Obedience training

So it's a three-day-weekend and I ain't done nothing except smoke weed, play guitar, and surf the fuckin' internet, man.

Give me a break, farmboy. I know you've done other things. Have you exercised?

Uh, yeah. I exercised, yes.

Read anything?

Um, yeah. I been reading...I guess they're called graphic novels, 'cept the last one was a memoir. A graphic memoir, I guess you'd call it. It's called Stitches by a guy named David Brooks. It was pretty fuckin' intense, man. His parents, fuck...let's just say that his father gave him cancer, literally, and his mother was just this bitch that never, ever loved her son.

You know, you seem to really like sad stories, farmboy.

Well, you know, it's got to have an element of sadness for me, or some kind of conflict. It's like how they taught students about writing and reading fiction when I was in high school -- you need conflict to make a good story. And I think the same goes for songs, too. At least the kind of songs that I want to write.

I can tell that from the songs you write. A lot of your characters have problems or situations that stem from conflict.

Yeah, thanks. It's a good thing that I listened sometimes in those English composition classes, you know. Even though that was college. We didn't write much in high school. School was more like obedience training back then.

Do you think it's changed?

Well, I work in special ed, but really, when it comes down to it, yeah, the public school system is more interested in training lots of little worker ants to make more profits for the learning class. Not necessarily the teaching staff, but I'm sure that the administrative staff...you know what?

No, farmboy, what?

This is getting too fuckin' depressing for me, and it's cutting too fuckin' close to home. I got one more day left on this weekend after today, and I don't want to spend it talking about work or education. Fuck that.

I understand.

It's music, you know. That's what matters now.

I mean, I gotta find ways to survive, especially now that that my way of making a living is in jeopardy. You gotta eat, you gotta pay rent. That's just the way it is, and, hey, I like having a place to live, I like having food in the cupboard, you know?

I know.

But in those moments when it's my time, I want to think about music...or creativity or God or love or sex or the people I care for.

And I can't say I blame you, farmboy.

Thanks, man. I'm glad you understand this stuff. A lot of people don't.