From 4th grade until the time I graduated high school, I spent two weeks of every summer at a Presbyterian camp. Even though the tightly scheduled days, happy counselors, and repetition of religious-themed songs were clearly designed to break down our will and finalize our transformations into unquestioningly loyal servants of Christ, they were some of the best weeks of my life. I made friends in those times that I stayed in touch with for a long time, some of which I still stay in touch with to this day. Well, that's a relative term since by that I mean we read each others' Facebook statuses and we don't really converse regularly or at all, but we are still indirectly communicating on some level, goddammit! Anyway, the point is, camp was fucking awesome and the fact that I never came back as a counselor is one of the great regrets of my life.
It was at those camps that I discovered how much I like making people laugh. Making people crap themselves with laughter at everything I said was a great feeling, and the sheltered religious kids made for an extraordinarily easy audience because uttering literally any swear word, no matter how minor, was shocking and taboo-shattering. Unfortunately, on one fateful afternoon, the fun and games took a dark turn.
The cabins we stayed in had three large rooms: The commons area, the girls' bedroom on the right, and the boys' bedroom on the left. Me and the guys were hanging out in our side of the cabin, and I noticed something strange. On top of a beam that ran slightly below the top of the vaulted ceiling, there was a brown paper bag.
I wondered what it was doing there. It was a good 12 feet or so high, so unless the person who put it there was an incredibly accurate thrower who managed to land the bag perfectly upright on the beam, a ladder had to be used to get it up there. No ladders were readily available to the campers, as far as I knew. The plot thickens.
I absolutely had to know what was contained in the mysteriously suspended bag of mystery. It could be money, pirate treasure, secret documents containing all kinds of spy shit, and if we were really lucky, drugs. Me and the other guys started throwing anything we could find, pillows, shoes, cans of bug spray, whatever, at the bag to try to get it to fall. Eventually, somebody grabbed a broom, reached as high as he could, and successfully pushed that little fucker off the beam. The bag landed on my bed, spilling its contents all over my blankets and pillows.
What did we find? Was it $72,000 in small, unmarked bills? Was it the pistol that killed Huey Long? Was it a hollowed out Bible with a smaller Bible inside? The answer was none of the above, because what was actually previously in the bag and now strewn all over my sleeping area was three crusty, flaky, dried out turds.
I called CSI (Cabin Shit Investigators) to the scene and they determined that the poop had to be many months and possibly even years old, considering how crunchy and aged they were. Yes, that's right. A long time ago somebody decided to take a shit inside a paper bag, then get up on a ladder or maybe even climb on top of a human pyramid and position it high above the cabin bedroom like some sort of demented air freshener.
To this day, I don't know why those turds were there, and despite putting way too much thought into it, I still have no fucking clue what thought process would result in somebody doing that. No matter how long I ponder this question, I still never get an answer. When some people sit and ponder the unknowable, they think about the secrets of the universe. Others wonder what the other side of death may bring us. Still others wonder if the religious texts intended for heaven to be taken literally, of if it is merely an ideal that we should strive to achieve here on earth.
I think about a bag full of shit.
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