Kids and dogs

I am sitting outside in a garden working on my computer, and I can hear little kids playing. They are yelling out unintelligible sentences that most people would consider cute. This is something that is beginning to bother me. Why do kids get away with so much (and all the attention)? You see a kid walking around like a drunkard, slurring speech, and everyone says, “oh, how cute.” The same thing happens with dogs. Dogs get all excited and jump up on you, lick you, wag their tails. If I were to do the same thing, I would be locked up.  Is this fair? Is this right? Why do kids and dogs get away with behaving in a socially unacceptable manner? The more I think about it . . .

The more I think about it, the more I believe that the problem isn’t that kids and dogs get away with acting like lunatics or perverts but that we, the adults, are the ones who are being suppressed. We are trained through life to repress our instincts of both pleasure and pain. Children can cry and laugh as loudly as they please without any sense of shame. Dogs, when encountereing other dogs in public, bark and smell each other. Nobody complains. What would happen to me if, when being passed by a woman on the street, I began to make noises, smell and rub up against her? I would be considered a freak. But, then again, isn’t that what people do anyways in bars and night clubs? Isn’t that what the dating scene is all about?

Please excuse me for citing Pablo Neruda again, but “las jóvenes estudiantes, y los sacerdotes se masturban / y los animales fornican directamente“.