Dream Rapper
with ‘tude
Last night, I put up an antenna. Not just a little, “oh, isn’t that cute sitting on top of your T.V.” antenna, but a “need crew of guys and a damn big crane” antenna. It went up next to the store, and once it was all guyed up, Paul and I climbed it partway. It only took us a couple minutes to get about a thousand feet up, and that’s all the further I wanted to go. Houses and stuff were already getting small, but I found the place we’re (Meg and Alden and I) going to move to: a little craftsman-style bungalow with a boat-truss barn pretty much right on the shore of a big lake (maybe Superior, but probably not). Then we climbed back down, one metal step at a time, for a long time.
I woke up in the minivan with Dad driving us west along some backcountry “road” that was sometimes pavement and sometimes just sand between the trees. We got “there” and I had to play two-on-two baseball in some kid’s basement with him and his brother for the first round of a national science competition. I know. When the kid “pitched” by tossing the ball up, then hitting it at me with his bat, I got pissed and beat him with my bat, but then we all mellowed out and talked about how stressed we were feeling with the competition, especially about the talent show that was coming up in a week, so we decided to get a pitching machine and go to a ball diamond the next day and try things again. They went much better and we wound up cheering for each other and sharing fielding tips.
The talent show was at the local Subway, which proved hard to find, what without any sort of signs or anything. Kids gave dry, note-card lectures on electron bubbles and surface tension and whatever. When my time came up, I jumped up, vaulted over my table, and started a rap – freestyle, of course – about how I’ve got the real love of science, how all these other kids don’t know what they’re missing, and how they gotta groove to feel the science. I kept going even when everyone, including the Subway staff, left the building, ’cause I’m hard-core like that.