"Killing Yourself to Live" was a song on the album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and I remember blasting the fuck out of I-275 on the way home from my hellhole job at St. Pete Printing Co. every afternoon as my '72 Gran Torino tore its way through traffic and I sonically vented out the frustrations bottled inside my 19 year old frame. I had just recieved a two weeks paycheck whereas I had put in 52 hours of overtime. To my naive horror, I discovered that the government of Ronald Reagan had saw fit to snatch over TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS of my hard earned overtime in taxes. I vowed never again to work more than 9 hours overtime on any given week after that. In 1981, if you were young and single, the gov't took roughly 23% of your pay in taxes. Overtime pay was taxed at nearly 37% if you were lucky enough to work in a job that doled it out. The Clinton years saw some reforms in how much the gov't can take out of short term pay and I hope the sort of shit my generation had to put up with never occurs again.
So in the land of the here and now, I spent a weekend with my parents who are both of retirement age, yet are still plugging along working. My dad works for Loomis, an armored cash distributer, and at the age of 67, he pulled a few shoulder muscles last Friday afternoon because his crew got sacked with extra duty and an extra shipment of cash and coins to cover his route for the Labor Day Weekend. We painted his newly refurbished deck Sat morning and his constant wincing, every time he ran the paint roller along the ceiling bore testament to his over-doing it at work the previous day.
In moving the furniture and grill back onto the deck, I saw how much his strength has waned over the years. He also has to take shots to manage his diabetes and I catch myself glancing at his feet and hands at times for those tell tale signs of poor circulation.
My step mom is no spring chicken either. What I used to pass off as just the bitchiness of a mom who's two natural sons turned out to be misfits came sorely to light this past weekend when my dad and I paid her a visit at work to purchase some school clothes for myself. She is the Southest Tennessee Training Manager for a national outlet store, and I always thought her job was a piece of cake. She met us all red in the face like she had been in a damn tug of war or something. I was kind of alarmed, really because she was damn near out of breath and really stressed out. It seems the company fucked up and sent her twice as much of a certain item and she had to make room for it and push the product before the halloween and thanksgiving stuff arrived. She is 65 and has all sorts of back problems. Instead of settling down upon moving to Tennessee, my parents had to go for broke and buy a fucking 4300 square ft home when the one in Florida was a modest 1800 square ft. They are both killing themselves to maintain a lifestyle most folks in their 40's could only dream of attaining. While I was pissed off and envious of all they had when I first moved up here, now I am kind of shocked and horrified at the discovery that with all they have now, most times they are simply too damned tired from work to even enjoy it.
This past weekend saw a lot of revelations and made me see just how easy I have it compared to them. I don't want to end up like they have, at the top of the mountain with no strength to walk back down.
