The Geezer and Teenage Angst

I'm not exactly a spring chicken, (What a visual picture that is!). I've been around the block a few times. In fact I have not only been around the block but I drove up and down the alley and I even found a parking space. I guess you get the picture that I'm probably on the downhill side of middle age, (My 14 year old stepson thinks that means middle ages like with dragons and plague and all that stuff). Truth be told I probably don't mentally feel much older than he does with maybe the exception of being able to reason things out a little better. At any rate, suffice it to say that even though I'm really not that smart I regularly get to impart my bon-mots of wisdom to his still forming jelly like mind.

Of course this has it's ups and downs. He's a master of the subtle yet wide mouthed yawn and the demon possessed like rolling of the eyeballs. He's also a master of the selective short term memory loss excuse for doing the things that incited me to dispense with my garnered wisdom in the first place as well as the snappy, (or should I say smart alecky?) comeback. I see so much in him of myself at that age that sometimes I just want to smack him into the outer reaches of the atmosphere. This I blame my parents for. If they hadn't pointed my foibles out to me back then I would have never known about them irregardless of the fact that it took forty something years to realize what it was they were trying to tell me, (and I had to have a graphic example to boot)

Almost every time I have to yell at him I almost immediately hear this nagging little brain lurking sounds just like my Mom's voice telling me stuff like "See what I mean?" or "If you'd only listened to me". This of course then automatically leads to the "When I was your age my parents used to tell me the same thing and I didn't listen but you should" lecture. And then I start thinking "Ah the devil's in the works here. This is like one of those science fiction stories where I keep getting transported back in time to repeat the episodes over and over again. It is so frustrating it causes me fits of apoplexy.
If only the little shaver would just take my advice and benefit from my experience.

My folks are still alive so I can't accuse them of plaguing me from beyond. I am convinced that somewhere in another dimension they are somehow observing my ill fated attempts to teach this youngster and are really enjoying themselves while having a huge belly laugh at my expense.

As I said before I am not really that smart but some of the mistakes my son makes are so boneheaded that sometimes I wonder if I'm really a lot smarter than I think I am and that there's a lot of truth to the theory that we are descended from monkeys. Needless to say, I find myself scratching my head a lot lately and I'm beginning more and more to resemble an orangutan.