Popeye
Have you ever been embroiled in a controversy?
Something like when you were a preteen, all legs and hands and greasy skin, and you are walking down the street from the convenience store, and you get seen smoking. You weren’t actually smoking. You were just pretending to smoke with those awful, floury tasting Popeye’s candy cigarettes. Candy cigarettes!
They were pretty cool, though, and it felt pretty badass to be smoking, for some reason. I could just say that advertising works. It does, but that’s not the reason that we wanted to smoke. We thought it was awesome, and we didn’t care why. Maybe we thought that the mean older kids that we saw smoking, and that we were scared of, looked cool, and we wanted to be like them. Maybe it was the parents that we were at the store buying cigarettes for that we were trying to emulate. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, and we were just young addicts that were already hung up on nicotine because people smoked everywhere, except in church, where I grew up.
The controversy sprouted from the mouth of some busybody who told my dad that I had been seen at the convenience store buying cigarettes, and then walking down the street smoking them, not even trying to hide in shame like any good christian child should. I was never the good christian child I was supposed to be, and this kind of thing happened a lot. It took me a while to learn about repression, but hiding and shame came pretty easy. It’s a familiar story, preacher’s kids always try too hard. We have to, our options are limited from an early age, and we have to make face all the time, so masking is mandatory.
I’ve been learning about the kid I used to be. I was a natural born introvert with ADHD. I guess I still am, but I didn’t realise this until I was 45 years old, so I was just a kid, hyperaware, highly trained in judgment, surrounded by people, all of who’s secrets he knew, who would tell on him, or just wonder aloud where the happy little 5 year old went, and isn’t that a shame, how you’ve gone all wrong.
All wrong. You’re all wrong. What a thing to tell a child. After 40 years it still hurts me. It’s so ingrained in my being that I fear I may never be rid of it. But the fear is the thing, isn’t it? That’s why adults say those kinds of things, because they’re afraid that you won’t ask them how to be all right if they don’t, because they want to tell you what they know, but haven’t been able, or willing, to do. They want to explain how to make right choices, and why to stay away from wrong ones. They want to be a part of bright and new, but there are too many rules for them, like the one about talking down to a bright young child, and piling weight on him until learns to obey, or breaks, because you’re an elder, and thus wise, and wisdom is your weapon.
I didn’t like to obey. I liked doing the right thing. I always thought it was weird that these old church people talked to me like I was a: stupid, and b: unfamiliar with their cult. I was the preacher’s kid, and anything but stupid. I required evidence to believe, and what I saw was a bunch of scared people following another scared person into trying to follow rules that they didn’t understand because they were blind and couldn’t put the rules in their proper places. I remember one elder repeatedly saying, “The bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.”, like that was some vast and deep wisdom. The bible. The bible says a lot of things, I knew that because I spent thousands of hours listening to the stories, and memorizing the bible, and if you believe all those things, and don’t understand context, your cognitive dissonance will drive you insane, just like the god you created, the one with the inscrutable plan.
He didn’t believe much except that he had to try sound like an elder, but he wasn’t specced out for that, so he just sounded like a fool. To me. What he said was “Obey, I cannot. Obey. I will not”, which is great if you remove “Obey”, but obedience was what was important, as long as they didn’t have to do it. But I wanted to understand; I wanted to be a part of the group, the community that held all the people I had ever known, so I obeyed, sort of, and went all wrong.
