I figured this out the other day when I watched a bunch of kids play that timeless playground game, suicide. Suicide, in case you grew up in some pacifist Quaker grade school and aren't familiar with this game, involved throwing a tennis ball at a wall. The main point of suicide is that if you messed up, you were penalized by standing against the wall and having some other kid hurl a tennis ball at your butt.
At the time, the "hurl-a-ball-at-your-ass" aspect of the game seemed like just good ol' fashioned fun. You know -- just a little twist to add some excitement. Come to think of it, some other popular sports might be made a little more exciting if they took this stance...
Dart Commentator #1: Oh, looks like Johnson missed that crucial double-20 he needed to win this match.Actually, while I'm on the subject of darts, does it seem wrong to anybody that the only place you see this sport is in bars? Whose bright idea was it to say, "Hey! Let's get guys liquored up and then have them throw sharp pointy objects around!" Maybe we should find this guy and make sure he's not putting any other of his bright ideas into practice. ("Hey, guys! Let's set up a combination gator farm and pre-school! We can set it up right next to the semi-automatic assault rifle shop run by postal workers.") But I digress...
Dart Commentator #2: And you know what that means, Bob! He gets a dart in the butt!
Dart Player: Ow!
But now that I look back on the game, I realize it's just an excuse to hurt other kids without the teachers coming over and stopping all the fun. I'm just not sure why we didn't catch on to the whole scheme. Possibly because we were too busy avoiding tennis balls hurled at our asses. Or playing the Two For Flinching game.
I don't know if any of you had to suffer through this, but one of the most inexplicable Junior High School games I ever played was the ongoing Two For Flinching game. The rules for this game went something like this: One kid would pretend to punch you. If you flinched, they called out "Two for flinching!" and punched you twice in the shoulder. Eventually we got really good at this game -- we wouldn't flinch no matter what. We could see a large rock hurtling towards our heads at high speeds, and we'd calmly stand there, not flinching at all.
Of course, the rock, not actually playing the Two For Flinching game, would strike us in the head and knock us unconscious. And this is what worries me -- what's going to happen to this Two-For-Flinching generation as we group up into adults, with all of our natural reflexes suppressed? Are we just going to be hazard-prone adults, walking into things without even flinching? Is this secretly nature's way of controlling over-population?
And there were other, stranger variations on the Two For Flinching game. One was to make a circle with your thumb and index finger. If some other kid looked at the circle you were making, you got to punch him twice. So, now we're growing up with a nation of guys who are also afraid to look at hand gestures. You know in Beverly Hills Cop when Eddy Murphy gives the A-OK sign? You show that in a theater full of people I went to Junior High with, and they all scream and turn away from the screen. (Those that don't get punched in the shoulder by their neighbors. Of course, those that do turn away get 2 for flinching.)
All of this finally led me to believe that Junior High school is essentially evil, and should be gotten rid of as soon as possible. I'm sure that if we really try, we could come up with more productive ways of using America's youth instead of just shipping them off to school. My suggestion is to use Junior High school kids as quality inspectors at factories across the world.
As I'm sure you're aware, when we were about 12 or 13 years old, we were experts at noticing things that were different in our peers. After all, if we couldn't detect differences in people, how could we make fun of them? (At around that age, the word "diversity" roughly translates into "more people you can tease.") Every junior high school had their collection of kids who were different, and therefore okay to make fun of: You had the fat kid, the kid who was too short, the kid who was too tall, the kid who didn't shower enough, and the kid who already had to shave. (Actually, the kid who needed to shave was usually the same as the kid who carried a knife around, so you tended not to make fun of him.)
So my plan is to take all these junior high school kids, and put them in a factory somewhere full of, say, millions of Reebok shoes. The shoes that are accepted by the students and invited to parties and so on will be shipped off to stores. The shoes that are given nasty nicknames behind their backs are the reject shoes, and Reebok can give them to one of those "slightly-irregular-clothing" stores, where they will be bought by some kid who will be teased for shopping at one of those stores.
At least, this was the idea that came to mind when I was watching those kids play suicide. But then again, it might not be such a great idea. This idea only came into my head after one of the kids, aiming for another kids butt and missing, beaned me in the skull with a tennis ball.
Naturally, I didn't flinch.