How do you retire at 35 if you haven’t won the lottery, hit it big in stocks or invented something incredibly cool that everyone in the world wants, like an iPhone or spray cheese in a can?
If you have some ideas, please let me know. Drop me a line, as long as it doesn’t involve knocking people off or me dancing. I have decided it’s time for me to retire. It’s not that I don’t like working. It’s just that I don’t want to do it anymore.
I want to vacation . . . forever. I want to wake up, go to the gym, drink lattes and read the newspaper after a casual stroll. I want to live in a hotel room where I can get cookie crumbs and smeared chocolate all over the sheets. I want to swim in big resort pools with Mayan pyramids and water slides until the chlorine bleaches my black hair the color of snow. I want an endless supply of towels that I can throw wet on the floor.
I want to sip rum drinks. I want to become one with my flip-flops. I want permanent stubble on my face. I want to eat greasy food and stay up late with my kid goofing off until we both pass out in bed, or my wife puts us in timeout.
I want that lifestyle!
Maybe it would get old after a while, but it sounds pretty good right now. The thing about taking a fun trip is how difficult it is readjusting to real life — work, dishes, laundry, phone messages, cooking, bills, mowing the grass. I call it the vacation hangover. You mope around for days, remembering the good times and longing to get back to them.
We took my 2 1/2-year-old daughter to Orlando for a couple of days. We went to Sea World and stayed at a Disney resort, which was both wonderful and like joining a cult all at the same time. (I like Disney, but you start to feel a little brainwashed after you’ve glimpsed your millionth mouse ears.)
But we had a swell time. We went along with an old college friend who has a 3-year-old and a 1 1/2-year-old. Three kids — with their ages adding up to only seven years — should have been a recipe for a reality show called, “When Vacations Go Bad.” It should have been enough to blow circuits, cause the police to shut down entire streets and restaurants to lock the doors when they saw us coming. But strangely, it went swimmingly. Nobody died or was maimed.
We fed dolphins and ate vast quantities of ice cream, exceeding what the Surgeon General considers safe.
We laughed, we played, and we even relaxed. Yes, it can be done with kids. I think it takes a special mindset — or a level of insanity — to do it. You have to be more mellow, take things as they come, smile a lot, revel in the lunacy, will yourself to have fun, and adopt a Jamaican accent. Everything is more relaxed and easygoing with a Jamaican accent. Try it: “Hey mon, don’t worry the bed caught on fire. Let’s go swimming.”
See?
Not everybody gets in the right mood on vacation, and that’s where they go wrong. We were walking into Sea World when I heard a woman tell her son, “I am going to smack you, I don’t care what the law says.”
That woman could have used a “Hey mon” and an expensive pretzel.
Have some fun, people! There are dolphins jumping over there and there’s a big buck-toothed shark over here. Life is good, and we’re all nearly broke. Go with the flow. Drink some rum. Smile, use some towels, and by all means, play a few lottery tickets, even if it’s the last few bucks you have. Hey mon, it may be the only way to stave off reality. I sure do wish we had hit that jackpot.