Wordless Wednesday: What Lurks Around the Corner

Kids These Days

When I pick up my sons from school, I often find myself overwhelmed by the swarming crowds of children pouring from the institution like locusts descending upon a field of grain.  Walking along the sidewalk, I feel as if we have become engulfed in a river of adolescent fervor and I fear being swept away by the current of preteen hormone fueled mass.  At that point, I grip my sons’ hands tightly for dear life, which probably makes them uncomfortable because they are at the cusp of the age when such things will begin to embarrass them, especially while surrounded by an ocean of their friends.

But this is a natural reaction to crowds for me.  I avoid them whenever possible, but there’s only so much you can do when your seven and nine year olds need a ride home, so I tolerate it the best I can.

Over several years, I find that the aspect of this afterschool madness which has come to bother me the most is not the crowd itself.  I am somewhat capable of staying in touch with my own childhood (maybe you’ve noticed) and can understand the excitement of being released from your day long holding cell while surrounded by a like-minded mob.  What grates on me is the complete disregard of any grown-ups in the crowd.

I have watched kids shove one another with adults in the midst of the crowd.  Sometimes the shoving victim runs into one of the parents, including me.  Kids will spit, swear and fight all without the slightest concern that a nearby adult will grab them by the ear and shout, “Knock it off!”

Perhaps this is an indication that I am getting older.  This may be a back-in-my-day moment, but I don’t think it is.  More likely, I feel it is disgust at the sloppiness of the current generation’s misbehavior.

Own It, Son

I try to avoid typecasting my sons over little things they do.  It is sometimes easy to over-magnify something you notice and try to predict their personality based upon it.

When I notice I’m doing this, I remind myself that my mother was convinced I had a future as an architect due to my Lego building skills.  In high school she then believed I would become a writer.  Alas, I am now neither.  Not professionally, anyway.  I do write here regularly to mixed reviews and there is an intricately detailed blueprint for a really awesome tree house out in my garage that I would start on if only I had the time...and a boom crane.

Is Kirby a Chicken?

There's a picture circling the internet, which I happened to see on the site where most of my insight into any world news not having to do with sports, cartoons and Lego comes from (I speak of Facebook, of course), that has disturbed a lot of people.  If you haven't already seen it, allow me the opportunity to show you the horrifying image:

So you are probably thinking, "What's so bad about that?"  You might be thinking it's some sort of insulating material or maybe even Play-doh.  I readily admit, the image is pretty innocuous on its own.  The repulsion comes after finding out exactly what you are looking at.  Ready for it?

Eeeeeewwwwwwwwwwww...(GASP)...eeeewwwwwwwwww!

What I am about to tell you is shocking and disturbing.  Well, probably more disturbing than shocking.  It will also probably prove embarrassing for one of my sons several years from now when he stumbles upon the vast collection of my blog posts/ramblings floating in cyberspace collecting virtual dust some day.


No matter how high my son's level of horror is at the discovery that his old man wrote about his most vulnerable and private moments on a very public forum (I'll assure him hardly anyone ever read it), it will not come close to the level of horror that his mother and I skyrocketed to when we saw the disturbing thing in question.


During my wife's attempt at a sweeping overhaul cleaning of our home, she decided to begin with our boys' bedroom.  Once elbow deep in dusty action figures and assorted lost game board pieces, she eventually reached the wall our sons' bunk beds are up against.  She had climbed onto one of the beds, removed the sheets, displaced an army of stuffed animals which the son in question most likely completely forgot existed and, there, an old nemesis that we thought had long been defeated reared its ugly, multi-textured head again.  My son's booger collection.


My wife found herself face to face with what must have been nearly a year's worth of collected production.  Literally, her face was right there, such that I insisted she go take a shower before I would go near her because her hair probably brushed up against it.


About a year ago, I wrote about the last time we had inadvertently unearthed such a disturbing display.  Apparently, I had repressed the memory, but my wife insisted that I had written about it and I discovered the previous post here.


Thankfully, no public displays of snartwork (my term for snot art, as mentioned in the previous post I just linked to) had emerged, just these gems of clumpy green that had been secretly tucked away in the shadowy recesses near my son's bed.


So, calmly and I'm sure holding back her gag reflex, my wife cleaned them off the wall.  I stood and coached, telling her she needed to get a fingernail beneath them and even offered to retrieve the paint scraper from my tool box.  But she handled it like a champ with just a scrub brush and some elbow grease.  She didn't even call my son out on it immediately and instead favored a talk planned with him later to save him embarrassment.


I, of course, promised no such thing.


I just wonder if he's going to climb in bed tonight and be quietly distressed when he sees all his hard work has been destroyed.  Maybe while my wife was cleaning it he even sensed a great disturbance as if millions of boogers cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.


Then again, he's a resilient little guy.  He'll probably just start fresh.