Guide to Kid Logic.

Kids are weird. One of the weirdest things about them is that they’re not capable of expressing their thought processes in a convincing manner. Or they’re scared to. So if you ask them why they did something they say “no reason” instead of “because I thought that if I jumped off the swing set onto the big wheel I would get a monster push and go super fast and that would be fun, and it made sense that if I pulled that off it would be even cooler if I had my two favorite color Crayons up each nostril, and I’m not sure how hurt I am, but the real reason I’m upset is because one Crayons broke and one got lost, and those are my two very favorite colors.”

Kids are up their own butts all the time.

It makes sense. They don’t know anything. They just have to go on what they’re told. They don’t know things like “there’s such a thing as two true ideas that are opposites” or “knowing one thing about somebody doesn’t mean you know everything about them,” or “not everybody feels the same way you do about this,” or “there are several mechanisms at work which produce a result, and life is more than a series of events that drop from out of the sky.” They also don’t know that if an adult laughs at you for saying what was going through your head about the big wheel thing, it doesn’t mean you have to be afraid of telling them stuff like that. They’re not laughing at you, they’re just surprised that you’re thinking that way because they don’t. Kids get fixated on every tiny little piece of knowledge they have, because it’s all they know about a given subject. All they know is “if you tell somebody what you were thinking, they will either laugh at you or be mad, and it will be embarrassing, so it’s better not to.” In a way, kids are smart this way. They have a survivalist approach to epistemology.

Writing about pee seat Russian roulette made me remember how I peed in my pants once on the way home from the Ice Capades. This was sometime between first and third grade. I had seen commercials for the Ice Capades, and as far as I was concerned, the Ice Capades were the single awesomest event one could possibly witness in one’s lifetime, with the possible exception of that one time I saw an ad for the robot dinosaur that eats trucks.

I sensed from what little I knew about my family that I had no chance of ever attending a performance by Truckasaurus. I don’t know if this was intuitive or if I just felt like a robot dinosaur who eats trucks was so unbelievably awesome that it couldn’t possibly exist. I don’t think I even mentioned my fascination with it. Partially because the idea of a robot dinosaur who eats trucks was so monumentally important to me, and the merits of witnessing this spectacle were so clearly self-evident to anybody with half a brain by my thinking, I was sure my Dad would have already known about this and decided against it. I held out a silent hope until we both saw the commercial together, at which point I looked at him hopefully, and he disdainfully burped out some Old Milwaukee’s Best, and I never ventured too far down that line of thought again. A robot dinosaur who eats trucks was too much to ask for. You don’t tempt fate by asking for things like Truckasaurus. It would have been like the party before everything goes horribly horribly wrong in “Beloved.”

The Ice Capades were a reasonably distanced second place to Truckasaurus. They seemed tame-to-parents enough that I even mentioned wanting to go. I was told no, and I knew better to pursue it further, but then there came a day in elementary school when somebody suggested a field trip to the Ice Capades at a group rate. Here was an adult in a position of authority suggesting a trip to the Ice Capades. This was one of those golden kid events that drops out of the sky without any reason, and improves your life instantaneously, like the time my parents got me out of bed to go watch TV because there was a “special” and Big Bird got locked in a museum overnight with some Egyptian kid who’s parents were constellations. It was awesome. I went to bed every night for a year or two hoping there’d be a “special” again that night. I didn’t know how a “special” happened, but I wanted to go down stairs and watch TV. Every night I would ask “is there a special?” Always it was no. Until like a year later Big Bird went to China. By the time he went to Japan I was kind of over Big Bird, though.

Still, Ice Capades fell out of the sky by some kind of divine decree in much the same manner as these “specials.” And my parents paid the group discount price. I could not have been more excited.

Then we got out to the Cap Center, and our seats were super far away and it was impossible to tell what was going on, and I don’t remember a single detail except for some weird spinning people in gigantic costumes gliding across blue-lit ice. I don’t even remember the theme. For some reason I’m thinking I saw Snoopy, but I can’t confirm that. All I know is it was not particularly awesome.

And also I had to pee super duper bad the whole time. We were late getting to our seats. I think maybe the show had already begun. And I had to pee. And not only would I have had to not watch the Ice Capades in order to go, I would have had to speak up, hence interrupting the Ice Capades for everybody else, and ask an adult to take me to the bathroom. So: everybody would know I had to pee, everybody would know I needed assistance, everybody would have to shuffle out of their seats and peel their eyes away from the motherfucking ICE CAPADES for, like, a whole minute, AND an adult chaperone I barely knew would have to leave with me while I peed, and that chaperone would also miss the Ice Capades for as long as that took. No way. There was just no way. I had to sit there as my bladder slowly turned into a knife inside of my little body until the Ice Capades were done. No wonder I don’t remember anything. I was being tortured. By myself. And my own kid logic.

And then, when the show was over, it was too crowded to be able to pee. We had this link hands stay in line thing going, and I didn’t want to screw it up. I was hoping to be saved by the same unknowable force that caused the chance to go to the Ice Capades or the chance to stay up and watch Big Bird be locked in a museum with some weird Egyptian kid. No dice. Nobody heard my silent prayers, and I was not invited to relieve myself before getting on the bus.

So I peed myself on the bus. And cried about the whole miserable state of affairs. My teacher comforted me with understanding platitudes about how it’s ok to pee on yourself, but she totally missed the point. I know it’s ok to pee on yourself. What’s not ok is that I missed the Ice Capades. And it was for everybody else’s benefit. And nobody was congratulating or thanking me for my selflessness, nor was anybody impressed by my ability to keep quiet and hold it in as long as I did. I could have ruined the Ice Capades for everybody in favor of enjoying it myself, and instead I was wet on a bus full of my sleeping classmates. The adults didn’t know I had already done the most difficult and noble thing I’d ever done in my life to that point. They were just consoling me about the fact that I peed. The pee was an inconsequential result of incredible personal sacrifice and what seemed to me to be hours of careful deliberation. Didn’t they understand that?

Of course they didn’t. Adults are idiots.

I realized all of this recently when I was in front of my apartment smoking a cigarette. There’s a nice family that lives across the street from me, with a daughter about as old as I was when the Ice Capades taught me one of the earliest of many lessons about the benefits and pitfalls of self-reliance. I occurred to me as I was out there in the freezing cold huffing and puffing on a little stick that I know for a fact will kill eventually kill me if I don’t stop huffing and puffing on these stupid little sticks that don’t do anything but momentarily make me stop wanting to huff and puff on a stupid little stick. A whole melodrama unfolded in my brain concerning this tiny person.

She asks her parents about smoking and what it is, and they say, “Oh that? That’s just a dirty habit.” And that’s it for me. Total judgment forever from that kid. Dirty habit. Dirty man. I am a dirty man. And that’s totally true. I am a dirty man. I smoke cigarettes. Why defend myself or ruin some poor kid’s day trying to teach them about nuance about how a good person can do a dirty thing and it doesn’t make them a dirty or bad person? That’s naïve. The kid would be right. She’s got me pegged. I’m a dirty man. I have dust bunnies in my bathroom and I don’t clean them right away. She’s right. It was such a simple and honest realization, that I almost said out loud “I am a dirty man.” But that’s a bad thing to say out loud when you’re out on your stoop in a neighborhood that has kids in it. I don’t mean it that way.

So I’ve decided to quit smoking and also try to cut down on the drinking and also try to clean my apartment once in a fucking while. I’m also making an effort not to eat the one hundred percent worst thing for me on the menu when I’m somewhere. It’s lasted three days so far. And it feels pretty good. My brain already works better now than it did three days ago when it was all cobwebby and drunk. It’s interesting. That damn kid with the words I put in her mouth that she never said and probably never even thought was right, in her own kid logic that deals with absolutes.

You can learn a lot from kids and their weird logic. There’s no room for bullshit. Of course you have to consider the source of who’s telling them the things they’re dealing with in absolutes, but the basic structure is there. I do a dirty thing. I am a dirty man. Stay away from the dirty man. Don’t trust the dirty man. Works for me. I’m going to keep using this logic on myself, because I find it strangely motivating. Of course. It’s so simple. I’m a dirty man. Don’t be a dirty man, me. Stop doing dirty things. It’s the single most perfect mode of self-examination.

What do the kids think? It works.

Adults have an external world that is rich in complexity. Children have an internal world that is rich in complexity. Teenagers are assholes because they only have a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms at work in their tiny little external worlds that have only like 20 people in them, and they think those systems are sufficiently complex to hold all the knowledge they’ll ever need. As if the fate of the world depends on whether or not Evan Bradley has had sex with Emily Durbin, and their insights into the matter carry a great deal of validity with the world at large.

And douchebags are somewhere in the middle of all of this. They know their internal stuff well enough to know what’s a good thing to do and what’s a bullshit thing to do in the external world, and they more or less just go by that.

It’s good to think about yourself the way a kid would, though. They might be scared to death of something dumb and fantastical, like what if lightning goes into the ground and then stays there waiting to shock you for a half an hour (because they only half understood some of the information their Dad was talking about that one time), but they’re right about you. You’re a dirty man.