The Peter Pan Complex

"What the hell is wrong with me?
My friends say I should act my age
What's my age again? What's my age again?"
-- Blink 182

My girlfriend's friends do not like me. They don't courtesy-laugh at my jokes and they don't invite me to barbecues. Word on the street is they think I am too old for her. Willow is a mere infant of twenty-eight, while I am a month away from becoming a nasty old bastard of --gasp -- forty years old.

Not that I care. It's actually better when your woman's friends don't like you because then you don't have to go to their barbecues and pretend to like their kids. But these so-called friends are using their prejudice against me as an excuse to exile her. There's more. . .

My longtime editor and nemesis, Andrew "Captain Hook" Altschul -- who enjoys dicing my genius into useless celery slivers -- insists that I avoid revealing my age in these writings. He says nobody cares to read the tales of debauchery and unrequited lust of a brooding, miserable, wretched, old bartender.

Meanwhile, back east, my boyhood friends who have matured into suit and-tie briefcase people, have taken to pestering me about my occupation -- saying things like, "When the hell are you getting a real job?" and, "Don't you know how unattractive a forty-year-old bartender is?"

You cut me the deepest. . .

1) To the snobby suit-and-ties: "Unattractive"? Ha. Who needs beauty when you get girls drunk for a living? Beauty is for people who can't get a bartending job.

For the record: Bartending is not my life's work. My life's work is avoiding work, and bartending is the closest thing I've found to it. But I'm getting closer: My magnum opus is me -- lying on a hammock, overlooking the ocean, with a copy of Swank in my lap and a twelver of Corona soaking in an ice chest. For the . . . Rest. Of. My. Life.

2) To Willow's narrow-minded, judgmental, suckass pseudo-friends: What pathetic existence yours must be, to turn the non-issues of somebody else's relationship into a shit-talking crusade. Sickening. I waste not another drop of ink on you.

3) To Andrew the Hook: I am not interested in living up to some youthy fantasyman image my readers might have conjured. I am only interested in being myself: a 39-year-old crank -- complete with a war-torn left knee, a broken right ear, and a nocturnal flatulence nuisance that babbles out of my anus every night like Willie Dixon on a rum binge.

But here's the thing, man: to each his-mother-fucking own. Growing up may work for you, but for me, well I wouldn't even know where to start.

Peter Pan Complex is a term analysts, yuppies, and jilted women use to disparage men like me -- who have no career, little ambition, and far too much bliss -- men who refuse to grow up. Although the term "grow up" is never quite defined, I assume they mean Career, Religion, Apple pie, Marriage, Procreation, and Stock options (CRAMPS). Well I don't agree with the premise that growing up means getting the CRAMPS.

To me, growing up is finding a road that's right for you -- and mounting it with confidence, determination, joy, and a case of prophylactics.

To me, growing up means not intruding in the affairs of others.

To me, "grown up" implies a finished project: the end of growth. Well I'd rather continue growing and growing, until my erection sprawls across the sky -- eclipsing the sun like a nuclear winter. Then all the meddlers, and the editors, and the arrogant peddlers of the world will drop to their knees -- in fear and respect -- and blow me until my boner shrivels and the sun returns.

And on May 2, there will be a fortieth birthday bash in Never-Never Land: Hundreds of kegs will be imported on the backs of pirates. Fireworks will explode and rain a thousand joints. A Hornitos mister will discharge a perpetual cloud of agave vapor. Black Sheep will be the house band. The stage will teem with pyrotechnics equipment, Floyd-like laser cannons, and amplifiers with the knobs all turned to eleven. And young women will dance around my maypole -- their smiles and their nipples pointing toward the sky -- while Mista Lawnge sings, "Similac child/Driving me wild/Simi-limi-lac child/You're definitely with it."

But most of all there will be friends. True friends -- who don't give a flying squirrel turd how old you are, what your job is, or who you are screwing. Everyone else can kiss my ass. You are not invited.

EJD
3/13/02