MOON BOATS, LAWN JARTS, AND AN OVERPROTECTIVE SOCIETY FILLED WITH NERF PADS AND SAFETY FEATURES

-This post dedicated to VR. He may not sit and smoke in a non-smoking office like the ol '07' used to, he may not pull off a nipper flask of Kerosene like the ol guys that had the scrambled egg chevrons on their hats did, He may not chew nicotine gum like ol Jack the Barber did, but he is not as scary as everyone thinks. He is much funnier than I am and currently runs the show on graveyards.


Can anyone tell me what the hell happened to society? I need someone to bear witness to their childhood. Can I get a witness? To the days of danger, suspense, and unsafe conditions. To the days of bikes without chain guards, pads on that bar for boys to bang their volksfanswagens on (wouldn't it make sense for someone to petition congress and make girls bikes have the bar and boys bikes to not have that bar if you fall off your seat? I'm no mathaoligst as Cooper used to say, but that bar hurts!!)


Do you remember fighting with your siblings over who was going to sleep in the back window of the 1979 Ford Granada while you headed out on vacation? Do you remember the seatbelts that had the "comfort ride lap belt only option" where you had to physically connect the lap and shoulder belt?

Do you remember LAWN JARTS? An awesome game that usually lasted for 2.6 minutes of trying to throw this 6 pound lawn missile with a blunt tip into a plastic circle tube? We all know the game always ended in you trying to stick the jart precisely into the skull of a worthless neighbor kid with a 75 yard arched toss into the air. I'm not a "mathologist" as ol Coop used to say, but I gotta believe that the lawn jart missile reached terminal velocity in that arch. OUCH!



Society today is "airbags, safety ropes, life jackets, safety fuses on fireworks, bike helmets"......ok, stop a minute. Bike helmets? Are you kidding me? I remember building jumps out of any flat piece of plywood and putting a severely unstable piece of wood under one side of it near the end to do JUMPS. And that got old quick, so you always had a brother or neighbor kid eventually laying down near where you would land so you could jump him.......This almost always ended up with you landing on the poor kids volksdonacaswavagen and crushing him. But guess what, WE SURVIVED JUST FINE!







Do you remember the long summer days when you got up, had breakfast in a non teflon pan that flaked off and put pieces of metal in your eggs that made the metal fillings in your mouth itch? And then, leaving the house in short shorts, a bike with a closepin and playing cards in the spokes that you sometimes installed while the wheels were spinning? And how about the matching stripes on your knee length white tube socks?




DO YOU REMEMBER DONNING A SNOWMOBILE HELMET OR NOT DONNING A SNOWMOBILE HELMET AND HAVING BB GUN WARS..........TWO PUMPS ON THE BB GUN WAS THE RULE.......REMEMBER THE FEELING OF HEARING YOUr BUDDY WHO YOU JUST NAILED IN THE LEFT CHEEK PUMPING HIS GUN ABOUT 16 TIMES? I remember a neighbor having to go to the med-center to get a bb removed from his cheek.

I look at my kids now wearing a bike helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, shoulder pads, riding a bike with more padding than a woman fresh out of childbirth and thinking, "what happened to what I grew up knowing was safe and okay?"

Here's the best contradiction to my youth. I distinctly remember growing up and hearing my mom and dad say, "be home by dark." HUH? I don't let my children get 4.9 feet away from me now without losing it. I would ride with my sister to the Dairy Queen on our Schwinn bikes about 2 miles from our house. We had $1.10 between us and would go eat ice cream until we were so sick we could hardly pedal. Then we would ride back to our neighborhood and play Yatzee with some kid in his tree fort that was 42 feet off the ground. We would light stuff on fire, let off fireworks, and sleep in his basement with his dog which I now realize was a pit bull.

I remember the County Sheriff stopping us for riding our dirt bikes around the local school track without helmets on. They didn't blue card us or fingerprint us at the jail. The told us, " you walk those things home and tell your parents what you did." We didn't mouth off to them. We went home, told our parents what we did, and they WHIPPED OUR ASS.....

In closing, I used to eat paint, get hit with bb's in the face, light stuff on fire, ride unsafely in a car, jump off stuff higher than my house I currently own, and roam the wild summer world for 6+hours during the day for which my parents had no clue where I was.

AND I SURVIVED!

THROW AWAY YOUR KIDS BIKE HELMETS, NERF BIKE PADS, AND LET THEM FIGURE IT OUT.

Allow them to run into sharp objects, burn things, and come home crying. We all did and guess what, NOW WE ARE RUNNING THE SHOW!