Sargeant Glass

One of my favourite pass times, which usually gets accomplished at the expense of something I need to get done not getting accomplished, is to browse Google Maps.  I love checking out far-flung places, mysterious little blips of colour splotches dotting the oceans in all corners of the vastness of the Earth.  Some of them I know, or recognize at very least.  Most I just notice while skimming over the map, shifting in and out in scale to locate the really tiny ones—the ones no one ever notices or even cares to discover.  Those are the ones that carry the most appeal.  Anyone can explore Paris or New York or Tokyo.  But have you ever heard of Gough Island?  How about the Orkneys?  Sark, anyone?

One of the best parts of teaching Grade 4, at least for me, is the social studies unit about exploration.  Since we can scarcely afford to explore our own back yards, doing any real traveling is of course out of the question.  However, a few years back, the government saw fit to invest in SmartBoards, which are interactive projection screens you conjure up with your laptop.  They were a great investment, if a little pricey and temperamental if not installed properly.  And lord help you if the bulbs burn out.  But when they work, you can do everything except cook breakfast with them.  Math sure can be a lot of fun when you manipulate virtual shapes and stuff.  Morning messages are chalk-dust free now (except when I use my actual chalk board, which I do almost daily anyway).   Atlases and globes—objects of my fascination when I was a child in Grade 4—are all but obsolete now, but who cares.  These interactive applications are a marvel to see, especially when you get Google Earth up and running.  Locating a place on the world map is like watching a super-fancy weather forecast—the ones where the Earth zooms in from space to the exact location.  Talk about exciting!  If you find this kind of thing boring, I can’t think of any better way to make it less so for you, but I’ll try my best.

I decided that rather than read books and copy notes, that I would take my class on a classroom exploration of some of the farthest-flung places in the world.  What appears to be uninteresting, uninhabited wastelands on the Google Map have turned out to be really neat places after all.  I mentioned the remote places interest me the most, and it turns out they interest my students as well, possibly due to my irrational enthusiasm for the material, but also because I decided to show them something different.  Last year, my group and my Grade 3 teammate explored Sable Island off the coast of Nova Scotia.  Most Maritimers know where Sable is, and its unique geography and history.  In short, it’s a large crescent-shaped sand dune in the Atlantic Ocean, and wild horses live there unhindered by humans.  I even went as far as to explore how much it would cost to go there.  Turns out I don’t have the $6000 you need to visit, but you never know. 

I chose to bring my kids on a trip to one of the harshest settlements on the face of the earth.  Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, belonging to Norway, and roughly equidistant to the North Pole as the northernmost reaches of Canada’s Ellesmere Island (the one way up there; the little place called Resolute that you see on national weather forecasts is where I’m talking about).  It is semi-famous for having one of the world’s most comprehensive seed vaults.  They store seed samples from all over the world in a climate-controlled bunker below ground in the event of some great catastrophe, so in the future we can re-introduce crops, sort of like Noah’s Ark without the noisy animals and Noah’s fighting in-laws.  The islands of Svalbard are very remote, and are mostly ice-covered, save for the capital of Longyearsbyen and the surrounding countryside, which has some breathtaking landscape and a surprising amount of tourist-friendly destinations.  I found a news clip on YouTube about a Thai family who moved to Longyearsbyen a while back (many long years ago—sorry, couldn’t resist), who loved it so much they stayed.  That would be some kind of culture shock I would think.  I was getting cold just looking at the pictures.  At any rate, Google Maps provided links to dozens of pictures submitted from both the land and sea surrounding it, and the students were thrilled to see sunsets, whales, snowmobiles, and even polar bear warning signs.  I never even got to tell them about the seed vault, which is what brought me there in the first place.  I could have spent hours with them, and they would have been glued to the SmartBoard the whole time, but unfortunately, I have other subject matter to teach.  So over to the virtual shapes we went…

After a few weeks, I decided to introduce them to another far-reaching destination.  This time, I chose a place with which I am somewhat familiar from my early atlas-navigating days.  Tristan da Cunha is a small volcanic island in the South Atlantic.  It is a British dependency, administered from St. Helena, which is some 2000km to the north and famous in its own right as being the detention center for Napoleon for a while.  Tristan is known as being the most remote permanent settlement on earth, which is to say it is further away from its nearest town than anywhere else.  Now that sounds fantastic.  Think of how much writing I could get done there!  With average highs of 22 C and lows around 12, the climate sounds perfect.  And the only way in or out is by boat.  Forget the tropics, this sounds like heaven to me.

Tristan is a remarkable little island.  During the Influenza Pandemic of the 1910s, only Tristan got by with zero reported cases.  It is somewhat famous among stamp collectors for its unique and rare stamps and other sundries, which you can order from their website.  There is exactly one police officer, overseeing a population of under 300.  They use British sterling, and don’t issue their own coinage.  Internet is available, but if you think your Rogers coverage is bad, forget trying to Skype Tristanians anytime soon.  The capital ‘city’ is called Edinburgh of the Seven Seas.  I like that name even more than Longyearsbyen.  In photos, it looks kind of like St. John’s, if St.John’s was made of only cottages.  In the 1960s, the whole island was evacuated because of a volcanic eruption.  The entire population was housed in England for a couple years, but when the ordeal was over, they all elected to return home.  They sound like my kind of people.

Everyone on Tristan has one of only a handful of last names.  The first person to settle it was reportedly a man named William Glass, a Sargeant of the British Royal Marines.  To this day, the surname Glass is prominent on Tristan.  Others include Repetto, Hagan, and Green among others.  When I was researching this quaint little island, I couldn’t help but imagine myself as Sgt. Glass, setting foot on that remarkable island for the very first time ever.  Today, we can thank Neil Armstrong for stepping on the Moon for the first time, imagining who one day might first tread on Mars, or even beyond.  As kids we explore whenever and whatever we can.  Rarely, if ever, can we find something original, but it’s that innate wonder within us that keeps that light of our imaginations bright.  Imagination of course is where all of our innovations are conjured, and to be sure, all the scary ones as well.  But once in a while, one of us stumbles upon something new, something invigorating, something special.  It might me a discovery, a work of art, an idea, or maybe just a clearing in the woods near a small stream.  There aren’t any more Tristans out there, but there is no telling how many Sgt. Glass’ there are.  If you don’t believe me, come visit my students; there were 23 of us in one room the other day.

Parking Parallels

I am one of those people who like slap-stick comedy.  Pratfalls, mishaps, and other goofiness always make me giggle, and I absolutely love potty humour.  I’m not grossed out so easily, and I can roll with the worst of them when it comes to locker talk and sailor-blushing cussing.  I have unabashedly laughed at some awful jokes, relished in self-deprecating potshots, and raised more than a few eyebrows over the years with my words.  Among my favourite comedians are the Monty Python crew, George Carlin, Robin Williams, Dennis Leary, Gilbert Gottfried, and more recent comics such as Eddie Izzard, Patton Oswalt and David Cross.  They lay it all out there, and they aren’t afraid to poke fun at anything or anyone, because they understand comedy.  The great Will Rogers once said, in so many words, that if you can’t make fun of yourself, you can’t make fun of anything.

It is with that that I introduce this next diatribe, because like anything, you have to have a context to fully appreciate the big picture.  I was recently invited to a Facebook group called “You park like an ***hole”.  My first instinct was to be offended, because I think I can park my car just well as the next guy.  Okay, so I have a Grand Caravan, and sometimes it feels like parking a yacht, but I do my best.  I even take the extra few seconds to straighten out so others don’t think I park poorly.  Then, I saw the cover photo, and laughed out loud.  I refuse to say LOL; I’m not willing to lay claim to the modern leet-speak generation just yet, IMHO.

The premise is simple, but brilliant.  Take pictures of examples of bad parking and post them on the website.  The internet is great for connecting people of like-interests, and this is another example of building a community online; people who are fed up with parking villains can have some small semblance of revenge by snapping a quick pic of the perpetrators, and with the click of a button or two they can be ridiculed for all to see on Facebook, as in this case.  What’s great about it is that you are practically anonymous.  It is highly unlikely that anyone who parks badly will ever see the evidence of their social crime on that Facebook group.  You would have to do some pretty deep digging to find out who’s license plate that is on the Dodge Ram parked at forty-five degrees across two spaces.  The guy (or gal) who parked that beast half-cocked probably didn’t even realize what they had just done.  There is a lot to read in parking like that; I like to think it’s like reading tea leaves in a garage frame of mind.

Let’s back it all up, and look at it from the highest vantage point.  Parking is a skill.  We have to learn it to pass the driver’s test, and that includes the dreaded parallel parking test.  You got three chances, or you did when I was sixteen stressing over my first of two road tests before I got my beginner’s permit.  You have to practice, preferably in a non-threatening area, like maybe with pylons or chalk lines, and someone you can trust not to back-seat drive or intimidate you.  You have to use your mirrors, have a feel for the size of the vehicle, and develop that intangible comfort zone you have to develop to be able to drive and park.  That’s the frustrating part about helping to teach someone to drive.  It’s like teaching patterns in Math; as an adult, you just ‘get’ it, but the kids often do not.

People love their trucks.  I can’t understand why you would want one unless it was something you knew you would use daily, either for work or leisure.  They guzzle gas, only fit a few people, and cost more overall, so I couldn’t imagine buying one personally.  I had an old quarter-ton for a few months, and I used it a handful of times, but my vans have served me infinitely more adequately.  Either way, they are bigger than most cars, and therefore need more practice if you want to park them properly.  The problem seems to be that most people that park poorly are aware that they are doing so.  To me, that makes me think that either that driver is too lazy to take those extra few seconds to straighten out, or what is more unsettling and possibly indicative of a disturbing new trend, they simply don’t care.  That means they deliberately leave their vehicle parked that way, and they couldn’t care less what the rest of us think.

If you park a car (of any sort) across two clearly marked parallel lines, you have a responsibility to back up, reposition your vehicle, and park it between the marked lines so that others can park as well.  If everyone does it properly, there would be, in most cases (unless you are at UNB) enough parking for everyone.  Sometimes you don’t find that ‘sweet spot’, that lucrative piece of parking real estate near the entrance, usually close to the handicapped parking spaces that never seem to have any vehicles in them.  Or the red-painted ‘family’ parking spots, which never made sense to me, since I too have a family that resembles the white spray-painted stick family in the photo.  Or the most recent ‘hybrid’ spots, reserved for hybrid cars.  Now there’s a reason to pay almost double for a new car.  Regardless, you can’t park there folks, so accept it and move on.  Park at the nearest available lane, and be sure you aren’t too far through, sticking out too far, too close to either line so people beside you with groceries can actually access their own car, and for crying out loud, do it straight.

I take great pleasure in taking pictures of people who park like ***holes and posting them on this group.  It sounds frivolous, immature, petty, and just plain silly.  It probably is.  Never will I wait beside someone’s badly-parked car until they come out so I can tell them to their face that they are ignorant and disrespectful to other drivers.  I will never leave a note on their windshield, write with my fingertip in the accumulated dust on their rear window, or otherwise cause a fuss.  I won’t write a letter to the editor, like some cranky old curmudgeon who just waits for a reason to rail on young people today. For those of us who take pictures of parking fails, it’s like our own secret club.  I will do only two things.  First, I will compose this blog entry for The Hole In The Fence, because I hope it will entertain people while conveying a message to which I think most of us can relate.  Second, I can discreetly take pictures and post them online.  Maybe one day the guy who clearly didn’t learn how to park his Silverado will actually see his sins in front of him while complete strangers laugh out loud at his ineptness on a digital soapbox.  Why do we do it?  Because there is something bigger than just a parked car gone awry.  People that just park and walk away are showing their true nature.  If you can’t take a second to make life a little more pleasant for a complete stranger, you are telling the world that you feel you are more important than anyone else.  Your time in that store is more important than the next guy’s.  We are in the midst of a generation of attitude problems.  Service is poor, and people are more arrogant than ever.  Take the time to do the little things right.  Second guess how you park in the same way you would (or should) second guess anything.  That is the real parallel in parking.

 

What I Meant Was...

Nothing warms the heart like a good gripe.  Let’s face it, we feel better about ourselves when we complain about others, or things for which we can’t be held to blame.  Isn’t it the great Canadian prerogative to complain about the weather?  About how the government is out of control, not looking out for the common folk, not doing enough and being paid too much?  About how hard we have to work to receive so little?

The best rants are of course political commentaries, from the likes of CBC’s ‘At Issue’ panel, Rex Murphy, Rick Mercer, and my personal mentor and role model, the late Andy Rooney.  These folks make (or made, as it were) a living opining about virtually everything, from quirky day-to-day peeves to hot-topic debates about international affairs.  Most of these commentators are humourous, while some are sharp like verbal daggers eager to be thrust without reservation.  The best employ both, inflicting the most damage while maintaining the comedic veil.  Even stand-up comedians make a living by fearlessly roasting their subjects under the long-arm protection of the notion of ‘parody’.  It is rare that a comedian steps over that line and gets reprimanded by the court of public opinion, but when it does, it can be harmful beyond repair to that person.  Michael Richards – aka Kramer from Seinfeld—learned that the hard way. 

We love it when people ‘tell it like it is’.  Most of us, most of the time, would love to tell our bosses exactly how we feel.  We would love to tell our neighbours to clean up their yard because it looks awful and might devalue our property.  We dream of telling that close friend that their breath smells bad, their jokes aren’t funny, that they talk too much, that they don’t speak up enough.  We would be thrilled beyond words to tell that cashier that her attitude stinks; that those bumper sticker logos and slogans are not funny at all; that the service at Service New Brunswick is anything but; that we’re livid that it costs that much for a Tim Hortons coffee but that we’re slaves to the caffeine and keep paying anyway.

There’s a little bit of chicken in all of us.  Even those who puff out their chests and blow off steam in an instant will only do so with the right audience present, and over the right issues.  We have been taught to reserve our thoughts.  We know we have something to say, but for fear of something impulsive spewing out rather than a constructive response, we delay our reactions because we know the damage we can cause by our words is significant.  There is a lot at stake.  Friendships, business relationships, and reputations can be made or broken with only a few choice words spoken at the right or wrong time.  It can work both ways.  Great speeches are great because they are equal parts eloquent and timely.  Dr. King’s speech delivered at any other time may or may not have had the same effect.  Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic Party’s National Convention recently was a huge hit; had he delivered a speech such as that for John Kerry, I dare say it would not have had the same effect, and perhaps would have been detrimental, since his own administration was still fresh in the American consciousness.  Super Bubba now almost radiates a late-90’s nostalgia, and nostalgia is always cool.

Telling it like is can be a major blunder if the truth that is revealed is so reviled by a majority of people.  You need look no further than presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.  This past week, while addressing a small group in a non-public forum, he made reference to the so-called 47% of Americans who live off social programmes, and therefore are blindly supporting incumbent President Barack Obama  and are not worthy of Republican concern going into the November polls.  The root of Republicanism—the  way I understand it at any rate—is  that notion of people being responsible for themselves, and to find a way to make their own American Dreams come true.  Any idea of social programmes in place to help those who need the help, those down on their luck and looking for work, or any kind of safety net to keep people from living in sheer poverty seem to be anathema to Republican values.  They are consistently against welfare or any derivative of it, stimuli for economic growth, universal health care, and other policies which might be construed as ‘socialist’.  Personally, I never grew up on a self-sustained or -contained farm, and neither has anyone I’ve ever met, so I can only conclude that as human beings living in 2012 we are social creatures by necessity.  Since when has helping our fellow people become so wrong?

Romney’s comments have struck a potentially fatal blow to his campaign, and with about six weeks until polls open, it appears he’s dead in the water.  Republican heavy-weights are condemning his words, which should be common sense, since anyone with half a brain should know better than to insult half your potential electorate.  The Republicans themselves seem to be at a crossroads because they had an awful time electing a candidate in the first place, and the campaign to do so pitted future allies against each other in traditional mud-slinging rhetoric to the point that they can’t stand to even look at each other.  To pretend they are one big happy family is preposterous.  They wouldn’t allow some candidates and their delegates to even attend the Republican National Convention.  Somehow, someone thought it was a good idea to let Clint Eastwood speak to a phantom Obama in an empty chair though.  I read on Huffington Post (a questionable source, I know) that some guy in Texas actually ‘lynched’ an empty chair.  Throw in the Todd Akin comments last month about ‘legitimate rape’, and this party has seriously become a gong-show.

I am going to venture a possible theory into Romney’s thought process while saying what he did.  I think, and it’s just a theory with no real evidence to support it, he was saying to a close group of supporters in what he thought was a private forum, that the Republicans have little chance of breaking through to almost half of the electorate, and in that case, what he said wouldn’t have sounded so irrational.  Barack Obama has an overwhelmingly faithful fan-base, and for a number of reasons.  I’ m not throwing the race card out there, but I will point out that it has traditionally been hard for immigrants or African-Americans, non-Christians or LGBT folks to support a party that at times has been downright hostile toward them.  If you were to count all of these people, they must surely amount to over 40% of the US population, but again, I am just speculating.  Romney knows this, and while he personally may not feel any hostility against any of those people, he knows that the word ‘republican’ is slowly becoming an utterance signifying a mélange of certain ‘values’, and that he has little chance of reaching them.  And there’s nothing wrong with admitting that, and admit it he did.  But boy-howdy, did he ever do it the wrong way.

Maybe in a few weeks, Mitt Romney will be elected President.  It would surely be the most stunning upset in memory.  It would give us a new model to follow:  that half-truths are as good as truths or untruths, depending only on the circumstance in which they are claimed; that ‘telling it like it is’ really is the best way to go about things, since you can conceivably survive any repercussions thereafter; that if you proclaim your opinion loud enough and with enough force, you can repress that instinct in others around you, so they will blindly follow your lead for fear of reprisal.  We are seeing that last one with the Harper Government in Canada right now.  I fear for a Republican government in the US, because there is a vacuum in their party, and there is no telling what will come rushing in to fill it. 

What do we do in the meantime?  Well, we can keep being unsatisfied with Service NB.  We can just accept that Rogers and Aliant are fleecing us, that gas prices have absolutely no reason to be what they are, and that nobody seems to know how to park their car in two straight lines anymore.  Or, we could look to a third alternative.  Maybe we could politely say “Pardon me, but I have a concern about why I am being charged this much for my cable package.  Is there something you could do to help me, because if there isn’t, I will take my business elsewhere.”  Honesty doesn’t have to be served on the edge of a sword.

Quit Stalling

Getting back to writing after having taken off over six weeks is a lot like going back to the gym after about the same amount of time off.  It is excruciatingly painful when you sit down, boot up the computer, top off the coffee, sit down once again, and then start to actually type.  Part of the problem, at least for me, is the fear of what will come out.  Will I have forgotten the English language entirely?  Will I end sentences with prepositions, and use the semi-colon incorrectly?  Will I be able to stretch out a blog or a story from the fragmentary ideas with which I built up the gumption to write in the first place?  Will I get severe wrist cramps and need physio I can’t afford? 

I expect I am not a typical writer.  While most writers I know relish in the moments they compose their work, I seem to have to drag myself to the keyboard and agonize over what I’m going to do.  I always settle into my groove within the first few minutes, usually after a preamble to which my blog readers are now accustomed.  I can write uninterrupted for hours, skipping even food if the flow is steady and the results look promising.  If I start a blog, for example, after supper, around 6:30 or so, I can work on it without fail until midnight, long past my most productive hours which typically end around 8 o’clock.  By then it’s time for either the news, a baseball or hockey game, and chips.  Or reading, which I never seem to have enough time to do.

After my most recent blog entry, which was written in early June, I went on an intentional hiatus from blogging.  The goal was two-fold.  First, I recognized that after my first full year of teaching, I needed time to de-escalate, to let the year wrap up not just in real time but in my own mind.  I think teachers will understand what I mean.  When you teach, whether it’s during the work day, in the evening, or over the weekend, you’re always on.  Teachers have to take time to just be off, that is to say, away from the academic world for a little while.  It’s okay for them to plan, catch up on professional reading, clean out emails, and so on, because they are doing so at their own discretion, and when it suits them best.  I was no different. 

I basically took July off from all things school, which was a blessing and a curse at the same time.  The second goal was to shift my focus over to writing fiction.  I have been working on a novel of my own, long-gestated, conceived originally almost nineteen years ago.  I never seriously thought about actually writing it until about five years ago, when I returned to my notes as a diversion from my university work.  The bulk of the framework of my novel was mapped out as a diversionary tactic in my first university degree, as procrastination from the work I was actually supposed to be doing.  I’ve shelved and retrieved it countless times over the years, but finally decided that the story was good enough to be told, and I have since done more stringent research, and begun the manuscript in earnest.  I’ll edit and rewrite it over and over before it’s done, but it is finally moving forward.  This summer I wanted to get a good chunk of it written, but I have only been able to write a small amount.  You see, when you divorce yourself from academics, you divorce yourself from all of it, or at least I do.  I was able to read Steig Larsson’s Millenium series, and the second book of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, but little else.  I couldn’t drag myself to the computer to write.  I spent way too much time on Facebook and on TSN’s website, and probably most of my online time on what I call ‘Wiki-trains’, going from one Wikipedia article to the next until I couldn’t remember where I began.  As small consolation, I did spend some of that time riding the Wiki rails researching topics of which I know only a little so I can incorporate them into my novel.  Some such subjects include sailing, the armed forces and weaponry of various countries, religious ritual and ceremony, and ghost towns or cities around the world.  If any of these sound interesting, then maybe my novel will be for you.  But I have to actually write it first, so don’t hold your breath.

The greatest barrier for my writing is not a lack of motivation.  It isn’t a lack of ideas.  I have awakened in the middle of the night and written scatterbrained notes so I wouldn’t forget a potential story.  Some of them even made sense in the morning.  I think that in my case my own self-confidence is the greatest hurdle I face in completing my novel, and for that matter a handful of shorter stories that are just itching to be finished.  Right now, as of this writing, I have my main novel, a lengthy short story which was originally conceived when I was living in Louisiana in 1999, two unfinished blogs for The Fence, three short stories of varying lengths, and even a second novel (completely separate from the first) fully mapped, plotted, which even has names for its chapters.  None are finished.  I believe that in the case of the novel, I have invested so much time—nearly twenty years, and all of my adult life—in the characters, the world in which they live, and the situations they portray, that to not write it perfectly would be to not do it justice.  And I ask myself, who am I kidding?  Thousands of people around the world want to be authors.  Most of them write something.  Most of them send a manuscript to a publisher, and most of them face the rejection that almost always follows.  I am legitimately afraid of publishers rejecting the characters that I not only created and developed, but in some ways with whom I’ve grown to really know personally.  Talk about voices in your head.

However, there is another side of the proverbial fence, pun totally intended.  Because I know the characters so well, I can describe them equally well, and I feel that will be a strength in my story.  The best books I have read have really well-developed characters.  The same principle of course applies to movies and TV shows.  One of the reasons I liked LOST as much as I did was because I felt that the characters were so stringently explored; most episodes were centered around one character specifically, and when shown as a full season or series, the characters were so intimately connected to the audience, it actually hurt when they were hurt.  The heartbreak the audience feels near the end of the first Game Of Thrones season (or near the end of the novel) is so poignant because the point of view of the story is told through that character’s eyes.  I won’t say who it was in case anyone reading has yet to watch or read it, but if you haven’t, I encourage you to do so, because that series is phenomenal.  I want my characters to succeed on the same level.  It’s like wanting the best for my own kids. 

And like my own kids, for whom I’ll feel that bittersweet pang when they graduate from high school and hopefully college of some sort, and move out on their own, I’ll be happy to see my characters leave the security and privacy of my own thought process and make their own impressions on whoever reads them.  They’ll succeed or fail on their own merits at that point, but I’ll always be proud of them.  I’ve come to realize that I need to accept the fact that for one, not everyone will like them, including publishers, and for another, they don’t have to make me millions.  Because realistically, that’s not in the cards.  Nor should it be the reason for creating them.  I have to remind myself that the stories I want to share with the world are just that—stories.  Writing requires you to take a leap of faith more often than is usually comfortable.  It’s not as easy as it seems.  You can’t just sit down and compose the next Great American Novel over the course of a few weeks.  There is no more humbling experience than sitting down to do just that only to have your own imagination hand you your ass on a platter.

The next episode of the Fence is already planned out in my mind.  While vacationing, I had more free time on my hands, and therefore more time to notice things, such as how bad service has become the last few years.   That topic could comprise several blog entries, and may yet, but I guarantee it will be more entertaining than reading about an egotistical would-be author making up excuses as to why he hasn’t published his master work yet.  What you have to understand though, is that there is a certain catharsis in getting this stuff down on paper.  Before I could proceed with the Fence, I had to look in the mirror.  And why bother posting it?  Here’s a final metaphor.  I hate it when artists produce something (a book, a film, or an album), then shortly after it’s released, renounce it as being of poor quality or not up to snuff.  Artists have the responsibility to stand by their art, otherwise the art in question was created under false pretenses.  So, I could skip posting this piece, or I could throw it out there as a glimpse into my thought process, warts and all.  Maybe the next blog will be funnier, smarter, better.  Maybe this is as good as it gets.  Either way, it was time to quit stalling.

Saving Face

This is one of those editorials that requires a fair warning about the forthcoming content.  Usually my subject matter is something of an issue I picked up on during the day, maybe while driving home from work, maybe standing in the shower trying to wake up, maybe even walking around in the mall.  Once in a while I pick up on a news story or two and try to connect them in a ‘big picture’ kind of way.  Sometimes I just write whatever comes to mind.  This one is about what most would call disturbing incidents in the media.  Again, I try to put it into perspective with the world around us, because everything fits in the big picture if you angle the pieces properly.  I’ll be exploring the depravity of the human mind via a number of well-documented exhibits.  I won’t shy away from describing what took place, but I’ll attempt to do it with decorum and dignity.  The way I see it, people prefer to just ignore any subject that instantly makes them uncomfortable, and that’s part of the problem.  Regardless, I’ll be discussing certain aspects of human deviant behavior, so if you suspect that you’ll get a little queasy, read no further.  With a preamble like that, those of you who do decide to continue must ask yourselves where you fit in the big puzzle.

When I first decided to become a teacher, I decided it might be best to volunteer in an elementary school classroom just to be sure I was making the right decision about my future vocation.  After that first day, I knew I would really like it, and after volunteering for about six months, I was sold.  The kids really responded to me in a positive way.  I think it was that feeling of acceptance from the kids, or maybe that they were so eager to just listen to their teacher, to be educated, that clinched it for me.  I will never forget one little girl, who I was told lived in a home where she was unfortunately exposed to situations and circumstances no pre-pubescent child should ever see.  Her attitude at school was nonchalant at best.  She struggled with her grades as a result.  She was constantly thinking about the boys—who, I can assure you for having once been one this age, were in no way interested in her.  I immediately wondered what would become of her in the next few years, when older boys would take notice of her, and with such a low self-esteem, she seemed to me destined to a life of teen-age promiscuity, and maybe even pregnancy.  One day, she wore a t-shirt to school that read “I need an above-average man”.  She wasn’t even 10 years old at that point.  I have no idea what became of her.  Now that I’m in the system as a teacher in my own right, I could probably find out how she turned out, but I just don’t want to know.  I’m afraid of what I’d discover.

This young lady, only a girl when we first crossed paths, was likely exposed to sexuality in a way her peers weren’t.  However, she needn’t have gone any further than the local shopping mall to be exposed to far more than I had ever been at that age.  If, for some reason, I were to have been hypothetically interested in girls at the age of 8 or 9, I’d have flipped through the most recent Sears catalogue to the women’s lingerie pages for cheap thrills.  How shocking, women in bras.  My grandfather had pin-ups of sexy ladies in his garage as far back as I can remember, so I’d be browsing in the toy section of the Sears catalogue instead.  Of course, as a rite of passage for the teen-aged boy, someone in our group would come across a porno mag, which of course taught us all how to be Cassanovas by the age of 13.  We were all Hugh Hefner in our minds.  Then, by the time you actually got to engage in tawdry behaviour with a girl, you quickly realized you knew absolutely nothing about the opposite sex; that relationships were nothing like the soft-core porn flicks you ‘accidentally’ found on the old-fashioned satellite dishes, the ones that you had to click twelve different buttons and wait for ten minutes for the big 10-foot diameter plate to grind into position while the whole neighbourghood could immediately tell what channel you were really w/atching. 

Still, that whole awkward adolescence dance wasn’t so bad.  Eventually, we all lose our virginity.  Most of us wish that first magical moment were more memorable, or at least adequate for our partner in that first dubious deed.  We get over it, have some relationships along the way, and some of us eventually meet Mr. or Miss Right.  Mr. or Miss R. remains elusive to some, often by their own choice, which is fine if that’s what you like.  What I don’t think is the same from our generation to the present one is that this one is in a hurry to skip all the above-mentioned pratfalls and shenanigans of the ritual of growing up.  While we were all peeking at dirty magazines, clumsily chugging for second base, or praying that the satellite dish didn’t have to grind that loudly, we were learning about ourselves.  Our sexuality makes up a really big part of who we are.  That’s why straight people are initially uncomfortable with the notion of homosexuality; if you aren’t gay, you can’t really ‘understand’ being gay I suppose.  I once asked a gay friend if he could ever have sex with a woman.  He served that back to me, asking me if I could ever have sex with a man someday.  Point taken.

When I walk through the local mall, I see a number of shops designed to market sexy clothing to young girls.  Worse still, there are often huge banner-sized photos of very young models wearing their wares, as if they were glowing neon signs advertising for any passing pedophile to ogle their images for future dirty thoughts.  My disdain for these kinds of clothing shops isn’t far from my absolute abhorrence of beauty pageants, particularly those where girls as young as 5 or 6 dress like supermodels, and even wear bikinis.  I was a young adult when Jonbenet Ramsey was killed, but what shocked me the most, rather than the fact a small child was murdered, was that she was forced to be a beauty queen when she should have been playing with dolls.  Then I think the dolls with which she would have been otherwise playing wouldn’t have been much better, and I feel even worse.  From as far back as they can begin to think for themselves, girls are in the cross-hairs.  They have to be perfect for everyone, until they hit puberty, then they’re eye-candy for society’s perverts.  If she doesn’t put out, she’s a prude.  If she does, she’s a slut.  If she goes half-way, she’s a tease.  I don’t know how girls make it into adulthood.  Just look at the entertainment world around us, and look at who the role-models for young women are.  Britney Spears?  Where do I begin.  Lady Gaga?  When has meat ever been so alluring?  Paris Hilton?  Yes little Suzie, you too can be the star of your own film.  You can’t even watch wrestling without watching two or more bimbos ripping each other’s clothes off.  There are NHL teams that have scantily-clad women dancing like cheerleaders to entertain the fans.  Hulk Hogan’s daughter even sings the anthem at Tampa Bay Lightning games.  I remember being entertained by the actual game, but I won’t get started on how bad hockey has become in this piece.

In the last few years, there have been a number of high-profile incidents or cultural phenomena that prove to me beyond any doubt that the world in which we live is too obsessed with sexuality and/or sensationalism.  We can’t avoid our sexuality, of course, nor should we, but we find ourselves entertained with more and more deviant acts that there’s no wonder the Christian Right is armed to the teeth with ammunition to push us right back to the Victorian age.  Even the ones that aren’t supposed to entertain us keep us glued to our iPads in anticipation of the gory details, which makes it a form of entertainment if you ask me. Here are a few notorious incidents, and while you read, you must ask yourself these questions:  a) what makes this scenario news-worthy; b) do you find it amusing or perhaps entertaining in some way, whether it’s the scenario itself or culture’s reaction to it; c) how has the world changed because of it?

·         About five years ago, a video went viral called ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’.  A co-worker told me very excitedly one day that I had to go home and look it up right away because it was hilarious.  I did.  I urge you not to do the same.  Why?  The term ‘coprophagia’ means ingesting fesces, and in this case, for sexual gratification it becomes known as 'coprophillia'.  If you’ve seen the video, you know what I mean, and you aren’t shocked that I brought it up.  If you haven’t, this bullet has made you queasy, and I think that that is the proper reaction.  If we have reached a point where we’re comfortable with this kind of thing, we’re in real trouble.  When I saw the video, fortunately I was home alone.  I am still embarrassed for those poor girls and myself for having seen it.

·         A few weeks ago, a guy allegedly took some unidentified drug, and stripped naked on a Miami freeway.  He ran until he came upon a homeless person, whom he immediately assaulted and then began to actually chew on his face until he had gnawed it almost completely off.  Dubbed the ‘face-eating zombie’, this guy took four bullets before his adrenaline ceased to support him.  The homeless man, by the way, was a university graduate with a near-genius IQ, whom his family had thought long-dead.  To me, the more interesting story is with the victim, not the drugged-out naked would-be cannibal.  Speaking of the ‘face-eater’, I wonder what his family must be going through in the wake of this terrible news.  And yes, the video for that is going viral, but I won’t be fooled this time.

·         At the funeral of late jazz legend Etta James, Christina Aquilera performed what would have been probably a lovely tribute to her idol and a cultural icon.  That should have been enough for anyone.  But no, our sex-crazed society immediately had to know what that mysterious liquid trickling down her leg could have been.  Use your imagination.  It turns out that she had been using a spray-tan product that had begun to condense in the heat, and that it just happened to have been spotted in an unfortunate location.  Forget trying to identify the substance—why were we so fascinated with X-tina’s body while a major milestone in pop culture was taking place?  Why was she dressed in so revealing an outfit at a funeral in the first place?

·         While I’m singling out Ms. Aguilera, why not take a stab at her biggest rival, Britney Spears.  I always felt the media was out to ruin her, which seemed so unfair given the near-God status the same journalists had previously bestowed upon Madonna.  Still, she didn’t do herself any favours when she crawled out of that limo with Paris Hilton revealing to the whole world that she was going commando.  I don’t know a man (gay or straight) alive that wouldn’t love to see Britney in a centerfold pin-up, but this just wasn’t sexy at all.  It came across as juvenile and pitiful.  My female readers out there, I’ll ask you this:  If you were photographed stepping out of a vehicle with your cha-cha exposed, even with underwear on, how would you feel?  It is convenient that we distance ourselves from the notion that the celebrities we worship have feelings.

I’ll stop the list there, partly so this blog doesn’t drag on any further, but mostly because there is no conceivable end to this kind of thing.  The four examples above have very little in common, except that they have become sensationalized in some way for our consumption.  As much as we don’t want to admit it, we are drawn to scandal.  As long as we can sit a safe distance away, we have no problem ingesting the shit.  What was the term for that again?  We’re raising our children in a world where sensationalism isn’t like it used to be, back when you cried when the Beatles came on stage.  Now, elementary-school children can sing ‘Sexy And I Know It’, and can do the dance better than any of us could do the ‘Thriller’ dance sequence.  Kids are no longer kids. They’re mini-adults that are surrounded by adult content, whether it’s an Aeropostale mannequin or a spam ad for hot Russian girls, but they don’t know the first thing about the big picture.  They’ve become automatons, zombie-like in their consumption of the culture we’ve allowed them to discover.  One of the two girls with the cup might have worn a shirt like the girl I met a few years ago did.  Where do they go from there?  It’s kind of like seeing all your co-workers at a nudist beach, then having to look them in the eye again Monday morning.  We have no trouble watching the train wreck, oblivious to the fact that our young are incurring unprecedented and irreparable damage all the while.  How will they ever save face?  Pun totally intended.

Derelict

Sometimes it’s better to take the long way home.  I often find myself driving less-traveled road when I have the time, sometimes to clear my mind, sometimes to let the song on the radio finish, and occasionally to just watch the countryside.  It’s interesting seeing the view for no other purpose but to ‘see’ it.  I mentioned that I only get to do this when I have time.  Who has time?  When do I have time?  There is less and less of it these days.  I never seem to have time to do the things I want.  I have had a hard time making time to write this blog entry.  Maybe the problem is making the effort to afford the time to do things.  Sometimes it’s just not possible.

When I finally get the time conundrum sorted out and I drive through the countryside, I look for certain things.  I have a fascination with old buildings.  They can be anything; maybe an old barn, an abandoned house, a shed hanging in tatters behind an otherwise well-maintained property, maybe a tree house no longer played in by children.  Buildings are like senior citizens.  They have withstood all the storms of life, and yearn to be needed still while they wait. 

As a child, my Aunt Madelyn (actually my great-aunt, but she was close to me like an aunt) had a cottage near our house.  The cottage was sky-blue coloured, and was bungalow shaped with two great, big old-fashioned windows with the small square panes.  She had storm windows that I used to help her install and remove when I was a little older.  The walls were brown paper and cardboard, and there was running water only in the small sink in the kitchen, primed by a pump every spring and shut off so as not to freeze the pipes in the fall.  There was a matching blue outhouse out back, and it was the worst abomination you’ve never seen.  Outhouses are nasty, but this one seemed claustrophobic, musty, and occasionally was home to grass snakes and all assortments of insects.  I used it only when it was strictly necessary.  She used to poke fun at me for being afraid of it!

Auntie Madelyn passed away in the spring of 1992.  She was found in her home on her way back from the bathroom (a real bathroom); presumably she had suffered a fatal heart attack and never made it back to bed.  She died on Mom’s birthday, and to this day Mom swears she died specifically on a day that everyone would remember.  Which of course isn’t true, but if you knew her spirit, you might just be inclined to agree.  She had diabetes, and a long history of heart trouble, so it wasn’t a total surprised that she would pass away in her sixties, but the loss was of course nonetheless considerable.  She had no children of her own, and her husband, Uncle Rae had died years before.  She left behind an extended family of nieces and nephews, and a lifetime of wonderful memories.  Her house was eventually sold, but the cottage remained in our family.

In the twenty years since her passing, the cottage was used briefly by my sister Marcie and I for parties with our friends in our high school years.  We had one of those chemical toilets to use instead of that godforsaken outhouse, but otherwise we had a great time.  You could draw on the paper walls.  We were just far enough away from home that we could drink without attracting too much attention.  We had power and water, but otherwise it was kind of rustic.  Eventually my uncle, who was bequeathed the cottage, began to use it as a storage shed, because really, no one had any real use for it anymore.  As the years passed, the natural age of the structure began to show, and while he made the effort to keep it in good repair, the reality was that the building was nearing the end.  With that end came the dissipating of the memories of many a summer weekend spent there, learning to play Auction 45s, listening to the radio, drawing and writing our names on the walls, and everything else.

My family has a knack for holding on to decrepit old buildings, among other things.  Dad transported, from his homestead as a child, a dog kennel, a garage and an old storage shed.  All three of those buildings have been moved more than once since they were relocated the first time.  The dog kennel, which saw new life as a pen for a half-dozen ducks, is long gone.  The garage has been refurbished as Dad’s new lawn tractor garage.  The shed contains numerous old car parts and the like, and has been dubbed ‘Jackson Auto’, after a nickname my grandfather once held.  Jackson Auto is in pretty rough shape, and is in need of more than a tune-up.  We have a hard time letting go of these things because we are a sentimental family.  My grandmother, whose property once housed these buildings, is now in a nursing home.  Dad was actually thinking of having her house, which isn’t much bigger than a standard cottage, moved to his lot to use as a guest home, which makes sense given our family has grown exponentially in recent years.  I wouldn’t be shocked in the least if he did it.  I would.

Behind Jackson Auto there once lay a graveyard.  It was a boneyard, really; a junkyard of old cars.  My grandfather (whose sister was Auntie Madelyn) was of the generation that dragged things out into the woods to get rid of it.  He was not exactly an environmental child of the 90s.  Things were used as long as possible, and received all of his TLC, until that fateful day when it was proclaimed useless, and unceremoniously dumped in the woods.  If it was anything but a car, it could be found virtually anywhere.  There’s nothing that spells nature like seeing an old washing machine rusting along the trail.  But if it was a car, it was laid to rest in the Spruce Grove, the stand of trees that blocked out most of the sun and harboured a car enthusiast’s dream of old relics.  My cousin and I built a cabin there of the remnants of my mom and her siblings’ old one, only to have my grandfather make a smoke shed out of it.  It’s hard to entertain your friends in a cabin that smelled like smoked fish.

Back in the woods, there is a camp that my family used faithfully every winter for many years.  My grandfather used to walk back and nap there because it was very peaceful.  Like the cottage, we used to write our names on the wall, and we even kept a log book you could sign.  There was an old wood stove that used to start to glow orange when it was super-hot.  We had board games, teddy bears, dishware, and bedding kept there permanently.  In the later years, the mice began to take interest in the bedding, and when us kids were grown, mom and dad never went back to the camp anymore.  After Grampie died in ’98, it was seldom used again.  Recently, I took a trip back to salvage what, if anything, was still of use.  There was a kerosene lamp, a few stuffed animals I remembered from my childhood that the mice didn’t exploit, and the log book we kept.  And the girlie poster my grandfather had put up.  Apart from that, there was nothing worth rescuing.  As I turned to leave, my foot breached the floor boards.  The building had succumbed to the forest that surrounded it, and it was beyond its twilight hours.  It sits there as it was when I walked out that last time, whispering behind me that it was time to leave, time to let go.  However, in the true spirit of my family, I have other plans.  I’ll be back this summer to see if any of the timber is salvageable, because if it is, I’ll take it apart myself to bring back to Fredericton.  I plan to build a small playhouse for my kids.  There is something cathartic about the thought of using the old wood from the camp to build something new.

When I’m driving through the countryside, and I see an old barn, defeated with its big doors hanging off its rusty hinges, I can’t help but wonder.  Who owns or owned this building?  How long was it used?  Did kids jump off the hay loft into big piles of straw?  Did precocious teenagers steal a first kiss out back?  How many makes and models of tractors took shelter within?  When did someone finally look at it and say “it’s over”?  Everything becomes derelict eventually, but the real moment of truth comes when you finally accept that it has.

Auntie Madelyn’s cottage has found new life.  True to form, Dad relocated the old cottage with my uncle, and after some cosmetic surgery, they have transformed it into a working garage for their respective recreational vehicles.  They even have room for the wood splitter.  I must say, it looks pretty spiffy.  They have vinyl siding on it, kept the original door for rear egress, and have removed the front windows, supplanting them for bay doors and ramps.  The old sink is still there though.  It’s pretty safe to say the old outhouse will be staying put.

Rules For Q*bert

Now here's a story with a proper dose of irony for you.  I am going to talk about how video games may not have been so bad for your brain as your parents told you, sort of.  Imagine that.  All those hours you spent thumbing your control pads or joysticks, shaking your Wii sticks and hoping they won’t come flailing off, hitting an unsuspecting partner or spectator while you dance up a storm, apparently isn’t that detrimental after all.  We have evolved our human thumbs in the last two generations so aptly as to invent a communication tool which relies heavily on our thumbs.  It’s called the cell phone, in case you were wondering where to get such a thing.  We have 3D movies pouring out of Hollywood faster than tanning spray off Christina Aguilera.  Owning a 50-inch TV is now not only the norm, but will likely soon be too small for the norm.  We can store our multimedia digital files on ‘clouds’, which we can access from anywhere.  I’m telling you, the ‘country music chip’ for your brain isn’t far away (some of you know what I mean by this, but for everyone else, you’ll hear about it in a future blog, no doubt).

It doesn’t seem like that long ago to me that video games were The Great Satan.  My ever-loving parents, who really did try to raise me in a home with good, wholesome influences surrounding me, never liked video games, and vowed that their children would never succumb to that great space invader of the child’s developing and fragile mind.  Young Brandon was never to have an Atari, Vic 20, Commodore 64, or Nintendo.  The first video gaming device we owned was a Tandy computer, and it wasn’t good for much except for typing and printing.  We owned a typewriter, but the Tandy was an actual ‘computer’, which immediately meant it was better.  Along with the Tandy, which of course had no internet access in 1986, came the inevitability of games to play on it.  Now, you could play games like the old consoles had, to some degree, but what the Tandy could do that consoles of that time could not was run games that involved strategic input from the player.  Role-playing games, such as the King’s Quest series, Leisure Suit Larry, and a host of other scenario games were readily available, and reasonably affordable.  You had to insert floppy discs—and I mean the old 5 1/4 inch ones, not the more recent-yet-still-obsolete 3 1/2 hard-cartridge discs.  My current PC is now 9 years old, and still has a floppy disc drive, so they had a good run it seems. 

Mom and Dad justified letting us play these games on the Tandy because the games themselves had evolved beyond simple call/response or reaction games like Donkey Kong or Asteroids.  Indeed, the new breed of games required the player to think about what would happen next, type commands into the computer and respond to what the computer had to say in response.  If you walked into a room in the castle dungeon, you might wander over to the wardrobe and ask the computer to open the door.  Maybe inside there was a secret weapon you could use.  Maybe a giant monster would jump out and crush you.  Either way, it was fun, and if the latter was true, you hopefully saved your game earlier and you could do something different next time.  Maybe you could hide under the bed while the evil wizard opened the wardrobe. You get the idea.

To some degree, my parents were right.  I didn’t waste my money on video games, and as a result, I focused my interest and energy on other things.  I read a lot, particulary the Hardy Boys books, a series which I still collect to this day (I mentioned this briefly in the last blog).  I developed a fondness for boardgames, and as an adult I am an avid gamer and owner of dozens of different styles of games, from simple party games to hours-long strategy games.  My money began to go to music purchasing, and as those of you who know me at all can attest, it’s still where most of my available funds go.  My first investment in a video game system was the Wii, which we bought as a family three years ago.  Still, I may have invested up to 2-3 hours total on it.  My sons adore the Wii, and Kieran recently declared that while music was my ‘thing’, video games were his.  Part of me was a little saddened, but an equal part of me understood. 

At school a few weeks ago, a few boys from my class were over near the swings playing in the fine gravel on which the swing sets are situated.  When I approached them, I noticed they were playing something I thought was long extinct.  They had a handful of little, green army men.  I was blown away.  I used to play with my Dad’s little army men when I used to stay with my Grandmother at her house while she watched me when my parents worked late.  They were pre-posed, and I had no real knowledge of the army, nor did I have the wherewithal to care about it, but they were fun to pose in mock battles, to make pretend gun noises while I maneuvered them around awkwardly.  When I made to congratulate them on finding some classic toys to play with at recess, they looked up with fear in their eyes.  It then occurred to me—they’re war toys.  In 2012, we’re afraid of war toys.  The world we live in doesn’t feel so easy about kids pretending to wield guns; the ‘Cowboys and Indians’ days are long gone. I remember playing ‘War’ in the thicket beside my house as a kid when my friends used to visit.  We had plastic rifles and assault weapons and we used to make forts, run recon missions and engage each other in open combat.  I even had a plastic bazooka.  We had paths through the woods worn down to the dirt.  We built platforms in high trees as look-out posts.  At the end of the day, we never realized how much we were developing our imaginations. And there I was, faced with the choice of whether to prevent them from playing ‘war’, or remember young Brandon who grew up to be Mr. LeBlanc, evidently none the worse for having played with toys like that himself.  I don’t think anyone that played ‘War’ in the thicket at my parents’ house ever grew up to shoot up a school, hold up a bank, or even obtain a hunting licence for that matter.  But man, did we ever have fun.  When I was visiting with my parents this past week, I stopped and looked into the thicket.  The paths are long grown in.  The forts are long gone.  My own children will never play the way we did.

When we were kids at Port Elgin Elementary School back in the 80’s, my friends and I ‘invented’ a game of our own.  Down a steep embankment, yet still on the grounds of the school, was an area where there were no trees, but the grass grew fairly tall.  Forming small islands in the hayseed were giant slabs of rock, probably about a dozen or so of them in an odd formation.  There were three or four large, flat ones, on which I’d say maybe five or six kids could stand at once.  The others were all a fraction of that size, and no more than one could stand on them without knocking another off.  We used to bounce from rock to rock, originally just goofing around, but gradually developing a sort of tag game.  Rules began to form, and word spread; before long, a dozen or more friends were making straight for the rocks as soon as the bell rang and we could get outside.  One day, someone finally suggested that our game was a lot like the then-popular arcade game Q*bert.  For those of you who weren’t children in the 80’s, Q*bert was a little creature who hopped on two legs on a wall of ascending cubes, whose goal was to touch every square before his enemies touched him.  Think Pac-man, but 2D and quicker.  Our game, of course, was much different.  Rather than have one Q*bert, our game had most people acting as Q*berts, while the ‘it’ person was his nemesis Coily (a snake who bounced like a spring on his coiled body).  The Q*berts all started on one of the giant rocks, while Coily started on a designated starting point in the middle.  The Q*berts had to hop from rock to rock until they safely made it to one of the other agreed-upon rocks at the far side without being tagged by Coily.  All this time, no one was allowed to leave the rocks at all.  If you did fall from one, you had to either go to a ‘prison’ rock, or start over, depending on who was playing and which rules were in play.  You see, in our version of Q*bert, we worked out a verbal agreement how to solve problems that arose during gameplay, and we moved on.  No one fought during Q*bert.  It was like an unwritten rule that if you spoiled the fun, you had no business being there.  And no one wanted to be banished from the rocks!

As a teacher today, I could find a host of things you couldn’t allow in a game like Q*bert.  First of all, rock formations like that would be removed from any playground.  If they weren’t, they’d be fenced off for sure, and duty teachers would be vigilantly policing them from children with over-active imaginations from playing near them.  Maybe the kids would pick up sticks and pretend to play war, mock-shooting each other like they might see on the news.  That wouldn’t be allowed either.  Too bad really, because all the skills they have been honing playing Call Of Duty would surely come in handy.  If it was winter, forget playing near the rocks.  A skinned knee might be as good as a lawsuit in 2012.  Never mind that you could smash heads playing soccer, or fall from monkey bars, or slip on an unseen patch of black ice.  Soon, we’ll need to bubblewrap the students to keep them safe. 

We have come full-circle with our video games; we worry so much about the dangers outdoors that we often let our children seek refuge in the one thing a generation ago we never thought possible.  We protect our children from two things:  the outside world and their own imaginations. Video games have lots to offer, and they’ve come a long way, even since the old Tandy Quest games from my childhood, and even then they helped foster critical thinking and creativity.  Ironically, my friends and I used a video game as a scenario for an original idea, for hours of harmless fun.   I would go so far as to say we were building character.  Perhaps we don’t give our kids enough credit.  Perhaps we think on their behalf more than we should.  We should rather remember when we were the Q*berts trying to get to the other side, back when Coily was just one of us, randomly picked for the fun of it.  I promise you, if the duty teacher ever came to play Coily, we’d have all left the rocks for good.