So much potassium.

When I was really young, back when my brother and I used to share a room, he used to talk in his sleep.  It was infrequent, occasionally memorable, and often having to do with him having ingested dairy.  My older brother, you see, was so lactose intolerant that he would actually hallucinate.  He used to see stuff that wasn't there, on a very very regular basis.  I think I was about four or five, for this particular instance.

He started doing this, "Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh..."  Slowly getting louder and louder.

I woke up right away.  You become a light sleeper when you share a room with an older brother who considers you a convenient source of entertainment.

I sat and watched, entranced, as his volume increased to the point that he woke up mom and dad, in the room next to ours.  They appeared in the doorway, in their pyjamas with a look of concern that soon faded into incredulity and hilarity, mixed roughly evenly.

"Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh..."  For two solid minutes.  Louder and louder.  "Buh-Buh-Buh-Buh-Buh!"  Louder and louder.  "BUH-BUH-BUH-BUH-BUH!"  At the very top of his lungs.  "BUH-BUH-BUH-BUH-BUH-BUH-BANANA!"

He bolted upright in bed to shout banana, and fell back immediately afterwards.  Just *wham* BANANA *bam*, asleep.  


We died a little.  Bricks were shat.  

Stairs, My and Charles Xavier's One Weakness

When I was really little, my mother made a Superman cape for my older brother. He loved that cape. He wore it constantly for about a year, and then was rather suddenly required to stop doing so, for reasons upon which I shall expound. I'm going to drop some nostalgia on it, son.

Since Superman wore a cape, and could fly, one can hardly fault my bro for the logical leap that lead to local leaping. Big brother was convinced that he had acquired the power of flight. He would demonstrate this new ability by taking running leaps over chairs, bounding over ottomans, and jumping onto couches.

Credit where it's due, his hang time was rather impressive.

Now, where it gets complicated is the plane of the intersection of my older brother liking to teach me life skills and him believing he could fly. He'd met with some other successes in imparting wisdom, notably mining for nose gold and my introduction to cursing, so you can forgive him for wanting to share his mastery of the aether with me.

Draping the precious cape over my shoulders and firmly tying the strings, he set me about my lessons, hopping over furniture. After some time had passed, and I had yet to demonstrate the capacity for leaping tall chesterfields in a single bound, frustration and desperation set in, and drastic measures were undertaken.

He stood me at the top of our basement steps, and pushed.

Well, shoved, really.

Heaved, maybe.

One might argue that at this point, I did surpass his previous airborne exploits, as I cleared an entire flight of steps on the way down. Man, I'm so glad that vacuum was there to break my fall.

Mother happened to be downstairs and not far from where I landed. I recovered fine, didn't even break a bone. Toddlers are resilient that way. My sibling senior got his butt paddled pink and that cape got put away.

True story.