Baby Boomers, X-generation, and Their Weak Helmet-Wearing Offspring
By Ike Hill

Today there are more regulations to save the stupid children than ever. How ever did I survive? Not once did I get caught in my grandpa's automatic garage door. Now there are safeguards to make sure even the slowest most befuddled child cannot get a mild concussion on the closing doors of parking doom. If you can't dodge a garage door moving at approximately one mile per hour, why haven't you died from drinking bleach? Oh yeah! They have those damn kitchen safety latches on all the cabinet doors now.

I recall my parents making me drive home when I was 13. They were trashed, and I was the next best thing to the mandatory fine of twenty-five hundred dollars (for the poor) or five grand-plus (for the rich) just to make it all go away.

I didn't mind. It was great to hear them hit on each other as I challenged the up coming yellow\orange\red lights with little care. But what an earful I would get from the slurring twosome if I even slightly clipped another car!

Seriously, if I knew better, I would have insisted upon a better allowance. As it stood, I was in the wrong for driving a dangerous vehicle with reckless abandon. Whew! Learned my lesson. Never happen again. Promise!

I was pretty much on my own. "Here's a key, you cute little latch-key spawn. Let yourself in after school and clean the house." Again with the responsibility. Not only watch myself, but clean the place up or else! And yes, I did walk up-hill to school both ways in weather below freezing everyday, 345 days a years. We only got harvest days and bereavement leave off.

As a child I had no special pansy-ass equipment like bike helmets. I did have my own private thresher, though. Every kid should have a stainless steel thresher. There was no real fear of cyanide in my Halloween candy; no warning signs on anything that might be even a little poisonous. I ate loads of candy from complete strangers. "A stranger offered you candy?" my mom would ask with great doubt. "Where is it? Did you eat it all? I want some you stingy little bastard!" But hell, in her day she was lucky to have a bicycle with two wheels, and a nice stone plate from which to eat her food.

How did I make it to the age I'm at now? I still find myself dreaming of a quick body cleansing like drinking a few ounces of smooth bleach.

Hell, I mix a little ammonia and bleach for a nice little wake-me-up on mornings after a bender like this one. I still won't get hit in the head by the garage door and be even a little dazed. Pissed? Sure.

Alright so I get jacked in the head by the garage door, should I spend the rest of my life in the head trauma ward? No, I get to live out the rest of my days wearing a Lance Armstrong approved bicycle helmet just in case there's a wall out there plotting to get me. Where was that kind of thinking when my little cousin dropped a bowling ball on my mellon when I was twelve? I went into the seventh grade knowing the guy on the one-dollar bill was the first president of the U.S., and that Benjamin Franklin was the 100th President and that Samuel P. Chase was our 10,000th president.

I'm damn happy to be able to recall those facts today knowing that I never got my childhood helmet!

- www.KCDrinker.com - 2004 ©

Eisenhower ‘Ike’ Hill is a high altitude native of Colorado Springs, CO. After extensive blackouts, he now runs guns to fuel the Missouri Border Wars near Kansas City, MO.  He is fully credited for the theory of, "Complete a sentence, and take a shot of whiskey." In his spare time, which is a lot, he enjoys dressing as an (Irish) Catholic priest and hearing the confessions of hot chicks.