Complex Numbers

Idols

PROMPT September 11th

Today’s prompt comes from tah20! (With additions by me )

Write about someone who truly moves/touches/inspires you. Do you know them personally, or admire them from afar? What do they do that makes them special?

Moves? Touches? Inspires? A Jedi craves not these things.

In considering this prompt, I racked my brains to come up with someone I knew. Each of my friends inspires me in his or her own way, but no single one really fits what I feel to be the spirit of the prompt. The closest fit is one I've mentioned before, the one I usually write for, who reads my stuff and is still my friend anyway. That's true friendship, right there - it would drive most people away.

So we're left with celebrities and the like: authors, directors, musicians, etc. - people I don't personally know but have had a great impact on my life.

I'm assuming, further, that I'm limited to living people here. Plenty of people who have died have shaped what I am and what I do. Leonard Cohen comes to mind, there; I first got into writing in a pathetic attempt to emulate his poetry. He was an established poet before he became a singer/songwriter/performer, and his songs reflect this background. He was one of the casualties of the dark year 2016.

That's the trouble with getting old. All your heroes start to die off and you're left holding the void. At least they've left a legacy.

I'm going to have to go with another singer/songwriter/performer, Bruce Springsteen. If you only know his work from the "hits," you're only seeing one facet of his talent, and you probably won't understand this. That's okay; it's a very personal thing with me, something I even hesitate to share here, in this context. But there's no escaping the history; from the moment I first heard Born to Run crackling from a shitty AM radio in a shitty Buick back in the 70s, I've been a fan.

It's not something I can readily explain, either. It's not like I fit into the categories of people he writes about. I tried to, long ago, but it's just not my life. There's a combination of things: the poetic lyrics, the music (which can as easily be droning and lost as it can be energetic and uplifting), the story - and there is a story, about someone who knew what he wanted and then reached out and took it, mostly on his own terms. I've never done that, myself, but I can admire it.

And wouldn't you know, I pick two people, one dead, one still with us, who are known to have achieved greatness in spite of - or, perhaps, because of? - crippling depression. That probably says something about me that I'd rather leave unexamined, for now.

This sort of thing is almost a one-way street, though. I can show my support by consuming their product, along with thousands or millions of other people, but I know I can never impact their lives, by myself, in the way they impacted mine. I'm not one for celebrity gossip, or hero-worship; they're just people, with the only difference between them and us being that they're well-known. And maybe a certain drive that I lack.

All this is not meant to diminish the impact on me of hundreds of other people - including my parents, who raised a stranger's child as their own. That takes a dedication that I certainly don't have. Yesterday was an anniversary of my father's birth, so I thought about what he was like at my age, when I was very young. I'm more like him than I care to admit, most of the time.

But he never did like Springsteen.