Green and White is the Color Of My Parachute

I guess I’m having what some would call a mid-life crisis. Yes, this summer I’ll be forty. No, I’m not looking to buy a sports car, or fuck a platinum blonde who’s half my age. Not that there’s anything wrong with those two things. But I’m having a mid-life crisis because at 39 and ¾ years, I’ve discovered that the philosophy that I’ve been living by is just, well, flat fuck wrong.

Let me tell you what I mean.

I grew up poor. Not ‘working class’. Not ‘at risk’. Fucking poor. Now that’s not to say I grew up in poverty. I had a big-wheel when I was little. And a bike when I was older. My clothes were never threadbare, nor dated. And when I was nine, my mother nagged the shit out of my father until he went in with her on a house. But being poor isn’t only about deprivation. For me, being poor wasn’t just a condition, it was a state of being. It was a continuous experience that I could never be free from. Being poor was going to your best friend’s house after school and keeping an eye out for cockroaches so that you didn’t bring any home with you in your backpack. Being poor meant knowing what store the poor people frequented when they were feeling particularly poor, and knowing by your mother’s pace through that store whether it was worth it to try to ask for an extra candy bar, or pack of gum. Poverty is a living, breathing thing. Like a virus, it has its own scent on a body, and whenever I smell it today on a person I avoid them like they have the fucking plague. The most ironic thing about being poor for me was that it didn’t limit my socio-economic aspirations (as theorized by so many social scientists) as much as it tamped down my material desires. For me, being poor was about learning not to want those $115.00 Air Jordan hi-tops, no matter how badly my father wanted to buy them for me to show everyone on the block that we weren’t poor. Those red and black masterpieces would have looked as out of place on my feet as bowling shoes on a fucking groom. And since I knew that I couldn’t sustain the discourse of the Air Jordan-ness throughout my whole wardrobe, I simply learned to un-want them. I know what you’re thinking; there’s nothing revolutionary in not wanting something you can’t have, or what’s more, feel you don’t deserve. But you have to understand, I made an art form out of the kinds of rationalizations necessary to remain spiritually intact through the process of rejecting nearly everything that one desires. Music lessons? Those were for my sister; I got the gift of a full set of World Book Encyclopedias instead. Cool clothes in high school? “Polo is WAY overpriced bro’, and that Bennetton…who wants that shit!”  Study abroad in Europe? “Why would I pay a bunch of fucking money to go see MORE fucking white people… you talk about a RIP-OFF!” Again and again and again, I found a way to make the repudiation of the trappings of wealth and privilege cool. Like I said, nothing new there. Poor kids have been doing that shit for ages, and some of them have even made a pretty good living telling jokes about their experiences. But here comes the turn: here and now, at age 39 and 3/4 , I fucking love money. FUCKING LOVE IT! When I go to sleep I think about money. When I wake up, I think about moving the shit around, about how I can get more money, or make my money go further. Hell, I’d even consider blowing a hundred dollar bill if the sonofabitch came in tens and twenties. And if I stop and think about it, I’ve always been this way. Always wanted those Air Jordans. I just was never able to face how much I hated poverty because I knew somehow that it would mean acknowledging how much I hated myself, my mother and father, my impoverished grandparents on both sides, my poor ass aunts and uncles, those broke motherfucking neighbors who lived up the street and would come to our house once a month for dinner. And I especially hated the way all of us would come together on this holiday or that holiday to cheerfully celebrate our poverty through "good food, fellowship, and song". FUCK THAT BULLSHIT! Today for the first time I understood that the cure for poverty isn’t the material aestheticism that I’ve been strictly practicing since the third grade; not logotherapy it’s simply NOT BEING FUCKING POOR!

And herein lies the underpinnings of the crisis. Because if I could just have acknowledged that fact when I was younger, faced up to the reality of the sum total of what I wanted even back in high school, I could have set myself on a different path and not ended up where I am today, someone with the spirit of Alex P. Keaton trapped within the life of Kwai Chang Caine. I want a new job. I want a new life. one with a whole lot of fucking money in it. So I’m here reading the latest version of ‘What Color is Your Parachute’ hoping that it tells me how to get more of that green and white, or travel back in time, or something….