Please don't do this to me at six in the morning, okay? My befuzzled mind took one look at that headline and shut down. The floor is lava? Excuse me? So help me, I actually jerked my feet upwards, took a look down at our hardwood panel floor and confirmed that it was most emphatically not lava. I felt better...a little. Still, there was this nagging "All kids everywhere" business. Apparently I was no kid, nowhere.
I read that headline out to Eva, just to see if she'd kack on it the way I did. Silly me, my wife is kackless: she takes everything in stride...even at six in the morning. "It's a game you play where you can't touch the floor." I looked around my living room in disbelief...flying squirrels could play that game in here, but human beings, even little ones, probably couldn't. At least, not without incurring a small fortune in damages and a spanking time-out.
The top voted comment, contributed by "darwin2500", clarified things.
"Agility-play is a very basic form of play, evolved to train for things like climbing trees and crossing rivers and dodging snakes and etc. The lava floor game is basically just a game where you restrict where you can step so that you have to make difficult or careful movements - basic agility play. Since you need some imaginary reason to not step on the floor, kids tend to converge on lava because it's the most obvious and generic type of dangerous floor."
Humph. Maybe that's why I'm not particularly agile. It simply never occurred to me to clamber all over furniture as part of a game. I was told not to do it at all; doing it "for fun" was thus unfathomable. Also, and I hate to go back on that 'fantasy vs. reality' thing, I was pretty young when I first saw a picture book depicting a volcano eruption. I can still vividly recall a photograph very much like this one:
The floor is lava! Oh, wait, all of us are dead.
Why would I want to even PRETEND this was happening to my house? Seriously, why? I get it, it's just a game kids play. the floor isn't REALLY lava, and yet...that picture shows what happens when the floor actually is lava, and it doesn't look like a game, does it?
There are a few others like me who make themselves known in that thread...but not many. And Reddit skews nerdy. Things like this worry me if I let them. Did I actually have a childhood? I remember one, a pretty damned good one all things considered, but it wasn't like most. And that was pretty much my doing, nobody else's. I almost had to be forcibly ejected from the house when I was eight; after that, I spent my fair share of time outside, certainly more than almost every child does today. Before that, though, I had books and music in abundance, and never felt the need to play "my house is burning down"...
4 comments:
My two girls have played this many many times but their version is the floor is the ocean and it is filled with hungry killer sharks.
Dearest Ken. One of the things that makes you a phenomenal writer is that you are willing to flay, dissect, display, share, bleed and massacre, love and show any and all subjects. And one of the reasons you are the best man in the world for me is that you insist on doing this on yourself as well. I know that you offer me veto on anything that involves me, and I truly appreciate it. I hope I don't use it too often. I try not to.
Not only do you inspect yourself, but you do it so that you can understand. So you show yourself to be who you are, and if there is something to examine you do it, and if you learn from it, so be it. And you are making many people happy by talking to them intelligently, responsibly and by being entertaining. I've been thinking about it over the past little while, and I think that it seems like you are always beating yourself up. It takes a strong man to do what you do. It takes one who is courageous, intelligent, enlightened, sophisticated and wise. It's the only kind of person I could have married. The only one who could make me try to be better. It's not to be around for you - although it is - it's to be around to enjoy you. How could I not want to stick around to enjoy being around someone who doesn't consider his day to be complete unless got me to laugh. Even if it's a horrified laughter - I didn't think you would fart right into the fan...luckily for you, your wife only rarely insists you have to act like a grown up instead of a frat brat.
Ok, so when you pipe up with questions in the middle of the night, and I have not had my second coffee yet....it means that you are truly stumped and need help. you know that both my eyes don't open until at least Timmy's oclock in the morning... But, yes, this one is very common, but what I remembered was much like what Rocketstar's girls like to do. Ocean, and waiting to get rescued, and having to tie our rafts together - that kind of thing. Suddenly, there is lava and houses on fire, and everyone is dead, and why are they playing games where the only thing that COULD POSSIBLY HAPPEN IS THAT EVERYONE DIES!!!!!!!
This is where the wife sighs quite loudly in her head, and why they sometimes occasionally leak out of me. And why, in the very bright, and much too early morning - I try to stop and remember that this man has little to no imagination and takes literal to a place I so rarely see.
But can write me to heaven and back with the power of his words. And he can make me laugh until I'm in so much pain that I literally cry. And that if I explain to him that it's really quite common, he'll understand a little more about me, and I'll understand a little bit more about him. But he'll think about it. Decide whether it's worth sharing, understand that it is and do it in a way that makes us laugh, or cringe, or nod in understanding.
Just in case you were feeling a bit down on yourself.
Thank you for this, love. Thank you very, very much.
I am not down on myself. Not really. It just often seems to me like I miss things everyone else sees, and see things everyone else misses. I was in an almighty hurry to leave childhood behind and 'grow up'...and yet in some ways I haven't yet and might never, you know?
I had a classics teacher in Grade 13, Rev. McCombe his name was. He was an ordained minister, and yet to talk to him, you'd find yourself wondering just what sort of God he worshipped. It came to me over the course of that year that Rev. McCombe worshipped ALL the gods, starting with neolithic cave paintings and working his way forwards in time. He had a particular fascination with Greek mythology, and every day there'd be a handout with a quote or six on it, most of them Greek, and many of them staying with me even now. It was in Rev. McCombe's class that I first came across Socrates and his "the unexamined life is not worth living". I was already keeping a diary at that time, but that was when my dairy became something a little deeper than a daily outpouring of mindless events. I realized I couldn't very well see where I was going without some idea where I'd been, and even at that time it felt as if I'd lived about six lifetimes. Many more since, of course. I don't examine them quite as obsessively as I once did--the life I'm living now, with you, is too wonderful to care overmuch about what went before--and yet every now and then I stumble on a piece of past that begs for some explanation. Why didn't I play much as a child? I mean, I was a solitary little man most of the time, but I wasn't completely without playmates. Only once do I ever recall horsing around with a pair of cousins, jumping up and down on a bed...which promptly broke, and we all caught hell from on high. To me, that was just one more confirmation that the standard brand of fun is dangerous and probably not worth having.
Anyway, love, your kind words mean the world to me. YOU mean the world to me, and I deeply, deeply appreciate your understanding and compassion. I love you.
Why thanks baby :)
One more thing to make the mush fest complete for your readers...
I forgot to say that while I love to travel with you, and we will do almost as much as we want to - you take me where ever I want to go in the world, and beyond in words. And you never make me feel stupid if I don't or can't explain myself the way I want to!
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