The Young and the Responsible

LibraryGirl and I were discussing ages – some women want their partner to set up all sorts of rules and monitor them or, in my experience, the women want to set the rules and have their partners monitor and enforce them. In several ways this is like being a child, say under 12 for a convenient marker – no responsibility for one’s self, no decisions, just stay within the rules. And without going into detail here (later, probably), that’s asking a lot of your partner if you’re trying to do this on a 24/7 basis.

LG isn’t like that – she wants to make her own decisions and such but not actually have responsibility for her life, like a teenager. If she’s got a job and money she can spend it all on CD’s and DVD’s (not that she does) and hair thingees and non-necessities. Ideally, to her, the rent is paid and the grocery shopping done and as long as she cleans up after her snacks all should be well and good. This isn’t only like a teenager, it’s also like a cat – or at least our/ her cats, which are the only ones I have experience with. She is like them in a lot of ways. And like an awful lot of people, she’d rather give up all kinds of material things if it means she can live modestly where she wants, do what she wants, and work when she wants. And if you have a partner who feels the same way you can put together something that works this way, sometimes.

My Permanent Age

I’ve always said (correctly or not) that women mature but men are born to an age and are that age all their lives – in my case early to mid 30’s. When I was younger – say mid 20’s – people actually said I looked good for my age, assuming that I was in my 30’s. And I can look back and see that for a lot of years that was the spot where I was heading my life – job – check; house – check; family – check; boredom – uncheck. Not really looking for a new car every two years, a good golf game, and a big 401k. Maybe, of course, it’s just not yet, and I’ll get there later. But the period of my life I was heading for completely skipped college or a young-twenties social life and headed to that nice orderly spot even back before I got out of grade school – really. I’m not basing this whole theory on one closely observed individual, however – we all know guys who will always be 17-19 even as they approach 50; other friends of mine (mostly at my work) were in their mid-50’s, mentally, when they got out of college – eager to have their retirement plan well-stocked, making purchases with an eye toward this TV or this couch being the last one they ever have to buy. And yes, I realize that a lot of the difference between men and women is that men don’t hear their biological clock, or recognize it as such; babies at 70 or 80 seem to be more the mark of a true champion than a symptom of dementia.

What I did to get to be old before my time, maybe I’ll get into later.

Too Responsible

I’m smart, very smart, LG is too, and while you’re growing up being smart seems to be everything to parents and teachers and you get a lot of positive reinforcement. And it becomes your identity, especially if you’re like me and you are nothing but smart – but whether you have other talents or not, being very smart defines you at that age, if not others.

And with smart comes responsibility for your actions, and usually a great willingness to recognize and accept this responsibility. I’ve let go of most of my grievances from that age, really, but now that it comes up I guess it still annoys me that you get this level of responsibility but no authority at all; no opportunity. I envied the big dumb guys who could make their living, have cars and apartments, without finishing high school while I had to wait through four years of college. A high IQ can get you a minimum wage job at age 16 but it doesn’t help – all it does is restrict your hours because you can’t afford to miss classes. If I had my way, though I never will, smart kids could get good $10 an hour jobs part time starting in early high school. Anyway.

I’m not saying that other kids don’t get punished – you came home late, you went too far, you should have known better – but all that happens to them is that they get punished, grounded, yelled at, lectured, whatever. But when you’re smart it goes beyond that – the parents or teachers also withdraw the approval of what makes you special to them – being so smart, always being right, being a good thinker, being a miniature adult. But if you screw up, you’re not just inattentive or forgetful, you’re defiant or disobedient. And the worst part is that this is true – I knew I was coming home late (so playing dumb makes me a liar, to boot), I knew I wasn’t supposed to cross the freeway (using an underpass, or a culvert, but still, I was in second grade). They were right, I was being defiant or disobedient. Maybe (looking back and guessing, I have no training in this and am just thinking off the top of my head) because I wanted the authority that went with my responsibility. Hey, why shouldn’t I decide when I come home or how far I go, since I’m basically a small adult?

Okay so they were right and I was wrong – a 60, or 90, or 120 pound “mental adult” cannot safely do the things a 20-year-old can. And they were wrong in expecting me to act with the responsibility of a 20-year-old (30, whatever) when my world was that of an 8 or 12 or 16-year-old.

We’ve all seen the Marx Brothers movie where Karl (he was the serious one with the beard) says “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” While this statement has its merits and represents a good ideal, it hasn’t proved very practical in, well, practice, not in general society. And it might make a good theory for raising kids – who doesn’t try to match what they do for their kids to each kid’s needs? But in certain ways it sort of sucks. I sort of prefer the Gospel passage (no, I’m not going to look it up) “To him much has been given, much will be expected.” Okay, parents, you want to expect a lot from me, what are you giving me? And don’t give me that “smart genes” crap, I mean what are you giving me lately?

So my point in all this blather is that it’s very easy for a smart, serious kid to miss childhood altogether – or at least an important part of it: carelessness without serious consequence. Your ice cream drips, so your clothes have to be washed. Is that better or worse than going through life making sure your ice cream never drips? Being able to foresee every likely problem and failure – and trying to mitigate it in advance – means you miss a lot of fun to avoid the occasional scraped knee. Scrapes might be one-for-one or two-for-one, but you can get a lot of thrills before you break your arm and the cast would have come off a long time ago. In fact, if I’d screwed up and robbed a bank, or gotten caught doing some of the things I really did do, I’d have gotten out of jail twenty years ago last month. And maybe I would have lost my right to vote in the last presidential election, as my mother used to warn, I believe. Oh boy oh joy, dodged a bullet with that one.

Now I'm not totally blaming my parents and teachers here – they couldn't have prevented it if they tried (though I don't really remember them saying "maybe you should try to be less responsible..."). We bring it on ourselves – maybe because we think that taking responsibility will lead to authority, or maybe just because we can't help it. In fact, if I was going to blame anyone, it'd be me, except...

Blaming Myself

Up till a certain number of years ago, I used to look back in horror at some of the things I did, in high school, at jobs, in college, in my first years working as a professional. And probably back into junior high school. Generally immature things, usually initiated in an attempt to be funny, to impress a girl, or as the result of an enormous amount of drinking. And according to Maxim, I had done everything wrong in the social department. Then at some point I realized that they were giving advice to guys in their mid-twenties – even though it included how to select a great video game – while I had been making these mistakes in my teens. Frequently (unfortunately, not limited to) my early teens – honestly. So no wonder. I looked around at some of the guys I knew who were younger than me at the time – say I was getting close to 30 – and realized that in a lot of cases they were years older than I had been when I tried to do some of these things – like, rent an apartment, at 17 – not everything went smoothly (though I did get one). Trying to switch from a blue-collar/ union upbringing to a white collar/ management perspective and playing office politics at 21. And I would have recovered, over the years, from those mistakes, had I stopped making new ones...

But in any case, at some point I decided to stop blaming myself – or start forgiving myself – or letting go of the stuff I had done but had stopped doing. Or did a lot less regularly. The stuff I haven't stopped doing, well, you have to learn to live with what you can't rise above, as Bruce Springsteen said.

I'm not famous – maybe I wish I was, but I'm not – I haven't even done a ShadowLane video and I certainly didn't do one twenty years ago, right after I got out of the reform school I didn't go to, which I'm sort of glad of because my hair in 1986 is not something I want to be remembered by. Somewhere around then I had about a three-inch high flat top and some other time I had sort of a pseudo-mohawk, or a faux-hawk. If those tapes had been made, though, I guess I'd have to get over it. And I sort of have to wonder what Madonna thinks (not of me, I already know that) when she reinvents herself and has the power to drive the definition of cool away from her old self, but in doing so makes her old self look all the more dated, ridiculous, and foolish. Does she shudder at every old picture or Sean Penn movie, does she just avoid them (hard to do), or does she just accept that at one time she sang "Lucky Star" and "Holiday" like Tiffany, or was too obviously provocative with "Like a Prayer/Virgin?" Does she say "that was another person?"

I went back to my hometown after I'd finished college and started making some serious money and walking the streets like I always had I almost told myself "there is no way the you you are now came out of here. How did that happen?" (a lot of generosity by a lot of people was a big part of it).

Writing this and looking it over, I can see that I overcame some obstacles just to get to a point where I was a self-sustaining, contributing, productive human being, which at one time was my goal – or at least my next goal. And yet, being a critical thinker, for many years when I looked back all I could see was the mistakes and the embarrassments – the person I was thinking most critically of was myself.

Where does this bring us?

When I was young I was too old, my expectations were way too high, and I had to learn to accept that I hadn't met those or even more modest expectations without feeling like a perennial failure. I'm not sure I missed feeling like a teenager or being one but I can see how I could have. I'm not really trying to get back to that stage of my life but in some sense I never left it, either.

Nice of you to have read this far to see how this ties into the spanking scene, but I treat spanking, at least most of it, like play. And I treat a lot of sex like play. Chasing, laughing, mock threats, throwing Cat around. Starting with clothes on. Who ever starts a seduction in clothes except a couple of horny teenagers? And I don't mean fancy lingerie, I mean jeans and t-shirts. I like making out under clothes – why? Because you're not supposed to, you're stealing a moment, it's something you do when people might walk by any moment. Smacking a bottom (once) – everybody does it, and no one's supposed to – she always looks shocked and insulted and embarrassed. Oh, sure, there's the running around the house naked, but that's for weekends when you have absolutely no plans before 8 PM like a kid whose parents are out of town. There were things I was supposed to get done last weekend – adult things, grocery shopping, organizing – but hey, there was no one here to make me do it. So – no.

I've always said the sexiest thing about a woman is enthusiasm, and that's what I love about spanko women – they're always (or so often) anxious to play – or play again. You can play for half an hour and fifteen minutes later just a sidelong glance and it's off to the races – like a couple of teenagers. And everything else takes a back seat. Except that I no longer have a car with a back seat you can play in, let alone make love in, though now the minivan does have some possibilities.

Another way that spanking is like teen sex, in a great way, is its (supposed) secrecy. If you're adults, married, living together, dating or whatever, if you've got a door to close and you're having sex no one says you shouldn't. How fun is that? But start spanking and all of the sudden you're doing something you don't want everyone to know about (even if they do). You hide it from the kids, you hide it from your parents, you try to hide it from the neighbors probably with no success, but you try. Is it dirty? Maybe. But at the very least it's covert. You're in a restaurant or a movie, pick any adult couple and you can say "He's going to take her home and make love to her." Ho-hum. "But you – I'm going to take you home and blister your bottom." Now you've got a secret. And if it's not so secret, who cares? Did suspicious parents, knowing teachers, and a Verizon-Network style crowd of onlookers ever keep us from mauling each other? Think not.

So that's where I am – it needs to be fun. Mistakes need to be free of serious consequences. It's better when it's something we're not supposed to be doing. And we're in too big of a hurry to change into pj's, brush our teeth, feed the cats, check the locks, start the dishwasher, and turn out the lights. Now. Quick. While maybe nobody's looking.