Yesterday I woke up with insane cramps in my stomach— so bad the pain was radiating to my arms and legs. In my half-sleep, tossing and turning to find the right position to alleviate the pain so I could get back to sleep, I remembered this instance from 2003 or 2004 and started laughing out loud:
My friends’ house had a great peanut-shaped swimming pool with a little faux jacuzzi at the top that ran off into it. We pushed the thrill of having a chlorine water-filled hole in the ground as far as possible. We found a plastic kids’ slide in a trash heap and around the same time a bunch of funboards, for a dollar each at the dollar store! “Fun boards” are a type of surfboard, but these weren’t even the same shape. They were handheld pieces of foam perfectly sized to fit on the plastic slide we had. It had a concave tail and when it was wet, it was slick and sleek enough to propel us into the pool like pucks on an air hockey table.
I don’t remember the timeline after that. We found another slide in the trash and carried it home a mile in the middle of the night. Some drunk dude and dudette thought we were stealing it from a kid’s backyard but seemed to advocate that as a worthy crime of passion.
Each time one of those hurricanes of Summer of 2004 hit we took the most preparation in sinking the slides so they didn’t get blown into a neighbor’s house. But only because it would have killed us to lose those slides.
My brother Joey made a bunch of funboarding bumper stickers. “HONK IF YOU LOVE FUNBOARDING;” “MY OTHER CAR IS A FUNBOARD;” etc.
The last one, MARRIAGE = (man) + (funboard), fixed my stomach five years later.
