-Humor – 1 Page
And now the story of Buildrock Mane. Buildrock Mane was a little boy with a long name. He could run really fast. He ran as fast as most people can breathe, or as fast as a fish can swim in a tank of Berrysaurus Rex Kool-Aid.
He loved to run. Zipping up and down hills, his arms trailing limply behind him, his hair shaved off in clumps by the wind. That’s how fast he ran. One day, while Buildrock was running a little more slowly than usual, about as fast as a troll can eat a billy goat gruff, he ran right smack dab into another guy, and knocked him all the way over onto the ground when he fell. Buildrock stopped running. He looked at the guy who sat in the middle of the sidewalk, swearing and muttering to himself. He knew more obscenities than a large bear stuck up a tree with the fire department on the way.
Then Buildrock noticed a dirty piece of paper laying next to a rock. “I’m going to recycle this,” thought Buildrock. He swept up both the crumpled paper and the rock, and took off in a totally random direction. He pumped his crazy legs as far as a middle aged Minnesotan who hasn’t received mail for the last two days. He stopped, turned sharply, and sped into the bank.
He strode up to a teller and slipped the piece of dirt streaked paper onto the counter like a social worker will perform experiments with anxious light bulbs. He had dropped the rock.
“I’d like to recycle this, please,” said the teller.
Buildrock looked around. He was the teller and the lady who had been the teller was just any old lady holding a piece of dirty paper in her left hand.
Buildrock snatched the paper away, and ran as fast as a moose who has a bone to pick with a squirrel away into the employee lounge. There, against the wall like a electroshock therapy machine celebrating it’s bar mitzvah, sat three recycling bins. One was labeled paper, one plastic, and one cans. Buildrock dropped the paper into the last bin, the one for aluminum cans.
He heard someone shouting behind him. He turned, out of fear and dread thicker than the Trojan horse at a Transformers convention, to see a huge man behind him. The man, who was as large as a mountain that is as big as a really big guy is tall, stepped closer to Buildrock.
“Paper goes in the bin marked ‘Paper’.”
In response, Buildrock fell down. The man took a foam bat out of his chest cavity, and proceeded to hit Buildrock like Rip van Winkle on Nyquil. Buildrock screamed out, “Please, let me try again!” but the man continued his fantastic windmill-like motion.
“Bears don’t eat porridge,” he said, with the force of Jason and the Cosmonauts singing back up to Shirley Temple and Jerry Mathers. “Bears don’t have rocking chairs,” he said. “Bears do NOT sleep in beds,” he grunted, following through. “Paper goes in the bin marked ‘Paper’,” he yelled, louder than an oscillating fan with a can of Spaghettios in it.
After his initial protest, Buildrock remained silent, the only sound he made was when the whistling bat struck his hollow, unwashed ears. He lay on the floor like a civil war reenactor with a bad hangover and a complimentary pen.
The police took the large man down with a volley of bullets. They pried the foam bat from his callused hands, and hauled him away. They pretended to write down Buildrock’s incoherent babblings, propped him up on a couch and drove away like anabolic steroids who drink recreationally, and only when friends are over. They left Buildrock gasping for breath and with a better understanding of Henry Thoreau’s “Walden”.
On his way home that day, walking like a gallbladder ambushed by Indians during the Rose bowl, Buildrock thought to himself, “Hey, I wonder what’s on TV.”
THE END
Originally posted 11/12/2000
