He invented, surrounded me with a world which would quickly be taken away. It would always be alive within me though. Its presence marking within me ambition, risk taking, pursuit of passion and would remain within me far after it had been forced out, walled out of him. Upon the collapse of this world he had constructed he vowed to never again put so much a stake. I was reluctant to side with him on this despite the fact that I had the tendency to consider his decisions infallible. This to my recollect in fact was the first time I recall doubting him. I told him in a rather blunt fashion “ You’re just quitting, I don’t want you to switch jobs”. He justified himself, not so much to convince me as to convince himself. He attempted to disguise his newest professional endeavor as something which he elected to do, he attempted to excite me with the prospect of it, all the while trying to excite himself, but even as a child I could see that his eyes had fallen flat, the passion gone. All this he broke to me while competing against me in a game of Mario Cart. He broke most news to me in this fashion. When he informed me of his and my mother’s divorce a few years latter I found myself in much the same position, with only a few years of age to separate the instances. He never let me win no matter what news he was breaking to me. Watching the life we had once known be slowly chipped away at, whittled down into something unrecognizable starting with my fathers ego as a result of career failure, I couldn’t help but see him as one of the drivers in the game. Constant roadblocks always seeming to stop him from progress, it began to seem like he let them, like he stopped trying to avoid them and accepted the lack of progress. My love for him was unconditional, but my respect for him began to fade with sympathy left in its place. I wanted so badly for him to emerge again as the power figure he once was, but every time I visited, that side of him appeared less and less. I began doubting that he would ever return. My reemergence fantasy was whittled away at much like our family had been. I despised all that my father valued. It was the value system which destroyed him. I despised the perfectly situated, kept up houses within our neighborhood whose inhabitants confirmed and kept alive this belief system. It was only a matter of time before their worlds were shattered beyond belief as well, some of them probably already shattered beneath the perfect exteriors of the homes. Why then did they have to aid in keeping alive this system which placed value on what valued so little? Why did my father have to?I knew from that point that I would never, could never let this belief system take hold of me. I could never let my career define and then shatter me.
I chose this music video, because I believe the idea of a house of cards parallels the idea of my fathers value or belief system, and the idea of forgetting about it when convenient, or in the case of the song, for the keys in the bowl party demonstrates the hypocrisy of the belief system.
