When I was five my Dad took me out on a boat and told me we were going to have an amazing adventure. First thing he did was he opened the cooler and shotgunned a beer. He said that you had to start before the fishes did, or else you would never survive.

That made me think that we had to fight the fishes, so I put on my helmet. I carried my helmet with me everywhere, because my Mom said it was a magic helmet with special powers. When I was seven, I heard her tell my second kindergarten teacher to let me wear the helmet, because I sometimes "F-E-L-L into the T-O-I-L-E-T" and that might be why "he A-C-T-S and T-A-L-K-S" the way I do. My magic helmet has lots of colours. Most of them I can pronounce, but I like them anyway. Sometimes I give the colours I don't know names, like Dave... or Napoleon!

But anyways, I was getting ready to fight the fishes when it gets real quiet and my Dad tells me to crouch real low in the boat and pretend like I'm unconscious, like the time he accidentally dropped me out of the car. So I take off my helmet, 'cause I didn't have it then, and close my eyes real tight and wait. My Dad starts screaming and wailing, like my Mom when I ran up the slide at the playground and tried to slide down the steps. So I start to look, but my Dad says, "No, Timmy! Keep yer eyes shut! Ya have to!" So I closed my eyes back up and waited real quiet.

Pretty soon I fell asleep, and when I woke up I was really hot and confused, 'cause I was trying to remember my dream. It was about a man in a raincoat who walked around with a giant paddle, and he would scream "Ice cream! Who wants ice cream?" and the children would run out to him all excited, and he would whack them over the head with the paddle and laugh, and the parents would come out of the house and laugh with the paddle man. I woke up twitching, 'cause in my dream, he'd just hit me — and I didn't have my helmet on.

The End