Star Wars Provokes an Early-Life Crisis (1996)
I dug out the Wayback archive of an old personal site that
contained, in turn, a collection of things I rescued from my original
GeoCities page. I started that page from my barracks room in Ft. Bragg
using a WebTV with a wireless keyboard. It sort of bookends this
anecdote, given I wrote it some time in February of 1997. I
had about 10 months left in my enlistment at this point.
I went to see Star Wars today. Like about every other person
who saw it with me it was the first time in 20 years I'd seen it in the
theater. It wasn't the same movie as when I was eight, but it was still
pretty good. Great, in fact.
I decided between the Sea Monkeys and going to see Star Wars, I
was being reminded of the regrowth vibe I was riding pretty hard when I
enlisted. I had plans to regrow whatever psychic arm had been mangled in
the year leading up to running away to the army. Like about anything,
the army demands a certain piece of you, though.
Between doing well in basic (best shot in the platoon,) and almost making honor graduate in AIT, then going to jumpschool, plus early promotion and a few awards, it was easy to forget I was supposed to hate it all and never surrender a single piece of me to The Machine.
As I'm hoping this journal reveals, I've at least recently chilled
out a little, but this is a pretty new development. Up until this fall,
I thought there might be a career for me in the army.
At the age of 28, only part of a degree in philosophy and a trail
of bad jobs and idiocy in my wake, it's easy to get scared about "The
Future" because it seems like the "best and brightest" I went to college
with are sitting behind desks being solid citizens. I'm just a
Specialist in the army, taking orders from people who were just out of
junior high when I started my first job after college.
It's easy to get scared, and easy to forget a goal I once had,
which was to set an example for other people by living above fear.
My own take was once that fear was the most misused emotion in our
repertoir. There are a lot of uses for it, most of them centered around
running around in the wild with nothing but a loincloth and a sharp
stick, which are ignored in today's society in favor of fear centered
around respectability, finances, and accumulation.
Hell, joining the army was a statement of deep personal fear on my part. I was never going to fit in with the squares and never have a good girlfriend because I was clearly a slob with no direction.
Now, on the cusp of being out of the place I ran to, I realize
that
- army technical training isn't going to make me rich
- I still act like a slob when unsupervised
- I never got a washboard stomach.
In other words, I ought to be very, very afraid if the standards of four years ago apply.
Happily, I'm really only afraid of two things right now:
- That I've forgotten how to intuitively avoid writing in passive voice
- I'll have to wait a while before writing pays again.
That's sort of a short list, really.
Star Wars fits into all of that in a roundabout way.
Mostly because it reminded me of when I was eight, and Star
Wars had triggered a passionate interest in "The Future." I watched
every science fiction thing I could, read every piece of sci-fi I could
get my hands on, and spent a few minutes one day in tears because I did
the math and realized that Star Trek, my other sci-fi passion,
was 300 years away, and there was no way I'd live to see it.
I was reminded tonight of how I used to ache for the future to
hurry up and get here, and how I let hard times scare me enough to lose
that ache and dread possibility.
So now, I suppose, it's about trying to remember that passionate desire
for realizing the unrealized. It's about undoing fear, which twists us,
and living life like the current moment is so good we don't want it to
end, even as we anticipate the discovery of the next.
I had a good time today.