Shut Up And Listen 228

Seeing Clearly As An Adult

There are a lot of shitty things that you realise as you grow up. That innocence you have slowly dies away and you begin to see the world for what it is. How much you see varies from person to person, as does how long it takes you to see things clearly. For some people (usually those happy, positive people you just want to smack), they never lose all of their innocence. For others (usually those people who write shitty poetry about their dead cat when they're fifteen), they lose it quickly and begin overreacting to things. For me, I like to think that I saw some thing clearly early, but I know other things have taken longer.

I learned at a younger age just how fucking sick and cruel the world is mostly through TV and movies and books. I learned that the people in charge are usually just as clueless as you are, but also more selfish and self-centred. I learned that a lot of the people I admired like authors and athletes were often people with a shitload of problems and not the greatest people in the world. Other things have taken a little longer, like realising the people closer to me, the ones I grew up around are just as fucked up and stupid as anyone else.

There are some members of your family you always dislike because they're such assholes that even a kid can spot that. By the time you reach my age, you just do the sensible thing and avoid them altogether. The hard part is when you get to be my age and realise that a lot of the ones you liked are just as, if not even more, stupid and just as big, if not bigger, assholes. Take my uncle Roger, for example. He's a big fat guy with a beard and as a kid, you're scared of him, but there's something about him you find cool and appealing. He has this loud voice and abrasive attitude that just makes you laugh as a kid. You think he's joking when he tells you to get lost or that he hates kids, because you don't think that an adult would actually mean something like that. Well, let me tell you, when you get older, you just realise he's a big fatass with opinions on everything, most of them based entirely in some sort of ill-conceived logic that shows him to be just stupid and a total jerk.

Dealing with these people is much more difficult as you've already established a certain relationship with them. The ones you never liked you can avoid because you've always avoided them. The ones you did like, well, how can you suddenly just turn on them without stirring up a shit storm? When they say something that is horribly ignorant and not even close to being witty, how do you just shoot them down without repercussions you really don't want to deal with?

So, you're stuck there, just smiling blankly and doing your best not to roll your eyes or jump up and let out a string of obscenities that help form one of the worst verbal beat-downs you've ever administered in your life. And what's worse is, you know you're going to have to keep doing that numerous times a year until they die. And then you realise that that is what your life is going to be: a never-ending series of situations where you have to be a fucking fake who sits there and listens to idiots spew garbage out of their mouth and try your best not to kill them or yourself in the process. There are certain things you don't realise about the world when you're a kid that you do when you're older, and most of them fucking suck.