Tweenage kicks

Ever since a gaggle of girls surrounded me like feral beasts at a high school play last week, I have been crossing the street to avoid any kind of young person. At first, I couldn’t tell if they were laughing at me—I suppose that had to do with being back in a high school and my prior experience as a total geek who’d gotten regularly wedgied. But no, they seemed like they actually liked me, but just didn’t know how to express it. The girls ranged in age from 13–16, and for some reason they decided they were obsessed with me and cornered me and took my picture and bombarded me with questions and loomed and ran past and giggled—as young, hormonally crazed hyper kids are wont to do. Like most kids who are assembled in a massive room without clear adult supervision, they got all Lord of the Flies-y and whipped themselves into a hysterical frenzy, leaving me feeling scared and objectified like Richard Gere’s pet gerbil.

That’s when I realized: kids scare the crap out of me. Now, I’m not talking about having kids. In fact, as I get older, the idea of a miniature me that I can dress like Hirohito for Halloween and can tell people, “Oh, that’s not my child, he just make my shoes,” becomes more and more appealing. I think childbirth is a miraculous, heart-wrenching wonder, second only to the miraculous heart-wrenching wonder of conceiving a child while riding the Monster at La Ronde.

No, I’m not scared of the kids of my possible future. I’m talking about the young people that are already out there. In the world. Scaring tender older people like me with their unbridled young people-ness. Okay, fine: babies aren’t so bad. Yes, when they come out, they look like little maggots and they can’t really do anything useful like finding your TV remote control or fixing you a nice ham sandwich or changing the brake pads on your car (FYI, don’t even try to have a baby hold a socket wrench properly. They won’t be able to, even if you duct tape it to their little baby arms), but there is something cute and helpless and alien about them that gets them off the hook.

When they grow into toddlers, they start to be scary, with their runny noses and their awful table manners (look, I don’t care that your motor reflexes aren’t fully developed, you can’t keep jabbing your eye with a spoon full of mushed peas. It’s not just disgusting, it’s dangerous). Toddlers also like to touch everything, and then their mouths, and then more things. It’s like they’re walking germ bombs playing mouth-tag with all the grossest stuff they can find.

As they get older, they get even more frightening. They start talking, and then they start talking smack. Their hormones start going buck wild until they reach the most frightening state of all: tweens. At this point, their bodies are endlessly pumped with tons of sugar, oodles of caffeine from soda pop, they have frazzled attention spans from TV and videogames, and, to top it all off, have more hormonal confusion than that lotion guy from Silence of the Lambs. They become emotionally unstable hyper-kinetic tweekers that scatter around all jittery like meth heads on payday, and they scare me.

This wasn’t always the case. In fact, I remember it wasn’t too long ago that I was revelling in the folly of youth. Sometimes I would walk on the mountain on a Sunday, noting how the laughter of a child would fill the air with song and brighten my spirits. Sometimes, on the way home from work, I would walk by a playground and then stop to stand and smile, listening to the silly rhymes they would make up in the playground. And then, hours later, I would laugh because they still hadn’t noticed me standing in the shade of a tree in my trench coat, sweatpants and ski mask, thumbing the end of the four-foot piece of rope I keep in my pocket. Those were good times.

Listen, I’m not crazy. I consulted a healthcare professional about my fear. Well, by “consulted,” I mean searched the Internet, and by “healthcare professional,” I’m talking about Wikipedia. Anyway Dr. Pedia said that I’ve got ephebiphobia. Like most fancy words, it comes from Greek, with the word éphebos meaning “youth” or “adolescent” and phóbos, meaning “scares the living bejeesus out of me.” So you can’t say I have a problem. It’s not me wi th the problem. It’s those garsh-durned kids and their crazy rock ’n’ roll music and their video games and Facebooks and their dang text-o-phones! I hate kids!

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA