Locked and loaded, here we go with a great story Straight Outa Tennessee at the expense of my brother!

This year the love-able big guy hitched himself to a great girl. And this was his first real relationship!

And now they’re married!

True love enthusiasts and soul mate sponsors out there rejoice! You have another strong case for your beliefs!

These guys led wedding season strong this year. And in case you don’t know, wedding season is when all of YOUR friends and family get engaged, married, or have a kid. Meanwhile YOU are still in school, still developing your career at working off five hours of sleep (or less), or better yet; freshly single!

Don’t worry I’m with you guys, it’ll be okay! Because we can have fun without a significant other for a while…

Because I had fun with the other groomsmen convincing my brother his wedding was cancelled!

J-Flo! you say at this point, Why would you do that? Don’t you know they’re stressed enough as it is?

Yes! In fact if I hadn’t made enough stress with the OTHER wedding I attended this year (that’s another story for another time!) I would have begun a therapeutic program of pranking the groom with the goal to calm him down.

Okay maybe not, but I digress!

I and the other groomsmen (all pastors!) convinced Christopher that his wife-to-be had fallen off the stage and broke her foot.

We pulled it off like professionals…

Walking into the waiting area, we had out heads hanging low and our faces sullen with grief (he could see it right away).

He asks, “What are we supposed to do now that photos are done?”

And we sigh and tell him, “Don’t know man… We think just got cancelled.”

“Why!?” He said in that way I’ve known for years to tell me he fell for it!

“Sara just broke her foot falling off the stage. We think it’s serious…”

He runs his hands through his short hair FURIOUSLY. I can feel the sigh of despair that he breathed.  We all took seats away from him so we could keep our snickering and smiling hidden while he sat in a corner brooding.

(the wedding is an hour and a half away from starting)

For the next few minutes we keep trying to tell him it will be alright, and that maybe she will be alright and it’s only a sprain. But he’s convinced.

Why?

Sara (we didn’t know until now) is kind of a KLUTZ.

The prank just elevated into Master execution levels!

So we’re still smiling secretly, he’s stressed, and all of a sudden, the camera guy catches wind of what we’re doing and FAKES a call from his partner. And he starts spouting words such as, “Serious… Emergency Room… Ambulance on the way!”

He’s had enough and he’s trying to get out of the room to take a drive, and wants us to go with him. To him the wedding is done, over with!

We had our fun at this point. So we tell him it was all a prank.

He has to call her just to make sure!

And then he goes to get a bat so he can strike us down.

Needless to say there was no bloodshed that day of course. Unless you count the busted guts we had while he was screaming, “That wasn’t funny!”

2: Squidward the Telemarketer

Everyone loves to listen to stories of people getting one over on those pesky people calling to sell garbage over the phone.

With cellphones it's a little harder to receive them nowadays but they come, and when they do it's an opportunity to have some fun!

Some dumb fun!

What is dumb fun? It's my special brand of fun I use on my favorite telemarketers.

How does it work? Simple!

ACT. DUMB.

That's it, simple and sweet, and it makes them upset every time!

This particular time it worked extremely well, and it fired Squidward up so much he wouldn't let me play dumb anymore.

He welcomed himself as an employee of the Publisher's Clearing House. Naturally I thought, 'Oh okay, I'm writing a book, so they somehow found that out and they want to talk to me about it!'

So when the guy asked, "Do you know why we're calling?" I replied, "I suppose it's because you caught wind that I'm writing a book and you want to help publish it!"

I knew I was wrong when he said, "What?"

So I replied at least two more times with the same response, and that is his beginning of his annoyance. Squidward (he didn't give me his name) just continued on with his script by telling me I'm a sweepstakes winner.

I was surprised (to him!), and I told him I don't remember signing up for one.

Level Up! Anger +1

He told me that I signed up for one and received a letter in the mail and should have called them back. But I didn't! Thus the call from Squidward!

Squidward said I won a million dollars and a new car!

I said, "Really!? That's awesome!"

I knew I made him angrier when he cried out, "OH MY GOD!"

He tried one more time to get me to believe I entered a sweepstakes, "Don't you remember signing up for our sweepstakes and getting a letter from us telling you to call us?"

And I said..... "Nope!"

And so he moved on...

"Well don't you want your prizes?" And so naturally I said, "Sure, what do I need to do?"

And his crushing blow that he set up for me was, "Well you do know that you have to pay for the shipping and handling right?"

And I said.... "NOPE!"

HE WAS SO ANGRY HE THREW THE PHONE DOWN!

It was then that I knew I was truly talking to Squidward...

...Shame I didn't get his autograph... Eh, no one would have believed me...

3: County Fair, Swing Ships, and Pinky

Story time! This one takes me back… before puberty, before girls, before driving cars, but long after getting over my thumb-sucking addiction.

...That's right I’m fourteen years clean!

When but a wee lad learning to play piano and starting (home) school the annual county fair rolled through the state of Georgia yet again, and this time it was bringing a Demolition Derby!!!

Cars smashing against each other, jumping over mounds of dirt, spinning out of control, ramming into concrete boundaries, AND cheap admittance! How could a young J-Flo pass up the chance!?

And it was a fair! Amusement rides, festival games, fair food, I mean come on! It was going to be Six Flags for a cheap price! Fun, fun, fun, fun!

....

...But little J-Flo did not know the difference between ‘county fair’ and ‘Six Flags’. And he was soon to learn…

The smashing of dreams began when the ‘games’ let me down… In the form of a small gambling stand. And Pinky the rat…

Behind the scenes, Pinky was trained to follow the smell of cheese. And the cheese could appear in a number of places for him, specifically FOUR places, red, blue, yellow, or green. And it was the hand that fed him to choose where his glorious dairy prize would go. His old… white bearded… Hawaiian shirt wearing… owner. I cannot remember his name… so I will name him ‘Dream Crusher’.

DC for short.

DC had some prizes that resembled my favorite video game character, Crash Bandicoot.

I wanted Crash to come home with me! The only thing standing in front of me was DC and his trained con-rat Pinky.

...I wasted all my quarters on that one game…

...And Crash never came home with me.

I was devastated! These games looked so easy in the movies! How could this have happened to a little boy?

DC happened… DC and his thieving rodent!!!

PINKY!!!!

Needless to say I learned a valuable lesson that day… I learned that on the side of trying to rule the world with Brain, Pinky was a carny! I couldn’t wait to tell my friends!

Next was the Demolition Derby, the main event!

Which turned out to be the main disappointment…

I never knew one passion men can obtain during midlife crisis is to get a broken car and rear end other broken cars for fun! FUN!

That was not fun! There were no explosions! No ninety-foot jumps, and no explosions! It was a rip off! It… IT… It was totally worth five dollars for entry!

...And now that I look back I realize that I had great expectations and high hopes for a lot of things…

But finally there were the fair amusement rides. Most of them were okay I guess, nothing to thrilling and pretty safe for the most part. I mean my brother was frightened while on the spinning apples, the rip-off of Disney’s spinning teacups, so I did get some twisted joy spinning that thing as fast as I could!

My brother even discovered the joy of food that day with the infamous ‘Turkey Leg’. He gobbled a leg that was the size of his torso!

But the worst was yet to come… The main ride, the main point of THIS story, was the life-threatening, heart stabbing, cheap and half broken thrill of the county fair…

...The Swinging. Ship…

I can still see it clearly… Pharaoh’s Boat… Some sick humorous biblical joke that made no sense! The Pharaoh’s Guillotine is more like it…

It was the last ride we had not ventured onto. The park was closing, and the sun was getting REAL low. It was a right of passage we would have to take some time in our life, one that took much motherly coaxing to do (yes she was there, poking us with her trident so she could revel in our misery).

Christopher was already crying when we were sitting down in it before it started. We sat in the middle, and the other victims sat on the very end, those brave fools…

At last the ride started, and it began moaning underneath to gain momentum. It took a few small swings back and forth before it really started swinging! The Pharaoh began laughing, and the swings were going higher, and higher, and higher!

At last it was finally into the full swings, we could see the gears that propelled at the base. Christopher began with the praying, and I began with the screaming.

Screaming to turn the ride off. You know, that screaming that all the little kids scream, thinking that the operator will hear them.

“TURN IT OFF! WE’RE DONE! I WANNA GET OFF! I WANNA GET OFF! TURN IT OFF!”

The cries for mercy went unheard…

It was so bad on that ride that the safety bars, (THE SAFETY BARS) around us began falling back and forth when the ride would have us upside down. We were holding on to our safety bar as hard as our ten year old bodies could hold! Our safety bar was not about to let us go! We were Floyds! And we were going to survive!

And then the ship came to a slow down and eventually stopped.

We soaked our mothers shirt in tears and agony. They were tears of fear, and relief. The nightmare was over, and the Pharaoh had had his torture with us. And we vowed to never ride a swinging ship again…

...And that I would one day rescue Crash Bandicoot from the claws of Pinky!!!!