Chapter 1
THE AGING THEORY
I’m not getting old. I am not aging. I am simply growing more mature, growing more hair, and getting the “rougher” look. It’s what happens when you have a birthday every year. It’s also why I don’t like celebrating my birthday. Ever since I reached the age of twenty-one, I realized that there was nothing more to look forward to with aging. When you were thirteen you couldn’t wait till you reached to sixteen to get your license. When you were sixteen you never waited till you were eighteen to smoke. You jumped in the back of a truck, headed out to a party in the boondocks, and got high. And no one waits till they are twenty-one to have a beer. I had my first one when I was a sophomore in high school.
So when I reached twenty-one, I had nothing more to look forward to. I had done everything in which everyone wanted to do. This is what I call The Aging Theory, the point in life where you stop wanting to get older because there is nothing more to experience in the world. It’s when life gets boring and nothing sounds exhilarating like the first time you did it. Like when I first had sex, my junior year of high school with a dorky girl with curly red hair. It was awkward of course, and really bad, but it was the first for both of us and it was a lot of fun.
Now that I’m about to be forty-two, twenty-one years later, I’ve gotten tired of aging. I wish I could be young all again. I wish I could be born again, rejuvenated to when everything was new and fresh, when I was still innocent. That’s what I want life to be like. But, unfortunately, it’s not.
I have a desk job. Well, not exactly. “You will be teaching the leaders of America one day”, my professor said to me on the last day of the year - even though I didn’t know if he was meaning that I would be teaching one day or that the people who I thought would be the leaders of America some day. I’m hoping he meant the former, which obviously came true. But if I’m teaching the teenagers who will be the leaders of America one day, then I don’t know if I wanna be here.
I preach to my kids, as us (the teachers) are told to do, that smoking is bad and alcohol is bad and sex is bad. Yes, it is bad, meaning the smoking. Alcohol can be good if you use it respectively. And sex is wonderful (I don’t think I need to go into much detail). But they’re teenagers. They’re not going to listen to us. That’s what I hate about being a teacher sometimes. We preach to them about not to do these things, but we did them when we were younger, and some are even doing them today, like the baseball coach who gives his athletes tobacco if they win a game - not saying that I agree with that.
Instead of telling them that, we should be screwing into their brains that they should live and be young because being adult really sucks - yeah, the sex is better but soon I will be reaching that age that it’s gonna be hard to get him up. And if I can’t do that, then I’ll probably sink into alcoholism and end up killing myself.
And maybe I have it all wrong. I probably do. But this is my life. The real and cold fact is that I have no life. I have no wife or family, just a stupid job that makes me stupid money that only allows me to do stupid stuff once in a while.
During the week I spend my nights grading papers for people who don’t even care. And during the weekends I go to the bar with my best friend Frank Ora, a cars salesmen, and hit on girls. Once in a while, I’ll get lucky. But I’m not searching to be lucky.
And then it comes all back to age. If you’re old and ain’t got money, then no young girl wants to spend time with you.
I guess I don’t know what I’m really searching for. A life maybe. Or something to look forward to like when I was young.
That seems nice, and it would be nice if it would actually happen.
But when do fairytales and dreams come true.
