AlexJonathan.com

Driving back from South Bend this weekend, I passed the office of the Muncie Star-Press at around two in the morning. The entire building was dark, except for one floor, which seemed to be burning every fluorescent light it had. I know this was only because someone was doing cleaning, or because those were the lights they always leave on, or because the switch had somehow broken and no one could turn them off until Ed, the guy who knew how to fix the problem, came in the next morning. Maybe someone just forgot to turn them off, whatever the reason, I’m sure it was nothing too out of the ordinary.

It’s masochistic, but I want every production night at every paper to be a disaster, the type of thing where the staff’s shocked the paper made it out in the morning, even though they watched it go to the printers. Better yet, I want someone to find himself, every night, jogging down streets too snowy to drive, with the PDFs burned on a CDR because when FTP doesn’t work, someone’s got to get the paper to press, goddammit.

I want everyone on staff to show up and immediately have a crush on the highest ranking person of the correct sex, not because those people really have anything in common, but just because you’re in this world that’s totally foreign to you and that person has all the answers and is unbelievably talented and is giving you an opportunity and maybe just looks more than a little cute when she feels deadline pressure.

I want everyone in any position of power to have someone they know they can flirt with, not out of some weird sexual harassment thing, but just because they need to not think, even for thirty seconds, about what the fuck is happening at the sports desk.

I want there to be two or three people who know the night’s not over until a phone call tells you it’s Miller Time, and I want this ritual to be unknown to everyone else on staff. I want those two people to have their own patterns for what happens next, and I want them to follow that religiously.

I want the newsroom to be two doors away from someone everyone’s dying to impress, and when he bleeds over the paper the next morning, I want that to fillet everyone to the bone.

I want some young kid writing the staff editorials, trying to find his voice while speaking on behalf of others, and I don’t want anyone, ever, to tell that kid that writing something that takes even one shot at those in power isn’t exactly the same thing as Judith Miller going to prison. Because, to him, I want it to feel exactly the same.

I want everyone to have the one story they really want to write, and I would say I want that to be the last thing they write… but I don’t ever want there to be a last thing. I want no one to retire, no one to graduate, no one to get downsized, no one to walk out the door to spend more time with the kids and the wife, yes, those people are important… but at some point after you’re finally out from under that eternal deadline, when you clock out at five and know you don’t have to think about work again until nine the next morning, someone wonders aloud whether you’re supposed to put a comma before the “and”…

And you know you’d kill to have it all back.

You wind up bored at work and remember you’re not as good at Scrabble as you think you are, you place the reason you had a Coke Zero phase, and you rediscover how quickly those college words used to fall away when something was really important.

Anyway… not the point right now. The point is she’s smart, funny, nice and one of those just generally awesome people.

(Chances are good this post is going to be a little spoilery, if you haven’t seen the movie. Consider yourself warned.)

The tragedy of Randy “The Ram” isn’t his fall from grace. It’s not the significant decrease in paychecks he received after transitioning from working major arenas in front of thousands of fans to a few hundred people in a bingo hall in South Philadelphia.

Most people would say the tragedy is that he held on too long, he didn’t know when to hang up the boots and cut his losses. Ultimately, though, I don’t think that’s the case either.

We all know what it feels like to be around with someone who’s overstayed their welcome. It’s that person in your creative writing workshop who has gone on far too long about their decision to end every sentence in a preposition, or the old man who lulls you into lowering your defenses with talk of football before busting out an hour-long sermon in the only diner in town that still lets you smoke.

If you’re paying attention to “The Wrestler,” that’s not what’s happening at all. It’s not that people aren’t interested in “The Ram,” it’s only that there are fewer of them. Sure, he’s not the superstar he once was, but he’s still able to perform in front of an audience who treats him like he is as big as he was a decade (or more) before that.

And I’m okay with that. I don’t see the problem in someone burning themselves out doing something they love, as long as they’re realistic in their expectations.  “The Wrestler” ends before the probable point in Randy’s career where the crowds aren’t dwindling, where they’ve all together stopped showing up.

I’m not sure how he’d handle it. I’m sure it would hurt, but I think there’s a point where you take your boots, go home and deal with that pain privately. Maybe he’d be able to step away, maybe he wouldn’t. But as long as there were people asking him to do what he loved to do, I don’t think you can fault him for doing it.

If they would stop asking and he would go home… I don’t think you can fault him for sitting by the phone and hoping they want to see him wrestle again.

The tragedy comes when you don’t realize how silly it is to throw yourself through a table trying to earn the cheers of an empty arena.