The Playground: a 5-year FLASHBACK blog!

(Originally posted June 12, 2008)

Well it's summertime folks and that means school is out and all the kids will be heading to the playground for some great summertime fun.  Of course playgrounds are not what they used to be.  Everything is made of brightly colored plastic and all the kids have parents with them.  It's almost impossible to hurt yourself there.

It was a much different environment when I was a kid.  The playgrounds I went to were built with splintered wood and steel chain and housed a nice variety of deathtraps and torture implements.  Parents would send you there to get rid of you until it was time to eat.

There was no grass, everything was built on concrete.  Twelve-foot-high monkeybars with blood stains on the ground underneath.  How fun was the merry-go-round?  a bunch of little kids would get on and then some big kid would come over and start spinning it 100 miles an hour until they all lost their grip and flew off.  The see-saw was just begging for trouble.  It was so easy to just roll off to the side while the other kid was trapped high up in the air.  Or just wait for somebody to try to get on and then yank the high end down real quick.  *BONK*

That long metal slide would heat up to like 8000 degrees on a sunny day.  Everybody's legs would stick to it and the skin would burn off.  Or if it wasn't a sunny day you would have a nice easy ride down and land in mud.  Then limp home all dirty and eat a baloney sandwich.  Good times.

Why do they even TRY to make playgrounds safe?  It's not like kids won't find a way to hurt themselves.  They can use anything, like a bench.  Get six kids near a park bench and one will say, "Come on, let's jump over that BENCH!"

"The long way, crotch-first.  Everybody get in line."


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