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You’ll Probably Need Stitches
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True stories about rogue altar boys, dreaded trumpet lessons, sibling intimidation, basement bombing raids, inept athleticism, incessant pinball, illegal vending to a minor, prison softball, invented profanity, brushes with death, living in Ohio Stadium, sexagenarian parents in the mosh pit, ill-fated travel, intolerable motivational speakers, and much more.
Plus a few made-up stories about things like dystopian sleep banking, bowling while guilty, and a satirical reinvention of classic literary boy detectives as pious Catholic sleuths.
You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll avoid chain link fences.
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“If athletic ability is predestined by our DNA, the sports gene is surely absent from my genetic code. If it is a matter of nurture rather than nature, then I must have been abandoned as a fledgling and raised by charity.”
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“During the course of her rampage, she made a vociferous and insulting anatomical reference to her embattled boyfriend using the rather impressive word minuscule. It burned in my mind as a brand seared on a hide, and even today the word minuscule is inescapably suggestive to me. God help me if a psychiatrist ever uses it to prompt me in a word-association exercise.”
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“Minutes later I was curled up under the covers, calmly awaiting my imminent death. How unfortunate that my wife and children should discover my lifeless form, but I was resigned to my fate. In fact, as the nausea increased, it was starting to sound pretty good.”
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“Do you realize,” he said to me at length, “that you can rearrange the letters in Giant Eagle to make eating a leg?” And there it was. My brother’s brain, its functioning threatened by the mind molasses that is fifteen minutes of unrelenting ”Rocket Man,” clung to survival by anagramming the first words it found.
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