There was no way for me to know,
At Kress's five and dime,
So many, many years ago,
The path that I would climb.

I pushed the dust mop up and down,
Those ancient wooden floors,
That never seemed to quite come clean,
But knew I wanted more.

I dreamed I'd leave that Kansas town.
I'd leave it in good time.
And roam the spinning world around,
In search of knowledge and renown,
And maybe someday settle down,
In some exotic clime.

The travel only led to war.
I went to Vietnam.
I learned the breadth of wholesale death,
Of napalm and of bomb.

Then landed in a foreign place,
In San Francisco, where
I met the children full of love,
With flowers in their hair.

They took me in and nurtured me,
I dreamed my hippie dream.
My life became an endless toll
Of acid trips and rock and roll.
I chased the rabbit down that hole,
And never thought to scream.

But then one day I looked around,
To see what I had done.
Yet nothing's what I saw that day,
And nothing's what I'd won.

I cut my hair, I got a job,
In high technology.
The Shuttle and the Hubble,
The internet. You see,

Behind the wonders of the day,
Us techno-slaves all stood.
They worked us sixty hours a week.
They called us dork and nerd and geek,
We fought with tooth and claw and beak,
To keep jobs if we could.

And then one day it went away,
The dust began to clear.
And there I stood, that Kansas boy,
But older, more austere.

I cannot say I have regrets,
Because in life, you see,
The path I chose? It led me here,
And that's the place to be.

But in our time we changed the world,
We brought to end that war,
And built the lasting techno base,
To elevate the human race,
To launch our species into space,
T'ward some resplendent star.