Ropeable

The thing I miss from my childhood that I’ve seriously considered creating a business out of is playgrounds.  Why the fuck don’t we have adult playgrounds?  No, I don’t mean anything dirty.  The closest thing I can think of is paintball, which is absurdly good fun but very expensive and you can’t do it on your own.  I want to get the largest empty warehouse I can find and make it into an obstacle course in the style of shows like Kakashi’s Castle, Gladiators and WipeOut.    Oh, and A*mazing.   I’m not sure if they had that show anywhere else but here, but it was where kids answered trivia questions for a chance for their team to run through a maze and find a bunch of letters.  The maze was awesome.  It was pretty small and compact like play equipment, but it had different levels and tunnels and different themed rooms and slippery dips and oh my god every kid wanted to be on A*mazing just for that maze.  

As much as I like my gym, except for boxing I’d never ever go there again if I could instead just play on giant grown-up size play equipment.  There’d be a travelator and rope swings and ladders and swings and rock climbing bits and water slides and tunnels as extensive as drains so you could explore them and secret passages as well. .  And a pretend shop like they have at kid’s playgrounds, because it would be funny to watch adults pretend to make each others coffees and pay for it with leaves and dirt. 

  Sometimes we have picnics at a park near my friend Lanky’s house and it has a big rope climbing bit, and we just climb up to the very top and sit there being monkeys.  I love the ropes.  Palex sits down the bottom looking up at me while I bully him for not being able to climb up and then I start hooting like a monkey and when he asks me to come down I pretend I don’t speak English, only Monkeyese.  He hates that.   If I can’t have giant play equipment, I’m going to build a rope climbing thing in my backyard.  My landlady will love it.  

Maybe I should just go outside and climb shit, or hijack children’s playgrounds, but people look at you funny and sometimes even arrest you if you do that.  The vitriol towards people like Cave Clan who explore drains and abandoned places is pretty strong.  No, it needs to be a safe space for climbing.  Kind of like womyn’s spaces and queer spaces at uni, but hopefully not like the room where Christians set up an Xbox in order to trap naive first years into hearing about Jesus.  The only Jesus in my playground will be in the exclamations of people when they see how epic it is.  "Jesus, that is fucking epic."  Yeah, I know.  

I don’t miss anything else.  I was even more awkward as a kid, I had trouble with friendships, I went to psycho private schools, I was the eldest of 5 so I was constantly babysitting without being paid, the more I understand what it’s like to be a parent the more I think my mother has serious head problems that made her border on abusive at times, my parents never came to any of my sports games baaaaw…  the only thing that I miss is playgrounds and having a good short term memory.   And trombone lessons and band camp.  And the short amount of time between braces and no longer being covered by my parent’s dental insurance where I had nice straight teeth.  And playing SNES for 8 hours straight. And sleep-overs that involved the great achievement of not sleeping at all.  And genuinely enjoying shit movies like Mario Bros and Speed and Empire Records.  And being able to beat the shit out of my siblings without any legal repercussions.  And getting someone else to tie my shoe laces.  And school holidays.   I’ll shut up now and post a video of A*mazing.