THAT TIN-FOIL, MICROWAVE, TIME MACHINE THING
Yeah, Joseph here. It’s like really late and I’m going to bed soon. Just wanted to write some stuff down here, ‘cause it was one of those weird days. Like there is really such a thing as a normal day. But hay, like that’s okay.
So anyhow, this morning my dad had to rush my brother, Dave, to the hospital to get his stomach pumped ‘cause he ate an entire bowl of wax fruit. What a pudding head! My brother I mean, not my dad. Like you think that after the first bite he’d of realized the stuff was fake! Not Dave, he ate not just one but the entire bowl of fake, wax fruit. While my dad was over at the hospital with him, Justin came over to stay with me, and almost blew up the house. See the dummy heard somewhere, probably on some WebTV geeks homepage, that if you microwave tin foil you’ll go backwards in time.
“I don’t think you ought to do that,” I had told him, but I can’t tell Justin nothing. He’s older then me, 12, and thinks he’s all that ‘cause he’s got plutonium in his blood--now that might make him strong and give him superhuman powers and stuff like that, but personally, if you asked me . . . I think that radioactive stuff has fried most of that gray jelly in his head.
That’s brains for you folks that don’t know.
Anyhow, I love the guy, I mean he’s my cousin an all, but the kid doesn’t have the good sense God gave a stick of wood.
Oh yeah, before Justin blew up the kitchen, we were both outside in my front yard watching Mr. Anderson chase one of his cows down the road, and I saw Andy. He still ain’t grown his lips back. It’s a long story. Anyone out there that red my report on what went on here during Easter 2001 knows what I’m talking about.
Yeah, we had to take that web page down after 9/11. That sucked, both 9/11 and having to take that web page down, ‘cause I put a of work into it, but-like-it just seemed like the right thing to do--out of respect. Know what I mean? Like when I wrote it back in March I had no idea how much the world would change in such a short time and suddenly joking about Reptilian Alien Terrorists blowing up the moon didn’t sound so funny.
Anyhow, I’m getting tired and stuff, so I’ll cut it short. Did I say I hate math?
Just checking.
So, like I was starting to say, seeing Andy still with no lips got Justin thinking, and that ain’t good. “You know I bet if we could go back in time, we could stop his little sister from gluing his mouth shut,” he says to me.
Yeah, and if cats had thumbs they could type, I kind-a muttered back. Justin then told me about how his neighbors cat had tried to run him over last week when he was walking to the park to play baseball with Timmy and the guys.
HUH?
“Let’s go inside, I want to try something,” he then tells me. Like right away I got that weird feeling in my stomach, kind-a-like my sixth sense--no, I don’t see dead people like that skinny kid with the name like a German breakfast cereal did in that movie with the diehard guy, but when something weird or bad is going to happen my stomach kind of gets all twisted in knots and I start to burping a lot and--this sounds really gross--my feet start sweating. Whenever that stuff starts happening to me, I know that something really not so nice is going to happen real soon.
SO, we went inside and that’s when Justin told me about his Tin-foil, microwave, time travel idea. Now like I said, I tried to talk him out of it, but it was no use. I might as well have been trying to talk about sports to a dead frog!
Justin went right ahead and waded up a big old ball of tin-foil and tossed it right into the microwave. And then he turned it on! At first it just hummed and then the microwave like made this weird noise, kind-a like a horse farting I guess. There was a loud bang, and smoke and sparks started shooting out the back of the microwave. That was kind of kool. And then the next thing I knew I was laying flat on my back in my backyard, steaming like a cow-pie in a snow bank. An exploded can of lima beans was laying next to me, some of the beans splattered across my shirt and on my face.
I was still picking mushed lima beans out of my hair when I took my shower before. Anyhow, when I was finally able to sit up I saw 3 thing.
The first was that I’d been blown right out of my sneakers, and I’d thought that was just a saying. The second thing I noticed was a thick cloud of dark gray smoke coming from the corner of my house where the kitchen used to be. When I looked in the other direction I saw Justin running across my backyard toward the fence screaming, “It worked! It worked, Joseph, we went back to Renaissance times!”
His hair was smoking.
Now I’m not sure if I said this before and I’m to lazy to flip the pages backwards and check if I did, but the Renaissance Fair came to our town last week, and they just like all the other times, set up in South Fields--the scene of last years Easter Egg, Gangster Rabbit and Angry Groundhog brawl, which in turn started that massive riot that spilled over into town and caused military to be called out to restore law and order.
(security video of town riot, Easter 2001.)
South Fields is right behind my house for those that don’t remember. I guess when Justin finally came to after being blown up, the first thing he saw was a bunch of people walking around dressed up in cloths and stuff from the fifteen hundreds and thought……..well you can guess.
It’s like my friend, Eight always says, Justin is a great guy, but he’s a few brain cells short of sentient. I know what sentient means, I looked it up and you know what, Eight is dead right.
Timmy, my best friend, showed up like right after that, and after he stopped laughing and making fun of my smoldering hair, calling me Don King JR and stuff like that, I told him what had happened. He laughed even harder, and before I could get him to shut up and help me go get Justin and put my kitchen out, the police and fire department showed up.
Then my dad came home.
It was like a major big mess. Things were crazy for like hours, with cops and firemen and neighbors all over saying all kinds of stupid stuff and asking me dumb questions over and over and over again. They thought Justin and I were making something like a bomb or something like that. They didn’t want to believe the truth, that Justin had tired to make a time machine out of the microwave and blew up the kitchen.
“Don’t give me that, Boy-O! You mixing illegal chemicals in your basement?”
“You got me officer,” I replied sarcastically, “my cousin and me--we’re trying to make an army of Zombie Carrots.”
“Joseph!” My dad shouted at me and gave me that look that said I better behave and mind what I say or I’d be spending all my free time for probably the next several months, doing odd jobs like fixing the fence and sanding the back porch instead of playing baseball or basketball with my friends.
It was probably a good thing that my dad had stopped me from saying more stupid stuff when he did. The police were none to happy about what had happened and didn’t find my jokes funny. Now that I think about it, I can’t say as I blame them. What with half the town still needing to be repaired, our school a mess, those mutant things that hatched
out of those genetically altered Easter Eggs the Grays gave us last Easter still running amuck in the woods, and Scary Mary’s Saber-toothed Easter Bunny still on the loose, they had their hands full. (for those that don't know, Scary Mary, THE BOO-STER, for her Easter project, extracted DNA from a fossilized rabbit bone she had found and cloned it.)
Two kids blowing up their kitchen while trying to make a time machine so the could go back in time and stop their friend’s little sister from gluing his mouth shut was just one more annoying problem they really didn’t need.
Anyhow, when everyone was done asking me dumb questions and the kitchen was no longer on fire, and at least my dad believed me, Timmy and I finally got to sneak off to the Renaissance Fair behind my house to look for Justin.
We found him sitting in a tent with a bunch of Vikings, chomping away on a big old roasted drumstick and drinking mead. “This is great,” he shouted when he saw us standing there. “Timmy, you came back in time too? Kool.”
“You got to love him,” Timmy muttered to me. “As much of an airhead as he is, you got’ta.”
“Them’s the ones,” a craggy voice shouted. It was the voice of a craggy old women who was pointing at Timmy and me. “They’re the Thirteenth Warrior!”
“Thirteenth Warrior?” Both Timmy and me said to each other at the same time.
“That was a way kool movie,” I told Timmy. I’d seen it like three times. Once in the movies with my dad and twice on cable.
“Antonio Banderas was in that movie, right,” Timmy asked me.
I nodded my head saying, “he’s so kool.”
“Joseph, there were cannibals in that movie!”
HUH? Cannibals? Game over! I don’t play with cannibals, real or fake. Timmy didn’t seem as if he was all that interested in them either. We both grabbed Justin and managed to drag him back home, which ain’t easy ‘cause Justin is real strong. It took Timmy and me like an hour to make him believe we hadn’t really gone back in time. I’m not sure he really believes us or not. It’s hard to tell with him.
Anyhow, blah, blah, blah, a bunch of boring stuff happened after that, blah, Oh, yeah, my brother Dave is okay, blah-blah-blah I ate dinner, took my shower and now I’m going to go to bed.
At the end of the day my dad always asks me the same question before I head to my bedroom, and that is, “So, what did Joseph learn today?”
What did I learn today?
Well, wax fruit will make you constipated. Mr. Anderson can’t run as fast as a cow. Don’t ever, ever, let Justin cook--anything! Apparently the Vikings drank apple juice, not beer, and if you have a good father and really good friends, somehow, if you let it, everything is okay at the end of the day, not matter what.
Cheeeeezzzzzzzzzzz!
Oh, yeah, one last thing. I don’t call this my daily diary or anything stupid like that. This is just a spot where I put things down about myself and what goes on around me in my life, crap like that. So. . . Well there you go.
G-Night.
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