Wanta Oughta Gotta

I have basically lived my life as a lumpen. Sure I graduated from college, but today that only serves to make you one of the more easily employed lumpens. Being a lumpen, I don't spend a lot of time philosophizing about the meaning of life in general or mine in specific. Nope, for the most part I have just lived a life of wanta, oughta, and gotta.

Went I was a child, it was all about wanta. I don't remember back that far but I am sure at some point is was entirely wanta. You pee in your diaper, you want it changed, you cry, someone changes it. Your belly growls, you cry, someone sticks a bottle in your mouth.

A few months pass and you grow to where you can start moving about, exploring, getting into things. Up pops oughta, or more appropriately, ought not. You reach for a cutsie on the end table and you hear, "no no" or "un uh" or "stop." You try to climb a chair and get onto the dining room table and someone pops you on your diapered behind. Oughta kind of permeates your life through the process of elimination. Gradually many of the things that you wanta do get replaced by things you oughta do.

Gotta comes along later. For most of us it comes when we get six and have to start going to school. For me it came a few months earlier. When my sister was a small baby we went down to my Aunt Annie's house for a visit. We had started to leave and were in the front yard when my mom realized that she had left the diaper bag in the house. My father told me to go back in and get it. I was about 5 years old and there were a bunch of scary old relatives sitting on the front porch so I didn’t want to go back by them. (I'm 58 now and some of my relatives would still be scary sitting on the front porch but that is a story for another time.) Anyway I told my father no. He tore a limb off an adjacent apple tree and whipped the dogshit out of me. At that moment I got my first big lesson in gotta. From that day in 1951 until February of 2001, I lived a life dominated by gotta. You gotta go to school, you gotta work in the summer, you gotta go to college, you gotta get a job, you gotta come to work, you gotta take lunch at 11:30, you gotta be back in 1 hour, you gotta go to meetings, you gotta... yada, yada, yada.

When I retired, all that changed. I still have a lot of things that I gotta do and many, many more that I ought to do but now I do get to concentrate more on what I wanta do. If I am lucky, I will be able to make it this way until I die. If my finances collapse, I may have to go back to more gotta and less wanta. I suppose that if I live long enough, I will get back to where I started. When I pee in my Depends, I will want it changed, I will yell and some one will eventually change it and when I get hungry, I’ll complain and some one will stick a spoonful of ground ham in my mouth. God, I hope I die before I get back to all wanta.