There was this old house around 40 feet from the chain-link fence that surrounded my elementary school.  In retrospect, it was just another crappy, run-down house in my crappy, run-down hometown.  However to the kids in the 5^th grade, it had taken on a life of its own, and had become… HAUNTED.

There were many stories around this house like that kids had died there, skeletons hung in the closets on coat hangers, blood stains could be seen on the windows, and countless other yarns that children find quite troubling yet feed on in some sadistic way.

By the time it was my 5^th grade class’s turn to have the legend passed to us, it had morphed into something quite simple:  If you looked into the upstairs window at the worn out dresser, and you stared hard enough and long enough, you’d see the drawers move on their own!

Looking back on things, I think what was really being handed down from class to class was a punishment in the same way hazing works, in that the older kids did it to the younger simply because it had been done to them.  Sometime towards the end of the year, when a kid had spent an entire year staring at the house, and hadn’t seen a single bloody handprint or dead kid waving from the basement, they would realize they had been duped.  To make up for this, they would then construct a story of their own to waste a year’s worth of recesses for the following class.

So we got the drawers.  Those damn drawers.  It was really just one drawer, and it was probably some hard working, blue collar father’s underpants drawer who probably would have been more than a little creeped out himself to know that an entire classroom of kids was staring at the drawer that housed his… well… drawers.

Yet there we were, every day, staring into that stupid window at that stupid drawer.  The weak kids peeled off one by one, turning their attention to the swings or the slide, but not me.  Oh no, I was going to see that stinking drawer move if it took every second of every recess of the entire school year.

Well I’ve built this up enough, so the big reveal is that I never saw the dumb thing move.  Not even an inch.  I have no idea what I would have done if I had seen it move, but I was sure pissed off when it didn’t.  I realized that I too had been tricked.  The blood-stained torch had been passed, and I fell for it rusty hook in the door, line and sinker.

So I dedicated the entire summer to shaping the legend I would hand down to the upcoming class.  I wound up telling a kid that a daughter of the family that lived in the house had been buried alive in the front yard, and if you watched long enough in one spot, you’d see the ground move.

Then I spent the entire year taking great pride in seeing him and all of his little 5^th Grade buddies hanging out at the fence and staring at that spot of ground.

What a bunch of rubes.

I let my wife read a recent post of mine that centered around writing a book about Honey Buckets (Port-o-potties) of the world.

I could tell she spent most of her time attempting to stifle at least a few snickers, a possible chortle, and most certainly at least one guffaw.  Then, instead of giving me the laughter I so richly deserved, she simply turned and said, “All you ever write about is poop.”

How dare her.

In fact, how dare her times two.

I’ve held back some of my very best poop stories.  Poop stories that would rattle the poop blogging infrastructure to its very core.  She’s insane if she thinks all I write about is poop.

I could have easily told of the time my friend, Steve, was squatting near his fishing pole at Denmark Pond when I told a zinger that made him laugh so hard he pooped a little.  We even had to bury his underpants behind the cattails and send my cousin to fetch Steve’s Dad to bring us home.  Can’t ride back down the canal bank on a bike after a fiasco such as that one!

Or what about the little doozy of a number involving my friend, Joel?  In Junior High, he got his fingers slammed in a car door resulting in him pooping his pants, but you didn’t see me writing about that little number.

Finally, I could have most certainly told of the time that I threw my back out so badly that I couldn’t move from the kitchen floor or call for help.  As I sobbed on the floor, crippled in pain, my 16-year-old Daschund did what any loyal companion of 16 years would do… he walked up next to me and took a dump within a foot of my head.

And there are more.  Believe you me, I’ve got lots of poop stories.  I’m ripe with poop stories.  I’ve got poop stories coming out of my… well… you get the idea.  I just choose to write about other things rather than being just a one-poop-pony.

So do me a favor, would you?  The next time you see my wife on the street, please mention that I write about many things besides poop.

Only write about poop… HA… where does she get off?

I live in the state of Washington, and the town I grew up in is almost smack dab in the center of the state.  I’ve long since relocated to the Seattle area, because I felt that my hometown lacked the number of beard-wearing, coffee-drinking, better-than-me-because-they-drive-a-Suburu people that I needed to really feel like I was living.

The result of this is that there is now roughly a 3-hour gap between where I live and my Mom lives.  So anytime I start feeling like the bad son for not allowing her to see her grandkids more often, we pack up the Family Truckster and head that way.

Today on our return trip, we decided to take “the long way home,” through the beautiful Cascade mountains, and one of our favorite towns in the world, Leavenworth.  If you’ve never been, think of Leavenworth as a Bavarian town, nestled in the Cascades of Washington, but just a stone’s throw from a bunch of beard-wearing, coffee-drinking, better-than-you-because-they-drive-a-Suburu people.

It’s an outstanding drive, especially given that we got some pretty decent weather for October, but the tradeoff is that our Son, who is a couple of months from turning 4, had to take a couple of potty breaks on our 4.5 hour drive.  One of these breaks needed to happen almost instantly as he suddenly yelled from the back seat that which all parents on a major highway fear hearing, “I NEED TO POOP!”

I jerked the car down the nearest forest road and we were all set to let him get out and fall his own tree when I spotted the following items on the ground, just off the road:

• A “well-worn” mattress.
• An empty case of Keystone beer.
• The outer casing of what appeared was once a gas-powered leaf blower.

I asked my wife under my breath (as not to alarm my son), “Are you seeing this?”  She didn’t reply, but her eyes, and the fact that she was drawing blood from my forearm with her nails screamed, “Honey, let’s find another abandoned forest road to get murdered on.”

So we drove.  And we drove.

And we drove.

What seemed like hours was probably 10-15 minutes, but when you’re constant glances to your backseat are met with a 3-year-old returning a stare to you that mixes fear, determination to keep things in place, and pain, time slows to a crawl.

And then… out of the blue, like a shiny, green, pillar of hope… we spotted it.

The Honey Bucket.

Known to some as The Porta Potty, or as my Father lovingly referred to it, “The Sh*t Shed,” this modern marvel is nothing more than a thin plastic shell, a toilet seat, and the worst mixture of chemicals and human to ever be placed inside a thin plastic shell.

I pulled up in front of it, shut the vehicle off and turned to my son as I pointed.

“You’re going to go potty in there.”

“Cool!” was the reply, which I was actually almost disappointed by.  I think part of me was hoping for a, “No… I can wait until the end of time if I need to.  Please don’t make me go in there.”  Instead, he was actually thrilled with the idea of going potty in what he later coined, “A poop pod.”

So we entered the Honey Bucket together.  Father and Son, ready for the worst and hoping for the best.  Frankly I half expected the owner of the mattress, case of beer and leaf blower to be sitting inside when we flung the door open.  He’d just laugh and say, “I’ve been expecting you,” and my wife would watch in horror as the door slammed and locked behind us.

Instead we got the typical stinky honey bucket, complete with what looked like 25 years worth of other 3-year-old droppings floating in the nuclear-blue sludge.  My kid was sitting there, talking about how cool all the blue poop was and doing his thing, when I got hit with a moment of inspiration:

A Honey Bucket Coffee Table Book!

I’m thinking of calling it, “Honey Buckets Around the World: Blue and Brown in Any Language.”

Now before all of you Internet Jockeys run around sending me Amazon links to the thousands of Honey Bucket books that already exist, let me explain that mine will be different.  Mine will be nothing more than the following:

• A text description of the Country, coordinates, temperature and time of day.
• A picture of the outside.
• A picture of the inside.
• A picture of inside the actual toilet.

I’m not trying to be gross with that last picture, but I just think it would be cool to see how blue poop compares around the world.  After all, you’ve seen one Honey Bucket, you’ve sort of seen them all.  It’s that blue poop that really is the finger print of the honey bucket.

By this point, I was snapped out of my book writing haze by my Son’s laughter.  he was now standing knee-deep in the blue sludge in our honey bucket and laughing wildly as his Mom pounded on the outside of the plastic shell yelling, “You better not be letting him play inside that thing!”  He was a mess, but it was no big deal, as I have a luggage rack, and as mentioned, it was unseasonably warm.

Better yet, I had a damn fine book idea.