Fun in the Sun (until you go to the Hospital)

Slip ‘n Slide – If you didn’t have a pool, Slip ‘n Slide was the next best thing. Actually, compared to a pool, Slip ‘n Slide was like swimming in a puddle of shit – but it was better than running around like a fairy in a sprinkler. What made Slip ‘n Slide so awesome wasn’t so much the slipping or the sliding, but how to convince one of your friends to do something as dangerous as possible involving the Slip n’ Slide. “Let’s see who can slide the furthest standing up!!” “I bet you and Jimmy can’t slide down at the same time!!” We eventually thought up the best way to get the most out of our Slip ‘n Slide – we put it on a hill. Physics was not our strong suite at the tender age of 7, and we sure as fuck didn’t have adult supervision. So we found out if you get a nice downhill sprint going and hit the slide in a sweet headfirst dive, you go really fast. That is, until you hit the end of said slide. That’s where all that momentum stopped, and you ate a face full of mud and grass, lost a lot skin, and separated a vertebrae or two. We even got one of those shitty knockoffs with the little pool at the end, but you just shot like a cannon off of the end of that thing. Nothing says summer fun like spending the rest of it in a sling with a separated shoulder!!

Jarts – Also known as Lawn Darts, or Satan’s Javelin. These things were awesome. You may as well have given us a set of Ginsu knives to play with. This game was supposed to be similar to horse shoes. There was a yellow ring, you put it on the ground, and you got points if your dart landed in it. But I don’t know any kid who played that way. We played everyone’s favorite, “Throw it as high as you can in the air, and see who ends up with a giant metal dart embedded in their skull.” If you didn’t get out of the way, well, that’s what we call natural selection people: “Jarts – Thinning out the numbers of dumb and slow children everywhere.” We actually figured out that if you throw them by the handle, over the shoulder, with a similar motion to throwing a football, you could get them to stick into the trunk of a tree……or another child’s thigh. I think that is when they sent this out:

I believe they used my actual likeness for this illustration. I looked so innocent in my Buster Browns, even if I did have a weapon in my hand. About 8 years ago, after my grandparents died, we were cleaning out the house and found these in the basement. The first thing me and my cousin did was take them outside and chuck one of those fuckers as high as we could in the air.  He was 24, I was 23.  It was our 21 Gun Salute - to our youth and our Grandparents who were kind enough to buy us things to hurt ourselves with.