Farmy Tales

Clown 4-H... The Mother of all Mistakes

2010-10-19T10:57:00.001-07:00

My parents were big supporters of my brothers and I participating in 4-H when we were young. If you aren’t sure what that is, I won’t be much help as I am not sure what it is either. All that I really knew that it meant being able to get into the county fair for free everyday during the fair week, which as a kid was maybe the coolest thing ever. Ok, I will try to explain it. Basically they were clubs or groups of kids built around a common interest such as raising cats or riding horses. Some clubs were cooler than others, but the basic idea was getting kids to learn about animals and build skills that they could somehow use some day… like public speaking… or keeping animals alive, that’s an important one. If your project died… you couldn’t go to the fair. I am not sure if that is a rule, but I assume it is. Like I said some clubs were cool, like horse and dog clubs, and some were not, like chicken and cow clubs. It was a very sophisticated process. Basically, the cooler the animal that you raised, the cooler the club was overall, and if you got to ride that animal at the fair… double cool bonus points. I was in a number of 4-H groups growing up, and I was a hug fan of the fair.

The fair was the greatest thing ever for kids. It always fell on the last full weekend of August, so it always marked the end of the summer. I always remember how excited I was for the fair, but also how sad I was going to be on the Sunday of it because that meant I would be “back to school” shopping with my mom soon. That weekend every year also marked my annual emptying of my bank account so I could win amazing prizes from the carnies such as the coveted inflatable hammer. The inflatable hammer was maybe the best prize ever. It was just a huge hammer that you could blow up and then straight up smash your little brother in the face with it… or at least that was my first order of business everytime I got one. I could talk about the Island County Fair for hours… and I will… in another blog entry. This entry is dedicated to the mother of all bad 4-H clubs… the short lived reign of the “Clown 4-H Club.”

That is right. Clown 4-H… it existed… why you ask… no reason at all, and that is why it was a one year club. When I was 6 years old my parents asked me what 4-H club I wanted to be in, and damned if I wasn’t beyond excited to get all up in the clown club. Now let me state for the record that I am not a fan of clowns, and as a 6 year old I wasn’t either, but I was a gigantic fan of the sweet stuff the clowns got to carry with them. Magic tricks, pranks, fake cigars… there was nothing off limits in the world of clown accessories. To prove my point, when was the last time you said this phrase? “That clown has a (Fill in the blank)… really? The nerve of some clowns, that’s not believable at all.” I challenge you to put anything in that blank space and tell me it doesn’t make sense… Yeah, it’s impossible. So in reality, I didn’t pick “Clown 4-H,” I picked a club that I created in my head called “Awesome Clown Stuff 4-H.” My favorite clown accessory was the invisible dog… hours of fun.

If my child had picked “Clown 4-H,” I might have assumed that a murder was going to ensue shortly thereafter… because kids who like clowns have Steven King movies written about them. It must have been disappointing to my parent’s to say the least. If that decision wasn’t bad enough, the clown that I chose to be was the “Hobo Clown.” Nobody, especially not a 6 year old, should choose to be a hobo clown. I am pretty sure that you are just supposed to end up a hobo clown after years of poor clown related life decisions, like over dosing on cotton candy or sucking too much helium. The point is that “Hobo Clown” is not an entry level clown.

My “Clown 4-H” endeavor was awesome for a large majority of the year that I was in it. It gave me an excuse to go to tons of magic shops and buy awesome magic clown stuff that I could sneak with me to my Kindergarten class and dazzle my friends… who pretty much thought I was the coolest “non-clown” ever. This awesome plan fell apart for me when the fair time came around. Though I had decided to join the club, the realization that I would have to literally BE a clown at the fair had never dawned on me. I just enjoyed dressing up like a hobo clown at my house and having my mom paint my face. I know it sounds ridiculous, because the point of 4-H is the county fair, but I had kind of grown to enjoy just screwing around in clown gear and never having to be an actual “clown.” In reality, if you want a club that kids will like, just make a club called “Fun 4-H,” and all they do is whatever is fun… maybe meet at Chuck E’ Cheese weekly.

I was really pissed off when my mom informed me that not only would I have to dress up like a clown at the fair, but I’d also have to walk around and entertain people with the awesome tricks and gags that I had bought for the sole purpose of entertaining myself and my friends. The irony that I am comedian now and I am in the business of entertaining others is hilarious. Maybe the reason that I don’t sing, juggle, or do magic onstage when I know how to do all that stuff is because I have a “clown complex”… or maybe I just have performance integrity… or maybe it’s because I do magic and juggle for me only.

Anyways, I was pissed. I walked around the fair for days muttering angrily and being grumpy, like a true hobo clown should be. The fair weekend that year happened to be one of those Pacific Northwest freak weather weekends where for some reason it is 95 degrees and all the white folks in the Seattle area get to pretend they live in Palm Springs and it pushes back their eminent weather related suicide attempt until at least early December. I of course did no plan for this heat wave and at one point fell down on the sidewalk in my little hobo clown suit from heat exhaustion. There are moments in life when the true moral flexibility of the human spirit shows itself, and this was one of them. I laid on the ground sweating and mumbling incoherently for a good 30minutes until my mother found me, rushed me to a hose and started spraying me down with cold water to bring my core temperature back to “volcano” from “surface area of the sun.” Why did nobody do anything? Well, I can only imagine when they saw me laying there that they thought to themselves, “Boy, that hobo clown is really committed to his hobo character. He’s gonna be somebody someday… probably a serial killer.”

Motocycle Apple Assassins

2010-08-11T13:12:00.001-07:00

In the summer of 93’ my lawn mower repairman neighbor moved away. I remember that we were sad because we really liked the treasures that they left for us in the garbage dump. This would have been a sad thing except for the fact that when they were moving they had a blow out garage sale, and since they were eccentric lawnmower repair people, their garage was amazing. I remember when Pat and I walked over to check out the sale and say goodbye to them, we lost our minds with excitement at the plethora of machinery that we could buy that we should never have access to. We were too excited to focus on anything. We looked like what happens when crazy dogs are over stimulated and all they do is run back and forth panting and jumping all over people. The excitement was blowing our pre-teen minds.

We searched through the deepest darkest depths of their sale, combing through the remnants with the focus of a coroner. Finally we came to the greatest treasure in the history of garage sales… a 1985 Honda 50cc mini-bike. It seemed as if the heavens opened up and sun beamed down on that little dream maker. There was no doubt what was going to happen next… we were taking that bike home. We were willing to buy, but even more willing to take it… with force if necessary. They are lucky that it didn’t come down to fisticuffs, because we were ready to throw down with the dedication of 3rd world freedom fighters. Were we fighting for freedom? Damn right we were! That bike was our ticket to a summer of motoring around the field without a care in the world.

They sold us the bike for $200. To this day, that was the greatest deal in the history of deals. Pat and I emptied the bank for that purchase. I am not sure why my parents even agreed to the buy. I was willing to buy it and hide it from them, but to my surprise, they were onboard with the purchase. Even as a 12 year old, I questioned their commitment to my safety for allowing the purchase. I thought, “Wait, you know this is a motorcycle right? Is there something I am not aware of? Do you guys want us dead or something, because usually when I bring you a bad idea you are not excited for me to do it, let alone support it.”

That first summer with the mini-bike was one of the best of my life. We would ride that bike for hours, and when I say hours, I mean hours, maybe even entire weeks. I remember that my parents only had one rule that I could break when it came to the mini-bike, and that was no driving on the road. I am pretty sure that I followed them down the driveway the first time they left us alone with the beast and drove with the wind in my hair down to the public dock at Deer Lake like an absolute biker badass. I was a big 12 year old, and the bike was small, so I am positive that people laughed hysterically at me when I drove by throwin’ biker peace signs at the other bikes I saw. I didn’t care, for the first time in my life I felt like a badass… and that is all that matters.

It didn’t take long for simply driving the bike to be not exciting enough, so we had to invent games for it. Our mini-bike games were basically just ways for us to increase the odds that we’d hurt ourselves. One of our favorite games was called “Apple Assassins” and it really was the epitome of what a bad idea truly was. It had every element of a bad idea, total lack of regard for health and safety… and a motor vehicle.

This is how the game broke down. It was very simple in structure. We had apple trees on the back side of the barn and tons of apples would sit on the barn roof until we’d come by and collect them to throw at things. The game consisted of a number of us sitting on the barn roof, and we’d throw apples at someone driving back and forth below us on the bike. That person would keep driving until they took a fatal apple shot and then we’d switch drivers. Everyone got a turn at driving and throwing, and we’d continue to alternate until everyone had enough apple violence. We weren’t idiots though; the bike driver wore goggles and a helmet… I mean come on, safety… well, not first, but somewhere in the mix.

This game was an amazing invention. It was paintballing before paintballing was a thing. We spent endless hours whizzing apples off the barn roof, hitting people in the face, knocking them off the bike, and then cheering with no care in the world. The more face shots you could take, the more respect you garnered in the “Apple Assassin” world. What brought this amazing adventure to an end? That is an easy answer… the near death of my cousin Tony. Tony really loved the game. He’d drive back and forth as fast as the bike would go taking apple after apple in the face and body, never even flinching. He was our favorite target because of his relentless love of apple induced pain. If this was a sport, he was the Michael Jordan of it. When someone took a face shot, we all won! It was great!

One day after Tony’s 10th or 11th run by the barn in a row, we decided that it was time to put an end to his reign. Generally, we all spaced our throws out as to not step on each others moment of awesome when your apple connected with nose. There was nothing worse then not being able to decipher whose apple was whose. There was no rule against it, we just all understood that nobody wants their moment of apple awesome stepped on. On this run, we sacrificed individual accolades for the good of the team. All four of us launched at the time. Now we had pulled this maneuver before, but never with the heat seeking laser precision that we happened to pull off on this attack. It was magical. Three of four apples connected with facial features and upper neck, dazing the driver, while the 4th apple… the one that I threw connected with all handle bar sending the dazed driver off course to the right and straight into the back of the flat bed truck where he was then clothes lined by the truck bed and the mini-bike drove off unmanned into the field taking out an electric fence. This was classified as nothing but success for the “Apple Assassins,” however Tony did not regain full consciousness for a few hours, and we had a fence to repair. In the end, it was worth every second of fence reconstruction, and I’ll never forget the hilarious sound Tony made when he smashed into the truck.

Our Own Private Junk Yard Heaven

2010-08-08T14:58:00.000-07:00

My parents were very “go play outside” kind of people when I was growing up, because our options for entertainment were very limited. We were only able to get antenna TV until I was 16. Why you ask? Not because my parents were anti-MTV, but because we were physically unable to get cable because the cable company hadn’t put the “cable” in yet in my neighborhood. Back in the 90’s, the term cable was literal… it meant a cable in the ground that piped Nickelodeon programs from the Nickelodeon headquarters all the way to your house… or in my case, not quite to my house, but stopping at the corner of East Deer Lake Rd. and Holst Rd. Why couldn’t it just have gone another mile? I remember the day when I saw the glorious sight of 3 very unmotivated Viacom workers half heartedly shoveling in the ditch a half mile from my house… I almost cried. It must have been a similar feeling as when folks in internment camps in WWII saw the Allied Forces coming and knew that their days of misery were numbered and freedom was on its way. Ok… maybe that is an extreme example, and not totally accurate. I know that simply not being able to chime in my 2 cents during my friend’s daily Ren and Stimpy recap conversations in grade school and feeling “left-out” about it, is not a level comparison with genocide… I am aware of that now as an adult, but try telling that to a 7 year old. The picture I am trying to convey is that only having 7 channels growing up is devastating. I will however, always love the days when a Seahawks game wasn’t coming in clear and my dad snapped, climbed the roof, and started wrestling with the antenna that looked like a 1920’s bi-plane wing and would yell down, “Brian, is the picture clear yet?”

Everyday those cable digging heroes dug closer, was another day that freedom was tunneling closer to me. With every inch, I could feel the “Real World” getting closer, and by that I literally mean the show. Once, I drove by them and they looked parched so Pat and I brought them a couple cans of Ruby Red Squirt… a Pete Moote favorite. Pat and I felt like we were part of team pop-culture liberation. Due to my lack of entertainment options, I developed a bad habit early on of lying about seeing things just to seem cool and get in on all of the great playground conversations. This is how it would generally go down. One of my friends would go, “Hey Brian, did you see that new show on the one channel?” My real answer should have been “No, I didn’t because I live in the wilderness and we are unable to experience happiness.” My answer was always, “Yes, it is my favorite!” That question was always followed up with this crushing inquisition by my friend. “Oh really, what was your favorite part?” I then would resort to the full proof tactic of flipping the question on them and agreeing with their answer. I generally would say something like this, “I don’t know, what is yours? (Pause for answer) That is my favorite too! I love it when that one guy does that. It is so awesome” It was a genius plan! To this day, I still have a bit of an empty spot in my heart where Nickelodeon programs should be. The sad thing is that now I live 2 blocks from the Nickelodeon studio so I have to confront that pain every day. My dad occasionally would make a strong run at convincing my mom to let us get a satellite dish, unfortunately back in those days when you got a dish, it looked like NASA was setting up a space station in your yard. My mom was anti-20 ft diameter lunar-lander dish ruining the ambiance of our pasture… so no dish.

Whenever my mom was tired of hearing us complain that we couldn’t find anything to do or that we were bored, she’d pull one of the most ingenious parental Jedi mind tricks of all time. She’d say something like, “How can you guys be bored when we have 7 acres for you to explore? You can stay in here and waste your time, or you can go outside and see what you can discover.” That statement would always make us feel like we were in fact missing something awesome outside and it would generally send us ripping out the front with absolutely no plan of attack, we just knew that we were not gonna miss out on whatever was happening outside… whatever that was. My mother was under the impression that our farm was safe, and she was very… wrong. I am amazed that I still have all of my fingers. We had unexplored barns and weird different pockets woods with oceans of junk, or as I saw it, treasures waiting for us to push the limits of our tetanus shots.

There is an interesting phenomenon in the country when it comes to how people get rid of junk. It is really an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. When people get tired of their stuff, they would never dispose of it at a licensed and maintained facility for junk disposal… they’d find a nice uninhabited nook in the woods with nobody around and dump it. Many might think that “dumping” is terrible and hard on the environment. Those naysayers would be absolutely right. It is terrible, but let’s look at the bright side of it. Those little hidden dumps in the woods were the greatest source of treasures for us to recon and play with ever, which in hind-sight, may also be one of their biggest negatives. Why do you ask? Well, here is an example. One of my favorite treasures where these things that we called “slime grenades,” and they were canisters that when you threw them at something, black slime would fly out. We used to throw them at each other constantly, and they provided countless hours of fun. It wasn’t until I was in high school auto shop class that I realized our beloved “slime grenades” were in fact “motor oil filters,” and the slime was bull dozer engine oil. Ok, so I admit, that might have been a little dangerous… and definitely bad for the environment.

One of my favorite hidden treasure dump sites was next door to us below my neighbor’s house in a small ravine. He was a lawn mower repair man who prescribed to the “out of sight, out of mind” theory of trash removal, so you can imagine the plethora of amazing awesomeness we’d find down there. The things we pulled out of that ravine looked like they were straight out of the prop trailer from “Mad Max and the Thunderdome.” It was amazing. Once I created a ball and chain type weapon that was made of a stick with a lawn mower blade tied to the end of it… ingenious I know. That weapon was one of the most devastating “stinging nettle” destroying creations I have ever made. Most of my creations were designed to destroy “The Stinging Nettle.” That evil plant and I did battle for a decade solid until I got into high school and we had to call it a truce… for safety sake. Every once in a while when I am home at my parent’s house, I’ll get out the weed whacker and rekindle a heated battle just to make sure that my worthy foe is still as mighty as I remember. Every time, I leave sweaty, severely stung, and glad that we were able to come to a peace treaty.

It did not take long for my mom to wonder how it was that her kids were coming out of the woods dragging automotive crank shafts and then using them to smash rocks in the drive way, and she started to ask questions. I remember having the realization that if my mom every found our ravine of awesome, she’d destroy it, so I swore my brothers to secrecy. We needed this ravine in our battles against our farm enemies. It was our private weapons arsenal. My mom was sneaky though, and one day she found our abyss of treasures. She told our neighbor that we were sneaking around in his dump and in order to stop us, he now started dumping dirt down the ravine to cover up our weapons. This in reality made the treasure hunting process more fun because now it was a challenge for us to dig up junk. Like a group of landfill Indiana Joneses, we excavated that ravine for years, pulling out weed eater frames, tires and one of our most prized possessions, a go-cart frame which to this day sits at the bottom of a pond across the street after a failed attempt at conquering Rolling Hill Road. I think my parents ended up footing the bill to dispose of hundreds of pounds of neighborhood junk that we dragged back to our house. Looking back, I’d like to think that was the ultimate scheme of people who dump junk in the woods. It’s not that they are littering and destroying the environment, they are just leaving things for kids to bring home, and for their parents to pay for.

Stunt Brothers: Operation Chicken Anti-Freedom

2010-08-05T18:03:00.000-07:00

I am the oldest in my family and I grew up with two younger brothers. I am fairly sure it was my mission growing up, to do my best to kill them… on accident of course. If you think about it from a psychological aspect, it makes sense. In my mind as the oldest child, the only way more children made sense to me was if my mom and dad created them so I could have them test things for me. They were like my personal stunt brothers. I know it sounds brutal, but when you are a little kid and have a very ego-centric view of the world around you, the only way younger siblings make sense is with this logic, “Well, mom and dad already know that they have a winner… so these new kids must be insurance policies for me to make sure I don’t hurt myself.” Solid logic, I think we can all agree. I accepted the responsibilities that my parents had bestowed on me and started buildings things that would utilize the strengths of my stunt brothers.

I feel bad for “only children.” They got robbed of the wonderful sibling relationships and how amazing it is to be able to look at your little brother in the eye and say “Yes… yes I believe that tree fort I just built will support your weight, no get up that tree buddy. We have a tree house warming party to plan.”

Stunt brothers are a very interesting phenomenon. They get tougher with every new model created. My youngest brother Kilian… way harder to hurt than my brother Patrick… and way better at convincing my mom that what ever wound he received was self inflicted. Dedication to the stunt game is an important quality in a stunt brother. Sometimes when I think back, I don’t even know why it was so important that we hoisted a 5 gallon bucket filled to the brim with rocks 30 feet into the air using nothing but bailing twine… but I am sure that we had our reasons at the time, and I am sure that they were very important.

I imagine that we were trying to hunt down one of the rogue chickens that ran loose on the farm. Growing up we spent countless hours trying to track those little suckers down. For some reason the fact they had “flown the coop” and were free range made them our instant enemies. We weren’t anti-freedom as much as we were bored and looking for farm villains to battle. In reality, they were the producer of one of my favorite stunt brother items, rotten eggs. That should have earned them a pass or at least a deal that as long as they hid nest of disgusting eggs we could break in the barn, we’d cease trying to hunt them down. Unfortunately for them, our young minds were incapable of such negotiations, so we’d still reap the benefits of their rogue status while also hanging buckets of rocks in the air to power the foot loop trap we had baited with chicken food under the big maple tree in hopes of snagging one.

My mom at one point actually had to make a rule against breaking rotten eggs in the barn, which is ridiculous and speaks to the cognitive operating level that myself and my stunt brothers were working with at the time. In reality, rotten eggs are the sort of things that should self create and regulate a rule like “don’t break them in the barn.” I am not sure why we were so obsessed with smashing them against the back wall and then running out of the barn dry heaving with watery eyes, but we were huge fans. I think in our minds it was a scene from G.I. Joe where we had to get out of the barn before it exploded. Regardless, it must have been a sad day for my mom when she had to put that rule in stone. I think you could build a special education placement test that was simply this, “1) Do you break rotten eggs ever? 2) Do you break them indoors? 3) If your little brother is next to a nest of rotten eggs you do what? ” My answers would have been: 1) Yes, everytime you see one, and if you don’t see one, look for one. 2) Yes, if there are unsuspecting people indoors who will have to run through the smell and you have a faster exit strategy. 3) Push him into them like a shoe running land mine and fall down laughing with no concern for his well being physically or emotionally.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a jerk. I was also concerned with building transferrable skills in my stunt brothers for the future. Anytime I would create a stunt that needed testing, I would first approach Patrick about it, and then if he chose to, he could out source that job to Kilian. That was to build their leadership and negotiation abilities. In reality, they probably learned a lot from the debates they had over who should hoist the rocks up the tree, and who should climb the tree to put the rope over the branch. In retrospect, my stunts and the stunt delegation chain of command is probably alone responsible for roughly 71% of their current success… more so in Kilian, who has developed quite the dedication to perseverance in things that he does. Like I said, the newest models of stunt brothers were always the best, new and improved.

Back to the rock-bucket-foot-loop-chicken-trap mission… I bet you are wondering if we were able to catch one of the rogue chickens wrecking havoc on our little farm world. I wish I could tell you that it went down just as I had drawn it out on out plans with crayons, and within minutes we had a chicken dangling upside down from the tree. Here is where the plan broke down, two words… bailing… twine. Here is the problem with bailing twine. It is not very strong, and way too abundant for kids to get a hold of. When you are a kid, rope is rope, there is no different between rope used to dock ferries and twine used to bundle dried grass together for horses to eat. In our minds, it should get the job done and hoist this 60lbs of rocks in the air no problem. What could go wrong?

Here was “Operation Chicken Anti-Freedom” in a nut shell. Pat scaled the tree to put the 60 feet of twine we had tied together over the tree branch, Kilian was the point man on the hoist, and per usual, I was the foreman on the job overseeing all of the details in execution. The scene was set, the twine was in place, the bucket of rocks was ready for lift off, and the care free days of one poor unsuspecting free range chicken were numbered. Kilian started to heave, but he couldn’t budge the bucket of rocks. Not even a little. His 6 year old frame couldn’t even rock the bucket from where it was sitting under the tree, presenting a major snag in the chicken bounty hunting plan. No big deal. Pat was there, so he climbed down and began heaving as well. Now, the two of them were able to get it of the ground a little, but not enough to complete the mission. I as the foreman understood that my job was to step in when the physical limitations of my stunt brothers had been reached, so I did.

Now, all three of us were heaving on that twine as hard as our little bodies could manage and, we had lift-off. The limb of the tree was bending towards the bucket of rocks as the bucket inched slowly higher. It seemed as if they’d meet in the middle in some sort of chicken capturing bliss if we kept pulling, so we did. What would happen when the two did meet? I imagine the limb would have shattered, come crashing down on us, and we probably would have found ourselves chase chicken angels on a farm in the sky. We will never now what happens because at about the 7 foot mark, our trusty twine decided it had played the game long enough and quit. The twine snapped, and we fell to the ground hard. Considering that we had been leaning into it with all of our might, we hit the ground with some solid force. Time slows down when a life threatening accident is in the process of happening. I remember the three of us falling in a heap on the ground and then having a couple seconds to process the fact that a 60lb bucket of rocks was now under the control of gravity, an arch enemy of the stunt brother, an enemy that my stunt brothers know well. I then remember having enough time to roll over and look up and see that blue bucket screaming down toward us.

I think this is when people talk about guardian angels existing, and if I have one, he or she did a hell of a job guiding this potential life ending bucket of rocks just inches from crushing all three of our heads. I remember that with the loud thud of the bucket next to my face, instantly all of the reasons why we shouldn’t have done what we were doing came flooding into consciousness. It was one of those all too familiar moments where you either hurt, or almost hurt yourself, where you go “Oh yeah, that was arguably one of the dumbest things that I have ever done.” My mom didn’t need to make this one a rule; we figured it out on our own. Buckets of rocks do not go in trees. Duly noted gravity, you made your point loud and clear. The silver lining is that at least all of us involved survived. Stunt brothers, you live to attempt another stunt, and chickens, you live to lay more rotten eggs I can throw at my stunt brothers. We all won this time I guess. Success… or sort of… at least my parent’s insurance deductible didn’t go up on this stunt… and that is a win I suppose.