Every Three Seconds: in the works

Every three seconds, a child dies. But really, that's a fairly narrow-minded way to look at things. Every three seconds, children lay waste on hundreds of verb phrases. Children plow their way out of women's vagina's every three seconds. Children pet dogs and chase girls and ruin their aristocratic parents' social standing by spreading fleas every three seconds. They finger-paint and ribbon-dance and other things that are "creative" and "unconventional" because they're happy little hyphenated noun-verbs. They play psychological games like "who can give the most adults the most hemorrhages." And then, they grow up to be normal adults who do normal things like file tax returns and pretend not to notice when their wives gain weight every three seconds, but kids don't know that. Kids still think it would be fun to be a firefighter because firefighters wear red and are prominent figures in coloring books.

I was more like the three-second dead kid than any of the other three-second kids.

It wasn't that I was void of emotion, I was simply less susceptible to the mass conglomeration of stimuli that other children were bloated with. I did thing that my mother would label as "quirky", simply because she didn't have the vocabulary or the gall to call it like it was.

My parents weren't coffee drinkers, but after a particularly taxing day at the Metropolitan, my father made himself a cup in our hotel room.

"Can I have some?" My brother asked.
My parents chuckled that annoying adult-joke chuckle, and my father handed him the mug.
"That's disgusting," he said, quickly shoving it away.
"It's an acquired taste," my father explained. "Sometimes, you don't realize you like things at first, but later you begin to appreciate them."

For a few years following, I applied this concept to magazine and newspaper clippings. Particularly displeasing images remained tacked to my walls until family visited, and I was forced to remove them against my will. I would then replace them with equally displeasing fragments. In theory, I should have begun to admire these items with time. It soon became apparent to me that man was flawed and so were his theories.