Age and Change or Dead Men Don't Win Bar Fights

Change works for me. Changing jobs. Changing cities. Changing addresses. The work of change stinks, but once it’s done, I just like the difference, for its own sake. One change I haven’t liked so much is the very real feeling of aging. You see it at 30 and that’s not so great. Still, age has made some changes in me for the better.

The tale of the short story.

For the last few years, I have been trying to fund a publisher for a short story I wrote. It’s called “Work Off,” and it’s about a boyfriend who finds his girlfriend doing Tae Bo Aerobics naked, in a roomful of other naked Tae Bo fighters. As the story proceeds, you learn the nudity was a communal act of protest against his oppressive ways.

The story won me a handwritten note on the rejection slip from The Missouri Review and a fiery ovation at coffee shop reading in Madison, Wisconsin. I thought it was good enough for publication, but it just hadn’t found its outlet yet.

There’s a small magazine here in Philadelphia that I read, and I decided to submit it there. I wanted to give it a quick read for typos first, though, so I opened it up this past Tuesday.

Wow, it was bad. Real bad. Wording. Pacing. Character. I still like the plot, but the only hope for this story was to take a blank page in the notebook and repackage it from “Once upon a time” on.

So what’s the positive side? This: that I could even see it. Before, I thought this story had it. Now, I can see why it doesn’t. Finally. At last.

Some part of me has gotten smarter.

The tale of the philosopher.

When I read Plato in college, I struggled to stay interested enough to talk about his work intelligently in class. I never really read the bits of Aristotle we were assigned. All I really remember about my Freshmen year Philosophy class is an image from Rousseau — I see naked men running between city states. That’s all I’ve got.

One of the ideas I have for my new book requires me to go back and read some Plato, some Aristotle, maybe some others, to help inform the tensions between some of the main characters, so I’m reading Plato again. It’s a whole different experience. It’s as if I never read him before.

I find myself engaged in a way I hadn’t been in class. It engages me on two levels:

1. Socrates has a great character. He’s so snarky.

2. All the fundamental assumptions of Socrates/Plato’s “investigations” are nonsense. I really disagree not just with what the philosophers have to say, but with the very premises by which they mean to sort it out.

When I was a teenager, Plato’s ideas should have been very seductive to me. I remember sitting with my mother and telling her that the goal of intelligent people should be to develop an ideology such that all their thinking about everything is consistent. Socrates sought a unity in all things, too, a simplification, a clarity.

Not to go into too much detail, but these days I believe the clearest mind is the one that looks well upon chaos. That definitions are a means, but they sure as hell aren’t an end. Lastly, that language alone can’t prove or disprove anything. In short, I find objecting to Plato very engaging.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get into it like this as a Freshmen, and I can’t help but think that was simply because I didn’t have the chops to wrestle with the old master yet. Now, I seem to, and wrestle with him I do.

And, lucky for me, dead men don’t win bar fights.

What’s good about going?

Now that I can look back on the way my worldview has changed since my brain switched on, it really gives me a greater appreciation for the journey. I suppose a beetle walking slowly and low to the ground might not notice the gradual change as he crossed desert then meadow then tundra, but if he looked back through his camera’s snapshots he’d see — the landscape has really changed. If the landscape has changed, at least that means you’ve gotten somewhere.