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#1
04-05-2007, 10:10 PM
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Bad beat stories w/some Paint
I had to write about "defining moments of my life" for a writing class. So obv I wrote about my bad beats, and included some MSPaint illustrations (to be handed in w/essay).
Griffin passed me another bottle of Labatt and I cracked it open. We often drank at Steve’s house, as he was already of age in Canada. It was late in the afternoon and we were hanging out on Steve’s dock at the lake. We had just gone swimming fully clothed and were still completely soaked. Sitting in the water next to the dock was Steve’s motorboat. It was essentially a tin rowboat with an illegally powerful engine mounted on the back. Steve had once showed me a warning on the back of his boat saying that mounting a motor with more than 60 horsepower was illegal and dangerous. His engine had 90 horsepower. Steve noticed me eyeing his boat. “Wanna take it out?” “Yeah man, for sure.” Steve went inside to get the keys to his boat while Griffin and I finished our beers. By the time he got back out, Griffin and I were playing “king of the dock” and you could say we were both losing. We were both wheezing and full of bruises from falling down hard on the slippery wooden floor. I had a nice scrape going all the way up my ribcage from sliding off the side at one point. The three of us got in the boat and drove out to the middle of the lake. Steve was driving like a complete maniac, flooring the throttle at all times. We stopped in the middle of the lake and Griffin rolled a joint. We stayed there for a long while before noticing another boat a few hundred feet away with some girls in bikinis sunbathing. Seeing this, Steve had no choice but to set off in their direction. As we got closer, we noticed there were two guys there along with two girls. Steve, notorious for his jackass tendencies, drove toward them at full speed. The girls sat up and looked at us nervously. The guys watched us closely, wondering what the hell we were doing. Steve floored the throttle and sped straight towards their boat until we were only ten feet away or so. He then killed it, pulled the rudder and gunned the throttle again. Our boat looked like it was going to crash directly into theirs, but instead took a sharp 90 degree turn at the last second, sending a massive wave of water all over their boat. The girls were drenched and looked confused. The guys clearly weren’t happy. We sped off full speed, laughing like idiots. Unfortunately, their boat was faster than ours. They caught up to us and asked us in thick French accents to slow down so they could talk to us. “Hang on, we just want to talk to you, man,” Said one of the Quebecois French guys, “We’re not going to hurt you or anything.” We slowed down. I was the shortest of our group, at 6 feet tall, and there were three of us vs two of them. What did they expect to do? They pulled up next to us, and as they got close, they started climbing up on the edge of their boat, as if they were going to jump onto ours. One of them grabbed a wooden oar from the bottom of his boat. I looked at Steve and he looked at me. I walked over to the side of our. “What is it you want to talk about, buddy?” I asked the guy on the edge of their boat. He lunged out and tried to grab me to pull me off my boat while the other prepared to swing at me with his paddle. Steve gunned the throttle at the last second, rocking their boat and causing them both to fall out into the lake. We sped off, laughing hysterically as they struggled to get back on their boat, cursing at us in French and threatening to find and kill us. Later that night we finished off another case of beer and went out in the boat again. This time it was dark out. Driving very fast across the lake, Steve decided to let me try steering the boat. He explained that I just had to hold down the throttle and steer with the rudder. That way, we would continue to go “sick fast.” I grabbed the rudder, and in doing so, pulled it all the way to the right. This boat was not designed for such a powerful motor, and taking a sharp turn at very high speeds is inadvisable in general. The boat jumped clear out of the water, and rotated midair so that we were literally perpendicular to the water. When I got back up to the surface, Steve’s boat was upside-down and sinking. “Whoops.” “[censored], dude.”  I had never played in a chess tournament before. My father taught me how to play when I was so young that I can’t even remember learning, but this was the first time I’d ever played competitively. The tournament was in Manhattan, at Trinity High School. The school was different from schools I’d been in. The public school I went to in Hoboken didn’t have standing walls separating classrooms. The gym here was full-size and had a weight room, and they had a full-size volleyball court. I’d played some basketball after my first match with some of the other kids in the tournament. They yelled at me for not dribbling properly. I’d never heard of a “double dribble.” I’d won my first match. I played a younger kid with glasses on, and he was pretty bad. I got him with a back-rank check-mate. I walked away from the table glowing about my first ever tournament game. My second match was against an older kid, probably in 4th grade. He was much bigger than me, but I was a much better player than him. We reached the endgame and I was up a rook and three pawns with little other material left on the board. There was no way he could stop me from winning at this point, and the anticipation of winning both games in a row was making me giddy. I looked around for my dad. I couldn’t wait to show him the transcript of the game. But my opponent was taking forever. He stalled and stalled and I was getting very antsy. Finally, he looked up at me, held out his hand, and said “Draw.” I was confused. Why was this a draw? I was clearly about to win, and it made no sense to me. There must have been some rule I didn’t know about in tournaments. Dejectedly, I shook his hand. “Good game.” “Good game.” I replied. I put away my clock and pieces and wandered over to where my father was. I showed him my transcript, and we went through the game, move by move. Finally, we got to the last move in the game, where it had been drawn. “Why is this a draw?” asked my father “I don’t know! He just said ‘Draw’ and I shook his hand! I had no idea what to do.” “Max,” replied my father with a smirk on his face, “You don’t have to accept a draw if he offers it to you.” “What do you mean?” “I mean he offers you a draw and you say, ‘No, thank you’” “Oh. So I guess he tricked me?” My father laughed. “Yes, Max. I suppose so”  My family had always gone to Canada every summer and every winter. My grandmother lived in Quebec, and we usually stayed at her house. She lived in a country town called North Hatley, and had a huge 5-acre property with apple trees and a jungle gym behind the house. My sisters and I would play all day every day, and come in every night exhausted, sun burnt, mosquito-bitten, and blissful. This year, things were a little different. I was eleven years old and now wanted my friends to come up vacationing with me. My best friend, BJ, and his friend Emre came up to Canada with us. Instead of staying at my grandmother’s, we rented a cottage in the nearby township of Hatley. The town was much bigger than North Hatley, and even more rural. We were in the center of town. There was a huge open field about the size of two football fields in front of a church and cemetery. Surrounding the field were the houses, about three on each side. This was the most densely populated part of the town, and the houses were a good 2-3 hundred feet apart. Other than this town center, all the roads in Hatley were dirt or gravel, and everyone lived on farms. All of us (my sisters, twin cousins, Emre, and BJ) would explore the wilderness for hours on end, playing hide-and-go-seek games that would last several hours. We built shelters in the forest and declared ourselves kings. We would often wage war on each other in the evening and then come back inside for dinner. One hot afternoon BJ and I were alone in the house with BJ’s mother. My mother had taken everyone else to Lake Massawippi to go swimming. Over tea, BJ and I discussed our plans for the busy day ahead of us. After some deliberation, we decided to go biking along the dirt roads. We took a couple bikes out of the shed and started racing around the field in the center of town. I was faster than BJ, so I’d let him get ahead of me for the whole race only to catch up and win at the last minute. It was more fun that way, and made him want to race again and again. Eventually, BJ’s competitiveness subsided. Frustrated with racing against me, he proposed we go explore the town instead of racing around center square. I agreed enthusiastically, and we started to head down the dirt road to the right of the church. Exploration was always a good choice. As we biked down the path, we left a trail of dust behind us. Some of that dust would cling to our sweaty skin and we got very gross. The dirt also got in our mouths and nose, which was somewhat unpleasant. However, this was outweighed by the rush of air as we sped down hills, basking in the freedom of being a kid. In Hatley there were nothing but farms. We trespassed into peoples’ barns, laying in hay. We ran around in their fields tormenting cows. We climbed trees and pretended we were super heroes. Finally, it came time to start racing each other again, and we headed back to where our bikes were. We approached a steep hill, and it became very tough to get to the top. BJ had to get off his bike and walk it up some of the way. I waited for him at the top, and upon his arrival, called him a slowpoke. Hearing this, he hopped back on his bike and started racing down the steep downward slope. I followed suit and soon passed him again. As we passed a silo, I turned to BJ to ask him if he wanted to go snoop around. However, BJ wasn’t beside me Nor was he behind me. In fact, BJ seemed to have disappeared completely. Confused, I started biking back up the smaller hill I’d just gone over. Upon reaching the top, I caught a glimpse of BJ’s bike near the bottom on the other side, on the ground to the side of the road. I sped down to see what was going on, but didn’t see BJ. I stopped next to his bike and got off mine to look around. Was he playing some kind of prank? Had he found something exciting? I walked over to see if he was hiding in the ditch. Lying in the ditch on the side of the road was a mangled body, soaked in blood and covered in dirt. BJ looked up at me, face dripping with a grotesque mixture of dirt and blood, and reached out towards me. His hands were completely covered in blood, dripping down to his elbows. A gash in his head seemed to be pouring blood which had formed a dark red pool in his shirt reaching down below his chest. His knees were covered in dirt and also bleeding profusely. “I’ll go get help.” I said. I’ve never pedaled a bicycle as furiously as I did that day, racing back to get BJ’s mother from the house. She immediately called an ambulance and then drove out in her car to pick him up from the side of the road. Ambulances in the country have to come from the nearest city with a hospital, and in this case, BJ had time to soak another couple full-sized beach towels with blood by the time help arrived.  Will I get an A? 
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#3
04-05-2007, 10:18 PM
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Re: Bad beat stories w/some Paint
BBV: A+++
Teacher: B- (bad grammer)
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#8
04-05-2007, 10:40 PM
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Re: Bad beat stories w/some Paint
[ QUOTE ]
I read the first sentence and then looked at the pictures and typed this and now am leaving [/ QUOTE ]
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#9
04-05-2007, 11:13 PM
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Re: Bad beat stories w/some Paint
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] BBV: A+++ Teacher: B- (bad grammer) [/ QUOTE ] GTFO WHERE DID I USE POOR GRAMMAR ps seriously where [/ QUOTE ] Not to be an ass, truely, but if I were in your editing group (assuming this is for something akin to an English-101 class) I'd have red-ink all over this thing. For a rough draft it's fine, but if this is a finished piece, I'd seriously consider getting someone to read over it and suggest changes for you. A few suggestions of things to think about as you re-read: "Steve had once showed me a warning.." 'shown' instead of 'showed' "Later that night we finished off another case of beer and went out in the boat again." -would perhaps sound better as- "Later that night, after we'd finished yet another case of Labatt, we again found ourselves out on the lake." -and- "By the time he got back out, Griffin and I were playing “king of the dock” and you could say we were both losing. We were both wheezing and full of bruises from falling down hard on the slippery wooden floor. I had a nice scrape going all the way up my ribcage from sliding off the side at one point. " -could be- "Steve returned shortly, finding Griffin and I engaged in a hopeless match of "King of the Dock". A match from which only the dock could ever win, given our intoxication, and it showed. Both Griffen and I, the would be kings, were in a sad state. Short of breath and full of scrapes and bruises, and I bearing a hard scrape along my ribs, were certainly no match for one another. Least of all the dock who so pointedly reminds us of our futility as it shows none the worse anytime our wet, naked flesh crashes into it." -I think what makes it sound poor is that you're writing each sentence nearly on it's own, almost as you think of it, while paying little attention to how the sentences form each paragraph.
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