Poop Shute

Happy Birthday To My Brother Day!

Today my little brother turns 22.

I thought I would take a moment from the usual poopiness to talk a little about my brother.

Funny guy, my brother.

Here's a little fictionalized version of my earliest memory of my brother. I wrote this about a year ago, I think

At about the age of four I had developed a finely honed sadism, which seemed only to be satisfied by torturing my little brother, Jonny. Whether you've been on the giving or receiving end of this; anybody with a sibling probably knows what I mean.

On this particular day I had decided to hide Jonny's bottle from him after mom had left the room, and I was celebrating this victory by teasing and gloating, and just generally be a jerk. For a while Jon seemed oblivious to all of this, and just kept on watching his cartoons, but eventually he'd had enough.

He calmly stood up, waddled his little two year-old walk over to me, who didn't quite know what to do with this unusual behavior and just looked at the little guy incredulously. Jon paused for a second, and then punched me neatly in the center of my face, after which he calmly waddled back over to the TV, and resumed his cartoon watching. Of course, I ran, screaming and bloody for Mom, who was not the least bit sympathetic. She knew that I would've had to have done something to provoke an attack from my normally docile and almost stoic younger brother. Well, of course she was right, but that didn't make me feel any better about it.

What neither I, nor my mom would ever learn was that, interestingly enough, Jonny couldn't have given a dirty diaper about the bottle. He hadn't even been hungry. Jon took issue with something else entirely. I had been disturbing his cartoon watching. All Jonny wanted to do was relax with his good friends, Bugs and Daffy, but I just seemed intent on drowning out their capering. Jonny decided to put an end to all that. Of course, this isn't the vocabulary little Jon-boy would've used to describe the event. In fact, Jonny had no vocabulary at all at the time. He chose not to speak until he was nearly four. It's not that he was stupid or anything, he just didn't have anything to say. This is in fact the exact reason that neither I nor my mom would ever discover Jonny's true motivations that day.

This is also a perfect metaphor for Joey and Jonny's entire childhood together.

**********

Of course, once we hit the strange age of high school we seemed to grow closer with each day.

My brother is a good man and a good friend, but man were we both ever bastards as kids.

Actually, it was mostly me.

Mostly.

At any rate, if any of you out there who don't see my brother regularly would like me to pass on any birthday wishes on to him, just drop them into the comments and I'll copy and paste them all into a nice email to him.

I think he'll like that.

I just wish I would've thought of it yesterday.