Hacky sack.
These days, humans have cell phones to fill up our down time when we're out and about in the general public. (And what a great time-killer those have turned out to be! I was in the waiting room at the dentist's office the other day, and when my name was called, I actually asked the receptionist if they could just chill for a couple minutes since I was balls deep in Genghis Khan's Wikipedia page. Did you know that because he banged so many women, and all his sons banged so many women, you can find his lineage in 8% of Asian men?!?! Crazy stuff.)
However, back in middle school, if you found yourself waiting in line, or bored at your Grandparents' house, or messing around in the locker room before football practice, or waiting for the bus, and especially if you had friends with you....you were probably digging in your pocket to pull out your trusty hacky sack.
I can't think of many things that I was definitively better at when I was 13 than I am now (Rollerblading? Getting chased by dogs on my trailer park newspaper route? Stealing half-smoked Dutch Masters from my Dad's ashtray?) but hacky sack might be the best example. We all had some mad hack skills, son. And you pretty much had to, when you were playing games like Pelt, or any other game where failure meant you stood against a wall and waited for your best friends in the entire world to throw an object as hard as they possibly could directly at your crotch.
After a year or so, the hacky sack craze died down, then was gone altogether. Among other things (my eyeglasses, my Batman Forever soundtrack, my football career), hacky sack didn't make the transition to high school along with me.
And then, almost inexplicably, we had a second hacky sack phase, the summer after Junior year of high school, around the same time my friends and I started listening to a lot of classic rock.** It was kind of a chicken-and-the-egg situation, in that I don't really know what happened first: Did we dig our hacky sacks out of the closet because we started listening to Dylan and Hendrix and Pink Floyd, and it seemed like the thing to do? Or were we already kicking hack, and we looked at each other and said "Does anyone have any acid rock CDs that they can steal from their parents' collection? This Goo Goo Dolls just isn't setting the mood right now."
In any event, once again, hacky sacks were never far out of reach. Cargo shorts pockets, glove compartments, lockers...they were back. And, much like the first go-round, it fizzled out after a year or so. In the last 12 years, I've barely even seen, much less participated in, a hacky sack circle. I imagine they still exist, at concerts, or communes, or any location with a sizable hippie contingent....or maybe not. I'm quickly getting more and more out of touch with the kids these days. Maybe the hacky sack era is completely dead and buried.
Or maybe there's an app for that now.
"Bro, I can't believe those Narcs wouldn't let us into the Phish show just because we didn't have any tickets, what a bunch of Communists, we're just trying to have a good time, br- WHOOOAAAAHHHH! WHO BROUGHT THE FOOTBAGS, BRO?!?! Now we can have fun again, forget those Commie Narcs, bro!"
**Other things that, at various points in time in my life, were seemingly extinct, then came out of nowhere to have an unexplained second run of huge importance: Professional wrestling; MC Hammer; those friendship bracelets you can buy with like 25 tickets at a video game arcade; David Ortiz; Muppets.
