Rusted Sky

This has been percolating for a while. Enjoy...

"Life's like a movie - write your own ending..." - K.tF

Actually, life is much more like a piece of fiction. Not terribly good fiction, at that, in most cases.

One of the minor problems of reading a lot of fiction is that after a while you tend to equate life with the stories you read. You want to fit the outlines of your life into the structure of a story - with a beginning as things start up, tension building as things unfold, then a dramatic climax and resolution of the plot, with everything tied up neatly leaving no subplots to cause problems later. Then the story ends.

You put the book away, satisfied with the ending. Or you throw it across the room because the plot, characterization and writing just plain stunk. Or it's the first in a series, and you want MORE!

Either way, that particular book or story is over. There's a resolution, an ending - and you can put it away. You can forget it - or incorporate what you've taken away from the story into your own life. I've done that with quite a few books - learning much that was honorable and good and some things which were base and not so honorable along the way. So it goes - the good and the bad intertwine and cancel each other out. I've tried hard to be worthy of my lovely bride - and with the Best Boy Ever in my life, I try even harder to be a good man. He'll learn from me what a man should be - I owe it to him to be a character worthy of emulation. If you're looking for characters worthy of emulation, I might well suggest the writings of Louis L'amour, by the way.

However - real life doesn't flow like a story. It's messy. It's convoluted. There's bits and pieces that you don't understand that you'll never get any explanation on, and you know how sometimes you think you've missed a critical plot twist? Well, you can't go back and try again - whatever it was is past, as surely as the snows of childhood. The chapter or subplots resolve themselves - but often you don't realize it until long after the fact. The story you live goes on much longer than that - and the final page often comes as a surprise.

And although we tend to, at least when young, try to plan out the broad structures of the story - often the details are something completely different than what was planned. The plot takes twists and turns like a roller coaster - and the preparation before you get on the ride determines whether you're happy with where you end up, or wearing your lunch... or end up somewhere in the middle.

When I was younger, before going in the Air Force in '74, I thought I'd do 20 years then retire. What came after that - I didn't have a clue. Twenty years seems like such a LONG time - but I was also thinking that my chance of making it wasn't too great, what with the fair chance of the US and the USSR getting into nuclear warfare. It didn't happen, which I don't mind in the least...

Anyway - that would take me to 1994 - but I'd be less than 40. What would I do for the remaining 40 years of my life? I had a nebulous idea of going to college on the GI Bill, but that turned out to be a joke, and not a terribly funny one at that - so no more on that bit. I'd get married - perhaps. But the idea of the future Mrs. Lawson was pretty incomplete.

Life doesn't work quite the way you expect. I had some very interesting (in the good sense) training in the Air Force, lost a lot of good opportunities due to focusing on plot details that were pretty far off what I needed to be doing at the time, got out in '84, moved to Atlanta, and had 'interesting' (in the Chinese sense) times for a few years. Then I was lucky enough to get back into the AF in a Reserve capacity - and did well enough to do 13 more years. I was fortunate enough to meet my lovely bride - and things got a lot better. Oddly enough, we got married in 1993. A year early, according to my original schedule? Well, the plot goes as it will.

The story took a much better turn. I started making better decisions, and better choices, leading to better jobs. Could it be simply because I'd made the wrong choices at first, and learned from them? It's hard to tell - but I like to think you tend to remember characters who learned from their mistakes much more fondly than characters who stupidly, obstinately made the same mistakes over and over again. It took me a while to realize I didn't have to make the same choices - that there WERE ways to do things that didn't include a whole lot of heartache in my personal life.

I learned. But some folks don't seem to, and there's a lot of them, if you hadn't noticed. But each of them is writing their own story, each sees himself as the central character of their narrative. The world DOES revolve around them, they're at the centers of their own stories - just not in a way that's particularly beneficial to them. That preparation I spoke of? It's a combination of schooling, talent, intelligence, judgement, sensible risk-taking and self-knowledge.

We all write our own stories. We're all the center of our respective narratives. There are characters that enter our lives for a while, then leave, only to pop up decades later - others that enter and stay. But we're all at the center. The world does indeed revolve around me. And you. And all of us.

"Life's like a movie - write your own ending." - Kermit the Frog

He got it almost right. Life's like a story - a tale unfolding. And you're at the center of it. The problem is - there's a LOT of different genres, and there's a lot of them I wouldn't care to be stuck in.

J.