crazy kids

Tuesday, sep. 26, 2006   |   0 comments

Today was a super duper ultra day of public transportation: I rode BART, I rode a shuttle bus, I rode the VTA light rail, and CalTrain, and boy are my charms tired.

It’s not even nine o’clock yet, and I’m already seriously thinking about bed. I just have to last ten more minutes, then it’s officially “past nine,” and that’s a somewhat dignified time to go to sleep, right? Wow, remember when you were little and all you wanted out of life was to be allowed to stay up after nine o’clock? “Just let me watch the first five minutes of Love Boat! PLEASE!”

As a kid I was also a huge fan of playing games like “grocery store” and “bank,” chores that are not nearly as exciting to me now that I’m old. And shaving my legs! I used to get in the bathtub and lather up my legs and use the “sharp” edge of a worn-down bar of soap to simulate the act of shaving. Just for the thrill of it! And now I get to shave my legs all the time. My life, it’s like a gift.

My friend Levon (co-owner of the great St. Francis Fountain) once told me about this golden realization he’d had, that if his teen-aged self had been able to see his life now — with his hundreds of records and his motorcycle and the going to see bands all the time and his very own apartment and the no curfew whatsoever — he would have been so supremely stoked.

Me: “Wow. That is GOOD. I’m totally going to do that, start looking at my life through teen-aged-colored glasses!”

Levon: “You like that? Enjoy it now, because it lasts maybe ten minutes.”

It’s true. Once you think below the surface of that one, you realize that having the kind of life that would provoke a stoked sensation in a teenager is perhaps a somewhat dubious distinction. Perhaps. But still…it would be nice if there were some way to resurrect childhood’s love-affair with the mundane. Banking, for instance. What if paying my credit card bill or visiting the ATM filled me a great, satisfied happiness? Actually, that would make me insufferable, and crazy. “I know, you guys. Let’s go to the BANK! AGAIN!!”

Have you noticed that? How the things young children think and say sound a lot like the kind of things crazy people say? Like if an adult came up to you and told you about how all cat angels are born on the sun (expect for the one that was born in China), you would think that person was totally insane. But kids, they totally get away with it.

Oh look, it’s 9:18!