The Fish Doesn't Have To Be Real — James Strauss

The minds of children do not work the same way as the minds of the adults around them. The minds of children function quite actively without the soothing and demanding layers of duplicity children are going to need to survive in the adult world. Adults, for the most part, give a pass to young children when it comes to the realities and truths these younger members of the species occasionally spew forth. Children are generally forgiven for the truths they tell and actively work out.

Publishing, this anthology of fictional children's stories James Strauss has done the same thing he has done with the more adult novels he has published. He has drawn upon real characters, situations, actions, words and the meaning (as he has perceived it) of the many children who've flowed in, around and through his life. The special dispensation and forgiveness society, and the species in general, allow children also allows for them to be just as in touch with reality as their direct life experience will allow, and it also allows them to transmit back to the adult population around them what is really happening instead of what is being deemed to be happening in the construct of a phenomenal world the adults are creating and living around them.

Adults tend to use humor to explain public and private displays of truth-telling and truth-acting that children participate in at almost all times and on almost all occasions. The children are considered to be cute, cuddly and very funny, although their revelations can be more cutting and intensive than almost any made by those same adults laughing at them and writing the reality revealed off to ignorant, silly and ridiculous childish humor.

Children are also special because of their naked and undisguised need to survive and to attract and support all actions and words that would give any evidence at all of securing and building upon their survival.