CREEPY CATALOG

I Went With My Best Friend To Our Childhood Hangout Spot

We came to The Shack every year, yet we never seemed to be able to remember exactly where it was on the first try.

"I think I found it," I heard the high-pitched voice of Jeremy call out from ahead of me in the brush.

Jeremy was right. A few more steps forward revealed a dilapidated wooden shack almost completely covered in moss and the dead fallen branches of the fir trees that were all around us. The thing was filthy, filled with potato bugs and could collapse at any moment, but it was our Shack and it was where we became men. It was also where we came every year to remember what happened in our lives – the good and the bad, the light and the dark.
I walked inside to see Jeremy already busted out the R&R whisky. He was one of those guys who needed the numb of alcohol to be sentimental, and it seemed to become more of a necessity every year we came. He poured a horn (whiskey, Pepsi, ice) as fast as he could into an old McDonalds cup.

The more cautious one, I first went to my little bed in the back corner and started setting up my bedding on the old army cot where I would rest my head for the night. I spread out my old scratchy GhostBusters sleeping bag and was fluffing my Jurassic Park pillow when I noticed something amiss about my usual bunk.

"Ah, what the fuck?" I yelled as I realized what I had just picked up was a used clump of toilet paper.

I threw the foul clump across the room and almost hit Jeremy in the back of the head.

"I think someone might be using our chilldhood playhouse as a toilet man."

I thought about it for a second and a cold wash of sudden fear washed over me.

"I think someone might be living in here."

"Oh calm down. It's probably just some kids doing the same thing we were doing back in the day."

What we did back in the day was use The Shack as our personal clubhouse – Jeremy, our friend Daniel and I found the shack when we were five and spent countless hours there every weekend doing what young kids did until we grew too old to where it just became a shack again. However, once we started to get over the shack in our early-teens, we vowed we would all come back and stay the night there at least one night a summer each year for the rest of our lives.

To commemorate the creation of the yearly reunion, when we were 12, we wrote down how we thought our lives would go for the next 20 years, sealed the predictions in old rusted coffee cans and buried them behind The Shack with a promise to dig them back up 20 years later and whoever had the prediction that was closest to the truth would get 100 dollars from the other predictors.

This year was the golden 20 year celebration and Jeremy and I carried a shovel out to The Shack this year to dig up those beat up old coffee cans. Unfortunately Daniel was not with us, but that's a longer story I will get to later.

With the used toilet paper passed us and Jeremy already a couple of horns deep, we grabbed our shovel and headed out to the soft earth behind The Shack. I let the much more strapping Jeremy handle the digging and within just a few minutes, we were staring at our childhood cased in rusty tin.

We ripped open the tin and picked the millipedes off of the faded scraps of paper we covered with ink so long ago. Jeremy and I dove into our predictions. It wasn't long before we were both laughing hysterically.

"I thought I would be married to Allie Sharp," Jeremy said with a laugh. "Thank God that didn't happen."

"Holy shit, I can't believe I seriously thought I was going to play in the NBA," I said with genuine astonishment. "I guess scoring 20 points a few times in middle school means you are going to be the next Jordan."