My son Cass doesn’t need a wolf suit to make mischief of one kind or another. He recently declared kindergarten war on handwriting, played tug of war with the dog using his teeth and won, and dismantled the light in the living room for the third or fourth time.

I am constantly amazed by how bezerker he can seem during the course of one afternoon, and yet, at the same time, I am protective of his originality, that brain that can become so completely the dog, he has the real dog fooled.

As a parent I know boundaries have to be maintained (since the bricks he licks on the way to lunch are unsanitary). I’ve also been thinking, though, about how often I want to run amok too. Society is nuts in my opinion—a completely cracked place where people tweet but don’t say hello, buy plastic cutting boards so they can throw them in the landfill, and design weird schemes with weather balloons just to appear on television.

Writing feels like a good way to legally respond.

A few crafted words are more satisfying than stabbing a finger in the air and laying on the horn in rush hour traffic. Books about rebellion and monsters cause controversy when they first appear, (In The Night Kitchen is still one of the most challenged books of all time) and a battle cry can sometimes fall on deaf ears, but a plea to society might be thing that makes the world change.

Cass has been building a solar energy converter out of his Legos and even though I wish he wasn’t building it on the stairs, sometimes just knowing where Where The Wild Things Are gives me hope.

Related posts:

1. Connect with J.T. (Jen) Dutton: Reading on the Edge
2. Connect with J. T. Dutton: How to Write a Literary Novel
3. GIVE UP THE GHOST by Megan Crewe
4. FREAKED by J. T. Dutton