I was about to set off a rocket slightly smaller than a cruise missile when I noticed a warning on the box, "Use under adult supervision."
Well ... I guess that would be ... me. A crazed adolescent in an aging body with an arsenal of dangerous, albeit colorful, explosives. I lit the fuse and ran. It shot up a couple of hundred feet and KA-WHAP! A pyrotechnic chrysanthemum lit up the sky over our house with a sonic boom that rattled our windows. Another successful 4th of July. Nothing caught on fire and everybody still had all their fingers. As we walked back into the house I realized I finally looked old enough to do all the stuff I couldn't possibly get away with as a teenager.
The only real difference between 15-year-old Bob and 60-year-old Bob is the older one knows he's not bullet proof. What might pass for wisdom is just having a better handle on Cause and Effect. If you just pay attention, even slightly, for 40 years or so, you realize it's not a good idea to do all sorts of things.
For breakfast add a couple of fried eggs. For lunch put some meat in-between two slices of bread and slather on the mayonnaise. For dinner fry everything or better yet, deep fat-fry everything. The only other vegetable necessary would be corn. On the cob or popped. Either way is fine with me as long as there's plenty of salt and butter.
Not a bad diet if you want the blood vessels in your brain to blow out like bald tires on a bad road.
Since I want to live long enough to see everybody graduate from college, get married, and bring the kids around to see grandpa every once in awhile, the 15-year-old Bob hasn't been in charge of menu planning for years. And that meant coming to terms with broccoli, cauliflower, fruit smoothies, and cramming bushels of vegetables into our juicer. It must be working because my doctor told me my blood pressure was great for someone "my age."
When it comes to Health Issues I'm pretending to be a mature adult individual. If you saw me at the organic market you'd see me outwardly making all the right choices but inside I'm thinking, "Screw the goddamned vegetables. I don't care if they were watered with the tears of virginal angels ..." I Want An Effing Cheeseburger!"
But I pick up a head of cabbage, put it in the cart, and wonder how much I'll have to choke down because it's an excellent source of vitamin C with significant amounts of glutamine, an amino acid that has anti-inflammatory properties.
Y'see ... I know I'm faking it. I am a pretend adult. In social situations surrounded by people I don't know ... I am not being thoughtful ... I'm just talking slowly. We're going to go to a big-deal dinner tonight. I have to break out a coat and find my tie. My time limit is about an hour and a half -- two hours tops. After that it takes an incredible amount of self-control to not blurt out things that definitely will put a damper on polite conversation. Things like:
"If you truly believe what you're saying ... you're out of your goddamned mind."
That one's
applicable for any conservative junior booster or religious nut-job. My
definition of a religious nut-job is anyone who believes the tenets of any
religion.
I have a sneaking suspicion that most so-called "adults" are
faking it too. And after 20 years or more ... they get so good at it ... they can do
it all day long. And that's the primary reason Mental Illness strikes 11 out of
10 people. People can't continually pretend to be something they're not all day
long every day without blowing their wheels somewhere along the line.
Sometimes the snapping point is pretty dramatic. Texas Tower sniper
Charles Whitman comes to mind. But most of the time it's a subtle gradual
transformation where people begin to believe more and more in the carefully
constructed faà §ade of their own adulthood. They believe in things that aren't
true at all. It doesn't help when the entire culture aids and abets these insane
beliefs.
We live with it all the time. Our previous mechanic seemed like
a normal person until we noticed he had FOX News running constantly on the TV in
his shop. He was getting his cues on how to behave and talk like "An Adult"
about Current Events from a crazy squawk-box.
The finest examples happen
like clockwork. Every couple of years, about a half dozen people believe so
deeply in their own B.S. they somehow manage to get in front of a television
camera and announce they should be the next president of the United States. For
the next 18 months they roam around the country, spending millions of dollars,
putting forth their image of what they think a mature adult individual capable
of handling the job of the most powerful person in the world looks and sounds
like.
Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum. Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul.
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