Fuller Wiser

Some people won’t let you die. Frank Slade in Scent Of A Woman learned that: poor, stupid Charlie rushing in to tell him he has something to live for, despite the fact that it was the old colonel, not the kid with no scars on his face, who had to live that pointless life.

I’m not talking about suicide, though. I’m talking about letting something go. Something that’s been hurting a long time, like a scarred, decaying limb that really needs to be amputated, and yet you can’t quite get up the nerve to make the cut.

And then one day you do it. You wipe away the tears, sit straight in your chair, and hack the damned thing off. You give a respectful salute to that which was once you. That was my arm, you tell yourself, but it has failed me, and now it is no more. What is now me does not contain that.

But then some bastard, some heartless sonofabitch, comes rushing in like Chris O-Fucking-Donnell, channeling a sandwich-hungry Homer Simpson. “It’s still good! You can save it! Don’t throw it all away! It’s still good!”

No, it isn’t.

You, who have only walked in for the last act, presume to know how hard I’ve worked to save it. Surely I haven’t tried this, or this, or maybe this…

Yes, I have.

I’ve done more than you can possibly imagine to keep that which I love from going bad, from losing its golden sheen, from the fate I’ve lain awake dreading for half of my life. You don’t know, and you never, ever will.

It can’t be that bad, you shout. There must’ve been something I didn’t try. These things don’t just happen, I must have missed something.

No, I didn’t, and yes, they do.

I was once like you. I blared in the faces of the downhearted that there was still hope, that no obstacle was insurmountable. Maybe they needed fresh eyes to see their problems, they just weren’t thinking clearly. I know, maybe you should try this, this, or this.

They didn’t. I cursed them, I wrote them off as losers, as the debris that constitutes so much of human life. Regular people. They just didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t listen to me.

I was a fool. Why does every generation of idealists believe that no previous generation has ever thought that they would be the ones to change the world? But of course most of my generation got the memo: Idealism is dead, get yours and get out. Eddie Vedder told me. I will stare at the sun till my eyes go blind, how much difference does it make? But I’m a perverse bastard, and the resistance my classmates showed to idealism further stoked my fires. They, along with the old failures, were all wrong.

But you: How dare you come into my life and reawaken dead desires? How dare you assume that half of my life has only been a waste because I haven’t been trying? How dare you trot out simplistic solutions with no bearing on the realities of industry, of vanity, of cultural change?

You come in from outside and presume to know that which I’ve spent nearly two decades immersed in. You talk of how much better I deserve. Deserve? There is no deserve. We do not live in a merit-based world, not in business, not in academia, and certainly not in the arts. Quality (a subjective concept for a start) has no bearing on marketability. None. I know artists of such great talent that they should be millionaires many times over, and yet they lie awake in dank apartments, dreading the punch of the clock in the morning. And in ancillary capacities, I’ve watched the creatively bankrupt rake in profits far in excess of the weight of their output.

I’ve seen all of this, and you have not. You have seen Hallmark stories of hard struggle followed by blessed reward. But you have not seen those whose struggles remain fruitless. Those whose greatest love flowers in the dark, stretching for life-giving light, and slowly withers for want of the sun’s fickle touch. To watch its last gasp, its pleading to live and to be powerless to keep it from dying…you do not know what it is like.

Please. Leave me be. I know what it is that I do. Be thankful that you don’t.