The dumbest I ever got was not getting the "Nut ‘N Honey" commercial. Somehow I wasn't able to decode the play on words. I've never forgiven myself for that monumental lack of brainpower. However, it's nothing 67 straight rounds of CrossFire (almost choking on 4 of the BB's) or an all-nighter on the Tournament Table and a tall glass of the purple stuff wouldn't cure.
But for as dumb as I was, I never got lost in the goddamn supermarket or at the mall. Or even at a theme park, for that matter.
If you are a historian of the 1980's, as I am, and as Corey Haim and Richard Grieco have become, then you can remember those parents who put a leash on their kids: the kid leash. Those kids were too young to know what humiliation meant, but they sure knew what it felt like. And I never wanted to be one of those kids.
Sure, I'd wander outside of my mother's direct line of sight, but I never had the un-dropped balls to make a B-line for the frozen section when my mom was still perusing the household cleaning aisle. I knew my limits. Like when I took the PSAT: I knew if I blamed it on my calculator dying, then an 880 wouldn't sound so bad.
My motto was, "Go ye far, but stay ye close; thwart the threat of the kid leash with tactical wandering."
Somehow I could barley read picture books, but I knew how to write a fashionable motto in Old English styling. And it worked. Whenever I'd be tempted to wander like a truly damned child, I'd just remember my motto, chant it silently for 30 seconds, sniff my thumb to see if my butt always smelled like that, and then return to the general line of sight my mother used to survey for her disobedient children.
Go ye far, but stay ye close; thwart the threat of the kid leash with tactical wandering.
Even amongst children there is a hierarchy in place. And kids that breast fed for upwards of a half-decade and kids stuck on the kid leash were on the same level--the bottom level. In the pyramid of dumb kids, even crusty-snot-bubble-face was ahead of kids tethered to a stroller or a parental arm on the kid-leash; they were truly an ill-fated lot.
I knew in thick crowds to stay close to my parents because I knew that delinquent wandering would bring consequences. The threat of the kid leash was always there.
The closest I ever came to getting a kid leash sentencing was when I was at the mall in the Christmas season of '89, just months before the dawn of a new decade. I was getting cocky, thinking that I was going to make it into the 90's without ever having to wear a kid leash. But as my mother went into a department store next to Foot Locker, I spotted Dippin' Dots, which at the time truly had the marketing legs to stand out as the ice cream of the future.
As the mountains of balled bits of ice cream baited me in, I was suppressing the urge to chant my motto. I'd take a step and then hear Go ye far before stifling the rest of the motto. Then I'd take another step. And a little bit more of the motto would creep into my conscious.
But before I knew what was happening, before I realized I didn't have tradeable currency to give the man behind the Dippin' Dots counter, I felt five Lee Press-On nails dig into my right shoulder. It was my mother, and she had seen me wandering away. Like a good parent, her peripheral vision alerted her that the dumbest of her brood had bolted.
And kids are even dumber these days. People are hatching some super dum-dums.
I think kids might behave a little better these days if they always had the threat of the kid leash hanging over them. There would sure be a hell of a lot more tactical wandering if this was the case.
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