Growing up, you kind of take what friends you can find. We all had those, the ones who really sucked, but you hung out with them anyway because you had nothing better to do. I had one, we will call him…Frank, cause that was his name.

Anyway, I had spent the night at Frank’s house, an entirely unremarkable place, filled with the kind of people who make their own soda pop. I am not fucking with you here. The idea behind making your own cola is this: Sure, you could be one of those idiots who goes to the store and plunks down a staggering $0.99 for a 2 liter of that fancy ‘name brand’ cola, or you could make it yourself, which, as opposed to buying it straight out, only involves:

Going to a specialty store that exclusively sells products to make your own carbonated beverages. I am not sure how in the hell someone with such a stupid business can make enough money to eat, but maybe they get a government grant or something. Anyway, I digress.

Buying a tank of syrup, some hoses, several tanks of CO2, and some spare plastic bottles to put your special homemade brew into.

Going home, hooking all this stuff up, then mixing all the ingredients together, and in less than 4 hours after you first set out to make your own cola, you have, what amounts to a bootleg version of Dr. Pepper. The real end reward comes, in the fact that you got a carbonated beverage, that you can say with great pride, you made yourself, and has the added bonus of tasting like total shit because, lets face it; you are not qualified to make your own damned cola. What the hell are they planning to do with this shit? Sell it? Of course since it is a vaguely Dr. Pepper-ish rip-off, they could capitalize on that aspect and market it under the name “Dr. Made By a Bunch Of Fucking Poor Ass Yokels, Who Must Honest To God Be The Stupidest People Alive Because They Spent 4 Hours Of Their Miserable Pointless Lives Making a Horrible Tasting Dr. Pepper Rip-off, That No One, Not Even People From Countries So Poor They Have To Eat Their Own Boots Would Think About Drinking, Not To Mention The Fact That, In Order To Just BREAK EVEN On The Cost Of Producing This Foul Tasting Syrup Water, They Would Have To Charge $6.00 For a Two Liter”

But if you want to know what they really did with this crap, was, they offered it to their guests, which if I were to put it on a scale of fucked up things that you can do to another living being, 1 being just a normal act of cruelty, like a kick in the nutsack, and 10 being the holocaust, it was definitely an 11 at least. I mean, come on, have a fucking heart.

Anyway, Frank had these stupid rules, because honestly, he sucked as a friend. For example, I was not allowed to play his Nintendo or read his comic books. If you know any comic book collectors, you know what I am talking about here. Losers, who honestly, no fooling put on rubber gloves to handle their X Men comic books, because, touching an illustrated woman on cheap paper with a latex glove is as close as they are ever going to get to having actual ‘Sex’ Sure they say it is to preserve the books value, but I can see through their perverted lies.

None the less, Frank was probably trying to tell me something with his actions, but I was not taking the hint. Agents of SORP, will never take a hint, EVER. Most of the time, we will not take a straight out “Go the hell away, you are irritating me” so what makes people think that subtlety is going to make a lick of difference?

Well, I was at this house. He had left without telling me, so I was sitting in his basement with nothing to do. I could not play video games, nor read books in his house, and going upstairs was out of the question. Franks whole family was insane.

His dad was one of those people who you honestly did not want to walk by, because if you did, you would be subject to him saying something so totally fucked up that you would have the urge to commit him to a nursing home right then and there, and not one of the good ones either. You would take this guy to the ones on 20/20 or Dateline NBC, where they use the patients as urinal soapcakes, and wash them off with fire hoses. He would say shit like:

“Yeah, boy. You think your new turnips are so fucking hot, but lemme tell you, you don’t know shit. Back in Nam, we had to put turnips in our rocket launcher, because that was the only thing that ‘Charlie’ understood. You could yell at those dumb people all day long, but never get anything across to them, so we had to fire turnips at their damned gook heads until they saw it our way”

So going upstairs was out of the question.

I took a quick inventory of the basement: A huge box of Lincoln Logs, a package of colored dry erase markers, and about a years worth of newspaper bundles. Now I am a fairly intelligent guy, with below average judgement, so I figured that I could definitely make some fun for myself with all this stuff.

I grabbed a paper, and some markers and drew up a bunch of old west looking maps on the paper. You know what I am talking about here, the ones with mountains, little wagon trails, a compass on the bottom, some little Indian teepees, really detailed. I made about ten in all.

Then, I would put on half of the paper on my knee, for support, and hold the other half. I then held a lighter under the map and hummed the theme to Bonanza! The paper would start to turn black, and then a flame would explode through the paper and I would yell “BONANZA!!!” And stomp it into the ground to put out them flames.

Well, about 8 Bonanza maps later, I got this really funny nagging feeling. There was something…different…about Frank’s basement. What was it? What had I not noticed that was not previously here? New wallpaper? No. Wait for it…waiiiiit for iiiit…NEW CARPET! That’s what changed! Franks parents put in brand new silver carpet in the basement! Hey wow, pretty snazzy looking, I had not even noticed, I was so busy with…uh oh.

I started clearing the smoldering pile of ash, thinking that maybe the carpet was OK still. For those of you who have ever spent an hour burning newspapers and stomping them into the carpet, you already know what the end result was. For the rest of you, the prognosis was not good. I used my lightening quick powers of deduction to determine that I had burned a good 12 by 14 in hole in some really nice carpet.

At that point, it was not really a question of how to repair the damage; it was a question of diverting attention for an adequate amount of time for me to get really far away.

I had considered full scale arson briefly, as it would definitely draw attention away from the carpet, but I turned that idea down, as I really did not trust the contents of the home made Dr. Ghetto Cola upstairs, and if they exploded, God only knows what the fallout would be.

Then it came to me! The Lincoln Logs! YES! Of course! It was a nice colossal box of them, so I poured it all out and started on my task.

By the time I was done, there stood the most elaborate detailed Lincoln Log castle ever created, complete with moat, drawbridge, spires, and even though I know that architecturally speaking, it is not consistent with the era, I put in a couple of flying buttresses, because I have always liked the way they looked.

In all, the castle stood about 4 feet high, and was a square 5 feet. I built the whole thing over the burn mark, and left the next morning.

About four weeks later, Frank and I were hanging out again. All of the sudden, out of nowhere, Frank goes: ‘You know what I hate about you? You don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself’ (of course a SORP hallmark quality)

Me: ‘What makes you say that, Frank?’

Frank: ‘A big fucking hole in my carpet makes me say that!!!’

Me: ‘Sooooo, moved the Lincoln Log castle, did ya!?’