Is This It?

Is this it?  Is this Adulthood?  (Disappointment)

I won’t speak for you, because you as an adult are probably just peachy keen on post-adolescence.  I mean you may have a nursing or CEO position, where saving lives or making millions simply spins your globe on your finger. 

As I see it, no job position, no incentive ladder, no growing family, popping out cute squirmy babies, no avant garde film, no elaborate book, no educational status letters next to my name, no fee-simple house by the angry sea, no yacht, named after a Melville character, with mates on each deck, no monogamy, no polygamy, no threesomes, no one night stands, no fame before the masses, no jogging in the gym, no climbing Mount Everest or Mount Vesuvius, no hiking from Georgia to Maine, no jet setting from here to Milan or Singapore for a dinner or a vaca, no cruise to a Caribbean with fake smiley locals, no Air Force to break sound barriers, no NASA to build a spaceship to the next inhabitable planet, and, certainly, no sheriff or governor or senator or president; no, not even comfort on a bed, rolling over to my lover, or, hand-swinging-hand, at the carnival; no, not even the pop, pop, of popcorn—compares to childhood innocence, my mother fucking childhood and its innocent grace.

I’ll come right out and say it, I’m 31.  Not the most mature 31 you’ll meet, but I don’t play X-box while smoking dope.  So apparently, I’m ahead of the curve on maturity.  But let me not even compare dope or videogames or ages.  I was a child from birth to about 15. Technically, I was a teenager by 13.  And it’s like some slow torture to adolescence and even slower torture to 30.  Really breaking out the cat-o-nines and paddles along the way.

And why am I at 31 disappointed?  Why do I sit and describe these things?  Not because of some Rolling Stones Satisfaction, and how I can’t get it.   No, from Hawaii to Alaska, to Maine, to Florida, to Texas, we have a country that has an arrow point at you.   And it says Be An Adult.  Be Mature About Things.   And I’m fucking pissed.  Because I thought, when reached adulthood, life would be better.  Don’t all children believe the 25 year old teacher has a better life?  Don’t all children want to be like their parents and siblings and adults, and do Big Boy or Big Girl things?

I mean, I loved playing.  Did you notice the period in the last sentence?   I mean loved playing games, climbing hills, running around the house, running in the yard, and playing with toys (do I have to go into specifics with “toys”).  And rather than imagine, with a chemistry set, magical potions that make me invisible, I drink espresso a Starbucks—definitely nothing magical is going on.

So what went wrong?  I do more productive things.  I write articles for magazines, websites, and imaginative poems for literary journals.  I use my imagination like a state trooper uses his radar detector.   And yet, Disappointment Song.

So is this why, after work, after a job of expertise, others face the distraction of TV, drink poison bottled since before America, compare their lives to a sport, with winning and losing on the line.   Is this why Shakespeare truly etched Hamlet?  Out of the disappointment of Adulthood.

Now do not, I mean, do not mistake what I say for an immoral, disgusting Peter Pan lifestyle.  I’m talking about the whole shabang of Adulthood.  Filled with waters to the ceiling of worries, worries about children, teenagers, strangers, murderers, kidnappers, taxes, the having and having-not of money, the State of the Nation, the State of the Nation within a Global Sphere, the pleasing of superiors, the teaching and guiding of subordinates: you name it and it has some adult worrying about it.  I mean wrinkles and suffering lines just crawl across faces as time goes by, and then to counteract with surgery everywhere from face to boobs to toes.  Fucking Ridiculous.

When you’re 21, you talk about girls or boys, movies, books, news.  When you’re 65, conversation pieces center around funerals, weddings, baptisms, strange behaviors in families, and your own knee or hip or bowels, for fuck sake.  Should I look forward to these “discussions?”   What about when I’m even older?  Do baths and nurse’s aides and reading obituaries for necessity, do these things seem enjoyable?        

I’m sure you’re girlfriend’s pussy, or boyfriend’s long dick, fulfills your desire, your artsy yet commercial job fulfills your need to create and earn a living, and your church pastor fulfills your spiritual notions, but, in reality, face it, fulfillment is just another way of trying to Rolling Stone it and get some satisfaction.

The fact is, puberty and subtle event after event tears the rare fleur-de-lis on the side of the mountain that is innocence.  Some call it “sheltering,” but my parents were the solo climbers of shading the rare lily on the mount.  They protected me from the Wide World of Compromised Good.   And I played, man, like when the coyote runs after the roadrunner, falls off the desert canyon, and picks himself up, shaking his head and tongue.  Man, I played.

And my dad has worked in rooms where the stench of death was unbearable and the toes of bodies had strings with numbers on the licenses.  And to-this-day he eyes at bones of men and women and spots inconsistencies.  And he still fears when I drive from one side of town to the other.

But what do we make of innocence?   According to Bill Cosby, albeit in a humorous way, children lie, cheat and steal.  And, of course, are Brain Damaged.  If being a child is brain damaged, that is the damage I want to my brain. 

No, they know not what they do.

Children are innocent, which is why there are so many restrictions and laws to prevent them and adults from meeting in the horrible Adultworld.   Children can’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes.  Adults can’t have sex with teenagers.  Why?  Obviously, because, with these adult things, children wouldn’t be fully reasonable in their actions and decisions.  So a child is not reasonable enough to drink a whole beer in the US.  A teenage boy can’t have sex with a woman older than 21.

I won’t attack reason at all here, but I will say that little by little, the child wants to be an adult and finds illegal ways to make that happen.  And this is the real problem.  That a culture such as ours may celebrate the child, but the child still desires to be an adult.   Perhaps the grass is greener, perhaps, evolutionarily, reason is more desirable than protected innocence.   These things may or may not be true.

But the fact remains, that what we have created with our reason has a Long Way to go, to even compare with the grace and forgetful-minded bliss of childhood.