Memories of a Fecalcentric Youth

It’s always a strange realization when you look back on your childhood and finally come to understand that you were an odd little kid. Actually, looking back on it, I ran with a whole pack of odd little kids who, when assembled, would feed and thrive off each other’s weirdness. So that atmosphere of oddballs, in conjunction with my natural compulsion to do off the wall stuff, meant that my childhood shenanigans were not quite what I imagine other children of similar age doing. Sewer fishing is one notable example of our strange hi-jinks. When I was around the age of 6 or 7, we somehow developed a game that simply entailed breaking the arm off of an action figure, lashing it to kite string, gently lowering it down the vented opening in the manhole cover, and collecting any detritus that would happen to flow by and catch itself on the crooked arm. Once carefully extracted from the sewer, you would swing the arm about your head a-la helicopter rotors, and chase other children. For some reason the game caught like wildfire and soon every boy in the neighborhood was having to explain to his mother why his action figures had no arms and why he smelled like putrid sewer water. Now that I look back, we spent a whole summer obsessed with that sewer. We would lay in the street peering down into the dark caverns of municipal waste water and attempt experiments to determine how fast the water was, or how long it took for things flushed in our homes to reach our subterranean peepshow. So, many a flashlight was absconded with and many a brightly colored Lego block was flushed in hopes that we would be able to see it rush by on the watery interstate of waste. We never saw any of our flushed items, and even if we had, I don’t think we possessed the mathematical wherewithal to even calculate the speed of the water nor the scientific discipline to even care about results. None of that mattered to us and for some reason, it was our greatest hope to one day gain access to the sewer and explore its tunnels for lost treasure and gators, all of which we KNEW was there (we watched way too much Goonies). I can remember breaking at least two broom sticks trying to pry the manhole cover up to unlock the doorway to our adventure. We never did gain access to that subterranean wonder land, but it wasn't due to lack of trying. That was how we spent a whole summer though, watching turds, flushing toys, planning what we would buy with our sewer treasure, and generally being odd kids. Fecalcentric. That his how my brother and I describe our childhood upon retrospective reflection. Yes, fecalcentric.