While unfortunately this isn’t real and all in good fun, it’s fucking classic:

[Link to video]

Thanks, Nathan.

I’m generally not a fan of children, strollers and the parents who feel entitled to abuse my peace and personal space with them. That’s not to say I dislike all children and parents; some are nice and whatnot, but I usually prefer to appreciate them from a distance. I don’t want any kiddie cooties.

Recently, I was posed with a dare. Was I a man of conviction, strong and brave enough to leisurely wander about Park Slope—breeder and baby stroller central, while wearing this shirt? Fearless barbarian that I am, I have accepted this challenge.

In professing my fearlessness towards babies and their parents, I was also challenged as to what I would do if faced with the scenario of having insulted enough parents as to incite a mob of angry procreators, attacking me and threatening to break my kneecaps with their strollers.

The answer is simple. I would grab one of their children by the feet and swing them like a club, bludgeoning parents left and right, hewing a path to freedom and earning myself a proper dosage of fearful respect. Duh…

This past weekend I went with eight other guys to a paintball course deep in the woods of Vermont. Our group should have been much larger, but several people canceled as punk-ass bitches tend to do. If you’ve never played paintball, you should know that it hurts, sometimes quite a bit. A direct hit from a paint pellet is similar in pain to being snapped hard with a fat rubber band, like those assholes undoubtedly did to you at least once as a child. The plus side to what seems like an extremely lame thing to subject yourself to is your ability to shoot back. It’s warfare, except no one really gets killed. You get to inflict pain on your friends and let your inner Shih-Tzu run wild. Paintball kicks ass.

After going through the obligatory safety speech and marching out into the courses, we split into two teams of four and proceeded to blast each other to high hell. Since there were so few people that day, the rounds were short and at times anticlimactic, but we tried to make the best of it.

After a few rounds, our referee told us that there was another group of eight people coming onto the courses and asked us if we would like to join up with them. We agreed, but immediately started worrying that we were about to get pasted by a crew of off-duty National Guardsmen or police officers. We waited, resigned to whichever bad-ass might show up.

Much to our surprise, our new opponents were a group of middle schoolers. They crossed onto our course, accompanied by some chaperoning parents with more than a little bit of apprehension in their faces. Here we were, a bunch of early thirties men, sweating, swearing and splattered with paint and these kids were being expected to give up their birthday party paintball games in lieu of getting their asses handed to them by a bunch of surly adults. Awesome.

We’d rented our equipment, so we were all carrying guns that were at the low end of the ass-kicking spectrum. These kids, however, were decked out with weapons ranging from good quality to fully automatic death machine. Some of them were sporting body armor, while others had improvised by stuffing pieces of cardboard underneath their clothing. We had no such accoutrements, only the clothes on our backs and an extra nearly twenty years worth of pent-up rage and disappointment. We were ready to kill.

Our first few rounds had the kids pitted against the adults which resulted in a complete bloodbath since many of them were too chickenshit scared to get shot that they rarely fired straight or at all. It was a thrilling fact that, at the shriveled and defunct age of thirty, I was being given the chance to deliver some serious smackdown on children that when I was at their age, would beat the fuck out of me and toss my ass in a dumpster every day at recess. I made it my calling to terminate their asses with extreme prejudice.

After several one-sided rounds, we split up and created two new teams, evenly mixing it up between kids and adults. This led to better action and some surreal moments of running into some area, knowing a twelve year old has got your back. At times we had to yell at them when, finding themselves blessed with some good cover, they made camp and prepared to hide put until the round was over. I would be getting pinned down, trading fire against two people and the kid next to me would be curled up with his gun lying on the ground.

Still, it was a great time. I walked away with several welts that have now blossomed into some beautiful golf ball sized bruises. Personally I think being able to shoot children with paintball guns may be one of the best things to ever happen to me. The only thing that might possibly top it would be shooting old people or maybe midgets.

It’s 11:36 P.M. as I start this post, giving in to the obligatory “Holy fucking shit the Harry Potter book is finally here” craze. Yeah, I’m one of the millions who rank themselves as huge drooling fan. While I happen to be at home getting pasted (South African cabernets, that’s my new thing) rather than standing in line like a tool at the bookstore waiting for midnight, I will admit that come morning, I’ll be running my ass straight to the Barnes & Noble in Union Square where I have a copy reserved.

Fact: I was a children’s librarian for about seven years. While I don’t particularly like children (gross understatement), over those years I developed quite a fondness for intelligent, artistic and creative children’s literature. In short, I kind of liked the really good stuff.

However, at the time, I refused to give in to the Harry Potter frenzy. People were crazy about it, no different than today, but back then it was this new thing cutting into the glory obtained by the tried and true blue ribbon prizewinners like Roald Dahl, my favorite sociopath or C.S. Lewis, the God freak with his pagan lions, satyrs and Turkish delights and others. Truth told, while there were good books, the genre of young adult and children’s literature was in a formulaic rut. The sixties and seventies had introduced a new style, centered on reaching out to those whacked out kids, speaking to them on their level and addressing important issues of the day in hip, “now” style. Authors like Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume and others, while occasionally writing the good book here and there, sucked the life out of children’s literature. Instead of original ideas, kids were served up problems, straight from rap sessions of child therapists presented with a neat little story to flesh it out, tie it up and present it in a nice little package. It was as if the book publishers were frightened of children and encouraged only books that were grounded in real life issues, be they realistic or thinly cloaked in some pseudo fantasy/sci-fi bubblegum bullshit so as not to foster any flights of real fantasy but above all, to impress upon them the all powerful edict: Today’s Kids Are Really Fucked Up.

When I was growing up nearly all the books, force-fed me by the pathetic adults that didn’t know what to do with me featured children, who when faced with a serious social, pharmaceutical, family, sexual, whatever problem, overcome and deal with the issues in an occasionally funny, but heartwarming and serious way. Could such a formula help kids recognize issues and open lines of dialog with adults and peers? Yeah, I guess…sorta. More importantly, does it reinforce the fallacy that in today’s world, to be real, to be of consequence, to be a hero, you gotta be fucked up and deal with drama?

These “Theradramas” were everywhere. Whenever anyone didn’t know what to do with me, invariably at some stage in the process, I’d end up with a Judy Blume book with the hopes that there’d be some miraculous epiphany that would save my parents from actually having to understand me. It sucked fucking donkey balls.

To have an imagination, to have flights of fantasy that serve no constructive purpose but to entertain is dangerous. “Dear God! There’s no fucking moral to the story! If I let my kid read this, why, he’ll end up a gay, crack smoking amputee! Myrtle, fetch me the Judy Bloome’s, God-Dammit!”

Whatever happened to the belief that reading fiction is a pleasurable exercise in escaping from life’s problems? I’m not sure who was behind the idea that children and young adult fiction without a serious moral backbone in it, without addressing real issues is heretical fluff, but whoever made that decision needs to be drawn and quartered. Their head needs to be mounted on a spike as a sign to out of touch parents everywhere that their children’s minds are not theirs to limit with the mundane and the practical at the expense of fantasy, imagination and enjoyment.

That’s why I love the Harry Potter books. That’s why I love the books of Phillip Pullman. They’re not trying to teach you about teen pregnancy, drug addiction or alcoholic dads. They’re not trying to get you to talk to your deadbeat parents about whats going on inside because your never going to do it anyway because they suck and no bullshit pulp novel is going to change that. The books are not about problems, it’s about getting you away from them, if only for a few scant hours of your miserable life. That’s what makes these books great.

If you’re not a fan already, I suggest you pick up a Potter book today. If you can, make your parents buy it for you. Likely they owe you for the shit they made you read all those years ago. Do it, you should at least know what you missed out on.