Warm Greetings from the Denizens of Munchkinland.

5/10-11/22

I wake up feeling an awesome dread.

Its too intense to ignore completely, though easy enough to distract myself from as it stubbornly looms in the background of my thoughts. It seems attached to nothing specifically, though I figure it probably has something to do with the ever-lengthening list of shit I should get done but don’t have the motivation to do — either that or its anxiety holding me back. Its always difficult to discern which.

I knew I wouldn’t be good at this. Adulting, I mean. I was just explaining to my mother how I knew this from a young age.

It was before I turned ten, as we were still living at the old house. There was a hallway that stretched from the bedrooms and bathrooms to the kitchen, and along the wall of the hallway there were hooks for our coats and bookbags. Despite the fact that only Eve and I were going to school at the time, as Linda was still young, Linda got her own bookbag, loaded it with shit, and hug it beside our own.

She was always eager to grow up and the years that followed didn’t dampen that desire at all. She has proven she is adept at this. Eve wasn’t bad, either. But even then, as a young little shit, I stared at that bookbag and realized how different I was in that respect.

Since as far back as I can remember, I knew I would have a rough time of it, and my life since that point has shown how right I was. When I was a bit younger, adulthood was far down the road, so I could ignore it, but now it began to sink in: before I knew it, I would be on my own, and I had no idea what to do or how to go about doing it. Getting a job, getting a place to live, getting a car, driving a car, paying my bills, being a responsible human in modern society. It suddenly struck me how much I was fucked.

Now, as it turned out, I exceeded my expectations, though given I expected myself to be homeless or dead far before this point in my life, I suppose I didn’t set the bar very high. Still, I’m 43 and I feel I’ve been largely carried or hitched a ride on the coattails of others to get even this far. And its not like my ambitions are huge, either, at least not on the mundane side of things.

I still don’t think adults exist, but there are certainly those who put their all into the role and act it out quite well.

I am not one of those people.

Just one more way in which I feel out of place in a world I don’t belong.

Later in the day, as I’m sweeping the patio at work, sinking into the shitty mood I woke up in, I look up and see a small boy on the other side of the window, staring dead at me, smiling and waving. I wave back and can’t help but smile in return.

Later, I’m sort of enveloped by the mood again as I walk to the dollar store for cleaning supplies. As I’m standing outside, finishing my cigarette, I see a mother with her two young boys. I keep my distance, as I’m smoking, but one of them runs up to me within a few feet. He’s wearing a badge and a plastic fireman’s hat. He looks up at me, smiles, and waves.

I look at him, crack a smile, and wave back, but the mood’s got me, so I sort of stare at the ground as I take another drag. I can still feel his eyes, however. I look back up to find he’s still staring at me, almost like he’s trying to figure something out. He looks rather sad and concerned now, maybe a little hurt.

I feel kind of bad. Like he was trying to cheer me up and I infected him with my mood instead.

Sorry, kid.

Later, back at work. as I’m coming in the doors after having another smoke, there are two kids sitting at a table. As I walk past, one of the kids — a boy who is, at best, in his early teens — held out his hands for a high five. Without stopping, I obliged.

I think to myself how that high five from an older child was sort of a fitting end to the child synchronicity, but then it happens again the following day, and again it seems to be triggered by a bad mood.

I’m on break, in my truck, and get maybe a few lines into the book I’m reading before a kid I work with walks up to my driver side window. What proceeds immediately reminds me of a Bill Hicks bit I haven’t heard in ages.

“You read on break?” He says it with a voice and a scrunched-up face that seems to convey disgust. “Why?”

Not what I’m reading, mind you, but why I’m reading.

He follows this up by saying how he always wondered what I did on break. Rather than be satisfied with having finally solved the mystery and leaving me the fuck alone so I can continue enjoying my free time of thirty minutes, he continues babbling to me for the duration. Blind to my body language, minimalist verbal responses, or the dozens of other factors all pointing towards the clear message of: go the bloody fuck away.

At the end of my not-a-break, I clock in, firmly rooted in a bad fucking mood, and proceed to gather trash from around the store. Out in dining room, I notice there are two occupied tables. At the table in the middle of the dining room is an elderly couple, likely the grandparents of the hyperactive little girl at the table with them.

As I’m changing the trash in the far corner, I hear the kid start yelling in a manner that clearly conveys she’s desperate for the immediate attention of someone.

“Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!”

Its like she’s stuck in a loop, delivering a rapid-fire greeting, and I look up as it continues and she’s hanging off her grandmother, looking right at me. I smile and wave, then she stops and giggles. Through the giggling, she explains to her grandmother, “He’s funny!”

I’m not at all sure why Munchkinland elected to send these three children via synchronicity in an attempt to lift my spirits, but I certainly appreciate the attempt.

Curious Eyes & the Inner Child.

This last weekend I decided to finally drop by the Rite Aid near my apartment to see if they had any of the covid vaccines. Turns out they have all three. Though I still have yet to get vaccinated, I plan to by this week’s end.

And its taken this long, I should mention, because I’m a procrasting piece of shit and not out of any fear of being microchipped. I mean, come the fuck on. We have cell phones on us pretty much at all times. We tell Facebook and Google Maps our location, share photos and statuses regarding our lives. Algorithms on the net have built up a personality profile on each of us. When it comes to who and where we are, the data the government and corporations have stockpiled on us are an embarrassment of riches. They don’t need to fucking microchip us.

In any case, I was talking to the woman behind the counter at the pharmacy and as she told me that they had all three vaccines and an appointment wasn’t necessary, I was looking in her eyes. They were bloodshot, subtlely wiggling all of the time and occasionally shooting off quickly to the side before returning to their point of focus, which is to say my eyes. I was fascinated, but as I watched her it felt like my eyeballs were somehow becoming synchronized, or at least naturally trying to, and following her jerky gaze. It didn’t hurt, though it wasn’t exactly comfortable. Regardless, I kept eye contact throughout our entire exchange in part out of my curiosity.

I wanted to ask. I was dying to ask. Not asking was like holding in a massive shit trying to push its way out with agonizing pressure. But I had restraint.

I did not have restraint during a strangely similar circumstance a few days prior, when I finally burst and asked Emory a question that had been gnawing at me. Interestingly, this incident also involved eyes. Or a single eye in this case, to be exact.

Years upon years ago, Emory’s father frequented our fast food joint. While the guy could annoy me, for the most part I really liked him. He’d often talk with me and was often with his son, a cute little kid. Well, his son, Emory, is maybe seventeen right now and works in the kitchen.

Shortly after he started working here, his father died quite suddenly. He took maybe a week off, and when he came back to work he seemed to be holding it together really well. I’m 42 and my parents, who are both in their 70s, are in good health, but I know they won’t live forever, and just the thought of losing them fills me with unbearable dread. When they’re gone, it will unquestionably shake up my life, and a year later I’d probably be in shambles.

Maybe he’s good at hiding it. Maybe he only needed to grieve for a week. In either case, he seems like a strong kid.

When his father used to come in, he always wore these sunglasses. Given he almost always came in at night, I found this perplexing, though not for long. When he was talking to you he’d bow his head a bit to look at you with his naked eye — singular.

Shades are more stylish than an eye patch, I suppose.

For years I was dying to ask him, my curiosity nagging me every time he’d stop in again. Recently the question arose in my mind again, nagging me, though I couldn’t bring myself to ask Emory something about his deceased father out of the blue.

Then, just the other day, I found a convenient opening. It was just him and I out in the dining room and he had said to me something about his dad, though I can’t recall precisely what. In any case, it came flying out of my mouth before I was even conscious of what I was saying.

Curiosity killed the cat, and I was tired of being a pussy.

I didn’t just blurt it out, but began by confessing I had always wanted to ask his father something and then posed the question. It didn’t seem to bother him at all.

When he was really young, it wasn’t on his radar at all, but he remembers it kind of hitting him one day. This didn’t sound strange to me at all. When you grow up around something, its normal to you, so your less apt to question it. After he noticed the cyclops nature of his dad, however, he became quite curious himself and had asked his father about it all throughout his youth. In response, he only got the dodge — his father had always given him a goofy answer, reluctant to get into it.

Once he was older, though, he asked again, and his father finally relented.

Evidently he had come home from the bar one night and the woman he’d been seeing was convinced he had cheated on her, so she had shot him in the eye.

I was rather surprised, and I told him as much. Someone getting shot in the fucking eyeball and surviving? I always thought that kind of shit only happened on The Walking Dead.

“I knew there had to be a good story behind it,” I told him, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically.

People often talk about getting in touch with their inner child, but mine isn’t too far below the surface. But a thin veneer separates my inner child from this so-called outer adult, and he wants to burst out my ever-thin skin and ask blatant questions like a curious, innocent, ignorant child would — an in a manner only children can get away with. No build up, no candy-coating, no hesitation, no strategy working within the cultural conventions we commit to.

Yet while kids can get away with that, as I said, adults are expected to have more finesse. More restraint. And remarkably less curiosity to restrain.

Not to sound like a whiney twat, but that isn’t fair.

Nobody’s Fault but Mine.

It is utterly irrational to blame your parents for who you are.

If you do blame your parents for all your suffering, all your trials and tribulations, all you have to do is extend your logic to its ultimate conclusion to see its inherent absurdity. After all, if they are to blame for who you are, then they were just as predestined to be who they are because of your grandparents, and your great-grandparents are to blame for who your grandparents became — and so on and so forth, all the way back to the first form of life, or even the circumstances that brought life to be, or all the way back to the Big Bang, or the quantum fluctuations that made nothing belch up something to begin with.

Alternately, we’re all ultimately responsible for who we are. We may not be able to control what happens to us, we may always have influences of varying intensities, but we always have a choice in how we respond and what we make of ourselves — and please understand that this is coming from someone who has made a cascade of shitty choices.

Even so, I believe in free choice. In free will and personal responsibility.

As far as I can see, for each and every one of us every moment presents a vast spectrum of potential choices ranging from the path of greatest resistance to the path of least resistence, and I think most of us lean toward the path of least resistance on default, chronically overestimating the amount of free will we put forth.

Not everyone starts out from the same point of departure, however, which is precisely why those who echo that whole “just pull yourself up by your bootstraps” bullshit instantly inspire me to punch them in the dick.

Or give them a cunt-punt. I mean, I’m not trying to be sexist here.

We may not be able to manifest the perfect external circumstances, but in the end, its up to us to manage our damage and pursue our passions, refine our talents, find or plow our own paths, or at the very least fashion our perceptions and alter our attitudes.

I still have that child in me that angrily points the finger here or there — anywhere but the self. He arises during intense emotional states, rears his angry little head in dreams. He is a poison in my veins.

He needs to learn. The inner child deserves a better outer adult.

Intellectually, I know the truth, and I need to start taking advantage of it. I need to take responsibility for who I am and invest more of my will in my external life.

Ultimately, I am free. In the end, I am responsible.