So I had a dream last night and I plan to make it a reality.
In the dream it was morning like always and I was entering the public pool on my summer pass, only this morning my swim suit was a giant robot cardboard suit with air holes cut in the head.
And the lifeguards all stood up in their pool-side guard chairs and saluted my ass when I waltzed in (my cardboard had gotten a little dented and bent going through the turnstile, but I poked it back into shape pretty well). I was like the Cardboard Robot King of the pool.
And all day I got free corndogs and snow cones from the snack bar, and also if fellow swimmers were nice to me instead of jerks like usual I could talk the concessionaire Ryan into giving them a free corndog. And also I got to expel anyone I hate from the pool, which was almost everyone, actually, and was totally fun since they had to watch me from the parking-lot side of the fence, and they couldn't pummel me for expelling them which ordinarily they'd totally do, but had to think of kind deeds to perform toward me and lovely gifts to deliver to me in a pitiful attempt to have me release them from their exile from the pool.
Oh, and the best part was, you know how every hour they have a 10-minute rest period where all humans must leave the pool? (Which is where a lot of trouble usually happens for me, incidentally, since I often sneak a little last-second dive back into the pool and have been known to go for breath-holding records underwater while the lifeguard's scream at me to exit the pool.) In my dream, the rest-period system DOESN'T APPLY TO ME. I'm the only one allowed to swim for that ten minutes.
And that's when I do my cardboard robot tricks, like jumping right off the top of the slide, instead of sliding down it properly, which the slide is WAY high up, since we have a twist slide that's actually really cool and scary and high, which little kids sometimes panic and won't go down even though they've waited in line and climbed the entire ladder to go down it, so then a life guard has to go up there and escort the little wuss-face back down the ladder all slow and backwards, usually to the sounds of me taunting from below, and the young child is disgraced and humiliated and mocked and shamed and shunned, if not outright beaten or made to beat themselves with their own small hands by an older kid playing the ole' "Why are you HITTING yourself?" game.
But for that 10-minute rest period in my dream, all the girl life guards had to come out with floating trays and feed me and ME ALONE my free concession-stand delicacies while I told them stories of my heroism and good grades and popularity until "All Swim" resumes (except for the exiles still looking in jealously through the fence from the parking lot).
So I plan to actualize this dream and make it concrete by crafting a cardboard suit via pizza boxes and other boxes and PCB tubing for the joints and tin foil for a hat. I made a prototype suit this afternoon and plan to test-run it in the bathtub tonight before debuting it tomorrow at the pool.
The only thing I'm scared about is that at the end of my dream the cardboard caught fire when an exile threw a match at me and I ran home screaming in terror and pain.
