Maturity

I giggle when others expelled gases from their anus. I could not resist the filthy squeak: puut. It cracked me up every time. I loved the way a child would yell out “Alex!” as if Alex had kicked a puppy, and the other children would mimic “Alex! Alex!” and smother Alex’s denials of flatulence. I loved the expanding sphere of fumes we pretended to suffocate from, even if we could not smell it. We all fled screaming and laughing. Every fart was a celebration.

But during middle school, the laughter stopped. Fewer and fewer giggled, and those who did receive looks of pity and disgust from who did not. Those who did not were the cool kids, and soon everyone stopped giggling. We all wanted to be cool.

Puut. Silence.

     Put under constant surveillance by our peers, we quickly matured, no longer feasting upon ants or burping any sequence of letters. Instead, we assumed ourselves by intelligently discussing M-rated video games, your mother, and sex, which we had just learned about in class. We even used profanity properly instead of referring to terms by their first letter. As a contest of maturity, we played the penis game, in which contestants yelled “penis” as loud as they could before they shrank in embarrassment. Spectators cringed and giggled at the profane announcements, but the victors became gods of maturity.

     As they matured, many boys also acquired immunity to cooties, which allowed them to examine the strange beings that wore ponytails and skirts. Those brave souls marched proudly — maturely — into the unknown, while the other boys watched in awe.

     But as we grew older still, maturity continued evolving. We quickly grew bored of the penis game, along with all the other jokes that had cracked us up, and the forms of entertainment that we previously enjoyed no longer enticed us. Even the video games rated “mature” were not at all mature. Everything that previously made the world unknown and interesting gradually disappeared. I could no longer laugh as merrily or as innocently. I had matured.

     But some of the immature continue laughing. I envy them. They can still laugh until they helplessly collapse on the ground, barely able to breathe, with tears in their eyes and find everything thereafter all the more funny. I miss the days when the room would be filled with giggles after an impressive fart, the days when the f-word drew gasps from students and schools had playgrounds. All that remains now is a somber silence.

     Maturity discards the fantasy and magic of the unknown and replaces it with a realistic view based on fact and experience. Farts clearly cannot kill you, and girls do not have cooties. The penis, an organ possessed by every male, is neither rare nor special. Once such facts are realized, the mysterious image previously drawn by childish imagination is diminished into the reality of the object. Such knowledge is maturity — the loss of innocence after the mystery of a taboo object is explored and understood. Maturity requires us to face the facts objectively without the giggles or laughter. And once we have explored everything that holds wonder, we can understand everything for exactly what it is, nothing more and nothing else. Then, there exists no “way it should be,” but only the way it is.  

By completely dismissing the views of childish immaturity, maturity destroys the bridge over the great divide between these two groups. Their respective perspectives on how to see the world are radically opposing and it is really in late-adolescence is when people are really beginning to be shuffled between the two sides. Toure finds the evidence for the divide caused by modern maturity in how it cripples music’s power to unify these two factions.

     Toure is nostalgic of the past where albums had the potential to create social revolutions. Albums like “Thriller” and “Purple Rain” are just some of the dated examples of how society can be rocked by a simple tune. However, music has evolved to become less of a public enjoyment to a personal secret. Today, people have so many varying tastes and it’s seemingly impossible now to find one song whose message appeals to everyone. Toure identifies the essential difference between the past and the present being the change in audience. The contemporary audience doesn’t have a monoculture; rather, it is divorced between two with the essential differentiating factor being wisdom. This wisdom defines maturity and the wise are able to understand the futility of these musical revolutions because “you’re not likely to look for revolution from recording artists, who are younger and less wise than you” (Toure, 61).1

     It’s this acceptance of a pragmatic perspective that also means the acceptance of the evils of society, along with the acceptance that one person cannot do anything about it, to bend to the will of others to make a paycheck to buy food and pay the bills. Joking about such things is not allowed, for it is all too serious — the reality is all too real. For the fully mature, no fantasies or dreams remain in this world.

     Nevertheless, maturity is inevitable. The objects people imagine as wonderful or mysterious they seek to discover for themselves. However, upon encountering the real version of their imagined object, people always discover it is not as beautiful or as terrible as they conceived it in their minds to be. Greg Ruth in “Horror is Good for You (and even better for your kids),” understands the harsh transition children make from a state of disillusionment into maturity and promotes the usage of horror stories to help make this transition. Ruth scrutinizes the disproportionate perspective of children. Children live in a world with giants, grand and mysterious structures, and with parents casting a veil of deception by saying “There is nothing to worry about.” As a result, children “are left to fill in the facts themselves, and what one imagines tends to be far more terrible than what is real” (Ruth, 8). With horror stories, it forces these children to face the truth that parents normally try to mask. This is often accompanied by disillusionment upon discovering that everything we anticipated was not as fantastic as we expected. Slowly, people lose interest, lose the wonder of their imaginations, and lose their immaturity.

     Some want to recover their innocence and immaturity and find wonder in the world again. There is a miracle drug called alcohol that is readily available pretty much everywhere. It allows people to have fun and live again. Simply picture a bar with two nearly passed out drunkards sitting at barstools when one of the expels gas from their anus.

     Puut.

     Teehee. Hilarious.     

Bibliography

Ruth, Greg. “Horror is Good for You (and even better for your kids).” In Professor R. Hansen’s Collection, compiled by Regina Hansen.

Toure. “Why I Miss the Monoculture.” In Professor R. Hansen’s Collection.