Peter Pan Forever?

At 36, I finally am feeling more like an adult; far more than I did when I became an "adult" at 21.  21 was a strange age, full of confidence and not much else.  Money was almost non-existent before that age and even then it wasn't that abundant so as with anything new, let's try it out and see what it can do.  Credit cards companies know this is the rite de jour for almost every newly liberated teenager, and market to college kids with a fervor.  More often than not, they get sucked into having a high interest credit card and the rest, ladies and gentlemen, is as they say: history.

Being the child of mostly absent parents; movies, books and fantasy became the more listened to voice of "reason".  In retrospect, I did alright.  I didn't end up like most people in my class in high school, which is to say a less than stellar existence.  Is that an elitist thing to say?  It sure is.  I wanted more out of life than to stay in a one traffic light town.  For some that maybe the best thing on earth but it's not striving for something better and it sure isn't expanding your horizons.  Regardless, I think I've done well with the cards I've been handed.


At 25, I got married and started off what I thought was the right thing at the right time.  Wrong.  At 30, I was paying for that mistake while continuing to excel at making new ones:  Hooray for me!  I was only just starting to really comprehend what being an adult was, funny how surviving most of the bad things life has to offer will do that to you.  All of those mistakes and choices, because no one really forced them on to me (well, maybe one or two actually were), made me who I am today.  If I had the impossible choice of being able to go back and do it all over again, I think I'm a moral enough person to want to choose my family over any kind of personal gain I might have been able to acquire by changing something.

So good morning 36: here I am.  37 is right around the corner and I am starting to feel that number - at least in some ways.  Being Peter Pan forever sounds good to everyone who wants to live in Neverland but sooner or later it loses it's luster and you yearn to be an adult.  At least that's the view from the mountain I'm standing on.  I've seen generations stand where I am standing and they've all had their periods of bliss, decades of excess, years of regret and garbage heaps of credit card debt.  I should fucking know fucking better.  But I'm a typical white American man/boy, battling against my own stereotypes who sometimes takes himself too seriously and other times not seriously enough.

Fuck yeah.