My Confession, Part One

"Welcome to the world of human beings. We are playing a game. The rules are rather intricate, but once you learn them you may be able to come up with better ones."

I fool myself. I constantly fool myself. Intentionally and constantly I fool myself. I have never been ambitious. When I was very small, around the classroom the children told the teacher what they would be if they grew up.

"Fireman," one would say.

"Doctor," comes from the small mouth of another.

When the querry reached my ears, my brain responded: "A cow. I will be a cow if I grow up."

As I grew and learned the rules a bit better, I realized that I could not hope to be a cow. People kept asking me this rediculous growing up question however, and I needed a reply that was at least theoretically possible.

"What do you want to be if you grow up, young Matthew?"

It was important that the answer was percieved as serious. People don't like to be mocked, espceially when they are taking interest in you. If I were directing myself in a play, I would say that this particular line must be delivered in a deadpan fashion - no irony, no sense of scale. The line must be delivered with the same spirit of one who wished to be a dentist or a truck driver.

"I want to be a rock star."

The problem with this, of course, is that there is no prescribed method, no technical school for rock stardom. The closest approximation to an instructional guide about this illustrious career is the folklore of popular music: Anectodal Accounts of How it's Been Done in the Past. And as we all now, such generalizations are nearly always useless to the specific case.

And so, I knew that this career path was a rediculous one, and what I knew in my heart but never let on was that I didn't hope to actually follow it. I never wanted to be anything other than what I was. The notion of growing up and 'becoming' some new thing was in my mind Nonsense. I expressed my contempt with the rockstar ambition.

to be continued...