When I realized I was a grown-up

With each succeeding year of my life I look back on how foolish I was earlier in my life and try to pin this moment in time. I cannot. When I was 18, society told me I was technically an adult – I could leave home, go to war, and die trying. When I turned 21, society told me I could now attempt to kill myself with alcohol. When I turned 25, society told me I could rent a car and drive off a cliff. With each progressive limit I've found that the actual "adultness" that I thought I had was just a part of a much larger pathway. I still am not an adult, but now I'm in open rebellion against adulthood. I covet things of my youth and I do my best to enjoy as much of it as I can. Being foolish, being a chatterbox, being random, that's a part of it. I also read comics, I watch shows that were on air in the mid 90's. Generally I question the condition known as adulthood. I've grown up being taught that adults behave a certain way and that as a kid, I would understand when I got older. Now that I'm 35, there is actually nothing to understand. People age in epicycles. They don't really ever become an adult, they drag pieces of their childhood along with them. The costumes change but usually the childish behaviors continue on. I've been fond of stating that if you laid gym mats in any office filled with adults they would all start thinking about laying on them and taking a nap in the middle of the day. No matter how old they are, they would all fixate on that and covet that idea. They would never allow themselves to do so even if encouraged because it's not what adults do, it's what children do. And in that, I never want to grow up. I've seen the adult world and it's just like a childs world, only it has inescapable consequences. If I grow out of my childishness, my loud voice, my odd behaviors, my passion then I will have ceased to be myself and I will have succumbed to the banal frost that has claimed the unbearably dull. Life is about tasteless remarks made in compromising situations. Life is about talking to yourself and making sound effects and skipping down the hallway and frying ants to death with a magnifying glass. When I lose my childhood I will be ready to die.

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