andy starts recycling

I’m in a writing funk. A friend emailed me and told me I was a good writer and that I should give up my plans to go to grad school and just travel to weird places and write. I wish he hadn’t done that. Now I can’t write. So until I can get out of this funk, I will post old stuff. I wrote this about a year ago, September 15, 2004 to be exact…

I was inspired yesterday by a story I heard on NPR. The big talk on Capital Hill the last couple of days has been whether or not anti-depressant drugs can cause suicide in adolescents. One of the parents talking had found his 12 year-old hanging from a rope in the garage. He said how he didn’t want to fight or say anything that would risk stirring up all those emotions, but he felt that his daughter’s memories were making him lobby for a change.
It seems like a great hook for a story. A man, a quiet man who peacefully keeps to himself, is reluctantly forced to fight a battle of some kind. It would be a better story if it was a battle he knew he could not win, where fighting the battle is what’s important. Kind of like the native tribes fight against the US government. I think most of them knew deep down that they wouldn’t win, but they tried nonetheless. They were left with only two options: sit around and become slaves, or fight and die. Sometimes simply fighting the battle is what is important. Win or lose, this man, this father is dealing with his loss and the memories of his loved one.
It’s like a cowboy (Think: “High Noon”) hiking up his gun belt, pulls down his hat and walking out the door to doom. It’s like that dream where I put on a plastic helmet and old metal canteen, roll up my sleeves and march out my front door to face the Nazi Panther division attacking my neighborhood. Is it the “kill or be killed” motivation? No, that’s when you are backed up against the wall and are forced to fight your way out. That’s too easy, too simple. You fight or you die, end of the story. No, rather I am talking when you have the choice not to fight. You will keep on living, actually life might not be that bad. But you will always know something is different, something is diminished.
I think we all must do this. We all must fight against the memories, the inevitable, the “dying of the light.” Like in that last scene of “For Love of the Game.” The main character Chapel is an aging major league pitcher in possibly the last professional game of his life. It is the last inning and he is mere pitches away from pitching a perfect game. And at that moment on the mound he realizes what he is fighting against. Losing the love of his life, age, injuries, the end of summer, the end of his career, and the end of the franchise. All things that are beyond his control. He could just pack it in and say “goodnight, good year and good life.” Instead he keeps fighting because he knows that simply by fighting he is making baseball and the world just a little bit better. It is an amazing thing when people know that they are going to fail, usually at great costs to themselves and yet still try because losing it all is better than living with only some of it.