Proverbs 18, Verse 15
"The intelligent man is always open to new ideas.
In fact, he looks for them."
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
If you listen to anything a sixteen-year-old says, that makes you stupider than a sixteen-year-old. Though I'm often lauding his brain-power, my father must not have been too bright seventeen years ago, because, when I told him what kind of car I should own once I got my driver's license, he not only listened, he allowed me to go ahead and buy it.
A 1990 Ford Crown Victoria, late of the Delaware State Police, I reasoned, was the perfect car for a horny, impulsive, emotionally unstable teenager with knobby knees and an addled brain. In arguing my case, I emphasized that police package vehicles had beefier brakes than their civilian counterparts and were therefore safer. I judiciously omitted the fact that the car was hiding under its runway-sized hood an obscene 5.8 liter V-8 engine that produced a testicle-trembling 285hp. Note: police-package engines and undeveloped teenage brains should not be combined.
It was very early on in my motoring life when I realized my innate knack for killing cars. That Crown Vic, having survived years of abuse at the hands of the Delaware State Police (Dover barracks) died after just four months of having my name on the title. My name on an automobile title, I soon came to understand, may well have been written in poison.
In the years that came rolling along, I went looking for the new experience. I owned a Volvo, then a Taurus, then I wanted the old experience again, so I got another Crown Vic. Then a Chevy Impala. Then a New Beetle. Then I rolled into anonymity in a Ford Focus. Switched over to my wife's PT Cruiser. Got another Volvo. Went all Japanese and shacked up with a CR-V for a bit. Now I'm in a Volvo again. Hey, at least it's fewer than one per year, right?
"It's a good thing you're not about women like you are about cars," my wife has sometimes remarked.
Or glasses.
Or watches.
Or breakfast.
Ideas and ideals, though, are pretty constant with me. It takes me many, many years to change my mind. I'm not sure why, really. I'm definitely rigid, but I wouldn't call myself totally impervious to reason or rational argument. Unless, of course, I think you're an asshole, in which case pretty much anything you say I'm going to turn up my nose at. But if I respect you, I'll listen, if I can bring myself to attend to what you're saying and not get lost thinking about sex or the next time I'm going to ingest bacon. I find it so hard lately to pay attention to anything-- it's not you, dear; it's me.
My views have softened on some topics and issues, but mostly I'm still whacking away at the same windmills and running myself ragged trying like Christ to prove to myself I'm not a bad man, and violently shutting my eyes and ears to anyone who tries to convince me otherwise. And that's exhausting, in case you haven't tried it. I'm still trying to prove I'm socially active. Still trying to prove I'm a writer. Still trying to be a good boy. And I don't know especially why-- nobody seems especially turned on by my efforts, and I guess that's okay. I'm not trying to make anybody's pants sticky, but I don't exactly know what it is that I am trying to do.
There are days when I want to leap back into the velour bench seat of a 1990 Crown Vic, turn the wheel with my pinkie finger, mash down the accelerator and be treated to a symphony by Dante from under the hood. But these days I know I'd be fixated on watching the gas gauge needle go down as the speedometer needle moved toward the right. It had the coolest horizontal speedometer. God, I loved looking at it.
Now gas is $3.61 and I'm feeling the pinch and I'm terrified of everything. I mean, that car only had ONE airbag. Can you believe we were so CRAZY?
We were so crazy, my loves. Gas was $1.50. We didn't know. We didn't care. We were so young. We didn't have children. We had pimples and anxiety and schoolbags and sneakers and I really wore sneakers back then-- really, I did. But not shorts. It wasn't that bad.
It was horrible.
I like to think that I've smartened up since those days. In group sometimes I read a "This I Believe" essay written by a woman who'd had one published during the original Edward R. Murrow days, and then, fifty years later, wrote another essay called "Have I Learned Anything Since I Was Sixteen", the age she was when she wrote her first TIB essay.
As for me? In many ways I think that, no, I haven't. The only thing that I'm learning, though, is to be okay with that.
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