Tunnel of MURDER Love

Christie and I went on our annual Minnesota State Fair trip yesterday. It’s the best thing that exists in Minnesota, or maybe the entire country, and we’ve even decided to go back again in a few days because we didn’t get to eat everything we wanted to. I mean, I only had one Pronto Pup. ONE. It’s like I didn’t even go. 

In my defense, however, I also had a thick slab of spicy bacon on a stick, three cups of chocolate milk, a bag of Tom Thumb Donuts, and Bacon Flavored Ice Cream.  And I registered to vote, had a blood sugar and BMI screening (I passed both with flying colors), took a vision test, sampled honey, learned about a revolutionary new hose nozzle, pet a baby goat, met my favorite radio announcer, and went down a big slide on a potato sack. 

After a few hours, our stomachs became too full to walk anymore so we decided it was time to go home. And then we saw Ye Old Mill. 

Apparently it’s been a ride at the State Fair for 98 years, and we’ve never even heard of it, so we decided that it was 100% necessary that we took it for a spin. We paid our $3 and then learned that The Old Mill is actually one of the last remaining Tunnels Of Love in the country. 

Now I’ve never been in a Tunnel of Love, but I understood that they're romantic boat rides that take young lovers through dimly-lit tunnels, accompanied by glowing pink and purple hearts. Most of the couples nervously look around, maybe hold hands, while some of the more confident ones make it to second base.  I may or many not have learned all of this from Hey Arnold. 

This is going to be cute! we thought, as we loaded our rickety red boat.

We entered the tunnel, and this is what we saw. 

COMPLETE. FREAKING. DARKNESS.

And we continued to see only that for a few minutes. We had no idea how fast we were moving, or whether we were moving at all - just complete darkness. And all of a sudden I realized Oh crap, maybe this is actually a trick Tunnel Of Love that is actually a haunted house. Something’s totally going to jump out at me, and I’m going to fall out of the boat and into the dirty State Fair water and drown. 

I was a little tense.

Soon enough, we saw light coming around the corner and I thought that maybe, thank God, the ride was over, but then I saw this. 

WHAT. THE. HELL. 

Yes. A dim forest filled with LSD-soaked leprechauns playing a silent “We're Going To Eat You”  tune on their pan-flutes. But as soon as they appeared, the current took us away from them and into complete darkness again. 

After a short sojourn of terrified darkness, we once again happened upon a forest. 

And this continued. 

By the end of the ride, I was thinking, My God, these demonic leprechauns are going to come alive and tear my eyeballs out and force my head under water, where I’ll drown and reanimate as one of them.  

So I tried not to think about it. 

ME: Haha, Christie. Let’s take a picture.

CHRISTIE: Okay! 

OH GOD, THEY ALREADY GOT CHRISTIE. SHE’S GONNA EAT ME.  

AND I ONLY HAD ONE PRONTO PUP THIS YEAR. 

If I was exactly what those ad scammers were looking for...

While I was watching Doctor Who on a semi-illegal video website because I can’t afford Netflix, this ad popped up on the sidebar...

Which obviously made me say, “OH MY GOSH! This sexy woman with a ferociously enormous butt wants to be my friend on Facebook so badly that she put her friend request in a personal ad so it can find me wherever I am! 

And her name is Tionne. How exotic! I'm not even 100% sure how to pronounce that!

We already have two friends in common; I must have showed up on her newsfeed twice and she was all, ‘Wow! That guy’s really hot! I see in him what everyone else misses! I need to be his friend! I will do whatever it takes!‘ 

She even left a personal message: 'Want to meet me?' ...So personal and inciting!  

I should probably click this sidebar Facebook notification and head over to Facebook STAT – I have three notifications that I should check anyway. 

*clickclickclickclick* 

HEY! This isn’t Facebook! ‘Find hot locals in your area’? Hmmm...Well, obviously Tionne is local because we have mutual friends, and she’s hot, so maybe this is some sort of Facebook shortcut to find her faster. Here’s my name, email, and street address. 

$26 a month? I will do whatever it takes to find her. IT’S US AGAINST THE WORLD, TIONNE. 

Maybe I’ll take out my own ad."

And this is why.

I must never watch nature documentaries on National Geographic Channel again. It’s quite rare that wander over to that section of channels because the only thing I usually find on there is The Dog Whisperer. And after twelve too many hours of six too many Sunday marathons of that show I just avoid the channel altogether. 

Every now and then, however, I stumble upon one of their nature documentaries and end up watching obsessively for their entire two-hour run. The first time this happened was a few years ago when I watched one special about an evaporating water hole in the desert. The water hole started as a bustling ecosystem with alligators, deer, monkeys, and birds happily coexisting and splashing together, but soon enough the pond began to shrink and that’s when things got effed up. 

Monkeys started fighting with the alligators over the limited water supply, and everyone was screaming and the alligators were chomping off everyone’s heads and one of the monkeys broke his arm while playing a game of tug-of-war with an alligator using his baby as a rope, and then there was a shot of a mother monkey trying to prod awake the lifeless body of one of her babies and. I. CRIED. 

Soon the monkeys either died or went searching for other water supplies (which meant they were probably just going to die), and the birds flew away, leaving a lone alligator in the disappearing water hole. The pond soon turned to mud, in which the alligator got stuck after awhile. At the end of the documentary the once lush watering hole was just a dry, flat area, and the camera zoomed in on a tiny crack in the dirt, where you could see the stubborn alligator, barely alive, forever trapped in his former home. 

I turned off the television depressed and a little claustrophobic.

So you’d think that last night, when the new NatGeo documentary The Last Lions came on, I would have watched something else. But apparently my love for animals and beautiful film making makes me forget that I’m probably going to cry at some point during the next two hours. 

The documentary was like all those movies about a single mom who has to overcome adversity to take care of her children, except with lions. It starts off with the Mommy Lion happily hanging out with the Daddy Lion and her three cubs. BUT THEN THEY’RE ATTACKED BY SOME ANGRY LIONS FROM THE NORTH WHO WERE FORCED FROM THEIR HOMES BY THE RELENTLESS ENCROACHMENT OF MAN. They were all yelling and swiping and biting at each other and became covered in blood, and I was all...

But the fight is done. Mommy Lion has a cut on her shoulder, and she's scratched out the eye of another lioness. Daddy lion is all banged up, missing an eye, bleeding like crazy, and limping. When the sun rises the next morning he limps away to a quiet place, lies down, and does that heartbreaking thing that lions do in these documentaries: he just chooses to die right then and there. 

[Notice this is still the only way I know how to draw a lion.]

Mommy Lion then takes her three cubs and begins to travel south so they can avoid the evil pride who invaded their home. She can’t find any food, and the cubs begin to go hungry. Each time she tries to hunt, hyenas come and try to kill the cubs, forcing Mommy Lion to come and scare them away. And each time the cubs are threatened, it feels like I have a bowling ball in my stomach. I become all sweaty and tense, white-knuckling the armrests of my chair. 

They find a herd of water buffalo and the Mommy Lion tries to take some down, but she’s not successful. While she’s off trying something else, the evil buffalo go and trample the spot where the cubs are hiding.

When Mommy Lion comes back, she finds that all her cubs have disappeared. She goes searching and finds only one of them, the girl, who’s fine but scared. Then a some more freaking buffalo come and attack them, and Mommy Lion tries to save the baby, but when she finally gets her out of there, the cub’s back is broken, leaving her back legs limp behind her. Mommy Lion carries her away, tests out her lifeless legs, and begins walking. The cub walks alongside her mother on her front legs, but soon Mommy Lion begins to go ahead of her, and then they’re ten feet away, then thirty. The baby stops, and cries for Mommy Lion, and Mommy Lion looks back, but then turns her head away, and her face contorts as if she’s about to cry. 

At this point I’m bawling.

I don’t even want to go on. Right now I’m in the same place I was when I stumbled upon Marley & Me on TBS and I was ruined for an entire week. I get choked up just thinking about it. 

Here’s the last half hour: Mommy Lion gets angry and charges into the middle of the buffalo herd without any strategy at all, fails, and because of this the mean lion pride from before see her as a leader and they all reconcile, and THEN MOMMY LION FINDS ONE OF HER OTHER CUBS, healthy as can be, and everyone lives happily ever after.

I’m relieved, albeit shaken. 

No more nature documentaries for me. Give me a gory human-slashing flick any day, but it’ll take a while for me to recover from the paraplegic lion cub. 

Butt birth: it’s the new hot rage.

I can’t believe I’m about to post this dream. A few advance apologies are in order: If you’re a girl who once found me attractive but will never be able to get this image out of your head, I’m sorry in advance. If you’re the pastor or another one of my coworkers from church who I just added on Facebook and you thought you’d check out what my blog is all about, I’m sorry in advance. I would even recommend reading some of my older stories first; I usually write about much more wholesome things, like here or here or here. If you're one of my normal readers, or my one Canadian reader, no apologies. We're tight now; I can tell you anything. 

I’ve found that the weirdness of the dreams I have is directly correlated to the unhealthiness of the food I ate the day before. I once tested this with an evil concoction of Doritos and some spicy glop that resulted in a dream I never want to redream. 

For the following strange and semi-inappropriate beauty of a dream, I had eaten Big Mac Pizza (yes, pizza with all the fixings of a Big Mac), cheesy popcorn, and five or six fun size Twix bars. I don’t usually eat this way, and apparently not only my body but my mind freaked out about it. 

[At least my brain is watching out for me this time, as opposed to THAT OTHER TIME.]

The dream began with me laying on my side on a hospital bed. I wasn’t sure at the time why I was there, but the fact that a doctor and my best friend were in the room with me made me feel a bit better.

DOCTOR: How are you feeling, Brian?

ME: Oh, I’m doing fine. I kind of feel like I have to go to the bathroom tho–WHOAA!!

Suddenly something humongous shot out of my butt. It didn’t hurt, but I knew it was huge. What is going on? I wondered, still not sure why I was there in the first place. And then I heard it: a baby crying. Of course. I was the surrogate father of one of my best friend’s twins, and his girlfriend was in the other room going through excruciating normal birth with the other one. I was happy that birthing a baby through my butt didn’t hurt as much. 

DOCTOR: So, do you want to cut the cord?

ME: Oh...no, that’s too weird. I don’t even want to think about it.

DOCTOR: Are you sure? A lot of new fathers find it to be a special moment. 

ME: Gross. That’s just not going to happen. I’m not going to cut my butt cord.

DOCTOR: Really? It won’t hurt...

ME: Couldn’t you just do it? You’re the doctor, so you should be okay with this kind of thing.

DOCTOR: No, you should do it. It’s your butt.

ME: But I don’t want to. Seriously, the baby’s not even really mine. Just cut the butt cord so I can stop thinking about it existing down there. It makes me all twitchy.

DOCTOR: Trust me, I wish it didn’t exist either. Here’s the scissors. Cut your butt cord and we can all go home. 

ME: My GOD why do you have to be such a baby about this? You could get a better angle anyway. You’re getting paid to cut my butt cord; guess how much I’m getting paid to poop out a baby? NOTHING. I’m doing it out of the kindness of my butt heart. JUST CUT THE DAMN BUTT CORD SO I CAN PUT SOME PANTS ON. 

And so he did. I didn’t appreciate the grimace on his face or the way he only used two of his fingers to use the scissors, and stretched out the other fingers as if they themselves were avoiding the task as well. 

At this point the dream fast-forwarded a few months and I was carrying the baby in my arms, the one I had birthed, and it was talking to me in full sentences. It would only do this to me, because he and I had a special bond that can only come from a butt birth. 

And then I woke up. 

Now on to less disgusting things.

Dreambomb, or 50 Word Dreams, or Expectations smashed all up in my face/grill.

Here and there I'll have a dream that is too complicated to tweet and not vivid enough to dedicate a whole blog post to. I know what you’re thinking: “BRIAN THAT SUCKS I’M SO SORRY.”  It’s okay, reader, it’s okay. I’ve created an innovative solution. It’s called The 50-Word Dream and I’ve done like four of them, so they're a pretty big deal. Here’s the latest installment, with each dream written in exactly fifty words, entitled “Expectations smashed all up in my face/grill.” 

Dream #1

As one of the judges on American Idol (they’re just letting anyone do it now), I was pretty sure that Snooki was going to completely embarrass herself. But when she belted out “Oh Happy Day,” I found myself euphorically sobbing with Paula and the rest of the viewers at home.

[No lie, folks: I spent a half hour drawing Snooki as an orange bell pepper with a leopard-skin dress, but decided against it.]

Dream #2

The Humane Society salesperson promised that Gus, an orange kitten with six toes on each foot, was actually an angel sent by God to release a prophesy bathed in heavenly light on Christmas Eve. I adopted him because it seemed like a win-win situation. He ran away before Thanksgiving. 

Dream #3

As Harry Potter AGAIN, my friends and I hid from a monster. When I peeked through the blinds, I caught a glimpse of its hideous form: Priceline’s Big Deal. Only a magical chocolate milkshake could destroy him,  but the only friend who was predestined to drink it was lactose intolerant.

Dream #4

I was N64‘s Banjo-Kazooie and I was very busy. Leaping between tree stumps, I tossed pizza slices at a gargantuan blue bull to keep it from murdering me. The bull was increasingly satisfied, but the college theatre company that were using the tree stumps for their play weren’t. 

And that's what I've been dreaming. Seriously, this Harry Potter Unconscious Fetish needs to stop. I don't know why it keeps happening. However, I think if I started dreaming that I was Banjo-Kazooie all the time, we would have a bigger problem

I would give this dream a title, but I really don't even know where to start.

Sometimes I wake up from a dream and think, “Good job, brain!” and congratulate it for dreaming in a way that maximizes the comedy for good old Popcorn Day. Like this one, or this one, and of course this bad boy, who started this whole crazy blog in the first place.

This is also one of those moments.

The dream started with pizazz: I was parachuting down to my friend’s lakeside cabin. I landed on the lake, and decided to do some walking on top of the water for awhile before I came in. It wasn’t too hard. Really, it’s all in the way use your feet. I’ll show you sometime. 

After I wandered to shore, I had to take a wee, and my friend directed me to go in the door and to the right. “The bathroom is being renovated right now so it looks kind of crappy, but it still works.” So I went inside to the right only to find an empty space in their kitchen where it appeared as if a dishwasher had just been. 

“This can’t be the bathroom,” I said to myself, “but there’s nothing else around, so what the heck.” I squeezed myself into the little cranny and tried to get in a safe and satisfactory peeing position. 

[This is a normal position for me, usually seen when I'm on an airplane, or getting into a car, or going spelunking. I'm just really tall, okay?]

Then my friend came in.

FRIEND: Brian! Brian NO!

ME: What...

FRIEND: That’s where our dishwasher used to be! Don’t pee there!

ME: You TOLD me to pee here! I was just following directions.

FRIEND: Why would we put a crawl-in bathroom in the kitchen?

ME: Okay, listen. You told me to go the right, I went to the right. You told me to look for a crappy half-renovated room, and what the eff am I in right now. You told me that  if I found that place I could pee there. Thus, here I am, about to pee. 

FRIEND: But it’s not a bathroom. It’s just not. 

ME: But it’s a torn-up place to the right when you walk in the door.

FRIEND: Still not a bathroom. 

ME: I was just following your directions. All items on the list point directly to this spot. 

FRIEND: You’re dreaming.

[Suddenly all the people in the scene minding their own business looked directly at us.]

ME: That’s beside the point. You directed me here. 

FRIEND: It was my bad. When I said go right, I meant left. The real, actual, non-dishwasher bathroom is to the left. You may pee there. 

ME: Thanks. I really gotta go. 

After I had peed, we decided to tour a nearby college. It was beautiful there: vine-covered brick buildings and flowering trees. There was a pool on campus with a poorly made and barely legible sign stating...

While my friends took some time to figure out how two of those items could possibly relate to pool rules, I said goodbye because I had to take off in my MILLENNIUM FALCON. 

Good job, brain!

But hold that thought. My copilot and I had just pulled out of lightspeed when he received a prophesy–yes, a prophesy–that we were going to be shot down. I wondered for a while if it was going to be a dramatic and heartfelt death, but then we got hit and my copilot put his hands frustratingly in the air.  

And as we spun through space in a sparking, smoky fireball, I realized it wasn’t going to be a very meaningful death at all. Well, that sucks. 

After I died, however, I found myself at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (yes, Harry Potter being the subject of my dreams again) and they were trying to teach me the school anthem, but I kept singing it to the tune of The Angry Beavers’ theme song, which coincidentally is also my morning alarm, which was going off. 

So I woke up. It’s not often that you parachute, walk on water, almost pee in a kitchen, fly the Millennium Falcon, and go to Hogwarts all in one night.  It’s probably because I had my annual Taco Bell visit that day. 

Blogiversary II (And the story of my URL)

Four score and two years ago (minus the four score) a 21-year-old man started a blog.

His name was me.

I mean, that was me. I did that. I was the 21-year-old and I started a blog two years ago today. This one. Called Popcorn Day. It’s my second blogiversary today. Are you following now?

It seems like only yesterday I was home fresh from a trip to Europe during which I discovered I had a panic disorder (I’ve found that many of the most successful bloggers suffer from similar ailments) but also discovered I love blogging and couldn’t for the life of me stop, so I started Popcorn Day based on a dream I had once.

As I began to set up the blog, I entered Popcornday.blogspot.com to check its availability. After a suspenseful moment or two spent watching as the words “Checking Availability” added and subtracted periods from their ellipsis, like the colorful pinwheel that Apple uses to say "I'm thinking, dammit," I was saddened to see that the URL wasn’t available. “Who could possibly have a blog with that title?” I wondered angrily. So I typed in the URL that SHOULD BE MINE, pressed enter, and discovered one of the strangest and mysterious blogs I’ve ever seen.

The blog, entitled “Super Queen Gum 2 Your Rescue,” consists of 19 posts, each written either on November 28^th, 2009, or February 6^th, 2010.  Every post has one picture, accompanied by a colorful sentence all in caps lock, mostly relating to either this woman’s birthday or Christmas presents.

THIS is why I couldn’t have popcornday.blogspot.com.

I was pissed.

To this day, the woman who refers to herself as Super Queen Gum (yet her name on her profile page is PopCornDay) is an enigma. Is her name actually PopCornDay?  Or is it Super Queen Gum, which is just as implausible? Who IS Oldman and why does he go gaga to get Godiva Teddies for her? And where did he get all his money? 

I’ve commented on one of her posts to try to get some more information about her, but received no response. Here is my final plea:

Dear Super Queen Gum (2 my rescue),

We share something that I believe is very special: Popcorn Day. When I first discovered our unique bond, I resented you because I wanted your URL. It’s been two years now and not only have I forgiven you but I’ve grown to love your unchanging, brief blog, like an online Pompeii, images frozen just like they were on November 28^th, 2009 and February 6^th, 2010. It’s beautiful, really.

What I’d like to ask of you is that you contact me, in all your colorful, all-caps glory if you so desire. Explain to me the mystery of what Popcorn Day means to you, so I no longer have to wonder. This is all I ask, Super Queen Gum.

Best regards,

Brian Schroeder, your friend from Popcorn Day

And so, I reluctantly settled with Brian-Schroeder.blogspot.com. Someday I’ll write to the douchemeister who owns Popcornday.com and uses it only as a referral to his other site. SOME PEOPLE WANT THAT URL, MAN.

Anyway, happy blogiversary, everyone! Cheers!

Goals for this year:

1. Don’t you DARE miss National Popcorn Day, January 19^th again.