World in My Pocket.

Some amount of time ago, not certain how long it was and if one were to ask 5 different people one would, no doubt, get five different answers; if the reader can picture this time, then she understands when this story takes place. It was a far away land. To journey there is possible, generally speaking, but it is an arduous journey, great peril is involved and one may find that upon arrival, they feel cheated for risking life and limb for such a state.

In this particular place, in this particular time, there were two small boys. Sam and Simon. Sam and Simon were best of friends. Being small boys, their world was large and small at the same moment. Large in the sense that they both understood that beyond the smoke covered mountains there were many, many miles, kilometers, fathoms, or whatever one fancies for measuring given sections of land-mass, to be discovered. Conversely, their world was small because they made it such. The concept of how small they were was not lost on either of them, particularly Sam, or Samuel. Taking a wild world and cramming it into one’s pocket is not an easy task, as one can imagine. It must be done one day at a time, one spoonful of dirt by one spoonful of dirt. Sam and Simon did, in fact, dig in the dirt, with spoons. Though they were not keen enough, neither of them, to realize what they were doing, they did go out and make battle on the world everyday, determined to make it palatable.

Simon found very great pleasure in capturing hobgoblins. There is a great art to capturing them, but once you have one, the possibilities for entertainment are endless. This specific lad, Simon, loved nothing better than dressing them up in little girly doll clothes complete with ribbons, makeup and all. Once he had something worth showing, he would take his pleasure to the market and parade it around. Naturally, the hobgoblin hated this and was mortified, often being forced to relocate to another part of the world thereafter, if ever he was able to escape. Simon relished this, the way that the little evil bugger would sit in his cage and sputter, shaking the little bars as ferociously as the tiny creature could. Sam also had strange character issues of the same nature, after-all, he was a little boy. These issues do not come into this story though…………

………ok, there was one habit that Sam had which is worth noting. While Simon was obsessed with Hobgoblins, Sam was interested in good old fashion trolls. Trolls can be particularly nasty, specifically at night. Sam had a long history with trolls, one incident that DOES NOT come into this story but failure to mention the following one would be plain negligence. This being said, Sam enjoyed catching, ‘and then…’ trolls. The ‘and then’ is the humorous and disconcerting part of Sam’s malady. Once Sam had the creature, he would not dress the creature up, but he would somehow convince it to play act. For instance, he once convinced a troll that he was actually elvis, mind you, trolls are a few french fries short of a happy meal. The confused little fellow had a troll-sized guitar, glittering outfit, the whole shooting match. On a particular evening when Elvis troll was really ‘rocking’, so to speak, Sam slipped into the room with a very small squirt gun filled with water. Sam must be commended on his patience, at the exact right moment, when Elvis troll was looking into the bright lights of his mind, singing his heart out, Sam sprayed him down with the squirt gun. Interesting to consider is that trolls turn into wood, immediately upon being sprayed with water. Sam was giddy with glee. Running about he had what he had dreamt about for so long, a wooden, singing troll, in the perfect stance…it was a moment of bliss. After he had thoroughly tired himself out he set his new, static friend on the shelf. The shelf had hundreds of wooden trolls in the most bizarre of states.

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Sam and Simon decided that the run of the mill dragon chasing and treasure hunting wound not suffice on a given spring morning. This was not a concern as there was a fallback routine that was certain to satisfy, and quite mandatory to practice if one knew what was good for him, and both of these ones did know what was good for them. BMX. BMX was the bee’s knees of all the land. With lunches packed by their endearing mothers the lads set out for the BMX mecca. It was a similar experience to that of actually traveling to this aforementioned land, once one arrived, the mecca often failed to live up to the name of mecca. But it did have one huge hill. Huge. The theory of this track is that of any racetrack…when the gate goes down, go as fast as you can, first one done wins, last one done disgraces their family and is executed. On the particular day of this visit, there were no formal races, it was the ideal time to tempt fate, see what this dragon of a track really had beneath it’s scales, poke around and see if there was any way to exploit the track to avoid death by last place come race day. After doing a fair piece of detective work, the lads arrived at the same answer at which generations of boys before them had arrived, the dragon is impregnable. One can only win by winning, live by not losing.

Armed with a new resolution to win, or at least be the second slowest (for fear of family disgrace followed by an untimely, painful death), they set about practicing. Simon was older, he was bigger, he was faster, and he was in a different age group, which was lucky for Samuel. This did not dissuade Simon from poking fun at Sam regarding his choice of starting location on the Hill. The real racers all went from the very peak, one gets the most speed, and frankly, it is illegal to start from any place else. There is a caveat to said starting Hill. At the bottom of this very large Hill, is a very large jump. In this far away land, gravity, conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy, and all the normal physical rules that Humans live by, were to be followed. Upon sufficient berating, Sam pushed his bike from the preferred, middle of the Hill starting point, to the top of the Hill. It is a historical fact, sweaty palms were invented on this day. He narrowed his eyes down the Hill. He had borrowed Simon’s helmet for the occasion and it gave him some false sense of courage in his quest to slay. As he imagined the voice of the announcer calling out the starting position verbiage, his small heart beat loudly in his Big World. There was a moment when the announcer in his mind summoned him and the other 6 invisible racers to go. Hurtling down the Hill was pure ecstasy. The speed, the whirling, the rush of victory at hand suddenly made his World small enough to fit into his pocket.

Somewhere between the split second realization of how large the bottom of the Hill jump was and a rough calculation of speed to weight ration Sam’s World began to grow, rapidly. He nearly had had it all the way into his pocket…but inflation was inevitable, as inevitable as he eminent trajectory. There was a moment, Simon saw this, Sam left his bike, he, Sam, was traveling though the air, but not majestically. The travel was that of a bird that drank too much wine and passed out at a bird party, as birds are known to do. His fellow party going birds then decided it would be fun to shave all of his feathers off and wake him with screaming that the nest is afire. The schwaggled bird jumps out of the nest, devoid of feathers and ‘flies’ (read falls from the sky, hitting every branch on the way down) that is precisely how Sam looked. Lucky for Sam, he had good solid gravel beneath him, and a God given chin to cushion his fall.

djmase

11.06.07