This was inspired by a little fluff piece entitled The Little Boy and the Ocean; a fairly harmless little parable about how men have a little boy trapped inside. The main character's "little boy" helped him find an ocean and helped him to play in it. It ends with the ocean saying that the man needs the little boy because the boy has knowledge of all that is good and joyful in this world. It was sweet, it was innocent,and (with apologies to the author) it was a complete crock of shit.Teddy Bear Cannibal MassacreMaybe I'm the only little bastard out there. While I did not have an unhappy childhood, I have absolutely no compulsion to go back and relive being that age. In fact the further away I get from my childhood the happier I am. Or maybe it's because my memory is too good. I can't simply go on blathering on about how great it is to be a child.
I am not trying to single out that one piece for ridicule. In fact the whole inner child movement is a pox upon this land that cannot die fast enough. When John Lennon sang about Yoko knowing the little child within the man, sales of The Catcher in the Rye must have gone through the roof. Gloria Steinem completely trashed what meager respect she once held as she spent an entire book talking about her inner child. Even Stephen King fell into this trap, in Danse Macabre, an otherwise excellent nonfiction book about horror. Even though he was defending the notion that children should go to horror movies, I was still left with a longing for the "innocence" of childhood.
No, you can keep your playgrounds and raindrops, and ocean view. My inner child remembers getting the crap beat out him, catching a whole shitload of illnesses, and being utterly bored with the ocean. What I always wanted to see was a woman taking off her clothes in front of an open window. The only thing that distinguishes me at age 26 from me at age 8 is that these days I don't actually walk around my neighborhood looking into windows. To be in touch with my inner child would get me arrested.
My inner child and your inner child and everyone's inner child is a nasty little creature full of hate and bile. To be in touch with your inner child is to be a selfish, whining, constantly frustrated shit. There is no innocence in childhood. Anyone who mouths this lie must have had a particularly lousy childhood and thinks that everyone else was innocent and carefree. Children are cute, children have a lot of free time, children look like they are having fun. Children lose the cuteness when they become teenagers and scare pretty much everyone. Yet, for some reason, a horde of yahoos would have you believe that when you were a child, that you had the answers to life. You couldn't even remember to wash your fucking hands before eating and you were some goddamn guru! While you were thinking of ways to strangle the neighborhood bully without getting caught or beating up that obnoxious kid in the back of class for stealing your crayons, you were at the height of innocence.
I do not hate children. I'm not advocating some kind of mandatory Kathy Lee Gifford-type sweatshop for kids or shipping them away to an island for a Lord of the Flies type experience. I simply hate the brain disease of nostalgia. This is also why the good old days of slavery or Nazism or dirty crappy hippies and their bad music and weak drugs don't impress me either. What we need are more shows like South Park where children talk like real children,( which automatically means that children are forbidden to watch it) and better memories for these amnesiac twenty year olds.