Booger Mountain

From ages 4-16 I collected all my boogers. It started out when I was around four years old. I liked to pick my nose and roll the boogers into balls. I used to do this all the time. I started realising that sometimes through the day I started getting these boogers to a decent size...like maybe the size of a marble. I would leave them on my window sill when I went to sleep at night, but the in the morning when I awoke I always would find out that my efforts were always in vain, as the boogers had dried out making them completely worthless.

At this point I started thinking. What if I was to put the boogers in the fridge over night? I decided to try it out. I put a marble sized booger into a small cereal bowl, and went to sleep. The next morning I rushed out of bed to find that the booger had actually been kept completely fresh. This brilliant discovery that I had made meant that I could keep adding to my booger through the week. With this in mind, by the end of the next day I managed to get it to about the size of a golf ball, and the next day a bit bigger than a tennis ball. By the end of the week it was about the size of a human head. It sat on a dinner plate on the fridge...the way it sat made it look like a little mountain. BOOGER MOUNTAIN was born.

Eventually it got to the point where I couldn't carry it around anymore. It pretty much filled up an entire dinner plate, and was getting too big for our fridge. It made sense that I start working on smaller booger balls that I would then later add to Booger Mountain. But where was I to keep it?

My friend Glen's dad was a butcher, and he knew about Booger Mountain so he came up with the idea that we could keep it in the giant fridge at his dads workplace. Every day when his dad closed up shop he would bring the key around to my house and we would ride out bikes to the butchers shop, carrying Booger Mountain in a little cart I attached to the back of mine. Booger Mountain would stay there over night, and it would be retrieved every morning before school. It was a lot of hard work, but Booger Mountain was worth it. Booger Mountain spent it's nights in the butchers fridge for almost a year. At this point it had a radius of about one metre, and was about sixty or seventy centimetres tall. I was so proud of what I had achieved.

One afternoon Glen and I were playing Street Fighter 2 at the milk bar. Glen was basically the worst at this game. He didn't know any moves, and I could just keep doing hadoukens and shoryukens over and over and easily defeat him every time. Today he got really shitty about the fact that he sucked at the game and said that he was going to tell his dad about Booger Mountain. I was freaking out a little on the inside, but basically thought he was bluffing as I felt he believed in Booger Mountain as much as me. The next morning I got the the butcher shop and found Glen's dad waiting for me. He started yelling at me about how it was disgusting and that it was against health and safety for it to be kept there and said that I wasn't allowed to keep it there anymore. Glen had betrayed me. Glen had betrayed Booger Mountain.

I didn't go to school that day. I was far too upset. I was freaking out and crying all day that Booger Mountain would dry up and die. That night I got home and in defeat chucked Booger Mountain onto the grass in my backyard. I wiped away my tears and went to bed.

The next morning I went outside to see the corpse of my once pride and joy, and was overjoyed to see that Booger Mountain had actually survived the night. It had not only survived, but it was looking healthier than ever. For the next few years it stayed in my backyard, and grew and grew. At that point I didn't need to worry about making smaller booger balls to add to it anymore, I could just go and blow my nose on it and massage it in a little and Booger Mountain would do the rest. It was almost as if Booger Mountain had become one with nature. It had learnt how to adapt and survive within this planets ecosystem, something that had never really ever happened before in history.

One morning I was out inspecting the mountain, when I heard a little gurgling noise nearby. It sounded really sweet and cute. I ran over and saw an adorable little goober snot baby crawling from inside of the mountain. What was I witnessing? Was my creation now capable of bringing life into this world? It was! This baby was so cute. It looked a little bit like Yoda. It wasn't like a normal size baby, as it fit in the palm of my hand. It was gurgling and goo goo gaa gaa-ing. This was the cutest thing I had ever laid my eyes on. I called it Lawrence. I made Lawrence a little bed in my sock drawer and that is where he slept.

Over the weeks more and more little goober snot babies were born out of the mountain. I was having a lot of trouble taking care of them all. They were all living in little shoe boxes in my room but I was running out of space. Thankfully I then found out that these mountain babies grew up much faster than human babies, and within a couple of weeks they turned into little snotty goober munchkins creatures that were about thirty centimetres tall. They looked like little elves. Snotty goober elves. So I just chucked all the babies back onto the mountain and let nature take its course. Except for Lawrence. He was with me.

As time passed the goober people created their own civilization. They made little houses for themselves at the base of the mountain. They spoke in their own language. I had taught Lawrence how to speak English so he could translate to me what they were saying. They did little goober oompa-loompa like dances, singing merrily in their little gurgley, high pitched voices. They sang of the secrets of the ocean, and space. They were a peaceful people.

It was the year 2000 and I was 16 years old. I was woken up by a knock at the door. I staggered out of bed to the door. I answered and it was Dean Cain and he said he wanted to do a segment on Booger Mountain for his then TV show "Ripley's Believe It Or Not". I am actually a very big fan of Dean Cain, and find him to be a very likable actor with lots of charisma, so I agreed. And the segment was filmed. After that Booger Mountain became somewhat of a hit. I received fanmail from all over the world, and people would come and visit. I set up a little merchandise stand and sold "I CONQUERED BOOGER MOUNTAIN T-SHIRTS" and little goober baby stuffed toys.

One day I spotted a couple of people at the base of Booger Mountain. A man and a woman. They had scientific instruments and were looking at scientific readouts. I went to ask them what they wanted. It turns out that they were scientists and were looking to purchase Booger Mountain from me. I declined and kindly asked them to be on their way. The female scientist asked me real friendly like if I was positive I didn't want to sell Booger Mountain to them. Again, I declined. At this point the male scientist became enraged. "Looks like we'll have to do this the hard way..." he says to me while sneering. He lifts a radio up to his mouth and says "Send them in boys..." I was real scared, and didn't know what that meant, so I ran to my bedroom and hid under my bed. I was hiding for a few hours when all of a sudden I heard choppers in the distance. I ran out the front of my house and there were heaps of trucks parked there. There were military men everywhere too. I ran outside screaming to let the goober people know that they were in danger and that they needed to get in the house.

What happened next is a story for another time. A story that is commonly referred to as... THE BATTLE FOR BOOGER MOUNTAIN...

Until next time.