We gotta get out of this place

My dad used to always say to me, Stay in school so you don’t have to do what I do for a living. And funny, now that’s what I say to my kids despite the fact that my father, if he were alive today, would look at the work I do and be so impressed. Dad, don’t be impressed. There is nothing impressive about what I do. It is, as they say, a living. To which the easy retort is, you call this living?

Dad came home tired and dirty every night from unloading trucks all day long. He wasn’t like all the other dads who drove nice cars and worked in offices and dressed “nice.” He wore derivations of his work clothes even on the weekend: blue work pants and a white t-shirt. T-shirt? Here I’m getting uppity. It was an undershirt. He wore underwear. He would have gotten a kick out of the fact that I could use the word, derivation, in a sentence.

Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin'
Watched his hair been turnin' grey, yeah
He's been workin' and slavin' his life away
I know he's been workin' so hard

I work as a writer. I joke and say I’m a word whore. I’ll write anything for money. Right now I have a full-time, steady job as a copywriter at a hoity-toity marketing agency in downtown Boston. I work on the Buick account. Lots of good-looking people here. Lots of people who dress hip and have straight teeth. And then I write other stuff on the side just to make ends meet. Business stuff. Columns. Articles. If someone will pay me, I’ll write it. The steady job still doesn’t pay for the steady stream of bills I find in my mailbox. Dad would understand that. Never making enough.

My daughter wants to be a writer, too. She wants to write screenplays. I tell her, if you really want to write for a living, stay in school so you don’t have to write what I write to make a living. My other daughter doesn’t know what she wants to do. I tell her to stay in school anyway.

I don’t come home from work filthy dirty like my dad did. But I do go home just as tired as he did. And sometimes I climb the stairs to my apartment with such a feeling of loss and defeat. Of dreams lost. Of a sense of life slipping away, and that there’s more to life than getting up, going to work, and coming home. Of taking what you make and handing it back over to bill collectors, and then there still are more with their hands out.

We gotta get out of this place
If it's the last thing we ever do
We gotta get out of this place
'cause girl, there's a better life for me and you.