The twenty-seventh day of April. What a great day to start a blog, huh? Not the crisp beginning of the year. Not even the waxy beginning of the month. It's not even the beginning of the day. It's almost 3pm. Hell, it isn't even the end of anything. It is only near the end of something. It's almost May. It's almost dinner time. But it's not the beginning nor the end of anything.
Fitting this idea comes at a unorganized time calendarily. Seeing as everything around me marches closer and closer to the beat of a fiery financial shitstorm. Forgive me. I'm bitter. I'm unemployed. Cast out from a sixteen year career with a company who couldn't find their ass in a wind storm. Laid off by a middle marketing manager with a degree in theater who only had a year with the company because he was the just-hired “friend” of a former VP. I guess that's how the world operates – on theater degrees and comfy business-politico friendships.
I did mention I'm bitter, right?
So now, unemployed for the third month, my wife and I (though largely the wife – such a trooper) trudge through the paperwork mountains of trying to save our house from a trumped up mortgage devised by the Fannie Mae money-hungry deviants, amazed that we have to become destitute before our mortgage company will even consider modifying our loan. That's what the only piece of mail in our mailbox said today.
Even more ironic is the absence of junk mail in the mailbox. Seems even the capitalist marketers of useless products and luxuriously stupid services ignore you when they know your ship spirals downward in the great American financial maelstrom.
So what do any of my troubles have to do with this blog?
Simple.
On my way back from the mailbox – the checkered flag lap to a three mile walk with my dog – I ambled down a asphalt path lined with crab apple trees in full-on blossom. There, holding my own paper marker of financial destruction, I saw over a dozen trees domed in white blossoms, a breeze deftly bobbing through them, sifting blanched petals to the ground, their syrupy fragrant aroma clinging to my overly long nose hairs. To cross into my dandelion infested backyard, I had to walk underneath the trees and let those sweet dandruff flakes flock my hair.
That's what this has to do with this blog.
Crab apple blossoms covering my hair.
When I reached up to brush them off, I noticed their softness, their smooth velvetiness, how such a fragile thing could survive in this world that makes a name for itself by driving things into extinction by crushing everything it sees beneath its heel like a spent cigarette butt.
It was the first time in a long time that I didn't feel like an adult anymore. I felt young, like a ten year old again, collecting grasshoppers in mason jars, rubbing dandelion heads on girls' knees, sweating all day long from playing at the park and not giving a flying fuck about what I looked like, smelled like, or where my next meal came from.
So I think this is what my blog is all about. Defying adulthood. Doing those things that breathe fresh air into our lungs, fire crazy-ass ideas into our brains and drag out every last drop of worry, responsibility and menacing obligation.
We all grew up thinking that once we were unshackled from our parents, our limits were endless, and they were, but we gained new parents – government and business; and if we thought our parents were out to get us, we need to thank them, because these new parents are nowhere near as lenient and definitely have no love in their hearts for us.
So screw them.
Shirk adulthood. Spend one hour a day, a week a month to be a kid again. Go out and lie on a grassy hill, watch the clouds roll by, break off a stick and throw it in a stream or rushing gutter and watch it sail by, hit a baseball with a bat, run until you can't feel your legs anymore and whatever you do for that hour, don't give one damn notion or care about being an adult.
You'll be surprised at how much you're missing out there.
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