There is so much bad and/or stupid stuff going on in the world, and I frequently find myself really, really wanting to write about it. Then I take a step back and realize there are enough angry voices out there, and that I just really, really, don’t want to be one of them – at least not right now. Instead, I’ve decided to write about something I love: Westerns. Specifically Western movies.

I’ve always loved westerns. Some of my earliest memories are of my little brother and I building pillow forts to watch High Chapparall on the TV. The only movies I remember my family ever going to were John Wayne movies (although dad did make an exception for Jeremiah Johnson – a glorious experience for seven-year-old me!). I would guess that Westerns have had a stronger influence on how I see the world than just about anything else.

Like any genre, the greatest westerns are those about much more than just cowboys and indians and gunfights and wagon trains and schoolmarms and whatnot. To be truly great, any movie or book has to be doing more than just telling a story: For example, Silverado is one of my favorite westerns. I never get tired of it, but it’s a fun western, not a great one.

One of the themes of most of the truly capital-G Great Westerns that resonates with me more every year are those about the passing of time and place. Sometimes it’s The Wild Bunch or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or The Long Riders going down in hail of gunfire because they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) change with the times. Sometimes it’s The Outlaw Josey Wales or Jeremiah Johnson or Shane trying to make a new beginning, to put the past behind. Sometimes, of course, it’s those burnt-out old cowboys and gunslingers showing they’ve still got some fight left in them, like in Unforgiven, Ride the High Country, and Lonesome Dove.

I think the reason I used to love those stories was that, in addition to being capital G Great movies, I felt a lot of sympathy for those characters – and glad that was never going to happen to me. Now, I love them because I can empathize with those characters – because I feel like it’s happening to me. The world I live in is very unlike the world I grew up in, the world of my salad days. Now, it seems like sometimes I spend as much time looking for the remote or cursing because I’ve-hit-the-wrong-damned-button-and-now the-TV-is-asking-me-questions-and-I-can’t-figure-out-what-I’ve-done-wrong-or-how-to-make it-stop, than I do actually watching a movie or show.

I’m pretty sure that in another 10 years or so, I’m going to need to pay a kid just to hang around, turn the TV on, change the channel, etc. It’s really frightening, how fast technology is changing, and how bad I am at keeping up with it. Most days, I don’t even want to try.

Of course, it’s not just technology. It’s society. It’s always changing, and the one thing that doesn’t change is that the generation shouting “We Shall Overcome” at us old fogies will, before they know it, hear a new generation shouting it at them (a tip o’ the hat to Sir Terry Pratchett for that joke).

I’ll tell you what, if you want to feel out of place, try being a retired veteran who’s always worked with his back and his hands, starting a Creative Writing graduate program at a really, really, liberal college like Miami University! It’ll freak you right out. I know it freaked me right out, and not only was I really, really, trying to belong there, everyone there was really, really, trying to make me feel like I belonged.

I’d never even known that pronouns were an issue, until the first day of the program (which was on zoom, talk about an adjustment!), when the Prof. asked us all to introduce ourselves and give our pronouns. At first, I thought it was some kind of English joke. It was not.

Don’t get me wrong – I have no problem with the whole pronoun thing. I figure you’re entitled to be referred to however you want. My issue isn’t philosophical or political or religion-based, it is entirely a matter of an inability to change, no matter how hard I try. It is embarrassing and frustrating to be unable to refer to a perfectly lovely human being as “they” when, for my entire 50+ years, it’s always just been “he” or “she”*. I would sit there stammering and stumbling and cursing, trying to correct myself to “they”, feeling like a jerk and a linguistic dinosaur the whole time (and this was in my last semester of the program!).

Fortunately they (meaning the individual in question, not everybody in the room) was very understanding, and when I apologized after class, told me not to worry, that they appreciated that someone like me would even try, which was more than they got from their family. Honestly, after that, I didn’t know whether to feel better or worse.

But I digress – back to the Westerns!

This morning, I watched Out of the Wild (on Amazon) which, if not a great movie, was a really good one, about a broken-down, alcoholic cowboy forced to take a job at a dude ranch after no real ranch would hire him. It was a beautiful redemption story, but not sappy or sentimental. It put me in mind of the TV movie The Good Old Boys, based on a novel by the late, great Elmer Kelton, about another cowboy facing the end of the cowboying days.

By the way, you can’t go wrong with Elmer Kelton, but his best, in my opinion, are The Good Old Boys, The Time It Never Rained, and The Day the Cowboys Quit, precisely because they deal with the changing times.

Thinking about The Good Old Boys got me thinking about Monte Walsh (the awesome Lee Marvin version, not the Tom Selleck one). Monte Walsh is another one about an aging cowboy, and honestly, I don’t think anyone can do that role better than Lee Marvin (and I just learned that Jack Schaefer, the guy who wrote the book Shane also wrote Monte Walsh! I just bought it – I’ll let you know how it is).

Anyway, this has all been (for the most part anyway) waaaaaay more fun for me than writing about all the things that are wrong with the world and how I’d fix ’em. Probably more fun for you, too. At the very least, you’ve got some good books and movies to check out! By the way, you don’t have to be a man to enjoy them, especially not The Good Old Boys or Out of the Wild, which are basically love stories that even a strong, manly man like myself can love.

I guess that’s about it, for now anyway.

Thanks for reading!

*Or, to my shame, as “it” whenever there was some question. That was years ago, before I became friends with a trans man, and had to seriously start thinking about this stuff, back when I was a much less decent human being, and less Christian, something I’m trying to rectify. Can’t fix something if you can’t admit it’s broken.