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Rollin' With The Kids
Feb. 16th, 2014 03:50 pmThis weekend I managed to convince a buddy and her roommate to help me do some reconnaissance on a roller rink. I've been wanting to find a good place to practice skating for a while, and this place is one everyone half-remembers from childhood.
The problem is, it's part of a Family Fun Complex, and the reason we all half-remember it is because somebody or other probably had a birthday party there once. So I figured it could go two ways. It could be like the swimming pool I frequented as a kid and be nicely regulated so that every style of enjoying oneself was represented, perhaps with all-skates or adult-skates or kid-skates or what not.
Or it could be a calamitous riot of chaos and anarchy, with little kids darting perpendicular to the flow of traffic on Razor scooters or Big Wheels and slightly larger kids obliviously cruising against the flow and perpetually desperate junior high kids trying to impress each other.
Guess which one it was?
So yeah, it was not a good way to practice skating, what with the loud music and the constant distractions of trying not to flatten small children.* It was fun, for what it was--I liked being able to try really cruising on skates, and some of those desperate junior high kids were clearly regulars and could do fabulous gymnastics while on roller skates, which was incredible to watch--but man, if I tried to make that a regular practice place my psyche would probably explode.
And it was rather a relief to be there when I WASN'T part of a birthday party, because MAN those were stressful back in the day. You'd be self-consciously assuming that everyone else knew more about how this mysterious Fun Complex worked than you did, and anyway you wanted to try the arcade games while everyone else was skating, and the music would be too damn loud and you couldn't hear your friends' conversation,** and any minute an overly-enthusiastic voice was going to come over the PA calling your party over to a picnic bench to have a slice of miserable sheet cake and Shasta soda. I am glad those days are over.
So my buddies and I skated around for an hour, I managed to fall heavily on one knee at one point, and then we left. And as long as we were in a Doing Fifties Stuff mood, we had burgers and root beer floats at an old-timey burger joint, and since I am always pretty one-track, I scored a bottle of their house-recipe cherry syrup because SODA-MAKING DOES NOT REST. And we all agreed it was a very fun evening and let's never do that again.
I think I'll have to stick with the park's skate-track in the summer time. Then all I have to worry about flattening is ducks.
*I realize a lot of this makes me sound like an old codger, but since I've had this opinion about The Kids With Their Little Scooters And Their Loud Musics And Their Hyperactively Hazardous Self-Absorption since I was about six years old, I have to conclude that I just AM an old codger and always have been.
**What you may notice I'm getting at here is that, even when it's music I like, I really hate it when it's constantly played so loudly that conversation has to be shouted. I dislike any loud background noise. Even before I had the personal epiphany that THIS was what bugged me, I spent my life subconsciously trying to avoid being in loud places.
The problem is, it's part of a Family Fun Complex, and the reason we all half-remember it is because somebody or other probably had a birthday party there once. So I figured it could go two ways. It could be like the swimming pool I frequented as a kid and be nicely regulated so that every style of enjoying oneself was represented, perhaps with all-skates or adult-skates or kid-skates or what not.
Or it could be a calamitous riot of chaos and anarchy, with little kids darting perpendicular to the flow of traffic on Razor scooters or Big Wheels and slightly larger kids obliviously cruising against the flow and perpetually desperate junior high kids trying to impress each other.
Guess which one it was?
So yeah, it was not a good way to practice skating, what with the loud music and the constant distractions of trying not to flatten small children.* It was fun, for what it was--I liked being able to try really cruising on skates, and some of those desperate junior high kids were clearly regulars and could do fabulous gymnastics while on roller skates, which was incredible to watch--but man, if I tried to make that a regular practice place my psyche would probably explode.
And it was rather a relief to be there when I WASN'T part of a birthday party, because MAN those were stressful back in the day. You'd be self-consciously assuming that everyone else knew more about how this mysterious Fun Complex worked than you did, and anyway you wanted to try the arcade games while everyone else was skating, and the music would be too damn loud and you couldn't hear your friends' conversation,** and any minute an overly-enthusiastic voice was going to come over the PA calling your party over to a picnic bench to have a slice of miserable sheet cake and Shasta soda. I am glad those days are over.
So my buddies and I skated around for an hour, I managed to fall heavily on one knee at one point, and then we left. And as long as we were in a Doing Fifties Stuff mood, we had burgers and root beer floats at an old-timey burger joint, and since I am always pretty one-track, I scored a bottle of their house-recipe cherry syrup because SODA-MAKING DOES NOT REST. And we all agreed it was a very fun evening and let's never do that again.
I think I'll have to stick with the park's skate-track in the summer time. Then all I have to worry about flattening is ducks.
*I realize a lot of this makes me sound like an old codger, but since I've had this opinion about The Kids With Their Little Scooters And Their Loud Musics And Their Hyperactively Hazardous Self-Absorption since I was about six years old, I have to conclude that I just AM an old codger and always have been.
**What you may notice I'm getting at here is that, even when it's music I like, I really hate it when it's constantly played so loudly that conversation has to be shouted. I dislike any loud background noise. Even before I had the personal epiphany that THIS was what bugged me, I spent my life subconsciously trying to avoid being in loud places.
