Scouts.

 I was a boy scout in a fairly dysfunctional troop of little hell raisers. There were only three scouts my age and so we usually got lumped in with the older boys to make it easier on the long-suffering leaders. I started scouts at age eight with the cubs and managed to get in trouble all the time by exceeding the bounds of good sense and reason pretty much continually. I lost several dad-help-boy car and spaceship races because my dad was not into helping but I learned to take defeat ungraciously. But when you turn twelve you are moved up into the boy scouts which is where they take the leash off and let you not have dad help very much at all so my anarchistic leadership was allowed to flourish and we had some good dangerous times. My first leader in scouts was actually the guy who's sandbox I burned down with Justin and Ryan but he had forgiven me by then and was a great leader who let us do what we wanted after he brought us to the woods. I stood out as a leader of boys so the summer that I turned twelve they signed me up for a boy scout leadership training camp where we were going to learn how to help the leaders mold these rebellious young punks into good citizens. This was also the summer when we would leave our hometown elementary/ middle school for the first time to go to Jr. High in the next town over so there was a lot of new stuff going on which suited me fine because I had not been even remotely successful socially at my old haunts so a change of scenery was just what I needed.  

Mikey Needs that F-ing Money

 Speaking of the mud digs cash run the next year I was lined up in some rather tatty clothes, having learned my lesson. I was then at the maximum age of twelve when who should line up by me but the two year older Mikey of The Bully Mikey fame. I was nervous to begin with because of his fearsome reputation and my previous run ins with him. My concern only deepened when he started thinking out loud how he was going to kill anyone who got in his way because he needed that F-ing money. He went on to talk to none of us and all of us about why he needed the F-ing money. He declared he needed money for a date that he had with a girl that night and without these extra funds he would most likely not receive any physical stimulation as remuneration for his investment of time and money. He may not have said it so fancy, in fact I think he used a phrasing more like “I need that F-ing money for my date to night or I won't be getting any ass.” Far be it from me to risk a beating and potentially deny a worthy young man the potential of such an invigorating engagement. I felt like someone should mention that this race was for younger kids but felt like maybe I was not the man, or boy if you will, for the job but while the announcer went over the rules I looked around at some adults meaningfully trying to get them to read my mind and kick Mikey out. No one did and the race began, Mikey easily outpaced his younger and intimidated competition and took home the prize. I never got the chance to follow up and see if he was indeed rewarded for his efforts from the young lady but I hope he was. Just because he cheated and scared me doesn't mean I will begrudge him his dry-hump if he has it coming.

Mud Digs and Breaking in the Clothes

 Coming from an hillbilly town pays off big time when it is city celebration time. Every year in the fall the town would but on activities for Cherry Days, later changed to orchard days because the other orchards got jealous. There was a parade, car show, fair, beauty pageant, mud digs and rodeo. I will tell you a little about what went on at all of these events but first I want to cover the most important because it is the most awesome – the mud dig. The mud dig is when the local fire department makes a mud ditch about twenty feet wide, three feet deep and 300 feet long. Competitors in several categories of vehicle would rev up at the starting end and then be judged on how well their car, truck, four wheeler or motorcycle went before it got stuck. The spectators got really drunk and sat in the sun and cheered wildly so the situation was win-win. The person going the furthest through the mud was awarded prizes and money so the competition was fierce. People from Santaquin love money so that was a good incentive. You know who else loved money? Me. Yes constant reader your author was deeply motivated by the prospect of found or won money so when the announcers called for all of the young men younger than twelve to line up I was sure that my pure white hot love of money would push my body through the mud and in to the loving arms of the twenty dollar bill that was taped to a fence post at the other end. The single went up and I ran as hard and as fast as I could and found out why the cars and trucks had so much trouble getting through the mud. It was wet and deep and muddy. I slogged to a stop a hundred or so feet from the glory and reward of the currency and exited mud pit left and walked home with the mud caking to my legs. When I got home my mom didn't even care that my feel-bads were hurt by loosing and all she could focus on was the fact that I had begged her to let me wear my new school clothes to look cool and then ran through the mud in them. I couldn't help but think that winning the twenty dollars may have taken the sting out of her reprove. A twenty usually did.

Hot Oil. Smoking Hot Oil.

 There was a general rule of thumb at our house and that was when our parents were away we would ratchet up the danger a notch. They would head out the door and all of the sudden we would be stuck with the notion to use power tools, jump off high places, or as I am about to relate in this little tale of woe deep fry bread on the stove. In many mobile homes there is a half wall between the kitchen and living room which allows for spectation of the kitchen activities by those not in the kitchen. Vital to the catastrophe I am relating there was also a sink with a spray head common to that was al within reach of our stove. We were going along frying some nice donuts and had made quite a few when my brother Matt and I we distracted by the switching of raw dough and reviving plates. In that time the oil got hot enough to smoke slightly which sent my little sister in to action she had been standing behind the wall and when she saw the oil smoke, and to be absolutely clear it was only that thin white smoke that oil often gets in deep frying operations, she grabbed up the spray head and turned on the water and sprayed water into the pot of superheated oil. If you are familiar with the middle ages, and I have no reason to doubt that you are, one of the classic castle defense maneuvers was to pour boiling oil onto invaders. I'll tell you why they did that, it is because it ranges from extremely painful to fatal to be hit with boiling oil. This ties back to the story I was just relating because when Mary sprayed the oil it erupted out of the pan splattering Matt and I with four hundred degree oil. The good news was that on the continuum of boiling oil injuries we were able to keep them on the extremely painful end of the spectrum, the bad news was too fold, first we had bad burns that left Matt and I permanently scarred in the abdominal region, maybe forever ruining my shirtless modeling career and secondly, there was a huge mess of oil splattered all over the kitchen which we had to clean up ourselves because Mary was off somewhere crying because of the beating she got for being an idiot.  

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

 Even though it was intended for a younger audience because Adam was into it I became a fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It started as cartoon watching and ninja weapon role play both of witch were not a huge stretch for me from what I loved already. Then we got into playing with the action figures and I thought that playing was best with gasoline and conflagration but Adam liked his toys less melted. Then the fad caught on more broadly and there were live action feature films and video games and sequels. Luckily, school started and I was on to seventh grade before I was obligated to lots more commitment to turtles. Adam and stopped being friends all together and I had very little to do with Adam or Ninja Turtles since. We always remained friendly but when school is in three years is much to big a gap for fiends because our middle school was in the same building but separate from the elementary school and crossing over was forbidden at all times both socially and by principal fiat.  

I Invent a Game

Like Risk but with no risk for me.  

The summer between sixth and seventh grade was when Adam and I were friends and in that time I was introduced to the game Risk. I was absolutely in love with the game except for one big problem – I could lose. That was not that fun so I decided to make up a new game with a board and pieces I bought at a local thrift store called the Deseret Industries. The board was a map board of Europe that I paired with army figures and some chess pawns for nuclear weapons. I had organized the rules to favor my strategy and almost guaranteed a win. I brought my game over to Adam's house and got him and his mom to play. The game play was going fine with Adam and I ganging up on his mom but then I started to get worried that he was becoming too powerful so I used the the nuclear pawn on him to decimate his forces. As a nine year old I don't know if he was familiar with Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, or Machiavelli, because if he was he would have recognized my friend-poor but strategically sound decision. When I dropped the bomb on him literally and figuratively Adam's face dropped and he looked on the verge of tears after he had helped me as an ally I bombed him to make sure I won. I felt horrible and tried to throw the game to earn back some friendship but he just wanted to lose and have it be over with and then I took my game and went home. I thought I liked winning above all but I was wrong.

Adam's Cellar Fort

 I had been playing Adam's house for a couple of months we discovered that he had a root cellar in his back yard. Well, a root cellar is most the way to a secret base already so we set to work cleaning it out and making plans to make it a cool fort. The main problem was that it was really dirty because it had dirt walls and a dirt floor. What we needed was some cement to make a nice floor and really spruce up the joint so we got a wagon and walked the mile to the hardware store and bought as much as we could afford, one bag. We hauled it back mixed it with water in a wheelbarrow and then poured it in. Unfortunately because of the laws of physics and math our meager plop of concrete only covered a very small section of floor and didn't do that very well. We were disheartened because of the futility of a project that would require more money than we had and more time then we had. We decided to abandon the concrete floor and walls plan and decided to focus on getting a few hammocks. I still am not sure where to buy hammocks to this day and I definitely didn't know back then. My plan was to have Adam's mom make us some from some really strong material and sew it up on her sewing machine. The problem with this plan was two-fold first I didn't have any really strong cloth and Adam's Mom's sewing machine was not equipped for industrial sewing jobs. I found some plastic feed sacks that I thought would make some nice hammocks and we tried to tie them together and hang them from the dirt walls. As most people know dirt is not he most stable of surfaces and it held true in this case as any sort of anchor we tried to put in the wall pulled out with any pressure. Multiply defeated we cashed in and headed inside to watch cartoons an activity we were successful at.

My Best Friend Mario

Doesn't this look more fun than human contact and friendship?

 If you are a long time reader you may have noticed that I was a bit like a heroin addict when it came to video games. I didn't have access to my medicine and I was sick man, I was sick. I would not go so far as to say that I used Adam for his Nintendo but there is that tinge and flavor to our relationship at times. He was into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and had that video game on his personal Nintendo on his personal television in his bedroom. When I would come to play sometimes I was more interested in the game than what Adam was wanting to do. It is the sad fact of life that those who have are bored by their possessions and those who have not spend all of their time fantasizing about how great it would be to have. He was very accommodating and would let me play as I wished with very little complaint but my addiction was not so great that the pangs of guilt wouldn't tug at me after a couple of hours and I would feel bad about coming over to play with Adam's Nintendo and not with him. Then I would put down the controller and go and try to find him in the house or outside or as had happened on one occasion I realized that I had been overlooked and the whole family had left together. The newest Super Mario Bros game was coming out near his birthday and I was sure that he would get it and I was probably more excited about it than him. I was intensely focused on the game because I had seen a documentary about the greatest video game player in the world who was a young man that went by the name of the wizard and he won the world championships of video games by finding a warp whistle on Mario 3 which annihilated the competition. Adam had my brother and I over to his house the night before for the friend birthday party and we gave him a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toy that we had wrapped up in layers of boxes and packing tape and had written a joke very similar to the ridiculous requests of the Knights-Who-So-Recently-Said-Nee in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

   

Of course our great homage was entirely lost on the plebeians at the party be cause they had no idea how they were going to use a herring to open a box and why that would be funny. We went home without knowing if he would receive the new Mario game because he didn't open his gifts from his family at the kid party. So I called him early the next morning and in the background of the call before I greeted him I heard the sounds of the coveted game and actually said, 'Happy Mario 3 Day! Can I come over?” I least he was not confused by my subtly hints and he graciously allowed me to come over and put me right into rotation with his sisters and himself and we spent hours and hours playing the game and made a deep run into the game before his mom was forced to kick me out to go to my own house when it had become night. I made no bones about my desire to come back for seconds and went home and dreamed about Mario navigating the digital perils that Bowser had devised. We played the game long and often until school started and there was not enough time to get a good solid day of play in. I never beat the game or saw it beat until I was an adult and played it to the conclusion on a emulator.

Making Stop Motion Movies

The focus of the action and inaction.

When I was friends with Adam we did a lot of projects and activities with his family which was not the way we did things at my house. Adam's dad and mom seemed like they were always around and facilitating snacking and playtime. One of the best days of my young life is one Adam's dad broke out the video camera that had a stop motion feature. We set up a little people's car park toy as the set and then worked out frame by frame a riveting and unwritten tale of a teenage mutant ninja turtle saving many other toys from the insatiable hunger of a blob of play-doh. Adam, his sisters and I worked for hours and hours while his dad patiently took one picture at a time. Finally, we had a few minute long video short on plot and character but long on love and hands and heads left in the frame. After we made that movie we had all kinds of plans to make a whole feature length movie with a real plot and characters but we never made another.

Our Atari 520 ST Has One Game

 Before PC's became ubiquitous there were several pretenders to the throne and my dad bought a couple of them. I mentioned the TRS80 and we had a Commodore 64 but my favorite computer before we got an IBM compatible box was the Atari 520ST. The 520 was Atari's foray into home computing but I loved it for one reason and that was a game called Mouse Trap. I had actually gone to the mall with my mom for my birthday and went to the computer store their that had a whole wall of Games for the system and I read over the boxes and scrutinized the pictures for a long time because at 20 dollars I knew that there were not going too be many if any more games so I had to choose wisely. Mouse Trap was a single screen platformer with fifty levels and fun themes and no continues and no extra lives. It was brutal, as most games used to be. I would get a good start and be deep in the twenties when I would make a mistake and lose two lives on one level and know I didn't even have a chance as the levels got harder. They got much much harder. Every play-through I could push a little further into the unknown and discover a new level which may cost me all of my remaining lives and require an hour of replay to get back to. I played like a boy possessed and even took the game disk over to a friend house who had a 520 as well to continue playing because my mom had kicked me out of the house and told me to go play somewhere else. I think she meant out in the sunshine but I did literally what she asked. This would be the part where I told you I persevered and got to see the end screen and finally learn the reason for the mouse's quest but the levels got too hard for me in the middle forties and I eventually lost interest and gave up. The 520 went the way of all of the non-PCs and other games would come and go but that was the first one that I loved because it was mine.    

Stealing Matt's Much Younger Friends

 I did not go to school in the sixth-grade and I had not made any friends in the fifth grade mainly because of my personality. My brother who was two years younger than me was in school and he did have friends, probably due to his personality. So, I would stay at home all day bored and then Matt would come home and I would be ready to play and that meant tagging along and then trying to take over Matt's playtime and friend. We got in several fights over it when Matt would tell me to leave them alone or later at night tell me I had no friends and to stop trying to steal his. I did need friends though and there they were, being brought right to my door step. After that he would just go to their houses to avoid me and I started moseying over just to drop in on them to see what was going on over there. I would try and get them to do projects with me and try and direct work flow at all times. Now that I am thinking about it I was a really wiener but in my defense I was desperately lonely. With one of Matt's friends I eventually stopped waiting for Matt to initiate contact and I started just going over myself and that was a neighbor kid named Adam. I think that he was even younger than Matt and was three years younger than me but he had a very nice mom and dad and was game for all sorts of crazy projects. When I went back to school and got some friends my own age I kind of stopped being friends with Adam and switched my interest over to his sister who was a year older than me because she was better looking.   

Mom Hates That Newfangled Cartoon

 About the time I was ten a new fad was sweeping the nation and that was a cartoon in prime time about a young man who sassed and skateboarded his was onto every cool kids tee-shirt. We didn't have television so we had no idea what was going on a school with this yellow 'don't have a cow man' saying young iconoclast embraced by the trendsetters. We wanted in on it, of course, but we didn't know what it was exactly. One Sunday we were over at my Grandma 'Other-Mother's' house and 'The Simpsons' was coming on so we finally got to see what all the hype was. It was an episode about Bart stealing Lisa's cupcakes she made for her teacher and my mom hated everything about it. She thought the animation was poor, the writing and voice acting was stilted and Bart need a spank and to be sent to his room. I honestly didn't really like it myself but if it was what the cool kids were up to then I was on board. I was so so intolerable that my mom shut it off ten minutes in and we played a game instead. She forbade us from purchasing Bart's sass mouth slogan tee-shirts, many of which contained the word 'hell' and we banned from school anyway. Soon the writers shifted the focus of the show off of Bart and onto Homer and the writing and animation improved and my mom became a huge fan of the show and would watch the new episodes every Sunday and the taped episodes her friend made for her. In her defense that was a pretty lame episode and not a great season at all but it got better and then it got worse, much worse. She stopped being a fan about the tenth or eleventh season and has pretty much stayed away ever since.   

You Will Watch the 'Milagro Beanfield War'

We didn't have a huge selection of videos in our home library when I was young. We mainly got movies that were in bargain bins or on sale or copied from video store versions. When you are looking at the ten or so selections we had on a long winter night you would get desperate and watch most of them even the horrible ones. We had, 'The Princess Bride', 'The Jerk', 'Critters', 'The House of Long Shadows', 'The Sound of Music', 'Father Goose', The PBS Miniseries 'Anne of Greene Gables' and almost finally - Two Nova documentaries on one tape the first and by far the favorite was about sharks and the second watched but not loved was one about Chernobyl. The outsider in this motley crew was a critically acclaimed and horrible boring bargain bin find that my mom brought home from a sale that a video store had as they went out of business – 'The Milagro Beanfield War'. It was resisted, it was fought against, it was shunned but on a night that had seen most or all of the rotation already there would creep in a desperation a little creeping need to suckle at the flickering electronic teat or be forced to cease vegetation and do something productive. That is something we couldn't do and so on occasion, rare occasion the tale of the old beanfield war would be inserted in the machine and we would power through another viewing. Sometimes it is about sacrifice and when you are willing to watch some awful Mexicans versus the Developer drama you find out something about your character and your personal commitment to avoiding productivity.  

Travis Friend

 Over the years I have been a pretty shamefully bad friend. I have many times used someone for their toys or social status or out of convenience only to discard them when I saw a better deal. Travis was once such case. Now it is important to understand in the realm of nerds there is not one universally compatible type that can always be friends with each other. There is in fact a rich tapestry of nerds who almost all believe while they might not be in the jet set they are cooler then some other type of nerd whom is helplessly pathetic. To a popular kid it may look like a band geek was at the same level as computer nerd, and sometimes they shared some of the same members in each classification but they were not the same tribe not at all. In elementary school the unpopular kids fell into just a few major camps. There were the poor kids, who could be cool but popular kids would never want them on their team during recess if possible. They would rather all be on the same team and cheat to win then to have a superior athlete who was also poor. The second type were those nonathletic kids who even if they were wealthy didn't gain acceptance if they couldn't play baseball or basketball or confusingly in the hierarchy – four-square. There were academically minded nerds who preferred to play checkers or read during recess and they were almost at the bottom of the barrel but they were saved by the stinky nerds. The stinky nerd classification was a catch all that included the weirdo paste-eater kids, the unbathed, the crazy and the deranged. I should mention that these were how the boys were sorted out I don't know anything about girls at this age because they were infested with cooties.

I was one of the poor and nonathletic kind of nerds that was in denial about my athleticism and was always trying to join up on a team and somehow pull out a Disney-esque win over the rich kids. It didn't work so I decided to strike up a friendship with a really nice poor academic nerd and test those waters. Alright now we are finally back to Travis and he was into all kinds of really nerdy things like models and computers and I thought that was something I could get on board with. I went over to his house a couple of times and we played video games and his older brother showed us some cool magic tricks. We watched Indiana Jones and the last crusade a couple of times because they owned the film. I genuinely had a lot of fun playing with him but he was from a family that everyone decided to pick on for some reason. Everyone made fun of them and pranked them for no real reason except for it caught on and stayed on through high-school. One day I was getting off the bus with Travis when one of his neighbors who I thought was about the coolest kid in the world made some comment about me being friends with Travis. I wish, sincerely, this was the part of the story where I tell you how I stood my ground and defended my friend but I didn't and I got off the bus and went to his house with him to play for the last time. The whole time I was over there I just kept thinking what people thought about me being friends with Travis and when I went home I never went back. At least we had not really become good friends before I curbed him and he wouldn't want to be a friend with a shallow kid like me anyway.   

Knee Boarding

 Tow sports are ranked and respected according to how hard it is to stand up while doing it. Therefore, a single ski is the hardest and most respected, then it is either wake boarding or two skis and the underachieving little brother is the knee board. I think the knee board was intended as an accessible and fun tow sport for children and the handicapped but I embraced it and loved when we got to go out knee boarding. First we would get the populist water weenie out of the way and once all of those victims were sufficiently whiplashed we would bring out the big guns. A yellow knee board that I could launch from the shore or the water. My dad would tow me for as long as I wanted around in big circles and figures eight while I would steer back and forth jumping off the wake. Well, what felt like jumping off of the wake. I could turn and ride backwards, I could even spin 360 or whip myself across the wake when we were close to shore and time it so I could cruise to a stop right on or near the beach. It was my favorite part of summer. I always wanted to get other people involved so they could learn how and then see how much better I was at it than them but no one seemed to really care. Once we even got my mom, a very reluctant adventurer, to give it a try she failed to plane and the nose of the board dipped under the water and instead of letting go of the tow rope she held on for what seemed like a minute with her face making a pretty great bow wave in front of it. Her panicked face plowing through a wall of water struck all of us in the boat as very funny and we joked about it for quite a while.     

Nun Chuck-ing

Sometimes the thing that needed to be tested was not a process like being pushed out of a window in a suitcase and was more focused on the effect of homemade weapons. I was always building different weapons and wondering how effective they were and needing a nice road test to see how they measured up in the beating down an enemy department. The main problem there was that I didn't want to beat down a real enemy in case they did not work. That would be disastrous. One day I sawed a broom handle into two one foot sections and hooked them together with a section of chain and a couple of washers and screws. I wrapped each chuck with foam and then used electrical tape to smooth the whole thing out and to make them look awesome. My nunchucks were pretty awesome and I was swinging them around hitting my self at turn in the head and in the crotch as one desiring to flourish a nunchuck but not knowing how is prone to do. My little sister asked what I was doing and I told he I was practicing my nunchucks and she asked if she could try. I told her that if she would like too I would let her hit me with them if she let me hit her with them first. She agreed and laid down on the ground so I could hit her in the back which I did after I gave it a little run up and a powerful ninja leap into the air. Judging from the intensity of her wailing and the fervent writhing she she was doing that the pain had been significant and I decided not to let her have a turn hitting me after all. I mean what kind of person would let someone hit them with nunchucks after they saw how bad it hurt? No one that is who. She was a little upset about not getting her turn but I made it up to her by taking her to the store to get some candy. I was just happy to know that besides looking cool my nunchucks were super powerful, enough to hurt a little girl at least. 

A la Pippy Longstocking

 There was a low budget movie version of the Pippy Longstocking books that was at the local video store. There were not that many movies that were children appropriate so ipso facto we watched that one, more than once. It was funny and fun but it gave kids bad ideas about the workings of physics. The movie featured heroine that was super strong and impervious to pain which makes her less than ideal as a role model because we were regular strong and pervious to pain. She did have one trick in the movie as a mode of escape that we thought we could try out and by we I mean my older sister and I would produce and direct and my then youngest sister Mary would ride the lightning so to speak. The stunt in the movie was that Pippy was escaping from somewhere and decided not to use he super strength but opted instead to rely on subterfuge. She secreted herself in a suitcase and then was pushed out of a second story window and arrived on the ground unscathed and laughing. The science seemed to check out but just to be sure we altered the parameters slightly we lived in a single story house, as most mobile homes are, and we were going to use our sister instead of our selves so we could observe but if she survived we would definitely have next. We loaded her up in the suit case which was a rigid baby blue number built more for its sturdiness than its interior comfort. We loaded her in and then pushed her across the bed and out the window for a drop of about four feet which was good because if it would have been more she may have been really hurt but she was still hurt just not so bad. She got out crying and mad and threatening to tell and we applied the standard kid method of dissuading a sibling from ratting us out. The standard method is to bribe and cajole followed quickly by a treat and then right back to pleading. Like this:

“Oh, I'm sorry you got hurt we didn't mean to hurt you are you okay?”

Through hitching sobs, “You hurt me really bad I am telling.”

“Please don't, We will go buy you a treat, what treat do you want?”

Still crying,” I don't want a treat I am telling.”

“If you tell I will hurt you even worse.”

“Mom! Mom!”, she would run off to tell and I would head her off.

“No wait I was just kidding I wasn't going to hurt you please don't tell do you want to hurt me and we will be even?”

You continue this way until you are told on or find a substitute you both can agree on.

I never took my turn in the suitcase but Mary had not completed her tour as guinea pig.

Nap-Time is Death Time

 If you wanted to ensure your swift and sure death in my house all you had to do was interrupt nap time. It was not held at a specific hour or for a certain duration but the amorphous temporal nature was part of the challenge. At some point my mom would announce that it was nap time and she and anyone else who felt like taking a nap would lay down for a while. If, god help you, you woke her up before she naturally stirred from her afternoon repose there was swift and painful justice administered to your bottom. When nap time was over sometimes she would tell us sometimes she would just start puttering around inside the house while we were still under full lock-down mode unknowingly acting civilized for extended periods without cause. The rules didn't apply for the kids who may have laid down to rest at the same time they were on their own because the dome of spank-punishable sleep protection retracted as soon as mom was up and from that instant on nothing was sacred. My dad on the other hand was not so rigidly ritualistic about when or where he took naps he would just lay down in the middle of the living room and fall asleep. If you are unfamiliar with mobile homes the living room is not a place apart so much as a widening of the main hall way/entryway/main room. You would walk in and find him supine, snoring and feet elevated on a couch many times. It was terrible to try and walk around him without touching him or making a noise to get to the back and use the bathroom or phone or go to your room. It was like an overly contrived game where an ogre is asleep in the middle of the path and you need to move slowly and then hold still and silent when he rustled.  

Lost Keys Party

Just about every time we needed to go somewhere when we were growing up we would have to have a key finding party. Not a party in the sense of a soiree but more like a posse. My mom is a lose-a-maniac who was always missing important items that were vital to moving the plot of our lives forward. The most common MacGuffin in this hackney and overused trope was the keys which were in a massive bundle that it would seem hard to lose but she was able to, over and over. We would be loaded up in the van ready to roll and she would announce that she couldn't find the keys. We would all pile out and go to the usual places. We looked in on and around the couches and in her recent clothing and in and around where she may have sat, stood or passed by in the past. The weirdest place I ever found them was under the porch, that was not expected because it was under the porch. We would usually find them in one of those place and we would be off. Until the next time, and the next time. 

Box Wings

 I think a parachute is a very good idea. Maybe I should say the idea of a parachute is a good idea but that in execution sometimes it lacks in execution. I naturally wanted to try my hand at paracute design and as is my style I wanted to go big with no safety net, except what would be strapped to my back. I started out my design to protect me from jumping from the top of our mobile home with a unconventional design that has become widely copied - the semi-rigid wing, or flying squirrel design. The current and successful designs use super strong polymers in a precision engineered airfoil. Mine used more cardboard and duct tape and less precision design but it was basically the same thing. I was not entirely sure that my cardboard wings were going to keep me safe so I backed them up with some sheets that I taped together and then attached to my shoulders with some yellow rope. I was all set for a test flight so I climbed awkwardly onto the trampoline with my rig and jumped off the side. I was not arrested in mid air or even slowed at all but I assumed that was because the wings and parachute didn't have enough time to deploy fully. The natural next step was to jump from the roof of the house. This was not as dangerous as it sounds because we lived in a mobile home and the roof was only 10 feet off the ground. I got a ladder and tried not to die while I climbed up wearing my apple box wings and sheet parachute. I looked over the edge at the ground for awhile looking for the softest spot and imagining how cool it would be wafting to the ground like a leaf in the wind. I jumped when I built up courage and shot to the ground with no discernible slowing from free fall. My feet hit the ground very hard and my knees buckled up around my chest and knocked the wind out of me and I got strangled in the sheets. I laid there trying to breathe and realizing that this design was not one to try again. When I was done almost dieing I wadded up the rig and threw it all away in the garbage and took a nap.

Swim Lessons Kick Boarding

I am by nature a pretty cowardly person but I also like to show off so sometimes those conflicting interests conflict and I end up doing something ill advised and poorly thought out to try and look cool. Mission not accomplished. There was an old run down community pool in the next city over that offered swimming lessons and one summer my mom signed us up even though we were already competent swimmers. We went to class the first day and the old lady was trying to teach us how to put our heads under water and blow bubbles but when she saw we were several years older than the group she was teaching and that we could already swim she sent us over to the advanced group which was a step too far. They were working on form for races and diving and stuff so we tried to jump right into the flow of that class but were quickly exhausted so the teacher gave us some kick boards to keep us afloat while we practiced. The kick board was awesome but when it came time for diving practice, or in my sister and I's case jumping off practice we were supposed to leave the boards on the side. While the teacher was not watching I pushed the kick board out under the high board in what I thought was going to be the set-up to a magical and impressive trick. I imagined that I would jump off the high board and hit the kick board in stride as it were and surf away standing on the board. I know that sound ridiculous and the reason that sounds that way is because it was. I pushed the board out and then ran up the ladder to dive before anyone else could steal my great idea. I lined up my approach vectors for my moment of triumph and jumped. I did hit the board squarely with both feet, so, so far so good. Then the board went under the water developing a lot of resurfacing potential and then it slipped out from under my feet and hit my right in the nose as I my head was hitting the water. It was one of those instant blood gushing nose bleeds that got everyone’s attention and the instructor pulled me out and was yelling at everyone telling them that having a kick board under the high dive was extremely dangerous and if she found out who had done it she was going to kick them out of swimming. I kept quite and bled because I felt I had been punished enough already for my lack of common sense without having to be kicked out of swimming. 

Heartwarming Mockery

 The local news channel had a feature every Wednesday called 'Wednesday's Child' spotlighting a handicapped orphan kid and his or her achievements and struggles. Is was heartwarming and touching. The point was to help the kid get adopted but all my brother and I got out of it was handicapped kids were being called Wednesday’s child. We took that and ran with it and would call my sister or anyone we wanted to insult a Wednesday's child. Then we would sing the theme song in a mock speech impediment, “Wess-dayss chil' is fuw ov wuv.” I don't know why it was so funny to us but it killed in the eight to ten year old Gause boy demographic, absolutely killed.  

Fishing with Scott and Not Chumming.

 Just because we sank a boat there did not make us love Spring Lake less. We discovered it was only a few miles away and accessible by bike and the fishing was generally passable. Ryan, Nathan and I and a rotating cast of neighborhood kids used to get up at 5 get our fishing gear in hand and bike to the pond to start fishing at the proper hour for all fishing to start. To the non-fisherman that hour has an official name it is 'godforsaken'. When we would fish I would keep a list of names and number and size of fish caught so there would be no question who was the best fisher-boy. One time the fishing was really slow so we decided to spice things up with a little outlaw behavior called chumming. Chumming is when you throw out a huge amount of bait to lure fish to your hooks neighborhood. Then we, like the ever resourceful crack dealer, would give a couple for free but there is a catch and they are hooked. We had not, on this day of traveling light, brought any corn to tempt the little fishes so we walked up to the general store that generally had nothing and found some canned corn for sale. On this fateful day we had invited a kid from the block named Scott to come fishing and he had heard the whole plan except for how it was illegal and that was because he was a little dim. We took our new-found chum up to the counter and I was about to pay and get back to fishing when Scott starts asking all kinds of incriminating questions. He was holding the can after the lady had typed in the price and started to wonder aloud how we were going to get this corn on our hooks it looked too small and mushy. Then he started asking why more people didn't try chumming because it was so easy to do and it helped you catch fish. The lady behind the counter then asked us what we were planning to do with this corn. I said Scott was confused and that we, the four fishing buddies, were just in the store to buy a little snack and a can of corn sounded about right. She told us that chumming with corn was illegal and would kill the trout and she was not going to give us the corn. I was to nervous to ask for my money back so we just left the store corn-less and fifty cents poorer. We all gave Scott a couple of whacks in the head for getting us in trouble and being an idiot. We were worried that the lady was going to call the fish cops on us and we would get in trouble for attempted chumming so we packed up and rode home.  

The Maiden Sinking

 With the massive boat and trailer the going was hard from Santaquin to Spring Lake but the stopping was harder. I made the transportation rookies classic mistake of only considering how I would make my trailer and boat go and not how it would stop. When I tried to stop to turn from the orchard road to the canal road it pushed me a hundred feet past the mark and I eventually had to jump off the bike and let it dig into the gravel to stop completely. I turned the boat and trailer around and could not get enough power to start peddling again so I had to walk the bike and boat back up to the intersection I missed and because it was then up hill for a stretch I had to walk about a mile pushing the boat and cart. Where were all of my co-conspirators you ask? Oh, they left me and went on ahead to go fishing while they waited for me. Good guys. I got up to the highway and it was all downhill from there to Spring Lake so I was able to coast it in to the lower side on the south end where I met back up with all those solid friends who left a man behind. I was only mad for a minute because our tar dingy with the glass bottom was ready to launch and it was going to be an awesome day. We loaded the boat out of the trailer and put it in the water and it floated and didn't leak, victory! My friend Nathan and I got in the boat and got our paddles ready and pushed off into the pond. It became pretty apparent pretty quickly that we may have not adequately designed this glass bottom thing because as soon as both of our weight was on it for just a second it bowed and shattered sending water up like a geyser. We tried for a moment to save the old girl but it sank to the bottom so quickly we had no chance really. All of the tar must have made the boat heavier than water because it went all the way to the bottom and I sat on the side and wanted to cry but with so many older boys with a bullying streak standing around I thought I better save it up for later. I told them I didn't feel like fishing and took my trailer and bike and started walking home. I walked as far as canal road and then it was down hill until the orchard so I was able to ride until the bottom but at that point I was too tired and hot and sad to carry it any further and I put the trailer in the apple orchard and left it. Ryan and Nathan caught up with me right about then and we rode to Ryan's house and his mom gave me a very dry chicken leg for lunch. I went home after that and cried and went to sleep. I don't think we could call the boat an unqualified success but it did sink pretty well so there is that.   

A Boat. A Glass Bottom Boat

 A year before when my grandfather had met up with us at lake Powell he had brought along a homemade dingy that was so very beautiful to a boy of ten. When My friends and I decided to make our own boat I was mentally modeling it on my grandfathers boat. He had the advantage of being able to afford all new material specifically for the project he was working on while we were more scavengers picking over the carcasses of old construction projects. So I started our looking for pieces of marine plywood but ended up with some old 2 x 12's. Close enough. We cut and shaped the pieces into a reasonable replica of the shape and size of my grandpa's proto type but there were a lot more gaps in the boards than I liked. I was not really sure about sealing technology but I knew tar sealed leaks, so roofing tar it was. After we had a tar soaked and pained boat it was not as magnificent and much more messy than I would have liked but I hit upon a brilliant plan. Why not take a piece of Plexiglas from a sign my dad had in the shop and cut a hole right in the bottom of our boat and make it a glass bottom boat. We destroyed the bottom of our boat to put in a window, a feature not found on very many boats at all because it is really quite difficult to design in such a way that it is safe and strong and keeps the water under, as opposed to in, the boat. We laughed and joked about all of the cool things we could see through our glass bottomed boat, we could see fist bite our bait, we could shine a light down the window and attract fish by the millions. It was going to be awesome. We screwed it to the bottom of the boat and slopped a little more tar around it and then tried to move it. While we were confident it would be quite agile in the water it had by application of heavy lumber and plenty of tar become quite heavy and unwieldy on land. We decided the best way to get it to our favorite pond which was in the next town would be to build a trailer for it so we could pull it on our bikes. The trailer we constructed to hold the boat was made of 2 x 4” and bike tire and weighed about as much as the boat. We loaded the boat on with a few paddles and our fishing gear and I hooked it up to my bike and tried to peddle it. No dice. We did discover though that if a few guys push started it I could keep it going and the pond we were going to was mostly down hill from Santaquin, so we set off.

Let My Motor Go!

 Before we started building our new boat we had to take care of the first things first, we got a motor. The motor we found was a non-working out board from the sixties that had the power of five horses to drive its mighty propeller. It was powder blue and magnificently styled like everything in the sixties with lots of extra chrome and ridges just for show. Beyond not running the other major drawback to this motor was that there was a huge lock through the mounting plate that had been used to secure it to the back of a boat. This unit may have been stolen because it had the lock still locked and a chunk of wood that look a lot like it could have been from the back of a boat in a jagged square around the lock. Getting rid of the wood was no problem but the lock was hard and really really locked. Ryan and I started in trying to break it off with a hammer but it appeared that the designers of this particular lock had thought of that and designed the lock to withstand to feeble blows of a couple of pre-teens and their hammer. We had seen stuff cut with torches before so that was the next plan but we didn't understand that we were looking for a specific type of oxy-acetelene torch called a cutting torch. So we just got any old torch and the one we ended up with was a MAPP gas unit suited for melting solder for copper pipes but not hot enough to melt those pipes. We were trying to melt something that was many times more durable than copper pipes and so our little torch fire just got the metal red hot and we kept the fire on it making it glow until the whole tank of fuel had been run out of the torch. When that method left us high, and hot, and dry we tried a hack saw, which can cut metal but just not the kind of metal that the clever people over at the lock company put into the lock. We had spent all day and were at the end of our patience when my dad came home and asked how we were doing on our motor project we told him everything we had done to get the lock off and he told us why each one hadn’t worked and then he went and got a huge pair of cutters known as bolt cutters and snipped the lock off in one glorious snap. We still had to get the old fella to run but at least our motor was free and ready to be attached to any boat we may ever make. We worked on the mechanics of that motor, with a book even for days to try and get it to light up and run but it never worked and we abandoned that angle of our super sweet speed boat until the boat was finished.  

'Old Nelly' and Hillbillies Burn the Effort.

 Having failed twice at sub-marine technology Ryan and his cousin Nathan and I decided to build a boat. Our first plan was to take an old head board from my dad's water bed and wrap it in the water bed bladder and we would be on our way. We were even planning on different names for the boat before we even got it finished or in the water it was to be called, at Ryan's insistence, 'Old Nelly'. I was not exactly ecstatic about the name because I favored naming things after ferocious animals or at the very least to have some sort of ninja/military ring to it but he was significantly stronger and more violent than me so I decided he might have a winner with 'Old Nelly'. We wrapped up the head board and stapled the membrane on in a matter of hours and carried the monstrosity the mile up to the reservoir. It was very heavy and took us probably longer to take to boat to the water then it took to make. We set it in and it floated which is what boats are supposed to do but in light of recent catastrophic and life threatening failures that was a big deal. We had two paddles but the boat was so narrow and so heavy that more than one boy in it at a time made it a little tippy and prone to sinkiness. We played with the boat until dark and then took our paddles and came home after we hid the boat in the bushes. We came back two days later because our parents wouldn't let us boat on Sundays and someone had broken up the boat and burned it for common fire wood. Damn those hillbillies, damn them to hell. He decided we would exact painful retribution on them if we ever found them and we had the same kind of strength and fighting skill that we possessed in our imaginations. After we swore out oaths of undying vengeance we decided the best plan would to build a real boat and a trailer that we could pull with a bike and get a motor so we could go fishing. We headed home will new plans and renewed fervor for boat building high after our success.

A Huge Sack of Snickers Bars.

When I was 11 I would have claimed that there was no limit to the amount of Snickers that I could consume. I was wrong, shamefully wrong. Justin's grandpa worked at a local stadium and the team was having promotion where they were going to give away a Snickers bar to every fan who came to the game. There was a mix-up in delivery and they were left with 20,000 candy bars which they sent home with students and employees. Justin's family had a couple of garbage bags full and at first they were rationing them out but after the first couple of days they realized that they need not control the amount that were eating as the amount anyone could eat was fairly self regulating. I was so excited at first, I mean, unlimited Snickers right? Ten or so bars into it I never wanted to see another Snickers as long as I lived. My throat was burning from the sugar and I was nauseous and there was a bag of a couple of hundred sitting there taunting me. It was horrible, there was Xanadu and my accursed stomach was turning on me in my moment of victory. About half of the candy was never eaten because it went bad before anyone could work up the will to take another bite. 

Helicopter of Doom.

When I was in fifth grade they had a book about helicopters in the school library and it was full of pictures and statistics about the capabilities of different helicopters. I fell madly and deeply in love. I drew helicopters and I drew helicopter blueprints and I drew and I drew. That is all I wanted to do at school was look at helicopter books and draw plans for my very own helicopter. There were naturally some engineering hurdles that I would have to overcome. First, how to make it go up in the air. I thought that helicopters worked basically like an air screw and disregarded the more technical lift diagrams that were in the 'official' helicopter book. Second, I needed to steer the machine once it was in the air. I decided to save this problem for after I had a working helicopter, I stop-gaped by planning on tethering the fuselage to the ground. Third, I needed to stop and land my helicopter – once again no big problem in my mind because I had a helicopter that ran on an extension cord so there was nothing to stopping but unplugging. I set to work making my dream flying machine and procured a Radio Flyer knockoff wagon for the chassis and fuselage. I then got the largest spare motor my dad had that ran on 110v power and mounted it with four legs made of metal conduit, one each to the four rounded corners of the little red wagon. I had made the legs tall enough for me to just be able to run the controls which consisted of plugging in the extension cord to the pig tail cord I had installed on the motor. I then tethered the helicopter to the ground with a rope so that it wouldn't fly more than ten feet in the air and the last thing I needed was a propeller. To make a propeller I got the longest 2”x4” lumber we had, a 12 footer, and set the blade of the table saw to a 45 degree angle and sharpened one side half way and the flipped it over and sharpened the other. Newly minted propeller in hand I set up the wagon and the motor to the side of our house so there was no chance my maiden voyage would be cut short because of parental interference. I drilled a hole through the center of the double bladed proto-propeller and epoxied it to the motor shaft. Ready for my maiden voyage into the sky I sat in the cock pit or more accurately couched in the the space under the motor and about to be spinning blade of death. I plugged it in and the blade began to spin slowly and then faster and faster. As the blade gained speed the blade started to shake violently as the eccentricities of the blade were amplified. I wanted out but I didn't have time to eject before things got really out of control. The wagon started to pitch so violently that the blade hit the ground and broke into several long jaggedy stabby pieces. With the lightened load the motor was able to spin much much faster and the wagon tipped over while the motor chewed trenches into the ground inches from my head. Thankfully, the blade caught the extension cord and it wound rapidly around the blade until it pulled it out of the wall stopping the carnage. I am not sure how I escaped injury or even death but the writing was on the wall and I cleaned up my helicopter by taking the broken pieces and hiding them behind the house and gave up on helicopters except for drawing. 

Submarine

 Having failed miserably at building a self contained underwater breathing apparatus I took the sensible route and played normal games with other kids. Just kidding, I tried to build a submarine. Once again I was un aware of the need for an air supply so the problem as I saw it was to make an container to hold out the water with some see through parts that I could look through. Simple as that. I got a 55 gallon steel drum and enlisted Justin to help me cut the bottom out of it. I worked out a method myself because I couldn't very well tip my hand about my super cool plan to my overprotective parents. I was not sure of their exact policy on submersibles but I was afraid that the rule may include a strict prohibition so I decided this was one of the forgiveness in lieu of permission situations. We used a hammer and screw driver to start the hole and then we cut it out very slowly with a jig saw. When the bottom was finally out we got a piece of plexiglass out of a storm window and cut it into a matching circle using the same technique. When we had the mating pieces all that was left was to glue them together using some silicone and viola! We had decided on using our legs for the propulsion system because we couldn't think of any other way. This meant that the top of the barrel had to remain open which is a pretty major design flaw in a submarine. We figured what we could do is just keep it at a forty-five degree angle and that would keep our legs and the water out of the open end and we could still see under the waves. Even though I had first go at the scuba equipment I also got to try the submarine first because I understood the inner workings of the system better than Justin and needed to work out the subtleties of our new design. We put the 55 gallon submarine on the back of a bike cart and rode up to the reservoir ready for uninterrupted fun. I put the sub in shallow water and was distressed by its buoyancy it bobbed around uncertainly high above the water and was not very stable. That problem was soon fixed when I jumped in face down over the lip and applied my weight to the contraption. The plexiglass view port instantly imploded flooding the barrel with me upside down from the waist down in it the water filled up around my head and chest as I struggled to free myself. The good news was that the now open pipe of a barrel had stuck firmly in the mud so the stability problems were solved. If I could just stop from dying I might be able to get the water tight issue resolved. I tried at first to pull my head and shoulders out by bending at the waist but I just smacked my head on the inside of the now full barrel it took a few panicked seconds to hit upon the proper extraction technique of pushing up on the rim with my hands until I was clear. For the second time in three weeks I had narrowly escaped drowning at the hands of faulty craftsmanship on brilliant inventions and I decided to give water based exploration a rest. Right after I built a boat.