If I could pick anything I would impart upon the young adults of this world, it would be these simple words: You do not have to fall in love with and marry the first person you get intimate with.
Those of you who know me well are quite aware of the depth of the oceans that I personally sailed on my way to discovering this particularly well-charted land. Though, I repeat, it is the fault of my elders and teachers for shirking the responsibility of simply telling me this information. It is disrespectful for a 16 year-old student of either gender to not receive this truth. Whether they can actually hear it or not is another matter.
Currently, I do not have any children of this relative age under my sway, so I get the personal satisfaction of passing this responsibility on to every one of you reading these words.
It took me forever to get out of my catastrophic inaugural relationship. I have no interest in going into the gritty details of the disaster, but suffice it to say, neither of us was ready to settle down and raise a family. We could barely keep our zoo of pets alive.
If someone had sat me down on the front seat of my sweet blue Chevy Nova on my 16th birthday and said some version of the following, perhaps I could have gotten much more out of my college years than an education degree and responsibility for the smallest parrot in the menagerie:
"Over the next few years, you will progress from curiosity to completely possessed by feelings and urges. These are to be cultivated and enjoyed. There will come a time when you will look at a (boy/girl: pick one - wisely.) and be overcome with chemicals and constellations of caramel. This object of thine affection will either respond positively or negatively to your outpourings of l'amour. When all is slayed and done and hearts are tripped upon and squashed, you will emerge hand-in-hand with one of the first few loves of your life. You will become as close as people can be, if ya' get my meanin', nudge, nudge. And there will come a day when you abruptly realize that you might be able to live happily ever after with this person...or you will even more abruptly be clubbed by the fact that there is more to be tantalized, tasted and tabulated in the 52 million square miles of habitable land on our planet. The prophet Sting once said 'If you love someone, set them free' (though he might have been plagiarizing), but the idea is that if something is real enough to last forever, you and your partner need to be of a sound (less hormonically-addled) mind and experienced soul when you knot the tie. You need to see some of the world and what magic is available for sample. And if it turns out that you are one of the chosen ones who hit the lottery the first time you buy a ticket, all my best, let's hope y'all still have enough luck in the tank to do the forever thing successfully. Long and the short of it is simply that you are not required to sew yourself to your love at first kiss, instead, consider using velcro, so it won't hurt as bad when you pull back."
Admittedly, you might want to come up with a better closer than velcro, but this is just your basic template. You have to make it your own and appropriate for your particular situation. Don't worry about coming off sounding judgmental, it's for the good of the future lives of people you are supposed to influence for the better.
For myself, I owe all the credit in the world for my happy beginning to two important friends, Dr. Jekyll and Miss Hide. They came from an island off the Georgia Coast and alerted my (sadly) 22 year-old soul that the door was ajar, and it was time to slip out the back, Jack. Without Jekyll's magic, and Hide's smile, I mighta been writing to y'all from behind some line in a Johnny Cash song: "Told my woman that she'd better shut that parrot up, or else I'm gonna grab a knife and cut that parrot up..." (though I might be plagiarizing).
Good night, San Quentin.
