Who are all these people that actually enjoy Monopoly?!
- April Fool’s Day
I think a lot of my April Fool’s Day pranks have been well documented here, but here’s two of my favorites. The first is when I dyed my mother’s dog blue (don’t worry, the dye was specifically made for use on animals an is completely safe.)
And the second is when I filled my mother’s front hallway with playpit balls. 5,000 of them!
- World Health Day / Scrabble Day
I’ll do one of each.
My favorite board game is Clank! It’s a really fun deckbuilder that has you more focusing on your own progress than everyone else, but still has a bit of competition. Wiz War is a close second place game though.
My favorite card game is Magic the Gathering, but like Urza-cycle and back. A lot of the news sets and mechanics are just confusing and dumb.
And my favorite video game is Dust: An Elysian Tail. It’s a metroidvania game with incredible art, music, humor, and story. Everyone should play it - no qualifiers, just everyone.
- Tax Day / Haiku Day
I pay my money
Always to the government
And yet, they take more
- Volunteer Recognition Day / Administrative Professionals Day
I life was positively impacted by volunteers when I used to also volunteer at a local animal shelter. While there, I really bonded with this one dog. Well finally, one day I convinced my mother (this was in high school when I still lived with her) that I needed a dog and we went to get him. He had been adopted out the night previous, but I found a husky mix that had been brought in that morning and he became my best friend. I named him Eddie Van Halen (the shelter said his name was Spot and there’s no way in hell I’ll ever let a pet of mine be named something as dumb as Spot, or Fido, or any other cliche, generic pet name.)
- Tell a Story Day / Honesty Day
Oh man, “tell a story” - it’s like this was custom made just for me! Strap in, ladies and gents:
So a long time ago (in a galaxy that is this one) my best friend (at the time) and I were hanging out with a boy she was flirty with. Well, he was working at Sam Goody at the time and told us that the store would always throw out unsold magazines, CDs, and other merchandise after a long enough time (something I now know that a lot of stores do.) Well, we took this to mean that we had a chance to get lots of free stuff. So we pressed for information and found out what night the stuff was usually put in the dumpster and when the day came, we, along with two other good friends of ours, got in my tiny, sporty car and headed to the dumpster behind the Sam Goody late at night.
So now, I park to the side of the building and we walk to the back where the dumpster is (it made sense at the time that we should park far away and be sneaky - I don’t know why. Pretty sure dumpster diving isn’t actually illegal.) So my best friend (who we’ll call Jen), a female friend of hers (who we’ll call Terri), and my other best (at the time) friend (who we’ll call Richard) all walked toward the back of the store and the dumpster. When we got there, we opened it and Terri and I climbed inside to find exactly what we were expecting - books, magazines, CDs, some boxes of whatever. It was dark and we couldn’t really identify everything so we just started passing armloads back out to Jen and Richard who packed it all into backpacks.
When we finally felt that we had a good enough haul Terri and I climbed out of the dumpster and the four of us started walking back to the far side of the building where the car was parked. And then we heard a car coming.
Well, being young and stupid (again, I don’t think we were actually doing anything illegal - once something is thrown away ownership is forfeited I believe, and this was a large, shared strip mall, so it wasn’t private property.) we assumed it was the police. We all jumped down into the tall reeds near us since we were currently obfuscated from view of the vehicle by the large dumpster.
I should elaborate that the parking lot was surrounded on the back and on the one side (not the side my car was on but on the side that this new vehicle was approaching from) by a large creek. There was an embankment between the parking lot and the water, the surface of which was about six feet below the parking lot.)
Ok, so to continue, the four of us are all lying silent and motionless in the tall reeds and other various foliage as the vehicle stops in front of the dumpster. We’re behind the dumpster so we can’t see the vehicle but we heard the people getting out of it. They were saying something but the breeze moving through the weeds made it impossible for us to make out the words. Then we heard them open their trunk, grab something large out of it, and approach the dumpster. Now they WERE near enough for us to hear and we clearly heard them say “hurry up, throw it in!” “Come on, let’s go!”
We heard a large thud as they threw something into the dumpster and then they got in their vehicle and drove away.
Their panicked tone and the sound of the large item landing in the now nearly empty dumpster made us decide on the most logical conclusion: they were murderers dumping a body. Obviously.
So as soon as they had driven all the way to the far side of the building and turned the corner (going toward my car but it was a shared parking lot so it wasn’t the only car, nor was it obvious that we were back here) we all stood up and ran. In our hurry, we didn’t even grab our backpacks that we had dropped in the weeds alongside us.
And then the car reappeared. We all see the vehicle coming toward us from the far side and we all instantly do an about face and start hauling arse toward the nearer side of the building. It will get us further away from our ride home but if we can get to the storefront side with lights and other cars, we figure we’ll be safe.
The car is coming toward us and we decide once we round the corner we can just go into the weeds on the embankment on this side and hide again - it worked before.Well, Terri goes first and ducks behind a fence. Jen was in front of me and started going down a small trail in the weeds and then stopped and crouched down. I was behind her and vaulted over her - only to realize that she had stopped because she was at the edge of the embankment and I quickly find myself falling through the air, and the branches of the trees that were growing at the bottom of the embankment (these tree branches and limbs are what I had mistaken for weeds and grass - turns out the embankment on this side was a lot smaller and steeper than the one on the back of the building.) Well gravity continues working and after the majority of my exposed skin is removed by tree branches, sticky grass, and at least on thistle plant that I somehow tackled in my fall, I land in the water below. I stand back up after being dunked in this cold river and realize it’s only waist high. I yell up for my friends to jump down because we can just walk through to the plaza on the other side and the car will have to go around. We can lose them!
Well, this is when the men in this car turn on their lights - the red and blue kind. Turns out they were not the same vehicle as the first one we had seen and were instead a patrol vehicle doing its usual sweep through the various retail plazas to make sure no one was breaking into any buildings.
Jen and Richard were still crouching obviously in the middle of the dead-end pathway. Terri was still crouching low behind a fence which would have been fine except it was a chain-link fence. So it obfuscated no visibility and she was just as visible to the police officers as my other friends who were apparently thinking they could stay low and motionless and pass for rocks? The only person they couldn’t see was me, as I was below the embankment (more of a cliff, really). Well they tell my friends to just come over and then I decide that I shouldn’t just bail on them and so I yell up that I’m coming and start climbing back up the cliff.
I could not see them but was told later that they had a confused and then bemused look on their faces when they heard me shout up.
They waited and when all four of us were standing in front of them they just stared at us in silence.
I looked at my friend Jen and I could tell from the look on her face that she was panicking and going to do something stupid. And a millisecond later she simultaneously starts crying and blurts out in a single run-on breath “there were these guys and we hid from them when we heard them coming because we were scared and then they put a body in the dumpster and we thought you were them so we ran away and we didn’t mean to do anything wrong and we’re SO SORRY!”
Now I can’t believe her stupidity in saying that because now the police will think WE put a body in the dumpster and so I disregard the situation and yell at her “are you kidding me? Did you just tell the police there’s a BODY IN A DUMPSTER you [female dog]?!”
The officers interrupt our squabbling and ask where we were from. I explain that we’re from my hometown, about a 30 minute drive north of the town we are in presently. The officer looks at me and asks “Are you the one driving?” I shake my head yes.
At this point the other officer starts chuckling to himself. I was later told that apparently he was (poorly) hiding a smile the whole time. The lead officer then says to me “ok, why don’t you all get back in your car and drive home. Also, that was a sewage ditch” he says pointing to the water I climbed out of.
It was at this point that my new smell hit all four of us.
The officers both laugh as they get in their patrol car and drive away, never even asking our names. And might I point out, they also never even went to inspect the dumpster we claimed contained a body either - so takeaway for any of you would-be murderers, just bring some confused and hysterical (in the literal definition, not a synonym for ‘funny’) teenagers with you and you can dump a body in a dumpster without problem.
As we make the long walk back to my car I am now cold, wet, bleeding in several places, and now begin to feel sore from my tumble down the embankment/cliff where I unsuccessfully battled Groot’s entire ancestral line. We did, however, retrieve the backpacks on the way back to the car.
So after a very long and smelly drive back to my house I took a shower and changed into clothes that weren’t covered in sewage and then my friends, amidst plenty of giggles, showed me our haul that had been inspecting while I showered.
Turns out, we had reclaimed AOL CDs, music sampler packs that they had out for free at the register, some damaged product that was thrown away because it was broken, and a slew of two-month old hustler magazines. So after all of that, we had exactly nothing of value to show for our adventure and my suffering. (No, despite being a male in his early twenties, I had no interest in old hustler magazines. At the time I actually had a girlfriend (who was luckily not present for this misadventure) and those magazines ended up quickly becoming tinder for a bonfire before my mother discovered them.)
So yeah, moral of the story: well, there’s a lot of them, but the biggest takeaway I guess is DON’T EVER TELL THE POLICE THERE’S A BODY IN THE DUMPSTER!
