Page 2/The Battalionrfuesday, June 7, 1988
The PTA — a life
For those of you
who missed it, Me
morial Day week
end (that one aus
picious time of the
year, along with • 1
the Fourth of July, Mark
when everyone Nair
who is anyone
suddenly has a
beer belly, and ev
eryone who is any
one is suddenly
quite proud to show it) was the second
annual PTA tubing trek down the
GWAD-AH-LOOPY river. And, for
those of you who are insanely curious,
the PTA stands for the more than illus
trious, larger than life, Professional
Toobers’ Association. (NOTE: the PTA
was founded a few years ago, basing it
self on a few basic premises such as ‘Life
is my toob, I shall not want,’ ‘Rubber
chaffing is fun’ and ‘Look, Ma, Tm
floating! Tm floating!’ To be a member
is to belong to a select fraternity of indi
viduals who reside on that end of the
spectrum known to the common folk as
regrettable idiocy.)
But back to the point. Memorial Day
weekend was happily dubbed “Jambo
II,” after Jambo, the river god of the
PTA, who is usually kept happy with the
normal sacrifices of sunBURN lotion
(gallons and gallons), noxious liquids
and weird and exotic strands of beef
jerky. Unfortunately, “Jambo 11” would
have been more appropriately titled
“PTA II, the Wrath of Jambo.” Ah, it
was a dark and stormy weekend, all
right. Call me Ishmael. I am a victim of
the cold war. This is my story.
Tubing (or toobing, as the case may
be) runs along these lines. You, the fool
ish youth, grab a mastodonic, donut
shaped rubber inner tube that probably
once belonged in the front left tire of a
monstrous 40-wheeled refrigerated
pickup truck owned by some guy named
Mordecai. You place said tube (toob)
gently into the pure-tee water of the
GWAD-AH-LOOPY. You get ready to
go. Your foot touches the water.
Then the cold. You have never felt
such coldness. You can see the frost
creeping upward on your leg. Ok, no
problem. You just have to GET USED
TO IT. That’s all. Just GET USED TO
IT. And far be it for you to be called a
WIMP or anything, so you decide to go
ahead and sit (adjusting your bottom in
the hole of the tube, at the same time
and simultaneously immersing yourself
— your complete self— in the water).
And then it gets much colder. I sup
pose you can’t really tell how cold it is by
just touching the water with your feet,
but when you sit in it, now that’s cold.
PTA person #1: Holy headcheese!
That’s cold!
PTA person #2: Nah. You just have
to GET USED TO IT.
PTA person #1: GET USED TO IT?
This is pain. I mean PAIN. I think all
my molecules have stopped moving.
PTA person #2: You do look a little
blue.
PTA person #1: Blue! BLUE! I’ve
passed blue. I’m on my way to fuchsia.
Ponch, Jon, help me.
Kelvin zero is a terrible thing. My legs
and arms were in blocks of ice; my teeth
had been filed down from their chatter
ing. And we only had five and a half
hours to go. Oh, joy.
And then there are these things
called ROCKS. These ROCKS stick out
from the water at odd, very sharp, an
gles. Don’t be fooled. The Titanic was
indeed sunk by these little buggers. Ice-
burgs, smyshbergs.
The common cry when such ROCKS
are spotted is “Butts up.” When said
ROCKS are encountered and when the
cry “Butts up” is not heeded, one finds
himself in the following situation:
SCRAAAAAAPE. The sharks were very
attracted to the blood.
BUT, once again, THAT’S NOT
ALL!
Because then it started to rain. And
If they’re saving gas,
leave them alone
A lady, o b -
viously quite dis
traught, wrote me
a letter recently
asking that I “w-
rite something
about all these
teenagers sitting
on the hoods of
their cars at the
shopping mall.”
“They just sit
there at night and
play their car radios loud when they
should be home,” the lady continued.
What is important is that I do, in fact,
write something about teenagers sitting
on the hoods of their cars at shopping
malls, which occurs, I suppose, all over
the country.
I think it’s a great idea, and I don’t
know why my generation didn’t think of
it.
What we did when I was a teenager
was drive around the Dairy Queen.
I don’t mean we drove around the
Dairy Queen once and then drove
somewhere else. I mean, we drove
around and around and around the Da
iry Queen, and I’m still not sure why.
It wasn’t to locate any of our friends
so we could converse with them. They
were driving around and around and
around the Dairy Queen, too.
It seems that once during all those
years somebody would have had the
good sense to ask, “Hey, guys. What are
we doing driving around the Dairy
Queen? I’m getting nauseous.”
But nobody ever said that, so here we
would go, buring up no telling how
many gallons of gasoline.
During the oil crunch of the ’70s, I
thought of all the gasoline we wasted as
teenagers driving around the Dairy
Queen and figured we probably were
the ones who at least started the ball
rolling toward an oil crisis.
Teenagers are going to hang out
somewhere. In biblical days they proba
bly hung out over where the goats were
being watered. The problem there was
all the flies.
In the Old West, they hung out over
at the livery stable. Me, I hate liver, but I
didn’t grow up in the Old West.
Our parents hung out down at the
corner store eating penny candy on
their six-mile walk home from school.
I say let today’s teenagers hang out
sitting on the hoods of their cars at
shopping malls if they want to.
Think of the precious gasoline that is
being preserved, and as long as teen
agers are sitting on the hoods of their
cars, they aren’t going to be out terroriz
ing the roads and highways.
It is basically impossible to terrorize
on a road or a highway while sitting on
a road or a highway while sitting on the
hood of your car at a shopping mall.
I do admit young prople have a ten
dency to turn up the sound on their car
radios as far as it will go.
What I do when I am confronted by a
young person playing loud music on his
or her car radio is drive as far away
from them as I can.
Which is what the lady from Tampa
should do. Drive far away and let the
kids enjoy being young so they won’t
grow up to be old goats like her.
Copyright 1988, Cowles Syndicate
Lewis
Grizzard
The Battalion
(USPS 045 360)
Member of
Texas Press Association
Southwest Journalism Conference
The Battalion Editorial Board
Richard Williams, Editor
Sue Krenek, Managing Editor
Mark Nair, Opinion Page Editor
Curtis Culberson, City Editor
Becky Weisenfels,
Cindy Milton, News Editors
Anthony Wilson, Sports Editor
Jay Janner, Art Director
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Opinion
not meant for everybodA&
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rain. And rain. And rain. We were in
the middle of the proverbial nowhere.
We were wet. We were cold. We were
suffering the wrath of Jambo. AND IT
WAS HELL.
So the story goes. We were rescued
from the clutches of the elements and a
certain cranky old man who needed his
juice at a certain mysterious camp
ground (no details, please). The river
rose more than ten feet that day. And
there was plenty of hail, lightning and
thunderous sound effects. It would
have been somewhat keen if it were not
for being stranded on a small inflatable
rubber tube, floating listlessly, glacier
like, down the river, much like a pitiful,
soaked rodent bulging from too many
Goobers, Boating on a decayed sheet of
unhappy driftwood.
Transition Transition Transition.
thing of any significance. I'll men
literature
Now, for the real stuff. What does
this have to do with the-just-happened-
a-little-while-ago summit? Nothing.
And what does it have to do with that
kooky middle east conflict? Nothing.
What does this have to do with anything
at all? Not a thing.
And sometimes, in College a
(a.k.a. Hell without an air condri
tubing is our last reprise, ouronl'f
to keep insane. Now, I won’t ej
tempt to tie this column in
■“'.onstructii
, closed th<
( <) 1> " 111 say ^Bil the enc
.iml .111\ thing is loi (he readerti(; n j veis j, v p,
find out, and assume. Some lam
And that is the way I like it. 1'dosed for she
|.mil h i happv, too. * exas *
two lanes to
Mark Nair is a bovine brain s Road to Tex:
grad student and opinion page flow the park
for The Battalion. B ec donsof
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