Rather Be a Living Failure Than a Dead Success

I have decided that if my life is ever made into a movie I would want Jeff Bridges to play the part of me. Don't laugh. Weirder things have happened. Little Georgie Bush becoming president comes to mind.

What brought this revelation on you might well ask. Well I will tell you. My grandson, the MIT educated programmer by trade, artful carouser by avocation, stops over for a beer and some conversation. He asks me what I would want put on my headstone when I go. I told him that I would like to be cremated and my ashes scattered to the four winds, because I have always had this belief that I will become rich and famous after my death, and their not finding my resting place will add to the allure of it all. So he uses the old hypothetical end-run and I fall for it and say, "Here lies a wise man who would rather have been a living failure than a dead success." Well I liked the idea of it so much I am thinking about changing my mind and having a headstone after all.

So this reminds him of a character he saw in a movie and we head down to Blockbuster and get this video called "The Big Lebowski." Now I am not much for watching movies, but this is a good one. I'll tell you I watched the "Dude" in action with great admiration. He had self respect where it mattered: by god someone was going to rectify the fact that his rug was gratuitously relieved on. There is no greater hell to be paid in life than in the presence of a bum who has had his one source of self respect besmirched. It would seem that nothing could have possibly bothered the Dude until his self respect had been attacked. He is a man who understands first principals, a man of character, a moral man in a slouching towards the ten pins way. Hell in these confused times he could be president. He should be president, but it would probably ruin him and he's principled enough to know it.

I have always thought the definition of a successful man is anybody capable of helping me out of jam. In that sense, my grandson has been a successful man for some time now. I think it did him a world of good to know this Dude fellah. A few years back I was threatened with success when this editor wanted me to write my memoirs, and actually gave me an advance on the project, which I promptly used to pay the tuition for the boy's mother who was herself trying to become a success. It would not have been so bad if I had left it at that, but I also went and rented the local Majestic theater with the very same money that I was no longer in possession of, to put on a Vaudeville to show case the boy and give him a taste of what I had been telling him about my younger days.

The double dipping looked like it might all come out in the wash until the show closed on the opening night when local poet from the park, who always seemed like his nerves were a little on the frayed side when he wasn't reciting his poetry, which I suspect was more or less made up on the spot, and instantly forgotten, who anyway had agreed to recite for the vaudeville performance and then went into shock when he realized there would be this audience out there, which thankfully was quite a large one, which apparently he somehow misconstrued as being a wave of gooks at the base camp's perimeter and as a result tried to set fire to the old theater to keep them all at bay. It also didn't help that the folk singer I had talked into performing showed up drunker than a skunk due to a final falling out with this woman friend whom he had been in love with since god knows when had apparently finally come to her senses (good guy but not exactly a rock of Gibraltar in the domestication department).

It was a catastrophe, but my dear Margaret played herself as a banker giving a loan to the boy to buy his first cornet which he conned her out of the collateral for by playing and putting out his hat. I was so proud of both of them my heart could have busted right then and there. And even as the poet fellah was going into hysterics, the boy walked out onto the stage all on his own and started playing to help calm down the audience as they fled for the door.

It was my dear Margaret who said she understood something or another about me through the whole experience, who bailed me out of the financial mess it caused with the landlord of the Majestic, but it wasn't more than a month or two latter when I showed the first few chapters to this editor who had given me the advance, and to my dismay he loved the stuff I had lied about and hated the stuff that was true and I told him to go to hell, which he told me he would be happy to do after I paid back the advance. That's where my grandson came riding in to save the day.

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit