The Karen Black Decade

It's been quite awhile since we heard from the Apt Metaphor Think Tank here at SingleTails. (Okay, we've actually never heard from them before, which leads me to question why I'm paying them all this money and giving them lush office space in the silo at the I.M. Pei re-designed farm that we here at SingleTails call home.) But they've come up with a good one!

I've written before about guys in their twenties. I do not and will not date them. I dated a 26 year old once and it was pretty bad. My reason has always been that guys in their twenties have no idea who they are. You have to spend years in therapy, and/or have an experience that brings home to you the fact that you're going to die, and/or get to a point in your life where you feel that you're an absolute failure, and/or just get real, and few and far between are guys in their twenties who have compassed any of those.

So they conduct their lives doing things and making decisions without having any good reason or the slightest inkling why. Such as, always picking fights on the second date, or always being late for work, or always maxing out their credit cards and having to ask their parents to bail them out, or... Well, you get the picture. And it takes a long time (usually a decade) before they notice a pattern in their behavior and start to wonder why it's there.

But until then, it's just like... (Here it comes!) Karen Black in the movie Airport, where the flight crew was incapacitated by a bomb and... the stewardess had to fly the plane!

Right? Right?

Isn't that what it's like being in your twenties? Don't you feel like you're in the cockpit of this enormous vehicle cruising along at 50,000 feet above the earth and somehow you're expected to be able to direct it and make it do things like find an airstrip and come in for a landing. But look at that! You're headed right for that mountain in front of you! What's up with that? Is there something maybe you should be doing? Is there a button to push? Do you go left or right or up? Wouldn't it be nice if you just could concern yourself with making sure everybody had hot coffee and their seatbelts were fastened correctly and passing around steaming hot towels?

Ah, it's sweet being the guy who knows how to fly the plane. For the most part, I know the mountain is there before it appears over the horizon line, and I've adjusted my flight plan accordingly.

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