When we are young there is a certain strain that sees the road of adulthood and speculates a revolt. Yes, the stereotypical teenage angst is ever prevalent in the modern millennium child just as it had effect over Nixon naysayers and “Reaganomic-Era” refuters. Growing into responsible adults is a prolonged, anxiety driven purgatory and we select few do everything we can to numb ourselves to it—to merely endure until the inevitable time has cometh. The young self of this demographic is not the one who went all “willy-nilly” and came in past the midnight curfew or the one, who in a stage of whimsical lawlessness, went eighty in their sweet sixteen present down the interstate highway. If their mother’s could only witness such monkey business! No, I’m alluding to a much decrepit class of teenager. They do not seek to amount to fathers or please the identified path to success—there is no such notion of happiness in such volatile instruction. I am talking about the one who values anarchic expression, going against the moral grain, sacrificing their bodies and their health for mere experience. This is how they learn about life, about people, about trade—not in board meetings and classrooms.
From the early age of thirteen, with the trials of puberty but most certainly not of self-realization, I idolized this precept; I wanted to be part of this strain. I was the Beelzebub spawn of a white-collar physician and a hard-nosed military captain. The combined titles of the two sounded as powerful as it did intimidating, and I should have never thought once of ever going against such “made” adults. They were to be perfect role models, the American Standard, yet if that were the case I wouldn’t have not wanted to take roads less travelled by.
Both acclaimed professionals from inert poverty, they were the dreamed up notion: From rags to riches. Mother was from the west side ghetto of Cincinnati, raised by her Japanese seamstress mother with seven other children. Father was raised from New England south-siders who “worked all damn day only to have the government take every penny.” This underprivileged upbringing is undoubtedly the catalyst that molded them to break out, so they worked hard all their life for what they had and cherished, never stopping to look back. So as life unravels, they both meet, both have the same work ethic, both decide to have children, and work and work and work.
By the time I was thirteen I noticed neither had the time they wanted for their kids. Father’s on call six nights a week, mother is deployed, then stationed, then deployed. I noticed how their work became their lives, all for the provision of wealth or self-accomplishment. By the time I gained any perspective in the world, or my first chest hair, I denounced such qualities. The question arises, are they even happy? Mother would come home, and for the first few months would be a disconnected blob due to the solitary life of Ohio. You began to wonder, what did she execute in those distant villages? Was it anything like Platoon? Her work is stoic commanding and she relishes in this, how does she find compassion again? Then father would return with dreary eyes. He delivered his fourth in a course of a night, all through cesarean section, and in four hours he will be checking up cobwebbed ladies at his practice for fifty bucks a pop. You wonder what a lifetime of sleep deprivation and monotonous routine can do to a man’s wits. I must admit, these two are not to be taken for granite. They provide, and provide well, just like every other straight road drones. They make time for football games and dance recitals and go out to dinner on holidays. However, on the other hand, they fall into the same predicament of socially accepted professional adults. They love in between work and work around love, holding pay-raise and promotion over sexual ecstasy or altering, open-minded experience—for they can now afford a time share on the east coast, and that is where love and existentialism will rekindle for two weekends out of every year. Maybe this is a lot for a thirteen year old to image or deconstruct, but that is how this different breed thinks. The brain is molded at an early age, but forever molding, forever changing.
