Kids These Days

Walking down a jagged brick sidewalk with a good coffee while three young skater kids glare at me, I think, this is it, right?, this is being an adult? 

I had thought that perhaps my ascension to adulthood would be signified or codified by something I did or earned, rather than angry glances and violent whispers from adolescents. 

But I guess that's the way things work.

You spend all of pre-adulthood insisting that you're not really a kid, or at least shouldn't be treated like one.

Then you get older and everyone tells you you're an adult now, treats you like one, and you think, fuck, really? 

You never feel like what everyone else insists you are; maybe we're always the last to know.

I've managed to draw breath for 25 years, and found myself wearing khakis and drinking coffee and walking by the kids who are not in school because it's the summer but still sit just outside it, boards propped up on their legs. There is a fiend skull on a backpack and man, The Misfits broke up years before I was born, kid, do you really even know what that is? 

I think that judging what they should or should not like (or present to like) is an embodiment of everything negative they expect from adults, and nearly laugh as I catch myself. 

Even my crooked smile prompts a too aggressive What? from one of the kids. As I pass I shake my head and tell him it's all good, man, and it is. 

I am the old man walking to an office job in his khakis, and I don't want to live in a world where kids aren't instinctively, abstractly, and reactively pissed off.