Red Room Where the Writers Are

"Fictional Passion" by Hai Tao

We live in a rational age - or do we? Politics is more about challenge and posturing these days than about a marketplace of ideas. We fight wars screaming with ideology, not the saber-rattling Realpolitik of the past. In sports: football, basketball, and baseball were once the showplace of muscle and speed-enforced strategies. Today they're the stuff of entertainment - the hail Mary, the trey from downtown, the 400-foot dinger. And road rage hardly draws a look these days, unless gunfire's exchanged. Adrenaline. Pushing the envelope. Getting an edge on. That's life in the twenty-first century.

Before you accuse me of age-onset curmudgeonliness, let me say this: Somehow, this race-to-the-finish tone of modern life fits. Maybe the Age of Aquarius was meant to be a passionate one, I don't know. But passion and obsession are here to stay -this I know. How do I know? They're in me, and they're not lurking - they're center stage. 

Okay, as much as the Millennials, the Gen Xers, the Echo Boomers, might grind their teeth at this confession, I'm a child of the 'sixties.  We were weaned, for better of for worse, on wholesale passion. Think Drugs. Sex. Vietnam. Communes. Alternative living. Were we not to have muddied the water to that degree, the world would be a boring place, I think.

So, having set myself generationally, I'll trifle with specifics. I, and my fellow 'sixties folk were a mess at the beginning. I mean, think about it. We were raised by a too-cool generation in gray flannel suits. We came of age along with TV, but that new medium gave us a jaundiced view of life. On Father Knows Best, no one argued. Donna Reed and her husband didn't fight, didn't swear, and slept in separate beds. Okay, Ricky Nelson sang, but only as an adjunct to Ozzie and Harriet's "adventures." Were we really meant to live that way? I hardly think so. At least I wasn't.

Athletics was once a passion - I lived Mickey Mantle and Bob Cousy dreams. But in my thirties, I bowed to another sporting generation when it came to pass that my step-son could beat me in a game of one-on-one. Now bum knees have dictated that I walk. And I do - four miles a day. Thank God for Steve Jobs and his iPod! I may look old, but music moves my feet, entrains the throbbing in those aching knees. Why do I put myself through that? I hope I'm not narcissistic enough to want to be forever young. I just don't want to go quietly into that good night.

 And that means not letting my once-adequately honed  mind grow as flabby. We live in  - what's the euphemism? - a retirement community, still some steps away from needing nurses and wheelchairs, but a community that mostly seems to have turned off their brains at the end of their last day on the job, the day the last kid left home. So I went back to school, gained another degree, and hope to find a teaching position soon.  Learning - that's something else that floats my boat. And what better way to learn than to communicate with the text-and-Twitter generation. Can I compete with their subversive micro-technologies? Hell, yeah! Even though the only thing we might agree on in the classroom is that passion moves us when reason fails to.

So. Passion is emotion, but in this age it's also a physical adjunct, a mental operator. It can be dangerous, problematic to an interconnected global community. But as long as we temper it with at least a nod to the four centuries of reason that preceded us, we'll be okay. I know I will.