Burning Down The House!

Two years ago while my buddies and I were on our biannual pilgrimage up at Lake Erie, we all had a near death experience.

Some of my friends are schoolteachers. All of them graduated from Slippery Rock University. The SRU alumni began the biannual pilgrimages in the early 1990's and through the course of time added about an equal amount of us non-SRU alums. Us non-SRU pilgrimage members think that our SRU compadres can be a little scary at times. Let's just say that they are not the brightest bulbs in the batch and leave it at that. Us non-SRU alums refer to ourselves as the Geniuses as a running joke to their questionable education at the Rock.

Cupcake, our resident gym teacher, is also our scariest SRU alum. He is the sweetest guy in the world and for all we know, he very well may have a tested IQ of 150. But Cupcake does things at times that really makes you wonder.

One night, as fourteen of us were bedded down for the night in Irish's cottage, Cupcake decided to load the fireplace full of logs and partially close the flue. Well, he fully closed the flue. As we slept, the cottage filled with smoke and it is only by the grace of God that the local rag, The Evening Disturber, didn't run a headline that read "14 Killed By Sheer Stupidity!".

We all dodged a bullet that night thanks to two of our friends, Geniuses by the way, Highmark and Pimp-N-Playa, waking up and alerting the rest of us. I don't know whether there was a real chance of all 14 of us dying of asphyxiation, but we never did find out.

Cupcake's explanation was that he was looking to slow burn the logs all night, but we quietly suspect him of just being "a plain ol' Tard". Maybe he was trying to win the Pilgrimage deathpool and had one of the guys on the 2nd floor. Another explanation is that maybe Cupcake was still suffering the after effects of a concussion from an incident where he was umpiring a softball game for his Special Education girls. While Cupcake's attention was elsewhere, one of the gals swung the bat and knocked poor Cupcake out cold. Cupcake awoke with the girls standing around him wondering if he was dead.

Whatever the reason, God smiled on us that night and we were spared. The incident is forever recorded in Pilgrimage Lore and we try to monitor Cupcake when he goes near the fire or the Kerosene heaters.

When asked about the incident, Cupcake, in thoughtful reply, retorts, "Blah..blah...blah...zebracakes...blah...blah..."

Story Addendum:

Pilgrimage officials have now officially downgraded Highmark's role in the incident to "barely helpful". Full credit for saving all 14 pilgrimagers goes to my son, Pimp-n-Playa, who bravely fought through the smoke to rescue us while Highmark (possibly of Mexican descent), rolled over and saw it was not time to leave the cottage before the morning work commenced, and went back to sleep, according to eyewitnesses.