WHAT'S NEW

Hey readers, brandy new stuff is up on the What's New page. Twenty-five pages worth of new stuff actually... though don't worry my screen weary travelers, I've provided a printer friendly version of it as well.

Tag, you're gone!

(deep SIGH)

First they took away Dodgeball, saying it was too violent. Then a couple of kids fell off the see-saw and monkey bars, so away they went. Soon after that, all the tall metal slides were replaced by short plastic corkscrew slides that don't allow you to pick up any speed at all. Before long somebody also said that even swings were too dangerous for playground play. Now just when you thought parents and schools couldn't get any more ridiculous and pussified than they already are, you know what some school board in Attleboro, Massachusetts decided this week? Apparently the game of Tag is no longer an appropriate game. Tag! I mean... TAG for Christ's sake! Claiming "Recess is a time when accidents happen," the Willlette Elementary School has now deemed one of the most basic, elemental and pure games of childhood to be too rough and dangerous for kids to play. What's more amazing is that there's nothing amazing about this particular decision. Apparently schools all over the country have been taking similar measures for years. In 2002 a Santa Monica school banned the game saying that it "creates self esteem issues among slower and weaker children."

I just don't even know what to say about this decision that isn't already self-evident to anybody who grew up in any previous generation, though I think George Carlin definitely said it best a few years ago when he said: "Grownups are taking all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives. It's pathetic."

I'll skip all the remarks and comments of how stupid and moronic this decision and other decisions like it are (I'm sure all of you reading have a least a dozen comments of your own that you could insert here... and if you don't, well then you're a hopeless case anyway who should never have kids of your own) and instead skip right ahead to the big picture and its long term implications.

Every generation fears the generation that comes after it. Our grandparents were horrified by the rock-n-roll that our parents grew up listening to. Our parents were horrified by the brain-numbing MTV programming we watched like Beavis & Butthead and Singled Out. It's expected. You think your parents are prudes and you wish your kids would be into the wholesome things you used to be into. But now that my generation is stepping into the roles of parenthood a new and disturbing trend is happening. We're actually saying that all the things we loved about being a kid are no longer good and valid forms of entertainment. Instead, we claim they're damaging to the body and psyche of our frail little children. That's what we're saying, but the more I think about it, the more I think it goes deeper. Parents aren't really vilifying things that are dangerous. What they're really trying to forbid is any activity that kids can participate in without the direct supervision of a group of adults.

I never made that leap of logic until I read a short article that talked about how soccer is now the number one sport engaged in by the youth of America. And what immediately occurred to me was that the article or the study or whatever it was had left out one key word from that declaration. What it should have said was that soccer was the number one organized sport in America. Whenever you see American kids playing soccer, it's almost without exception a structured, organized event with official teams, coaches, referees, and soccer moms from the boosters club selling refreshments and car magnets in the shape of soccer balls. You almost never see a group of four or ten unsupervised kids trying to kick a soccer ball through a makeshift goal they set up using a couple backpacks. That's what kids in every other country in the world do, but not in America. No, in America I would stake my life on saying the most popular sport that kids engage in, irrespective of any kind of supervision, is basketball. Kids don't need an organized group of parents in order to play basketball. As long as they have a ball, a net and a hard surface they'll shoot hoops for hours just for the sheer joy of playing. But since there's no way to poll every pickup game on every cracked asphalt court in the country, soccer is the sport that wins the most popular title.

And that suits the parents of my generation just fine. For some reason, parents my age just can't stand the idea that their kids could be having any kind of fun in any activity that they didn't personally orchestrate and supervise. Give kids the opportunity and a rubber ball or three and they'll organize their own game of dodgeball. They'll monitor themselves, coach themselves and referee themselves. Give them the chance and they'll run around for an hour, chasing each other and tagging each other in the most unstructured game ever created. There's no need for parents. There's no need to keep score. There's no need to even determine a winner. You just play the game until you get sick of it, at which point you move on to something else. I'm not sure why, but games like that, games that we ourselves used to play, freak out the parents of my generation. It's inconceivable to them that their kids would do anything without their direct influence. And that's why things like playground equipment and unstructured games like tag and dodgeball are going away. "Safety" and "self-esteem" are just easy scapegoats for the real truth, which is today's parents are scared shitless that their kids... might not need them.

I don't know where all this insecurity originated and why it seems to be unique to the parents of my generation. Is it that we wish our own parents would have spent more time playing with us that we feel compelled to make sure our kids never spend a joyful minute outside our presence? Is it the reports of kids being stolen out of their own yards are making us too scared to let our kids leave our personal guardianship for any reason whatsoever? What is it that makes games like soccer, where literally dozens of kids can be supervised all at once, more preferable to games like tag where kids can supervise themselves? Why on earth is our generation unique in vilifying ourselves by vilifying the things we used to love? And where will it end? How much of our children's lives will we attempt to structuralize with no thought given to what we're depriving them of?

New stuff coming, I swear

Okay, so remember the essay I alluded to in my last post, saying I hoped to have it up by the weekend... this past weekend as a matter of fact?

Well... it's still not there, and I know I haven't updated much in the last month, and that's becaues all my effort has been going toward this essay - plus other paid work as well which obviously takes priority. Well the essay, which recounts a weekend spent camping, hiking and reveling at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire took on a life of its own. It's nearly as long as one of my Road Trip Weeks. In fact it will end up being the longest thing on this website after the Road Trip once it's up. As of now it's only in rough draft. I'll be editing and webpaging it over the next week at which point I'll post it for your reading pleasure. Sorry to all my devoted fans (all six of you) who I know I have been neglecting. I hope the end result will be worth your wait.

But hang in there. I swear it's coming.

RV People

HEY EVERYBODY, THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM A MUCH LONGER ESSAY THAT I'M WORKING ON AND WILL EVENTUALLY POST (HOPEFULLY BY THIS WEEKEND) ON MY WEBSITE. BUT I JUST SPENT THE BETTER PART OF THE EVENING WORKING ON AND REWORKING THIS SECTION OF IT. AND I'M SO FILLED WITH PASSION AND IRE ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW THAT I FELT COMPELLED TO OFFER IT UP FOR APPRAISAL AND COMMENT... AND RIDICULE IF IT COMES TO THAT.


As you have probably gathered by now, I harbor quite a large reservoir of contempt for people in RV's. But more what it is, is an unbridled hatred of the people I refer to in my road trip travelogue as "interstate tourists":

These are the types of people who get annoyed that there isn't an interstate going straight through the middle of Yellowstone Park. Everywhere they go, they zoom in at 65m.p.h. and hop out of the car with the look of people who expect to see the Second Coming of Christ at every rest stop... They never stay long enough to take something in. They never actually look at anything except through the viewfinder of their camcorder. And they never spend the time seeking out those special nuances of an area that can't be described in a guidebook. They stick to the interstates where they never have to go more than thirty minutes between rest stops with bathrooms and Burger Kings.

RV people epitomize this travel ethic. Rather than looking at a road trip as an adventure, as the exploration of something new and exciting, with all the minor risks and aggravations go along with it, they prefer instead to insulate themselves inside a tin can from anything that they potentially didn't plan for. Using an RV insures that these people will never have to go out and interact with whatever environment they drive through - whether it be small town life, kitschy roadside amusement, or the great open outdoors. Instead they come to accommodating "campgrounds" by the droves where they park, hook up power and sewage lines and then spend the rest of the time sitting inside their antiseptic, air conditioned environment, watching cable TV, observing what they consider to be nature through a pane of glass, and talking about mindless idiotic jabber - primarily about the features and benefits of their RV's. When they do venture out of their Winnebago-designed ecosystem and into the out of doors, they make sure to pull out their state of the art comfy lawn chairs and extend the RV's built-in awning so that neither the heat of the sun nor the cool of the ground will disrupt the hermetically-sealed utopia they've worked so hard, and paid so much, to create.

I know what you're probably thinking: What do you care? You don't have to travel like that if you don't want to. So why are you bitching? I'm bitching because more and more I see the traveling culture leaning the way of the RV interstate tourist. More and more campgrounds clamoring for income are doing whatever they can to attract caravans of RV'ers of whom they can charge more than they would a mere family with a tent. And as more and more businesses cater to the RV crowd, more and more people begin to think that this is an acceptable form of vacationing, so they eagerly buy or rent the latest model. Without even needing to acquire a special license, they drive these lumbering, gas-guzzling behemoths down roads far too narrow for them to be traveling on (if only they would stick to the interstate), slow down traffic behind them, force oncoming traffic to ride the shoulder, make hundred-point K-turns into every parking lot they come to, then stink up perfectly good camping real estate with their gas fumes and sewage releases.

But those are just pet peeves. My real hatred comes from the fact that as I see it, RV's, RV people and RV culture are slowly but surely killing the allure and legacy of the great American Road Trip - and to a broader extent, destroying the very definition of "America" itself. The whole concept behind an RV is to be able to get to a destination as fast as you can so you can set up your temporary home away from home, then never leave its comforts unless absolutely necessary. You have no reason to go out and eat at Big Ed's Barbeque Pit because you can just boil up the spaghetti you bought at Wal Mart in your kitchen/bathroom. There's no need to buy a Coke from Mom & Pop's Roadside Convenience Store because you left home with your refrigerator-on-wheels fully stocked. In an RV, the only people you need to interact with are the ones you brought with you; other RV people who wander over to compare RV bells, whistles and penis sizes; and the occasional minimum wage amusement park worker who you'll viciously berate without pity for making the line for the roller coaster move too slow.

And as more and more people adopt this mentality, the very notion of Roadside, America will begin to die. As people stop passing through these little towns with their local fairs, attractions and colorful people, opting instead for the super-fast, super-convenient interstate, eventually there won't be any local fairs, attractions or colorful people to see. America will cease to be a vast and detailed canvas with wonderful things to see and experience everywhere you look. Instead it will become an uninspiring connect-the-dots of destinations, with busy divided highways zipping people from one dot to the next. And as the spaces in between those dots slowly languish and die, the land will be bought up by investors who will in turn build malls, condos and corporate parks, so that in time everywhere you go in this country will look exactly like everywhere else.

Already this is happening. The interstates alone - and the airlines for that matter - have helped perpetrate this slow death. Just ask anybody who traveled the famous Route 66 back in its heyday. Every little town along a major cross-country route had a name and an identity. Every hardworking person and every struggling family business had a real and genuine opportunity to carve out their own little niche in the American economy and way of life. Some accomplished this goal by providing a decent hamburger and soft-serve ice cream. Others did it by offering a cheap and cozy place to sleep. Still others did it by constructing items of a somewhat dubious nature (The World's Largest Buffalo, a giant cannon designed to shoot its creator into space, or even just a very tall pile of cans) and heralding their existence to anyone who might be interested - which they often were. Roadside, America used to define this country. It used to be one of the many definitions collectively affirming America as the land of opportunity where truly anything was possible.

These days giant corporations are ever trying to narrow down that list of definitions - preferably to ones that also contain their logo. These people deal in destinations and their very existence depends on people, hordes of people, arriving at those destinations day in and day out. They don't have time for the traveling public to poke around in Tractor Falls, Nebraska or Twineville, South Dakota. They need these people to get to their destinations, their destinations, as fast as possible and stay there for as long as possible before they race back home. And somehow they've succeeded in convincing most Americans that they also don't have time to waste between one destination and the next. Too many people have bought into the corporation-created notion of the destination reigning supreme - and nobody more so than RV people. And as more and more people adopt the mindset of the interstate tourist, the Great American Road Trip will die. And when that happens, the very definition of America, the very thing that made us great, will die along with it.

So fuck RV people and the cumbersome pieces of shit they rode in on.