Spoiled Brats and How They Got That Way

There are little children, designer gear in rags and mismatched smiles across their faces, eyelids pounding open and shut as the drums beat from behind the walls, their own -ruined before they start- heartbeats, you know those that have been decided for them, playing along to the finish-your-own-story game on the dated players, tiny machines that rape and plunder all the way to the point when their premature batteries lose their charge....their blinking shoes laughing at them and their skins peeling from their auras, all the colours slammed down into grey, which is the only freedom they'll ever know. Brats making single cell demands from places which they shouldn't even know how to inhabit yet. At least work your way into your daily greed and sustenance; don't just drink it up in your mother's selfish, inhibited tit as it's shoved into your halfway house mouth, drinking up all the greed you can as early on as you can. "He beat the shit out of me, I know he did......but you know what? I deserved it every time".

It's high time I climbed in and slammed the door of my winged caged bird and took a little trip to every home in sight - next time you scream and demand and insult people, making fun of them and you not even big enough to wear big kid pants yet - I will slap you hard, across the side of your head. Let me guess - you won't be doing that again, now will you. I would like to gather all the spoiled children of this far fetched universe and give them all a good beating....if we beat the greed from their souls early, took away all their toys, gadgets and extras that they do Not need, and made a big happy bonfire of it all............start ‘em young is all I have to say. Make them join the circus, slaughter the herd, feed the others, and clean up the sick, and waste and garbage of those who bore them, and let them see what we've done to each other, all in their sweet and twisted name. The little children shall also inherit the Earth, and a bitter day will come to even them when they realize we all get what we deserve, and nothing more.

Now, that was a midnight rant, but now sitting slightly ill, vulnerable to the point of taking a step back, one can think of it more rationally. Put the spoiled child down somewhat gently, letting go of his hair, and lower the ax, tuck it back behind the fireplace and let’s talk about this. It’s really his parents you need to talk to. People are so concerned with what they Didn’t have as a child, that they want to shower and spoil their children with as much as they can. Well, that’s all well and good, but giving into a whim and a tantrum is not the same thing as instilling into them the idea that they deserve and require and need things.

I, yes now is the point in the story, where the ubiquitous “I” comes into it – I could spend the morning to dinner time outside, with two dogs, the dirt, the sticks, the flowers, the bugs and insects, the rocks and the clothes line – for some reason, when I think of that one day my mother and I were having a showdown, and I curled up fetal on the deep end’s diving board (I’m still hiding out there now, closer and closer to jumping) since she wouldn’t come get me for dinner – she wanted me to come in from outside of my own accord – she knew I was like him and I would never, and she being like Her stubborn father, also wouldn’t give in. She took down the clothes from the line, and it was growing chilly, and grey and windy and I lay there, covering my back and feeling the cold of the diving board, looking at the hill up to the tennis court he built for me (dirt, but exactly to Wimbledon standards and being the anglophile I was even at age eight, it suited me fine) and the long step pyramid like levels of rose bushes he and she planted there – in extended lines, some faring better than others, from red to yellow and speckled and more….I think of that Kafka story about the executed man and the pit – I think I read it at a very early age for some reason but the connection has no bearing on this scene, it just – for some reason – comes back to me every single time I think of it. I don’t remember who gave in, but we ate dinner and it wasn’t the last of the showdowns between her and me.

He then told me the story of our grandfather living with them, in Queens, before he came to our upstate house to live, after his accident. How he kept the apartment upstairs on the 2nd floor of their house, and his father and maternal grandfather were like fire and fire, stoked by oil and the flame on both sides – they did not get along. He, the boy, a notorious troublemaker who knew the streets from a very early age, would run from his father’s belt up to the grandfather for protection, and then when the grandfather threatened, down to his father for the same. He knew the game and ran it with gusto and aplomb. One day, he came home from school and saw his mother, kitchen knife in hand, saying to him “I could have killed the bastard, I could have knifed him” with a smile and probably more than a handful of gin in her belly. Across the house, it was quiet and his father was fixing some odd household thing, and just muttered “woman is crazy”. That’s all he needed to know.

The point, children, you, the ones who expect the whole world to open up since you’re arrived (and I relate, I was the young one of the four siblings/cousins, they all looked at me, never hit (but she should have been is the consensus on that, and I tend to agree) and all smiles and the center of attention, but that was for those I loved – the rest of them could earn my attention, if they so chose, I didn’t run after Anybody, it wasn’t in my bearings to do), the ones who now as adults and still children, with this sense of entitlement – how putrid that sense comes across to me. How selfish, and sorrowful and like a slap in the face to everything earned and deserved. How they ruined the idea of spoiling your child with love.

So, I don’t have the energy to fly around in my mythological slaphappy machine and beat you all. Life will beat you all in time – when you don’t know how to love someone, because you don’t know the meaning of loving Despite vs. loving what is done for you, walking around with your stuffed animal winter hats and big boots like oversized children – afraid of being complete human beings and afraid of someone, something, Anything taking away your toys and your entitlement and then, you are left sucking your big, no-hard-work-has-seen-it thumbs, wondering why the finish-your-own-story game didn’t work out as they told you, it deserved to---let’s hope a few imperfect, un-healthy slaps to the brain will wake you all up to the fact that the story is you, and everyone else at the same time, and we all get what we deserve, and nothing less.

M. Lucia