Sheriff Years

Navel-gazing on my birthday

I think I might finally be grown-ass.

I’ve come to think of 30 as the arbitrary marker of grown-assedness. But from the reactions of my friends and family yesterday, on my 28th birthday, I’m gathering that I might be grown-ass now.¹

I’m still a little embarrassed to tell older people my age, but they’re starting less frequently to (lovingly) call me a baby, and it’s only a matter of time until I start longing for the clock to go backward instead of forward. (Not sad, just true!)

I’m not ready to admit how much I liked the mascara Bear tattoos Casey drew on me for Halloween.

I was one of those kids who always wished he was older. I wanted hardly anything more than to drive and to make out, and wanted the former so badly that I used AppleWorks to draw up fake driving learner’s permits for kids in the neighborhood and me. (Also catch me in the Blisters short rockumentary saying I was ten when I was really nine and getting taken to task by my bandmates for it.)

Luckily, while I was a teenager, I read enough interviews with artists and authors to recognize that rushing past youth is a great way to waste your life and fill yourself with regret. So I turned my focus away from the next milestone and tried to, you know, live in the present.

Nowadays my focus is less on looking ahead and more on worrying whether there might be an “essential” age for every artist, even entertaining the disgusting fear that I could have passed my own already.

I know this will seem laughable or even obnoxious to readers or friends who recognize how many opportunities are in front of me, but like so many others I feel a micro pang of existential dread when I watch sports (rarely) and realize that the pros are six years younger than me, or when breakout singers on SNL are college-aged. (We should all realize by now that all this stuff, social comparison and envy and self-doubt, is relative.) I indulge myself in feeling like I’m not doing enough, like I need to get up off my ass before I don’t have a chance to. I try to hang on to the constructive, propelling bits of that anxiety and let go of the nasty, baseless bits of it.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loathed the idea of peaks. Of an artist’s “essential time.” Partly out of fear for myself, that one’s productive or creatively fruitful life could be so fleeting, or that one could miss it altogether. But also because that line of thought is like a type of creative deforestation: it discounts and diminishes all of the work that falls outside the edges of an artist’s supposed essential period, and lifts up the works that fall within them to a superhuman, unapproachable status.

An artist who finds themself on the receiving end of this extremely fortunate but also bizarrely destructive formula can end up freezing in their tracks, retreating into hermitage, or literally dying.

I don’t want that for artists I admire, nor do I want it for myself (if I could be so lucky!), so I strongly prefer to see life as a continuous stretch of time in which making stuff can become a regular practice, rather than a “before” and an “after” or a flat line with a soaring blip somewhere along the way. Let’s let artists and ourselves live and let’s let them continue to dig into their expression and their natural ability through the ebbs and flows of social recognition.

In Paddle Your Own Canoe, my dad’s husband Nick Offerman writes about a casting director who cheered him up after yet another rejection by telling him to look forward to his “sheriff years.” That is, the years when Nick’s natural appearance and ability would line up with what producers and audiences wanted from him. When he would have the ’stache and the knowing eyes to project paternal wisdom.

I’m not sure if the casting director thought of her comment in terms of an artist’s innate essential time, but that’s kind of how I heard it. As though we each have a clock in our bodies or in the inner-workings of the Life in Entertainment Industrial Complex Divine Control Center. And that… was scary.

If one’s Sheriff Years could be in one’s future, does that mean they could also be in one’s past? I’ll just put it bluntly: Could it be that audiences would only love you if you were a kid, still cute, still prodigious, still innocent? Or still a twenty-something, still sexy, still cutting-edge, still underdog-ish and rebellious? Not Sheriff Years, but Cute Kid Years or Cool Young Person Years? I don’t have to name the examples, but I’m sure some come to your mind.

I don’t want to be one of them.

Let’s be honest about a few things:

It’s true that our bodies change. We decay, and we die. Or, we grow signature mustaches. The cartilage in our joints dissipates. We’re challenged to swim upstream against a decline of brain plasticity.

It’s also true that culture is surprising and fickle. The way art is perceived has only partly to do with the art and a lot to do with things other than the art. We’re barking up a hollow tree if we’re going to try to predict or control how culture doles out recognition for stuff.

But the idea of artistic essential periods still needs killing because we think it’s about the artist themself, their own ideas and innate talent, and because it’s not really about our reliably unreliable bodies.

I get out of essential time-ist thinking about art by looking at all the long-runners, and thinking about how much their work means to me even when it isn’t supernova bright in society like their opuses are.

Also: by remembering that some so-called opuses are made after tastemakers say the artist was washed up. I mean, really. Can you imagine if Neil stopped after Harvest?

I ask myself, too: How much does it matter whether something is an opus or not? Is that what we’re trying for? Or are we trying just to live and make someone else’s life better?

Glory rules. Making a million people’s lives better rather than ten rules, too. But it’s not a loser’s consolation to say that we all make the world into what it is with daily acts, with and without “scale”; it’s a fact. Thank god for these everyday heroes, all of us. And all the better when one of their creations rises up into a beacon. (And, yes, sometimes we take steps, like hiring a publicist, to make beaconhood possible.)

In short, the answer to the fear is, like the answer to so many fears, “Who gives a fuck?” And the ability to say that and mean it (and then get back to work and play) might be the best measure of all of whether someone is grown-ass.

Love,
Spencer

1. What’s grown-ass? It just means not a baby. I’m not saying I’m old. I cringe at twenty-somethings who say they’re too old for a tedious gig or a hard conversation, sometimes in front of a sixty-something who’s endured more tough gigs than any young ’un could imagine.