If Kent is suddenly sounding or acting like a certain shades-wearing caped monolith of masculinity, it is purely coincidental. Purely. Scout's honor. Eagle Scout's honor, specifically, because I keep getting fucking mail from them even though I've never been an Eagle Scout ever in my entire goddamn life (though they seem to think otherwise).

Perhaps I was, at some point in the distant past, an Eagle Scout, and I simply left off one day, going into a permanent fugue state in which all mental records of my Eagle Scoutery were wiped clear of my conscious mind, folded up and tucked away deep in the spongy gray recesses of my brain. What trauma may I have experienced that caused me to entirely block out what was, evidently, a fervent pursuit of my youth? A horrific birdhouse construction incident? Perhaps I was lost in the woods with my troop and, with starvation closing in and our rations exhausted, I was forced to consume my recently-deceased Scouts-in-arms simply to stay alive. Maybe I was attacked by an entire dam of angered, bristling beavers, the sound of their tails smacking against their wooden city-state like the sound of tiny river gods tolling a death knell.

Dear God, the sounds of their tails! And then the raccoons came, frothing and glibbering and crying dark prayers in unknown tongues to the daemon sultan Azathoth and the messenger and soul of the Old Ones, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, a creature so named by Egyptian raccoons of old and who presided over the unholy compact between the river-dwellers and the garbage-scroungers to scour the dark places of the forest of interlopers and miscreants!

I have been reading too much Lovecraft lately. Apologies.

Anyway, while all this musing and theorizing is well and good, I suppose we shall never know. The fact seems to remain that, at some point immemorial, I was an Eagle Scout...or so I'm being constantly told. It's actually quite surreal, as though I've received an invitation to a class reunion at a school I never attended. On the upside, if anyone ever tried to profile me the old-fashioned way, they'd have a massively false piece of information on their hands to base their assumptions on.

For every baffling, inexplicable cloud, there is a silver lining.