Captain’s Logos

People don't really ever grow up. And I don't mean that in the Peter Pan type of way - a perpetual starry-headed child that is in awe with the world type of way - rather the opposite. It seems the people that do grow up learn, as they mature, that they have to strive to retain that wanderlust approach to life, they have to work at it, and some achieve it. The people who don't, well they just remain children in a very snotty way.

Like the kid you knew who, while out on the playground, would steal a steamshovel from right underneath you, and then walk only a few feet away in the sandbox and start playing with it like you don't exist. Now he's your neighbor. You see him from time to time, wave hello in passing, but you can tell he's the same kid. He's cruising into his garage every evening at six-thirty in his convertible mercedes C330l or whatever he's leasing at the time, dark sunglasses and bad comb over and you can almost smell it.

And then one day this picture of self-absorption looks down from his Men's Health magazine and realizes that his blue barrel trash bin, the one the city gives you and picks up once a week, is missing. Or maybe it's cracked, or he just wanted a new one. Whatever.

So after trash day when you walk down to the street to pick up your bin, lo and behold, you don't have one anymore. You are perplexed because, in this orderly society of homeowners, who would be so petty and thoughtless to rob someone else's means of disposing garbage. It must be a mistake, someone must have accidentally grabbed yours.

You puzzle over this on the way back to your house and then you see it, blatantly sitting in your neighbor's driveway, right next to his other cracked one. Never mind that you have your name written on it in bold, black, sharpee letters. There it is, already with a day's worth of fresh trash inside festering. Forget the fact that you no longer have a place to put your trash, and it will stack up in your garage attracting ants for the next week; that steam-shovel stealing prick had a crack in his old bin and needed a new one, what's the big deal. It's totally selfish. And childish.

And doesn't really leave you any other choice but to take one of the other cans that still has yet to be retrieved by it's rightful owner. I mean, it's not your fault that someone else stole your trash can, is it? It's really their fault for being so damn lazy they waited till, what, Saturday evening to pick up their can. And trash day was Friday!

Childish is what it is, all of it.