. At the age of 5.5, we moved to a spot in between the two mega metropolises that are Central and Waterloo, AL. Far enough out not to get cable, but not too far out to have to go to Waterloo. Thank God. My Dad had continued on his own mission to get me to become a man through killing animals. While, not against hunting, I just don't want any part of it. I like just going to the store, and purchasing the after effects. I assume that maybe Dad was worried that Regonomics would fail, and that we would have to forever live off the land. Or he was trying to get out of the house. One early saturday morning, he decided to wake me from bed to go quail hunting. As watching saturday morning cartoons were not as high on his to do list as they...

This is my ongoing quest to relive some embarrassing stories, in the hopes that somehow, somewhere, someone will get a laugh or two out of them. A long time ago, when I was much younger, my family didn't have a lot of money. By some standards, you may say that we were kind of poor. Or just poor. I don't know if you can be kind of poor...at any rate, we didn't have money. We lived on a cattle farm in Greenwood, Mississippi. We shucked our own corn, and peeled our own peas...that sort of thing. We didn't slaughter our own cows, pigs or chickens, as those were all bought at the store. The one thing that was killed and eaten by us was deer. OK, so here's the thing. I don't hunt. I'm fine with folks that do hunt. I don't necessarily agree with some of the measures, but if they're eating what they kill, I've got no beef with that (pun intended). Dad would go hunting, kill some deer, and we would eat some and freeze the rest. I knew this....

Its occurred to me that in this particular point in my life, I don't have anything to really complain about. I've got a girl, dog, cat, house, and some whiskey in the freezer. I've grown tired of complaining about shiz I can't change; crappy musicians, politics, bad grammar. As I used to be able to go on these rather entertaining rants about what I was pissed off about at that moment, which you can read right at www.myspace.com/mike_henderson (which I haven't posted to in over a year, and the only reason its kept active, is that's because of where I met my girlfriend six years ago). So here's the thing, I've had the itch to write about things, but can never really get it going. I've done a few game reviews for a site, and that was fun, but then they stopped publishing said reviews. I thought "what could I write about that would be entertaining?" And it suddenly dawned on me...why not tell the stories that have been making my friends...