The Racket 39 : REVENGE

After Bob Mizer / Lola Dupre

It feels like there's been an overflow of other people's bad news recently. A host of updates from friends new and old, all of them heavy with the weight of adult responsibility - mortality, health, the decisions without correct answers more and more commonplace as we grow older. From a certain angle, there is an unfairness to growing older, a slow, ugly break from the blissful ignorance and irresponsibility of childhood where suddenly all of our actions have consequences and none of these consequences can be ignored because ignoring them will only create more consequences.

Clearly, childhood and adulthood are not entirely separate entities. We do not segue easily from the days of being a kid to the days of being grown up. It is a slow learned process with arbitrary checkpoints - marriage, jobs, children - whatever else we tell ourselves to help delineate our days of being young and being old.

If we could though, if we could sever the stages into two distinct chunks and analyze them separately, without context, I can't help but think how evident it would be that adulthood is a big, vengeful fuck you to everything that comes before. The ideal childhood (and I understand almost no one has a childhood remotely described as "ideal) is one where a kid can be a kid, where parents are able to shape a world free of the omnipresent ordeals of existing as a human. We keep our kids away from screens, away from dire warnings in the news, away from violence, away from all of the bad things our world is rife with. All of the things eventually as adults they'll have to deal with. We keep our kids unaware of what comes next because childhood is supposed to be an unexplained reprieve from a world we are all inevitably going to run head-first into.

We are granted x number of years of light-filled childhood where the only things we have to worry about are what we're going to name our stuffed animals and how many marshmallows we can fit into our mouths. And then with little to no warning and only a barebones survival kit to pull from, we are suddenly adults and the world is big and scary and everything we were held from at arm's length is suddenly, oppressively there and it all feels like the universe's cosmic revenge for the gift of being a kid we didn't even know we were getting in the first place. 

And please, I acknowledge the beauty inherent in the complexity of being an adult - the goods, the bads, the extremely uglies and how they all wend together into the mess we call life - I just want to acknowledge for a moment, in a day and week and even a month full of the kind of sad, hard, difficult life events you can only chock up to a certain amount of time in the realm of adulthood, how unfair these latter days can be.

Or maybe unfair is a silly word to describe the grand tapestry of living. This is just life - good or bad or whatever.

And maybe it's just been a hard day and I can't process emotions without swathing them in overwrought abstraction. 

Maybe I'm just a little sad, and I want to blame someone for it.