St. Remedius Medical College: “Project 236: The Great Highland Park Armadillo Hunt”

“Walk Softly But Carry a Big Stink” or “Shit for Brains, Born To Swill”

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

If Dallas had to choose between patron deities, the choice would fall between Some Guy and the Great God Football. Some Guy was everpresent, both the blind idiot god at the center of the universe and his malevolent servitor, and his worshippers similarly flailed in approximation of productive activity, being perfectly happy as recipients and instigators of mindless chaos. The more damage caused by a Some Guy edict that was forgotten femtoseconds after being uttered, the more effective, because the alternative was having to take initiative with their lives. If those worshippers had a prayer other than “I wanna make people HURT,” that prayer would be “Oh, Some Guy won’t burn me THIS time,” because Some Guy was both a jealous god and a vindictive god, and his responses to his prayers always rolled downhill. Dallas functioned the way it did because when Some Guy delivered a command or an initiative, the assumption was always that it affected someone else, even when the official record showed otherwise.

(By comparison, the Great God Fuh-Boh was King Log to Some Guy’s King Stork, but only just. Fuh-Boh demanded worship and Fuh-Boh demanded sacrifices, but was content with supplicants covering the windows of cars, trucks, and houses with Dallas Cowboys stars as both a signal to fellow fanatics and a warning to others. Both reveled in the Monday morning services of barrelling down Dallas highways while nearly terminally hung over, bobbing and weaving in the road between bouts of puke-out-the-window nausea and cheering recap videos of the previous night’s worship on their phones. By blood count alone, Fuh-Boh was a thirstier god: Some Guy wanted his worshippers hale and hearty through the rest of the week so they could take their punishments, but Fuh-Boh feasted best when his worshippers slammed into each other on the highways and other worshippers blocked off traffic while attempting to get video of the vehicular and human wreckage.)

Some Guy is ephemeral, and Some Guy is eternal. Some Guy is everywhere and nowhere, and Some Guy evaporates and re-manifests, millions of times every second, all over the universe. Some Guy is Many, Some Guy is Legion, and Some Guy is Who The Hell Is That? Some Guy is both responsible for the development of sentience and civilization throughout space and time and responsible for their utter destruction and degradation. Some Guy instigates and encourages evolution of mind, body, and spirit because, like all parasites, Some Guy is successful enough that life forms change and alter just to get a break from Some Guy’s horror for a rotation of a galaxy, a geologic age, a generation, a day, a lone breath. Like any bully, Some Guy is worshipped but never loved, and like so many bullies, Some Guy attracts worshippers willing and happy to crush family, friends, neighbors, and complete strangers under a boot if they think they might be allowed to look at the boot one day. Some guy was expansive enough not to care about his worshipper’s adoration, and monomaniacal enough to throw continuum-spanning tantrums the moment the adoration stopped. Some Guy’s worshippers tried to become as much like their deity as they could, and by doing so, Some Guy became just as bad as they were. The feedback looped ran across the universe, up and down the timestream, starting and stopping wars, starting and stopping life, starting and stopping vendettas and reconciliations and contractual obligations. Some Guy cared, and did not care, and his adoring faithful returned the sentiment.

To anyone unfamiliar with blind idiot forces of chaos, Some Guy’s seeming love of Dallas, Texas seems incongruous. A little research, though, shows that Some Guy’s influence runs through the city, in all of its incarnations, like fungus mycellae in a poorly maintained wooden porch. So many business decisions rested on final approval from Some Guy. Some Guy featured in so many federal, state, and municipal court cases that a few wags suggested either submitting an arrest warrant or advocating that Some Guy take the state bar exam and practice law directly. The less said about the various Dallas journalistic and advertising organizations that depended upon Some Guy as a source, a publicist, and a counterargument, the better. Pluck at random threads of the tapestry that was Dallas, and one rapidly learned that Some Guy was both the binding for completely unrelated threads and the worm gradually eating away everything from behind. As such, the biggest surprise was that Some Guy didn’t get his own columns in the Dallas Morning News and D magazine simultaneously, thereby increasing both publications’ readability and accessibility to advertisers.

In the years before its disappearance, the archives of St. Remedius Medical College described the never-ending war with Some Guy and his worshippers, with innumerable incidents of particular ludicrousness attributed to the Vaporous Entropy. Some make a strange sense. Far too many, though, are on a par with what has become known as The Great Highland Park Armadillo Hunt of 1982, where the threads of influence spread further the longer it’s studied.

For backstory, the Park Cities, University Park and Highland Park, are areas in Dallas north of downtown much like Beverly Hills in Los Angeles: separate independent cities surrounded by the larger city, full of only the best demonstrations of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Decades of relative isolation from the rest of the area, combined with decades of selective inbreeding, leaves Park Cities residents as the Damascus goats of Texas residents, only without the goats’ charm or usefulness. Highland Park in particular fell to Some Guy’s influence shortly after its founding, and the rot spreads outward: look at any Dallas boondoggle or grift that causes the most damage or despair, and behind it is almost always a Highland Parker who pushed it because “Some Guy told me about it.” Very occasionally, Highland Park gets recognition in national and international affairs, always as an example of mockery and justified avoidance, but most of its residents are perfectly happy to remain isolated and insular, fearing outside influence that might expose exactly how ignorant and susceptible they really are. As such, both cities are best described as “Dunwich with more money,” with observers wondering which would run out first: the area’s generational wealth or residents’ DNA’s ability to withstand that much collective abuse and neglect.

The St. Remedius archives were full of anecdotes of Some Guy using the Park Cities as a particularly cruel punchline, but one of the most distinctive was later catalogued as Number 236, to distinguish it from Number 235 (an effort to rebuild United States Post Office automated postal tellers into devices that could deliver letters and postcards in the past) and Number 236 (an effort to blackmail the editors of Time magazine into giving its Man of the Year 1998 award to Creative Onanism editor Michal Kasparek), stands out in its sheer surrealism. Commonly known as “The Great Highland Park Armadillo Hunt of 1982,” the further one digs into the details, the harder one has to keep from jamming crochet needles up one’s nose with a 5-pound sledgehammer to make the pain go away.

The story that escaped Dallas: the spring of 1982 was one of the wettest in North Texas recorded history, to the point where the local reservoir Lake Grapevine overflowed its spillway, washing out a major road with a raging rapid that dug out what was later known as “Grapevine Canyon.” (The discovery of dinosaur tracks in the bottom of Grapevine Canyon involved a separate St. Remedius investigation into Harkun time travel prankery.) According to popular accounts, the rains led to armadillos leaving their normal habitats in the Trinity River basin and moving upland, eventually settling into the Park Cities. Said rains also allegedly led to explosions in lawn grub populations, thereby giving the armadillos a ready food source, causing then to inflict “indescribable damage” to overly cultivated lawns throughout the area. Being unable to handle nature giving them a metaphorical finger, Highland Park residents contemplated hiring hunters to shoot the offending edentates, only to discover other residents had issues with random gunfire in the neighborhood and still others with watching armadillos shot, stabbed, and macheted in plain sight. The general assessment was to purchase live traps to “take the dillos out to the farm,” but argument started about the best available bait. The equally general assessment was not to bait the traps with stale beer, a classic trick for farmers in Central and South America for centuries, but with raw shrimp…put out first thing in the morning, right when the armadillos were finding places to sleep. The issue went out on newswires only after the whole of Highland Park smelled of rotting shrimp when summer temperatures arrived, and after the rest of Texas justifiably laughed and pointed, the armadillo problem was never addressed again.

Again, this was the story that escaped containment. Anybody with even the slightest familiarity with St. Remedius read the story and automatically assumed the answer to “Who the hell told these upper-class twits that armadillos were attracted to raw shrimp?” was “Some Guy.” In fact, news articles about the armadillo invasion admitted as much. It was dedicated study of the backstory that showed the answer was “Some Guy” all the way down.

Question 1: Who was the instigator who convinced Flower Mound resident Stig Gator to invest his life savings into starting the “Flower Mound Catfish Farm and Armadillo Petting Zoo” in late 1981, even after discovering that armadillos were a vector for leprosy?

Question 2: When the Flower Mound Catfish Farm and Armadillo Petting Zoo shut down a month after its opening, who convinced Gator to staple his face back on, load up some 100 of his armadillos and 50 of his catfish into the back of a cargo van, and drive to the Dallas Zoo to convince the Zoo to buy up all of his animals so he could afford the money for gasoline for the trip back to Flower Mound? Equally importantly, who told Gator that his animals were worth “a shit-ton of money,” but only if they were delivered without cages?

Question 3: Who put in an order for repairs at the intersection of Interstate Highway I-35 and Mockingbird Lane, including signs detouring commuters through the center of Highland Park, on the Monday morning Stig Gator started his drive from Flower Mound to the Dallas Zoo?

Question 4: Who encouraged Highland Park homeowner Leslie Chew to spend the night cutting through the trunk of a massive red oak tree leaning over Mockingbird Lane with a hand saw, on the promise that doing so would get her an interview on all three of the local television morning news shows?

Question 5: Their subsequent voluntary commitment to a state-certified drug rehab clinic prevents their names from being released in police reports or news coverage, as mandated by state law, but who convinced three Southern Methodist University frat brothers to break into the back of a single cargo van awaiting removal of a fallen red oak tree on Mockingbird Lane and toss the still-live channel catfish in the back into the nearest storm sewer?

Question 6: Who convinced jogger Vin Goggo to abandon his normal morning route and run alongside Mockingbird Lane, encountering a racing herd of freshly freed armadillos and scattering them with screams of “Squeal like a pig! Squeal! SQUEAL!” before one startled armadillo jumped in his face, knocking out his front teeth and giving him a concussion?

Question 7: Who spent the spring of 1982 recommending that lawn care services in the greater Park Cities area switch to standard pelleted weed-and-feed lawn fertilizers to “BugOut,” a new product that promised to control lawn grubs but in fact encouraged them to grow to much larger sizes than normal?

Question 8: Who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in trucking companies shipping frozen raw shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico to triple their normal shipments?

Question 9: Who fitted the armadillos with radio trackers shortly before their release, so they could be located, loaded up, and rereleased along Lake Travis outside of Austin once Highland Park was redolent of rotten shrimp?

Finally, Question 10: Who told reporters at the Dallas Morning News to cover the armadillo invasion and editors to put the final piece over the newswires?

From his throne at the center of space-time, Some Guy laughed and laughed and laughed, particularly because nobody ever asked about the catfish until it was far too late to stop them. St. Remedius had to clean up that mess, too.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

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