#98 Cheerios Dust
My very close friend and “on again off again” boss has always told me to relax a little, and to enjoy the “underachieving phase of my life.” But I’ve never been very good at this, and this column has basically been a catalogue that articulates my struggle to fit into adolescence. But this week, as I prepare to commit to a graduate school program, I suddenly felt very reluctant and afraid of this decision, for it seemed to mark the end of my underachieving phase of my life.
Lately, my brain has been plagued with one consistent thought: “I don’t want to grow up.” After all, what could be better than living the high life that I currently live (pun absolutely intended)? My life is a life of debauchery, wherein day by day, I get off from work, then go out to bars, hang out with friends, consume unhealthy food, and fail miserably with women…it’s great!
Fortunately, there is a rational side of my brain, and it tells me that my urge to accomplish something important with my life has very little to do with the lifestyle I lead. What I mean to say is that I’ve observed plenty of successful adults in my brief stint here on Earth, and I’m convinced that most success stories involve people who ignore standards and do what feels right to them.
And I have certainly never been the type of person who conforms to any of the standards that I come across as I meander through this existence of mine. I mean, I have personal standards, don’t get me wrong, but they are bizarre and, to most everyone I know, these standards of mine seem arbitrary at best. But they’re mine, and I like ‘em!
The other night I was eating dry cheerios from the bag they come in during a game of Scrabble and my friends took notice and ribbed me a bit for this “weird” way of eating cereal. What they didn’t realize is that eating dry cheerios from the bag is one of my earliest memories in life, and therefore quite the “creature comfort” for me. As a matter of fact, whenever I eat the “cheerios dust” (not to be confused with angel dust) at the bottom of the bag, I am automatically transported to a magical land of nostalgia featuring one happy kid (me), who is watching “The Smurfs” on our thirteen inch Trinitron television in the kitchen in the house I grew up in. It’s damn nice, I tell you.
As I get older, I begin to cherish memories like the aforementioned one. Maybe it’s because I know I can never actually return to my true childhood, or maybe it’s just the amazing power of nostalgia; but I really miss being a kid. I miss feeling wide eyed. I miss getting overly excited about future events. Nowadays, no matter how “fun” something sounds, I know not to get too excited, because more often than not, the things I look forward to don’t meet my expectations when they occur.
But the more I think about it, and the more I observe the reality of my condition, the more cocksure I become about the fact that no one is really a “grown up” in this world of ours, we’re all just faking it, and longing for that feeling we used to get when we were real young, and innocent, and “wide eyed.” Everyone’s just chasing the tail of the dragon of their memory equivalent to my “Dry Cheerios Dust and Smurfs” memory.
This past Saturday, I took a trip to the local Science Center here in Portland, called “OMSI” (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry), and I was suddenly transported back in time to a magical land of being a child. This place had it all; paper airplane wind tunnels, giant rooms filled with rubber balls and pressure hoses to shoot said balls all over the place, water bottle rockets, and general mayhem.
The best part was that I was surrounded by loud, obnoxious, pre-pubescent awkward looking children, who were each having the time of their lives, and it was a beautiful site to behold. Despite my lack of compassion and understanding for what it means to be a child, lately, I’ve been finding myself constantly fascinated by children.
I’m fascinated by their lack of socialization, by their lack of adult goals and the adult stresses that come with said goals, and most of all, I’m hopelessly curious about their ability to get excited by things in life that normally seem expectable and mundane to me.
As I made my way through a tiny portion of the Science Center on Saturday, there were fleeting moments (read: the entire time) in which I found myself wide eyed, curious, excited, and unaware of my adult problems as I traversed the unique landscape of science exercises disguised as toys.
And I think I would have stayed in this magical land of childhood if I wasn’t being escorted by one of my “three nanny’s,” the incredible “J-Nine” (She’s also the lead singer of the Bolt-ons, the only all acoustic Michael Bolton Cover Band). I am speaking literally when I refer to J-Nine as one of my three nanny’s, because here in Portland, three of my closest friends are all professional nanny’s with years of nanny-ing experience under their belt, and I think I get along with these three girls so well because they are used to dealing with small, annoying children, so they understand how to keep me from getting bored and desolate. After all, despite my age, I am, for all practical purposes, a whiny, attention starved little kid masquerading in adult clothes and therein making a mockery of the adult system.
As a child, I constantly dreamed of all that I could, and would achieve. But now that I’m encroaching on my thirties, I feel full of doubt and reluctance. I can’t understand my reluctance, because I am on the cusp of achieving most everything I ever thought I wanted, but I can’t shake this nagging fear of achievement, because I’m worried that once I achieve the things I think I want, I’ll be left with ennui, which is the French term used to describe eternal boredom.
But I think this is, actually, total bullshit (excuse my French)! What I’m really doing is failing to understand that in life you simply do things, or don’t do them, and no one else really notices or cares. No one out there is waiting for me to finish my next novel. No one is losing sleep over the progress (or lack thereof), of my career as a writer.
A close friend of mine, who is in his early sixties, and basically an older version of myself (extremely witty, well mannered, down to earth, sophisticated, always interesting to talk to, well, you get the idea…), he gave me some great advice the other day, which led to the preceding epiphany. I was going on and on about my struggle with writer’s block (read: procrastination in the first degree), when he interrupted me (I told you he was like me!) and said, “Mike, Just Do It. It’s the only good thing Nike did for this Earth; they summed up how you accomplish things. You Just Do It.”
Even if I were famous and beloved by millions (which, incidentally, is both my greatest dream and my worst nightmare, and this dichotomy explains a large percentage of my insanity…), it wouldn’t change a thing in so far as my personal motivation goes. Because my friend’s advice is both simple and true: In this world, successful people just do things or they don’t; and it really is that simple.
I hate you, close friend of mine (you know who you are!), for always making the solution to my artistic problems sound so simple. Maybe I don’t want to “just do it.” Maybe I want to write column after column and book after book about my writer’s block. I mean, writers block, it’s a truly amazing thing! After all, without writer’s block, I wouldn’t have all of my eight hundred CD’s alphabetized with every single CD backed up into mp3 form, I would never have finished my taxes on time, my apartment would be a total mess, and I probably would not have been able to watch all five seasons of “The Wire.”
They say that the only way to begin fixing a problem in your life is to first identify and then accept that you have a problem. It is in this spirit that I hope this column will thereby mark the beginning of the end of my personal onus. Because my problem is not writer’s block, and my problem is also not that I am afraid of success and adulthood. The problem is that I’m hallucinating; I’m seeing the trajectory of my life in terms of black and white, when there are a million and one shades of grey!
Before I visited the Science Center, I thought that becoming a successful adult had to mark the end of my childhood innocence, but I was dead wrong. Hanging out with little kids and acting just like them helped me to realize that I will never truly “grow up,” because I am still in touch with my childhood instinct to seek the fascination that comes about from learning (about) new things. I am therefore pleased to announce that I am no longer afraid of success, I will no longer complain about writer’s block, and I am no longer convinced that I will someday become an adult. And I have Toys ‘R Us and Nike to thank for their apt, corporate slogan advice, for I have found a zen like mantra in reconciling their two slogans: “I Don’t Want To Grow Up!” and “Just Do It.”
