Of Cabbages and Kings

July 31, 2004

Today was a pretty good day. I woke up on time, had a nice shower, had an awesome blueberry muffin for breakfast, and then the world's most famous former hacker taught me how to get any major corporation to grant me access to their most prized secrets and tell me to have a nice day when I was done. I had dol-sot bi bim bob and a few slices of cheese pizza for dinner and I think I'm going to go have a nice lie down.

Old lady

Every day I drive down the same road at the same time on my way back from class. Every day there's this old lady standing in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at the cars that go by. She looks like the mother in Throw Mama From the Train. Every time I see her, she's muttering something very fast. I can't hear her, but I can see her lips moving. Nobody ever stands next to her, she's not talking to anybody else. I roll down the windows when I drive by and play five-second snippets of Beatles songs for her. Maybe they'll cheer her up.

Weird

Some people have strange ways of discovering this site. Result number 3.

2,096 words

All right. So I've been gone on a boat for the past six days or so. This is my story.

I'll start by outlining what I'd been told would happen going into the trip. We (about 20 guys from my Scout troop) were going to get on this 70-foot long boat and sail around in Florida. We were going to snorkel and see awesome sights, fish and stuff, and maybe stop by a couple of islands. There was another boat, too, a catamaran called the Dreamer. We were going to put 13 guys on the Eagle (the one I've been talking about) and 7 on the Dreamer, and then switch out twice so that everyone got a chance to be on the Dreamer. The trip took place from Monday morning to Saturday night, and we were going to head to Miami on Friday night and have a fun night on the town, maybe sleep at a hotel or something. There were six sophomores (we're the senior scouts; in fact, we founded the troop) that went on this trip, and since this is probably going to be our last outing with the Scout troop, we were hoping to have a pretty fun experience.

We couldn't have been more wrong if we thought we were going to ride a unicorn to Mars and stop by the Taj Mahal for tea with Ghandi.

We showed up to the harbor late Monday afternoon and started looking around for our boats. We knew that they were called the Eagle and Dreamer, and they were supposed to be pretty nice. After a bit of looking, we found the Eagle. It was about 50 feet long, counting the seven or eight feet of protruding bow that couldn't possibly be used for living space. We looked at each other and made sure that it was the boat we were supposed to be on. It was. The sophomores started walking to the catamaran to see what it was like, but before we could touch it we saw that six or seven kids - all of whom were two or three years younger than us - had swarmed on it and claimed it as their own. We could have easily forcibly expelled them, as they were all pretty small and weak compared to us, but we decided to be nice guys and - since we were going to switch off in a day or two anyway - we took our stuff aboard the Eagle.

The first thing we noticed was that it was pretty small. It turned out that there were six beds and two usable couches for the thirteen of us to sleep on. That's a total of eight sleeping areas for thirteen men, for six days. Then we noticed the stench. The heads (toilets) were of pretty poor quality; I won't go into detail here, as it's pretty nasty, but let it be said that they clogged several times a day and made all of the cabins smell like "the inside of a dead elephant's rectum", as one of the Scouts so eloquently put it. Once we set up our stuff, the captain turned on the motor and we idled out of the harbor, anchoring about twenty minutes out. We slept, or tried to. I tried to sleep on the deck, but it ended up being too windy and cramped - we had three guys sleeping on the same box, when it would have been awkward with just two. I then tried sleeping on one of the beds, but the waves that sounded so innocent and quiet from up above were actually socking hard against the side of the boat and making a huge amount of noise. I got two hours of sleep that night.

I can't remember much of the next day (Tuesday), except that we spent five minutes learning how to sail and we were told that we weren't going to switch to the Dreamer until the day after. The sophomores figured, okay, we'll just switch then and take the Dreamer for the rest of the week. We slept. I folded my sleeping pad in half and curled up on the ground by the couches and right next to the ladder to get to the deck. That's where I slept for the remainder of the trip.

On Wednesday, we sailed a little and then snorkeled for about fifteen minutes. The reef we anchored at was pretty plain, though - there weren't many fish, and it didn't look cool at all. At some point the engine broke for about half an hour. We were told that we weren't going to switch boats at all for the duration of the trip, as the captains didn't want to because they claimed the logistics wouldn't work. At lunch, a couple of people swam over to the Dreamer to see what it was like. We found out that each kid had their own queen-size bed, there were two fully operational showers and bathrooms, they had leather couches, and they were watching Family Guy on the DVD player that one of the kids - the son of the Scoutmaster who had expressly forbidden us from bringing DVD players - had brought. After dinner, we decided to try out the VCR and TV set. We put in the tape of the singularly awful movie known as "Deep Blue Sea". As soon as we pressed play, the TV started making the noise of static and simultaneously playing the video and audio of the tape. To give you an idea of the effect given, imagine having a conversation with one or two of your friends and having a stranger come in and stand there, making the dial tone sound at the top of his voice. After watching the movie, we slept.

On Thursday, we decided that we'd head out to this statue the Dreamer's captain had told us about. He said that a 22-foot tall bronze statue of Jesus had been built and was sunk in 27 feet of water; it was supposed to be an amazing experience. Figuring that we might salvage the trip that had, so far, been completely boring and a profound waste of our spring break, we set out. At around 10 AM, we ran aground on a coral reef. The captain told everyone to run out to the bow (front) of the boat and stay there in the hopes that it might help us get off the thing. Then he told us to head to the starboard (right) side of the boat and lean out. We did this while he gunned the engine for about an hour, stirring up huge amounts of sand. One of the Scouts said "I'm going to laugh when the impeller [the thing that sucks in water to cool the engine] gets clogged with sand and the engine breaks." Finally, the captain gave up and consulted his tide chart. He saw that high tide was going to be about 4 PM that day, and told us that we were basically stuck till then. After an hour or two, he radioed SeaTow (some company that apparently helps people out of precisely the situation we were in) and told them to get us out of there. The SeaTow boat showed up at around 3:30 PM. The guy drove circles around us for about ten minutes, then came up to us and tied our boat to his. While this was going on, the tide was coming in. Not thirty seconds after he had tied himself to us, while he was still debating prices with the captain, our boat started moving. The guy stood there for five seconds, not wanting to realize what was going on, and then started screaming off strings of obscenities and running around on his boat, attempting to untie the lines. As we floated away, dragging his boat with us, he whipped out a massive knife and frantically sawed at the remaining ropes. From what I gathered, he was in pretty big danger at that point. While this was going on, our captain stood on the deck, stripped naked without warning, and put on a wetsuit so that he could untie any lines stuck on the boat. The SeaTow guy eventually sorted everything out, and we went back on our way. Not forty-five minutes later, we ran aground again - this time on a nationally protected wildlife sanctuary of a coral reef, most likely causing irreparable damage to the ecosystem. He called SeaTow again, and an hour later the same guy came and, this time, got us off the reef. We figured "screw this" and anchored a little while away by some lighthouse. That night, we tied the Dreamer and Eagle together and had a sort of dinner party that amounted to all of the guys from the Eagle climbing aboard the Dreamer and gaping in awe at their good boat - you know, the kind of boat that we were supposed to be on. We were tied together for more than two hours. This would have been a perfect time to switch boats for the rest of the trip, but the captains forbid us from doing that. We slept.

Early Friday, the captain realized that the boat's engine was broken. After working on it for two hours, I heard him tell the first mate that the impeller had sucked in too much sand and had broken, causing the engine to overheat. We were too depressed to laugh. I read for the first four hours that he worked on the engine, looking through the portholes (windows) every so often. I saw the clouds going by pretty fast first one way, then the other. Either we were going forward and then in reverse very quickly, or the boat was turning a lot. I shrugged, figuring that the captain must have anchored the boat, and continued my book. After four hours, the first mate asked him if he wanted to anchor the boat. The captain furrowed his brow and said "Yeah, I guess that'd be a good idea." This means that the boat free-floated for four hours, with nobody steering it. It took the captain eight hours to fix the engine. At that point, it was something like 2 or 3 PM on Friday, which was supposed to be our day in Miami. The Dreamer had abandoned us the day before and arrived in Miami at around 3 PM. We were told that we wouldn't get to the city until midnight. We sophomores decided that we'd sneak ashore that night/morning and have a good time. From 10 PM to 11:30 PM, the waves were tossing the boat so much that it was tilted at a forty-degree angle each side every five seconds. This means that things were flying from side to side at a pretty decent velocity. A few of us were sitting on the couches, with a table inbetween us with a lot of stuff on it. This stuff was pretty heavy, and could only be moved with a lot of force. The aforementioned stuff started flying around and falling on us. At around 11:30 PM, we ran aground. When we ran aground, we were twenty minutes away from the harbor where we were going to dock.

It takes special effort to sail that poorly. We slept.

On Saturday, we cleaned the boat for a few hours and got all of our stuff out of it. I had a Belgian waffle at the food court; it was actually pretty tasty. I found the public bathrooms and showered for the first time in six days. That's one thing that I forgot to mention - we didn't have any showers on the boat, so we were all pretty stinky. This only made the boat smell even worse than it did when it only smelled like poo. I walked around the mall for about half an hour, checking out random booths. Not a single person there spoke English as their first language. A little while later, we stuck our stuff on a bus and headed to the airport. Our bus driver almost ran over a guy as he backed out of the parking lot, in addition to just barely missing a Corvette on the highway. He played rap music so loudly that my CD player couldn't drown it out when I turned it up the maximum volume. I'm pretty sure we almost died at one point.

We got back late Saturday night from the trip that was most definitely the biggest waste of spring break ever.

At long last

Wondering where I've been for the past three months or so? Well, your answer is right here. Let me know if you can help out.

Flow, morphia, slow

I've been busy. Should be done with the first stage pretty soon, and then you'll have more to read.

None.

Consider Christmas saved.

Bombs away.

Bombs away.

It's early in the afternoon. The sun is so hot that it will actually vaporize human flesh, so the kids are supposed to stay inside for a couple of hours and sleep.

Fat chance.

One child is trying to rest, though. His slumber is often disturbed by the sound of sandals rapidly slapping against stone and cement. After ten minutes of this, he gives up and looks out the window at the bathhouse next door. He waits for a minute before he sees one of his comrades run out of the edifice, slamming the screen door behind him. He's carrying a small trash-bucket, which comes up to a few inches above the kid's knee. Ordinarily, the bucket's very light, considering the fact that it's made of plastic and often empty. However, the posture of the one dragging it indicates that it weighs somewhere in the area of forty pounds. The observer makes no sound and waits for this spectacle to pass before he steals into the bathhouse. Inside he finds several empty, unmarked plastic bags. He shrugs. Then a bright speck catches his eye, and he crouches to pick up a small piece of plastic. A glimmer of recognition passes over his face, and he realizes that he is holding a burst water balloon.

He quickly traces the path of the grunt he saw earlier - it's not very easy to do so, for the trail of water the bucket left is quickly being consumed by the fiery orb above, but he manages. He comes upon a cluster of campers and a few counselors. They're all rapidly whispering important-sounding things to each other, and a couple of them are fiddling with some sort of rubber contraption, and the counselors are each situated next to one or two of the buckets he noticed before. One of them acknowledges him, and he is informed that something major is going on. Before he can be briefed further, the bucket-bearing counselors get up and start walking toward the covered patio next to the gym. Everyone follows; there's no time for explanations.

Once they reach their destination, the buckets are laid out in a line. Each bucket has more water balloons than the protagonist has ever seen at one time. One of the counselors begins to give orders, and it is revealed that the girls from the adjoining female camp are on the other side of the gym chowing down on their midday snacks, opening packages their parents sent them, and generally having way too much fun. In an attempt to remedy this situation, one of the male counselors has planned a raid. As he barks out orders, he draws the mass of guys up into five groups. One of the groups will go through the gym and hurl water balloons through the windows at the snack area five feet away, while two more groups go around the sides of the building - one on the left, one on the right - and burst in, guns blazing. The remaining two will serve as the second wave of attackers, and will follow in the footsteps of the footsoldiers thirty seconds after they are first deployed. Before all this happens, the counselors solemnly equip each camper with all the balloons they can carry. Then the aforementioned rubber monstrosity was brought out and revealed to be a water balloon launcher. Using this, the counselors launch five balloons over the roof of the gym and then the order is given for the campers to wreak havoc.

And it is truly wreaked.

All goes according to plan, as the balloon-wielding attackers plunge into the crowd of screaming girls. Our hero throws a beautiful shot that explodes right in the middle of someone's freshely opened care package. Things are going well, with no opposition, until one of the guys gets it into his head that it would be funny to bombard the owner of the camp, who's currently standing off to the side and laughing. He attempts to do so and, even though he misses horribly, succeeds in royally pissing off the owner. This does not go unnoticed by the attacking hordes. They retreat before him as he shouts threats and kind of jogs in their direction. The mission is, however, a success; the women will think twice before attempting to put food in their mouths and chew it when there are bored men nearby.

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Story ideas go to electricidiom@aol.com.

You can't see me. I'm invisible.

This happened about six or seven years ago. I was, of course, much younger than I am now.

It's midnight. Eight children stumble into a small room, rubbing their eyes and yawning. Meaningful looks are exchanged, but not a word is said. They all immediately climb in their beds. An astute observer would notice that not one of them bothered to change clothes before doing so. An even more astute observer would comment on the fact that they're all wearing black clothing.

Time passes, albeit very slowly. Every minute or two the ceiling is lit up by the green glow of an illuminated watch dial.

Three beds emit a beeping sound at more or less the same time. Their occupants slap at their own wrists, and the noise is eventually silenced. Each of the kids gets out of bed. They all converge upon a cot in the middle, and a much larger form is produced from its depths. It flails its limbs at the tacit attackers, then realizes where it is and freezes. Someone turns on the lights and is backhanded. The room is plunged into its former darkness, and they all exit. The back door slams. The tallest one, the counselor, whispers angrily at the last person out of the door.

Cut to a view of a piece of land about thirty feet long. On the right side are a few trees, on the left side a brick building, between them is an empty space. Behind and above all of this sits a building with the words "Pill palace" inscribed on a sign hanging from the roof. It's a few minutes later. Lights flash on the right, and one can see flickers of movement. All of a sudden a dark, blurred form dashes across the clearing and takes up residence behind the building. Eight more follow suit. Once everyone has made it across, they huddle together for a moment and then the largest silhouette produces a set of keys. He unlocks the screen back door and they all dash in.

Cut to a dark room, empty except for a waist-high cabinet that takes up the space of one of the walls. Shadows flit to and fro. A muted clattering emanates from the back, and a happy child carrying piles of bowls and spoons hops out of a closet. The equipment is passed around. Now suitably armed, the men crack open the top the container. A wedge of light spills into the room and causes the children to squint. Slowly, reverently, the senior burglar reaches in with a spoon and serves forth cold, ice-creamy goodness to all those present. All is well.

Suddenly, the door bursts open. A flashlight-wielding man runs in and announces that all of the participants are, in a word, "busted". Unless, that is, they let him in on the gluttony. They all shrug and someone gives him a bowl. He grins. There is silence for five minutes, broken only by slurping and the sound of metal and plastic clinking together. The bowls and cutlery are abandoned, and the pleased group happily exits out of the back of the cafeteria, then regroups outside before their escape attempt.

The group begins to migrate, one by one, from the building to the shelter of the trees nearby. Halfway through the grand getaway, someone from far away shines a light over in their direction. They panic and the rest simultaneously run for it. The light traces their route, and distant yells are heard.

Silence has gone out the window at this point. All of the participants, including the counselor, dash to their cabin. Once they arrive, the kids jump in bed and pretend to sleep while the counselor looks for a way to appear as if he were working, neglecting to take into account the fact that it is now 1:30 in the morning. Someone enters through the front door brandishing a flashlight and demands to talk to the counselor, who's now busily sorting through his clothes, messing them up and then folding them again. He looks around to make sure that the intruder's speaking to him, then gets involved in a hushed conversation for a few minutes. Someone says "The nurses saw lights." The kids can hear someone else, presumably a counselor from the cabin ten feet away, come up and assert that they've all been in their beds the whole night. More muttering. Someone walks in the room to make sure they're all there, shrugs, and leaves. The counselor comes back in, gives a thumbs-up sign, and collapses into a sleeping heap on his bed.

The story, however, does not end here.

The sun breaks free of its mountainous fetters and begins its slow pilgrimage. The children eat a substantially smaller breakfast than usual and grin stupidly at each other. The day passes normally until one of them goes to canoeing, a class which just so happens to be taught by the counselor "guarding" the cafeteria the night before - the very same one who shirked his duty in exchange for a dollop of Bluebell. He and the kid get to talking, and once they are sure nobody else can hear them, their conversation turns to the aforementioned raid. The counselor - Garland - reveals that he stuck around after the burglary occurred, just for kicks. It turns out that as the kid's cabin was departing through the back door, another cabin entered through the front. It was a fantastic sight; even as the back door was opening, the front door was being unlocked. They were immediately caught and no mercy was shown, as other people were beginning to notice by this time (hence the flashlights).

It's still not over.

After all of this occurred and everyone was sent back to their beds, Garland went for a final look. While he was scoping out the cafeteria, he happened to glance at one of the nearby trees. It seemed a little odd; some of its leaves were white instead of green, and they seemed to be shaking quite a bit. On a whim, he went in to investigate. He found the fattest youngster in the whole camp hiding behind a tree no bigger around than my right wrist. The white "leaves" were the ninjas which dotted the trembling offender's pajamas. His eyes wide with fear, he stuttered something about waking up and finding his cabin gone, then recalling hushed conversations that occurred the day before. Garland tried not to laugh and sent him on his way.

It was a good night to be on cafeteria duty.

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Let us continue to save Christmas. (The story so far)

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Story ideas? Send 'em to electricidiom@aol.com.

There's always one.

You know how it is. There's always one person who just doesn't get it.

Allow me to illustrate my point in the form of a camp story.

At this camp, the kids are divided into two teams, "tribes" if you will. These two tribes compete in various athletic events throughout the month for no reason other than to have another excuse to laugh at the few morbidly obese children. Traditionally, one of the first competitions held is known affectionately as the scream-off. In this amazingly nonathletic challenge (although the fat kids look comically like heart attack victims), the two tribes sit down facing each other in the dead of night. Their leaders, or "chiefs", guide them through a series of chants. They are judged on volume, coordination, and cooperation. Cooperation points are the proverbial biggies.

So after all of the main mantras have been exhausted, one tribe starts the very corny "We've got spirit, yes we do! We've got spirit, how about you?" The other tribe replies in turn. They end up screaming at each other in unison, "We've got the most!" After a short amount of time, their chiefs cut them off with hand signals; cooperation points are subtracted for any campers still shouting after that time. Now, this takes place right after the term has begun, so the new guys - most of them aged 6 to, say, 10 - have no idea what the hell's going on, even though they've been prepped for over an hour beforehand on the procedure. So a few years back, the screamoff was taking place. It was going particularly well, with a minimum of extraneous chatter, until the point where the chiefs cut their tribes off with swooping "stop" gestures after the spirit chant. It was amazing how silent everyone became, how well coordinated the cessation of sound was. But then, just as the judges gave each other impressed looks, one child spoke up. This kid, about seven years of age, had been a problem the whole time he had been there - he couldn't sit still. He bawled, as vociferously as he could, "We've got more than the most!"

There was a disbelieving silence. A few mutters. Someone managed to get the youngster to sit down. The judges' pencils made ominous ticks on their clipboards. The competitors tried to decipher, using only the hand movements the evaluators made by the act of writing, what exactly it was they were writing down. Necks craned. The judges retired to a corner and conversed for several minutes. There was silence, except for a few scattered coughs. It was announced that the loudmouthed tyke's tribe had lost. Whispers of exultation fromt he one side, sighs of acceptance from the other. Above everything else, though, was the sound of the aforementioned urchin shrieking "Curse you!" at the top of his little lungs. He was taken out back and, presumably, shot shortly after.

Wherever you go, whatever you do, there will always be someone present just like this child. Accept it.

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Happy December. Now let's save Christmas.

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Once again, if you want your very own story idea to be featured in next week's post, email.