Custom kitchen deliveries
We gotta move these refrigerators
We gotta move these color TVs"
-Dire Straits, "Money for Nothing"
The other day at work, as I was clearing out a storage closet, I had to move a carnival-style popcorn machine. For some reason I was hoping I would feel like I was in some sort of magical, exciting, slightly whimsical state of existence as I moved it, and that somewhere in the background a pipe organ would start playing "The Entertainer." Maybe a clown car would drive up and carnies would start setting up a ring-toss game and funnel cake would come raining down. But instead it was just more shit I had to move. There was nothing exciting about it.
I think this is a sign of growing up.
As a kid, when you don't understand things, everything is exciting, or at least has the potential to be used as something fun. The older you get, and the more you understand things, everything just becomes an obstacle. If you grow up right, there are no adventures, only inconveniences.
So as much as I've tried to avoid growing up - eating apple jacks instead of special K, believing that my car is a spaceship, etc. - it looks like I may be heading in that direction. For example, I am starting to like coffee. Coffee is an "acquired taste," which means that it's something you're not actually supposed to like but you trick yourself into liking it anyway. Coffee tastes bitter. Poisonous plants usually taste bitter. You are not supposed to eat poisonous plants. This means you are probably not supposed to drink coffee, but we do it anyway because we're a society of addicts and we're convinced that it makes us adults.
I remember my first cup of coffee. I was in fifth grade. On that particular day, I had to give a speech of some sort, as I was running for class office. I was up at four in the morning because I couldn't sleep, and my dad decided that I was going to need energy for the big day ahead of me, so he gave me coffee. (It's ok, I'm 6'1" so it's not like it stunted my growth at all.) After every sip I would pour in some milk until it got to the point where I could actually drink it because it was essentially milk with a hint of mocha. And I felt so damn grown up because I was drinking coffee. I hated it, but the novelty was enough to overcome the fact that it tasted worse than all of the kale soup my mom made ever put together.
I still hate coffee, but now it's at least become something that seems normal, even though probably as early as middle school some of my peers were drinking it for its utilitarian function. If we're using coffee as a litmus test for adulthood (in an actual litmus test, coffee would give you a 6.9), then I'm, well, at least in the early stages of being grown up. As a result, the imagination lobe in my brain will now atrophy. Sticks will no longer become guns and swords, swings are no longer airplanes, brooms are no longer guitars, cooking pots are no longer helmets, broken sprinklers are things to be fixed rather than things to play with, cardboard boxes are for recycling instead of being building materials for forts, the newspaper is for reading and not for making hats, I know why the sky is blue, I know how cars work, I know where babies come from, I have to register for the draft which could (theoretically) turn me into an army man at any second as opposed to voluntarily dressing up like an army man and shooting imaginary Iraqis, I'm starting to legitimately consider things like "grad school" and "health insurance," and it will probably be in the next few years that one of my close friends gets married. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
And to top it all off, there is nothing different between a popcorn machine and a rack of folding chairs; they're both heavy shit that needs to be moved.
All I can say is: I want my MTV.
