By Joey Kaufmann
Staff Writer ’06

The five young boys set out for their long adventure, knowing that the road ahead would be difficult. Sure, they had gone on small excursions close to home, but nothing could really compare to what they were about to encounter. Johnny, Howie, Wes, John, and Joey made sure they were prepared for the long trip by talking to others in their town about what they would experience.

You see, it had all started with the rumors of the monster in the East. He was a small but powerful guy, widely thought to hold the highest order of authority. This monster looked over vast oily fields and lived in a large white castle, a castle that no man could honorably enter without successfully overthrowing the monster. Luckily, many people had told the five boys that the monster was idiotic and needed to be defeated: “The things he does to the world are wrong.”

The boys traveled together in a pack, thinking that teamwork would be the only way to defeat the monster. They rode upon their saddled donkeys, entering town after town to accumulate support for their trek. Various strangers encouraged the boys and passionately cheered for their victory. These fools didn’t know where the boys were from, their strategy for victory, or even their whole names. They didn’t care—as long as the evil oil monster was crushed.

Along the way, the boys encountered fifty enormous roosters. With each fowl came a different outcome for each boy; on more than one occasion, a rooster would be knocked down by a boy, only to get back up again and peck him unconscious. Johnny prevailed over the Iowani rooster, but all five seemed to be losing their momentum. Were they really cut out for the adventure? It didn’t matter, they decided; giving up was not an option for these five.
Although the boys had originally hoped that their collective efforts would defeat the monster once they arrived at the castle, most of them now resorted to insulting each other. “You’re too much of a monster yourself, Wes. You don’t belong with us,” Howie said. Soon enough, one boy prevailed as the cream of the crop. Johnny, the sole survivor of the rooster fiasco, enjoyed his victory over the other boys thanks to two maneuvers. One trick involved throwing mud and dirt at the other boys to blind them. The other tactic called for using mirrors, smoke, and fire to distract and confuse the roosters and grant Johnny the kill.

Now, in order to establish his domain over the world and reside in the towering white castle, there was only one more foe to beat—the oil monster of the East.

Johnny knocked on the massive white doors of the castle and demanded that the dreaded monster come out. The boy yelled and screamed, declaring that the oil monster was not right for the job and that anyone could do better. The door slowly opened, and Johnny prepared his mirrors and mud and waited, sweating with anticipation.

When his opponent became visible, Johnny nearly fell to the floor. A small elephant carrying an even smaller shrub approached him. Instinctively, Johnny tried to throw his mud at the shrub, but to no avail. He tried his fire-and-smoke-and-shiny-objects tactic, but that failed as well.
Finally, after realizing his petty strategy was only humiliating him, Johnny lowered his head in defeat and slowly walked away. After fooling so many into believing in his ambitious campaign, he had not actually come up with a plan to defeat his opponent. None of Johnny’s tactics, it turned out, had helped him claim victory over the elephant with the ominous shrub.

The boys had now all been defeated, and the shrub presided over the entire world and maintained peace for yet another term. As it turns out, it had all been just pretense about the “evil monster” from the start. The elephant, despite cynicism from some of the townspeople, had actually been a decent ruler and kept the people safe from cruel and powerful tyrants in distant lands. People who had not been riding on the monster’s bandwagon had actually been enjoying the shrub’s policies over the last several years.

And so, it would take another four years before others would attempt to overthrow the leader of the world. Would it be another complaining, insignificant boy, or perhaps a girl, that would try next? That is another story for another time.