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While it wasn't the house they had wanted, it was a house, which seemed a great step up from apartment living.  Despite the lack of running water in the first floor kitchen and the boarded windows across the front, that is.  The pipes had been stolen from the kitchen for the copper, and, like closing the barn door after the cows had left, the city finally secured the windows with plywood shortly after.  Luckily, in this one instance, the robbers had ignored the fact that the house had been converted into a triple.  In all ways, it was bad for the house, excepting that it meant there were two working kitchens.  The home had once been grand, as had the neighborhood, but had been passed from uncaring person to unlucky person to unskilled person through the decades and it was now, like the neighborhood, a shameful wreck.

211

I was always envious of bands that shot to stardom.  Comics who landed on Saturday Night Live.  Actors who won an Oscar on their first movies.  Assholes.

I realized later that these "overnight successes" weren't really.  These were people who worked and slaved unrewarded for years, decades before finding fame and glory.  The "sudden" part was only my perspective.  I began hating instead people who made home videos that went viral, lottery winners and fortune inheritors.  Those were the undeserving twats.

I mostly hated them while I was in my slaving away years.  Who every knows if your unpaid work will ever pay off.  A creative art isn't like working your way up in a company.  In a company, you get paid no matter what you do.  When you're working in a creative art, you practice and practice and work at your craft completely unpaid and unrecognized without any inkling if it will pay off eventually at all.

Standing in my crappy apartment surrounded by crumpled notes and a beat to hell drum set I was the asshole.  All my parents' disheartening advice was sneaking back into my brain, this time betraying me even more by using my own voice to say it.