A Good Reason

One of the main differences between being an adult and being a kid, besides the influx of nose hair and lower back problems, is that as an adult you need a good reason for everything.

This came to mind one day when I saw a kid pedal past my house on his bike twice in a relatively short time frame, at which point I determined that he was going around in circles, which he continued to do for well over an hour.

 

Now, if you were to ask him why he was doing it, he’d probably just shrug his shoulders and say something like, “I dunno,” at which point you’d send him on his way, figuring it was better than him setting off firecrackers in the front seat of somebody’s car.

 

However, if I were to jump on a bike and ride circles around my neighborhood and say “I dunno” when asked why I was doing it, the response would probably be, “That’s weird. I’m calling the cops.”

 

You see? Adults need a good reason for everything, and even worse, they have to plan and schedule it all out in advance: “I’m working until five, then I’ll have road-rage until six, followed by a terribly unhealthy dinner and complaining about work and my commute, after which I’ll try to fix the washing machine that keeps trying to eat me whenever I walk by. Boy, I sure wish I could squeeze in some time to drive my bike around in circles, but I’d better not, because I haven’t yet filed the proper paperwork with the county. I guess I’ll just go to bed instead.”

 

Even worse, our fun must also be pre-planned and jammed into our schedules well in advance: “I can fit you in for racquetball in three weeks, from 7:30 to 8:30, assuming nothing else comes up. After that, it doesn’t look like I have any room for fun until November. Of 2017. Beyond that, my plan is to keel over from a massive stress-induced coronary, so you’ll have to look me up in the afterlife. Check with my secretary, first, though. I might be busy.”

 

However, if you’re a kid and you decide you want to spend a Saturday poking at a dead raccoon with a stick for eight hours straight, it’s completely acceptable, and even possibly encouraged: “I don’t care what you do, as long as you don’t fill up everybody’s mailboxes with pudding again.”

 

So what’s my point? That every adult should shirk their responsibilities and just do whatever they want, regardless of the possibilities? That we should live in a chaotic world of pudding-filled mailboxes and dead-raccoon-poking?

 

Heck no. Nobody wants that, even if it is chocolate pudding. All I’m saying is that we slightly relax our obsession with making people have a good reason for everything. For example, I believe that the following should be considered perfectly acceptable explanations for an adult to have done something:

 

“It was either this or finish my taxes.”

“I got sick of cleaning the fireplace.”

“I wanted to see how big of an explosion it would make.”

“I saw it once in a movie and I wanted to see if it’d work in real life.”

“Don’t worry. It’s chocolate pudding.”

 

And now, even though I don’t have a good reason, I’m going to finish with a poem that has nothing to do with anything else:

 

Roses are red

Oranges are orange

Dang, I just remembered

That nothing rhymes with "orange"