“Uhh…. I’ll be… um, 25 in June.”

It’s a standard question asked of most people. “How old are you?” I always thought that it was when you were about 39 that you started freaking out about answering that question.

Nope. It apparently starts at 24. At least for me it did.

At first, I was freaking out because I couldn’t remember how old I was.

But then I was freaking out because I remembered.

And what I discovered later today didn’t make me feel any younger. While I was sorting through and trying to organize the mass of Word documents I’ve accumulated in my “My Documents” folder, I came across a 21 kb file called “A Prepared Speech Upon Weirdness.”

It was something I remember very well. I even remember the day I wrote it. I was 12 years old. My dad had just brought home a new computer - a 386 with a beautiful 15 inch monitor and running Windows 3.11 with Microsoft Word pre-installed. Well, I was so thrilled to move up from our 286 that I fired up Word and wrote the following, which appears (based on the title) that I thought I would be giving as a keynote speaker at an Amway conference. I’m simultaneously proud, embarassed, and convicted by this little peice. And in a strange and sad way, it still seems like the best idea I ever had. Here it is. (It’s painful to watch, by the way.)

A Prepared Speech Upon Weirdness by Adam Brault
The biggest problem today is that not enough people indulge in insanity. Has it become almost unheard of to be weird? I have looked deeply into this subject and concluded upon the fact that nobody has any fun any more. To be weird is not a curse it is more of a gift….a talent if you may. After injected with the “miricale” medicine of fun, you can truly experience life without having to worry about what others think of you. You can look at things nobody else could EVER see. If you just daydream and let your mind run through the field where Kevin Costner is you just may find the answer to a problem. Once loosened up, you can then go about solving your problems in a more enjoyable fashion. If people in this world were to lighten up and see through the media’s negative poison and goof off a couple hours day, do you know how many people’s lives would be saved?…how many wars would be stopped?…how many starving people could be saved? How can you know unless you allow yourself to kick back and relax an act like a total moron, but not worry about it.

By the way, the whole field where Kevin Costner is came from having just watched “Field of Dreams” eight times the previous week.

Yeah. I misspelled “miracle” (”miricale?” sheesh!)… but to me today, those are actually some powerful thoughts and I really like the fact that I wrote them when I was 12. But they just kill me today.

Why? Because I am not the person who wrote that anymore. I’m so boring in most situations that if I happened to stumble across myself at that age from some parallel dimension, I would probably kick me in the shins. Hard. No kidding. Well, maybe not kick me in the shins… but I’d certainly throw tic tacs at myself, perhaps from under a table.

Yup, I’m still a weird guy to those who know me very closely. But I realized recently how much that’s not me anymore when I heard two people in one day say to me, “Man, Adam, you’re always so serious.”

Crap. What do I say to that?

I don’t want to be serious. I wish to death I could be 15 again and just hang out and do the craziest stuff with guys like my cousin Steve, my ultimate hero in more ways than one. (He’s not only the most brilliant, creative and weird guy I’ve ever known, he’s also amazing at Flash animation! Okay, I made that part up. Sorry, Steve.)

Anyway, sometimes I get these bursts that just run through me from my socks up to the tips of my ears and I feel like I’m 14 or 15 again. And at a creaky-jointed 24 and three quarters, I long for the days of my youth when the most exciting things in life came out of spontaneous explosions of creativity that were about as weird as they come.

But that’s just fiddle faddle! I’m going back to my newspaper. Harrumph.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2004 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.