The Thousand-Foot Mouse

This is a story I wrote when I was a kid. Spelling and grammar have been left intact for posterity.

Nightmare

Once I told a ghost story. This was what it was. Their was this kid who was good at telling ghost stories. Once he told a ghost story so scary that it came true. There was a giant mouse and he wanted to get bigger! So he started to eat a lot of people and bugs. When he got bigger, he was about 1000 feet long! (Thats big for a mouse)! He started to attack other houses and buildings and lots of stores and stuff. They called the army, the navy, the mareins, and the US airforce base, but they could not kill it! But one time they took a m-x missle and hit the mouse. it got hurt rellaey bad then it fell down dead. The end.

Note the story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure. Pretty sophisticated for elementary school. I had probably forgotten the two framing stories by the time the mouse fell down dead.

Night Things and Completely Normal Activity

I'm sitting by myself in a hotel room late on a Saturday night in Baton Rouge. This is not particularly exciting.

What IS exciting is that my feature film Night Things is screening at the Fear Fete Horror Film Festival in Baton Rouge at 3pm on Sunday, October 7, 2012. That's 14 hours from now. You better get your butt down here.

You know what else is exciting? Season 2 of Completely Normal Activity, the web series I co-direct, began on Wednesday, October 3, 2012. That's -4 days ago. You better get your butt to our website and watch it now.

That's a Lot of Cake!

I woke up early, so I hopped in the shower and headed down to Sel Marie to grab coffee and a breakfast pastry. About to pay for my small caffeine and gigantic scone, I spotted a cinnamon sour cream coffee cake, roughly three inches tall and ten inches in diameter. (That's a five-inch radius, kid.) I thought, "Hey, something for tomorrow," because it was too early to form complete sentences, and then requested from the barista a slice of the tasty-looking cake. A slice turned out to be one-quarter of the cake! (That's a five-inch slice length, kid.) That is more cake than I should eat first thing in the morning, and, no, putting coffee in front of the word cake does not make it healthier or more appropriate to eat, as though that breakfast-drink modifier transforms the ingredients of said cake into vitamins and fiber.

How much cake is it? Let's do the math. The area of a cake is pi*r^2, assuming a circular cake, which this was. The radius is five inches, kid, and 5^2 is 25. One slice was 1/4 of the cake, so we want to calculate (1/4)(25pi). That comes out to 19.6 square inches of coffee cake. I would calculate the volume but that might make the number bigger.


Now, let's retract for a moment the hasty assertion that coffee cake is just as unhealthy as cake eaten at other times of day. Assuming a Euclidean universe, the word coffee is about equal 0.65, so, going back to the area of our cake, we must perform this calculation: 0.65 * 18.7 square inches (I've eaten some since the last paragraph). This comes out to 12.155 square inches of cake. That's still a foot of cake, so let's get a refill on the coffee and do the calculation again. Now we get 7.9 square inches of cake, which is a hair below 8. The number 8 turned sideways is infinity, which exists only in theoretical terms, and so it follows that my amount of cake almost does not exist. This means that I hardly have any cake at all, which means that my breakfast is not unhealthy. It also means that the barista totally overcharged me.

Well, I guess I'll have to go back tomorrow and get what I was owed, plus a free slice for the inconvenience, a 50%-off coupon as a customer-retention bribe, and an extra slice for Saturday. And an extra slice for Saturday morning. And Saturday is my sister's birthday, so I'll get another slice with a birthday candle to remind me that it's her birthday and a whole cake with many candles for her birthday celebration.

Wait, my sister gets a whole cake?! I'd better get a few extras. And one for the road.