I Ain't Got Time To Bleed

The (almost) final draft of this piece in which I raised Mrs. Baker from the dead. My mommy said it was good.

Daisy Buchanan Can Eat a Dick

In my younger, more vulnerable years, my high school English teacher gave me some advice. I was thinking really seriously about going to college to study management but Mrs. Baker told me to follow my heart because “college is not a trade school.” My academic elitism get the better of me and, when my more pragmatic but less interesting relatives asked why I was studying English, I would declare “trade school is for a recession!”

Then I graduated in a recession and the books I had read did me little good as I drifted from commission job to telephone sales to temp work and back. Kids who had learned trades were employed, married, had children and lives while I crisscrossed the country, building up more debt than life experience in meaningless jobs with pay as miniscule as the impact I made on the world.

The morning I laid, staring at the ceiling, wondering what kept me beating on, a boat against the current, borne ceaselessly back into mediocrity and failed expectations, I remembered the punch line to all of it: That teacher, Mrs. Baker, lost her job a year before I graduated. Last I heard, she was working as a cashier at Walmart. I call that one a draw.