The Foggy Man

Summer in rural Kansas is loud.

Well, at least it was loud when I was a kid growing up there. Not because of the people or the cars or the whatnot. In rural Kansas there are no people and there are no cars. They do have whatnot, but the whatnot is usually very quite and well behaved.

Summer in rural Kansas is loud because of the bugs. Billions and billions of bugs.

I don't know what they're called. I wasn't really paying attention in school. Crickets or chiggers or cicadas or pinatas or pilates or something like that. All I know is that those mofos were loud.

And we had a lot of other kinds of bugs that weren't necessarily loud, but they were still bad. I don't know why they were bad. Like I said, I didn't pay attention in school. Or at home for that matter. I just know that there were bugs, and the bugs were bad. The reason I know the bugs were bad is because of the Foggy Man.

Here's how it would work...

You'd be inside your house with your family trying to watch Little House on the Prairie. And you'd be saying to each other:

"DID ANYONE HEAR WHAT MICHAEL LANDON JUST SAID?!! I CAN'T HEAR ANYTHING BECAUSE OF THE BUGS OUTSIDE!!!"

"WHAT?! I CAN'T HEAR YOU! WHAT DID YOU SAY?!"

"HUH?! I CAN'T HEAR ANYTHING!!! TURN UP THE VOLUME! I NEED TO KNOW WHY HALF PINT IS CRYING!"

"WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!! SPEAK UP! IT'S TOO LOUD BECAUSE OF THOSE FREAKING BUGS!! WHAT HAPPENED TO HALF PINT?!"

And then some neighborhood kid would come running into your house, shouting, "THE FOGGY MAN IS HERE! THE FOGGY MAN IS HERE! COME QUICK! IT'S THE FOGGY MAN!"

The Foggy Man was a guy who worked for the city and drove this thing around town during the summer, spraying some noxious kind of poison into the air. It was DDT or HTD or HGH or PST or ESP or something like that. I don't really know. I didn't really pay attention in school.

So every kid in town would come running out of his house and we'd all run after the Foggy Man. I don't know why we were excited. I think we all believed he might have ice cream.

But that's what we would do. Run behind the Foggy Man, dancing and shouting and sucking in all of his deadly plumes of smoke that would fill the air. It was like a bunch of retarded kids running through the streets of London on May Day.

And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that our parents were crazy for letting us all chase the Foggy Man like that. You're thinking that we're all lucky we didn't get sick and die.

Well, I happen to think that parents today make too big of a deal over protecting their kids. They practically make them all put on flak jackets before they drive them over to some ultra safe, soft patch of grass and watch them play their little gay soccer games.

We didn't do that kind of thing when I was a kid. We played in empty lots full of rocks and dirt and stickers. We ran face first into trees. We drank scalding hot water out of the hose. We dove for footballs in the middle of the street. And yes, we ran behind the Foggy Man. And I'll tell you what, it never did any of us one bit of harm. I mean, all those years of inhaling deadly toxins, and look at me. I'm perfectly fine. No side effects whatsover ljlsidkkkkkkkkks ljdioisdj

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