Trout Lodge at Lake of the Ozarks. And Camp Lakewood at Lake of the Ozarks.

There was a difference.

I was sold on summer camp at the trusting age of 10, applying my signature in a grandiose backhand scrawl while perhaps getting some things screwed around in my head as Missouri's own "Little Lord Flauntelroy", all but lacking the golden locks and the little insufferable suit like a young nobleman. Somehow, I was left with the distinct impression that we would be put up in the Trout Lodge resort, coming down when it pleased us to the dining hall where we would feast on frosted green mint cakes and "read the racing forum", if not Nintendo Power magazine. Bellhops would carry our luggage, as we "smoked" candy cigars. In other words, it would be camp George Herbert Walker Bush Kennenbunkport style. Or so I thought.

Down at the bus station a rabble of children loaded up their bags and waved goodbye to their parents. Some were weeping, and for the life of me I couldn't understand why. Rich kids, poor kids. White kids, black kids. Country kids, city kids. We shared the bus like Vietnam recruits-- short of words, impassive expressions, looking out the window at the rolling countryside.

Eventually, with the shift of pistons, the buses pulled in and rumbled over smooth blacktop. There was Trout Lodge! To my dismay, I realized that the driver was leaving "Trout Lodge" behind. I got up and looked over my shoulder. The driver hollered at me to sit down.

We "scritched" on a rude gravel driveway and pulled up to a crooked standstill with a puff of dust next to some ratty cabins. We got out of the bus and the counselors were already bellowing directives. "GET YOUR SHIT OUT OF THE BUS! LINE UP WITH YOUR AGE GROUP! GET PREPARED FOR THE SWIM TEST! GO, GO, GO, GO!" It was as if a drafted soldier had been dropped down into a rice paddy and was watching the helicopters fly away. "COME BACK!", he yells as the chopper gave him a commodious dip as if to say "son, you're on your own", courtesy of the United States government leaving you to fend for yourself like a man.

That was my introduction to summer camp. . . . . And strangely, I got something out of the experience-- like patriotism, honor, and self-respect! The mornings began with a flag ceremony. The lakefront in the background, the scent of duckweed in the air, and the mouldering odor of sand beneath it all, as the camp director led this solemn occasion.

It was good to be humble enough to obey because you might give orders someday, like the code of the Samurai! We kids were fed a constant diet of Ninja imagery and military derring-do and sports heroism and Guns n' Roses antics and the flashier jewels of the Americanized zeitgeist of larger-than-life "Super-Heroes" and it all began with something very basic. . . . . respecting the flag that made it all possible in our capitalist system of the spectacle, instead of the vegetable mind of the icy Soviet collective that outlawed achievement.

But regardless, our system can have its own flaws when men fall into the cynicism of consumption instead of the heroism of motivation. For a while, there was some talk about turning my stories into a series of comic books but such "big talk" usually goes for naught with the essential stickiness of slime sucking on a rock. You have a gregarious record store owner from New Jersey, a throw-back to the potent, hairy stench of Cheech n' Chong records who keeps in his employ the clonking, dead-fleshed unfit who look like the worst that neurotic, cloud-eyed apartment scum can generate. Among their number, he sees a golden steed who will carve out a niche that will gradually take over the world-- what I see is a broken-down old hack who is terminally-unreliable as he is hopeless with the essential aimlessness of man, given the low human quality of such liberal counterculture strata.

Who can take account for these volatile commodities whose depreciation rate goes down so rapidly and only leaves you standing there with worthless merchandise? But it's the world of brokerage, where values are somewhat arbitrary, luck is fleeting, and "the good deals" have been mined out long ago like tomb robbers spurrin' off with the loot on camels.

It is a losing proposition, like those kids running around in middle school with their porno tapes and Adam Sandler records and "Jerky Boys" CD's like the worst of cruddy, low-brow zaps of stimulation to their "pleasure centers" when there's never an incentive in our society "to grow up", but to keep dancing on like muppets on "Sesame Street", but to more X-rated routines that are definitely "not for children" as putrescent boy-mutants in search of honor they will never find. You can see them to this day working in pizza parlours and comic book shops and will never go anywhere until they decide "to get serious".

It's like any young man who's ever had the stray thought that he's like to be with a girl like Winona Ryder, moonlights like a lowing calf, but never gets it together "to back it up" with anything as he circles around "the forest of challenge" but never actually plunges into the unknown like a hunter or woodsman in search of the castle where he will find and woo her.

And sometimes, even strong-willed types like me "need to be shown their master". We live in a society where cheap, ten-penny nihilism and existentialism and "the challenging of authority" has become the order of the day-- stripped from its original golden relevance, but sold in cruddy form to idiots who just parrot whatever they've heard without understanding the relevance or import of the original movement. And even if they did, they cynically weave the argument toward their advantage to avoid taking "the honorable path" in favor of laziness and debauchery and the downward dissolution of forms which insults "The Life Force". Sometimes the only way I could be broken of this was when my Dad quite literally had to beat the shit out of me in order for the boy to be drug back to shore, drowning in the filth of his lower instincts.

And I loved him for it. Once things had reached that level, then you knew for sure that you had been "a little too much like "Little Lord Flauntelroy" and not a reasonable young man of his time and station. Some of my most constructive experiences was when I had brief, brutal knocks with reality when I couldn't "run away" or deny the world. Such as busting concrete for an afternoon up at my Uncle Jim's, or getting out of bed after surgery even though you had a raw incision in your side, or a couple of days of taking up the worst, rankest, most humble jobs imaginable. I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything though I certainly "hated it" at the time, "when there was no way out but through" until you couldn't do any more and had reached your absolute limit. To be noble, all knights must serve in the lowest stables to purify their souls. Only then, after years of discipline, may they sit at "The Banquet of Heroes".