I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. Like, at all. This morning alone, I hit the snooze button no less than thirteen times before getting out of bed, and let’s be real, I only really gave in because I had to pee and I figured pissing my sheets would be more trouble than it was worth on a Tuesday afternoon. And yes, before you ask, I have in fact considered peeing my bed rather than standing up and walking fifteen feet to use the toilet, and the day I decide doing laundry is less work than walking to the bathroom is the day we’re all in a hell of a lot of trouble. And sure, I managed to put on sweatpants and walk to the deli across the street to order a breakfast sandwich, a muffin, and a chocolate milk, but only before I dragged it all back to my apartment, climbed back into bed, and stuffed it all in my face seconds before falling back asleep for another three and a half hours.
This, my friends, is what I consider a productive day.
Here is my truth. I’m Matt. I’m twenty-six. And I’m terrible at being a functioning, self-sufficient, adult member of society. If they gave out awards for being bad at growing up—like Most Likely to Eat a Frozen Dinner That’s Still Frozen Because He Couldn’t Wait the Full Four Minutes for the Microwave to Finish—I probably would’ve won a whole bunch of them by now, but then again, they’d probably make me show up somewhere to accept them, and then I’d have to shower and put on deodorant, and probably wear a bow tie and cuff links, and the thought of doing just one of those things is exhausting enough. Also, I don’t even know how to tie a bow tie and I don’t really know what cuff links are supposed to do, so my talent for being horrible at adulthood will probably go unrecognized forever. Unless they send me the award in the mail, in which case, I’ll totally accept it, but only if I don’t have to sign for the package, because I don’t like opening the door for the UPS man, since he’s usually unreasonably attractive and my eyes are usually still boogered shut from sleeping until four o’clock in the afternoon. But I will absolutely pick it up from the doorway once he leaves.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself, which is a thing that tends to happen when you have no idea what you’re doing and also you’re trying to write a whole fucking book. Apparently writing a book takes a very long time and is not something you can just wait and do the night before it’s due, no matter how often it worked in college, ’cause a book is a whole lot longer than those papers you wrote in college, and also nobody is spending money to buy your college paper from the bargain bin at Target, which is where I assume everybody will buy this book.
The truth is, I’m very bad at growing up, and I always have been. And, like all problems in life, it’s most likely my family’s fault, or at least it’s easiest to just blame it all on them.
Like many babies, I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, and I don’t technically blame my mother outright, but I do have questions. Sure, it’s a perfectly normal thing that happens during labor—it happens in something like one in three childbirths—and most people don’t even think twice about it. But in my case, I can’t help but wonder whether, on some subconscious level, my mother’s body knew exactly what it was doing and simply refused to let go, intent on keeping me in the womb until I became an elderly man and died. Or worse, it was trying to kill me before I had a chance to grow up and write a book that painted her as some kind of overprotective gestapo. Whatever the reason, I survived the attack, blue-faced and bloated, able to breathe on my own. And that was perhaps the first and only time I did anything by myself.
I went on to spend an inordinate amount of my childhood bashfully attached to my mother’s pelvis, mostly out of social anxiety, but also because I was raised, from an early age, to fear anything that posed even the mildest of threats. In my mother’s worldview, no danger was too small or insignificant to ignore, and my older brother and I were taught to mistrust basically anything that spoke, breathed, or moved.
Riding bikes outside the driveway was a surefire way to end up as roadkill, and roadkill was a surefire way to catch salmonella or rabies or whatever diseases raccoons carried, which we were to safely assume was every disease. Pools of water deeper than puddles were traps sent from heaven to claim little angels. (“A child can drown in an inch of water,” my mother would often yell. “An inch.”) And don’t even get her started on public parks. Sure, go ahead. Go to the park. Have fun spending the rest of your life cooking meth with the other kids in some guy named Burl’s basement. I bet he won’t make you a birthday lasagna. In retrospect, I think it’s quite possible my mother kept me purposely fat and lazy to make me less attractive to abductors. Go ahead, try stealing my flabby baby boy. Good luck getting him to do shit for you, though. Feeding him alone will cost you a fortune!
And so I grew up thinking every activity was brimming with peril. To Debbie, letting a child onto a trampoline was no less dangerous than arming him with a loaded semiautomatic pistol. A water gun that fired anything more than a sprinkle was the quickest way to lose both eyes. And snow days were not days of glory and amusement, because glory and amusement equaled extremities lost to frostbite. “If the snow is too dangerous for you to go to school in,” she told us, “then it’s definitely too dangerous to play in.”
Now, my mother was by no means a doomsayer who forced us to live in some bunker and bide our time until the nuclear apocalypse burnt us all to hell (though we did stock up on canned goods before Y2K, but that was just common sense). In fact, my mother freely encouraged us to go outside—as long as we stayed within six to ten inches of the front door at all times—and we were given all the trappings of midwestern suburban kid life, like scooters, big wheels, pogo sticks, and skateboards—and we could do anything we wanted with them, as long as anything didn’t include riding, jumping, running, brisk walking, or moving.
I know, of course, that all of this worrying came only from a place of love. My mother likes to remind me that I was a miracle baby, because her uterus had been almost entirely removed before she became pregnant with me, and doctors told her the likelihood of conceiving another child was basically next to impossible. Which is all to say that I was not a miracle, but what they call a big, fat accident. But still. I was her precious baby boy, handed to her by Jesus himself. I grew up, in other words, being what psychiatrists might later diagnose as “hopelessly coddled into emotional and physical dependency,” which is just fancy talk for “loved too much and fucked up because of it.”
By the time I was old enough to go to preschool, I’d already become so terrified of the grown-up world that I literally refused to get out of the car on the first day of school. When my mother came around the car to open the door for me, I’d scurried up to the driver’s seat, locked all the doors, and sat steadfast in nonviolent protest. If I’d had the stamina, I would still be there today. They managed eventually to lure me out with the promise of sugar and gifts, but once we were inside, I refused to be put down, and dug into the thick of my mother’s arm while three grown adults attempted to peel me from her. This happened every morning for the first week of preschool, until they finally broke me.
Of course, I can’t entirely blame my mother for teaching me to fear the world, in part because she will read this book, and if she’s made it this far, I’m sure she’s already pissed, and I have no doubt she’s already plotting her own revenge memoir just to publish every embarrassing detail of my entire existence in excruciating specificity. But also, I have to be fair. Because Michael Jackson is also to blame.
Now I know what you’re thinking, and no, I never had to go to court and point at a doll and I’m almost positive I’ve never been to Neverland Ranch. But Michael Jackson ruined my childhood nonetheless. Let me explain.
When I was somewhere around two or three years old, I was minding my own business, probably playing with my Mr. Potato Head in peace, when Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” came on the television. This was 1993, it had been a full decade since “Thriller” was first released, but they only showed three things on TV in the nineties—The Oprah Winfrey Show, TV shows about black teenagers going to live with their aunties and uncles in Bel Air, and thirteen-minute-long music videos—and “Thriller” fell into at least two of those categories. For whatever reason, my mother thought it would be a good idea for me, her three-year-old infant baby child, to see this video with my own two innocent baby eyes. She beckoned me over from Mr. Potato Head and innocently said, “Look, Matthew. Watch the man turn into a big doggie.” She figured, I guess, that I was three, and my interests included dogs, bright jackets, and effeminate men, so maybe I’d enjoy watching Michael Jackson turn into what she affectionately believed to be a large, kind puppy.
Of course, if you’ve seen Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” you know that this is a wild mischaracterization of what happens in the video. Dogs are friendly and they are nice and they lick your face. Michael Jackson does not turn into a dog. Michael Jackson turns into a jagged-fanged, yellow-eyed, contorted-faced werewolf who literally rips a girl to shreds. And my mother made me watch that shit. The second his eyes turned into angry yellow slits, I screamed like he had personally burst through our front door, and I leapt headfirst into my mother’s uterus (or what was left of it), refusing to reemerge for nearly three days. Some nights, I close my eyes, and I still see his face.
And perhaps I would’ve forgotten this event, had it not been for my brother, who purchased a rubber werewolf mask days later, just to chase me around the house while I screamed for mercy.
To make matters even worse, not long after this, my older cousin Nick tried to scare me into obedience with a story about a clown named Pennywise who stole insubordinate children in their sleep and forced them to work in underground labor camps. It didn’t matter that this was merely a bastardized version of a Stephen King novel. I believed it outright, and spent four straight nights without sleep, shaking uncontrollably, fearful that closing my eyes guaranteed my immediate kidnapping.
This is all to say that I entered adolescence scarred not just by my mother, but also by my brother, my cousin, Pennywise the child-stealing clown, and Michael Jackson himself. It should be no surprise that I’m fucked up. I spent most of early childhood fully expecting every person I met to transform into a wild-eyed beast who would kill me in my sleep, if they could get to me before the clown forced me into hard labor.
Eventually, of course, I grew up, and those fears went away. But the fun thing about fears is that they’re easily replaced with a bunch of new fears that are just as believable and overwhelming. Don’t drive a car faster than 10 mph, because you will crash and we won’t even be able to identify your body. Don’t drink alcohol before you’re twenty-one, or your liver will tell your brain to become an alcoholic, and you’ll spend the rest of your life in rehab, where they don’t even get all the TV channels. Don’t get on airplanes because airplanes are the number-one travel method of terrorists, and if the terrorists don’t kill you, it doesn’t even matter, because the plane is gonna crash on its own anyway.
It’s a miracle I make it outside of the house at all.
So here we are. I’m now twenty-six, which is the age at which people start to assess whether you have your shit together, or at least whether you have the mental and physical capacity for one day getting your shit together. It’s the age at which people start categorizing your laziness as less of an endearing quirk and more of a problem the government will have to solve one day. It’s when people start to wonder how long you really have before shit goes entirely off the rails and you end up as one of those people on the evening news who managed to live unnoticed in the basement of a Staten Island Burger King, and when the reporter asks you why you’ve been living down here all these years, you ramble about trampolines and snow days and Michael Jackson and a demon clown.
It’s the age at which you should know what the fuck you’re doing, regardless of how much the world fucked you up.
And yet, I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. I don’t date. I don’t drive. I don’t eat right. I don’t exercise. I don’t cook. I don’t clean. I don’t know how to dress myself. And I can’t remember where I left my remote, which should be the least of my concerns, but somehow it’s the most upsetting.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Matt, none of us know what the fuck we’re doing with our lives and all of us have problems and we’re all just meaningless sacks of meat wandering aimlessly around a rock that’s hurtling through space, and eventually that rock will slam into the sun and the universe will explode and none of this will mean a damn thing.” Which is true. But also I can’t help but feel like the Italian boy behind the bodega counter is judging me every time I show up at three in the morning to buy a pint of mint chocolate chip gelato. He doesn’t seem to care that the sun is gonna melt the earth one day. All he seems to care about is that I only need one plastic spoon and no bag, because he knows I’m popping the lid off this thing the second I walk out the door.
So yes. I have no idea what I’m doing. Today, I went outside. I ate a sandwich and a muffin. I drank a chocolate milk. I took a long nap. And it was a productive day.