I live with a 14 year old. Yes, thank you, sympathy cards would be appropriate. 14 year olds are a rare breed, a mixture of 1 part kid, 1 part adult, and 1 part heaving emotional train wreck. It doesn’t help when they’re as sharp as a tack and have a twinkle in their eye that belies the mischievous thoughts running amuck under tussled hair in the style du jour.
On a recent morning, I was greeted by him in full sartorial splendor wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the caption ” Can’t sleep, the clowns will eat me.” I know that 14 year olds perceive the world differently, but this, for him really makes sense.
He hates clowns, always has. He appears to be in good company; King’s Pennywise in “It”; the clown under the bed in Poltergeist; and singing groups like the Insane Clown Posse. Paul understands what these people think about clowns.
What are clowns anyway? We all know that the thick white pancake make-up really hides the suture marks that show that these real life Frankensteins are stitched together from the hideous dregs of society; murderers, mimes gone bad, and Enron executives.
Painted-on smiles fool the unwary, but the eyes, yes, the eyes show evil incarnate. Their oversized clothes and frizzy hair hide grotesquely misaligned bodies, giving new reason to consider why the shoes are so large and incongruous with body size. One should always be wary of their dreadful accessories like the ubiquitous squirting lapel flower, filled with acid to blind the unsuspecting, an additional affront to the well being of the non-clown universe.
So, is this clown thing a perception of the adolescent man-child phenomena? Yes probably, I mean there’s really no such thing as killer clowns that hide under the bed, right? As for me, well, I do this for Paul. I sleep with the night light on and one eye open, ever vigilant for clowns in the night