Andrews Rants

SKIPPING ROCKS

A week ago I took my kid Ethan to the shooting range for a few hours to knock over pop cans and practice gun safety. When we got home I realized he was sun burned. Now keep in mind we were there for perhaps two hours and were under the same conditions. Ethan has in years past tanned as brown as a nut while I being a red head will burn at the drop of a hat. I’m the proverbial Twinkie when it comes to sunlight. We hadn’t stayed out long enough to even get me slightly red while he looked like a cooked lobster. That’s when I realized he was spending way too much time behind that fool x-box playing Halo 3. I decided to start getting him outdoors more. We tried fishing and that was a bust. I’m the world’s worst fisherman and couldn’t teach anyone else how to fish to save my life. So we tried a nature walk at the local historic park complete with a recreation log fort and a winding trail along the riverbank. I noticed all the smooth stones on the bank and thought here is something we can do. I tried to show him how to skip rocks across the water. Making a competitive game of it would help him understand a small aspect of sportsmanship along with developing hand eye coordination. At the end of an grueling hour of not losing my temper Ethan had mastered the art of flinging the rock directly at the water and exclaiming how this was gay and he wanted to go home and play on line with his little knotty brained friends.

Once again perhaps I’m getting too old but when I was 18 I was outdoors with guns and riding around the county with my best friend George in his pickup or my nova, looking for excitement in a very dull town. Sure we played our share of video games I was a Galaga champ but we also went hiking in the woods, went cruising, blew things up, and lusted after girls among many other things our mothers would have rather we not done. All healthy activities for young boys who were bored. But no, not my kid and evidentially most of the other little numb skulls out there today. If it isn’t on the computer flat screen they are not interested. Today’s youth is so wound up in technology they are losing contact with others of their own age. For instance text messaging, for god’s sake just pick up the phone and talk to someone. I really don’t understand a form of communication that is slow and cumbersome and requires learning a whole new form of language that fails to impart emotion, and tonal inflections. They communicate by e-mail, online, in blogs, chartrooms and forums but they never meet one another. If it keeps up like this we might be looking at our last generation because the little turds will never actually meet in real life and I will never have any grandchildren.

I finally gave up at the riverbank and called it quits. My plan to acclimate the child to the real world rather than the virtual world failed. I guess he will become a pail computer zombie with a large set of thumbs to work the x-box controls. By the way I got 21 skips, pretty darn good don’t you think?