We're all children. We invent the adult facade and don it and try to keep the buttons and the medals polished. We're all trying to give such a good imitation of being an adult that the real adults in the world won't catch on. Each of us takes up the shticks that compose the adult image we seek. I'd gone the route of lazy, ironic bravado, of amiable, unaffiliated insouciance. Tinhorn knights of a stumbling Rosiante from Rent-A-Steed, maybe with one little area of the heart so pinched, so parched, I never dared let anything really lasting happen to me. Or dared admit the the flaw...
The adult you pretend to be convinces himself that the risk is worth the game, the game worth the risk. Tells himself the choice of life style could get him killed -- on the Daytona track, in the bull ring, falling from the raw steel framework forty stories up, catching a rodeo hoof in the side of the head.
Adult pretenses are never a perfect fit for the child underneath, and when there is the presentiment of death, like a hard black light making panther eyes glow in the back of the cave, the cry is, "Mommy, mommy, mommy, it's so dark out there, so dark and so forever."
Cojones are such a cultural imperative, the man who feels suddenly deballed feels shame at reentering the childhood condition. Papa Hemingway will never take him fishing. George Patton will slap his face.
We turned the sound off and watched the news on the electronic printer, going by at a pace for a retarded fifth grader, white on black printing with so many typos the spelling was more like third grade than fifth.
The woes of the world inched up the screen. Droughts and murders. Inflation and balance of payments. Drugs and demonstrations. Body counts and new juntas.
... The trouble with the news is that everybody knows everything too fast and too often and too many times. News had always been bad. The tiger the lives in the forest just ate your wife and kids, Joe. There are no fat grub worms under the rotten logs this year, Al. Those sickies in the village on the other side of the mountain are training hairy mammoths to stomp us flat, Pete. They nailed up two thieves and one crackpot, Mary. So devote wire service people and network people and syndication people to gathering up all the bad news they can possibly dredge and comb and scrape out of a news-tired world and have them spray it back at everybody in constant streams of electrons, and two things happen. First, we all stop listening, so they have to make it even more horrendous to capture our attention. Secondly we all become even more convinced that everything has gone rotten, and there is no hope at all, no hope at all. In a world of no hope the motto is semper fidleis, which means in translation, "Every week is screw-your-buddy week and his wife too, if he's out of town."
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