The Fun Enforcers

The woman ran up to me and said , “ Are you enjoying the park?" I said yes so she said, “Well , that’s good. And you know , we have a beach wheelchair for you!” I wanted to let her down gently. I figured that this must be one of those state parks I’ve been hearing about where they’ve purchased a bunch of equipment that’s supposed to make natural terrain a lot more cripple accessible.. And when this woman saw me she got all excited because she probably thought that since I am an actual card-carrying cripple, I’d be dyig to use the beach chair. But I wasn’t. It is true that beaches are probably the most foreboding of environments for wheelchair cripples like me because beaches are full of sand and wheels sink into sand real quick and then you’re stuck. However a beach chair looks like a glorified lawn chair with four big wheels on it that are supposed to be able to zip right through the sand, thus enabling wheelchair cripples to frolic on the beach like normal people do. But the beach chair doesn’t look very comfy. It looks like if I sat in it my ass would start hurting in about ten minutes. I don’t want to frolic that bad. I was also afraid that if I turned her down too emphatically, the situation would soon deteriorate into one of those pissing matches like I used to get into at Jerry Lewis cripple summer camp. Everybody in charge there was a vert (which is what I call people who walk because it’s short for vertical). And they seemed to think that their job was to make sure that the cripples were having a good time, whether we liked it or not! They were the fun enforcers. They seemed to think that the more we said that we didn’t want to do something, the more we really wanted to do it. Take, for example, horseback riding. I hated horseback riding. I couldn’t hold my balance very well on the back of a jerky horse. I was terrified that I would fall off and crack my skull. That wasn't my idea of fun. So inevitably, one of the fun enforcers would come along and crouch down to my eye level and try to convince me that I’d discover what a load of fun horseback riding was if I would just give it a try. I felt ambushed. I heard stories of crippled kids being dragged kicking and screaming to the horse stables or to arts and crafts or whatever. That’s why I feared that if I was too firm in telling this vert woman at the state park no that she might chloroform me and I’d wake up down on the beach in the beach chair with my ass hurting. That wasn’t my idea of fun. (Please support Smart Ass Cripple and help us keep going. Just click below to contribute.) https://www.paypal.me/smartasscripple?fbclid=IwAR2qrql-UFH19OepgeaCG4WmblyNylb27k2q8eYxXHH-