Backyard Fun
This is a continuation of my previous entry http://ryanmcbride.blogspot.com/2004/12/turning-over-whole-pile-of-leaves.html
Yeah so i mean my childhood was a little different per se.....ok, a lot different. Maybe thats why i can slap a guarentee on the fact that you don't know anyone like me. My childhood was seriously manditory fun. People always use that cliche: "If your life was a book, would anyone want to read it?" Well my life is a blog and yes, people do read it--thanks for your support by the way. Now that that taster's choice moment is over, i want to introduce you to the hub of my childhood. The swingset. Most kids in the neighborhood had or knew of kids that had bigger, better swingsets than mine but none of that mattered. In the word of swingsets, mine was king. The best part is that it didn't even have swings on it or really anything for that matter except one ring at the end of a chain. It had monkey bars and the bars where normal people hang swings from. We hung a birdfeeder. The swingset was dark green and covered in rust. I would put money on the fact that the swingset contained lead paint. This is a blog about how to make the best out of being poor and having a shitty swingset.
One of the uses of the swingset was as a soccer goal. If you kicked the ball just right, you could hit the bird feeder and it would just spray seeds in the goalies face. Behind our soccer goal was a "net" and by net i mean rusty fence with pricker bushes climbing up it. Behind the fense was compost pile and lines of ugly bushes. Basically all the glory of scoring a goal was negated when you had to wipe rotten egg shells and prickers off the ball afterwards. I remember this other game that we would play. You would ride your bike as fast as you could toward the swingset. Right before you hit the fence behind the swingset you would jump off and grab onto the monkey bars and watch your bike slam into pricker bushes and other things that suck. This was a modified and "safer version of the original game where instead of grabbing onto the monkeybars, you would grab onto the ring and just swing really high into the air. This game ended when the chain on the ring broke when he swung on it and ended up flying into the compost heap. Everyone laughed at him because laughter heals all wounds. Actually we just laughed cause he got hurt. When we would play football in the backyard, the swingset was our field goal. This worked great except for the fact that every time you kicked a fieldgoal the ball would slam off our neighbors alluminum shed making the loudest noise ever. Either that or it would land in the neighbors garden taking a few tomato plants with it. We also played basketball on grass in the backyard and used the gaps in the monkey bars as our hoop. It had no backboard cause everyone knows shooting bank shots is for pussies. Another game that we played on it was we would time people on how fast they could run across the monkey bars. Yes, i did just say that. The best is when peoples' foot slipped and they landed on their nuts on the bar.....oh yeah and then they fell like 6 feet. hahaha. But don't worry, we stopped after the first kid got a bruised spine and went to the hospital. I mean c'mon, we knew our limits. When we finally did get a swing for the swingset (re-read that sentence) oh the irony......anyways......It was short lived, we had a fat kid that sat on it and the bar broke and he fell on his ass and rust just poured out of the broken pipe above and onto his face and in his hair. His face was orange for like a week and he probably got lead poisoning. I drive by my old house every now and then and as far as i know, the "swingset" still exists. It has to be about 25 years old by now if not older cause it it was built before i was born. If for some reason it was torn down, it was because of these reasons A) board of safety took it down B) The new residents of 17 hayes road couldn't handle how much their new swingset ruled! C) They took it down so it would become marytr like. Basically the moral value you can take away from this is just try to make the best out of a bad situation. Kinda seems like my life story.
Yeah so i mean my childhood was a little different per se.....ok, a lot different. Maybe thats why i can slap a guarentee on the fact that you don't know anyone like me. My childhood was seriously manditory fun. People always use that cliche: "If your life was a book, would anyone want to read it?" Well my life is a blog and yes, people do read it--thanks for your support by the way. Now that that taster's choice moment is over, i want to introduce you to the hub of my childhood. The swingset. Most kids in the neighborhood had or knew of kids that had bigger, better swingsets than mine but none of that mattered. In the word of swingsets, mine was king. The best part is that it didn't even have swings on it or really anything for that matter except one ring at the end of a chain. It had monkey bars and the bars where normal people hang swings from. We hung a birdfeeder. The swingset was dark green and covered in rust. I would put money on the fact that the swingset contained lead paint. This is a blog about how to make the best out of being poor and having a shitty swingset.
One of the uses of the swingset was as a soccer goal. If you kicked the ball just right, you could hit the bird feeder and it would just spray seeds in the goalies face. Behind our soccer goal was a "net" and by net i mean rusty fence with pricker bushes climbing up it. Behind the fense was compost pile and lines of ugly bushes. Basically all the glory of scoring a goal was negated when you had to wipe rotten egg shells and prickers off the ball afterwards. I remember this other game that we would play. You would ride your bike as fast as you could toward the swingset. Right before you hit the fence behind the swingset you would jump off and grab onto the monkey bars and watch your bike slam into pricker bushes and other things that suck. This was a modified and "safer version of the original game where instead of grabbing onto the monkeybars, you would grab onto the ring and just swing really high into the air. This game ended when the chain on the ring broke when he swung on it and ended up flying into the compost heap. Everyone laughed at him because laughter heals all wounds. Actually we just laughed cause he got hurt. When we would play football in the backyard, the swingset was our field goal. This worked great except for the fact that every time you kicked a fieldgoal the ball would slam off our neighbors alluminum shed making the loudest noise ever. Either that or it would land in the neighbors garden taking a few tomato plants with it. We also played basketball on grass in the backyard and used the gaps in the monkey bars as our hoop. It had no backboard cause everyone knows shooting bank shots is for pussies. Another game that we played on it was we would time people on how fast they could run across the monkey bars. Yes, i did just say that. The best is when peoples' foot slipped and they landed on their nuts on the bar.....oh yeah and then they fell like 6 feet. hahaha. But don't worry, we stopped after the first kid got a bruised spine and went to the hospital. I mean c'mon, we knew our limits. When we finally did get a swing for the swingset (re-read that sentence) oh the irony......anyways......It was short lived, we had a fat kid that sat on it and the bar broke and he fell on his ass and rust just poured out of the broken pipe above and onto his face and in his hair. His face was orange for like a week and he probably got lead poisoning. I drive by my old house every now and then and as far as i know, the "swingset" still exists. It has to be about 25 years old by now if not older cause it it was built before i was born. If for some reason it was torn down, it was because of these reasons A) board of safety took it down B) The new residents of 17 hayes road couldn't handle how much their new swingset ruled! C) They took it down so it would become marytr like. Basically the moral value you can take away from this is just try to make the best out of a bad situation. Kinda seems like my life story.
posted by mcbride at 6:19 PM
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