Tuesday morning, during my usual morning ablutions, I composed a haiku:

I am resenting
The demands of Mgmt
Task-master sadists

Certainly not great verse, but it hit the mark.  To wit:
These limey gits put me on a clearly impossible schedule eight weeks ago.  I agree to it because, badass that I am, I typically view people trying to do the impossible with a great deal of respect, and usually reframe the “impossible” as “audacious.”  Fine.

Then, they suddenly, without valid reason, shaved a month off that same schedule, changing its status from audacious to ludicrous.  On top of that, they then demanded I dramatically increase my social media presence.  Since my social media presence was basically zero, I didn’t think this would be particularly challenging.  And it in and of itself isn’t particularly challenging, but keeping up with the various messages that come with any social media presence is a time-consuming pain in the ass.

I had decided I’d had enough, so after the ablutions mentioned supra, I arranged for a meeting with Mgmt.  The meeting was fairly hilarious (I’d love to post a transcript here, but was reminded of the ruthlessly confiscatory N.D.A. I had signed) and pleasantly productive.  Sure, there were a few expletives and some potentially rude and/or threatening remarks, but in the end, we agreed to return to status quo ante: tossing the ludicrous schedule in favor of returning to the audacious one.  On my end, I agreed to post at least one current photo of me by the end of the summer.  You likely don’t understand what a big deal this is to me.  I hate having my picture taken.  I was that way even before I went underground.  Pretty much every picture taken of me in the last several decades ends up just being a close-up of my palm as I aggressively block the picture.  But, I suppose a picture or two isn’t a totally outrageous request in this weird world of ours, so fuck it: I agreed.  So I need to get back to the book, but first [puts on English Instructor outfit), This Day In Badass Literary History.

Today, May 9th, we’re forced to acknowledge a literary genesis that ought to be sacred – J.M. Barrie’s arrival into this wretched, time-obsessed world in 1860, a Scottish scribbler who’d eventually birth Peter Pan, that jagged, unruly testament to freedom’s cost, a story which, in its original 1904 play and 1911 novel forms, stands as a snarling repudiation of adulthood’s suffocating grip, only to be gutted, neutered, and bedazzled by the saccharine, capitalistic meat-grinder of Disney® – a cultural crime so grotesque it demands we pause, seethe, and reconsider what we’ve let happen to art in the name of “family-friendly” pablum.

Barrie, born in the bleak nowhere of Kirriemuir, wasn’t some twee sentimentalist doodling fairy tales for the nursery set – he was a man carved up by grief’s dull blade, his brother’s early death a specter that haunted his family and left him, forever, the boy trying to fill an unfillable void, a void that metastasized into Peter Pan’s feral howl against the adult world’s obsession with control, its ticking clocks, its soul-deadening norms.  Peter, you’ll recall, isn’t a mere child playing dress-up in Neverland; he’s a goddamn revolutionary, a pint-sized anarchist who says fuck you to growing up, who gathers his ragtag Lost Boys – those castoffs of a society that’d rather see them broken than free – and wages war on pirates, on Hook, that sneering embodiment of “The System” with his crocodile-shadowed dread of time’s passage.  There’s a raw, almost Nietzschean will-to-power in Peter’s refusal to conform, a rejection of the social contract that’s less “whimsical” than it is a throat-slitting act of defiance, and Barrie, with his own quiet wounds, pours every ounce of his disillusionment into this kid who’d rather die than let the world domesticate him.

But then, goddammit – enter Disney®, that glittering behemoth of sanitized mediocrity, which in 1953 took Barrie’s jagged blade of a story and sanded it down into a toothless, pastel-colored singalong, a cultural lobotomy so thorough it’s a wonder we can still find the original text beneath the wreckage.  Where Barrie gave us a Peter who’s as much tragic antihero as he is liberator – a boy who pays for his freedom with a chilling inability to love, to remember, to connect, leaving Wendy and the Darlings as mere ghosts in his eternal childhood – Disney® gives us a smirking, green-tights-wearing imp, all wide-eyed innocence and catchy tunes, as if Neverland were just a theme park ride and not a lawless refuge for the broken.  The Mouse House, in its infinite, profit driven cowardice, couldn’t stomach the story’s darker currents: the haunting loneliness of Peter’s rebellion, the way his refusal to grow up makes him both free and damned, the way Barrie dares to ask what it costs to spit in the face of time and society and everything that demands we bend.  Disney® scrubs all that away, leaving us with a Peter who’s little more than a mascot, a sanitized avatar of “youthful spirit” that erases the blood and grit and existential dread Barrie wove into the tale’s very marrow.

And don’t even get me started on Hook, dear reader – Barrie’s Hook, that is, a figure of Shakespearean chaos, reduced by Disney® to a bumbling cartoon villain, all mustache-twirling and pratfalls, as if the whole point of his character weren’t the way he embodies the adult world’s desperate need to control what it can’t understand.  Disney’s® version is a betrayal, a cultural felony, a reduction of Barrie’s work to the intellectual equivalent of a Happy Meal™ toy – shiny, cheap, and utterly devoid of the original’s searing, subversive soul.

So here we are, on this May 9th, marking Barrie’s birth with a bitter nod to what he created and what’s been done to it.  Peter Pan, in its undiluted form, is a homemade grenade of a story, a reminder that freedom isn’t free, that rebellion cuts deep, that the world’s rules are made to be broken but not without consequence.  Barrie knew this; he lived it.  Disney®, in its contemptible, focus-grouped cowardice, did not.  And we’re poorer for it – left with a shadow of a tale that once dared to show us the cost of staying young forever, now just another cog in the machine of mass-marketed nostalgia.  If you want the real Peter Pan, the one who’d sneer at Disney’s® glittering lies, go back to Barrie’s text.  Read it.  Feel its teeth.  And then ask yourself what else we’ve let the House of Mouse™ ruin in the name of “magic.”

N.P.: “When You Fall” – Gary Numan