September 17-23,2015

"There are no second acts in American lives." F. Scott Fitzgerald

When Fitzgerald dropped this particular truth bomb, I suspect he was not aware that it would become one of his most persistently quoted epigrams, but then he apparently left this world with only the most glimmering sense that anything he wrote would be remembered by anyone anywhere.

There are at least two distinct readings of this statement, each of which can be taken to reflect Fitzgerald's awareness of three act dramatic structure, that is, a play that begins by establishing the basic situation (exposition), then introducing some element or character unsettling this situation (complication) in act one, before moving on to act two to see the conflict grow organically from the complication as the main character strives to satisfy some desire, and finally reaching the climax in act three in which we see the protagonist get (or not) what he or she wants, then presenting the resolution in which the play shows how the main character feels about the climax.

In the first reading, Fitzgerald is pointing to the uniquely American need to skip over conflict and head directly to climax and resolution. While this take has its appeal, those who espouse it tend not to explain just how one tells a story without including its most essential element, conflict. Thus, the second reading which rather baldly hews toward the view that Fitzgerald means exactly what he's saying, that the truly American among us are all exposition and at most complication, never really moving into conflict enough to reach climax and resolution. Without wanting to take sides in this struggle to define the American national character, it seems pretty clear that I am moving into my third act. Thus, the title of this, my new blog.

At the same time, the title of this blog points toward a huge problem with most of the neat accounts of dramatic structure essayed above — which is, obviously I think, that they're too damned neat. And I don't just mean on the page — though I will admit to being embarrassed at presenting story structure that works a bit like a math problem — but rather spectacularly so when applied to reality. In other words, I don't need to reflect too deeply to understand that my life is considerably messier than the swell progression noted above.

So. Not "My Third Act (In Which I Get What I Want [Or Don't] And Show The World How I Feel About That)." Not Even "My Third Act," for that matter. Not nearly that definitional. Nope, just "Notes Toward A Third Act." Somebody's story, probably mine, and the non-math-problem version, at that. I guess if someone held a gun to my head and made me state a subject for what will follow, I would say that it's intended as an exploration of what it means to be at a certain age in America — as man, dad, but mostly, as retired human person.

So why not "My Retirement Diary?" To answer that, it would probably be useful to explain why I'm sick of the baby boomers. To put that as simply as possible, I don't like things that are too obvious, and if there is one thing in this here America that is too obvious, it is that the boomers are in love with the sound of their own voices and determined to hold center stage singing that same lame-ass song for as long as possible, and that as titles for that song go, "My Retirement Diary" is not altogether implausible.

All that said, as sick as I am of the endless, navel-gazing, self-regard of my generation, it's clear that it's the only generation I have, and that the answer to my visceral disgust is not sullen silence but rather the rough eloquence of one willing to explore as deeply as possible what it means to have come of age in the second half of the American Century. So, rather than spend all my time in the present, it seems to me that looking back, and forward, have a definite utility. Thus what you will get here may indeed be "rough," at least in part because of my personal circumstances which may act as additional tonic to the generic boomer memoir.

And so let me close by stating my grandest ambition for this project: that by packing these meditations with sufficient idiosyncratic detail — such as what it felt like to grow up in the hot shadow of the Malleable Iron Foundry, the way it made the air itself taste rusty, and the roar of enormous industry outside my window screen as I lay down to sleep at night — I can avoid the trap of self-indulgence and create something truly necessary, and through that, come to some understanding of what it meant, and means, to be a working man in America.