the youth, the waffle, and the laxative

I have recently discovered I did a lot of strange things as a child. Let me share a few of them with you now. Short of telling you about the home video sketches we made in the vein of in living color on crack minus the budget/talent. These videos featured some classic skits such as the unsuspecting heterosexual, the bobbing heads, Roger Duke, and many many more. I will however leave this part of my life out. As it should deservingly have its own blog dedicated to it, itself. I will say this however I often would show these videos to any new girl Casey would bring home, as he was the lead in what usually turned out to be amateur gay porn of the dry humping variety which was hilarious to most if not all teen age boys. I still remember how upset he was, the first time we ever showed our father. However most people thought these videos were very funny. He was still embarrassed. I think a part of my father died when he had seen these skits. And he may have lost all respect for us, but like Will Smith says “Parents just don’t understand” you will find I live most of my live based on things that will smith has or has not said. No one understands this, No one except for one Jessica Thurber. Who is part of a strange section of my life. Quick thought, she randomly bought me, in paperback form, a book about the life and times of Will Smith. This memory has implanted Jessica into my memory, much like a first love, or a loss of virginity although she was neither. One thing I’ll say about her was I used to tell my brother Casey, because she was in the same grade as him. That he should date her. I didn’t know her name at the time but she had this strange beauty to me. He instead dated Mel. And when he described who he was dating I really thought he meant Jessica. When I met her she was clearly not. I think part of this decision is why I had been so hard on Mel. Calling her C3P0, and B.O.B (brother’s old booty whenever they broke up) or Greasy. Mel was very pretty too I was just disappointed Casey didn’t go with my choice. So when he brought Mel home I showed her Casey in our videos assuming she would go running for the hills. This did not work. Mel stayed for many, many years. So it was very strange how Jessica and I came to hang out much later in life after I graduated and had my first apartment. I don’t know why buying me that book has such a profound effect on my memories but it does. So thanks Jess! I wasn’t exactly nice to her, and for that I’m sorry but like most things in life. I will blame that on my actual first love. Which like the gay porn videos deserves its own blog. However I will not blog about it. It’s over, it’s done, all Ill say is she’s the one, Kill her! Which was famously scribbled on the back of the photograph from the movie memento except his said He’s the one kill him. I had always liked the idea of that and use it on the back of my first loves pictures. So the following are a few stories that I remember back when life made sense.

I remember the happiest day of my “under the parent’s law” life was when I got my very first car. I say under the parent’s law, but we were never really under the law of our parents. I think having 7 bro and sis is a benefit in a way. After the first kid fucks up, and the 2nd child fucks up and so on by the time it your turn for some child rearing they have pretty much given up and had lost all hope. As one of the middle children it was clear my parents had been jaded and short of getting a divorce had adopted a mentality where they would just say “Fuck it, do what you want” or they would say things like “Your grounded go to your room” to which you would reply “Fuck it, I’ll do what I want.” I soon mastered the art of being a bastard child. This process will help explain why each one of my brothers and sisters are extremely different people. If you knew any of us you would assume that we were raised as an only child. Except for Jessica and Kendyl. They are very similar. They both live in Naraganset, they both can be are good mothers, and they both have an eating disorder. With the recent weight gain I have noticed on Jessica it is clear that Kendyl is winning. By weight gain I mean she actually looks healthy. Where was I, Oh yes, my car. I guess a car in a way represented freedom to me. I had this strange understanding of how the slaves must have felt when Abraham Lincoln gave his speech or how women felt when there husband came home one day and said “You are no longer my property, oh and you can vote.” I’m guessing they must have had a very similar feeling as I did on this beautiful summer day. It was an 89 Ford escort, hatchback. Pretty sweet ride. I know comparing getting an escort and ending slavery will not compute to some of you reading this but I say that it would make one hell of reparation. I encourage Obama to give all African Americans ancestors of American slaves a brand new used, well it’s new to them, 89 Ford escort. It’s the least we can do. And it will go a long way to improve race relations while limiting reverse racism. Moving on, prior to having a car my life was spent mostly riding bikes, climbing walls, and going down to the park with Josh Vargulish, Billy Hoyle, or Nick Sadler where we would travel through pipes. We would wait till winter where the water would freeze, this would allow us to walk even further through the pipes, otherwise we would often have to step in what was probably dirty sewage water. This was ok with us, as we felt like we were like a modern day Louis and Clarke about to discover something exciting. I’m not sure what it is we thought we would find, maybe it was the Nintendo up bringing in us and we were looking for a secret underground world like in Mario. It was during these simple years that I think I learned to appreciate nature. That and those ninja turtle commercial where they would remind me to turn off the faucet while I brushed my teeth, and turn off the lights when I leave a room to help save mother earth. I stopped believing in god at some point in my childhood and started praying to mother earth instead. I spent a lot of time turning lights off after my brother and sisters had left any room of our house. It was like a part time job to me. I spent too much time on this. I try to instill my love of nature into my brothers kids however big screen tvs, and complex video games have ruined imagination for the youth of today. So as a younger kid we would drive our bikes as far as we could, and often forget that “SHIT, we need to now turn back and drive home.” We may have pushed our limits too far on this ride. It’s funny now I have no energy now as an adult, yet then it was never ending. And I didn’t need to pay 5 dollars for a 3 oz bottle of liquid crack. Can I just say that this energy trend is a trend that I hope ends. All these energy drinks. It seems like dark magic to me, and I don’t believe. Most taste disgusting like a medicine. At least when I’m taking medicine though I feel like it is going to do something. We always had wild plans back then, like riding our bikes as far as could and camping out and never returning home. I always wanted to bring ramen noodles to cook over a fire. I loved ramen noodles at a very young age, at an age where you should not yet know what ramen noodles are. My pre car childhood had several eras. Based on the friend I had at the time. There was the Billy Hoyle era. Home to my first ever sleep over. This is where I tried bacon on pizza for the first time. I love bacon. Than we had the Nick Sadler era. Who I can easily say was one of the funniest kids I have ever met. And we hung out with our good friend Louis Colon until he stole my yellow vfr dyno bike. Bastard. I could tell you a million stories about Nick and me. He was the main developer of making funny videos. Our first movie was called the Nick and Todd show. We created a lot of special effects for these videos, you would not consider them special effects now but they were special to us. Then Nick had to move to central falls and I was afraid of Spanish people so that era shortly faded. (I’m joking Louis was Spanish after all it wasn’t easy for us to be long distance friends is all) Then It Was the I hate my parent’s era. Then the Josh Burt era which continued into me getting a car and into the social ocean era. Social Ocean aside from the lack of motivation was probably the greatest rock band to ever come out of Woonsocket.  And this band had both made me and destroyed me. The social ocean era splashed in Corey Machowski who had been a constant in my childhood acquaintances, and a bunch of other random starring roles. This was the era when we mastered the art of objectifying women. After the demise of this era, came the final and most disappointing era of all. The John Losoya era. I call this the Futon era. Because a futon to me, is the most disappointing transformer of all time. If you don’t understand that joke, than you have never slept on a futon, and I hope all is well in that ivory tower of yours. My only wish is for you to keep reading and stop mocking me from up there. I say John, the human futon if you will, is disappointing but at least we get along well and always can catch up no matter how much time has passed. He may very well be my heterosexual life mate. Each of these eras had their great moments. Throughout the mix the one constant was my brother Casey. We are not that close today, but I would say he is my best friend. Having so many different best friends at different times, helped shaped me. However I do now as an adult feel like the plot to I love you, man. Maybe I need to go on some man dates to meet new male friends. If I were to get married I’m not sure who I would have in my wedding party. Casey is getting married in August and has asked me to be his best man. Which is an honor. I’m not sure what kind of speech I will give. I will probably just Keep it short and play “The video” from before on a wide screen. Anyone of my friends during any of these eras I would have loved to share this honor for me and be my best man. I think it would be Casey. But I am way ahead of myself; I’m not married, not engaged. Hell I’m not even dating anyone. And if it weren’t for money I wouldn’t even be sexual active. Ok that was a joke about prostitution. I like to follow that joke up with a simple fact that it is in fact a joke and I have never really paid for sex. Josh and I need to reconnect nothing helps pick up chicks like a great wing man. And I’d say we always did well if it weren’t for all of our young jealousy and youthful competition. I miss you red bull. (My nick name for Josh)

One tradition we had and I think a lot of people had in high school. Was the artful misendever of pumpkin stealing? You can brag about stealing pumpkins all you want, but no one did it quiet like me and my band of misfit friends. We decided that when we stole a pumpkin, we wanted to leave something in return. We wanted to stick out among the normal pumpkin stealers. So we decided to leave in its place a frozen waffle and a ransom note. And because are wit was larger than our tact we called ourselves the Waffle bandits. Every so often you would here the rumblings in school of someone saying “It was the weirdest thing someone stole our pumpkin and left a frozen waffle in its place. God damn waffle bandits strike again!” well I added that last part in my head. And we would choose one home and take photos of their pumpkin in compromising situations, hanging over a cliff, blind folded, Smashed, If we did this now a day’s hell I think we would of water boarded one of them. Thank you Dick Cheany for helping keeping all of us so safe for 8 magical years. I hereby make you an honorary member of the waffle bandits. We would leave pictures of the pumpkins at the home. With no evidence in the photo of course just masked men. We also had a website we would inform people to visit. I wish it was still online because we had an example of one of our ransom notes. I don’t remember what it said but I do remember it made us laugh and laugh.

One time I had brought Casey out with us. Me and my friend Fatty and a couple of Casey’s friends. We made the biggest heist of all time. This pumpkin was so large we could not fit it in the trunk. It was in front of a restaurant it took 3 of us to pick it up. When we tried to put it in the trunk we couldn’t, nervous we sped off. We later pulled over and slammed the trunk shut. Later that evening we were stealing average size pumpkins, and all of a sudden from behind us were high beams. I immediately had a flash back of a time when we were younger. We would read and actually listen to this book of scary stories. One of the stories was about a man that was hiding in the back seat. Every time the guy stood up with a knife the car behind them would flash there hi beams as a warning, then my mind wondered still to another story in the book and I started humming WHERE IS MY BIG TOEEEEEE!!!! My mind wonders pretty easily. I shook my head and came back to reality. We were now being chased. So we are driving all while throwing pumpkins out the car smashing in the road. The car behind us fast on our tail swerving out of the way of the renegade smashing pumpkins. At this point we are speeding and we drive past a parked cop car. And we see the police lights turn on, we are not slowing down, the cop ended up pulling over the car behind us who had been chasing us. It was the most satisfying teen age victory of my teen age life. We were now free to turn the radio back up and rode off into the night while rocking out to you saw my blinker bitch by Will Smith. Two days later we saw in the newspaper a story about the large missing pumkin. Again we never took credit for the heist, or the waffles we didn’t want the fame or the glory we just wanted to leave our mark on society any way we could. After this I think I could rest easy. In the words of George bush, I’ll go ahead and state in premature fashion of course “mission accomplished. “

I probably have a million stories about John. The kid has a million nick names. We call him Wal-Mart, Johnny Wal-Mart, JW, Arty-choke, J-Lo, Johnny brooks, Johnny Walgreens, Johnny Right aid you name it. Any store you can name rest assured this dude has taking a dump behind it while getting his junk sucked by a retarded boy. I’d like to say this was a joke but this boy is the queen of the slow all male plumpkin. He calls himself the waffle bandit (he is known for stealing all of my good ideas) and would like to say he was going plumpkin stealing. I don’t know, I would hardly call taking advantage of a slow person male or female as stealing if anything it was plumpkin rape. This however is not the story I will share with you, although by now you are probably wondering what the fuck am I talking about or have stopped reading all together. I’d like to tell you the infamous laxative story now. Oh how great it was. John is the type of friend that everyone has. You know the kind of person that you have all made fun of so much that you think you should thank him for all the good times you had. This was John. I’d say he has change a lot since then but this is the story of how johns life got flipped turn upside down, I’d like to take a minute just sit right there I’ll tell you how john had to take a shit in bel air. See I told you, live my life by it. One day, I was with my roommate Nate. And John was over. We invited some girls over. And John begging for attention as he usually was whenever we brought any women over the house plus sized women especially. He would get extra excited because he would feel like he would have a shot. At the very least he would get someone’s sloppy seconds. The way he got attention was often different. Sometimes it was being the sensitive type to swoop in after something probably horrible had been done by one of the roommates in the house, by backstabbing, or he would just do something outrageous. Like let us shoot him with 500 paint balls. Or let us shave his head. Or test the can of spray paint we threw in the fire don’t worry john its save you can trust us go find out why it hasn’t yet exploded. I helped him understand early on that humor can unlock a chastity belt faster than a box a wine and a brad pit movie marathon. And John was just hoping a female was looking, or would be watching. And that she would be laughing. So he decided to let one of the girls that had come over tie him up with duct tape. So they did, they mummified him. He could not move only his feet and head were exposed. He was lying on the couch and then started to say he was hungry and asked one of the girls to feed him pistachio nuts he had in a bag. When he said this I realized I too was hungry. So I said ok lets go out to eat. We debated do we take him as a mummy, untie him, or leave him behind. This was back when john was a fat kid. We decided taking him would be too much work, untying him would be no fun, so we left him behind. So we put the pistachio on the other side of the room unopened on a night stand. We told john we would be back and left. Already that is hilarious. We ended up going to stop and shop, and Emily. One of the girls that had come over decided to buy some chocolate laxatives. They looked exactly like a Hersey bar. So we bought one of those too. We came home maybe 40 mins later to find that John, had somehow shimmied across the room, knocked the nuts off the table, ripped the bag open with his mouth and had been eating and spitting nut shells out all over the living room corner. So the girls are talking to him and laughing. John is loving the attention. So Emily starts to feed John chocolate candy and chocolate laxatives until the whole box is gone. We then inform John of what he had just eaten. He gets silent. Surprisingly he didn’t have to go to the bathroom that night. The next morning I went to brunch with my brother at Chellos. John came along with us. He didn’t really enjoy his breakfast as he spent the whole time in the bathroom, I ate his waffle. I told my brother the story who then told my parents. And my parents think that I am a bad person. I still think it was hilarious. And everyone in this story is a winner. I got the laughter that I needed and John got the attention he wanted. And the toilet at Chellos got the attention that it had been craving as well. The person that went into the bathroom after John, priceless.