When I was a kid, the thing that I always hated the most was when someone would shit on my imagination. You have so much ahead of you when you’re little that you don’t have as good of a frame of reference for whether or not things that you want to happen will actually occur. This is part of growing up, realizing that the things you dream about aren’t going to happen and that instead of being special you’re actually just one more asshole taking up space.
This is the way it would always go down: I, either alone or in conjunction with other kids, would think up something totally awesome that we were going to do, be it “Build a suit with suction cups so we can climb the walls” (With the child of my parents’ friends from Missouri) or “Start a rock band and name it ‘The Fireballs’” (With my cousin Jason), and we’d make plans for days of how things would be once we did this. Sometimes these things actually occurred – My sister and I really did put all of our old toys in the garage and have a garage sale that exactly zero people showed up to, and my First-Grade friend Adam and I really did set up a stand on the street where we sold rocks and made a very nice profit off of his brothers – but most of the time we’d just talk about them until we got bored or, even worse, until an adult ruined our fun. This was in the form of being told “Stop talking about this and go to bed” or just flat out being told that we couldn’t do this thing that we wanted to do. An adult would step in and burst the imagination bubble, and we’d finally realize that this idea that seemed totally possible, like it had already happened in our heads, was never going to happen.
When I was 5 or 6, I decided to run away from home. Not like how most kids run away from home – I wasn’t pissed off that my parents made me eat lima beans or anything like that (I liked lima beans); I just thought that running away from home was cool and wanted to try it. I was so excited about it that I told everyone and asked my parents to help me pack a bag full of things I would need, like candy and toys. The plan was for me to run away from home and go live at Cottonmill, a state park on the outskirts of Kearney. I didn’t have a plan on where I’d sleep while living there, but living at the park seemed like a swell idea, so that’s what I intended to do, and talked about it all day. I even asked my cousin Wendy (in High School at the time) if she’d go with me, and she said she totally would.
Now here’s the thing: to everyone else, this was a cute idea, me wanting to live at the park; to me, though, this was a reality – I really was going to live at the park. I could see it in my head, and I was going to do it. At age five, you don’t see anything standing in the way of your doing each and every thing that you want to do. I was serious and I wanted to run away.
So that Friday afternoon, when I said “Okay, Mom and Dad, time to drive me to Cottonmill so I can live there now,” I was met with a strong bubble-bursting as my parents shat on my dreams. “Oh, Gregg,” they said in a tone that was somewhere between the way teachers talk to retarded kids and how girls sound when they’re telling you that they don’t want to go out with you (which, now that I think about it, are pretty much exactly the same). “You can’t go live at Cottonmill, it’s dangerous out there. You can’t stay outside. You have to stay here.”
This was devastating. I didn’t see why I couldn’t at least just try it. I wanted to do it, and they had destroyed my fantasy by telling me that they wouldn’t allow it to happen. This same thing happens later in life, except as an adult you just tell yourself that you can’t do the things you want to do and instead decide to give up and spend your life behind a desk trying to earn enough money to go on vacation to the places where you’d always said you were going to move and open up a beachside bar that exists only in your drunken dreams.
There was another time, I forget how old we were, when my sister and I discovered our true calling. Sitting there on the beanbag chairs in or basement, we realized that we were destined to become the world’s youngest crime-fighting superheroes.
We weren’t stupid. We didn’t think that we were going to drink ooze or get radiation poisoning and somehow have super powers. We were simply going to get costumes and masks and go kick the shit out of bad guys. We’d stop bank robbers and all other sorts of villains with the help of our sidekick, our dog, Corky. He would help us defeat evil in the world with the help of a cool little mask we’d make for him; never mind the fact that he was twenty pounds overweight or that he was too stupid to ever learn a single trick. This shit was going to happen. We were certain of it. We even told someone who was older (possibly cousin Wendy again; she’s very good with kids), who responded the way adults always respond when kids are acting like little dip-shits:
“Superheroes, huh? Really? Wow…”
And we responded with total confidence: “Yeah, we’re for sure going to do this.”
The rest of the discussion mostly centered on what to call ourselves, our superhero names. I don’t remember what it was precisely, but I remember the prolonged argument over whether we were the “[Whatever] Three” because technically Corky wasn’t a full person so it really should be the “[Whatever] 2 ½.” Meanwhile I envisioned revealing to all my friends at school that I was indeed their hero, the masked defender of justice against the criminal underworld of Kearney, Nebraska. We never really thought about how it was that superheroes go about locating all these criminals that they beat up. I certainly hadn’t seen too many bank robberies at that age.
Then, eventually, it happened: my sister said “Gregg, we probably can’t really do this, because some of the bad guys might hurt Corky.” GOD DAMMIT! She had a point, but I didn’t want to let go of my fantasy world. I wanted to actually become a crime fighter, to make the thing I was talking about doing a reality. I didn’t want to just talk about it and then never act on it.
That’s a thing that’s remained true as I’ve grown up: I detest people who always say that they’re going to do things that they’re never actually going to do. You get a lot of this in Hollywood – “So and so is writing a screenplay and we’re going to produce it and I’ll direct it and it’ll be huge and bloobity blah blah” and nothing ever happens. I don’t say I’m going to do something unless I know for sure that it’s going to happen, because in my experience talking about things you’re going to do almost guarantees that you won’t.
When you’re a kid, though, you’re still able to believe in a whole lot of things that you later learn just aren’t possible. Kids can talk and talk all day about the things they want to do because they’ve got wide-open possibilities of what will happen to them, even if they just forget about it later or change their minds and don’t follow through. A lot of adults still retain that luxury, but it’s really annoying when you know damn well that someone is just talking out of his ass and has no intention of staying true to his word. So I say, Hey kids, put your fucking money where your mouth is and get to work. You want to be a superhero? Start sewing. Those costumes don’t just appear out of nowhere.
Stupid kids. You ain’t gonna do shit and you know it. So shut the fuck up and get a job. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to make copies of medical forms as I think about that novel I haven’t finished.
