Somebody thought I was insulting Where the Wild Things Are. I was just being silly. Once Upon a Potty makes me giggle. Perhaps I'm still in the bathroom humor stage. Or maybe it's that I never went through the bathroom humor stage as a child. When I was six, I used to roll my eyes at boys on the playground singing that Popeye the sailorman garbage can song, like "Grow up."

I appreciated Where the Wild Things Are quite a bit. I experienced it as a film about disillusionment... realizing that children are lonely and disappointed, and so are adults, and you will be lonely and disappointed your whole life, and families and communities, in particular, will never meet your expectations ...but there's a glimmer of hope in it, I think. Sometimes you and your friends will build awesome forts, and jump on top of one another and fall asleep in a big pile, and there will be various kinds of love to get you through the loneliness.

I related to Max a lot more than I expected. I was not much of a wild child, I tended to feel very invested in my identity as somebody who made adults lives easier, particularly my mother's. I was always well known by my mother's colleagues as the kid who could entertain himself for hours without disrupting others. However -- when I did get angry, I had a lot of trouble processing that emotion, and I've absolutely damaged gifts I've given my mother in fits of rage, like Max does to that little heart thing he gave his sister. Once when I was mad at my mom, I ripped up the lyrics to a silly song I'd written about her. I think often my anger was directed at friends, family, communities, etc who didn't meet my expectations for them, a lot like the Wild Thing Carol. I can absolutely see myself stomping off to obliterate my own artwork when the other kids didn't play the game the way I wanted them to play it. I had multiple parties where I locked myself in the bathroom because my friends didn't act the way I wanted them to act.