A couple nights ago, my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I had dinner with the guitarist from my band and his wife, and she was telling us how she started college at a big fancy school until the money ran out, and then finished up at UMass-Boston but it took her six years, and then she went to Suffolk Law School at night while working full-time, and now she’s been a lawyer for thirty years, and I swear, I have never, ever been that determined to do anything in my entire life.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve wanted things. When I was twenty years old, I woke up one morning and realized I wanted to be a rock’n’roll star, but it’s not like I really did anything about it. Sure, I was in that band, and we had some good gigs, but I didn’t go into my dean’s office the morning after my epiphany and yell, “@#&$#$ this @&#$#$ing place”, and move down to New York City to get my elbow pierced and shoot some heroin. I was never committed.
Nope, most of my life has been a matter of falling upward into something pretty excellent and thinking, “OK. This is good enough”, and staying there, for, like, forever. I’ve lived in the same (pretty excellent) house since 1997. I’ve had the same (pretty excellent) job for 40 years. And, of course, SWMBT, who is quite a bit more than pretty excellent, thank you very much, but it’s not like I did much to earn it. Like my song says, “We meet, we wed, we live happily ever after”. There was no frantic dash through an airport after a departing plane, no boom box under her window (which, of course, nowadays John Cusack would have been slapped with a restraining order and spent the night in jail, because that is just not cool).
Ambition mystifies me. It’s just so much trouble. I mean, there you are, bopping along, having a pretty good life, and all of a sudden, there’s this thing on the horizon, and your life will not be complete until you have it. Fame. Money. Professional recognition. And now you’re not bopping, you’re striving. The pretty good life around you loses its luster. It pales in significance next to this thing that you do not have. And I’m not talking about, oh, having a roof over your head – if you count that as an ambition, well, I am right there for you. But once you get to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I don’t exactly see the point.
I play my music occasionally for some very nice people who have a very good time. Most people never get that far. I did want the world to know my genius, a long time ago. And I look back on those days and what I see is the utter impossibility of it. If you want the world to know your genius, you have to be talented, and lucky, and determined, and a good schmoozer, and a good self-promoter, and have an astonishing tolerance for poverty and humiliation. You have to want it. You have to feel it in your bones. And what my bones tell me – what they’ve always been telling me, if I had had the sense to listen – is “Meh. This is good. I think I’ll stay here.”