When I Told My Mom I Wanted To Be a Writer . . .

. . . she said, "Well, you've always had a unique way of looking at the world, even when you were a little kid." It's true. For example: When I was around two-years-old, my mom was telling me that the zipper in the front of my pants is called a fly, and I, thinking I had a new pet fly to follow me around, asked, "What's his name?"

I also could entertain myself for hours alone with my toys. I didn't just point my G.I. Joe's together and say, "bang-bang!" I didn't merely smack my King Kong Bundy and Ricky "the Dragon" Steamboat wrestling figures' bodies together until it got boring. No! My guys had elaborate story lines that would take them from one end of the house to the other, each room being a whole new scene, one a dessert, one a mansion, the dog an AT-AT Walker from Star Wars cause who the fuck could afford the toy? My hero would hijack numerous vehicles, wear an array of disguises, and would stop at nothing to save the world from eminent destruction, unless one of my buddies called and wanted to hang out, at which point our hero would pick up right where he left off the next day.


I'm also not sure most little kids spent as much time in their own heads as me. I used to climb the tree in the front yard with no better plan than hanging out. I remember the best time to do this would be when my folks would say it was almost time for dinner, so there really wasn't a whole lot of time to start anything. I mean, Christ, that would hardly be enough time to get through one murderous scene in my never-ending epic toy story line. So, I'd just sit in the tree for a while and think about stuff. Sometimes it would be twenty to thirty minutes, sometimes just five, but five minutes when you were a kid was enough time to think about just about everything because for one, there wasn't much to think about, and secondly, time moved by so very slowly when you were young.

I liked daydreaming back then. I still do it, but now I get mad at myself for it because now I worry about that time being wasted - that's time spent thinking about weird scenarios that will never happen, like would if I became a famous rock star despite having no musical talent, or what it would be like to just smack someone in the face out of nowhere, and not necessarily someone I don't like. And I don't just think about the immediate shock the person might have, I think about minutes, hours later, how I would justify to this person doing such a thing. That's the sort of weird places my mind will go if left to it's own devices.

Perhaps I should allow myself time to daydream about dumb shit completely guilt free, if only for just ten minutes a day. I only wish Chicago had bigger trees around here.