#571 Party-pooper

At some point I guess I crossed over that threshold of age into what I always abhorred in my parents.
I became a party-pooper, a fuddy-duddy. Perhaps it happened when I had a kid of my own. All those romping and crazy good times of my youth evaporated into the phrase, “lucky I survived.”
I once emceed an event and really connected with the youth involved because I tried to get the crowd to go wild. At another event a couple of nights later, I tried to get the crowd to simmer down. A youth called out that I sucked.
From hero to goat.
The difference was, in the event that I sucked, I had to exercise some authority lest the invulnerable youth involved got hurt.
The fact that they didn’t care whether they got hurt was beside the point.
I cared because I foresaw that their parents—should serious injury actually occur—would jump in with a team of lawyers and put my organization through a legal moshpit. One that would leave us smarting in areas where the sun may not but colonoscopies normally do shine.
And the funny thing was, the actions I was preventing—slam dancing, stage diving and crowd surfing—were actually actions I wouldn’t mind doing.
I remember a game we played in college called “dinosaur,” which was a definite precursor of slam dancing¾a big, mass, semi-violent banging together of bodies that was painful but oddly satisfying.
Not satisfying in the way you’re thinking, but satisfying in a sense of connectedness. Of being part of something larger than myself.
A feeling that alienated, angst-ridden youth rarely enjoy.
Sure, stage diving is dangerous. But so are Mount Everest climbing and bungee jumping. Why should one be more socially acceptable than another?
And I suppose the answer is that the spontaneity of stage diving renders it liable to litigation. No forms are signed. No releases of liability.
And that, in a nutshell, is the adult world. Planning for failure. Looking for disaster. What the youth condemn as our “negativity.”
Maturity is, in a word, seeing it before you step in it.
Welcome to the slow-walking land of the fuddy-duddy.
America ya gotta love it