I’d always wanted to try writing a children’s book but came to realize that my ethics are questionable, and the odds are that any child reading my book would actually become less intelligent because of it.
It seems like it could be a hard sell to, say, Scholastic publishing, that I have an idea for a book that will make children both dumber and less good. Best case scenario, I’d have to self-publish, and then you would forever wonder, did I really write a book? Am I really an author if I am also the publisher of said book? How come none of these little shits will give me money for my book?
I like kids, especially little kids. Everything is still an unknown for them, these pint-sized intrepid explorers, a discovery lurking around every corner. Petting your first dog. Then making the connection that both a tiny Yorkie and a huge St. Bernard are somehow both dogs. Then eating your own booger.
And frankly, I identify with kids more than adults. For example, I am easily amazed. I’m curious about most things, yet I don’t understand the balance of what’s happening around me, so I ask a lot of questions about what’s happening and why, but then I forget and ask the same questions again later. Sometimes I shit my pants.
I turned 48 today and birthdays always get me thinking. Everyone who has aged past a certain sell-by date knows that time moves at a different pace depending on your age. When I was a kid, the last 5 minutes before the end-of-day school bell seemed like an eternity, while entire decades now feel like they’ve slipped away without having given two weeks’ notice.
Another year has gone by, and as they do so at this stage in my life, I’ve begun to think more about whether what I’ve put into the world over the past 365 days was on the whole good, or is it the case that I took more than I gave?
So far I fear that it’s the former, and I’m running out of time for the latter, because we’re more than halfway to homebase, people. We’ve rounded second and even third is not guaranteed. (I should note here that I never played baseball.) Yet still I have this deep-seated feeling that my life hasn’t actually begun yet. That most of what’s happening now is prelude.
I think the solution to eliminating that feeling—the opposite of fulfillment and which can’t be a good one but which I suspect isn’t uncommon—must be to run full speed toward whatever it is that you desire in your life, whatever will give it meaning, while at the same time beginning to set aside those things that have been slowing you down.
I had the day off work today after spending nearly a week in Maine where the weather was beautiful. Despite this I woke up with a sore throat, because how can you not get sick when you spend hours in an airport, and then hours more in a plane? I much prefer driving. And so I ventured out only into the outdoor gardens area at Ace Hardware, where I gifted myself two pumpkins and a mum. It’s my first mum, something I recently wrote about for the University of Minnesota that was fascinating to learn about and fun to write (“The public demands beautiful flowering shrubs”).
Here’s a poem I wrote as an adult about cheese:
All kinds of crazy cheese
Cheese take many forms
Comes in can
As wheel
A thin slice
On top or under ham
Sometime cheese is triangle
Or look like Pac-man with triangle missing
Not sure why cheese that way
A lot of time, cheese is square
Or not square exactly, but cube
But also it take log shape
And so many kinds of cheese!
Cheddar cheese
Harder to pronounce cheeses like Asiago and maybe Havarti
And cheese that sound like other things, like when people say “gouda is gooda”—people so clever!
And then that car cheese, Chevy cheese, but it is that Chevre stuff?
which is goat cheese, made from goat, not car…
Farmer cheese is made from farmer
Then cheese with holes in it
All kinds of crazy cheese
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