Confessions of a Family Bully

Entering the New Year with a clean conscience and a clear heart

It is New Year’s Eve, and I want to enter 2025 with a clean conscience and a clear heart, as there have been a few pesky, evil deeds hanging over my head all these years. While I wasn’t raised Catholic, please allow me to confess a few sins and almost sins to you, dear readers, and thus lighten my guilt-laden soul.

First and foremost, I was a childhood bully.

It has taken me many years to come to terms with this, but I am no longer in denial.

Now, before I confess details of this most grievous flaw, and before you go judging me on that fact alone, there are other actions and character traits to consider. In my younger years, I was also a bit of a thief, burglar and pervert.

The burglary, you ask? Oh, that’s easy to explain. All I did was use my Swiss Army pocketknife to pick the lock of a school building and then hang a lewd, nude Playboy centerfold from a deer’s antlers in a wildlife contest exhibit on the very day the judges came to inspect it. In my defense, North District Middle School went on to win that statewide competition, thank you very much.

As for the common thievery and perversion, I didn’t steal Dad’s secret collection of vintage Playboys so much as borrow them, you know, check them out like a patron would in a local library. It was an exquisite collection featuring bombshells of the 70s and 80s like Suzanne Somers and Dolly Parton, with a few older copies such as the Marilyn Monroe issue. Such a collection as that would be very valuable today in a lot of ways, and no doubt took Dad years to accumulate.

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