Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-08-13 - 9:31 a.m.

Halfway

I am, beyond a doubt, the lamest person I know. I am sooo lame. (How lame am I? I'll tell you.) I am so lame, I actually have fantasies about moving into some sort of halfway house for people who aren't quite emotionally equipped for the big wide world, a place where the routines are simple and after I've gotten up and washed my face and wet-combed my hair, I can eat breakfast with everyone, help clear the table if it's my week, and get on the little bus to go to the place where we make straw brooms for the day. It seems amazing to me sometimes that some kindly person hasn't already PUT me there. How did I get out here in the middle of all this crap? This is WRONG, people.

"Don't be in a hurry to grow up, it ain't no picnic," my mother said. Actually, I don't remember if she did, but she probably did, except she would have said it more colorfully. She said something like it, anyway, but I knew it was bullshit. I knew that adults had cocktails and stayed up way late and went where they wanted to when they wanted to and no one told them that was enough cookies for one sitting and no one served them liver and onions or made dental appointments they didn't want to go to.

I don't know if I was in a hurry or not but it apparently happened, I growed up; I can't tell, myself, but I know a test for it. If you go and ask a kid if you are a grown up and they look at you like you are completely wack, then you are. It means you look just like all those people your parents had over for cocktails. In truth you probably feel inside just like the cocktail people did, which would be, "AM not am not am not no no no can't make me la la la la la la la" but YOU didn't know that when you were a kid, and the kids don't know it about you. Of course you can't tell them, because kids need to rely on their adults being competent and confident and steering the world around safely while they wait for the kids to grow up so it can be safely handed over. Kids do NOT want to know what it feels like in here, I guarantee that.

Can't tell the kids, "Know what? Know what? I feel just like you do, only I have a lot more guilt. Will you make me a sandwich with no crusts on? Can I watch a video with you?" Scare the hell out of them. You can't even ask your own kids if you're a grown up; you have to approach some stranger's kids in the park.

So I don't think I can ungrow, think I'm stuck, right here in the land of dental appointments - and this week, I would be happy to have a dental appointment instead of the shit I have to do. This week is like one of those gauntlet-running type things, where you have to tear down between rows of people armed with clubs. Wasn't that in a movie? Didn't they hang that guy by his pectoral muscles afterward? I don't want to hang by my pectoral muscles. My mother never said anything about that. See, maybe I could run down that gauntlet faster if I knew there was something on the other end that I wanted, but if it's just those hooks, man, I ain't going for it. I don't think there's any cookies down there.

At least now I have a better understanding of why all those cocktails. I don't drink, but I kind of get it. Maybe there were cocktails at the end of my mother's gauntlet; maybe that's what got HER to run. Everybody's gotta have some sort of cookie to run for, otherwise what kind of idiot would run past the people with the spiky clubs? Maybe my halfway house is down there, and when I pass the last person and take that last whack, they'll dust me off and show me the room I'm going to share and which dresser can be mine, and then they'll help me write my name on the labels of all my clothes. I would like that.

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