I don’t need Depends – yet – although during the playoffs, I kind of thought they’d be pretty cool, because you wouldn’t have to keep getting up during the commercials, and if I’d been wearing Depends, I wouldn’t have to missed the shot that took Eric Lindos off his feet, onto his head and, possibly, into retirement.  You miss a good clean and utterly vicious check like that, you start wondering if maybe incontinence wouldn’t be kind of cool.

Also, because I have to keep getting up the commercials, I’m the only guy in the country, except for my goat-herder uncle on my father’s side who lives in the forest without the television or female companionship (nobody ever tells him his ass looks fat) who has never the I am Canadian beer commercial because every time it comes on, I’m in the bathroom.  You guess it, I miss the commercial encouraging me to buy Canadian because I’m otherwise engaged in the process of jettisoning the Canadian I already bought.

            We were on the subject of What’s The Matter With Kids Today?

            My generation, which spent its formative years smoking dope rolling up dollar bills to suck cocaine up our collective nostril, engaging in casual—no jeans allowed—sex with as may partners as possible, not to mention elevating greed to an art form…  We’re worried about what’s with kids today.  And not without some justification.  I remember one smoky, glazed over evening with a buddy of mine, Jim-Bob Dalton, back in the late 70’s.  We were talking about the future wondering what it might hold, how different we were from our parents and wondering how different our kids would be from us.

“I feel sorry for the kids we’re gonna have,” I said.  “What are they going to do to shock us?”

  “Hard to do,” Jim-Bob said.  “But I figure they’ll manage.”

  “How?”

  “Well,” he drawled, “they’ll either get weirder or we’ll get a lot more normal.”

  “I’ve got a ways to go till I get normal,” I said. “Never happen.”

  “Well then, they’ll get weirder.”

  “Weirder then us?”

  “Sure.  Ritual cannibalism.  Blood drinking.  Celibacy.  Facial tattoos.  Body piercing.  Low fat foods.  Bringing shotguns to school.”

“We brought shot guns to school.”

“Oh sure,” he said.  “During hunting season.  Set the alarm for 5 a.m.  Hit the blind at 5:30.  Bag your limit by 8.  At school by 8:30, pit the gun and the dead birds in the locker, take ‘em home at 3:15.  But this next generation…they won’t be licensed for birds.”

  “You’re nuts,” I said.

      He wasn’t, though.  You want to know what really socks me about kids today?  There’s an organization staffed by teenagers, promoting virginity among high school students.  Now, this may please people like me, who have daughters just wandering into puberty, surrounded by guys who were pretty much like I was.  But remember what it is like to be in high school?  Who would have thought such a preposterous notion would make sense to high school students?  I figure they really want to have sex but figure that not having sex will worry their parents.

  Guess she’s not one of those celibacy kids.

  So I gave it some thought.  What’s really the matter with ids today?  How’d they get the way they are?  I mean, we were weird nut we weren’t eating our friends, drinking the blood of our parents and driving chunks of industrial metal through our soft parts

  And it came to me: bicycle helmets and kid-friendly playground equipment.  Nobody wore a bicycle helmet when we were kids.

I used to have to get on my bike by leaning it against a fence, and descending onto the bike like a cowboy getting on a bronco in a rodeo chute.  Then I’d push off, pedal like hell, and hope I could get her going in a more-or-less straight line before I fell off onto the street.  And my dad, the first time I tried it, leaned against the fence with a beer and a cigarette, and offered sage advice.  “Try to fall on the grass,” he said as I toppled off the bike and onto the asphalt.  “That looked like it hurt,” he said as I stood up, the skin scraped off one knee and two elbows and bleeding only moderately from the gash on my head.

  Same thing with the playground equipment.  You fell off the monkey bars, you didn’t land on high tech, rubberized fabric.  You didn’t fall on sand .  You fell on concrete.  WHACK!

  So that’s why kids of today seem weird to us.  They’re the normal ones.  We’re running around like slow-witted, brain-damaged morons, only we don’t know it.  We baby-boomers enjoyed a childhood composed of equal parts television and whacking our noggins on the concrete, and we simply aren’t smart enough or creative enough to pierce our tongues and come up with innovative and interesting things to do with our time.  We play golf.  Our children seek out extreme sports like snowboarding…while wearing helmets.  We watch TV.  Our children write virus programs and unleash them on the Internet to screw up our email when we go to work the next day.  When we were young, we used to smoke dope and look at our hands while listening to Pink Floyd.  They smoke dope, dance all night, pierce their tongues and eat their friends.    

They’re too smart for the world we made.

           Personally, I’m thinking too much unimpaired intelligence is a bad thing.  Let’s hear it for us brain-damaged baby boomers.  We’re simply too dumb to do harm.  A if you want to make the world a better place, you might consider whacking the nearest teenager in the head with a brick.

  Just a thought.  It did wonders for us

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