Boy Scouts

Ah, the Boy Scouts. Brings back memories, doesn’t it? Of camping and camp fires and summer camp and campers and John Cougar Mellencamp. Well, not if you were a girl. I mean… are a girl. Whatever. You had the bastardized version of Boy Scouts, cleverly named Girl Scouts, where you would sew or make tasty things. But if you’re a guy, you know what I’m talking about. And if you’re still a girl, you can just read along and laugh when appropriate.
Any way, boy scouts was a pretty strange time in my life that I have blocked out, for the most part. But its all resurfacing because I fell and hit my head on the toilet. And instead of coming up with a way to time travel, I pretty much just remember more things.

Here’s how I remember it, let me know if you disagree. Be prepared.


Well, before you’re a boy scout, you’re a cub scout. You have to be a baby bear before you can become a boy. Sort of like a messed up Pinocchio, I guess. But it didn’t stop there. You were a cub, a bear, a wolf… You’re this animal. Now you’re this one. You’re in a pack, a den, a troop… Wait, you’re a tiger, a bobcat, a webelo… Hold on a second. A webelo? What in the hell is a webelo? Oh, I didn’t realize it was an acronym. I guess I wasn’t paying attention when I was awarded the gold and blue pin star badge medal that goes on your front left shirt pocket next to your order of the sacred Indian super patch.

And then you get to be a boy scout. You earn all those badges. You learn all those knots. And when it’s all over… you’re an eagle. What? I thought… but… I was an animal earlier.. and then I was a boy… can I be a man yet? No? Eagle? OK. But you can’t be an eagle until you’ve done that service project. You come all that way and earned all those silly pins and patches, but you have this project. You can’t put it on your resume until you’ve convinced some poor, unsuspecting church to let you build a rickety fort in their playground where it can collapse on future eagle scouts.

And I’m sure that “Eagle Scout” really works on the resume. “Well, it looks like you really have no experience and your grade point average is almost non-existent. But what is this? Eagle scout eh? Welcome aboard. We need someone that can use Morse code or survive in the wilderness. That’s the kind of man we need on our team.”

Hiking, which was basically walking around for a while carrying all of your stuff. And then when you got tired, you stop and put it all down for a while, take a nap, eat a little, and then pick it all back up and walk some more. I always hated it, probably because I teeter totter along like the monster from Frankenstein, and carrying crap on my back doesn’t help. I always thought “Why don’t you carry your stuff around and come back in a day or two? I’ll be here. With my stuff. Not walking. I don’t need to carry it some place else and then come back, because it’s already here. And I’m comfortable.” And it was almost required to carry a pocket knife. “Ok, you got your sleeping bag, your flashlight, your ridiculous outfit… wait… where’s your pocket knife? What if you need to cut small branches or tweeze things?”

But you couldn’t just carry the knife around and cut things whenever you damn well pleased. You had to have a whittling chit. What in the hell is a whittling chit? Never heard the word chit anywhere else in my entire life except when it was used in scout knife safety. Boy scouts just MAKING UP WORDS.

You could saw some wood or fell a forest, but you couldn’t whittle without a little card that said you knew the proper whittling technique. “Whoa there, Timmy, what are you cutting? Wait a minute, that looks like whittling to me. Where’s your chit?”

And then there was this whole scare recently about gays being in the Boy Scouts. And everyone was all surprised. “What? You mean, a gay person in the wilderness, I didn’t think that was possible.” I don’t know, I just thought they should have seen it coming. I mean, look at them. You’ve got colored handkerchiefs tied around your neck, flowing sashes like a Miss America pageant, and short shorts. Oh yeah, and it’s all male.

It was bound to happen. Some fruitcake learning knots and he figures out the sheep shank and goes “Ooh, naughty.”

And look at the parallels to the military. All the saluting, the badges, the medals, and the summer camps… just on a larger scale. The Boy Scouts are basically building a small army of boys with tiny knives. And at the time the military had just gone through its own bout with homosexuality and political correctness, where they basically ending up saying, “Shhhhh.”

I say we have a boy scout and Catholic priest mixer. Everyone all together in one big room, just “dancing” the night away.