TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

#93 – The Hero Rides Away

#93 - The Hero Rides Away

The really embarrassing thing about learning where you get some of your values from is to realize how ridiculous some of them really were. I had a lifelong fascination with highly technical blue collar jobs after watching "Hellfighters", that John Wayne flick about Red Adair, the oil well firefighter. I always wanted a job like that, either that or doing controlled demolition - I've even got a whole DVD of them at home. So deep down, after all of my hoo-hah about refusing to be influenced by pop culture, it turns out that I wanted a career based on what I saw in a John Wayne movie. Either that or I wanted to be Richard Dreyfus in "Always", dive-bombing forest fires in a vintage A-26.

There is that period in your later 20s, after you've been out on your own for a while, when you really see what parts of your belief system actually make sense and which parts are just warmed-over horse crap. Each part gets subjected to the same test, on a long-enough timeline, you will use that belief system to make an important decision and if it stands or falls, it will tell you a lot about how much it was really worth.

So - to save your suspense, let me put it this way. In the past 10 years, I've seen a lot of preconceived notions I had about life just basically crumble like a stale Dorito. The ones I thought just had to be true, well - they're gone now. The ones I didn't put too much stock in, the basic human experience of day-in-day-out struggle with a lot of things you don't think you should have to endure, that's the stuff that's lasted much longer than anything else. Life is a lot less exciting than you might think, sometimes. Running around like Don Quixote, thinking that your life can be dramatic and action-packed with the right frame of mind, that will only take you so far. You could really believe that you're destined to live a life of consequence, and then life takes you at your word and goes, "Okay, here!" and hands you an opportunity to really go nuts. You quickly realize that you really wouldn't prefer to live like Earnest Hemingway or Hunter S Thompson. I think the advent of the Internet blog has helped me to see that given the right amount of writing creativity, every day can be weird or crazy - there's even that shirt that I've seen over at www.thinkgeek.com that says - "I'm Blogging This" like anyone wants to know what a skinny nerd thinks about his dining experience at El Pollo Loco.

Enough strange and unusual events happen to me that, if I had the time and energy to write them all down, this site would be twice the size it is now. As it stands, maintaining the drive to keep writing while all this other crazy stuff is happening takes a lot of discipline. Writing for me is one of those things that I do because if I don't, it gets jammed up inside me and then just pops like a bleach bomb inside of a 2-liter bottle.

Obviously, we didn't plan on having kids - I think that was mentioned before, but I just wanted to clarify that. Someone asked me if I decided to have kids or if she did, I said, "God did" and left it at that. Titus was a completely unplanned event, I don't want to say "Accident" because accidents don't usually have good endings. I think he will, but just by existing he's making me take a look at one really entrenched concept I had that as of now is officially and completely dead.

Western fiction for a long time has had the mental construct of a lone hero. I think it dates back to stories about knights in medieval times but I'm sure that it dates back even further than that. Regardless of the origin, heroes are the guys who walk alone into the fight, the burning building or the runaway train to save the day. They usually survive to the end of the book or the movie, the woman who saw through his tough exterior hangs on his arm with a level of reverent ardor just madly in love with him. Think about all the heroes you've seen in books and movies: Han Solo, Indiana Jones (same guy, I know), Bat Man, Superman, Spiderman, Wolverine, Shane, the captain of the ship in the Firefly/Serenity shows. In every case, these are the guys who live this ascetic life free from familial attachment, who risk it all and at the end are back to their lonely yet noble existence.

It occurred to me pretty early on, even though it's taken me almost 7 months to correctly articulate it, that you don't see heroes with family in this world. Think about Mr. Incredible in the semi-recent Pixar film. He's the typical Anglo-American superhero…until you see him 15 minutes later in the movie. He's got a family, he's fat, he's stifled and it isn't until he sneaks away from his family that he can resume the identity of his true superhuman nature. This isn't a male-only thing, by the way. Female heroes have kind of the same path; I'm just using male examples because I am a guy.

So, equating familial attachments with weakness, for years I lugged around this idea that I was the hero in the movie about my life. And by the way, that doesn't mean I actually think everything about my life is like a movie…I don't have a voice in my head going "Speed, marker…Action!" Familial attachments do make you feel weak at times, especially when they become so toxic and negative so as to become this huge millstone around your neck. It keeps you from making the most basic progress forward in different relationships and brings you down in general; it's a real morale-killer if you can't even have an evening with your family that doesn't blow up into a bunch of knotted-stomach tension fests. It really makes you question your ability to get along with anyone.

So you daydream about a life where you aren't weak, where you are capable. Subconsciously, you long to be out from under and whether you admit it or not, you know that these billions of threads between you and other people don't feel comforting or helpful. They make you feel trapped like Frodo in that gi-normous spider-web toward the end of "Return of the King". You want to be that guy who saves the day, tips his hat quietly and rides off into the sunset. You want to live happily ever after. You want to be Shane and not Brandon De Wilde going "Shane! Come back!" After a while, after this subtly implants itself in your head deeper than crab grass on a lawn, you start building your life around it. It's not a "little t" truth to you anymore, it's a Truth…no, more like TRUTH.

So when the rest of your life happens, when people come into your life and you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with them, that's the chink the armor. You let this one person in and then it seems like an unending parade of people seem to come along with them. You go along with it for the most part, in the end still believing about yourself that, "Hey, soon the part in the movie where I lose everything will happen and then I'll become like Caine in Kung Fu and just walk the earth."

What, you thought Samuel L. Jackson was the only person who thought of that?

So now, I am not Caine, or Spiderman or Han Solo. I am that guy in the movie with kids - that ineffectual middle-class balding white guy who thanks the hero after he rescues his children. I wish I knew what it was about Western fiction that paints fathers out to be so useless, but now I know that I have my own story to write. And that it will be the sum parts of everything I know as well as everything I will learn. It won't involve me leaving, or involve people who leave me. We'll all be together for a long while and I want that time spent to be something we all enjoy.

People have never gotten tired of asking me, am I excited? Am I nervous? Am I ready? I usually end up giving people some drawn-out answer because I keep thinking that they really want to know how I feel (silly me). I didn't think I was excited for a long while, because I equated excitement with that feeling of going over the first drop of the rollercoaster. The night before the last day of school, or before we took off on vacation. Going into this next stage of my life has energized me to really hit the gas on what it is I want my life to be about and what I want to accomplish as a parent. After a few months of that, it hit me that yes, I was excited - just not in a way that I expected. Having this kid come into my life has made me work harder, be more focused than I've ever been. That's an excitement to action and it wasn't something I was expecting. Am I nervous? Have you been listening to me? I ask. Am I ready? I honestly don't know - but I think at this stage, it doesn't really matter. Life doesn't wait for you to be ready and I've totally let go of the idea that I could really plan out the next 20 years of my life and my child's.

One of the things that I had to come to terms with and, if I keep doing it I'll at least know why, is that I plan things out to the nth degree sometimes. On some levels, that makes me very detail oriented but on others, it makes for a spectacular train wreck after things failed to transpire like I had planned. All that time and energy spent was for nothing and all it did was rob me of the ability to act appropriately when the time came.

I don't want to make that kind of mistake with another persons' life. Especially not someone like my kid. I keep calling Titus that…the kid. The prospect of raising this child correctly is such a complex problem that I just mentally clicked off of trying to plan how exactly how I would do it. I just knew immediately that I couldn't plan it and focused instead on how to solve the problems that were right in front of me. Needed more money, needed to get some living space for him - start looking 5 years down the road and saying how can I make sure that I have the resources available to be available for this kid?

We're now about 8 months into that life-changing process and I've been a lot calmer, a lot more focused and (at least in my mind) mature than I'd ever been. I let the things that did not matter truly slide. It took Tom's death, going to be around 3 years ago by the time Titus is born, to make me see that it was possible. It took the birth of my son to show me how to do it as a full-time job.

So I am the hero and I am not riding away. I am a hero as a full-time gig and I won't do it in a few cinematic moments but I'll be doing it 24 hours a day. A lot of little things and a few great big ones. No, I haven't the slightest idea how I'll do it and I'm pretty sure that I'll make some mistakes. Going on 11 years after I graduated high school and I am letting go of the transitionary period after I left home and before my kid came into my life. Eyes wide open into a vast field of possibility.

- Tim Woolery, 06/04/2006