Say What You Want

I miss being a precocious child.

I'm pretty precocious now, but it just isn't the same when you have 5 o'clock shadow and nosehair.

I think that, when you're college-aged, you're reasonably intelligent to grasp the idea that there are going to be precious few times in your life when you are going to be able to behave like a total asshole and face relatively few repercussions-- unless you have sex condomless with the wrong chick or throw up on a campus police officer-- and, knowing that, I think that most college kids make sure that they live it up a little because they're aware that they're going to have to settle down and grow up.

You know, at least ten or so years after graduation.

When you're a young child, even a precocious one, you don't really have the intellectual foresight to appreciate how lucky you are that you're a small child and you can say pretty much whatever you want. And, yeah, you might be sent to your room or remonstrated sternly by some D in a sweatervest, but, basically, nothing's going to happen to you.

Like the time my sister was giving me a hard time on the front lawn one beautiful summer's day, and I had had enough of her.

"Oh, go dip your vagina in duck sauce!" I yelled at her, at age 8.

We must have just had Chinese food.

What is even funnier about this situation to me now, looking back on it, was not that I said that to my sister, loudly, in the open space of our front yard, but that my sister then had the courage and lack of embarrassment to report, verbatim, what I had said to our parents. Truthfully, if she had told me to go bathe my penis is hoisin sauce, I don't know that I would have been able to repeat that to my parents.

Oh, it was a good life.

In fourth grade, when Ms. Curly asked me what would I have done, had I been one of the bears who found Goldilocks sleeping in my bed, I said,

"I would have decked that straying son-of-a-tulip."

I think I was just repeating a phrase I had recently read in a "Bloom County" cartoon from the book "Night of the Mary Kay Commandos." Ms. Curly, obviously not a fan of Berkeley Breathed, was not entertained. While displeasure spread over her face like Parvovirus, she didn't throw me out of the room. She just harshly said my name as her eyes bugged out, making her look, I remember thinking, just like Bill the Cat.

Then there was the time in sixth grade where I made a film about the Loch Ness Monster, investigated by an fictional policeman from Scotland Yard named "Constable Clitoris." Thanks, Monty Python.

Amazingly, no phone call was placed to my parents' home. No letter from the principal. No disciplinary action. The Precocious Child wins again, remains unscathed, and lives to fight another day.

It was a good life, really.

Did I appreciate it then? The shield of immunity provided to the precocious child? No, I did not. Now, the only way I can say whatever I want is pretty much what you're looking at here. And, in one respect, that's okay, because there ought to be consequences for going around shooting your mouth off and being inappropriate in the company of others, in the public sphere-- on the front lawns of America. You can't expect people to work in an environment where people are telling their bosses to go dip their vaginas in duck sauce, for example. That just wouldn't work. But I do miss that freedom of the tongue.

Of course, this freedom returns, pretty much as it was, when you reach old age and you can just blame everything on dementia. At least there's something to look forward to.