Please Stop Infecting Me with your Terminal Negativity (or Darling I love You But You Can't Make Me Smile)

It’s true that often times we grow up creating this fantastic story of what our lives will turn out to be like, and that that suit that we created eventually stops fitting. Like an overgrown adolescent trying to fit into one of those plastic Halloween suits that came with a cheap mask, holding on is sad and a little bit creepy. As we struggle with that burgeoning knowledge that sometimes doors get closed in our face, that tragedy is not poetic when its people you love, and that some sins are never erased our definitions of reality began to change shape. The thing you have to remember is that it wasn’t the suit that made the magic but the eyes you saw it with.

When I told my shrink that I wanted to be magnanimous, like the Buddha, she said “Have you considered that that’s an unrealistic goal for you?” “Why would it be?” I retorted, “If I was that way as a child I can be that way now. I remember being so quietly happy.” “Are you sure you were happy, and not just scared?” She responded. It was just too incredible for her to believe that my childhood was so infused with magic. That the rocks by the hydro plant glittered like a thousand diamonds in the sun, that furiously riding your bike was the closest we’ll ever come to flying and knowing freedom, that changing your outfit twice in one day was a daring rebellion against the hum drum rules of society, and that poverty was a minor detail relegated to the non sensical cares of adults. Does a rocket pop turning your mouth blue innately bring less joy now? Or are you too busy plotting the top of the hill to appreciate it? I know that when the lizard opens one eye I’m just a fucking peasant toiling in the fields, but when the other eye is a transplant from the exhumed corpse of Tolstoy, well, then I’m the fucking hero aren’t I? In second grade I harbored the dream of being a comedian and even though I’m not on the bill at Just for Laughs, when I say something funny I think I’ve succeeded. In university I wanted to drop out and pursue my newest passion to be a highly successful chef. Every time my spouse finds my meals so appetizing that he eats until he gets diarrhea, I think that I’ve succeeded. And even though my teacher implied that I’m not a real writer, well, what the fuck do you call this then? My point is that a sense of innate wonder and endless possibility is not immature. It’s merely childlike. But holding on to a premature and inorganic vision of the structure of your life is.

So the next time you look down on me in disdain as I fondle my paltry cabbage, remember that I can make cabbage rolls while you can only continue to write your name in coal on the sidewalk in the rain.