Starving already

 

Dad tells me it’s time for me to go to college.

Hew doesn’t want a bum living in his house for the rest of his life.

I barely got through high school, I tell him, and like the job I have at the warehouse since I don’t have to think too much.

A man’s got only so much good think in his life without giving in over to a boss eight hours a day five days a week or more.

College, I figure, only teaches you have to give over the better side, letting some boss somewhere use you up so he doesn’t have to use up his own thinking.

I like being numb when working for other people.

I’m 26-years old, living in my parent’s house, with my whole live staring out ahead of me like an empty road. I don’t want to clutter it up with needless pit stops.

Dad says he wants me to have it better than he had it when he started his working life – which means he wants me to wear a suit and carry a brief case so I look better than all the people I see around me everyday.

I see him hogging up the good life on me.

He had a good job with good benefits that left him work eight hours and the rest was his.

I tell him the good life he has in mind for me will have me working all the time and drinking all the rest to forget all the other people’s thinking I’ve had to do all day – when all I want is a drink with my high school buddies like dad did after he finished work, and maybe I want a week night in the bowling league, too.

Even dad has to admit college is a rip off, holding the good life hostage with their tax free tuitions nobody but a Rockefeller can afford to pay without going into hock for a life time.

The local pimp has more of a conscience than any college president has.

But day is willing to help me pay the college ransom just to make sure I get a foot up on life.

This means he’s willing to folk over his GI savings just so he can start living the life of Reilly without me around to muck it up.

He would throw me out, but he’s not yet ready to divorce mom, who would make his life a living hell if he did.

He suggests I take up law or engineering.

I tell him I’ve always had an inkling to become an artists of some sort.

He says I’ll starve.

I tell him maybe I’m starving already.

But I go off to college anyway. I don’t want to wake up some night to find his hands around my throat.