It's a Zany Action, A Crazy Contraption

I have had a few larger writing projects on the go for a while now. The most obvious one is my thesis, which I am almost done with. It has been my main project for the last two years of my life and I am so happy that I've nearly finished it.

I have two other things that I've passively worked on over the last few years on as well. I'm not really sure how to classify them. I will admit that I have tried (maybe 'started' would be a better term) to write a few novels. One was a teen coming-of-age story I started writing after a break-up. Guess what that one was about. Another was about a minor league baseball player being called up to the Major Leagues. It was AWFUL.

I have two that I'm reasonably happy with. It's not that I've put a ton of work into them or that they're even close to being done, but that I still think the main idea behind them is pretty good. One is a Sci-Fi serial called Hands in Space and the other is called The Waterpark.

Many of my friends enjoy my stories that I tell about my old summer job and Party Pat in particular encouraged me to write them down. I did just that. I wouldn't say it's a novel at all in its current state, as it's just a collection of stories that might not be completely true, but are 100% based on real happenings.

With that, I present you with one of my stories from this thing:

Mouse Trap

The main reason I could get away with so much shit was my friendship with my supervisors, specifically George, and specifically because we smoked weed together regularly at and out of work.

One morning the two of us were opening the park; him being the supervisor and me being the head guard. Once we sorted everyone out and got the day started, we quietly snuck out for a wake ‘n bake behind one of the slides. We powered through a little joint and came back to a few of the employees waiting for us in a group.

“George, Ken, there’s a mouse on the slide.”

We both groaned internally.

Every day when you are an attendant and opening one of the slides, you are supposed to walk down it to make sure that there is no debris on the slide, since that could damage the slide when it was turned on. Or something? I guess? I never walked down the slide a single time in my four years of working there and while I’m sure a few sticklers did over the years, almost all the other employees didn’t bother either. There’s always a few duties you’re “supposed to do” at a job, but you just “don’t”, and this was one of them.

On this particular day though, the attendant did choose to walk down the slide and had apparently found a mouse on the slide. So, George and I had to do our compassionate duty and go and get the mouse off of the slide so that we could finish opening the park. While both high. And nobody knew that we were high.

We climbed up to the top of Rush River and started descending the long slide, keeping our eyes peeled for the mouse. I must admit, it felt a little surreal walking down a giant teal turned-off water slide at 8:30 in the morning while high.

We eventually spotted the mouse about halfway down the slide. To catch it, we had brought a dustpan with us, a big one like this, and our plan was to have one of us chase the mouse so that it would run right into the dustpan, held by the other person. Simple.

But we were high.

This proved to be much more difficult than we thought, because the mouse was very small and very quick and the slide was very big and we were very high. What we initially thought would take about five minutes was quickly moving pasts twenty. We were slightly worried that we wouldn’t catch the mouse in time for the park to open, but were honestly much more concerned with this mouse getting the best of us in our morning haze. A mouse can't beat us, that would be embarrassing.

We switched strategies a few times, exchanged multiple “Fuck this mouse”s, but were finally able to catch it in our dustpan. We shared a few glorious high-fives and cheers and descended the slide’s stairwell feeling like Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum walking across the desert at the end of Independence Day, a feeling which was surely unique to us.

We let the mouse go into a bush and then went to turn on the park. The day started normally, with the two of us chuckling to each other all the while. For the other employees this must have just been a minor nuisance at the start of a regular work day during a regular work week, but for me it was a very funny morning and something that I consider one of my fondest bonding experiences at the waterpark.