once upon a time cad was a young'un growing up in a baptist church and his mom and dad made sure cad was involved in as many church-related activities as humanly possible.

one such activity when cad was about 12 was taking our broken down bus from monroe to little calliou to host a VBS for the kids in the area.

baws i had no idea what i was in for.

when someone asks me where little calliou is, i tell them drive directly south in louisana until you hit the Gulf. then drive south about 10 more miles.

anyway, so we get down there and its like nothing i had ever experienced. pull in on a sunday and the good folks at the little church there were kind enough to bring all their crockpots and cajun and creole voodoo with them that cad had never experienced. it was like i had flown to a new planet.

anyway, we sang or were recognized or somesuch at the evening service and afterwards our youth director thought it would be fun to load everyone up in the bus and drive back to Houma to get popeyes. so we did.

arriving back in the dark, we all got out of the bus and headed into the church....

......

......

...flipped on the lights....

roaches and water bugs and all kinds of creatures COVERING THE WALLS. no, not just a few..THOUSANDS. we all just stood there in the doorway, frozen; like we had just entered the gates of hell.

suddenly, one of the older boys shrugs, takes off a shoe and gets after it.

for the next 2-3 hours we are doing nothing but killing bugs with shoes and anything else we had on us. just a fruitless exercise at that point. i felt bad for the girls. we boys could make a game out of it but the poor girls were just absolutely terrified.

we slept on cots so i scrounged up all my stuff and put it inside the sleeping bag wiith me. no way anything was going to live on the floor.

so that was day 1

the next morning bright and early we got on the church bus and went 'fishing' for kids. we drove ALL OVER the delta and just loaded up little poor cajun kids (we weren't much better off than they were so it was the slightly poor leading the more poor) and to this day i can still see the GIGANTIC SMILES on their faces as they came running up to get on the bus.

we had a HUGE crew by the time we got back over to the church and i can't remember a thing we did, but i know we had all kinds of food and activities planned.

so day 2 introduced me to the GIANT RED FIRE ANTS of LITTLE CALLIOU. those damn things were everywhere. i couldn't sit down without having them crawl on me (foreshadowing)

so go to bed that night..wake up middle of the night in EXCRUCIATING pain coming from my penis. i jump up and head to the bathroom and when i flip on the light, there's the biggest ant i've ever seen sitting on the head of my penis that was about the size of a golf ball at this point because he had stung the every living shite out of me.

it wasn't like we brought a nurse along so after peeling the ant off and crushing into molecules, all i could do was go back to bed.

the next morning it wasn't any better so i told the youth leader what happened and he gave me something to put on it. dont remember what it was.

so that story was over..well so i thought.

wed night the little cajun church preacher shows up and he's very charismatic and he's up on the pulpit working the audience and for whatever reason i had to introduce myself..and he says "CAD! oh yeah i heard you met some of our finest locals...TELL ME WHERE HE GOT YOU AT!"

i'm standing in front of 100 people, face red as hell and he's got ahold of my arm giving me a "Are you gonna tell us?" look and i gave my youth minister the biggest "please save me" look i can muster but i had to speak so I just lamely mumbled "it was on the lower half of my body" and i think someone finally came to my rescue and got him off the subject.

ok there you go. CSB. feel free to fuss at me for wasting your time reading this but i swear every aspect of this story is 100% truth.