Toys MUST Be Destroyed

I’m not trying to get all grinchy and ruin Christmas but I’ve got a strong, neigh overwhelming, desire to stomp all my child’s toys until they are just piles of polymer and battery guts. See the kid is fourteen months old and that means chiming toys, singing toys, lighting toys, musical toys and vibrating toys. Every single one of them runs on batteries. Which really doesn’t bother me, the batteries I mean. What I find irksome is the toys all have a friggin hair trigger, one wrong step, one slight breeze and they all go off at once in electric music light flashing epilepsy inducing ire rising vibrating cacophony. Well, they don’t all go off simultaneously, ahh no, that would be too short, far too bearable. What happens is that toy A (little Tigger Annoying tune) is set off by the dog excreting the portion of dinner that was converted to a gaseous form. Toy B (Happy Face Veg Along) waits fifteen seconds and decides that toy A is having too much fun and starts swirling lights around in a toddler show freak out. With two toys going Toy C (Happy Africanized Bee of Stinging Death) realizes that it shouldn’t be left out so Toy C begins it’s caterwauling and vibrating. The rest of the toys, like unthinking lemmings join in. By the time that happens Toy A (Die Tigger Die Fun Box) has wound down. Noting all the action Toy A jumps back into the fracas. Thus some perverse battery driven self perpetuating feedback loop begins and, of this writing, never ends.

It wasn’t like this when I was a kid, I played with a stick and a dirt clod and while not exactly grateful I do remember finding particularly satisfying dirt clods, not too hard not too soft. Oh, it’s not that that there were no battery powered toys or that we were poor. My parents just didn’t like me much.