My Spirit Being Crushed, Every Weekday from Eight to Five
Preface: Let me just admit that if I were home right now, I’d be watching cable TV and eating sugar-free kettle corn. HOWEVER… it’s the potential that’s missing while I’m sitting at my corporate desk, isn’t it?
This morning, finally exhausted of morning DJ blather, I put on the mix CD I got from Omar. As any conscientious parent would do, I explained the cultural relevance of each song to my children. My oldest was navigator. He read the artist and song names out to me as I drove. “And then he put them together and called it the Gray Album,” I said. My children nodded, recalling earlier lessons on color theory and sampling.
When we got to Courtney Love, I slipped into a reverie. “Real rock stars are angry,” I thought. It’s okay to express your anger through guitar; it’s not okay to express your anger by destroying your cubicle with a baseball bat. How many of us know how to play guitar and sing? How many of us have the free time to tour the world?
For the fifteenth or sixteenth time, I imagined the rock band I might have if my life were a little less responsibility-frought. Of course, rock is pretty low-key in America right now. So I’d have to be big in Japan, instead. I imagine that I’d be VERY big in Japan, and not just literally.
I worked on the lyrics of my number-one hit, in my head, there in front of my oldest child’s school, while we watched the cops speed trap the Mercedes-es and the Lexi.
It’s a pretty good song.
Then I did a bad-parent thing. I whined to my son. I told him that I wished I could do creative things today instead of the very double-plus-un-good-ly non-creative things I’d be doing in my veal pen of a freaking workspace today. “… and a trained monkey could do it,” I said. “And if you don’t do it when they want you to, with the proper amount of ass-kissing, they treat you like a trained monkey. And if you do it all perfectly, they STILL treat you like a monkey.”
I wiped a tear from my eye and some froth from the corner of my mouth. My son looked out his rainy window and heaved a sigh.
But then I got hold of myself and managed to turn the Bad Parenting Moment into a Good one, turning the whining into a lecture. “And THAT is why,” I concluded, “THAT is why you have to work hard from a young age. Unless you’re lucky enough to have been born rich. Which, as you may have noticed, you weren’t. So…”
“Bell’s ringing. Gotta go,” he said.
Okay. Okay.
Some day, my children will put into fruition the benefits of my lectures. Before I know it, they’ll go out into the world and do better than me, leaving me lonely. And if they were to become a little condescending to their dear, old, retro-genre-downloading mother, it’d still be totally worth it, as long as I could live to see them set up in townhouses without rats or roaches.
And when that happens, finally, my job will be complete. And then, finally, my rock band will go to Japan.
