tangents while SIP writing after film class

My alter ego is John Wayne. He would be my second self. My better half. The part of my identity that I don’t’ let my friends see. He makes vague appearances when I’m shooting my father’s guns or driving my grandfather’s machinery or when I look over a field of green turning wheat. Or sometimes after a walk through country roads that’s been so long my legs are a tiny bit numb and my stride is a set rhythm and I’m wearing the perfect boyfriend jeans. I am John Wayne. Or sometimes when I throw open the hood of my car and crook my hip or when I slip into the gruff, know it all responses including the cuss words when I answer my uber girly friends. I let a little bit of John Wayne out. My alter ego goes real deep because you see I inherited him. Its eve a little watered down in me. But in my father its a little bit closer to being John Wayne and my grandfather is even closer. The American myth of the cowboy, of John Wayne strutting the original swag, the careless nonchalant shrug of a gun belt, the rough almost cynical voice that never wavers. My grandfather’s alter ego. When he gets up from the dining room table to limp over to his rocking chair, I see it, that John Wayne lope. A lone wolf. Except my grandfather groans as he lowers himself into the rocking chair and then clicks on FOX news. My father tells me of times when the old man in the rocking chair wouldn’t budge and throw grown men on the ground to prove his point, to stand up for his own dignity. A healthy self-respect. This old man is my myth. The American cowboy in the rocking chair. He is also my grandfather and the self-confident, unselfconscious swag is still there, beneath the mellow of over eighty years, three children, over ten grandchildren, bowls of ice cream, color television, an absorbing love for new electronic gadgets, a sentimental attachment to songs people stopped singing in the fifties, and the equally old woman in the kitchen. I wouldn’t know what to say if I saw him cry, if myth shattered completely into reality, if my alter ego split into a messy sentimental Hollywood-glorified rodeo clown. I would split a little bit too, even when I am not John Wayne, even when I’m just me. I’d be left without the John Wayne moments and then who would I really be? Evil would probably triumph. Liberty Valence wouldn’t be shot dead. Tom Chaney would still be unjustly shooting husbands and fathers. The fact is I need John Wayne. I need both the real and the alter ego. The old man in the rocking chair and the man loping into the saloon with the six-shooter and the nonchalance yet purpose only a cowboy could pull together walking through those swinging doors. I need the man and the myth. The me and my alter ego. Because the world already has enough chaos and bad guys and complicated mess. Because we need John Wayne. Because I need him, sitting next to me in the living room and walking around in the old black and white television.