CREATING A FAKE REALITY

CREATING A FAKE REALITY

When I was a kid I used imagination as a form of entertainment. My favorite pastime was to lie in the grass on a mound of dirt behind what we called the “Potato House” and look up into the sky and stare at the floating clouds which I called “the cloud sheep.” The soft, clean, green, grass made a comfortable carpet for a boy’s imagination to run wild. But this green carpet was a different carpet; this carpet was alive and a child could feel the green grass breathe beneath his shirtless body. This child did not have a care in the world because the only world he knew existed within the boundaries of a Louisiana farm.  

It was easy for his mind to drift from reality into a natural high. His   imagination had no limits and the clouds would turn into faces, and the wind would whirl the faces into ships, and ships into skylines of big cities.  Even though it was a pastime, it created a desire within this child   to learn more of the wonders of the world.

Far from a world of imagination things changed for that kid, and the world of imagination became a reality. To a kid time becomes a waiting game, and a lifetime passes between the ages of one and twenty one. One day a big, yellow, bus came along picked up the kid and dropped him in the middle of a world of education. There he found hundreds of new faces and with those new faces were new challenges.

Soon this teenage boy came to the realization that he was living in a man’s world. He was expected to have the characteristics of a red-blooded American man, who holds a high position in the world of masculinity. In this man’s world there is no room for emotions, no room for fears, and no room for tears. He had to be the hardest hitter on the football team, the fastest man on the basketball court, and the homerun hitter for the baseball squad. Success was his only objective but to achieve and maintain success, it was much harder than he expected.

The world of competition separates boys from men. As a result, the word “dropout” becomes the center of conversation.  Many individuals’ dropout of college, dropout of organized shorts, and dropout of advanced studies, and some choose to dropout of life. There is a world of difference in a child who uses imagination and the adult who is unable to cope with the responsibilities of adulthood.  It becomes easier to revert back to the world of imagination than to compete in the real world.  Responsibility is too much for some, and thus they create a world of imagination that is supported by mind altering drugs.

But still others find the world of reality too difficult, so they create a “fake reality.”  They produce fake reports of high marks in high school and college. They produce PHONY degrees from colleges and universities. But to their horror, they discover that living in a fake reality turns into a series of lies, and living with lies is more difficult than expected. They forget such idioms as, “MAKE SURE YOUR LIES WILL FIND YOU OUT,” and one day when it is least expected a “slip of the tongue” exposes the real person.  All hell breaks loose and the person stands before the world as a NAKED PHONY surrounded with friends as phony as he ever dared to be.

Who among us would be so foolish as to create a fake reality, not only for themselves, but for their children? Being a fake is like a house built on sand, when the rains come and the winds blow, it is swept away like the grains of sand on the beach. But to the man who used imagination as a prelude to the real world, he found a peaceful existence. There were hardships and struggles, but he was prepared to smile through them all. His reality was built on a firm foundation and when the rains came and the winds blew he stood tall among many.