DAY FIVE: WELCOME TO MY HELL

I have been to hell and it is called Gattiland. If you have never heard of this place, count yourself among the blessed. It is like Chuck E. Cheese without the endearing/annoying mascot. The wife and I took the wife’s mother’s foster child there and I shall probably never be the same. The first thing that struck me was the extraordinary number of surfaces. They were everywhere, potential locations for the children to leave their germs and infections. The entire place is a veritable orgy of touching: grabbing pizza from a buffet, plastic cups piled about, token machine dispensing perpetually recycling coins, video games that were last washed god-knows-when, and don’t even get me started on the piles of shoes outside the climbing in/around/under thing that must have the residue of god-only-knows how many upset stomachs following a pizza binge.

And they swarm – the children, that is. They are everywhere: searching something else to touch, scavenging for a misplaced token or two, or perhaps hunting between surfaces [the places you know never, ever get cleaned] in hopes of uncovering a precious ticket, that coin of the realm for obtaining even more useless crap to touch for a while and leave laying somewhere broken and infected.

But I survived. I lasted a solid two hours in hell and emerged seemingly unscathed [except for what I am sure will be enduring emotional scars]. I must say that I am extremely proud of the wife for the courage she showed in hell. She – in her effort to assist the foster child – was able to touch the surfaces that surrounded us and even played a few games [all I could manage was a single game of Skeeball which was followed by some rather severe hand scrubbing – right up to the elbow]. So… large props to the wife.

Happily the foster child seems to have had a lovely afternoon and is pleased with the trip – his first time to the, for him, mythical Gattiland. I, on the other hand, have vowed to raise children that will show appropriate disdain for such places and would rather properly disinfect their hands and read a good book [unless professional wrestling is in town, and then all bets are off].