The White House is not a chair. This is an absolutely crucial point to make before I begin. A White House, you see, looks like this. A chair, like this. You do not want to confuse the two. Got it? Alrighty then. Continue.

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My best friend in elementary school was Sean Naples, affectionately known later in life as Sean Nipples. I spent the latter half of every day at the Naples house, an airy three-story McMansion in the treeless development next to mine. We passed the time shooting stuff and crushing stuff and throwing stuff, like you're supposed to when your age is still measured in single digits. And we always made sure to stay away from the third floor; that was were His Dad lived, and that man scared the crap out of me.

I was justifiably frightened. After all, Mr. Naples was a Post-It Note engineer. Adding to my vague suspicions were his suspect hobbies: bird watching, coin collecting, home genealogy. But his true passion had always been solving scale-model jigsaw puzzles of famous buildings. He loved the things. The Naples's spare bedroom was like the aftermath of a globe-spanning typhoon; a tiny Arc du Triumph lying on its side between the Forbidden Palace and the Sphinx. An entire Smithsonian worth of miniature architectural wonders, perfectly aligned to capture the light from the room's massive windows, and always kept painstakingly intact.

Until one day in the late fifth grade, I was forced on to Mr. Sean's Dad's floor in order to use the restroom. I had tried desperately to convince Sean's younger sister to let me into her private bathroom; but she insisted her need to pull the heads of off Legos in a bathtub superseded any biological needs I might possess. So I ran upstairs, stains of exertion and perhaps a little anxiousness showing beneath my arms (puberty-psh!) In my excited state of mind, I somehow took a stupid turn and ended up in the guest bedroom, without really realizing where I was. And instead of pulling down my elastic shorts and sitting on a toilet, I skipped a step and sat down on the first white thing I could see out of the corner of my eye. Which turned out to be - the White House. Oh boy.

Things might have gone a few different ways after that. I could have lied. Sean's clumsy, and non-too bright . He's the perfect fall guy. I could have tried my hand at three-dimensional jigsaws and attempted to reconstruct the now-broken puzzle myself. I probably even could of just opened up the windows and broken all the pieces. It was the wind, Mr. Naples! The wind!

But instead, I went downstairs and played James Bond until Sean's dad came home, and then I confronted him. I was yelling before he opened his mouth to scold me, before he could even so much as wag his finger. I called his birds stupid and his Spanish galleons stupid and his family tree stupid and his models stupid and his Post Its stupid stupid. All of it - stupid!

And in turn, I was not called to the Naples household anymore. I would come over, always at my own volition, maybe once a week; then once in a few weeks; then once a month; then basically never. I'd see Sean at school, but that wasn't enough for true bestest buddydom. We drifted apart, and by the time he moved to Wisconsin five years ago we hadn't said a word to each other in months.

But remember, by this point everyone called him Sean Nipples, so overall - no great loss.