Chasing The Illusive High

They hook you at a young age. It starts simply enough, a lost afternoon in the backyard or at the kitchen table atop a pile of newspapers, with only a large mess and abstract ideas trapped within the pages to show for it.

It's all a bit of fun at first, something to do when you're bored or need to feel special. But then the cravings kick in, the smell of a fresh box of crayons, the rip of a piece of red construction paper, and the malty taste of Elmer's leave you in such a state that you don't know if you're awake, asleep or trapped in some new dimension with Rod Sterling.

Before you know it you're hocking VCR's for an Easel and a box of watercolors and your friends find you half starved sitting in a small windowless room ranting about the trees not behaving or hunched over a computer your eyes crusted over as you fervently retype the same sentence endlessly.

Parents, you must protect your children from that most deceptive of drugs - the creativity high.

You think it's no big deal to hook your son or daughter up with a coloring book and a 6 pack of crayons, something to help them relax and you'd much rather it happen in your own home. After all, everyone's doing it. But that little 6 pack is never enough, soon you're buying them the 16 and then the 24 packs to get them off. Then, when you're cleaning your kids room, you find hidden at the bottom of their toy box every parent's nightmare a 96 assortment box of crayons!

Creativity gone unchecked can lead to all manner of illegal activities - composing and recording a song about flying cannibalistic monsters, a novel series about a wizarding community or the most dangerous of all a painting of a bunch of soup cans. Oh I can't even begin to tell you the horrors we found at that studio. The walls splattered in red, tomato and chicken noodle soup everywhere.

Please, for both your sake and your childs, squash any sense of creativity your darling ever has by belittling their creations and shoving accounting literature brochures in with their lunch pails.

If not, you may find them skipping school to do this:

Won't somebody please think of the children.