Ruining Things for Stupid Reasons
I am not Jill.
Okay, now that we have that cleared up, let’s talk about ruining things for stupid reasons.
Exhibit B:
(I started with “B” instead of “A” because “B” is the first letter of “Ballzooka.”)
Exhibit B is the Ballzooka.
Jealous? (of this picture I found on the internet?)
The Ballzooka is a beloved, discontinued Nerf gun. I had one. I had one, and it was awesome. But, as I got older and ventured further into my teenage years, I (quite naturally) stopped shooting friends and relations with Nerf guns and instead started running around the woods, pretending to shoot friends and relations with fake, plastic guns.
When shooting friends and relations with fake, plastic guns, one desires, of course, to have the most “realistic” fake gun possible. For the Downs boys — rugged outdoors types who spent their free time building things like trebuchets — that meant painstakingly crafting custom sniper rifles (and ghillie suits). For me, that meant covering a squirt gun in black spray paint.
One day, I noticed that back end of the Ballzooka bore an uncanny resemblance to an MP5 sub-machine gun. (I was familiar with the MP5 because my mom let me play Rainbow Six — a videogame in which the player searches whimsical, brightly colored worlds for six lost Rainbow Fairies and then shoots them with an MP5.)
So, reasoning that I was through with stupid, kiddie Nerf crap, I broke off the “ball” portion of the Ballzooka, and spray painted the rest of the gun black.
Identical, right?
I regret nothing.
Wait, that didn’t come out right. I meant to say, I regret ruining what has become a much-sought-after vintage Nerf gun in order to “create” a completely unconvincing fake sub-machine gun that I never really used anyway because just a few short years I discovered Airsoft replicas.
I would say that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, but it doesn’t come close to the time when, as a six year old, I traded a friend of mine a Kirby Puckett rookie card for a plastic hand grenade. (I must’ve always had a thing for fake-killing people. I blame society.) The worst part wasn’t even that Kirby Puckett was my favorite baseball player. (As a Minnesotan child of the ’80s could I have had another?)
The worst part was that approximately ten minutes after my friend left, I discovered that the grenade had been stuffed with a used pair of whitey tighties.
Boom.
Later that day, I’d determined that the only way to get any value whatsoever out of the trade would be to unleash the same “surprise” on an unsuspecting sibling. Knowing my brothers were in the basement, I walked over to the upstairs laundry chute and tossed the grenade down.
It wasn’t a great plan. Even if everything had gone perfectly — my brothers hear the grenade come down, open it, recoil in disgust, and then projectile vomit all over each other — I still wouldn’t have been there to see it. But, needless to say, everything did not go perfectly.
The grenade didn’t even make it down the chute. You see, our house had the worst laundry-chute design in the world. First, the upstairs chute was tiny, just wide enough to accommodate (barely) a single, flattened-out gym sock — not the comforters, coat hangers, and board games that we routinely shoved down. Second, the shape was all wrong.
The easist way to describe this is, as always, in terms of Tetris.
Most laundry chutes are designed in a straight, vertical line — just like the Tetris shape that everyone loves.
Yeah, that one!
But our laundry chute was designed like the Tetris shape that everyone hates.
Yeah, that one! (As opposed to that other one)
And so, as you’ll see from the following diagram, my plan was destined for failure from the start.
Where was I again? Oh yeah, ruining things for stupid reasons.
For years, the official Reini Wiffle ball home plate has been the bottom of a tee-ball tee (with the “tee” part removed). I’m sure I tore the tee off at about nine years old after deciding that hitting off of tees was for stupid babies. Little did I know at that time that hitting off a tee would become a regular part of high school baseball practice, and it would’ve been really handy to have had a functioning tee at home. But then, as an arrestedly developed young adult, I played a ton of Wiffle ball, and I was glad to have the tee-less plate again. But now that my kids are approaching tee-ball age, I kind of wish they had a tee. But in a few years, they’ll think hitting off a tee is for stupid babies.
So, I guess the lesson is buy two of everything, including iPads.
– Reinman
LOL I could not help but laugh, sorry. rofl but it makes me remember all that I tore up to make it better rofl so I thought
Yes! Maybe it has something to do with kids wanting to control a small part of their world — to put their individual stamp on something.
That, or kids are just irresponsible little cretins.
I would like one of those iPads, please. I promise not to let our sticky-fingered kids touch it.
You should be more worried about your husband’s inclination to “improve” them.
Outstanding. I read this om my small blackberry screen. So I was scrolling just a few lines at a time. I scrolled to the “piece everyone hates” and almost died. Thanks for a good, nostalgic, stupid laundry chute laugh.
I like to imagine that the remodel enclosed and preserved that chute, and future generations will “discover” it like a hidden Peruvian temple chamber. They’ll find Topple and determine it to be some sort of idol — or a ceremonial hat.
Kids.
Did you once give us a tutorial on how to properly lay our underwear completely flat before sending it down the chute, or am I imagining that?
Re-reading this post, I was reminded that when we finally tore down and remodeled that section of the house, we found EVERYTHING you listed in the diagram lodged in that exact spot. In other words, this post is not only funny, it is 100 percent true. Please send me one Ninja Processor.
You didn’t really find the underwear grenade, did you? (I’ve actually wondered over the years if my anecdote was somewhat apocryphal.)
I am mildly perturbed by the lack of giant walking robots in the banner of this blogg. In fact, the occurrence of giant walking robots in the banner has decreased, quite alarmingly, by over 99.9%! When can the discerning readers of this blogg expect to see giant walking robots again?
Do not try to trick us. We can tell.
Done. (And, truth be told, it didn’t take much convincing…)
Haha, TNG! Those guys was dum.
He is smart. He will make the banner strong.
I almost died from laughing. I was reading the post outloud to Mark, and I couldn’t even finish I was laughing so hard.