..... 1. I FUCKING HATE WINTER

..... God takes shits. But his aren't warm or brown. They're cold and white. And right now I'm lying in a massive pile of the stuff bleeding from a gash on the top of my head and staring up at a midget tweaker holding a drum-fed shotgun in my face.
..... Only in fucking Ohio.
..... The midget screams at me to get the fuck up. Slow. I do as the little prick says. I mean, what choice do I really have? I'm staring down the barrel of a pump gun. I would lay there and make a fucking snow angel if he told me to.
..... When I get to my feet I look down at the midget holding the gauge on me. He looks like a demented Christmas elf standing there in the snow. The thought makes me laugh.
..... "You see sumthin funny?" the midget asks.
..... "Everyday when I look in the mirror," I say.
..... I find self-deprecating humor to be a good defense mechanism against aggression. It disarms people.
..... A shotgun blast obliterates my right foot.
..... "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccckkkkk!!!"
..... I guess not.
..... You might be wondering how in the hell I ended up in this situation. I can tell you the explanation only gets more absurd. It all starts with a legend.

..... 2. THE LEGEND OF MUNCHKINLAND

..... Munchkinland is a legend that's been around for decades in Southern Ohio. The story has it that there is a village of retired circus midgets who live on the rural outskirts of greater Cincinnati. It is said that the midgets live in tiny sized houses and that if you approach their homes, the midgets will throw rocks at your car until you leave. People also say that you can hear circus music when you get near the houses.
..... This was dismissed as bullshit in the collective consciousness of the local community of course. An embellishment at best. You see, there was an actual village of tiny houses located on a thirty acre farm behind Rumpke dump. Percy and Anna Ritter owned said farm. Mr. Ritter built their home halfway up a steep hill of stone on the property. He also built a surreal collection of little buildings that the balcony of the home overlooked.
..... He dubbed this miniature frontier village the Handlebar Ranch. The tiny town had small log cabin homes, dance floors indoors and out, picnic tables, pavilions, and hand painted totem poles. The whole thing done up in a funky Wild West motif.
..... Percy was one eccentric dude.
..... According to Mrs. Ritter, Percy came home one day with some cast-iron school bells that he had bought someplace. He put them up below the house, at the edge of the road.
..... Then everything started.
..... Kids began to come in the middle of the night and ring the bells. The Ritters would come out on the balcony and yell at the little shits and tell them to scram. People have speculated that Anna and Percy must've looked kind of small to the kids down on the road looking up at that balcony (Anna being only five-three, Percy five-nine).
..... Just like that a legend was born.
..... For the next couple of decades you had drunk teenagers showing up on the property in the middle of the night looking for munchkins and taking shits down the chimneys of the little houses. Mr. Ritter would usually come out and chase them off with his shotgun. That all stopped for good though when the Handlebar ranch was torn down in '07.
..... Rumpke purchased Mrs. Ritter's land after she kicked the bucket earlier that year (Mr. Ritter died in 1990). The company paid an estimated six million dollars for it. Can you believe that shit? Six fucking mil! The Handlebar Ranch is now a landfill, but that's not the end of the story.
..... I'm just getting fucking started.

..... 3. THE GREATEST TRICK THE DEVIL EVER PULLED...

..... . . . was convincing the world he didn't exist. Yes that's a line from The Usual Suspects (a great fucking movie, by the way). It also sums up exactly what happened.
..... You see, Munchkinland was the real deal.
..... There really was a community of retired circus midgets living at the Handlebar Ranch. These midget Keyser Sozes pulled the wool over everyone's eyes.
..... With a little help from the Ritters of course.
..... The clan of midget circus performers was tired of being gawked at by people like some kind of . . . well . . . like some kind of circus sideshow. They just wanted to live normal lives away from the rest of the world. Being the good-natured people that they were, the Ritters sympathized with their plight. Mr. Ritter built the tiny village for the midgets.
..... The midgets managed to live in obscurity for years on the Handlebar Ranch. After word got around that there was a village of circus midgets somewhere they became more withdrawn. Coming out only in the day during school hours, when teenagers wouldn't come around, and staying in at night. Shortly after Mr. Ritter died they became even more reclusive, but not because they felt their way of life was being threatened. Now they feared exposure for an entirely different reason.
..... Exposure is the last thing you want when you're cooking methamphetamine.
..... The Handlebar Ranch was the perfect setup. It was secluded, the dump next door masked any noxious fumes put off during a cook, and most people didn't even believe they fucking existed. All they had to worry about was an occasional group of dumb-fuck high schoolers and Mrs. Ritter finding out. Anna was old, but she still had her wits about her.
..... The operation ran smoothly up until the day Anna checked out. Then the midgets knew it was just a matter of time before Munchkinland was no more. But these midgets made good meth.
..... Really good.
..... And the guys they were working for knew this.