Decades In Pittsburgh
Gather round. Everyone needs to hear the story of how I acquired the Magic Pogo Stick. I hop hop hop around on it everywhere. The simple mechanical device has become a part of me. It is unique from common pogo sticks.
I am respectful towards all spring operated amusement gadgets and feel compelled to seek special dispensations not granted common stick hopping personage.
The pogo stick looks ordinary. Like the one’s sold online now. Temu sells pogo sticks, and customers have posted glowing feedback about them. Very good steel compression springs by our trading partners in China. I’m happy as a Pennsylvania religious snake handler during groundhog estrus.
I cannot speak for all pogo sticks. My expertise is limited to models produced during the Great Depression. Sears Roebuck sold the things out of their eponymous famous catalogs. I owned models sold by Sears. Hopped all over the place on those fine products. But to my knowledge, and I respect differing accounts by other pogo hopping individuals, magic is not blown into the tubing at the factory like aerosol insulating foam.
I was skateboarding on a dreadfully steep incline. Flying downward, serpentine, on my board, thunder slammed, chariots in the sky popped wheelies, horses screaming and blowing equine snot, A hail storm began as if stern vulgar warnings were in progress. Bruising hail stonies thwapped viciously on my plastic helmet. Freezing rain poured like a trillion hateful hoses. I lost balance and the gushing filty water carried me careening down the incline. Seconds before an eighteen wheel truck tried to run me over the flood forced me, painfully, down a storm drain. That was painful. Freezing cold. Water up to my snoot.
Choking and freezing down there, treading water to breathe, I injured a foot on the pogo stick. Reaching to dislodge it from my…self…it leaped magically upward with a splash and bubbles.
Sadly, the decaying corpse of the guy who used to own the Magic Pogo Stick was still clinging to it, and I had to pry his remains off of it. But soon, the stick perked up. We were best of friends. Placing my feet on the part you put your feet on, the Magic Pogo stick began talking to me. It said, “Hey Bruce, let’s get out of this filthy putrid storm drain.”
I said, “There you go, Stick, you have the right idea.” Together, the Magic Pogo Stick and I heaved upward. And down. Up again, naturally, until it and I was back on Federal Street, and the sun was shining. Osage oranges were rolling downward, bumping into things, happy as could be. The green, inedible warty fruits mischievously cracked into fenders, headlights, chrome grills and windshields as drivers tried to avoid the osage oranges on their ways to work. I was down one skateboard, it was lost in that disgusting putrid storm drain, that horrid hell hole, and went forward hopping. Hop hop hopping on the Magic Pogo Stick. And nothing too shitty has happened so far.
