It’s an age-old credo and common literary theme: adults suck. We lack imagination. Not a single one of us lame adults will engage in, much less initiate, a mustard fight. Because we aren’t idiots. We know that mustard stains the crap out of everything it touches, and we’re gonna have to spend a buttload of money to replace everything that is ruined during that short burst of “imagination-fueled, fun-filled frolicking” with mustard.
From the child-ruled world of Neverland to the timeless words of Jesus the Christ, adults are chided for being…too adulty. Or rather, we are instructed to somehow maintain childlike imagination and faith while being strapped with all the responsibilities of adulting. Hell, until the last couple of decades upright society considered any adult clinging to a wisp of whimsy to be some sort of immoral fruitcake. Then along came Johnny Depp, and being a nutter butter became cool. (God bless you, Mr. Depp.)
We all remember being a kid and thinking how much it would suck to grow up and be some lame-ass adult. (Of course being a teenager meant having unlimited access to Shangri-La.) Personally, I vowed to never lose sight of the fantastical. I promised myself I wouldn’t become some stodgy, old bore stuck in his rut. No! I would never stop fighting against the Man. I’m not sure what I thought that meant as a rural, white kid. I just knew that for some reason most of the adults around me had stopped rattling cages and had instead accepted a life inside them.
Then the twenty-teens happened. Somehow, I had lived my way into that gilded cage…except it turned out to be more like an apple crate…or a potato sack (I live in Idaho). Over the span of a decade, I went from believing I could change the world to being worn down by it. My “fire in the hole” life philosophy had burned out and left nothing other than singed fingers and ringing ears. It turned out, changing the world for the good was really, really, really hard. I wasn’t even sure I was changing myself for the good anymore.
The year 2020 became a respite for me, a lifeline for a drowning man. The solution took time to identify, but it was ultimately simple. I needed to suck less. On a day by day basis, I needed to unwind the psychological damage I had suffered from embracing (and internalizing) all the hysterical, internet-fueled bullplop going on around us. Adults, adults, everywhere! Adults are all I see! No faith, no trust, no imagination, no wonder. No grace. No stomach for forgiveness and/or redemption.
I can only imagine if my child self were to suddenly appear here in the current day he would drop to his knees and say something reminiscent of Charlton Heston’s famous decry, “You finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up!”
For too long, I’ve been allowing the worst kind of adults to determine how I invest my daily energy: control-hungry politicians, money-hungry Silicon Valley investors, ego-hungry talking heads, influence-hungry entrepreneurs. All of them sharing one thing in common—a self-centered worldview willing to shit on others for selfish gain.
Pardon my French (and an extra pardon to the French people), but I feel this deep down in my gut, the excrement processing facility of the body. It’s inevitable that all of us adults suck to some extent or another. Since early in our childhoods, we’ve suffered trauma and grief. As adults we compound things with our own poor decision making. But we don’t have to buy into all the bullcrap trappings put on us by the most ambitiously awful representatives of adulthood. This is America! It’s us commoners with common hopes and dreams (and childlike ambitions) that are supposed to run the show.
This new year, this 2022, I resolve to get to know my neighbors, to shovel someone else’s walk, to help carry groceries to someone’s car, to read books outside my worldview, to have conversations with people with whom I disagree politically and philosophically, to teach someone a useful skill, to ask someone else to teach me, to say I’m sorry, to say you’re forgiven, to dance like an idiot, and to exercise my childlike faith. As a result, I’m confident I will suck less, and the world will suck less too.
At the Desk This Week
I’m still reviewing a couple of my older projects and trying to figure out where I want to invest my efforts. I’m thinking I want to dust off my very first manuscript and follow wherever that takes me. It was a book I took on as a therapeutic effort to wrestle with my southern, white demons. I’m guessing the result will be something for my own benefit, though it might someday see the light of day. Before I commit to this as my next project, I’m reading through the entire book/manuscript to see if it has any fatal flaws that just can’t be fixed.
If You Wish to Start Reading The Green Ones…
[Click here to start at the beginning.]
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