我们本周的天气好,和一个新的use to tend to with a yard and peace and quiet and whatnot, I've started feeling a little bit nostalgic to the last time I had such things in my life which was truthfully a very long time ago. I don't think I've lived in a house with a nice yard like this since I was about 17, so 22 years ago. Anyways what I've started to be nostalgic about isn't mowing the lawn or weeding, it's link to this so called "normal" pedestrian existence is much more tenuous. I've been thinking more about the "when I was a kid" stuff, and in particular just how dangerous things were back when I was a kid,and how those things were normal...
I'm talking stuff like riding bikes and tricycles with no helmets down the biggest hill around and getting speed wobbles. Skateboards that were made out of plastic about as wide as a cigar with clay roller skate wheels on the bottom that would send you flying on contact with an 1/8" pebble. Lawn Darts. Steel tip darts, riding a bike with flip flops, slip and slides with exposed metal stakes, trampolines with ZERO PROTECTION FROM BASHING YOUR SKULL INTO THE FRAME OR SPRINGS.
When I was a kid you got your butt kicked by the world and your street cred was measured in skinned knees, raspberries and knots on your forehead. Most of these you could walk away from, or as I liked to do just start running. Nowhere in particular, just running from the pain. Most of the time when the pain made you run that was just about as painful a thing as you'd experience, but there was one more level that I've been thinking of lately and my clearest memory of that level of pain involved one of these:
The friggin" sit and spin. Looks innocuous enough, what could go wrong? Sure it was the Playskool wheeled horsie thingie that I fell face first off of onto our driveway and killed one of my front teeth, (not knocked out, mine turned brown and they left it in my face because it was a baby tooth and would fall out on it's own later anyways, which was zero consolation for the 3+ years of teasing I got for having a brown tooth at school), but it was the sit and spin that left the indelible mark on my psyche. It was after a long session of sitting and spinning that I attempted to get up and run out of the kitchen, instead stumbling at top speed into the corner of the cabinetry and experiencing the highest level of childhood pain which is indicated by temporary paralysis. Pain so bad that you can't move, you can't scream and you can't even cry. You just sit there and take the pain contemplating your certain, impending demise while the world seems to pulse and spin off in every direction away from you.
So I figured we could start there, if you've got a good story about doing something stupid that you really didn't know any better about at the time and got yourself jacked, put it here. If you want to talk about what a soft world the kids these days live in with their safety gear and hyper-protective parents you can put that here. Or if you want to post any other junk, well here it is. Oh crap, I just remembered that it's April Fool's day tomorrow, so if you've got a good April Fool's day story put that here too, cause I don't feel like scrapping this whole thing and starting over...
