The Chou Life

LOL….p0wn3d!!!

Do you know what a barrel shroud is?
I believe it is the shoulder thing that goes up.
No, it’s not.

this is a barrel shroud….actually

I don’t understand people sometimes….well, alot of times; especially when I’m trying to read lips or when I’m being talked at by 2 or more supervisors at the same time or when I’m asked to help with housework and “huh, what babe? I can’t hear you,” you know what I’m talking about. But anyways, I get this chain mail that says “Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Childhood in black and white“. Apparently, the author feels that I’m too young to understand this email…so forgive me if I have been mistaken. Maybe you will understand me better if you read the included chain mail (below) before reading the rest of my post.

Obviously there is nothing wrong with reminiscing, but for me, this email just raised some of these questions. Maybe you can share your thoughts with me and tell me that I’m overreacting….which I’m sure I am.

First of all, if yester-year was sooo much better….why didn’t they send this email through the United States Postal Service? If these 40+ers were so active on their dirt hills and lakes…then why are TV characters the only example they can show to create a complete and whole pictorial summation of this outdoors rough and tumble generation? No, you probably wouldn’t die from a bee sting……unless you actually were allergic…and in that case, if you didn’t have benadryl or an epipen you probably could die. You need a cutting board to spread mayo on a piece of bread? And just who is taking these children to the emergency room so often? Could it be the 40+…since they actually have children old enough to play king of the hill? Eating raw hamburger? Ok, even if you don’t get horribly sick from it….that’s just disgusting and as a certified emergency medical professional, I approve this message.

Word to all my old(er) people. Love you all and wouldn’t be alive without you….or have a job

the email:

I think you’ll enjoy it. Whomever wrote this, described childhood to a T.
(Under age 40? You won’t understand.)

You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,
“Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.”

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn’t seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can’t remember getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE .. and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked’s (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can’t recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option – even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can’t recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah … and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played ‘king of the hill’ on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn’t sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn’t act up at the neighbor’s house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof.. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN’T; SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN’T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING.

Pass this to someone and remember that life’s most simple pleasures are very often the best.