Booger

My dad and I and my twin sisters live in Shipstead, California, up the coast from San Fran. We live in an old Victorian mansion that my dad is fixing up. My dad is the veterinarian in town and they call him from all over cuz he’s good with strange animals like blue-butted baboons. Sometimes he brings these animals home which is why we have a gorilla in the garage (Mick Jagger) and a three-toed sloth (Manfred Mann) living up a tree that sticks out of the roof. My dad names everything after old rock n-roll stars and our house is buried in Beatle stuff. You get used to it. Anyway, this book is about a bunch of things. One is Jack Granite, the former astronaut and richest guy in town trying to buy Crummie Burgers, which is like the best hamburger joint in America. So we definitely don’t want that to happen. Another thing is my mom lives in SF with Mark Nash, the famous singer, and she wants us to move there and that would be bad too. It’s about having a girlfriend, Gloria, and losing her but finding a better one, Niki, so that’s okay. But mostly it’s about my desire to crush Douglas – Don’t Call Me Dougie – Brown and win Inventors which is like this cool contest they have every year in Shipstead. Dougie won last year (I came second) and that can’t happen again. This year I call my project, Alpha Amoeba: Quest For Life. The idea is that life might have come to Earth in the form of a cell trapped in an asteroid. Could happen, right? So I bought a piece of asteroid at this store called Weird Stuff and I put it in a beaker with Diet Coke and then I heated it cuz earth was hot long ago and then I got the idea to add a guinea hen egg cuz guinea hens are like ancient but anyway when I tried to crack open the egg the beaker broke instead and I was so mad I threw the beaker and stuff out the window. Apparently it landed in the hot tub. Which was struck by lightening. And now I'm the proud owner of a six-foot living jellybean. I’ve named him Booger. He calls me Mommy!