| Whenever I let my guard down and find myself saying, “I’m coming up,” I brace myself for the response of “so you’d better get this party started.” Whether it’s playing off the lyrics of bad pop songs or the foreign exchange student, Yossawee’s nickname (Mee), I can always count on Shaine Griggs to put me through the pain of some of the worst puns I’ve ever heard whenever he is afforded the opportunity. He almost managed to single-handedly push me to the point of never using another pronoun in my life with his constant references to Mee (Example: Random Stranger walks down the street and sees Shaine preparing to board a Green Line bus at one of the city’s many bus stops. Random Stranger (unsuspecting): Hold the bus for me please! Shaine: What are you talking about? Yossawee doesn’t even ride the bus! Random Stranger happens to know who Yossawee is, and that his nickname is Mee, realizes the moral depravity of a joke that bad, loses all will to live, produces a handgun, and places it in his own mouth.) Believe it or not, Shaine has managed to survive (and even prosper) despite his horrid (and constant) use of puns thanks to his ability to compensate for that particular comedic deadfall with his propensity toward being a jackass…and unspeakably hilarious. Being almost exactly 18 months older than I, Mr. Griggs is an older person whom I would be remiss to not detail in this writing assignment. Whether doing something as simple as standing in the road with our pants around our ankles in the middle of the night as we watch a man use a propane-tank-blowtorch to, well…. torch the weeds in his sidewalk or something as grandiose as our greatest prank ever – which lead to three weeks of suspension for yours truly and to Shaine’s never gracing these halls with his presence again (though still graduating) and, very rightly, shall not be discussed here – Shaine and I often formed a comic duo not to be soon forgotten. I do not envy you, the reader, for due to the fact that we were not busted for all of our exploits, I am unable to share some of the greatest achievements I participated in with Mr. Griggs, yet I shall do my best to leave you with a lasting impression of this truly memorable individual. Shaine and I were actually pretty boring (comparatively) until some point in the 2001-2002 school year, when we realized that being Grade-A jackasses beat out being boring debate nerds hands down. As I’m having trouble thinking of things to describe that would not get me in trouble at this juncture I shall discuss one particular date on which the two of us managed to demonstrate our ability to get a yuck or two at the expense of nothing more costly than our pride. All right, I don’t remember the date (I can get it later), but it was the day of MSHSAA Debate Districts. Now, for the sake of realism, put yourself in our shoes: It’s seven in the morning (on a SATURDAY), it’s snowing… a lot, we’re on a tiny school bus with two certain loud individuals (Eric Chambers and Jenna Weston to be exact) who, despite being jackasses were not being the least bit humorous. To be honest they were just plain urinating us off. It’s sort of like of the twelve or so people on the bus there was this dark cloud of bitter despondency hanging over the seats that Shaine and I occupied (yes, even though there were twelve of us on a mini-bus, at 7:00 AM on a Saturday morning, there’s no way in Hades that we weren’t getting our own seats). So when word came that the tournament had been cancelled due to whether Shaine and I nearly wept in joy. Thus, the day was set for fun. We proceeded to the home of our friend Brittany Braucher (who, by the way, doesn’t seem to be interested in giving me the time of day, let alone being my friend any more so perhaps I should be speaking in the past tense – “our THEN friend”. I’m not bitter, by the way.). I occupied myself temporarily by taking advantage of the snowfall and writing a certain word, the likes of which I shall leave to your imagination, in letters twenty feet high in the snow. We then sent her brother, who for some bizarre reason was awake at that ungodly hour on a SATURDAY MORNING, to wake her up. As he hurried away on his task, we did the obvious thing by getting back in Shaine’s truck and driving away. If that doesn’t qualify us for being referred to as jackasses yet, it just gets better. Obviously, we needed rest, so we went back and crashed in my basement where our blissful slumber was interrupted no less than three times by the incessant telephone calls of a certain Jason Michael Zajdel who happens to be sitting in THIS VERY CLASSROOM – (icy glare of death). Interesting, but wholly unrelated postscript to that story: I had a process for answering the phone every time Jason called that morning. I would let it ring exactly two times, yell “D___it!”, get off the couch and run/stagger to the phone before the even more annoying answering machine picked up. We traded the truck in for my dad’s minivan after rousing and picked up Jason, for some reason I can’t recall – I think it’s because he had food and my parents were out of town and I don’t know how to forage for roots and berries very well. It paid off though because something like his whole mom’s side of the family was there so it happened to be the birthday of one of the mass, which means one thing: NOISEMAKERS. These weren’t just any run of the mill noisemakers though; these things were LOUD. If you blew on one of these things with gusto you got an ear splitting squeal loud enough to break glass and temporarily deafen the surrounding populous within a three click radius. They were so loud we eventually changed their names from noisemakers to Assaphones. Yeah, that loud. The Assaphones blended beautifully with the freeze-out match Shaine and I initiated upon returning to the van. For those not in the proverbial “know”, I shall explain the nuances of this time honored tradition: freeze-out is a game in which any number of combatants undress to their classy Calvin Klein BVDs, roll down the windows and see who lasts the longest. By the way, the game works best when played on a cold day, otherwise it can last a really long time. It probably goes without saying, but for the average person there’s really nothing much better on a winter day than to drawn from whatever you’re doing by the siren song of two Assaphones being blasted on for all they’re worth only to see two scantily clad adolescent boys driving in a green minivan with all the windows open and their skin turning blue. At some point we went by Brittany’s again and got her; I guess it’s worth putting in as we did wake her up at 7:30 on a SATURDAY MORNING. By the way, that really, really, really hurt my skin. All of it. Still not jackass enough for you? Well, we kicked it up a notch – after declaring the freeze-out match a draw and setting fire to ourselves to stave off hypothermia, we proceeded to perpetrate a quite humorous act of charity. In my pantry we found a jar full of really nasty, eight-inch long, thin German hotdogs (my dad’s a big fan of ethnic foods) just begging to be liberated from their glass prison and used for some inane comical purpose. Being the humanitarians that we are, Shaine and I selected a Frankfurter, had my dog and Zajdel each take a bite out of it (they’ll eat anything) and then Scotch™ taped it to the following sign which we placed in the Porta-Potti at Radio Springs Park: |
| “The Real Estate King of Nevada” Scott Ross 1st Hour |
| Aren't you intrigued? Join Ace of Base and see the sign on Page 2 ---> |
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| The Man of the Hour, Shaine Allen Griggs poses for a glamour shot in eighth grade. |
| I wrote this paper for Richard Daut's English IV class. The assignment was to write about an older person, or a meaningful experience with an elder, or some such concept. I, therefore, wrote about the events that transgressed on a date I still haven't bothered to figure out. The events written about are true; names have not been changed to protect the innocent, because, quite honestly, we are all sinners. I got a B-. |