What Do You Want to Be If You Grow Up?

I’m sure I had a weird answer in second grade when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grow up (if I grow up?), but my first firm answer was a rock star. Thanks to my wildly liberal upbringing and severe disconnect with reality, I held on to that dream until about 16. I remember meeting my girlfriend’s mother for the first time and she outright laughed at me when I told her I was planning to attend the Guitar Institute of Technology. I laugh (internally, of course) when I think about how wounded my tender self was when she didn’t take me seriously. Maybe if I played the guitar, at all, ever, I should’ve considered such a vocation, but that turned out to be a serious flaw in my plan. Plan B: writer.

I say that like I’ve ever had a plan B (I think when plan A fails and one goes back to planning, one ends up with a second plan A.) Punctuation nerds: do I have the period in that last sentence on the correct side of the parenthesis? I’d look it up but I have to get up and go to work at, sigh, my construction job in three hours. Fucking stupid planning anyway….

So yeah, there was some majoring in Art in college, and some consideration to becoming a physical therapist, who hates touching people, before dropping out completely, feeling utterly defeated by Howard Rosenburg’s design course, and resigning myself to a strictly blue collar future. It wasn’t until years later that I correlated my dad going to prison with my first college drop-out. I’m not saying it was his fault, but it sure didn’t make that fucking hellish class easier. Like dads are here to make shit easier. Ha! Ask my kids.

Here I am, 150 years older, and still “transitioning” into full-time writing. It’s not for lack of trying this time either. Then one day your junkie girlfriend nags at you to get off heroin (because she doing the superior drug), and you finally do, and realize you’ve been driving the car that is your life while mostly asleep. I crashed a literal truck that way–I do not recommend it literally or metaphorically. Now, the vague point. Why am I telling you this?

I was recently offered a union construction job (I worked in the union for over a decade), which pays a lot more and has benefits, and the people who I tell look at me like I’m a little simple because I don’t run back to the union. “That’s a no-brainer,” they say, or “that’s why it’s called ‘work,'” they say, forgetting that they quit the only construction job they ever had , if they ever had one, after one or two summers. I loved the union when I was planning on staying a carpenter. When all the union work dried up and I went back to college to fill the time and my belly (by borrowing lots and lots of money from the government and banks–fuck ’em, they fuck you all the time) I thought I was never gong back to construction. Well, plan B2: I want to publish a book before I die and survive any way I can, and I’m fairly certain I’m done with the union. I will probably keep doing side jobs because I do enjoy building stuff, but since the government and the banks are going to do what they do best–hound and threaten me for the money they foolishly loaned me–I’d like to turn some profit out of this degree. But even if I don’t, and the banks take two-thirds of my money and the government takes the rest and kicks me twice in the balls, they won’t be able to take back my education.

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