Surrender, Dorothy

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The Other Side of the Douchebag

This weekend we went to a Royals game. And we got our seats moved. 

Her name, we think, was "Liz." Our middle-aged, shorts-around-the-armpits savior, who noticed the ten or so wasted twentysomethings in front of us smoking cigarettes in their stadium seats, dropping the f-bomb every other word and almost coming to blows when each of the large man-boys were armed with the souvenir mini-bats.

Liz was an usher/ass-kicker.

The kids, as I see them, even though they were probably early twenties, weren't all that bad until it came to the near-fight. Yes, their language was horrible, but hello, I'm me. It's not as though the little angel has never heard a driving word before. It would be great if it weren't used as EVERY OTHER WORD IN THE SENTENCE, but yes, it's baseball, I get it, I'm not a total prude. The smoking in the stadium was asshattery at its finest, but again, it didn't blow my mind. We were outside. 

When the one guy in front of me kept screaming THE FUCKITY FUCK, the girls directly in front of us kept shushing him, saying "there are little kids behind us" -- we were there with friends who had a six-year-old. He didn't listen. I remembered being the twentysomethings, shushing my fuck-yelling friends, smoking in the stadium, trying to keep my man-boy friends from fighting over something ridiculous, and being wasted enough that even if I did notice kids nearby, it didn't really compute. Kids nearby inspired a vague guilt akin to eating ice cream for dinner.

And now I'm that parent, sitting behind the kids, seeing them for what they are, what I was -- complete douchebags.

Someone in front of the kids complained and our savior Liz came up asking who had the lit cigarette and assuring us we'd be moved, stat. And she made good on it. We watched our old section and one by one, most of the kids got thrown out of the stadium.

Score one for the old people. Thanks, Liz.