Stay young, however you can

Even the word is ugly—“budget.” But as I sat down and started calculating numbers, crunching figures, and setting long-term goals, an awful seed began to germinate. I’m scared that I started to grow up.

I never figured myself to be the guy to plan things or take precautions. For as long as I can remember, that was something that the weak had done; those too scared to live life at full throttle kept receipts in their wallets like Costanza. But when you can see things itemized on a list—I spent how much on shitty DVDs I bought to decorate my shelves?—reality rushes up like high tide. You can drown on responsibility.

I’m enjoying this box of wine, because as far as I can tell, it will be the last one I ever have access to, ever. Things that I thought were small, like my “meager” booze budget, have ballooned larger than the GDP of many third-world countries. Part of me is proud, and part of me is eyeing AA pamphlets.
The point of all this is growing pains—the figurative ones, not the real ones—are like mountain cats. You can hear them scratching, but you never see them until they pounce. That’s one positive, I suppose: I’m going to stop spending frivolously, and instead carry a large knife.

The summer before I went to college for real (no post-secondary enrollment option shit), I worked in my father’s factory in the boxing/unboxing department. At 6 A.M., I’d wake up, get out of my car, walk into the factory, grab a handful of hairnets and beard nets and razor blades, and go to work. Four hours were spent placing boxes of expertly-designed fish “products” into boxes for consumers to buy and eat while the other four were spent in a freezer throwing slabs of fish onto a forklift as they made their way to the “cooking facility” where warlocks turned it into crab and lobster and sauce. Alchemy—turning lead into gold—has been debunked, but what can you call a person who turns the meat of one species into the meat of another anything but an alchemist? I did this thing, and for money, and when I went to college “for reals” I never had to worry about money.

And then college ended, and I had jobs lined up that didn’t pan out and was on the proverbial street. Graduating from college and not having a job meant moving home to the family. This was before the recent recession where such occurrences were commonplace and expected; this was a bright badge of dishonor visible to all those to whom you described your dreams of success. And so I took a job lying to people and selling them things they didn’t need, and spent my off hours drinking. Young Adam, Innocent Adam, was a sensitive man unaware that people constantly look for frivolous reasons to spend money. With a Delorean and flux capacitor I would gladly go back in time and smack sense into these people.

I hate to say it, but two “careers” later and here I am, staring at an itemized list of what I spend money on and choking back horrified laughter. What can you do but laugh? It’s so easy to blame outside forces for my current lifestyle of paycheck-to-paycheck roughing it, but when the evidence is so pristine and goddamned organized, what can you say? In a misguided, semi-romantic sense, I always imagined that I would be my own end. Coming face-to-face with that reality is not nearly as poetic as I had imagined. And the worst part of all? Tomorrow I have to go back to work, smile at my peers, and start the process anew.

There was a time when opportunity knocked and all you had to do was open the door. Today, opportunity lives in the house, and you wait until it goes on vacation before you break in and steal a necklace or flat-panel. Sometimes I miss just having a future. These days, you have to take one.