Kick-the-Can is a sore subject for me. I have nothing against the game itself. No, all kids should play it; there should be city leagues. 

But when I dare tap into the shadows of my elementary years, I see a sad sight, a kid, his eyes boiling with tears beneath a hot head of curly brown hair. Scuffed knees top his grass-stained socks, and his shorts are much too short by today’s standards. Once again, head hanging, he drags himself across the summer grass, the endless stretch of connecting neighborhood backyards, in route to the wounded milk jug. It is caved in on one side, where just moments ago a foot had met the plastic with mean force, echoing like a gunshot between the houses and throughout his soul. Again, all his prisoners are free, and his hard work is ruined - an endless, ruthless cycle.

With all the neighbor kids back in hiding, the world is a ghost town. The birds in the trees chirp occassionally to break the twighlight silence only to mock him. Tears in the kid’s eyes smear together the rich summer colors with a liquid worn out sky, as he goes after the confounded milk jug. This time they had booted it clear to Mrs. Moon’s. She’d probably come out and yell at him for setting foot on her grass. 

For two hours now he has been it. Now, two options lay before him: (1) he can retrieve the milk jug, set it back in its place, and go back to work again, collecting his escaped prisoners; or, (2) he can run the risk of being called a baby, quit, and go inside. If I know the kid as well as I think I do, he will choose the latter. 

This is how it was for me growing up. My neighborhood pumped out a brood of mean-spirited kids who shaved and would knock endlessly at my door to get me, a first-grader, to play kick-the-can.

“Come on,” they’d say, “we need only one more player.” Through my screen door, they’d disarm me with pleasantries and warm smiles, insisting we were friends and I’d be well liked – because that’s all I ever wanted, anyway – if I’d just come out and play this once. This time it’d be different. Besides, I’d be selfish not to play, because if I didn’t, mysteriously, no one else could. And, of course, young and naive as I was, I’d play. And two minutes later, I’d be forever it.     

Kick-the-can was a big deal in our neighborhood. I don’t know who invented the game. Perhaps its orgins are from the Deep Depression, when all that anyone owned was an old can. As for us, we prefered an empty milk carton, because it got good hang time. Also, I vaguely remember the older neighbor kids having me stick my nose in it and breathe the carton’s spoiled insides – “Take a whiff,” I can still hear them saying - so there may have been other more sinister reasons why.   

Kick-the-can is not a complex sport. A can is placed in a designated spot, preferably, a nice dirt spot in someone’ s yard, but any agreed upon spot will do.  The person who is it (I’ll call him the ”jailer”) (which usually was me for hours on end) guards the can with his life. Everybody else hides behind houses, cars, bushes, or if they’re a good climber, in a well foliaged tree. The jailer (which, again, was usually me) must round up everyone he sees in hiding and put him in jail.  This is done by calling out the name of the spotted person and where he is hidden, and running like a maniac to jump the can and complete the prison sentence before some jerk kicks the can half way to China. For example: “I see Jason! Jump the can!” Once all have been captured, someone else gets to be it.

Whenever the can is kicked, everyone runs free, hollering and taunting the jailer all the way to their new hiding places. Say twenty kids are playing and nineteen are imprisoned, if the twentieth man kicks the can, everyone is free, the game starts afresh, and the jailer (which was always me) experiences the soul-wrenching feeling of having two hours of his hard labor, not to mention his only chance at freedom, crumble into oblivion, right before his eyes.

Sometimes, if the neighborhood kids were feeling particularly merciless, they’d form a terrible, human kick-the-can train. Appearing suddenly from behind a house or an oversized pine tree, they would rush the can. Of course, the jailer must shout the name of and jump the can for each person he sees. Impossible. Under such conditions, if the fourth of fifth person were unable to make it, the ”caboose” would, and off to Mrs. Moon’s yard I’d go, building up the courage to quit. 

The kick-the-can train was only one of the many strategies used against me. Another good one that particularly irked me involved switching shirts or hats and running behind the house to the opposite corner from where I saw them. They’d emerge about five minutes later after I’d shouted their name: “That was Scott you saw. I’ve been hiding here the whole time. And plus, this is a red shirt, see? It’s different than the blue one you saw. Now, close your eyes and count to fifty while I go hide again.”       

Besides this, we played many more neighborhood games. But whatever the game, they would all end in the same result: me crying and going inside. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it at the ripe old age of 32, that probably was the game. Anyway, my point is, if you’re a counselor and you want to get to the bottom of my psychological problems, kick-the-can is probably a good place to start.

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The oval is dead. Yes, you heard me right – the oval is no longer. And if you think that’s bad, the diamond’s dead, too. I first suspected they’d been running with the wrong crowd and had come to the typical tragic ending. Ended up, however, they were victims of a certain group’s desperate need to do something. 

My wife, a very reliable source and highly esteemed preschool teacher, told me the sad news just the other day. Her job is to know and love everything there is to know about shapes (and storytime). “What’s this, kids?” “Oball…(in unison)”

So you can imagine the gasps throughout the preschool halls the morning the moms arrived, kids in tow, and announced how if their child were to mark ”oval” for its corresponding shape on the kindergarten entrance exam, they’d wind up infinitely wrong, and perhaps a year older than their graduating class. Nope – now it’s called an ellipse. And the diamond, a rhombus.

The hard, cold imaginary truth of the matter is that this is what happens when you get a bunch of shape experts in the same room together. Realizing the shape field has experienced next to zero major achievements since King Tut’s day, when the wheel was dubbed the circle, and, therefore, their paychecks might be in danger, they did what any normal shape experts would do: they held a convention.

Someone needed to invent a need for change - and fast. Otherwise, what in the world were they getting paid for? No, seriously, what?   

 Since all the good shapes were taken, the assembly of minds unamiously agreed that the only real route to take was to rename a couple well-known ones. If anything, this would at least confuse the general public, not to mention the up and coming kindergartners, long enough to secure their jobs for the next few years (and, fingers crossed, open the opportunity for a nice Time Magazine write-up). Plus, the ellipse and rhombus sound a heck of a lot smarter than an oval or a dumb old diamond.

Well, this is all fine and well, I guess. A shape expert’s gotta make a living, too. But it dawned on me that I suddenly stood outside the with-it crowd. I no longer knew my shapes. I was an oval living in an ellipse generation. And, chances were, from old habit, I’ll still go on calling an oval an oval, only to be met, no doubt, by snickers and secretive giggles from those young lads in the know. I will be labeled with the folks who either can’t help or insist on calling a movie a picture show, or an automobile a horseless carriage.       

Worse yet, what about cards?! The Queen of diamonds is now the Queen of rhombuses (or rhombi; whatever its plural form). It’s dreadful; we are witnessing the extinction of those who call a spade a spade! This here was too much. I sat down, took some deep breathes. My head swam with the sense of a world spun out of control. Suddenly even my neighborhood felt strangely unfamiliar, like I’d slipped into a deep coma and woken up on Mars. I panicked, fearing for the triangle’s life, then the circle’s. Where does the terrible momentum of shape renaming stop? And, what about America’s votes on the matter? Does democracy only reach so far?

 Soon they’ll probably change my name. So, to avoid forever getting stuck with something ridiculous, I must get a jump on these guys. For now on, I declare my name to officially be Eoj (which is Joe spelled backwards) Oval (in memory of) Diamond (also, in memory of), Sr. (incase there’s ever a junior).   

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According to Yahoo! News, a man was recently spotted on Mars. This of course was made possible only through the highly technological advancements of satellite camera. The headlines of this real life ”My Favorite Maritan” chilling on the red terrain, made my pulse quicken and my imagination run wild. How’d he get there? Are there more of them? And, more importantly, does he love or hate President Bush?

So you can imagine the let down once I discovered that, in this special case, it turned out to be nothing more than a rock formation that just so happened to look like a man. Yes, this lame fact had been confirmed by ”scientists.” As the imaginations of my Martian-crazed mind lay dashed to pieces on the rigid red rocks of Science, a new, and perhaps more mysterious set of questions presented themselves: who are these so-called “scientists” referred to in nearly every serious news article?

In order to get to the bottom of this, I decided, on the spot, to conduct a make-believe study involving billions of imaginary tax dollars. I lounged back in my desk chair, threw ball with my very persistant 9lb dog, and turned my brain loose on getting the inside scoop on this slippery tribe of brainiacs. This of course required little to zero research on my part, seeing I really hate research.

Scientists – the term sounds so vague, yet so profound. At the thought, I am immediately wisked away to the picture of lab-coated men in spectacles and clipboards, huddled around a tall cylinder glass casing. Inside is Einstein’s brain, suspended in a preserving liquid of sorts, kept alive through, you guessed it, Science. A network of tubes hooked to the famous brain feeds directly into a massive mainframe that burps out only the purest forms of intelligence in regular intervals, such as the devastating ripple effect that would certainly transpire if Burger King really did stop selling the Whopper.    

The weird thing is, any latest news article about the discovery of an unusual back molar found in a remote field somewhere overseas that further proves -”according to scientists” -that man evolved from kangaroos, or the like, sends me nodding hypnotically along, powerless against the scientists’ rule of my mind. Unusual teeth equals evidence of evolution – check. Well then, I thought, if that’s the case, I know how the scientists could cut travel costs. If it’s unusual teeth they’re after, they need look no further than the closest county fair.  

Anyway, in my head, I decided to do a little experiment of my own, to see if these scientific claims wielded the same power on the minds of others. I went around making outlandish claims to all sorts of people. For example, I’d confidently state something like,”Bananas are really cocunuts in disguise.” If challenged, I’d simply say, “according to scientists.” 

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” Case closed. “I mean, if ’scientists’ said it…”

I tried the same experiment using God, who made the scientists, in place of ”scientists”. “You know, according to God, the first man was fashioned from dirt,” I’d say. Surprisingly, this didn’t convince anyone. Instead, I was met with a fusillade of questions.

“Which god? you’re god? how do you know your god is the right god? And you can’t tell me the words of the Bible have remained unchanged, untampered with all these years, what with human error, not to mention corruption.”

“I’m just kidding,” I’d respond, “I meant to say, ‘according to scientists’.”

“Well, in that case…”      

On another occasion, I noticed that the scientists can be real pranksters.  Why, just the other morning, I checked the news and was briefly paralyzed with horror as the headlines read something to the effect of ASTROID HEADS FOR EARTH, and below that, “scientists say”. It will arrive next Tuesday, and, if you’ve seen the movies Deep Impact and Armaggedon, you know what that means. The fact that the death asteroid would miss earth by millions of miles (which, apparantly, is quite close when you’re dealing with space), was cleverly hidden in the middle of the story - after I’d called off work and put in several calls to Ben Afleck about what to do. “False alarm,” I called to my wife. 

Billions of asteroids fire through space everyday. Why bring it up, unless to frighten the pajama pants off the reader? Practically speaking, if you’re going to talk killer, earthbound astroids, the least the scientists could do is rattle off the vastly unlikey odds that it might nip a polar ice cap or something. And start by saying, “Earth’s okay. Everyone will live.” No, the scientists have a different agenda: devilish pranks.    

And which scientists? All scientists? Every single one? It seems they always all agree. This is amazing. We should pattern world peace after these guys. You’d think there’d be at least one renegade, lounged in back, cooly blowing smoke rings, who’d occasionally object to a theory or something. (ex. “I don’t believe Barium is an element.”) 

Anyway, after all the hard thinking about scientists, my head started to ache. I’d learned some very interesting things about scientists today. And they are very smart, indeed. There’s no arguing that. But I thought of something the scientists probably never even considered: what if the Martians are made of rock?  

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