The Blog of Brian Hodges

Every year, the second grade in my school did a month-long project involving pen pals. They’d get a list of names from a neighboring school and have the kids write letters back and forth—learning about letter structure, the postal service and the taste of stamps along the way. The project culminated on a day when the pen pals finally met. As a final act of pen pal unity, everybody wrote one more letter, tied the letter to a balloon and released it. The balloons floated into the afternoon sky with the excitement of new pen pals just over the horizon.

I waited two long years to do the balloon thing. I was psyched to do the balloon thing. But when the day finally arrived, my second grade teacher Miss Lockjaw told us we were not doing the balloon thing this year. Something about fish choking to death. This was right around the time those tree-huggers at the EPA started making us feel guilty about all things rubber and plastic. They told us fish were mistaking grocery bags, six-pack fasteners and pen pal balloons for bait and trying to swallow them whole. They (the EPA, not the fish) had apparently never stopped to consider the theory of Natural Selection which states that, “Any animal who selects its food before verifying that it is in fact natural, does not deserve to reproduce.”

I blame them (the EPA and the fish) for my pen pal never writing back.

I was a very committed child. When I decided I wanted to do something, I didn’t let bleeding heart greenies stand in my way. If the second grade wasn’t going to help me send a balloon to a new pen pal, I was prepared to go it alone. Unfortunately, I had no idea how the whole process was supposed to work.

The letter part was easy.

Dear Pen Pal,
How are you? I am fine. Do you like to go sledding? I do. I have a cat and a dog. Do you have dogs? They are fun. Aren’t fish stupid? Write back soon.
Love,
Brian

Perfect letter structure. Thanks Miss Lockjaw. But with nobody around to teach me the mechanics of this particular mailing method, I had to learn by trial and error. The first important rule I learned is that you must tie the letter to the balloon and release it on the day the balloon is inflated. I got sidetracked after tying my letter to a leftover birthday balloon. It’s tough getting anything done when your bedtime is seven o’clock. So the balloon just floated in my room for a few days. I woke up one morning to discover it was no longer floating, but simply… hovering. When I finally released the balloon, it immediately sank to the ground under the weight of the letter.

But I learned my lesson, and when the next opportunity (and balloon) presented itself, I tied that letter on and let it fly right away. Up and up it went, off to find me a new pen pal. I watched until it cleared the horizon, excited but perplexed. How on earth was my pen pal ever going to write back to me? The odds of their balloon finding me by sheer chance seemed astronomical. But I figured, others have done it, it must just work out somehow. Had the fish and the EPA not discouraged Miss Lockjaw from doing the balloon thing, maybe somebody could have explained to me that I actually had to put my return address on the letter! How the heck could I have known that? How could I have known that after the initial balloon was sent, everything from that point on was supposed to take place via the Post Office?

I waited and waited for my balloon to come back. But it never did. Realization didn’t dawn on me until several years later and by then it was too late. So if anybody reading this column found a letter attached to a balloon in rural Maine around 1986 that mentioned something about sledding and dogs, please contact me through this website.

And to all the fish and employees of the EPA, I hope you choke on a plastic bag.

The cooks in our elementary school didn’t take kindly to criticism. They yelled and made us spend recess inside with our heads down whenever we complained about the burnt pizza, hairs in our yogurt or rubbery meat in the spaghetti sauce. It had gotten so bad that by Christmas of fifth grade, our teacher forced me and my trouble-maker friends to write the cooks a formal apology. We drew happy pictures of ourselves eating cafeteria food under inscriptions like, “I’m sorry I said your meatloaf tasted like Play-doh… From now on I’ll just pick around the brown lettuce… My mom told me it was just a stomach flu.”

We choked down our spongy carrots and freezer-burned fishsticks without a word for a while after that, but a constant sense of impending vomit can only be kept silent for so long. By May that year, the cooks and lunch monitors had resorted to all out ignoring us, saying, “Just go!” whenever we so much as asked for a shaker of salt. We took it begrudgingly. It was spring and none of us wanted to risk any more recesses inside.

Everything came to a head the day our gang got to the cafeteria late. Our teacher had undoubtedly held us back to yell about something trivial, and by the time we got to the cafeteria, everything was gone. Not the food of course. There were always sufficient economy-sized, re-thawed, re-heated food-like products on hand to survive the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. No, on this particular day they had run out of silverware. Not a clean knife or spork to be found.

This time we felt perfectly justified in raising our concerns, but the lunch monitor cut us off, “Just go!” The cooks turned a reflexive deaf ear to us saying, “I don’t want to hear it boys!” And when that spatula slammed down on our tray, plopping the day’s nutrition into one of five pre-portioned slots, we knew they meant business.

On any other day, I think we would have continued pushing our point, even if it meant risking yet another recess inside. But the group of us, in a rare moment of psychic harmony, all decided to let it go when we saw what was on the menu: Sloppy Joes and blueberry cobbler. The latter was a relative term of course—pie filling and Cool Whip really—but it was certainly a meal that one would not want to eat with one’s hands… unless, of course one, was a smartass eleven-year-old with an axe to grind.

Oh the fun we had that day, devouring our government sanctioned Hot Lunch (again, a relative term) with bare hands and the ravenousness of starving children. We shoved Sloppy Joes into the general vicinity of our mouths. Some hit its mark. The rest slid down our faces. We closed our fists around handfuls of blueberries, squishing half of it into our mouths and letting the rest ooze down our forearms.

Did I mention that they had run out of napkins that day as well?

The lunch monitors yelled of course. But what else could we say through smiling mouthfuls of ground beef and fruit product as we wiped our hands on the fold-out tables? “They didn’t have silverware.” And then the most amazing thing happened. Not only didn’t they make us spend recess inside with our heads down, but the lunch monitor actually ran to get us the silverware we had been asking for.

We were baffled. Somehow, we had won. We had subverted the entire cafeteria system, and the teachers and cooks had been powerless to stop us. We’d acted like bratty inconsiderate snots and gotten away with it! We should have been relishing our victory and making plans for new and exciting ways to make mischief. If only we had realized the truth.

Fortunately for all our future teachers—and okay, for us too—our parents had instilled a healthy fear of adults as unshakeable bastions of authority. Had we pushed forward, the sixth grade academic and nutritional world could have been ours to manipulate and control. Instead, afraid that retribution was just over the horizon, we eased off on the cooks, giving them time to regroup. By the time we came back to school that next year, they were ready for us. Any further attempts at rebellion were dealt with swift and harshly. We had no choice but to deal with another year’s worth of bad food… and recesses spent inside with our heads down.

I have never actually decked any of my halls with bows of holly. Though, I did once Fun-Tak® the closet door with a poster of Cindy Crawford in a Santa bikini. Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Growing up in my house, there were three decorations that provided constant strife every Christmas. The first was our blinking star. Eight inches tall and studded with lights and silvery tinsel, it sat atop our tree, flashing and pulsating in no particular time or sequence, and casting the harshest, most searing white light that even the angels must have shielded their eyes. It’s a good thing none of us were prone to seizures.

Every year, my mother spoke of retiring the star, and every year, she was vetoed. Sure, the star was annoying, and sure it had a tendency to slip off its perch… And yes, okay, it was annoying—and more than a little ironic—that this particular ornament only came with an eighteen-inch power cord. But come on, it was Christmas! Plus, our only other option was one of those phallic aluminum ball-and-spike things—which to this day I have never been able to decipher the religious or historical significance of. So the star has remained in its exalted position, unmoved even to this day.

The second object of our frustration was a small, yet very lifelike dove ornament. It became an obsession because of the year our cat attacked the dove with vicious ferocity. I suspect that history has given way to legend with this particular story. What probably happened is that the cat merely walked by the dove and sniffed it just long enough for somebody to say, “Look, he thinks it’s a real bird.” Every Christmas after that—and I do mean every Christmas—we made sure to perch that dove on the lowest branch just to see if we could fool our cats once again. And every year, the cats have ceremoniously ignored it. They have not attacked. They have not sniffed. They have not engaged in so much as a double take to indicate they give one rat’s petutie about that bird… not even when we grabbed their little heads, forced them within an inch of the dove and said, “Look at the stupid bird, you moron!”

The third decoration of our discord was our Nativity set. Every year, my sister and I fought over who got to arrange the figurines. Being the oldest and wisest, I felt entitled to the privilege. Plus I always had new and innovative ideas on how to present the blessed event. Semi-circular arrangements of the wise men; strategic hanging of Christmas lights to give the scene a sexy red glow; even an upside-down flashlight on the slatted roof to bathe Jesus in a halo of light. I knew how to showcase a freakin’ virgin birth my Judeo-Christian friends.

All my sister ever did was make it look like Mary and Joseph were kissing. So I’d hold the manger over my head out of her reach. I’d hide the sheep and shepherds so she couldn’t find them. I’d wait until she’d set everything up, then go in and change it, holding her back with my arm while she screamed at me to stop. Our bickering got so bad one year that we ended up breaking Jesus’ right arm.

Silent Night? Yeah right.

But when the smoke had cleared, and Christmas morning finally arrived, all was right with the world. The blinking light from the star never seemed too bright. The tree was never destroyed because of our pets’ hunting instincts. And Jesus was always in his place as the center of attention. And all of the bickering, the fighting and the petty annoyances of the season were pushed easily from our minds when we gathered around our tree as a family. And for one day, everything was perfect. It was Christmas.

Fall is here once again. Time for the brisk autumn air to move in and turn all the leaves a vibrant shade of orange before they fall to the ground. After which will begin yet another round of the ultimate suckers game for kids: raking leaves. Do parents even lump that chore on their kids anymore? They did in my day. But see, my parents were tricky. Actually, the adult community as a whole was pretty darn sneaky.

My dad told me that he used to love raking leaves. He and his brother would rake them into a big pile and then jump into it. Wow, that did sound like lots of fun. Jumping into a big leafy cushion and watching as the bright autumn colors poofed up around you. Just like the House of Balls at an amusement park. All over television, in commercials for banks and home insurance, heck even on Sesame Street there were similar images showcasing the joys of raking. You’d see a picture perfect back yard with a tall oak tree and a white picket fence, and two small children raking leaves into a pile. Dressed in their perfectly color-coordinated L.L. Bean jackets and scarves, they were joyously and whimsically throwing their brightly-colored leaves into the air like confetti. Innocent children, playing without a care in the world.

I bought into that big pile of crap.

Believe me, I’m all for the whole “spoonful of sugar with the medicine” thing. If you can make a chore seem like a game, fantastic. But let’s be honest here. When you’re nine years old, it takes a good five or six hours to rake a big enough pile to warrant jumping into. My sister and I spent the whole first day of our fall vacation raking a kind of big pile. It certainly seemed like it should have been bigger for as much as we were sweating in November. Exhausted, with blisters on our thumbs and cricks in our backs, we weren’t exactly in a joyous or whimsical mood. But still we drummed up the energy, got a big running start and flopped into our pile.

It was fun. For about a minute. We jumped in a few times. We even threw a couple handfuls into the air—though our dry brown leaves didn’t quite have that confetti look to them. And that’s about as much enjoyment as we were able to squeeze out of it. I mean there I was, lying in my pile-o-six-hours-of-work, already feeling the anticlimactic end to a hard day, already suspecting I’d been had. But then the insult went a step further. Ever lay in a pile of dry crumbly leaves before? Let me rephrase. Ever jumped into a pile of dry crumbly leaves so that they break into tiny pieces under your weight, then poof back into the air, getting into your eyes, nose, mouth and down the back of your shirt? Not that sneezing and itching aren’t fun and all, but you’re also sharing this particular pile with the many insects who make dry crumbly leaves their home.

The only thing you accomplish in this not-so-much-fun game is strewing your big pile of leaves all over the yard so that your parents don’t actually believe you did your chores.

Parents, your children look up to you. They trust you as only a child can. I beg you, please don’t betray that trust. Don’t tell them something that sucks is really going to be fun. Just be honest with them. Tell them it sucks, you know it sucks, but you’d rather be watching football. Let the harsh reality come from you. Don’t force them to learn it the hard way. If you want to cushion the blow or make this horrible chore seem fun, do what my parents did that following autumn: pay them two dollars an hour.

Can anybody explain to me why so many parents have such a stick up their butts over their kids climbing up the slide? Go to a park sometime. I guarantee within five minutes you’ll hear, “No no, honey, slides aren’t for climbing… No, no, honey, we only go down the slide.” or some variation therein.

Seriously my-generation, did you read some study that I somehow missed? Why are you so afraid of your kid going (gasp) the wrong direction on a slide? I understand if there’s actually another kid at the top waiting to slide down. But barring that, he ain’t gonna pop the tires.

I love spring. There’s nothing quite like that first warm day in the city, when the sun liquefies all the frozen street garbage, sending that wonderfully urban fragrance into the air. As I sweat right through my shirt in the ninety-percent humidity, watching vibrant songbirds eating the remains of a thawed out squirrel, I thank God that winter is finally over. I didn’t always love spring though. For seven years of my life, spring had a seedy underbelly, because from Kindergarten through sixth grade, spring meant one thing: Marble Season.

The snow banks hadn’t even melted all the way before the kids in my elementary school started bringing sacks full (or socks full) of those alluring glass balls and engaging in their very first form of legalized gambling. The basic rules were simple. Two players, one marble each. Whoever hit their opponent’s marble with their own won both marbles. The loser drank himself under the table.

Just as in Poker, special rules, which always seemed to end in “-sies” were decided at the beginning of each game. First, you had to decide whether you were playing for Funsies or Keepsies. Numbered “-sies” (Onesies, Twosies, etc.) indicated how many shots you had per turn. In general, you were obligated to roll your marble into your opponent’s, but Picksies allowed you to pick your marble up and dead-eye your shot from above. We all generally agreed you had to make your opponent’s marble move at least an inch from the point of impact to score a win, therefore Nicksies and Ticksies didn’t count as Hitsies.

In the high-rolling hierarchy of marbles, Cats-Eyes and Aggies (not to be confused with Aggots) were the most common and least prized. Their designs were unimpressive—a few colored flecks amongst clear or white glass. Crystals and Swirls were the most sought after. Their names were self-explanatory: the former, mystically colored crystal balls, while the latter had mystical colors swirling through their middles. Also highly coveted were the solid-colored Corns, and the engine-extracted Ball Bearings. All classes increased in value when they took the form of Poppers (big marbles), or Aggots (really big marbles), but decreased in value in the form of Pee-Wees. Yes, size mattered.

All through Kindergarten, I’d only owned hordes of stupid old Cats-Eyes. I was so happy the day I came to First Grade with my very first Crystal Poppers. Two of them. When Henry Morris asked if I wanted to play them, I was wary. “Well, okay, but only for Funsies.” Turns out, I played phenomenally, beating him two games in a row! I decided to play for Keepsies, making the mistake of agreeing to a game of Fivesies. In one five-shot turn, Henry nailed my first Crystal. Determined to win it back, I played him again, and within seconds both my Crystal Poppers were now in the hands of a notorious marble hustler. I went home and cried.

I became compulsive about trying to win back some of what I had lost. But, having only Cats-Eyes I was forced to give people odds. I had to win five games in a row to score a Swirl. Three games in a row for an Aggie Aggot. As I lost more and more of my Cats-Eyes and became increasingly desperate, people started whispering about my worsening insanity. “Poor guy,” they’d says. “He’s lost his… marbles!!!”

Oh come on, you couldn’t see that one coming from like a mile away?

But as silly a game as it was, it was important to me. Even my parents could see that. And one sunny April day, my dad brought home the greatest gift a father could ever give his son: a Ball Bearing from a tractor trailer truck. It was beautiful. As big as a softball and ten times as heavy. The Ultimate Marble. The other kids started foaming at the mouth. Suddenly, they were the ones giving me odds. Ten games to one. Twenty to one. I started winning everything. Crystals, Corns, Swirls, Poppers, Aggots.

It was fun for a season. But by the following spring, my über-Marble’s reputation had spread. Everybody knew they couldn’t beat it. So they stopped trying. They forced me to start playing even odds once again. By the end of that next marble season, I lost all that I had won. I was washed up, already at the age of eight. At least I was smart enough to just hang up the marble sack for good. I began wandering the springtime playground amidst a sea of glass racketeering, seeking out even one person who just wanted to play tag.

Everyone knows that becoming a parent changes you, often in ways you never expect. First of all, whether you know it or not, whether you accept it or not, once you have a kid, you are no longer cool. It just doesn’t happen. You can try and hang onto it, try and tell yourself and others, “Hey, I’m still the same cool guy I was before,” but no, it’s gone. All of it. The only thing to do is to reinvent yourself as a different kind of cool. You know the kind of cool where you know all the lyrics to Laurie Berkner and High School Musical songs. “Nick Jr. cool.”

Still the thing that changes most once you become a parent, is your level of tolerance for gross things. You obviously have to get past a normal person’s gag reflex since you’ll be changing about nine thousand diapers per week. But it doesn’t stop there. What ends up happening is that grossness actually becomes a matter of convenience. That’s why you see mothers upending their infants, putting a nose to their diaper and sniffing. It’s just faster and easier to smell for poop than it is to undo a onesie, pull back the Huggies and check to see if there’s something inside. When you see a dad pick a booger out of his toddler’s nose, the ick factor is simply more convenient than searching the house for one of those little bulb suction thingies—which said toddler probably hid inside the VCR anyway. This elevated yuck threshold obviously goes hand-in-hand with the loss of coolness I mentioned, because you simply cannot be cool while sniffing a person’s butt on a daily basis. It just doesn’t happen. Ever seen George Clooney sniffing for poo? I rest my case.

But this grossness thing recently reached new levels of abominableness when my entire family became sick with the flu. On one of those fun-filled nights my one-year-old threw up on Lauren. But he didn’t just throw up on her. He threw up on her while he was nursing. You get that? He threw up… on her breast. This wasn’t just some relatively harmless baby spittle either. This was full on, chunky, stomach flu ralphage. And do you know what Lauren’s response was? After her initial, knee-jerk, “aw gross” reaction, she quickly composed herself and said, “Okay, well at least it didn’t get on the couch.”

The couch? She has vomit on her naked breast and yet she’s happy because it didn’t get on the couch? That’s how far we’ve come as parents—getting thrown up on has somehow become the preferable alternative to something else. When the heck does that happen anywhere else in life? Short of getting killed by an axe-wielding psychopath, how is getting thrown up on not the worst possible outcome of any social situation? I mean imagine you’re walking through the ethnic foods section of the supermarket and some guy just walks up and blows chunks all over you—lifting up your shirt and exposing your chest before doing so of course. Could you ever find a silver lining in that? Yet somehow, as a parent, having somebody puke all over your bare naked BOOBS is actually seen as a somewhat positive thing!

Man, I really hope my kids grow up to be rockstars because it would be a shame for them to siphon so much coolness out of me and Lauren and not put it to good use.

There are many reasons why I never ever ever eat at McDonald’s, not the least of which being I start farting about halfway through my burger and then don’t stop for about three and a half days. But also, I just find it utterly depressing that I have to deal with an entire team of people who are quite literally as stupid as a person can get without qualifying for a legal “disorder.”

I ordered a Chicken McNugget Happy Meal for my daughter tonight. Now there are two choices when one orders a McNugget Happy Meal: a Four-McNugget meal or a Six-McNugget meal. So when I stepped up to the register and placed my order with Mister Headgear, I said, “Yes I’d like a Four-McNugget Happy Meal, please.” You can imagine my surprise when I looked at my receipt ten seconds later and realized my credit card had just been charged fourteen dollars for a Happy Meal that should have cost about $4.50.

“Well you said you wanted four Happy Meals,” responds Mister Headgear.

Okay, I’m sorry, Mister Headgear. I know you’re stupid. But I also know that the corporation employing you understands that you’re stupid and has broken down everything you must know into about thirty simple phrases: Big Mac, Fries, Number Six, Super Size… I simply can’t imagine that I am the first person ever to come in here and verbalize this particular order. I know that you know you have a four-McNugget meal, so… why, Mister Headgear-wearing McDonald’s employee, wouldn’t you have at least clarified what you thought you heard me say before charging me for four freakin’ Happy Meals? Especially when you can clearly see I am standing her with ONE STINKIN’ KID!

Now please go ask your slightly smarter manager to give me a refund while I continue farting in your general direction.

My family recently booked a flight on US Airways. A few days later I got an email from them encouraging me to sign up for their “Dividend Miles” club. The basic gist of the email was, “Hey, if you sign up right now you can still get these miles.” But they didn’t stop there. The email continues on to say, “If you don’t sign up right now, we’re going to give your miles to Marvin!” I’m sorry, but why should that be the detail that ultimately convinces me to sign up for this program? If you’re not inspired enough to earn frequent flier miles for yourself, why should losing them to “Marvin” (swear I’m not making that name up) in any way sway your decision?

Apparently US Airways is trying to appeal to the three-year-olds in all of us. I can’t tell you how many times my daughter and niece—who are three and four respectively—have broken down crying simply because one of them wanted to play with a toy that the other one already had. “Mommy, I want the Littlest Pet Shop Bulldog!” Mind you, the crying child wanted nothing to do with that stupid bulldog thirty seconds ago, but now that her cousin has decided to play with it, it’s suddenly the only thing on earth that could ever possibly make her happy. You can try distracting her with food, movies, other toys, but no. As long as her cousin continues to possess a bulldog that should have been hers, nothing else will make her happy. The three-year-old mantra seems to be: “I don’t want this. I don’t want that. I want what YOU HAVE!“

I guess we never really grow out of that. That’s where the whole “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality comes from. Your big screen standard def TV was just fine two years ago until everybody around you started buying plasma HD. Now, god forbid they have something you don’t. US Airways understands this mentality better than we do apparently. And the thing is, I’m almost certain that scare tactic works amazingly well on their customers: “Oh no! I can’t imagine that I’ll ever fly enough to make these Dividend Miles worth the effort of signing up, but I will not let that little jerk, Marvin (who might actually find some use for them) get his grubby little hands anywhere near my miles.”

Well hey Marvin, you can have our miles. I don’t think my inner three-year-old is going to notice.

As a father, I am really really looking forward to the age where ant farms become appropriate toys. I loved my ant farm as a kid and I can’t wait for the excuse to have one again. For the uninitiated, a typical ant farm consisted of two-panes of glass (or plastic) spaced a couple of centimeters apart which you filled with soil from your yard. You’d go gather up about twenty or thirty ants and jimmy them one-by-one into the ant farm with some food (the instructions suggested sugar water curiously enough). After that, you’d just sit back and let them go to work for about a week, digging tunnels and settling into their new home. That’s when the real fun would begin.

You’d start by collecting another twenty ants from a different anthill. Your next move was really a matter of taste. You could drop all twenty of the rival ants into the ant farm at the same time and watch as both sides fought to the bitter violent death, leaving behind only one or two befuddled sentries. On the other hand, you could drop them in two or three at a time and watch as the colony ganged up and tore them to pieces. Occasionally, one of the intruders would put up a good fight and take down a couple of the ravenous mob (especially if you were lucky enough to find a colony of red ants), but in the end he was still inherently doomed.

This was the way I chose to put my rival ants to work. I’d gradually up the number of intruders over the course of an hour or so, giving my colony plenty of practice against increasingly difficult odds. Then, after I felt that all of my six-legged soldiers had been sufficiently trained up in the art of war, I’d go out and find a huge freakin’ SPIDER. Here’s where the action really got interesting. Unlike ant-on-ant battles, which pretty much always came down to whoever had the bigger army, you never knew how a spider would fare against an entire colony. A spider is obviously big enough and tough enough hold its own against four or five ants at once. And if he positions himself properly the narrowness of the tunnels can actually work to his favor, preventing the ants from swarming him in numbers he can’t handle. But ants are nothing if not coordinated. It all boils down to how fast they can rally a multi-pronged attack, sending flanking units to the surface and attacking him from behind. Once the ants can pin down the intruding monster on both sides, forcing him to split his attention, it’s only a matter of time before they get past his long legs and onto his back. After that, the outcome of the fight is pretty much a foregone conclusion. It’s just a question of how many ants the spider takes with him.

When people think of little boys and ants, they usually conjure up images of us incinerating them with a magnifying glass, or dousing them with gasoline. They really don’t give us enough credit. We came up with way way way more messed up ideas than that. Ant farms gave us a staging ground to recreate the Roman Coliseum! We made countless drones fight for their lives purely for our own amusement. We let swarms of opposing armies slaughter each other just to see who would reign victorious. We put trained fighters into the ring with the equivalent of Bengal tigers just to see how many would die before vanquishing the beast

Now I know what you’re thinking: serial killers in training. But trust me, no mass murderer has ever wasted his time executing insects. They killed cats and dogs and birds and things. Things with faces. Things with personalities. Things you can love, sympathize and identify with. But who ever identified with a freakin’ ant? And I mean a real ant, not that cute puppet thing from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Sure we were messed up. All boys are. But hey, at least we purged our homicidal curiosities on creatures that everyone kills on a daily basis. Is it really so messed up that we got additional entertainment value out of it? And is it really so messed up that I can’t wait to share that simple joy with my kids?