Monday, October 26, 2009

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.

4 comments:

Radioactive Tori said...

You sound like you were very much like my boys are. They have their "stories" and they don't like their sisters to play because they "girl up the story". I have tried to play in the past and get lost with the elaborate story line they have. I love that they are so creative!

We have a whole forest of trees behind our house. My 9 year old son has one climbing tree that he loves.

HeatherLynn said...

Ahhhh...the joys of youthful creativity and imagination.

Anything is still possible back then...

I remember spending so much time being very dedicated to things....like, one time, me and my sister went out and we caught a bunch of toads/frogs. But when we caught them, we realized we didn't have anywhere to keep them, so we took our red wagon, and we turned it into a frog habitat. We built an entire world of sand, and we put in ponds with bread bad liners so they wouldn't leak...we make make shift trees for them out of willow tree limbs we tore down....oh, it was beautiful until the sun came out and we apparently hadn't planned out the locale of our wagon frog-a-tarium....we came home from church and they were all cooked....dead.

*sighs*

I think our mom realized then that maybe she should buy us toys, so we'd stop messing with nature.

The frog population in Ohio is just now finally recovering! ;)

~hl~

BeckEye said...

I daydream a lot. The problem is, most of it happens when I get into bed, so I'm lying there daydreaming when I should be sleeping and real dreaming. Then I can never get up in the morning because I was up all damn night daydreaming.

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater said...

Radio: Keep an eye on that 9-year-old because THIS is where he is headed.

Lyn: Your tail of dead frogs has inspired me! I'm going to stick a firecracker up a bullfrog's butt! Just kidding. That's cruel.

Beck: Is that ironic? I'm not sure what is anymore so I just stay away from that term.