UnMotivationalPosters

I have a small child in my life.  She’s really marvelous and it’s great to see the world through fresher eyes sometimes.  Small children are fun to kick it with.

But there’s a darker side to kicking it with small children.  That side is wickedly awesome and hilarious in all the wrong ways.  Take a look at this poster.  Look at this little boy.  Sure he looks scared but it’s still funny.

C'mon, that's awesome!

Oh no, Little Timmy!   Quick, use your sword!  He’s so cute as he tries to comprehend with his young mind what surely must seems to him to be the looming of imminent death.  He may actually be enjoying himself but I prefer to think his mother is glad he’s wearing a Pull-Up.  “Oh God Phyllis I told you to stop letting him watch soap operas!  He’s clutching that sword like a GIRL”

Now, far be it from me to suggest that a child should be traumatized for life behind an incident involving a scare but let me tell you a funny story.  The year was 1987 or something, my baby sister was 6 years old.  She was my dad’s favorite and our brother and I couldn’t stand that.

One day after school we got some big kitchen knives and menaced her, saying that our family was a group of cannibals and that we’d had a little brother before and eaten him, and that we were going to eat her too.  We told her it was our job to get her ready for cooking.

The look on her face was priceless, as were her screams as she ran through the house and eventually locked herself into the bathroom, completely freaked out.  Eventually our mom came home and we got our asses beat.  Hardcore.  But for those couple hours we terrorized the hell out of my sister and we loved every minute of it.

She’s fine.  She turned out absolutely fine.  Mostly, but the part that’s not fine is absolutely not our fault.  Her daughter is much more savvy.  At 6 she knows we’re not cannibals so that won’t work on her.  We’re thinking of caking her in the night.

Back to that photo of that little boy: he’s a’ight.  Sure he probably has pants-shitting nightmares right now but when he gets older and past the humiliation of this photo coming out on every first date, along with the story of his various neuroses, he will look back on it and laugh.  Then at night, after his children have gone to bed, he will ask himself, “How can I top that?” and chuckle to himself as he thinks of a way to scare the piss out of them.

post script: Yes we ran with knives.  We’re fine.  Tonka trucks were made out of metal too and playgrounds had everything made of metal *and* sand instead of foam.  We LIVED.