Preface

Shedding childhood’s insulation from the weight of time, I balk.

Damn.  This finite life is a heavy load to shoulder.  And it’s obsessively dominated my thought pattern since leaving undergrad, enabled by the extra time I bought with grad school.  Finally, after twenty years of studenthood, I’m prying mental fingers off the freedom from responsibility and consequence that childhood so generously provides.

It’s easy to think you’re still a kid, albeit of advanced years, when you live at home, eat from a mom-stocked fridge, and are subsidized by parents at the cellular phone level.  Maybe you’re exactly like me.  Or maybe you’re already out in the non-student world, but hear childhood’s siren-esque call.  We are millenials.  Spawn of boomers, we’ve been called lazy sissies, stinking the stench from a sense of entitlement.  Maybe so, but the root of the problem is external.  The whole adult thing—and their world—it just doesn’t make sense.  Fuck it, it sucks.

Your telling me I need to work how many hours for shelter and food?  Your telling me I’ve gotta sacrifice time with family and friends, or on hobbies and entrepreneurial pursuits, for a steady paycheck?  What happened, mom and dad, to all that stuff you told me about dreams and pursuing a passionate life?  What happens when passion doesn’t pay the bills or sit behind a desk all day?  Must I waste finite time on ambivalence?  And what the hell happened to playtime?  Seriously, where did it go?  If this is adulthood, or “reality,” I call bullshit.

The only salient argument I see for growing up is to become a contributing member of the human species. Other than that, shit is whack.