Billy’s Weird Life, (Also dubbed “the most uninspired piece of writing to come out of Brian’s fingers.”)

Sometimes I feel like half of me is Timid & Shy Little Brian, and the other part is his boisterous uncle who is always trying to embarrass him. Timid & Shy Little Brian just wants to stay under the radar and live in anonymous peace, but the boisterous uncle is always yanking him out of it and reminding everyone of the time he got stuck in a his girlfriend’s parents’ bathroom. It is because of this conflict that I write this post.

The problem is that I promised I’d do this in my previous post. About a year ago I posted The Fraidy-Cat Lion, which is an endearing and Young Authors Award-winning story written by me in third grade. Yes, third grade, my rebellious year. Between episodes of playing drums with my pencil and playing High-Five Spin The Bottle with a glove, I was writing the damn cutest thing you could ever imagine.  That’s right, Mrs. White and that Meatloaf-doppelganger recess aide, I used the pain from your oppressive fists to foster my creativity! Who’s laughing now?

Then fifth grade came along, and with the entrance of scant traces of puberty, more and more of my adorable creativity took its leave. That year it was announced that we would all be writing books to be entered again into the Young Authors contest. Being a veteran of this kind of contest, I was sure that my story would be a shoe-in for the award. But I wouldn’t let the fame make me sloppy; I wanted my new story to have the same artistic integrity and grounded panache as The Fraidy-Cat Lion. So I started brainstorming.

This was the year that I had started reading the Harry Potter books and I wanted nothing more than to be him. Each chapter of the books filled me with such giddy excitement accompanied by the mournful sigh, Oh my sweet goodness, I wish someone would tell ME that I’m a wizard! It permeated my every thought, and clearly affected my dreams as well. So when it came time for me to choose a story to write, I undoubtedly had one choice and one choice only: to use this passion to write a story about a boy who finds out he’s a wizard and is invited to Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Creative.

Even more creative, though, is the title. Ladies and gentlemen, Billy’s Weird Life.

 

  ["I dedicate this book to my family"...because they don't know that I played High-Five Spin The Bottle yet and I have to rack up all the points I can before conferences.]

 

[Billy's dad and grandparents are dead ringers for my dad and grandparents. Really, I did a horrible job concealing the fact that Billy is me.]

 [My Calvin & Hobbes influence started early. See?]

 [My sister drew Billy for me on this page. That is clearly 8th grade artistry.]

 [This is one of my favorite pages, because (1) Again, Billy's dad looks just like my dad, (2) I used colored pencil, crayons, AND gel pens to illustrate this, and (3) I thought that people wouldn't recognize the golden starlike shapes as "sparks."]

[I owned a shirt just like that at the time. Billy = me.]

 

 [I amazed even myself with my mountain-drawing abilities. WATCH YOUR BACK, BOB ROSS.]

 

[I'm not fully sure what is going on here between Billy's mom and dad, but it seems as though I was hinting at some sort of deeper problems in that relationship.]

[The Chair-Moving Spell: A favorite among weary-legged wizards.]

 

[Billy ends up being HOMESCHOOLED? What the HELL?]

 [Probably not the best idea to end the book with a fragment sentence.]

I did not win the Young Authors Award that year. During the assembly during which the award winner would be announced, I sat confidently cross-legged, ready to stand up and accept the prize. But it never happened. I was crushed. 

How could I not have won? Comments written by my classmates on the back cover of the book included such praise, as:

Cool! - Hans

Cool book! It was really GOOD! I liked the idea about "Harry Potter" ~Alyssa~

Very good book! I loved the not very many mistakes. Cool(written with eyes in the O's and a silly, tongue-wagging smile underneath)! - James

I guess that's that. You've now read my embarrassing fifth grade novel. And it's all because of that embarrassment-fixated second half of myself. There aren't any more on this subject, thank God. (Well, except for my seventh grade autobiography.)

DAMN YOU, SECOND HALF OF MYSELF!

My Name’s Harry Potter and I Love Horses

I can’t stop dreaming that I am Harry Potter. Seriously, take a look: Not only was I Harry Potter in this post, but I was also Jesus (a puzzle I don’t even want to begin to solve); and I never told you this, readers, but in Dream #3 of this DreamBomb series, I was actually Harry again. I blame J.K. Rowling for being such a good writer of relateable characters. Her, and the fact that I probably secretly wish that I was a wizard and the only time I can say that out loud is when I’m dreaming. When I was younger it was harder to keep it quiet.

In fifth grade I had written a short book called Billy’s Weird Life (which I must admit is quite the literary zenith of a title), about a boy who learns that he is a wizard and goes on an adventure while traveling to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I would totally post the story here like I did The Fraidy-Cat Lion but trust me, folks, Billy’s Weird Life is nowhere near as endearing or funny as that one. It’s really just a poorly formed, copyright-infringing story with “I WISH WIZARDS WERE REAL AND THAT I WAS ONE OF THEM!” screaming between every line.  So I won’t post it. (You know I probably will.)

 [That's all I'll give you for now. Click to embiggen.]

And once again I have dreamt that I am Harry Potter. Here it is.

My friends and I (you know, Ron and Hermione) were in hiding because, obviously, Voldemort was trying to chase us down. So for those of you who are keeping count, I was the “Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows” Harry Potter, the one who’s all dark and cynical now because he just wants to be a normal famous wizard. Dinner that night was canned pasta alfredo, as in the whole meal was in one can. Noodles, chicken, white sauce. It was even bland in my mind.  I choked it down, wishing for some Sriracha sauce to squeeze on top. 

But something better than Sriracha arrived. A freaking horse, people. It was light brown and kind of looked like a tall Airedale terrier with a mane. I knew immediately that Dumbledore had sent it.

[Let me stop right here to say that I KNOW that at least one of you Harry Potter nerds reading would interrupt and say, “Wait wait wait wait…By The Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore is DEAD, Brian. He was killed in The Half-Blood Prince and you know it!” I DO know it, my friends. Frankly, I’m a little embarrassed that my unconscious mind didn’t pick up on this when I was dreaming it. I promise it will never happen again.]

I quickly slung myself onto the horse and went on an adventure. It was quite a long adventure and I didn’t know where I was going, but I remember a Rocky workout-like scene, where they cover days and days worth of activity in a short segment, during which the horse and I bonded. It was heartwarming.

 [No, not like that.]

Soon enough, in the middle of the night, we arrived a stable owned by a crotchety old man. He let us in, begrudgingly, but I would have to stay in the stable with the horse. I was okay with that, since apparently in my dreams I’m okay with sleeping on a floor strewn with horse poo.

The next night I was introduced to the petulant old man’s wife, who kept dropping hints about my horse being special, which confused me. And then she told me that the reason her husband was mad at me was because he wanted the magical clarinet I had with me.

ME: What?

HER: A magical clarinet.

ME: Why would I have a magical clarinet?

HER: You just do. In your bag.

ME: No way.

HER: Yes way. Look in your bag. See that box? What’s inside?

ME: Woah. A clarinet. And you say it’s magical?

HER: Sort of. It can play like a bunch of magical songs.

ME: Who gives a crap about that?

HER: My husband.

ME: Well he can have it if you want.

HER: Oh, that would be great. Maybe he’ll stop griping now.

It was the strangest conversation. Then my horse, whose name turned out to be Midnight (I know, right?), came out of the stable. He was skinny, but not gaunt skinny; it was more as if a picture of him had been stretched vertically, so he was all disproportionate and lanky. I turned to the stable owner’s wife.

ME: What the heck happened to my horse?

HER: Oh, that. His body reacts to the conditions of storms. See how there’s a small storm forming in the distance? That’s why his body is like that; the storm is small, so he’s small. That’s why he’s called Midnight. 

 

ME: That makes no sense whatsoever.

HER: It does in this state of your brain.

ME: What?

HER: Nevermind.

ME: Can I still ride him?

HER: Sure! Just jump on.

So I jumped on top of Midnight, even though it felt like I was riding a wooden sawhorse (get it? SawHORSE?), and we rode off into the woods. The stable owner’s wife yelled after me, “Oh! And he understands everything that you say!”

This new realization was so exciting for me. No wonder we had bonded so well! I said “Go left!” without moving Midnight’s reins, and he went left. I said “Slow down just a bit,” and he did just that. And then I told him all of my personal secrets because I knew he would listen.

Then I woke up. 

I texted Christie right away when I woke up, to share the story with a fellow Harry Potter nerd, and also so I could remember as many details as I could. She replied, saying, “That’s a good one! You should blog about it today.” I told her I couldn’t because I didn’t want to cheapen my relationship with Midnight by joking about it. I’m sure she didn’t know if she should laugh or not.

The day I learned that it’s good to tell the truth about NOT making out with your 3rd grade classmates.

I’m pretty sure my 3^rd grade teacher, Mrs. White, had a personal vendetta against me. Or maybe I was just always in the wrong place at the wrong time, like that time I was recounting my most recent laser tag adventure with my friends and got chastised for making a gun shape with my fingers. Sure, it was only months after the Columbine shooting, but as a non-news following ten year-old, I had no idea that making a gun shape with one’s thumb and forefinger was now considered threatening. Well excuse me, Mrs. White.

Then there was that time that I was rolling my pencil from the top of my book to the bottom while not listening to the English lesson:

MRS. WHITE: So Brian, I see you’re playing drums again with your pencil.

ME: Clearly that’s not what you see.

MRS. WHITE: I see what I see, and you’re playing drums!

ME: How does rolling my pencil like this constitute playing drums? I’m not tapping it or anything.

MRS. WHITE: Just stop playing drums, Brian.

ME: What kinds of bands do you listen to? Do they play drums like I do? Can they only play on a slight incline? Does the guitarist play in the same fashion? I can’t imagine how that would work.

MRS. WHITE: Go sit in the corner.

ME: Bullocks.

Because of Mrs. White’s constant raking me across the coals, my tenth year was mostly spent with the sneaking suspicion that somehow I had, against my will, gone bad and was on some sort of inescapable moral decline.

 

Perhaps my succumbing to that very thought caused me to commit the following act, which haunts me to this day. This, of course, is the day I learned that it’s good to tell the truth about NOT making out with your 3^rd grade classmates.

It was at recess in January and I was hanging out with my mixed-gender group of friends when one of them suggested, “Wanna play Spin The Bottle?”

Silence.

Of course we didn’t want to play Spin The Bottle. I experienced my first semi-crush a year later, and any sort of desire to kiss a girl didn’t develop for a year after that. Spin The Bottle was something that I had always imagined happened somewhere around seventh grade.

(For the record, to this day, I have not once played Spin The Bottle. I think that game is just an allusion that television shows use to help preteens deal with questions about attraction and sexual growth. Maybe it was big in the sixties and seventies, maybe even the eighties, but not once have I heard of someone my age who actually played Spin The Bottle when they were younger. If anyone has, PLEASE take advantage of my comments section and tell me about it.)

After a clumsy silence, my friend quickly covered his steps.

FRIEND: Uh, of course I meant High Five Spin The Bottle. No kissing. Just high fives.

THE REST OF US: Sure, okay. That seems age-appropriate.

And so, we went up on the hill in our playground, circled up, and Tia—the Australian foreign exchange student—took off her Tweety Bird glove and placed it in the center. Then one of my more daring friends spun it and bashfully high-fived the girl it landed on. When it was my turn, I spun the glove and when I saw it landed on someone, I yelled “YEAH!” and high-fived her. This was met with gasps.

ME: What?

THEM: I think you’re taking this all too lightly.

ME: Really? It’s just a high-five.

THEM: It’s high-five SPIN THE BOTTLE. The stakes are much higher. If we were in seventh grade, we’d be kissing and some of us would be getting coupled-off to go have Closet Time. I saw it on The Adventures of Pete & Pete.

ME: I didn't know you watched that. 

THEM: We LOVE it! Two brothers, one name. What a hilarious situation! 

ME: Whatever. The deal is, we're not in seventh grade. We’re high-fiving like normal, non-sexually committed 3^rd graders; it’s just that we’re leaving it up to the chance of a spun glove.

THEM: It’s so much more than that! This is practice for the world that inevitably awaits us. This game is the single most important stepping stone into our teenage years.

ME: I think you’re over-thinking it.

THEM: I THINK YOU’RE UNDER-THINKING IT.

So I pretended to take it more seriously. We kept this game going for two recess periods, feeling more and more rebellious. There was even talk about one couple actually kissing but that never amounted to anything, because in second grade we had all watched a video about a kid who kissed a girl at school and got expelled and was screwed for the rest of his life, so we were all afraid of that happening.

Then someone told on us. One of the meanest, nastiest recess patrol officers walked up the hill toward us. She looked exactly like Meatloaf. The singer. 

 

*

**

***

 

You would have thought we were just told all of our dogs had died in a mysterious cement mixer accident. We were sentenced to a week's worth of recesses sitting by the outside wall of the school building, also known Azkaban, under the watchful eye of it's main dementor Ms. Meatloaf.

 

[I'm not saying that Evergreen Elementary hires cocaine users. However, if they hired Meatloaf, then that's exactly what I'm saying.]

It was a tough week. What’s such a mystery about the whole experience is that NONE OF US had the brains to tell anyone, “Oh hey, it actually was High-Five Spin The Bottle. There was no kissing. Just high-fives.” We took our punishment like little baby douche-raccoons, perhaps because we felt like playing this watered-down version of Spin The Bottle was too close to having Closet Time.

What's worse is that I didn’t tell my parents about this incident until parent-teacher conferences a month later, which means that I had nothing but diarrhea for thirty days. And still, I didn’t tell them that we only high-fived instead of kissed until one day, while retelling the story a decade later, I told them the truth. What a relief. 

*Honest to God, she looked EXACTLY like that.

**I distinctly remember her saying that. I also remember NOT thinking that she was born yesterday.

***Okay, there's a small chance that this Meatloaf picture is actually Neil Young.

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.

GREAT NEW IDEA: OKakes!

Have you ever wanted to make someone happy by surprising them with a sugary treat, and reply affirmatively to their question at the same time? THEN LOOK NO FURTHER.

As the inventor of SongBomb©™, PoemBomb©™, and RapAttack©™, I am proud to introduce new phenomenon which will be sweeping the nation in no time:

 

 

OKakes!

 

OKakes! are the perfect treat for answering questions in a fun and meaningful way! This is how they work:

1.) Someone asks you a question, for which your answer will ultimately be “Okay.”

2.) Instead of answering, drop whatever you’re doing and run away.

3.) Go and make a cake. It could be any kind of cake, really; a big cake, a little cake, cupcakes, petit fours…really, whatever you want.

4.) Decorate your cake with frosting, and squeeze “OK” onto it.

5.) Bring your newly made OKake to your friend who asked you the question.

6.) They will then reply to your tasty treat/answer with a smile, laughter, a hug, or tears of joy. They’ll LOVE it.

OKakes! are a most versatile concoction! Check out what these fine customers have used them for! 

. . .

 

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See? They’re a perfect idea! Call now for an OKakes! Starters Pack, complete with OKakes! Guide to the Perfect Positive Response, including tips for making OKakes! in advance!*

*It is recommended, especially for the smaller OKakes!, that you keep the letter O and K on the same cake. If not, your friends may wonder why you have KKKakes! sitting around your house.

Submit your own stories and videos of your OKakes! experiences for a chance to win an individualized PoemBomb©™!