Fulfillment of a lifelong dream...

Well, half of one at least. I’ve always wanted to at one point in my life be chased by the police. I imagined myself being approached by an officer after having commited some minor infraction of the law like riding my bike down the ramp behind the Smith Field House ($50.00 fine) or throwing snowballs (again, fifty bones if you get caught. Although there was that one time we were walking home from wallball and I hit J-Peck in the face with one and this cop, I swear, he just materialized like two feet to the left of me. No joke, no one was there and then a BYU campus police officer was telling us to stop having fun. Or at least telling me to stop having fun- I’m not sure if Jocelyn was having much fun with a snowball in her eye. He didn’t give me a fine though, probably because he was only a spirit and incapable of interacting with the physical world.) but rather than just taking the fine I’d show off how fast I was and my parkour skills and would lose the pursuing police officer.

So last night I’m longboarding at the Wells Fargo parking garage down by Center Street around 3:30am. It’s sever stories high and it’s fun to coast from the top around in circles to the basement. There are signs all around it expressly forbidding loitering, roller blading, and skateboarding and I had heard stories about people getting their boards confiscated there but didn’t think they were true. They should have signs up telling homeless people it was against the rules to pee in the stairwell, because that place is rank with the smell of urine. Anyway, I’m going up the stairs for my third run down (the outside stairs, not the stairwell because I’m serious, it is a foul and unholy smell in that place) and I get up to the third floor when I see the back of this police suburban going slowly up the parking garage. I made like the BYU officer and evanesced quicker than all get out. And get out I did. I booked it a block and a half away, then watched from behind a parked car the as the suburban made its way to the top of the parking garage.

I’m pretty sure they didn’t see me, because they waiting at the top level for a while before going back down and leaving. So I wasn’t chased by the police, but I did run from them which is half the dream. I’m willing to count that one for now and move on to the next: getting a Vitamin Water on an airplane.

While driving through a residential area on my way to work yesterday I passed a lemonade stand some kid had set up in his driveway. A block later I passed a second one. I was at least two miles away before my conscience caught up to me. I'd had enough entrepreneurial ideas that either never got off the ground or never turned a profit (see the million dollar ideas and nastytie.com, and the most recent one www.nightshiftsteven.com ) and here I was passively watching other dreams die. I turned around and drove back to pick up some lemonade.

The sign in front of the first kid's stand advertised a glass of lemonade for a quarter. I wasn't especially thirsty, but thought the little tike could use the business so I bought two. That kid knew how to make a potent mix of crystal light. I'm not sure what the correct ratio of water to powder is, but the adage of "less is more" would not have been wasted on that particular afternoon. I felt like Socrates looking down at my second cup, but didn't want to hurt the kid's feelings and downed it anyway.

Having already decided to be charitable no matter what the bodily danger may be, I drove to the second lemonade stand. I was grateful to see the second microbusiness had decided to diversify their product lineup and along with what looked like Kool-aid there were also rocks for sale for ten cents apiece. I sure as heck didn't want anymore mismixed liquids, but didn't really want a handful of rocks ( all of which looking suspiciously similar to the ones alongside the driveway) so I told him I'd give him fifty cents for the very best one. I'm not sure what criteria was meet or what separated the rock he gave me from all the others, but I still have it in my car so I'll be able to try and determine exactly what it is later on.

Second chances for first time offenders

Notice anything different about the layout of this here blog? That's right, ads are back. Check them out. Over there to the right. Nice, huh? Google AdSense apparently doesn't have a program to cross reference their clients- this blog was created under the blocked email account tysonvanderwerken@gmail.com (send me funny links/pictures. Don't sign me up for Chinese pharmaceutical products) but I can put ads on it from a new, unblocked account.

Google, 1
Tyson, 1

I ended up going 2 hours and 43 minutes

I'm the firstborn in my family, which means I grew up being a kid for the first time with two adults being parents for the first time. I’d like to think my parents put some thought into how they wanted the raise their kids prior to them making one. Whether a trial and error method for rearing children is any better than making up the parameters after circumstances present themselves is difficult to determine, especially in my case where I feel there were influences from both camps.

Example of the trial and error: if my room wasn’t clean, I wasn’t allowed to play outside until it was. In theory this should have been enough of an incentive to guarantee a tidy living space. In reality I didn’t want to play anywhere outside my room anyway (still the case) so being forced to stay there didn’t have the desired effect. My parents both went to college, and weren’t to be outsmarted by a six year old. Having my mattress removed and not returned until my room was clean caused me to respond the way they hoped I would.

Example of circumstantial parameters: There were rules about when and who I could date. There weren’t rules about the length of individual dates until the day after the night I didn’t come home from one.

One hard and fast rule that applied to the entire duration of my childhood was in regard to the television I was permitted to watch. PBS. Nothing else. “Wishbone” got me through high school English (and some of college), I can’t count the number of times “Bill Nye the Science Guy” was the only reason I got an answer right in Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy, and I still know ever y word to the theme songs for Reading Rainbow, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, and 3-2-1 Contact (that one really dates me, but I have fond and very vivid memories of The Bloodhound Gang and Math Patrol).

I did sneak in a lot of TV on the sly. Mom napped every afternoon and dad was still at work, so between most days 2:00 to 3:00pm I had a window to indulge in Fox Kid’s cartoon programming. “Spiderman” was a favorite, and the first one in the program lineup so I usually got to see that one before mom woke up. “Big Bad Beetleborgs” was on for a while and came right before the show it ripped off, “Power Rangers”. But always outbalancing my illicit television was the quotidian diet of publically funded programming.

One feature of PBS I miss is what they would show between programs when there wasn’t anything scheduled. I assume the children’s educational television market wasn’t as saturated as it currently is, because often times they would just show B reel footage of a helicopter flying through the Grand Canyon. That was it. The shadow of the helicopter would gracefully as glide over the surface of the canyon walls for half hour blocks, while 4th graders whose parent’s didn’t approve of cartoons waited idly on living room carpets.

Boredom is an excellent motivator for activity (case and point- I’ve now been at my job at a call center for 2 hours and 25 minutes without taking a phone call. That’s a new personal record, if anyone’s interested. With nothing else to do, I log into my blog and proceed to write everything up to the period you’re about to see. <-- That’s the one) and I would likely leave to go build Legos or make puddles of mud to bury stuff in or go pull my sister’s hair. Or I would just watch the shadow and imagine how I would keep up with it were I running alongside it- which crecipices (minted it- sorry, no stealing it now) I would jump over or path I would take to keep pace.

Sadly, the helicopter in the Grand Canyon no longer has a place on the public broadcasting station. In its place are a slew of banal and insipid programs like “Bob the Builder” and “Dora the Explorer” that rot kids’ brains. Sadder yet, my parents have become unbelievably lax in what television they allow the youngest of the six children to watch. Cable? When did we get cable? And why isn’t the Disney channel blocked? That station is all trash, all the time. Have fun being dumber than a pair of bricks, Aspen and Capri- thank mom and dad for it.