We don't have Flubber, but we have Blubber.

I used to go to the library regularly in fourth and fifth grade, mostly to browse the science fiction section. The library was a tiny, one-room building crammed with books. The head librarian, the only person there most of the time, was a very old, wrinkled, hunched-over lady who moved and spoke slowly.

One day, while I was perusing the scifi shelf, a girl who was roughly my age came in with her mom. Clearly unfamiliar with both card catalogs and the "alphabetical by author" system of shelving fiction, she immediately went to the librarian and asked if the library had a copy of Forever.

"Well, I know we have Blubber," she said, shuffling over to the young adult section, "but I don't know if we have Flubber."

"Forever," the girl said, following the librarian.

"Yes, yes, I know we have Blubber, but I don't know about Flubber," she replied, leaning close to the shelf and eyeballing books.

"Forever," the girl said again, "not Flubber."

"I don't know if we have that. I know we definitely have Blubber, though. Do you know who it's by?"

"Forever," she said again, clearly frustrated by this point, "by Judy Blume."

"Ah, yes," the librarian said, pulling down a copy of Blubber, also by Judy Blume, off of the shelf for the girl. "We have this one, Blubber, I don't see Flubber here, though."

"I'm not looking for Blubber or Flubber," the girl told the librarian. "I'm looking for Forever."

The librarian finally understood what she was saying. "Oh," she said, suddenly much less enthusiastic. "We got rid of that because it had some overnight stuff," she said in what sounded like a disgusted tone as she shelved the book. The girl stormed out without saying another word, and her mom thanked the librarian for her help before following.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out that the book is still unavailable in that backwards little town.

The greenhouse effect.

In class one day in fourth grade, my teacher asked if any of us knew what the greenhouse effect was. I raised my hand. Nobody else raised theirs, so my teacher called on me.

"It's when they mix the old food with the fresh food at Chinese food restaurants, so the fresh food isn't any good because it's full of old food that keeps getting older," I said.

"No," my teacher said, shaking his head and looking amused. "No, that's not it at all."

The reason I believed this was because a few years earlier, a Chinese food restaurant opened next to a video store we frequented. One day as we were driving away, my parents were expressing their sympathy for the owners of the restaurant, because it seemed like nobody ever ate there.

"Why don't we eat there, then?" I asked. I thought it would be nice to give them some business. My dad, however, explained to me that if nobody was eating there, they would just keep mixing the fresh food with the old food, and it would just keeping getting worse and worse. He said that this was called the greenhouse effect, and it was the reason why we weren't going to eat there.

The funny looking rock.

When I was really little, I was visiting my grandpa and playing in his backyard. I liked to lift up rocks and collect the bugs crawling around underneath them. I also kept an eye out for interesting looking rocks to take home and stick in an empty cookie tin that was my "rock collection." In truth, it was mostly gravel, but I had a couple of neat looking ones. On this particular day, amidst the spiders and beetles, I found a completely awesome looking rock. It was unlike any other rock I had ever seen, but it was hard, dry, and stiff, so it was definitely a rock. I picked it up, excited about the new acquisition for my collection.

I brought it inside and showed my mom and my grandpa, who immediately made me throw it away and thoroughly wash my hands. I was still convinced that it was a rock, but they told me it was actually a dried up old dog turd.

Super Mario Bros. 3, all night long.

During the summer between fourth and fifth grade, I spent some time at my grandpa's house with my cousins. My Nintendo was there, I had Super Mario Brothers 3, and my cousins and I spent as much time as we could playing it. Our time was usually severely limited by my mom's insistence that we didn't spend too much time playing. She used to "hide" it in the cupboard where the cups and mugs were kept when we weren't supposed to be playing it. My oldest cousin, Dino, used to regale us with tales of spending entire nights, from dusk til dawn, playing Nintendo.

"Yeah, me and Ryan waited until everyone was asleep, and then we played Contra until the sun came up! It was awesome!"

One day we formulated a plan for us to experience such a night of pure bliss as he had described. We would wait until 2:00 AM, when the adults were soundly asleep, and we would silently move to the living room, where we would spend the entire night playing Super Mario Brothers 3.

When nightfall came, we went to bed, but we didn't sleep. We laid in our sleeping bags, awake and waiting for the right moment.

"Is it time yet?" I asked.

"No, we still have two hours and forty minutes. We have to wait until they're definitely asleep," my cousin said. He was the one with the clock, and the one with the plan. We trusted him, because he had done this before. I tried to lay there silently, every so often asking him if it was time.

And then, after much waiting, it was finally time.

The house was silent, and we slipped out of our sleeping bags and tiptoed into the living room, gleeful that we were about to spend the rest of the night gripping a plastic brick, mashing buttons, and making 8-bit pixels move across the screen. The ultimate goal was to defeat the evil Bowser, but the experience of the mission was more important than the final objective; Nintendo had to be played all night long.

The kitchen, and it's cupboard where the prize was held, was directly connected to the living room. We snuck to the cupboard and swung it open. Our hearts sank as we gazed upon shelves of mugs and cups, the Nintendo Entertainment System conspicuously missing. Somebody must have gotten wind of our plan.

Dejected, we went back to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.

Gerard stinks, pass it on.

During the summer between first and second grade, my parents had me enrolled in a daily summer program to get me out of the house. I had no friends there, and would eventually get kicked out when they took us to a second-rate amusement park where I spat at the llamas out of boredom.

Every morning, all the kids enrolled in the program would meet in a big gymnasium somewhere, and then would split off into different assigned groups to go do whatever it was we were doing that day. Each group had a couple of adults to make sure that we behaved and didn't wander off and die. One of our adults was a guy named Gerard.

One day, our group was on the city bus heading somewhere, and I saw the kids sitting across from me whispering to each other. One kid would whisper to whoever was sitting next to him, and then that person would whisper to whoever was sitting on their opposite side. I secretly wished that I had some friends, so that I would have somebody with whom to exchange secrets. As I was thinking about that, the kid next to me leaned over and whispered something in my ear.

"Gerard stinks, pass it on."

I laughed a little, but didn't yet understand the concept of passing it on, and didn't have anything against Gerard. The kid waited a minute and whispered it again. I failed to pass it on, so he waited another minute and whispered it once more. I suddenly understood the "pass it on" part, and I turned to the kid next to me and whispered.

"Gerard stinks, pass it on."

I must have whispered it loudly, because an old, grubby-looking guy with a beard who was riding the bus heard me.

"That's not nice," he said.

Going ape shit.

When I was really little, my family took a trip to the zoo. I'm pretty sure my cousins were there, and my sister, who is two years younger than myself, was still in a stroller.

As we walked around, we saw these guys ahead of us who kept running back and forth in front of one of the exhibits. They seemed like adults to me, but in retrospect they were probably teenagers. When we got closer, right in front of the exhibit where they were, I saw them making funny faces at the animals, which turned out to be chimpanzees. They ran away again, right as the chimps began throwing poop. We didn't know there was about to be ape shit thrown, so my sister's stroller got poop on it.

Fear of dogs.

When I was little and still lived in a big city, my family would spend occasional weekends four hours away, in the middle of nowhere. There were seemingly endless forests full of trails to explore, bugs to catch, and some decent kids to hang out with. The place was a paradise where I could ride around on my bike all day with my friends, and ride we did. In our travels, however, there was one place that we avoided. It was a house that contained something so horrifying that we didn't dare get too close. We would ride our bikes ten minutes out of the way to circumvent it, or, if we were in a really extreme hurry, we would race past it at top speed on our bikes, never looking back. The people who owned the house supposedly had a pet, the likes of which I had never seen, though I had heard the tales. According to legend, the golden retriever that lived there once almost ripped some guy's brother's leg off.

One time I was riding my kick scooter alone on a dirt trail through a forest. I stopped to pee on some bushes, and when I finished and turned around to get back on my scooter, I felt my stomach drop below my knees.

Standing next to the scooter was a dog.

I had never seen a golden retriever, so I didn't know if it was the monster dog, but I was generally scared enough of dogs by this point that I was shaking with fear. Knowing I had little chance of escaping on my scooter, I tried to remain calm and walk with the scooter between myself and the dog, using it as some kind of entirely useless shield. The dog followed me out of the forest, panting silently and glancing at me. By the time I got back to the street, I had figured out that the tail-wagging may not have been an act of aggression, and I decided to risk riding the scooter again. The dog didn't chase me, and as I rode away I felt incredibly relieved to have not been mauled.

Another time I was riding around with one of my friends, and we decided to explore a trail we had never taken before. It turned out to be a horrible mistake.

Shortly after embarking along the dirt path, a dog barked at us from one of the houses that the trail ran behind. We stopped for a moment, wondering if we should turn around. We decided to risk it and keep going.

A few minutes later, we were being barked at again. We kept riding, and soon more dogs were barking at us. It seemed like every house had a barking dog behind it. They were mostly fenced in behind chain-link fence, but they could obviously see us, and that was terrifying enough. What if they got loose? We stopped our bikes and feebly tried hiding behind them, but the dogs kept barking.

"Should we keep going or go back?" my friend asked, tears coming down his face.

"I don't know," I sobbed, "There are dogs both ways!"

We decided to keep moving forward, walking our bikes and trying to duck low to the ground, which slowed us down immensely and did absolutely nothing to curb the noise of the ferocious house pets. We were both scared out of our minds and crying, almost positive we were going to be eaten alive.

"I have to pee," I said.

"We have to get out of here!"

"I know," I cried, "but I really have to go!"

I tried to remain in my crouched position while I peed on a tree, my friend begging me in a panic to hurry up so we could continue our escape. Sometimes you really just have to go. I finished and we kept moving.

Eventually, we got to the street, hopped on our bikes, and rode away as fast as our legs would let us. We never took that trail again.

My fear of dogs subsided as I grew older, until I was about 20. I was at a friend's house, and another friend showed up with a pit bull. I was sitting on the floor, and the dog walked over and began sniffing me.

"Wow," my friend with the dog said, "He likes you. He doesn't like anybody."

The moment he was done saying that, the dog started growling at me, inches from my face. My friend pulled him away and took him into another room. I was a little shaken, as I had heard that if a pit bull bites you, they almost have to kill it to get it to let go. I stayed in the room where I was.

When I finally left the room, the dog saw me and ran at me. It jumped up and bit my arm. It bit softly enough that it may have been playing, but my friend ran over and pulled the dog off of me, yelling at it. I was going to hang out for a while, but I decided to leave instead.

Shortly after that, I went to a girl's house with one of my friends to pick up a drum set. Her family raised rottweilers, and they barked at us ferociously from their outdoor kennels as we walked to her door. I was shaken enough by the recent pit bull incident that I was a little freaked out by the big, loud dogs. When we went into her bedroom, she had another rottweiler standing on her bed, it's head level with mine for easy access to my jugular vein. She tried to convince me that she was a friendly dog and that I should pet her, but I just wanted to get the drums and get the fuck out of there as quickly as possible.

When I first met my girlfriend, her family had a pit bull that was so dangerous and mean that it had to be chained up all the time. It would bark and growl like a maniac at everybody who didn't live there, and would even come to her window to terrorize me when I was in her bedroom. That certainly didn't help improve my opinion of the breed.

To this day, rottweilers and pit bulls both freak me out to the point of looking like a complete wuss. If I see somebody walking one of these dogs, I walk the other way.

Go play on the freeway.

When I was about 8 years old, I took a horse riding class for city kids at the park. The class met every day for a couple weeks, and it was all kids roughly my age. There was one other boy, and the rest of the class consisted of girls. There was one red-haired girl who I instantly had a crush on, probably because she looked just like the girl from The Goonies.

Having always been a shy kid, I didn't talk to anybody for the first few days. I wanted to make friends with the other boy, because he was a dude and didn't seem to have any friends either. I wanted to talk to the red-haired girl, too, but I was too scared. A few days into the class, though, she came up to me with a group of her friends.

"Hey, kid," she said.

"Hi," I said.

"Is your name Bart?" she asked me.

"No," I said, "Paul." The fact that she called me Bart was noteworthy, because this was a couple years before The Simpsons was even on TV.

"Paul?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Go play on the freeway," she told me.

"Yeah, go jump in a lake!" said another girl.

I remember thinking that the red-haired girl's comment was sort of clever in a mean way, but that the other girl's comment was just stupid in a mean way. I also remember thinking something along the lines of fuck this class, and fuck these bitches! I wandered off on my own for the rest of the day, and when my mom picked me up they told her that I had disappeared and that they couldn't find me. I didn't tell them why I had walked off, but they warned me not to do it again.

The dude and I became good friends for the duration of the class, because the girls were horrible bitches to him, too.

Kids stealing bikes.

Between fourth and fifth grade, I lived near a single mother with three filthy children. My siblings and I were somewhat afraid of the mother, because she could often be heard screaming obscenities at the top of her lungs early in the morning. I'll never forget riding my bike past their house one morning and hearing her scream, "I spent all fucking morning making that fucking oatmeal and you're going to fucking eat it!" like a completely crazy person. Her public persona was much more subdued, and she never screamed at any of us, and we often would hang out with her dirty, sticky children.

Early one morning we were sitting in the living room of our house, and heard somebody in the back yard. We pulled the curtain open and saw one of the dirty kids riding away on one of our bikes. We went outside and found that they had taken all three of our bikes, as well as our little kick scooter. We walked over to their house, where they had all of our bikes in their back yard. We assumed it to be a juvenile prank, but in retrospect, I wonder if they were thieves and were going to sell them. Their family were no strangers to being shady as hell, and once when their dad came to pick the kids up in his semi-truck, he ran over our mailbox. We didn't know who did it, but one of the kids later told me who it was.

I was also a bike thief during this period.

I only stole one bike, and I didn't actually intend to keep it for more than a few hours. I couldn't really bring it home without my parents wondering where the hell it came from.

There was another kid who lived near me, and we had decided to trade my kick scooter for his bike. Like so many bad business transactions that kids make, the deal fell through, and I decided I would just take his bike for a while. I planned on bringing it back to him later, but I had only had it for about an hour when the kid came back with his dad in his pickup truck. I didn't say anything, and neither did they, I just walked the bike to the truck, where they loaded it in and drove away.

Burning down the toilet.

When I was 8 or 9 years old, I locked myself in the bathroom at my grandpa's house and went through the cabinets. I looked for anything that said FLAMMABLE on the label. When I had collected a few cans and bottles with this warning on them, I began trying to start a fire in the toilet. I figured since I was doing it in the toilet, it would be safe, because the toilet was full of water and could be flushed.

I'd spray or pour a flammable product into the toilet, and then drop a match into the water. Each time, the match would go out with quick sssst sound, and I'd repeat the process.

Sssst!

I did this a number of times in a few minutes, each time with the same result. I decided to give it one more shot. This time I would go all out. I dispensed a very large amount of shaving gel into the bowl, and then to that I added more of each of the other products. I lit a match, and dropped it into the toilet.

Whoosh!

A huge fireball shot out of the toilet and into my face. I jumped back, spun around, and looked in the mirror, sure I was going to be hideously deformed by burns that must have been too intense to hurt very much. Instead, I found that I looked the same, though a tiny bit of my hair had been singed into tiny brown lumps. I was shocked that such a huge fireball to the face did so little damage, and kept wondering if the Freddy Krueger burn scars would appear as I stared into the mirror.

And then I smelled the smoke.

I turned around, and saw the toilet paper on the dispenser near the toilet was burning. Worse, my grandpa had shag-carpet cover on the lid of the toilet, and it was also in flames. Panic hit me, and I grabbed a towel and began frantically smacking at the flames. I was terrified that everything adults said about fire was going to come true, and I was going to burn down the whole house. Relief hit me when I put the fire out, but then terror struck once again: what was I going to do with the evidence? I took the cover, the ash-covered towel, and the toilet paper all outside and threw it over the fence, into my grandpa's front yard. I knew they would find it eventually, but there was heavy foliage where I threw it, and I hoped it wouldn't be found soon.

Then I went back to the living room, and sat on the couch watching TV with my cousins as if nothing had happened.

A few minutes later, my grandpa appeared.

"Who was playing with matches?"

Nobody said anything.

"I know somebody was playing with matches, because I can smell it in the bathroom."

My mom and my aunt came in, and my grandpa told them that one of us was playing with matches. We were supposed to go to the pool that day, but they told us if we didn't confess, we wouldn't get to go.

"You won't get in trouble," my grandpa told us, "I just want to know who did it. That's very dangerous."

"It was Ruben!" I said.

"No, it wasn't!" shouted my shocked cousin.

I continued to lay the blame on my cousin for the rest of the day, and he continued to deny it. We didn't get to go to the pool.

A few days later, when I was getting a haircut, the lady cutting my hair asked if I had burned it.

"No," I said, looking at my mom in the mirror and wondering if she could hear us.

"It looks like you burnt it," she said.

"No," I said, "That's just dry hair stuff."

"Oh," she said, almost definitely not believing me.

Maybe it was some sort of cosmic payback when, a few years later, my friend blamed me for setting a knife on fire in the closet of my fifth grade class.

Ricky bleeds to death.

When I was in seventh grade, I had my first experience with a friend abruptly ceasing to exist.

Ricky Duncan was the first friend I made when I had moved from a big city to a tiny, middle-of-fucking-nowhere podunk town in fourth grade. I was riding my bike around and ran into Ricky, who was also riding his bike around. He was a year younger than I was, and we hit it off and began hanging out all the time. Nearly every day, I'd ride my bike to his house, where we'd usually sit in the basement playing Nintendo for hours. Our favorite game was a two-player co-op game where both players had a little army guy at the bottom of the screen, blasting away waves and waves of enemies. The game would only let you continue so many times after dying, but I think we were able to finish the whole thing at least once.

I've never been religous, but I once went to church with Ricky and his family for some reason. I think that they didn't normally attend, but a relative was in town visiting them and he wanted to go, so they all went. I had spent the night at Ricky's, so I was already there. I rode my bike home and asked if it was alright, and then came back and we all went to church. Even as a little kid, I thought it was stupid. I remember there was a lot of singing, but I'd make up my own words or just pretend to sing when everybody else was getting into the spirit of the Lord. I don't think Ricky was very excited to be there, as he had made some negative remarks about seeing the elementary school principal there. At some point, they called all the kids to sit in the front and talk about good uses for the Bible. A few kids talked about how it was great for learning lessons about life and God. Ricky and I just sat there.

One time Ricky told me I needed to stop swearing around him, because he was finding himself swearing more and more. I asked him what was wrong with that, and he told me he thought it was wrong. I told him words weren't harmful, but he disagreed. On at least one occassion after that, he told me I had to leave his house for the rest of the day because of my foul mouth.

I can only assume it was mainly Ricky's parents that had given him the impression swearing was wrong. My parents didn't allow it, but their attitude only taught me that swearing was something you shouldn't do in front of authority figures. Swearing hurts nobody. I tried to convince Ricky of this, but he wouldn't believe me. To him, swearing was always wrong. Perhaps it was because I had always questioned authority, and maybe Ricky was one of the ones who never did. It's a trait that I notice in people now that I'm older, but probably didn't when I was ten years old.

Thinking back about Ricky, I find his attitude on swearing to be completely bizarre when contrasted to other things his parents instilled in him. Mainly, I find it mind boggling that they convinced him that swearing was always wrong, but they gave him guns. Guns kill things. What does swearing do again?

Ricky had a B.B. gun when I first met him, but my parents wouldn't let me play with it. Later, Ricky's parents bought him real guns.

In 5th grade, I moved across town, and rarely saw Ricky after that. The last time I saw him was when I was in seventh grade, during some kind of school event where they invite all the parents to come to the elementary school in the evening and watch the kids sing or some such.

"Hey, Paul," he said, passing me as everyone was leaving.

"Ricky, hey!"

After that, I kept thinking I should give him a call. He was, after all, the first friend I had made when I moved. I thought it would be nice to hang out again.

One day, I arrived home from school to find myself greeted by bad news.

"Hey, remember the first friend you made when we moved here?" my sister asked as I walked in the door.

"Yeah," I said, "Ricky."

"He's dead."

Ricky, while home alone, had accidentally shot himself. He bled to death. He was in sixth grade.

Learning to swear.

My preschool had a massive playground behind it. Along one side of it, a tall fence separated the playground from an alley, where classfulls of older kids could regularly be seen being escorted somewhere by their teacher.

I had been hanging out with this kid who was bigger and older than I was. He always had a thick trail of snot leading from his nostrils to his gap-toothed mouth.

"Come on," he told me one day, "Let me show you something!"

He brought me to the fence, where we could see a class of students moving through the alley. He put his face up to the fence.

"Fucking assholes! You fucking assholes!" he yelled. I had never heard the term, but I started shouting it with him.

A few weeks later, I was hanging out with a different kid.

"Come on," I told him, "Let me show you something!"

Wanting my turn to be the cool kid, I lead him to the fence and started calling all the kids fucking assholes. He looked at me like I was crazy and refused to partake in the exercise.

At the end of the procession of kids, their teacher scolded me.

"That's not nice," she said.

I honestly didn't realize I wasn't supposed to yell "You fucking assholes!" at a bunch of older kids. The look on her face when she told me it wasn't nice made me feel bad, and I slunk away from the fence. I never did that again.

Comedy can be so cruel.

I feel bad that one of my most hilarious memories was this kid in pre-school getting peed on.

I had been hanging out with this kid, Jimmy, and he had taught me this cool trick where you go inside of this wooden playhouse thing and pee all over the walls. I guess it wasn't much of a trick, but it was an excellent way to get urine on everything. One day we went in there and were getting ready to pee when this other kid came in.

"You have to get out of the way," Jimmy told him, "We're going to pee here."

"I don't have to," the kid replied.

So Jimmy peed on him. The kid instantly started crying, but for some reason didn't try to get out of the urine stream.

I still laugh whenever I think of it. That probably makes me some kind of an asshole, but I can't help it. It's funny when people get peed on.