Ah, But I Was So Much Younger Then...

It was a year ago today, one day after the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The night before, someone posted a poem reacting to the tragedy (among other things) on a private blog I followed. I asked the author if I could use their poem in Oddball Magazine. They said yes, as long as it was anonymous. I agreed.

Excited, I considered pairing the poem with a drawing by Eric N. Peterson. It's the same piece at the top of this post. It wasn't a perfect fit, a large bald man wearing a McDonald's logo with the flag behind him. It mocked a different aspect of America from the one the author focused on. But at least it mocked.

It was all I had at the time, but I was still wary. I sent the artwork to the poet and asked what they thought. If they didn't like it, I would publish the poem with no art.

The poet said no, which would have been fine by itself, but here's how they put it:

I don’t like the artwork. It makes fun of fatness and age.

The artist, Eric N. Peterson, is a man older than me. For as long as I've followed him on Facebook, his thing has been to draw people in a variety of shapes and sizes, often naked, often running in the open and expressing joy, sometimes in a playfully profane way. You could look at his work and see it as anti-body shaming. 

I could see why the art might seem fat shaming at first untrained glance, but ageist?

I didn't want to argue with an author who was willing to share their work to help the journal mark a tragic day. As a result, the poem ran without art, and an older artist had his work left out of the magazine because the author didn't want to somehow insult him.

This is how ageism works, I'm learning. The young see old people as a sensitive focus group instead of individuals who might be a little more biting about themselves and the world around them, sometimes playfully, sometimes not. 

Makes it easier to exclude them out of fear of offending them.

Eric didn't suffer at all, neither did I, and a necessary voice was heard. But as an man growing older, that moment of clarity still bothers me.

It happened a year ago on the month of my birthday. I was mostly "feeling" old then. I can now be called "officially" old now one birthday later. 

I'm also big. I've been called "big guy" for decades even though I'm only about 5'10 (and holding, thankfully). 

I also consider myself on the less pretty side (as do others, or so I've been told). I have to live with that and often do so successfully, one day at a time. 

This already made me largely invisible in the everyday public eye except for comic relief. 

Am I ready for more of that? 

In the future, as an older, larger, uglier man, I'll be sure to wonder how people might be working unconsciously (or deliberately) to keep my work and my self away from creative outlets. In an effort to save me from myself, of course.