La la lala la la

    One of my most favorite cartoons growing up was Smurfs, you'll need to know that later.
    Once, and I won't say how old I was when this happened, I went into the hay-shed we had on the farm to kill some of that precious but unappreciated free time you often have as a kid in the summertime. The hay shed was actually fun, like a rural jungle gym. I could tie a rope to the cross-beams and swing half the length of the shed, fall, and it was no big deal, I'd just fell into a pile of hay. Or, often times, if the hay wasn't stacked quite properly, there'd be gaps that you could crawl through, a lot like the tunnels in the McDonalds playlands these days.
    It occurred to me that these tunnels were a sort of unexplored territory, the possibilities of where they would end or how far they would go were mind boggling to me at the time. I decided that if I were to set out and explore them all, it was possible that I might even be able to locate a certain village of a small blue hominid species. So I began crawling.
    After about an hour of this, with almost all of those mind boggling possibilities now explored, I suddenly became very frightened. I look back on it now as a small step toward maturity. Not because I realized that finding my beloved Smurfs was impossible, but because I began to wonder what might happen if I did. What if they're not as nice as they are on television? What if they're all hungry, or sick? Would they hold me responsible for these ailments? What if I scare them, and they attack with military capabilities not yet suffered by even Gargamel? I was a kid, all of this responsibility stuff was freaking me out of my skin.
    So I went inside, and have never searched for the Smurfs village since. Screw them.