Warped

Going from childhood to adulthood is similar to space travel, or realizing halfway through life that you’ve been spending your nights as a werewolf or flesh eating zombie. It’s creepy.

As a kid you have all of these thoughts and aspirations that you are too wobbly and cocooned to deal with, so you push them into the future. In our formative years, time seems like a never ending blanket covering everything in front of us. And all we need to do is grab on to it and pull ourselves through. It’s like standing on a moving sidewalk at the airport – you’re going slow as hell – but you know you’ll get there eventually.

Anything that you want to experience, but aren’t able to as a kid, is buried and hoped to be discovered by the person you’ll be one day. The adult person who will magically have transformed from a neurotic goober into a stable, responsible, able bodied being who is waiting on the other side of the blanket to catch all of your pitches through time.

Well if my age means what it’s supposed to by normal standards, I’m an adult now. I am 30 years old and standing here, at the other end of the poop tube of life, and all the crap that I saved up for myself as a child is now dumping on my head in an endless stream. I wish I was able to poke my 14 year old self with a really long stick that could reach back all of those years and ask, “Why the hell couldn’t you have just done all of this sooner?”

I can remember being in high school and daydreaming in my room about wanting to be a writer. I have written stuff since I was old enough to hold a pen, but I didn’t think that was enough to make me a real writer. I was disgusted by my loving parents and two-story home with a pool and would have given it all up to live in some run down hotel plunking away at a typewriter while chucking things out the window in fits of dramatic frustration. At that time I was heavily into the Beat Generation guys and would obsess over the adventures and weirdo resumes of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs – willing myself to one day be as accomplished as them. I made attempts to reach this goal by experimenting with drugs and burning out the engine of my car after getting stuck in the middle of nowhere having fled an illegal dance party being held at an Indian reservation, and yet, for all of this, I was still not getting the results I wanted. I felt that I was too young and too put-upon by the burden of having a good family (which was so lame to me at the time) to be the kind of writer I wanted to be, so I tossed it into the future to worry about then. I started writing pretty regularly when I was in my early 20s, but now that I hear about friends of mine who wrote books and started magazines in their teen years – I regret having put it off.

The other day I had lunch with a friend of mine who also recently turned 30. We depressed each other in between bites of burrito by coming to the joined conclusion that our lives were practically over. I explained that in my opinion, achievements start losing their “cool” factor after the age of 25. If you invent something great, or write an amazing book in your 20s, you are a genius and can be boastful and cocky for the rest of your life because you did something amazing – and did it young. Once you turn 30, everything that you accomplish takes on sort of a desperate feeling, like it’s your last ditch effort to make a name for yourself before you’re shuffling along in sweatpants with all the other drones. You can pretty much hang it up once you’re 40 – and by 50 you’re old to the point of punch-line. So we only have 10 years to make it happen! That’s a lot of pressure. If I had only realized how awesome I was when I was a teenager, then I wouldn’t have to work so hard at being TWICE as awesome now. I’m too old for this mess.