{"id":3504,"date":"2012-11-09T11:08:08","date_gmt":"2012-11-09T15:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/?p=3504"},"modified":"2012-11-09T11:08:08","modified_gmt":"2012-11-09T15:08:08","slug":"living-in-neverland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/?p=3504","title":{"rendered":"Living in Neverland."},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the really cool things about getting my life back and coming to Seattle is that my close friends say I look and act a lot younger than I used to. I’m not the old man I had become down in Florida. I’m back to my old self, a bit whacked, full of mischief and with more than a slight bit of devilishness in my heart and soul.<\/p>\n

I have always been a big kid. Even when I was in Florida, somewhere deep inside of that old man was that little kid, screaming to get out. Whenever he did, he was admonished and belittled by the ex-whatever. While she found that side of me charming when we were dating, the impish, mischievous youth wasn’t something she wanted to see in a husband, even if he was just one of a string of many whims in her life: wild pig found on side of road, goose that flew the coop, someone else’s horny husband, flying squirrels that fell out of tree, check, check check and check!<\/p>\n

So it’s refreshing that my friends up here in Seattle notice that I am back to being me. They didn’t like the old man. And neither did I. I still have that wondrous innocence of youth that I’ve always had, allowing me to live in my own little world of relative naivety and random misunderstanding.<\/p>\n

When I was a kid, I regularly misunderstood the world. I suppose it could have been in part because of my dyslexia or simply because I love to put two and two together and get five.<\/p>\n

\"\"Some of my misunderstandings continued on for a long time. I think I was 32 before I found out that you’re not all dry inside, like the Invisible Man model you’d see in the hobby shop. All your guts just neatly stacked inside, no syrupy, liquidious stuff flowing around them. Imagine my surprise when I saw my first operation. Thank God it wasn’t mine. I was sick to my stomach. And it was on TV!<\/p>\n

Maybe I’m just happily delusional, living most of the time in my little world and only venturing out now and then into the real world to forage for input.<\/p>\n

I still remember the first time I heard the word “euthanasia.” I had never seen it written before, only spoken. Go ahead and say it out loud with me. I thought for a long time that it was all about helping the disadvantaged kids in places like Vietnam or Laos. Why would I think it means anything else?<\/p>\n

I only thought of this last night because I heard a hilarious line in a movie playing in the background on TV. This guy was at the counter of a restaurant, telling someone else that he couldn’t get hired at Wal-Mart because he looked too old. To correct his, he was going to get his youth back. He was going to go to a doctor so he could be “euthanized.” Cracked me up!<\/p>\n

As a writer, you’d think I would know to look stuff up when it sounds confusing to me. For the longest time, I thought the word facade was pronounced, “fay-cade.” When I said it out loud, people would look queerly at me, as if I was speaking in tongues. I guess I was. I was probably in my mid 30s before I came across facade on a web page that was both written and pronounced. What a dunderhead.<\/p>\n

Last night, I found I still have remainders of my confused youth. I was having a pain in my lower abdomen and asked where the appendix was located. The Janmeister looked at me and without missing a beat said, “at the end of a book.” You’d think by now I’d know where the damned thing is on my body, but I had to look it up this morning. Obviously, neither the Janmeister nor I paid much attention in physiology class, because she thought it was on the other side from where it really is and, of obviously, the Invisible Man didn’t have an appendix.<\/p>\n

Still, even though I can be blazingly brilliant at times, I do love these moments when I am still so childlike. Sure I don’t believe in Satan<\/span> Claus any longer, but I still like to play with the order of the letters – no it wasn’t a typo. There are things I know are absolutely not true, but I like to entertain that they are now and again.<\/p>\n

As we know, I still believe in happily ever afters, even after several marriages, two divorces and one tragic widowing. I just can’t get rid of that childhood dream. I want to think that someday my toys will come to life again, just as they were when I was a kid. For me, Toy Story isn’t a fantasy; it was a documentary. And I still hold out hope that one day they will be able to clone me and keep the spare me in a closet in some lab, just in case I need to order up a spare part. I think that would be really handy. “Hey Joe, this guy needs a liver. It’s in Case #10-Z. He’s on the table waiting for it.”<\/p>\n

Of course, I would hope by then that advances in modern medicine will have gone far enough that they won’t have to cut me open to change out my liver. I fancy having a zipper down the front instead, like a winter coat. Lay me on the table, unzip me, put my liver in and zip me back up. Not a single drop of anything spilled, because as we all know, there’s nothing to spill.<\/p>\n

In the Emerald City, dreaming up the world as I go, just like the Aborigines,<\/p>\n

– Robb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the really cool things about getting my life back and coming to Seattle is that my close friends say I look and act a lot younger than I used to. I’m not the old man I had become down in Florida. I’m back to my old self, a bit whacked, full of mischief […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-defies-description"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3504"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3727,"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3504\/revisions\/3727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}