Ramble On
Cole
Brazell: English II LH
5-24-00

Recently I assassinated a mosquito via smashing it with a sledgehammer for fun. His name was Charlie, and he was a leader of several mosquitoes that lived in my yard and ruthlessly bit people. He always made me too scared to go outside for fear of being bitten by him. I would stare out the window with my face pressed against the glass, watching him fly around and order the rest of the lesser mosquitoes to attack and sting anything that moved, even the lawn sprinkler. Right now you are thinking that Charlie is either an extreme idiot for attacking a lawn sprinkler, but that’s exactly what he wants you to think. I know the real Charlie, Charlie the Tyrant. I have seen too many people walk outdoors in Charlie’s territory, only to be bombarded with savage attacks by him and his army. After taking a few too many Aspirin I realized that Charlie was Hitler reincarnated. They both constantly saluted with their arms extended in the air, they both had small mustaches under their nose, and they both had a heavy German accent. So, when I was watching a rerun of Sandford and Son on TV with my dad (it was the episode where Lamont makes Fred really mad, and Fred thinks he’s having a heart attack) and I could hear the incessant buzzing of Charlie and his Luftwafa out side the screen door, I decided then and there to kill Charlie. I went in my basement and looked for a big, deadly weapon to kill him with, preferably a cannon. I ended up with a sledgehammer, I wasn’t sure if it could get the job done, but I was damn well going to try. I slowly went outside, located Charlie, swatted him to the ground, and brought the hammer down on his body, killing him instantly. It was like I had been stalking and murdering powerful bugs my whole life. By now the Aspirin I took before started to wear off. I sat there in the lawn and looked at my kill, and that made me think. I wondered where Charlie’s body and soul would end up from there. Would his head be cut off and delivered to Josef Stalin in a glass jar like Hitler’s? Possibly. I wiped Charlie off of the head of the hammer and never saw him again. In a way I kind of miss him. Then, I thought about all living things in general. Is life a never ending circle that depends on death for new life? Or is life a linear and definite journey that ends forever with death? I hoped that it was circular, so that in my next life I could be a dog and be able to catch a Frisbee in my mouth. Could this be physically possible? Could I ever end up as a kickass, Frisbee nabbing dog? I decided to sit down now and try and figure out if it is possible. If everything goes according to plan, I will die when I’m 135 years old from choking on a hot dog in my nursing home bed. My funeral will be made up of about 300 of my family members, but no friends because they will be long dead. Most of these 300 family members will be my great, great grandchildren who are cynical teenaged bastards, much like I am today. They will probably sit in the chairs in front of my coffin and sit and giggle at my wrinkled up body. Then one of them, most likely a male, will bring up the thought of what my 135 year old body would look like naked, which will immediately cause them to all burst out laughing and be sent to the parking lot by a priest until they can, “Shut the hell up!” There they will play hackey sack while all the other respectful adults will sit in the church and mourn my death. By mourning my death I mean they will curse me, because they didn’t get time to mow the lawn, and it’s going to look like shit after they get back from their four freaking hour long drive back home. I have no sympathy for them though, because I know that they never would visit me in the funeral home when I was alive because it smelled funny there, and they absolutely hated to play bingo with bananas as prizes. Well they had better play all the bingo they can now, because they don’t have bingo in hell, no sir. Anyway, after all the funeral mass stuff is over, they will bury me in the ground about six feet deep and no one will ever see me again, or at least that’s what they think. When I get six feet of dirt piled on top of me is when the next stage of my existence begins. The first few years will be pleasant in my coffin. I will have plenty of time to lay and slowly rot all by myself. After being buried for five years I figure the crypt will develop little cracks in it because it is real cheap and made in Japan. These cracks will let water leak through, along with worms and bugs. God bless those little critters, they will slowly eat away my skin and chew on my dried out crusty eyeballs until about one hundred years of being dead I am only bones. Since I have been eaten by bugs and digested by bugs, and the bugs will use my meat to develop their own body tissue, I will technically be a bug. Hopefully I’ll be a green bug, because red is my favorite color, and because I am colorblind so green really looks red and red looks orange. Now I am one step closer to being a dog. Being a dog is my huge fantasy and goal, my white whale if you will. However, just because I’m dying to trade my opposable thumb and ability to walk on two legs in for full body fur and a tail to wag, doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy myself along my journey of reincarnation. As a bug I will be a June bug, because my birthday is in June. Well, actually that’s a lie, my birthday is really in November, but it would be cool if it were in June. I could have a birthday party at a baseball game and they could put my name on the scoreboard, along with a message. I believe I want my message to read: “Happy Birthday Cole. You are getting older. Whatever you do don’t end up like you parents. When you get to the age when you say the word ‘responsibility’ more than the word ‘kickass’ you should just put your face down in a pool of water and inhale deeply. It’s all over after that, so just buy a coffin and sit in it until you are dead.” That would be a real kickass party with no responsibility at all. Anyway, I will be a June bug, and quite a famous June bug at that. I will be the first rock and roll legend that is a bug. Rock and roll music doesn’t get much attention from bugs, seeing as how they don’t have ears, at least I don’t think they have ears. With my revolutionary visions though, music will be brought to the bugs who are most likely deaf. It will be like giving a colorblind kid crayons, a guy whose tongue fell off a candy bar, or an idiot a book. As the Adam of bug rock and roll I will not be like anything anyone has ever seen before. (Note: By ‘The Adam of rock and Roll’ I am making a reference to the Bible meaning that I am the first rock and roll bug artist. This can be captured in Genesis 4:19: ‘And Adam did pick up his guitar of rock granted to him by God, and Adam did then play ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,’ and it was good.” Also note that in making a reference to God and the Bible I am intentionally breaking the separation of church and school not because of my devotedness to religion, or my enjoyment of misquoting the Bible, but because I genuinely want to do something that I’m not supposed to do, and that’s just the way I am. Cole Lohman: 2 wings, 6 legs, a bunch of eyes, and one rebellious soul.) I will most likely resemble rock guitarist from the Who, Peter Townsend. Not because of his excellent ability to play the guitar which he undoubtedly has, but more because of his even greater ability to smash his guitar. In an article I read from some magazine somewhere at sometime, Peter described his rowdy, violent actions. (Note: I didn’t actually do any research for this, so anything written from here on out, and in the rest of the story is a bunch of lies and crap). Peter said he got the idea of smashing his guitar from watching reruns of “Gallager Smashes Melons” on Comedy Central. Peter said the secret to demolishing his guitar into billions of pieces and enticing the wild crowd to begin violent riots was to, “Smash it real good!” Hey, he did a lot of drugs in the 60’s, give him a break. When Peter was asked about drug use earlier in his life he stated: “Uh-huh. Yes. I was coked out of my mind from the Civil Rights Movement to the Stock Market Crash.” He also added,” Colorful wallpaper is eating my pajamas.” (Question to self: How did you go from becoming a dog, to hearing about Peter Townsend being coked out? Answer to self: Ummmmmmmm.......). Also, for hopeful guitar smashers of the future he recommended starting small by practicing smashing a violin. Right Pete, I’ll be sure to try that, idiot. Anyway, in performing my wild rock and roll music with my band The Impolite Guitar Smashers I will eventually run into some trouble. I am quite certain that during one of my live shows when I’m smashing my guitar one of the splinters from the frame will shoot into the crowd and poke out one of the 2,154,461,235,513 eyes of a fly. He will sue me for all my money on grounds of physical and emotional damage and I will spend the rest of my bug life in a prison. There, I will receive a lobotomy and try to escape, only to fly into a horse’s mouth and be eaten alive. Okay, so now I’m technically a horse. (Note: I know that that was a lame transition to becoming a horse, but I don’t care what you think. I asked what I should do next in the story and my friend Kevin said that I should be eaten alive by a horse, so I did). When I’m a horse I won’t be one of those race horses, or one of those prissy show horses, I’ll be a horse set out to pasture. I’ll be cool and laid back, and I won’t take any crap from anyone. The thing that will make me such an awesome horse though, is that I’m not going to have an owner to boss me around. The Man will never beat me down. It will be nice at first, eating grass and sitting in the sun, but I figure that after a while I will eat all the grass in my pasture and I will need to go and get a job in the city. I will most likely be the head hamburger flipper at McDonalds. I will take the frozen patties and toss them on the grill and laugh. Those stupid cows got what they deserved. Who do they think they are eating grain all day and leaving patties of poop on the ground? Real animals poop in clumps, like horses. It serves them right to be slaughtered over a screen floor so that the blood can properly drain. Anyway, one day I’ll be in the back flipping burgers and this guy will come through the drive through and order a “Mc-Why-Don’t-You-Go-And-Kill-Yourself-You-Stupid-Horse Burger with fries to go.” That won’t make me happy, so I’ll take off my burger-flipping apron and I’ll go in the parking lot drive through area and I’ll mess up whoever said that. It will be like an intense scene out of a movie. I will slide over the counter and push past anyone that is in my way. Then the scene will fade to slow motion with a close up on my angry horse face. I’m not really sure what a pissed off horses face looks like, it probably shows its teeth, turns its ears back, and snorts a lot. So I’ll be pushing the exit open, snorting my nose like crazy in slow motion. I’ll look left, then right, and then I will hear something, something eerily familiar.... a COWBELL! We will stand across from each other in the parking lot, and oddly, yet appropriately, a car radio will be playing the theme song from the movie The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. Neither of us will have guns, because animals are not violent creatures, and they don’t have a trigger finger. Slowly I will step towards the cow, and he will step towards me. I will make a clip-clop sound synchronized with the beat of the song, and he will have his cowbell softly jingling. I’ll get close enough to him to attack, and I will pick up my front hooves and stomp at his head with them. We will fight for a couple minutes like this, but in the end I will kill him and be arrested for manslaughter of a cow, or cowslaughter. Honestly this would be the highlight of my existence. If I could be a horse and live a wild life where I beat to death any cow that made me mad I would be in heaven. I wish I could live on a farm and have horse fistfights every night. Except when I get arrested and ordered to death, which is what will happen to me after I kill the cow that made fun of me. I will be sentenced to the glue factory where the workers will take the meat off of my bones, and then take my bones and make glue. (Note: Have you noticed a disturbing trend of being sentenced to death for committing violent crimes? I know I have!). I’m not sure exactly how the bones turn into glue, but I know it does. That’s why they put a picture of a cow on the front of the Elmers Glue bottles, because it’s made up of dead livestock animals. After that they will take my meat to the dog food factory, preferably Alpo because they have the best tasting dog food around. Not that I have ever tasted Alpo and found it very, VERY delicious, no sir. I know Alpo is the best because my dog told me so, he’s a talking dog. Anyway, after my meat is made into “Gravy Delight” canned Alpo dog food I will be consumed by an athletic dog named Space Cowboy. This starts the peak of my many lives. I am now a kickass, Frisbee nabbing dog. I’ll be happier as a dog than any other creature because it will be simple to be a dog. When I want attention I will bark, when I am angry I will growl, and when I am happy I will wag my tail. I won’t have any stress, and I won’t have any money to worry about. The best part of me being dog after being all these other creatures is that I will have experienced and endured a more complicated life, so that later I can truly appreciate being a dog. Hard work and patience will pay off in the end and what I want is what I will get. Going out in an open field and watching a red Frisbee spin above me and sail in the sky will be awesome. I will chase after it at full speed, I will time my jump, and at the last second I will leap into the air, without weight. I’ll be lighthearted and happy, and when I grab the Frisbee in my mouth and land on the ground I will be satisfied, happy, and peaceful. That’ll be the day.

THE END


Written by Cole. This story property of Story of the Evening, as well as Cole . Any comments should be directed to Cole or Chris Schmidt. Also, check out stories such as The Monkey story, The Dime Story and more.