I just got done watching my Yankees clobber the Phillies in the 9th and I am totally exhausted so this post might be a little shorter. It’s actually not even very late, but with day light savings switching back last night it feels like it’s two in the morning. Oh sorry, for those of my readers in Arizona, daylight savings is something we do in America…get with the program or we’re gonna give you back to Mexico!
Has anybody noticed how sad trick-or-treating has become? Nobody even goes anymore. It could just be that I live in Orem where the population has continued to get older from the moment I graduated high school. I swear I must have been the last graduating class in this city; what happened to all the kids?
The saddest thing about Halloween (sorry again Arizona…Dia de Los Muertos), however, is not the number of kids out trick-or-treating, it is that nobody can go out alone anymore. It amazes me how much society has changed in the last ten or so years; if kids are away from their parents for more than four minutes there is a global crisis and Amber Alerts are sent halfway across the Universe. When I was a kid, I would disappear into the orchard with my friends and not come back until dinner time the following day and nobody would miss me. Okay so that was a little exaggerated but you get the point.
It’s not that I think parents have gotten more paranoid, although that does have a little to do with it. I am not sure where they came from or how it happened, but there truly are more deadbeats, drug dealers, sexual predators, junkies, mouth-breathers, bottom feeders, misfits, gang bangers, ciphers, hobos, goths, cutters, pedophiles, two-bit hussies, and “O’Doyles” in the world than there used to be. By the time my kids are old enough to trick-or-treat I am probably going to need a concealed weapons permit to take my kids to “trunk-or-treat” in the church parking lot. Am I alone here or have things truly gotten worse since we were all kids?
Sometime between today and my next post, which I am thinking will be about how all moms who decide to go back to school somehow think wheelie backpack are in style, we need to come up with a plan to go back to the way things used to be…no I don’t mean we should all start renting Gremlins on VHS from Albertson’s every weekend. I just want my kids to have some of the same fun experiences I had, like a paper route, without me having to call in the live 5 viper to run chopper surveilance over the area.
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We DID miss you Jared. I just wasn't worried about you, because well - you were in the orchard! And was that supposed to be YOUR paper route?
ReplyDeleteA-freakin-men brotha! Although I'm a total paranoid about my kids going outside alone. I'm getting help and I think it's paying off. For real though, just the thought of a real O'Doyle would make me run to the mountains. It would depend on the O'Doyle you were referring too. The O'Doyle's from It's Always Sunny or the O'Doyle from Billy Madison.
ReplyDeleteI think it might just be utah man, I remember lots of trick or treaters in philly last I was there. But ya I agree that the times they are a-changing and not for the better, I miss when a grown man could wear zubaz to the grocery store and nobody would think a thing of it
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