a progressive story
Seven-year-old Jimmy walked into the schoolyard where the other kids were playing. He reached down to pick up a small blue ball on the ground and suddenly he was back in his bedroom. “What happened?” he thought to himself as he looked around.
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…As he was contemplating on the prior experience, he heard his mom yelling from the kitchen that it’s time to wake up for school.
He figured it must have been a dream until it dawned on him that he was standing in the middle of the room with his backpack on. He rarely slept in that position.
He had licked the ball, which had the same hallucinogenic properties as those wierd Amazonian jungle frogs. He spent the entire day staring at a gum wrapper saying, “Do you know what I like about things that SHINE?”.
The next day on his way to school, he saw a green ball on the sidewalk. As he picked it up, he found himself transported to the Amazon jungle surrounded by frogs. One of them began to speak…
…The frog told him every question in life could be answered simply with “42”. The frog also asked the boy if he knew of any good agents in Hollywood. The frog wanted to be a brand name spokesperson like that lizard. He had a bit part falling from the sky in “Magnolia” but further work escaped him and he had to return to his family in the Amazon…
The frog that spoke (in an Italian accent)said, “Hey kid, I bet you $100 dollars I can tell you where you got your shoes”. The boy, really surprised at this point, and really excited about the prospect of a talking frog that will most likely have to find money to pay the boy, replies with “Sure, you’re on”. The frog then says “You got one on your left foot and one on your right. Pay up boy”. The boy then thinks to himself, dratz! This really isn’t my lucky day. I hope that frog doesn’t chase me.
The boy then realized he could have answered the shoe question with “42” and the frog wouldn’t have had to beat him over the head with a bamboo stick for not paying up.
Rubbing his head gingerly, he walked out of the jungle and encountered a native who spoke like Scooby-Doo.
The native, dressed only in a loin cloth and covered in enough hair to look like scooby doo, was crouched down low to the ground. As the boy crept forward he saw the native move like lightening and create a fire in a shallow pit. Beside the pit lay 3 plump field mice. “Wow” thought the boy, “I am quite hungry, I hope he’ll share”. The boy stood watching the fire and recalled a similiar time when he was camping with the scouts. Using only two sticks, this scooby doo lookin’ and talkin’ native did what 50 adult men couldn’t do with 100lbs of dry wood and a blow torch.
The boy also recalled several other – for lack of a better descriptor – interesting things he had witnessed while in the scouts. One of them also happened to involve fire, though far fewer grown men participated – only one, in fact, who was referred to as ‘Adam Fool’ by the other scout-masters, something the boy could never quite figure out, given that he knew the man’s name to be John Goldman – Mr. Goldman to the children such as himself. That incident had been born of a road flare, a pile of rather green and/or wet wood, and a desire to cook hot-dogs over an open flame. It had resulted only in a lot of foul smelling smoke and several cold, foul-tasting, slightly discolored hot-dogs.
In fact, the more the boy thought about it, the more he realized that most – if not all – of the ‘interesting’ experiences he had had during his time in the scouts involved Mr. Goldman in some way. Knife fights – butter knife fights, luckily – between scouts under his supervision. Other scouts – again, under his command – running away. Naked scouts. Thieving scouts. Scouts in ‘barrowed’ clothing (usually underwear), stained in Kool-Aid and yammering about this, that, and the other – all of these events had involved Mr. Goldman in some way.
Strangly, the native and Adam Fool had a strange likeness. Perhaps it was because both were overly hairy, or maybe it had something to do with their speech impediments. Adam Fool had been known to wear loin cloths, as he believed that it allowed him to “be one with nature”. They both seemed overly addicted to peanut butter sandwiches and possess a horrible habit of interrupting a person when talking. Both, strangely enough, had a single golden front tooth. Although the boy couldn’t put his finger on it, he knew SOMETHING must connect the two men.
…and whilst pondering this connection, the loincloths and overall creepiness of both men reminded him of the creepy loincloth wearing critter in the latest Lord of the Rings movie. That thing reminded him of Dobbie in the latest Harry Potter movie. Soon his mind swirled at the great connection of everything…
And he realized that the other scout-masters hadn’t been called Mr. Goldman ‘Adam Fool’ after all. Rather, he had simply misheard them – they had been calling him ‘a damn fool,’ slurring their words together just enough that three words sounded like two, a phenominon the boy had laid witness to many times when his late father had struck his thumb with a hammer or dropped a jar of pickles, and he had sometimes muttered, sometimes yelled one word instead of four – ‘sonvabich.’
All this thought of loin-cloth and fire and the uneducated and groundless contraction of words made the boy thirsty, and when he looked up and saw the large brown cow milling before him (where the shaman had got to, he did not know) he thought “I can drink a cow” and promptly walked over, wrapped his fingers around one hard rear leg, and lifted, drinking the cow until all that remained was a horn (male cow) and a few tufts of hair, which he tossed aside while wiping his mouth with the other hand.
He belched and sat down on the soft jungle floor, patting his satisfied tummy. That cow had really hit the spot. His eyes grew heavy after the large meal, so he decided to take a nap. While adjusting his position to get comfortable he removed what he thought was a rock, but was in fact another colored ball.
A burst of light blinded him, then disappeared. A few seconds later there was another flash of light. Between the bursts, he looked around and was shocked to discover he was in the lantern room of a lighthouse.
As the boy – whose name was Meepleton for those have not yet been made privy to such information – tried to wrap his mind around what was going on with all this flip-flop teleportation-translocation crap, the ball-formerly-thought-to-be-a-rock flew forth from his hand, and began whipping around and around the lantern room, whipping the already sudsy water into a crazed froth and sending not unsubstatial waves rolling towards the walls.
“Ah, that’s nice – gently rocking, suds-filled waves to help me drift off this morni-”
He stopped mid-thought. Sleep…? In… Gentle suds-filled waves.. Created by a possessed colored ball. Inside the lantern room of a lighthouse. His mind was doing that rushed dance from conclusion to conclusion again, jumping from one to the next faster and faster, with no destination in sight (or in mind).
Meepleton screamed, and stood up, at which point he noticed he head poked through the clouds.
Whack! A Boeing 757 smashed into the side of his head. Meepleton winced and leaned over to avoid any more unwelcome run-ins with aircraft. A bird flew by his ear and yelled, “Follow me!”
Meepleton, always the obedient one, ran after the bird and found that each step carried him several miles. He had wanted to be tall, but this was more of a liability, especially for the unfortunate folks in his path. His unusually large size however, didn’t last long. Before he could say, “Sweet heavenly monkeys in the fiery heavens above me” he was back to normal size, standing in the schoolyard. Everything was back to normal, except for the large monkey flying towards him.
That’s when Meepleton looked down at his side and saw the frog again. The frog asked him to take him to Hollywood somehow — that he had improved his acting skills and figured he could make it big. The boy, a budding geek, then thought to himself, “Wow, a talking frog. That’s _really_ cool. I’ll have to show it off in Show-and-Tell today.”
And so, after impressing his class with Harold (the talking frog), they began their journey to Hollywood. The trip was not easy. There were many obstacles in their way, not the least of which was Harold’s excessive flatulation.
Unfortunately, when they finally got to Hollywood, Harold was an awful lot like that frog in Looney Tunes. He would perform only for the boy, not in the presence of anyone else. He could sing, “Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal. Send me line by wire, baby, my heart’s on fire.” He could dance, “Everybody loves the Michigan rag”. But whenever they entered an agent’s office, silence prevailed follow by “ribbit” and a horrid stench due to Harold’s tooting.
In a sudden burst of flatulation and tears, Harold explained why he couldn’t perform in front of anyone else. Meepleton wasn’t the boy’s real name. It was Jimmy. The moment Harold pointed out the error, Jimmy was transported to his bedroom. Harold was still there, breaking wind with gusto, but he could no longer talk and Jimmy vowed never to say the name “Meepleton” again.
Many hours went by where Jimmy and Harold lived happily in silence. But as the silence grew, Jimmy began to reminisce over better times when Harold would cheer him with a tune. Jimmy began to crave the sound of people calling him by that forbidden name “Meepleton”. Just the thought of it filled Jimmy with excitement. The excitement grew with every moment and thought. Could he be Meepleton again? Could Harold sing to him once again? Tickling with the idea, he began to rub his hands together and move about the room in a pace fitted for a very tall adult man. “Yes”, he thought, “I could go back”. Harold, having just left the bathroom to flatulate (as he was becoming quite civilized now) was immediately aware that a change had come over Jimmy. He was mumbling incoherently and pacing through the room.
“Laaaaaah, la la la la la la la laaah laaah, la la la laaah, la la la laaah.”
Harold’s shrill tenor voice sang the aria with such fervor it shattered the windows and left Jimmy speechless. Harold knew Jimmy quite well by now and deduced from the pacing and incorehent mumbling that Jimmy wanted to be Meepleton again. The wise old frog explained that all Jimmy had to do was click his heels together and say there’s no place lik…ahem, sorry, wrong story.
Harold farted.
As the sounds of flatulence reverberated off the canyon walls Jimmy strongly desired to be in another location and to find out what brand of beans Harold liked to eat.
Jimmy sat down on a nearby rock to contemplate how he might convince Harold of his resurgent enthusiasm, and was about to embark on a long tirade when he observed something so completely dumbfounding, its revelation caused him to fall off the rock and almost into a nearby stream. That thought process went as follows:
“Damn that bloody frog, always strutting about and farting and living the good life – even though we’ve only been home for a few hours, its already starting to seem like an eternity. I’ve fed him, watered him, provided him a place to pass his excessive gas, and even stole my sister’s ‘Barbie & Ken: Living in Sin’ scale queen-sized bed for the little bastard to sleep in. And for what? What has he ever given me? What will he ever gi- What the hell? I’m in a canyon, sitting on a rock, next to a stream. This is… odd.’
“Meepleton,” said Harold, “do you know what just happened?”
“No” said Jimmy/Meepleton.
“Well,” said Harold, “to put things simply, you’ve grown to old – if only by an hour or more – for the colored balls to transport you from one place to another anymore. Instead, I must harness the power of my rather pervasice flatulants to move us from one location to another.”
“Ah,” said Jimmy/Meepleton, “in doing so, however, you seem to have forgotten the proper use of the English language. Instead of ‘to’ you should have used ‘too’ and ‘pervasive’ spelled with a ‘v’ not a ‘c.'”
“Shut the $*#@ up” said Harold.
Jimmy and Harold were walking down the street when suddenly Jimmy realizes he needs to facilitate. Or in other words, use the lou. They search frantically knocking on neighbors doors, going to the public library, gas stations, police stations, grocery stores, even construction sites. Everywhere they look, no one seems to have a toilet. “This is insane” Jimmy thought to himself. “Has the world gone crazy? Don’t people use toilets anymore?” Being quite nervous over his perdicament, Jimmy begins to run up and down the streets looking for help. Suddenly the back of his head begins to ache. The pain is overwhelming. As the pain intensifies, he realizes that someone calling his name. He looks around but doesn’t see anyone. The voices become louder and the pain on his head becomes more intense. He falls to the ground, covers his ears with his hands and closes his eyes. Immediately Jimmy is aware that someone is shaking him. He opens his eyes and sees the sun blaring down on him. He looks around and realizes that he’s back in the playground. Miss Forester, his favorite teacher is looking down on him holding the blue ball that earlier had hit him in he head. “Was it a dream” Jimmy thought to himself? “Did Ronny Meepleton really throw that ball at me? What a jerk. Wow.. I really need to use the bathroom”.