Friday Is For Lovers (And Cartoons)

After being around for awhile, a "weblog" can start to get stale. Well, here at Fifty Shades, we've decided to add a new feature to start running on every Friday and therefore ruin everyone's weekends! Enjoy!

This original masterpiece of cartoon art brings up the pertinent issue of kids today being coddled too much, something I have utterly no experience or right to say anything about.

I think kids today are coddled too much. In my day (1), my mom used to let me and my brothers roam the streets at will. I had a little delinquent urchin friend, Pete Blackbird, who had dirty dishwater blond hair hanging over his Mean-Streets-esque face, and a chipped front tooth from having dived into a swimming pool and missing it--without adult supervision, no doubt. And that's the way we liked it! We used to go dumpster diving. (Pete now habituates a dive on South Broadway. You see the trend?) Pete was convinced that we might find something valuable in the smelly trash of others, like old TVs or Hitler posters. We rarely found much beyond rotting meat, buzzing flies, despair and empty Cheetos bags. One time, however, we found a whole bunch of beer bottles in a big cardboard carton. We were ecstatic! But did we turn the bottles in for the deposit and therefore make enough money to purchase some sweet pinball action?! No! We chucked them into the air, one after the other, and watched them shatter in the alley. It was like our own white trash Fourth of July celebration there in broad daylight! *Smash* *crash* went the bottles! Whooo! (It was like surfing with your baby on board!) Oddly, people in the neighboring apartment building were not pleased. They ran out like wasps from a beer bottle and yelled at us to stop filling the alleyway with broken Independence Day glass. Pete and I ran for it. I remember having my feelings hurt. While I ran in complete panic, adults screaming at me from behind, I remember wondering why those people were yelling at us and how mean they were. Such was my savage, amoral little mind at that age.

So in summation, mean people suck, and parents today should let their toddlers go out and play in the dumpsters once in a while because why not.

P.S. Please don't point out that the grown-up in the cartoon is surfing while doing a complicated ballet movement. I'm aware of it. I suck.

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(1) The late thirties. The nation was still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars.