Story continued....

I got up from the chair and crouched down in front of the scattered VHS’s to pick one out to watch. Some of them were old Disney movies that I got when I was little, but one in particular caught my eye. It had a white sticker stuck to the front of it with the words “Fabulous Life of: Secret Lives of the Mega Rich” scribbled in pen across it. It was a taped copy of the VH1 “Fabulous Life of” show that I had recorded off TV when our cable bill was paid for. The “Fabulous Life of” series was all about celebrity livin’, like how expensive their mansions and yachts were and how much money they tended to blow in a day. Most other people who had seen the show in my town considered it a show documenting how spoiled some people were, but I considered it a show about how successful or lucky certain people were. I picked up the tape, popped it into my VHS player, and went and sat back down in my chair. And there I sat for another hour watching the fabulous life of mega rich stars, rewinding the tape at some points to catch how much a certain item cost for a celebrity or who the famous designer was that made the certain item.
I loved watchin’ shows like this because they changed my perspective on life. I would sit there and listen to the narrator of the show say “Five-hundred thousand dollars!” and “For a total sum of three point two million dollars!” and I would sit there and think about my living situation. These celebrities had done something with their lives, and they were reapin’ the benefits of it. While they took their vacations to their very own private islands, my daddy was workin’ as an employee at a local gas station that was fallin’ apart and lookin’ for small jobs around town in the meantime while my momma sat on her ass at home and occasionally went to spend his hard-earned money on cigarettes or other groceries. Sometimes she would babysit one of her friends’ kids for a small sum, but that was about the only income she made. I would watch these shows and learn about how some celebrity had worked hard as hell to live a life of luxury and occasionally feed the poor, and I would question how my parents settled for what they settled for.