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1.20.99 Real Life? I don't know how it happens. One day you're in high school full of hormones, confusion, and acne then, suddenly, one morning you wake up in Los Angeles with a real job and a headache. What strikes me most is the excess of guilt over the time I had wasted worrying. So many emotional resources spilled out frantic in the fear of an unknown future now looming big and dark on the horizon. Breaking through this wavefront I become the casual anthropologist as I sit in the mall and watch the status of my adulthood pass before me. The new cool has emerged but I have been dropped from the mailing list. Since when, I do not know but somewhere between high school and self-awareness it happened. They are not my generation, I realize, and for the first time I stare in wonder at their strangeness. I realize what my parents must of thought of us as we differentiated and became. I am invisible to them now, just another adult amongst the general throng of incomprehensible chatter. It's too soon for this, I am NOT through with my irresponsibility. I hardly got a chance to rebel and now find nothing but myself to defy. But in this city I see so many that have ended their rebellion. These are the ones who are convinced of, or deluded by their own adulthood. It is as if this is a metamorphosis into a new existence that finally corrected the backwardness of their former selves. "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me;"(1) however, I am still that very soul who wet his bed and cried when Bambi's mother died. Yet I see so many, "I had not thought death had undone so many."(2) Their eyes do not delight in the sun and their bodies no-longer respond to the sensuality of music. They hide in this urbanity and blame it, but it is ever more alive then they. Within this I still have eyes of wonder for the miracle of existence. I do not find satisfaction in sufficiency but seek to rebel against mediocrity. I will rage against it always and find fulfillment in unrest. This is LA, things go just a little faster here. The youth are younger and the life dies quicker but it all burns brilliant with combustion. 1
. 1 Cor 13:11 NIV, The Apostle Paul Gabriel Chapman, 1999 |