Peter Pan at the window in anticlimatic

What is the point of growing up except to fulfill the fantasies we had as children? What other meaning could there be? We know meaning is relative, and manufactured by the individual- with or without our knowledge- and we know childhood is a particularly special and impressionable time, wherein the meaning created within us is largely beyond our control- the product of the environments and situations we happen to be thrust into, filtered and adjusted further by deeper or even perhaps hardwired personality characteristics.

I feel like I am being compelled into living a life I watched my parents live through my oldest and rosiest memory goggles. Almost everything that brings me joy as an adult- towing a boat, lording over a weekend pot of chili on the stove, splitting wood in the November snow- is something I have a distant memory of watching one of my parents do. Marveling at all the difficult and astonishingly productive things grownups did, while I sat where it was warm and dreamed and played and consumed. Never any producing as a child. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, or thought I could. Even the art I produced was crap for a very long time.

Production is now a singular obsession of mine, it seems. I make it my business to shove past any ineffectual derelicts standing between me and anything broken or chaotic so that I can exact order upon it through strength and force of will. This folly also I inherited from my father, I believe. I don’t wish to give it up, but I hope I can come up with a way to better reconcile it with reality- better accept, and find meaning, somewhere beyond production. Beyond the fantasies of my childhood. One day both of those are going to run out, and if I’m lucky I’ll still be alive.

But then what?