Sample Chapter From Future Book

Just a note: I just wrote this chapter today for a book I've been writing about random events from growing up in Sac City Iowa. I started this project a couple years back doing small occasional essays for thesacnews.com back when it was a fledgling organization on myspace. Eventually I discontinued it from public view, started and stopped writing on it repeatedly. Have been editing some, and am preparing to start submitting to literary agents for representation in the hopes of getting a book published. So for those of you who used to follow the series, and those of you who are just curious, please enjoy one of my latests essays.

Urination and Lifesavers


Let’s just face facts right off the bat here. Boys find potty humor of all sorts funny. Well, basically we find anything the body can excrete highly interesting and amusing. Its funny when we do it, say it, read it, or write it. Snot, poop, pee, farts, blood. It’s all fair game to our strange sense of humor. We may be absolutely disgusted to the core when someone lets a nasty fart rip, and yet still amused. VERY amused. When someone steps in dog poop, again we are disgusted by it, especially if we are the ones to step in it, and yet we can’t help but laugh our heads off about it, especially when it’s someone else stepping in it. For the next couple short anecdotes, if you are a girl or highly sensitive to disgusting things, I’d suggest you skip this next part altogether because it gets pretty bad. What’s it all about? In one word, Pee.
Little boys and dogs are more alike than different. Dogs will wander about the neighborhood lifting a leg and peeing on everything in sight that they find to be valuable real estate. Growing up in Sac City, I knew a particular young boy we’ll call Miah, who acted just like this. Although to be honest, I don’t think he cared about the real estate he was marking. When he decided he had to go pee, he just went pee. On a bush, a fire hydrant, the sidewalk, on the tires of a parked car, on a moving car for that matter, your leg, his own leg, behind a tree, next to a tree, from up in a tree, or on your house, your cat, or your dog; you name it, Miah peed on it at least once. I think that if Miah found himself in the midst of a busy intersection and felt the need to go pee, even if it meant being squished by a semi truck, he was going to whip it out and go pee RIGHT there and RIGHT now. I’m pretty sure the only thing safe from getting peed on by Miah was an actual toilet. I don’t know if he had an allergy to porcelain or an affinity for peeing on everything else, but like a dog, he marked his territory wherever we went.
Little boys and packs of dogs also have something in common. There must be in any pack, an established Alpha male. One day while playing in the ravine with my friend Sonny, he was standing on the wall while I was below on the ground. I was busying myself with something or another when he called my name. I looked up in just in time to see a golden stream headed in my direction. An as though I was paralyzed I stood there while my t-shirt got soaked with Sonny’s pee. Clearly Sonny had established himself as the alpha male. He got in trouble as I did what any good young fighting warrior of a boy would do- I tattled to my mom. And while he was in trouble and stuck sitting on the couch until his mom came to pick him up, he still had a stupid grin on his face knowing he had marked me as his territory, and himself as the top dog.
Now everyone knows that dogs love to chase mail carriers. In Sac City we had one particular mail carrier that handed out lifesavers to the kids. Any kid who asked received a tasty fruity Lifesaver once a day. I managed to find out that by helping the mailman deliver mail to some of the houses on one side of the street while he walked down the other earned me one more Lifesaver for every stop back to the mail truck. On days when I was bored, I would spend a couple hours with the mailman, earning my lifesavers. My mom, realizing how much of his candy I was consuming, always made sure to buy him a big box of Lifesavers every Christmas just so other kids could have some as well.
One day, my best friend Jed and his little brother Miah caught me in the middle of doing important mail delivery. They wanted to play, but I blew them off, saying I would come over after I was done following the mailman around. When I finished I grabbed my sister and went over to where my friends were hanging out. Since I had blown them off they hatched a very evil plan to get me back. I found my friends, and they informed me that they had just gotten brand new released flavors of Mr. Juicy drinks. This time it came in lemon flavored. However, they said, it had been in the sun for a bit, so it was warm. Being my gullible and naïve 8 year-old self, I had no problem trusting my wonderful friends without any suspicions. Both my sister and myself began to sample the lemon flavored Mr. Juicy. My sister was thirsty and started to guzzle it down. The Mr. Juicy concoction entered my mouth, hit my taste buds, and I immediately knew I had been tricked.
“AUGH!” I cried out after spitting the nastiness onto the ground. “This tastes like piss!” To which my sister started gagging and trying to spit out the remainder that was in her mouth. She had clearly swallowed some already. My friends were laughing hysterically.
Hey! I warned you this was going to be disgusting! If you read this far and are sorry you did, fearing you may have just thrown up a little bit in your mouth, you only have yourself to blame. Don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning to skip ahead.
Thanks to my friends, I now had Miah’s pee inside of me! He literally gets it everywhere. After a few words were exchanged, I joined in and helped prepare more nasty drinks to see whom else we could trick. See what I mean? Yes, it’s definitely disgusting beyond belief, and yet still leads to the funny! Why does it lead to the funny do you ask? Because, we made it happen to somebody else too!

Curiosity Creative Writing Exercise

The object of this exercise is to creat a short story from a multitude of authors in a semi-fractured style. Write as much or as little as you like to take the original storyline and add your own take on the next events. Copy and Paste the previous chapter(s) and then add your own. Label your chapter number and your name/moniker at the top and then tag 2 people to pass it on to, for them to continue the story and see how it can develop through those different paths. Do NOT tag it back to any previous author of your story's chapters.

Chapter 1- by Mookie

It is summertime in the middle of the day. Moms and dads are at work, so my friend Jay and I, having nothing better to do, go down into the ravine behind my house. We have decided that today we will build a small fort and a campsite we can call our own. This small stretch of creeks running through the woods in the dead center of our town forms our own wilderness frontier.

We set to the task of grabbing fallen branches and sticks to create the walls of our fort at the base of a hill. While Jay begins construction on these walls, I move to my own litle task of creating a dam in the creek that runs through this section of the woods. An older creekbed that is usually dry, except for when the rain comes, has a variety of large rocks and broken concrete. These will be the materials for damming the creek up and creating a small ponding next to our campsite. Back and forth I lug rock after rock and concrete chunks as well. Once I feel I have a sufficient amount of rocks and concrete, I begin to set them into the small and shallow running stream. Soon the water level begins to rise and expand outward away from the bank, as I choke off the streams natural flow. As with any 10 year old, seeing the fruits of my labors, even in the early stages, makes me feel like a god in my own small world. By late afternoon we expect to have a sheltered fort, a bridge over the creek, a pooling of water to soak our feet in, or to use to put out the campfires we set from time to time when our parents don't realize we've stolen a box of matches or a lighter. We even have a designated circle of rocks for our campfire along with some wood, twigs and dead leaves to fuel the fire.

While pushing through some high brush in search for more wood, we spook a doe. She runs off, along the creek, and with a graceful leap she jups down into a culvert pit, ad into the dark tunnel that goes underneath a neighboring road that runs along the top of the east end of the ravine. We followed her to see just where she went. But when we got to the tunnel, we were spooked. Rumors of the tunnel being the spot for Satan Worshippers abound through our heads. This was the one place we had never dared to venture into. Graffiti was scrawled all around the tunnels entrance on the concrete exterior. Older kids had scared us with stories of animal sacrifices, complete with evidence of blood soaked walls that lay within the interior of the tunnel. We look down to one corner and see some scattered small bones, which only further reinforced the validity of these rumors. Then suddenly out of nowhere the doe came running back out the tunnel toward us, veering away as she moved past us, a wild look in her eyes. what had caused her to be so scared and willing to run back in our direction? We had neither heard nor seen anything that might represent danger. The adventure in our little stretch of frontier wilderness was only beginning...

I tag: Renaissance Guy and Scott Erb
Although anyone who reads this is free to paste this chapter to their page along with THEIR next chapter.