Brain-dead at the beach

At least once a year, my lovely and talented wife Kristin and I decide that our children aren't doing enough to drive us crazy, so we all pile into the minivan for a four-hour road trip to the beach.

Orange Beach, Alabama, to be specific - home to sugar-white sand, wonderful restaurants, luxurious condos, and some of the most brain-dead tourists in the history of mankind.

We were there over Memorial Day weekend, so we expected crowds. Actually, it wasn't as bad as we thought it would be, except on the beach itself. And, to be honest, the beach itself wasn't really all that crowded, either; it was just the pack of goofballs from Louisiana who plopped down RIGHT NEXT TO US when they trooped to the shore.

Picture the scene: A beautiful day, plenty of sun, waves splashing onto the sand, and a 47-year-old man with pasty, flabby skin building a sandcastle. Supposedly my five-year-old was building the sandcastle, but he quickly grew bored with the actual construction phase and move on to the "build a mound of sand and watch the waves eat it away over and over" phase, which is crucial in your more advanced sandcastle design.

So I'm squatting on my haunches in the sand (which, in case you didn't know, can get into some extremely uncomfortable places when you squat in it), building a sandcastle for a five-year-old who isn't paying any attention at all until I do something wrong ("Daddy, that wall isn't right - it's not even with the other one"), when a pack of Louisianians with spawn in tow thunder onto the beach. After surveying the available miles of sand in which to set up their base camp, they decide the one best place to plop down is within three inches of my sandcastle's wall. The same wall, incidentally, that my miniature Frank Lloyd Wright had informed me wasn't done correctly in the first place. And then their three-year-old child begins using a shovel to sling sand all over creation, including onto my sandcastle.

I was on the verge of blowing my top, when three important points occurred to me:

• It's a sandcastle, not the Mona Lisa.
• It's not even a GOOD sandcastle, especially if a five-year-old notices flaws in its architecture.
• The aforementioned five-year-old isn't interested in the sandcastle any longer, what with the intensive effort he's putting into the sand mound / wave project. 

So I left my sandcastle to be pillaged by the Louisiana Huns (which would be a good name for a rock band) and took the boys to the arcade. Now, in MY day, arcades were dimly lit buildings with about 20 video-game consoles, where guys with unlit cigarettes dangling from their mouths would hang out all day cadging quarters to play Galaga. Today's arcades look like a cross between a Vegas show and a shopping mall. The games are all three stories high, with more lights than downtown Cleveland, Ohio, and when you put in several dollars' worth of tokens, you can play for about 20 seconds and then get tickets, which you can then use to "buy" toys that failed the quality assurance inspections in Chinese factories.

In the past, I've gone to the arcades out of a sense of parental duty, because there was nothing there that really interested me. This time, though, a new game caught my eye: Down the Clown. 

In Down the Clown, you get a bunch of rubber balls, and you use them in an attempt to knock down several rows of pillow-type clowns with fuzz all around them. The bigger the clowns you knock down, the higher your score.

Now, you may not remember this, but in my youth I was an extremely good baseball pitcher. And although my youth is more than three decades in the past, I thought I could do pretty well at Down the Clown. So I "borrowed" a dollar's worth of tokens from my 12-year-old's coin cup while he was busy playing another game and tried to channel my old skill. 

And you know what? I WAS pretty good. I got something like 400 points my first try, knocking down clowns left and right. And to my amazement, the game spit out 40 tickets! All for just a dollar!

I immediately went to the token-dispensing machine and got ten dollars' worth of tokens. (Hey, the boys each got $20 in tokens, so I figured I could get at least $10.) And over the next 15 minutes, I was a clown-knocking-down TERROR. My worst game, I got 30 tickets. 30! If you can believe that. I wound up with a huge pile of tickets - more than 500. The boys were very proud of me.

So we all trooped up to the ticket redemption counter, and I handed the pimply faced teenager behind the counter my ticket coupon with the number "500" proudly displayed on it, and I magnanimously told the boys they could combine my tickets with theirs to get something good. And as I was scanning the available prizes, I realized the absolute best thing you could get for 500 tickets was a miniature rubber basketball - the kind of basketball that you might see a three-year-old Louisiana child throwing onto a sand castle. 

Suddenly it hit me: I had just spent $10 for a ball that was probably worth about 75 cents. And of all the brain-dead tourists in Orange Beach - INCLUDING the Louisiana Huns - I was the brain-deadest of them all.

(c) 2014 John Puckett