80. The Get Up Kids “Automatic” There Are Rules [Quality Hill]
“Therapy is just a habit.”
You couldn’t quite tell it by looking at him, but he has been ten years old for approximately eighteen years. It wasn’t like Robin Wiliams in Jack, it wasn’t like Benjamin Button at the end of his life, it wasn’t a body swap comedy starring Macaulay Culkin circa 1992, and most surprisingly, it wasn’t a Judd Apatow movie where Seth Rogen still acts like a kid even though he has a beer gut and his own apartment. He had just stopped aging on his tenth birthday or sometime thereabouts. There was no shame in it because as near as he could tell there was no curse to undo or similarly cinematic resolution to come to. His parents got scared and confused around the time the tenth year rolled around so they put him up for adoption and somehow convinced the agency that the date on his birth certificate had been mistyped so that it would go through. On the one hand he felt abandoned, sure, but he mostly just said goodbye to them like it was an awkward business transaction and moved on. In the fourth year of living with the Crenshaws he finally decided that he would make it easy on them (as they had at that point been taking him to doctor after doctor just like his real mom and dad had and simply freaked out more and more) and left home. He’d managed to perfect his lemonade stand profiteering by this point so that he could roam the country comfortably and indefinitely, setting up shop in the most lucrative places (outside fitness centers, retirement homes, etc.) whenever he needed to re-up on hotel rooms, Twizzlers, and DVDs of The Wire. The last time I heard from him he called me from Langley, Virginia, saying he had always wondered what a real life CIA operative looked like. I don’t doubt my brother will call me in another couple years from another city he’s heard about from pop culture.
