Strange day. I turned twenty-one at midnight and I must say the fire and lightning that comes and makes one responsible enough to drink booze was over faster than I expected.
I bought alcohol for the first time from a liquor store today. I wasn’t carded and I fear that I could have gone into that very liquor store anytime during the last year and gotten booze, but I never tried and even if I could go back in time to try, I don’t think I would. It’s fear that does it. What if I buy wine and vodka and whatever else twenty times and then get carded the twenty-first? What are the consequences? I don’t know. It’s the not knowing that kept me from ever trying. I don’t fear fines or tickets or court dates, but I do fear the unknown.
Perhaps it’s not fire and lightning that visits you on your twenty-first birthday, but the specter of death. You are no longer an invincible teenager, but an adult with responsibilities that keep increasing until you are crushed under them. A mountain of debt for those who were foolish enough to use a credit card when they were teens, or perhaps a child who brings with him an amazing upkeep charge, or even a job that has no security so that you are never sure if you will be able to make the next payment on your shit-for-shiet apartment. Pleasant stuff, growing up.
While working optical retail, I could watch customer after customer come in with vacant eyes and crushed demeanors. Most paid in credit. How many could pay that credit off? Is that why their eyes were so vacant? Is it because they knew that they couldn’t pay off their debts? What other worries occupy the mind of those poor folks? Why were they so unhappy? I fail to see why someone should do anything if they don’t want to. I know that if you want something you have to pay for it and if you can’t pay for it you can have a credit card company pay for it, but it seems like a shitty deal. In the end you still have to pay.
Worries, worries, worries. Worried about friendships, worried about money, worried about school. It never ends.
No easy answers and life is hard and getting harder. I know that I don’t have it as hard as the homeless or all the starving people in the world, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
Which is not to say that I’m depressed; just worried.
birthday future