The Kickball Dilemma

I have tons of friends who can’t stand the Adult Kickball League and I can see why, people from NOVA clogging up our happy hour beerways with their jackassery. I don’t share that opinion. (If there ever is a movie made of this blog, they’ll have have to film me last week ago with some friends where we portrayed two rival kickball leagues in a mock West Side Story dance fight)

Bill Maher (probably the funniest asshole in America) went on a long diatribe about what has come to be known as the “Rejuvenile” movement. I’m paraphrasing Bill, but basically he said grow up already. I don’t really agree with that and not just because I live in a particularly fragile glass house. I was a “rejuvenile” when “rejuvenile” wasn’t cool. Scratch “cool”, substitute “named by the media”.

I don’t have a problem with it because it brings back what is what I think is the best parts of childhood: carefree whimsy and complete dedication to fun. It may be a bit forced, but my experience at the toy store taught me that’s better than the other childhood traces that we see more naturally in adults.

We are born selfish creatures, reaching and eating everything in our grasp because we have no reason to believe it’s not there for us and crying when we’re not allowed to do what we want. We are suppose to grow out of it, but we don’t if we’re not taught out of it by our parents or by experience, we don’t, and we do it as adults. Trust me, I’ve worked in retail.

If I was to trace it, it would go back to parental battle picking. If you always pay your child’s sales tax they’ll be 14 looking for you to pay it when you're not even in the store. If you reward your child for everything, they’ll become adults that expect rewards just for being decent human beings. If you let them they’ll keep screaming at the top of their lungs when they don’t get what they want way into their forties, trust me. Education doesn’t seem to matter, the people that have yelled the loudest have usually been doctors, interestingly enough.

But the whimsicality gets beaten out (psychologically) first by a parental desire to “mature” you until puberty rears it’s hormone addled head, when you do it all by yourself. But you miss it, eventually and it manifest itself, cloaked in faux irony, in action figures, old board and video games and God help us, kickball.