When I was growing up we had an extra bedroom in the basement that nobody ever used. It had no windows and was coated in thick purple shag carpet and soft velvety wallpaper. There was nothing inside except an old bed with a bouncy broken mattress, a couple pillows, and piles of thin flimsy sponge sheets the size of dining room tables leaned against the walls. We never knew where those spongy sheets came from and just assumed they were packing material from that time my parents were nuclear arms dealers.
Whenever my cousins Nikki and Adrian came over we’d wait until the adults were busy doing boring things like drinking punch and talking about interest rates and we’d sneak off to The Secret Basement Room Of Fun. That’s where we’d flick the lights off and run around blindly like madmen, bodychecking each other against the walls, squeezing each other into foam sheets, and jumping off the bed into mountainous pillowy landings. The whole time we were laughing hysterically, sweating buckets, and in a world of childhood bliss.
Fun time continued until somebody took a flying headbutt to their nose and started crying … or until an adult came to check on us. We would hear loud creaky footsteps coming down the stairs and would flick the lights on and pretend to be casually hanging out, with mysteriously soaking wet T-shirts, in a foam and pillow disaster zone. Since we were trustworthy kids we generally got away with it and flying headbutts, 360 piledrivers, and suplexes into the closet were never discussed.
My cousins and I still talk about that room today.
Little kids running around going completely insane is a beautiful thing. After all, kids grow up in bedrooms and backyards so when they escape into a head-swirly unknown it’s like they hit Total Infant Actualization. Spinning electrons in a spinning solar system can’t help lead to spinning bodies sometimes.
Yes, little girls in frilly dresses twirling in the middle of the dance floor, boys behind the school playing made up games, or just my cousins and I running around in shag carpeted darkness, are an amazing sight to behold. Let’s look fondly at little kids running around going completely insane and let’s let them remind us how easy it really is to find those secret hidden worlds of
AWESOME!