If I had a kid I’d make them watch Marcel the Shell with Shoes on. We’d watch it together a few times when they were two or three years old. I’d want that film to be their first memory – or at least the first movie they remember watching. Marcel is a relatable shell. The kid would clamor to hear the cute shell’s voice; and, when they experience their first real loss, that movie will guide them through it.

I’d make them watch My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away and all the great Studio Ghibli movies. When they’re five years old they’re watching Grave of the Fireflies. I wouldn’t tell them anything about what it means. First they wouldn’t understand it; then they’d understand it as a movie about loss; then they’d have some thoughts about war.

My kid would come out of the womb listening to Górecki’s Third Symphony and Reich’s Electric Counterpoint. When they’re old enough, they’re listening to Different Trains. I’d drill Xenakis and postwar serialism into their head until they rebel by accidentally reinventing Baroque counterpoint. They’d hate me and love Palestrina.

I’d make that kid watch every movie I put off watching myself for a decade or more. I’d make them listen to all the music that would have been foundational for me, had I discovered it a little earlier.

Earlier this evening I took a walk. I listened to a 50-minute podcast analyzing “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead. Then I listened to “Paranoid Android” and thought: Okay, yeah, I get why people call them geniuses now. This is fine.

See, I’ve been listening to OK Computer almost every day recently. I didn’t listen to Radiohead as a teenager. I know the names of the albums; I know that Thom Yorke is weird and Jonny Greenwood is God’s Guitarist Gift to Earth. But the few times I tried listening to them, it all just sort of struck me as decent 90’s rock – good music, but not especially moving for me. I fear that, because I didn’t get into them at a maximally neuroplastic developmental stage, I’ll never get the hype surrounding them, and I’ll be a little stupider for it.

I know that’s not true, because otherwise there wouldn’t be musicologists over the age of 19. Literary criticism would die before it ever got started. I got really into “Let Down” in the summer of last year, and that song is now a little magical to me, despite me not listening to it until the withered old age of 22. But I worry.

My dad told me 25 is the last birthday you get to look forward to, because your car insurance rate goes down at that age. And let me tell you, after the last several months of paying my current rates, I am fucking pumped. I wake up every day now and think about things like car insurance. I care about these things.

As an aside, this morning I woke up at 5 a.m. and ate a bowl of Cheerios. I then half-fell back asleep and experienced nightmares at various lucidities for the next four hours. I drove to court for work and feared my driving would get me pulled over, despite having no substances in my system. I wrote notes in a dissociative daze and wrote a story in a dissociative daze and started to come back into my body around 4 p.m. I took a walk. I’ve had nightmares every night for the last month.

Tonight I watched Grave of the Fireflies for the first time and it stunned me just as much as I imagined it would. I wanted to say something intelligent about it. I sat and stared at a wall. Then I stared at my screen. But then I just thought: Maybe I have nothing intelligent left to say. Maybe if I were 14 years old I’d say some things that had been said before. Maybe later I’d nurse these thoughts into something original. Maybe, if I had a kid, I could force them to watch every movie I’ve failed to say something intelligent about, and later they’d say the things I was never able to say.

That’s a terrible reason to have a kid. I’m not having any kids.

If I had a kid, though, I’d teach them everything I’ve learned about loss. I’d want them to be one of those really annoying college kids that has a lot of deep thoughts about something they haven’t personally experienced.