My dad grew up on a small farm in Ohio, he worked his way through college, doing labor around the country side. He carted off loads of manure, seeded countless fields, and rose early to finish his chores before going to school. He was poor, well everyone was poor back then, but he didn't have the luxuries that we have today. Especially in rural Ohio, technological advances do not advance as quickly out there. But from this beginning and amongst his four siblings that he helped to rasie as the oldest boy, he managed to become a highly successful business man. He used to be the one in the tractor or wrangling my aunts and uncles up for suppertime. But this responsibility and this struggle to make ends meet breeds a differnt kind of person. You do not hunger for wealth or success if you are born wealthy and successful. I might have heard this or maybe I read it but there is a trend that my generation is changing, the generations before us were more successful than their parents. I do not see myself becoming more successful than my father. This isn't just humbling modesty this is the truth, he had a fire inside him that I do not have. He trudged through cowshit and poverty to climb atop his financial fortune. He paid for his own education working two jobs and still managed to get better grades than me.
His work ethic has diminished my own, it has withered because of the comforts that I have been afforded. He paid for my college, a really expensive college on the east coast, while i mostly just drank beer and partyied. The classes were merely hourly containment units where the words of the extremley intelligent professors floated over me while I doodled to pass the time and ignore my purpose for being in school. College was simply another step in my process of life, graduate high school, go to college. If only I had approached it as something that I wanted to do, if only I could have appreciated what was being offered to me. But when it just seems like part of the protocol it is hard to do more than just eek by. I didn't think about the effects of my college life, how those years spent there would wind up with me in a department store putting clothes back from dressing rooms. I was cursed with a successful family, hard workers who worked hard enough for me to sit idly by blissfully laying in an intertube, riding the current of their success.
My dad wanted more for his life, he vowed he would never shovel cow shit again, he promised himself that his family would be taken care of and we wouldn't have to struggle through life like he had to. Which i mean really that is nice, that's good thinking but if I am the byproduct of such an experiment i think he should have made us fend for ourselves. I am the perfect example of getting complacent, I am the guy that will lose the family fortune because I don't know the true meaning of a dollar. I look at cars and i think they are all affordable, my vision is skewed, I have no fire, no reason to better my situation. Everything was handed to me and I just had to maintain it all. But without ever having earned it myself, never having gone hungry or had the lights turned off. How am I supposed to know how to survive in the real world. My dad was like a wild tiger, forced to learn how to persist and perservere, me...well I am like a spayed cat that has been declawed, friendly and socially amicable but no threat, no drive to be feral and fight for what I need, i don't even have the correct tools for the job. When my dad put himself through college he was the first in his family to do it, now it is expected, I knew that was what I was going to do, and maybe I would have tried harder or understood more about what college was for if i had to pay for it. To me it was like a vacation, shit life was like a vacation. Was like a vacation.....now reality has appeared that life that people complain about, the real world, it makes a little more sense to me now. Bills have signifigance, I don't use my heater because I can't afford it. I miss eating out and buying things that I don't need. Now I struggle to save up for a new tie for an interview. I work short shifts at two jobs and i am learning about what helped make my father, i just wish he would have let me get started a little earlier. He was too successful for my sake, he made life to plush and comfy, our wealth served as a buffer between reality and our happy home. He just wanted us to be comfortable and we were, we just became too comfortable.
bleeeeeeeeh dunno about this one
No comments:
Post a Comment