It is my regrettable conclusion that, in due course, we become all that we rebel against. Sure as we are that our upbringing was cruel and oppressive (and sometimes it truly was), nature weighs our ankles against riotous attempts to escape our ancestral fate. For all our jumping and fretting and fighting, we find ourselves like the ouroborous serpent: back where we started, having bitten off more than we can chew.
Hard work is salvation, was the belief woven into the itchy scarf, and baked with the egg whites into our parching leak-and-water pie. Tireless effort was not our prosperity; it was our purpose. Life was in fact supposed to be toil. Lethargy was a matter of embarrassment, even disgust, on bitter winter mornings and the sunniest summer Saturdays.
Naturally, at the earliest opportunity, I seized my freedom, determined not to live another torturous moment in the workhouse of my genealogy. With what little I had acquired, I rode rodeo three times through indolence, intemperance and debauchery. Preparations for a fourth outing were curtailed sharply by a fleeting requirement to live at Her Majesty’s pleasure. These institutions are run on a familiar principle, I discovered: that life, like a prisoner’s morning loaf, should be short, and tough from one end to the other.
This cursory séjour left me no choice but to embrace the menial virtuous labour which had filled the hymns of my childhood. The drudgerous quotidien consumed me. In little time I came to loathe those who by any means avoided its compacting, numbing grip. Suffer one, suffer all. And thus, by some scenic route, I had quite inefficiently adorned every resentful representation of the family I had rejected.