Kix 'Cool Kids'

Once again, I’ve reached one of those moments where I’m struggling to find something to write. Inspiration refuses to work its way through the smoky haze that sometimes fills my cranium. It can be a dangerous place in there… Lots of stuff lying around and it’s dark too. One misstep and someone will need a little therapy or an icepack for the groin. So here goes anyway…

I watched the first little bit of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien last Friday night and it seems that his staff are trying to kill him.

They had a stuntman on there giving him one or two minute tutorials on how to perform a stunt and then proceeded to rough up on the red-headed giant. It was funny and as it turns out, Conan has more skills than Napoleon Dynamite.

The whole bit took me back to a summer long ago… When the Lively/Sims cousin summer exchange program was up and running. Paula would come down to North Carolina and I went up to the Motherland for the summer.

It was the same summer when Dan Lively (my cousin) and I discovered how to make our own fake blood using corn syrup and food coloring. We made gallons of the stuff! It was cheap to make and had many practical applications.

The entire family came together that summer for a large cookout featuring hamburgers, hot dogs, and crazy children. I’m not talking about the usual crazy children that commit the uninspired acts that cause broken bones, stitches, or even crying. I’m talking about the kind of crazy where one minute there’s a large watermelon glistening with water drops upon it and in the next, there’s a large cutting knife firmly embedded into it with fake blood dripping down the sides designed to create any kind of reaction that the one discovering such a scene would like to share with the group.

We also liked to paint our faces with faux blood gashes and filled our mouths with the stuff so that when we “took” a punch to the jaw, we would spray out what seemed to be blood. We liked to plan fights with fake blood and practiced them in the yard. Dan and I finally got to show off our stunt talents in front of the house that the family built my Grandmother. It was located on busy Highway 3 leading into Union, WV.

Dan and I would venture up to Randall’s Barn (Randall was their neighbor that I never ever remember meeting) where we could turn up the volume on our stuntman training and learn how to fall from heights.

There was always a big pile of hay on the floor of the barn with a loft above it. We would just climb our way up to the loft by using the built in ladder. Dan and I took turns climbing up to the loft, then acting as if we were being shot by the other below before falling into the pile of hay.

That led to falling over the side of Uncle Malcolm’s GMC truck and landing as flat on our backs as we possibly could. We saw that in the movies along with watching professional wrestlers work their craft every week on television. Of course, we did this with the truck in park. We got a few scrapes and bruises, but otherwise we were pretty much undamaged.

That led to Dan rolling over the hoods of slow moving cars and falling to the ground safely on the other side. He only did this with family members or good family friends in the Lively’s driveway or the church parking lot. The concerned driver always slammed their cars into park and got out to find Dan upright, beating the dust out of his clothes.

I was never gutsy enough to try such a stunt because I was younger, smaller, and valued my health more. I didn’t want to gamble a broken or crushed limb with a stunt where the most important person involved had no clue... And they were the one driving the car.

Are you digging the new Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien?

It’s miles above that tired lame krunk that Leno has been feeding the viewers.