Trending
Who remembers playing Slug Bug during long car rides or school bus field trips as kids? Some people called the game Punch Bug. As a fan of alliteration and rhyme, as most youngsters still are, I always referred to the contest as Slug Bug. Pretty simple game. The first person to see a Volkswagen Bug calls out Slug Bug and has free reign to punch the person sitting next to them in the vehicle.
This silly game passed the time during long car and bus rides much like singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall or the more genteel The Wheels on Bus did. Unless a fight broke out, parents and teachers preferred the quieter Slug Bug to the raucous singing of rowdy kids. The game forced kids to look out vehicle windows and examine their passing surroundings. And for many it was much better than trying to read in the car or on the bus, which often made kids car sick. Even obnoxious and inappropriate singing and/or quiet punching was preferable to the smell of puke during long car and bus rides.
Does anyone play Slug Bug during vehicle trips anymore? There are probably many reasons why this game fell out of favor. There are not as many VW Bugs on the road as there used to be. Kids today have laptops, cell phones and other electronic devices to keep them occupied during long vehicle rides. And of course there is zero tolerance for even playful punching nowadays.
I have to admit to witnessing more than one scuffle break out when a youngster got a little too zealous with their punches while playing Slug Bug or the other popular punch game Flinch. So it is probably a good thing that these kinds of roughneck games have fallen out of favor with youngsters. Although a simple playful punch on the arm could arguably be much less violent than so many of the video games that young people play today.
During a recent long car ride with my family I happened to see an old VW Bug while I cruised by it from the passing lane. I joked with my wife about playing Slug Bug. She gave me that stern look that let me know she was not in the mood. A short time later a hideous Tesla Cyber Truck roared past our Buick. My wife hates Cyber Trucks although she does like the appearance of some of the Tesla sedan models. As for me, I think I will always be a gas guzzler fan. My spouse commented on how ugly the Cyber Truck was and that is where I got the idea. For the rest of our trip, whenever I saw a Tesla of any model, I would gently touch my wife's arm and point it out to her. After about the tenth time of doing this I was told by my spouse, " I don't care if there's a Tesla" and "Why the hell do you keep doing that?" And that's when I told her that I was playing Tesla Touch, the new game that I had just invented.
I wrote that this first session of Tesla Touch lasted the rest of the trip. It didn't. My wife played Tesla Touch with me for about half an hour and then got tired of it and once again gave me the I'm not in the mood anymore look. Since our first game of Tesla Touch my wife and I have played many times and I have gotten other family members to play along as well but never for extended periods of time. There are likely too many other distractions for Tesla Touch to ever catch on the way that Slug Bug did decades ago. But if the game ever does find a following, remember that you heard of it here first and that I invented this past time.
After I invented Tesla Touch, my family and I passed through a very red state. As I drove, we viewed many, many MAGA and Trump bumper stickers, flags and signs as well as people wearing their red hats. I briefly toyed with the idea of inventing a game called the Trump Touch. I quickly thought better of the idea. Trump's touching has gotten him into a lot of trouble that only the very wealthy or a teflon president can get out of. Every day people like us would end up in jail for Trump Touching.
Andrew Ludwig is a retired math teacher and a retired public school and Catholic school administrator. He currently works as a substitute teacher in Chautauqua County.