The reasons I admire Derek Webb are many, and most of you probably know this. His latest album, Mockingbird, is in my opinion one of the most important records out there these days due to its subject matter, not to mention that it represents musical innovation and artistry at its finest. His other two albums aren’t bad either. And by not bad, I mean that they are fantastic.

If you haven’t heard of this guy, or you haven’t heard the new album yet, I have great news for you. In 49 days, FreeDerekWebb.com will be launched, and Mockingbird will be set free. That’s right, not only will you be able to listen online, but you’ll be able to download the album in its entirety and you can burn as many copies as you want and give them to everyone you know. And it’s legal. It was Derek’s idea, for Pete’s sake.

Read more here…

One of the classes I took in college was First Aid & CPR. It was a wasted class from the start.

The only reason I took it was because I needed at least 12 credits to maintain full-time status, and to keep my financial aid, I had to be considered full-time. In classic Millersville style, just about all of the classes that would have done me any good filled up before I could get into them, so I was left picking up a couple of classes that I knew would mean nothing, and First Aid was one of these classes.

My friend Matty was in the class with me and we would sit next to each other. To pass the time, we would flip through the textbook, finding photographs representing people with various ailments and injuries, and we’d whisper to each other the page number on which a certain photograph was found.

“234,” he’d say.

I’d turn to this page and would struggle to control my laughter upon discovering a dramatized obese man sitting on the ground, looking confused, apparently a recent victim of a stroke. I know this sounds either cold-hearted or just stupid, but it was how we’d get through those three long hours every Thursday afternoon as immature college students.

Our professor, probably in her late thirties or early forties, once told us about the time she amazingly saved her own life. She was eating dinner at home and began to choke on something. No one else was around to help her dislodge the piece of food in her throat, so she positioned a chair in precisely the right spot, ran halfway up a flight of stairs and then flung herself over the railing, aiming for the back of the chair. When she came to, she was lying on the floor, and a piece of food was sitting a few inches from her face.

I would have thought a class like First Aid & CPR would make me feel more confident in life, giving me all the know-how I needed in order to help anyone in distress, but such was not the case. More than anything, the class made me paranoid. I went into the class pretty carefree, but I walked out thinking it was more than likely that I would die before midterms, whether from getting a pencil stuck in my eyeball or from getting run over by an eighteen-wheeler, seeing as these both now seemed to be extraordinarily common causes of death.

The professor told us that in the event of a house fire, there were a few basic things to do to ensure our safety. First, we should take an inventory of the house, and consider all the things we might be tempted to run back inside to pull out if the house was on fire. These things could include photo albums, trophies, antiques, or any number of other things. She suggested that every night before going to bed, we’d collect these prized possessions, take them into the bedroom, and close the door. Then, we were to take a damp towel, roll it up, and place it across the bottom of the door. This is all standard procedure, she explained. We were also to keep a bucket of water in the closet to be used in battling the flames, as well as an ax which we would use to break through the walls in order to get out if the firefighters were late coming to the rescue. Of course, it would be wise to decide ahead of time which wall would be the most strategic to go through as we escape. Having children in other bedrooms would further complicate things, and these were issues to think through as well. I remember thinking that this professor was a psycho, that she must never sleep at night, for fear of any number of fates befalling her unawares.

During the lecture on snake bites, she was telling us about four particularly sinister kinds of snakes: cottonmouths, copperheads, rattlesnakes, and one other one I can’t recall just now. I remember how she was going on and on, instilling excessive fear in all of us, saying how these are all very deadly snakes, and yet I don’t recall anything she said about how to treat snake bites. I was too busy being realistic. I raised my hand and asked her how many of these were actually in our area, suggesting of course, that she was off her rocker. They’re all out west, in places like Arizona and Colorado, right? She said that they are actually all found in Pennsylvania, and come to think of it, they are all found in Lancaster County as well. I didn’t believe her, and went back to looking for comical pictures of people with bloody appendages.

*****

Yesterday afternoon after work, a bunch of us went hiking in a park in the southern end of the county. Up some hills, down the hills, across the creek, through the creek, up some more hills and back down again. As we scaled our way down some mossy rocks, I wondered aloud who would be most qualified to give someone mouth-to-mouth in the event of a severe head injury or other terrible accident. Matty was on the hike, and my musing about our medical qualifications (or lack there-of) led to reminiscing about the first aid class, with tales of Professor Paranoia much to the delight of the other nearby hikers.

We had just about come to the end of the hike when we were stopped dead in our tracks because my friend Anna spotted a snake resting on a big rock in the creek just a few feet ahead of us.

“It’s a copperhead,” Matty said. “I’m sure of it.”

The rest of the group had already gone ahead of us, and they had almost certainly stepped on this very rock, within inches of the end of their lives without even knowing it.

We didn’t want to die, and someone said that we should stay away and not aggravate it, but Seth picked up a rock and as I hit the record button on my digital camera, he threw the rock as hard as he could at the Scaly Creature of Death just before us. He hit it on his first try, splitting it in half, thereby ending its afternoon siesta, along with its life of scaring the living daylights out of the occasional passerby.

“I guess our professor was right about those copperheads,” I said to Matty as we stepped past the stiff, bloody half-body of the snake on the rock in the creek.

Having averted one surefire way to get ourselves killed, we walked across a closed bridge that amounted to nothing more than rusty support beams, and then proceded down to Quarryville, where we lit things on fire into the wee hours of the night.

For a visual interpretation of the events that inspired this blog entry, click here.