Do you ever get the feeling if you stop complaining there will be nothing left to say? Because, seriously who really gives a crap about the crossword puzzle you finished, the weather, or the city employees you watched dig around in in a six foot tall leaf pile for twenty minutes searching for the water meter? Insert a, “but nobody loves me or visits me,” or a “call back later my shows are on”, and I might as well be eighty years old, with metal pin in my hip and the inability to set the clock on the microwave.
It’s funny how the older we get, the more we equate responsibility with being dull. We seem to harness all this passion and potential, until one day the wizard steps out from behind the curtain and tells us all about 401Ks and termite contracts and all of a sudden we began to suck, finding ourselves dwelling on tedious details. Sure, it’s all in the spirit of improving quality of life, but seriously, do we have to sacrifice all the insanity and impulsiveness that fueled our youthful mishaps. It’s like waking up one morning and finding out that bitch of a tooth-fairy crowned three molars and swiped my spirit of adventure as payment because she she doesn’t have a contract with my insurance company.
I suppose this is the sort of thinking that leads middle aged men to get hair plugs, join a gym, and by a two seat convertible that they can only drive with the top down, because they are too tall to sit in the driver’s seat without rubbing out those radical plugs on the rag top. If Cougartown is an accurate representation of female coping skills, women don’t look any less ridiculous in their quest for eternal youth, dressing like skanks and kidnapping unsuspecting bag boys at the grocery store. If mainstream media is considered an adequate barometer for measuring the public at large, it’s fair to say growing old gracefully is nothing more than myth that belongs on the same shelf with if you touch yourself that way you will go blind and no those pants don’t make you look fat.
Flaws and all, we stumble forward looking for the next best thing, the eternal easter egg that will change our lives forever. Though there are those things, they never seem to work in the manner anticipated. Life is a series of setting goals, and making things happen, not a singular pinnacle that absolves us of the necessity to constantly adapt and evolve. If life were perfect, how would we fill the hours formerly filled with complaints?


It is amazing that when i decide not to complain as a conversational gambit, i have a hard time talking. Boo.
maybe they will be filled with wonder?
I think we are conditioned to it, this sharing of the bad. The news should be renamed the bads – excepting for the 30-second fluff piece on Grandma’s 100 birthday, news is the bad stuff that happened today: robberies, murders, bombings. The juiciest gossip is the the nastiest. Perhaps is that if we hear the worst in others we feel our lives can’t be that bad. Maybe we’re afraid to share the good things for fear others will hate us for having achieved something they didn’t, or will accuse us of bragging – lording our successes over them.
Yes. I have been walking this road for some time, thinking the only thing worth saying is something juicy or negative. I went through a phase of attempting to always be positive and well, I realized I had not much of anything to share. That was a rather disheartening moment.
And as for yearning for the youth we traded for mortgage payments and dental plans. Um yeah. I liked spontenaity. We were pretty good friends for a while. Like to have visits from her more often.
meno, I think the complaining is habitual. If we form a bond based upon it, it makes it more difficult to explore other aspects of communication.
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flutter, could be, like I wonder what I can say next?
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Bob, I think nailed it. When good things happen, I am often reluctant to share, fearing they’ll sound remarkably dull, which they frequently are.
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Maggie, it’s funny when we attempt to recapture our youth now, we appear absolutely ridiculous.