The WT On: Playtime
You could hear the sighs of relief from parents everywhere when kids finally headed back to school last month. Summer is a stressful time for parents, what with having to entertain and interact with their kids after enjoying nine months of free eight hours of babysitting a day.
This is where they make their mistake. Interacting with kids is hard. You should handle playtime, and summer vacation, the WT way.
When summer comes, WT kids know what they’ll be doing every day from dawn ’til dusk. Playing outside. Whether they like it or not. Here’s the summer routine. Mom wakes up kid(s) at 6am, throws some clothes at them, hands them a Pop-Tart, shoves them out the door, and locks it. A few hours later a pitcher of Kool-Aid and some plastic cups will appear on the porch, for sustainment, and if a kid has to pee, (s)he better find some bushes.
Left to our own devices, without the cool shiny toys the non-WT kids were privy too, we had to invent their own games, often with materials just lying around. Here are the most popular:
- Rock Fight. Overwhelmingly the most popular, due to its ease, easy comprehension of the rules, and readily available, free equipment: rocks. You faced off against each other, grabbed a rock off the ground, and tried to cream the other kid. Last one standing wins. Simple.
- Fire Fight.. Simply, you made fiery explosions out of household items. You could throw a butane lighter against a cement wall, dump some gasoline on a bush and light it, or La Specialtie, the WD-40 blowtorch. Most impressive fireball wins.
- Weapons. Make a weapon, find a weapon, just try to get the other kid with it. Popular entries included BB guns (the bullets actually don’t hurt that bad, unless it’s in the face), nunchucks, ninja stars (these were amazingly prevalent in white trash neighborhoods for some reason,) and the best of all, ruler spikes. Just take a ruler, rubber band, and shish kabob skewer to make the baddest weapon of all time. You could put the skewers through drywall. Easily. Now just imagine how awesome that would look vibrating from your brother’s forehead.
- Running wild. You could always fall back on this one. Run through roads, trespass into people’s yards, steal oranges and kumquats from their trees, invade the woods. I can’t count the number of times I ripped my back and/or thighs open on barbed wire fences. The woods, of course, were not the lovely scenic trees and velvet grass you may have. We’re talking dirt, rusted car parts, dead animals, and mosquito-infested puddles. In fact, we found out years later that we’d been playing right over the section of woods where the (aptly named) serial killer David Gore had chosen to bury his victims.
This one kid, Lying Chris (he had that name for a reason) once said he found a hand in the woods. He’d also said aliens had visited him and Kiki Smith had let him feel her up, so nobody believed him. But maybe the hand thing was true after all.
So, do you think you’re tough enough to play with the WT kids? What were your favorite games?
Wanna play?
Instant Del.icio.us Bookmark This - 
|
| RSS for this post's categories: ">Primitive Rubbish People
This entry was posted
on Friday, October 7th, 2005 at 6:40 pm and is filed under .
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response.
Trackback:
