I'm Only a Man: Lucky

I'm exactly like Clint Eastwood in every possible way.

First of all, his real name is Clinton Eastwood Jr. My dad's name is Charles Ray Hartsell, and my name is Carol Ray Hartsell. Everyone knows that Carol is the feminine version of Charles...the feminine version being less patriarchal and racist (women didn't technically own slaves because women didn't particularly own any property back in the day). So that makes me a Jr., just like Clint Eastwood.

Clint Eastwood has received four Academy Awards, five Golden Globes and five People's Choice Awards. Similarly, I won two Who's Who awards in high school: Most Unique and Most Likely to Succeed. I don't think anyone in their right mind would argue that Clint Eastwood isn't unique. And successful? Yeah, I'd say that displaying equal facility with comedy (as in Every Which Way but Loose), romance (The Bridges of Madison County) and the dramatic chick flick (Million Dollar Baby) adds up to being pretty successful, wouldn't you?

Clint Eastwood was the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea in California. My dad, Carol Ray Hartsell Sr., was the mayor of The City of Tarrant in Alabama. If a terrorist attack had killed every member of the city council as well as everyone in my family except me because I happened to be playing in the concrete-reinforced sewer pipe in my neighbor's backyard, I might have been called upon to assume the role of mayor for a week or two until a suitable replacement, possibly Clovis of Clovis's T-Shirt Shop, was elected...just like Clint Eastwood.

Clint Eastwood was born in San Francisco, California, a town I have visited more than once. He has English, Scottish, Dutch and Irish ancestry. I, too, am very, very, very white with an affinity for colonialism.

Eastwood previously worked as a gas station attendant, a fireman and a piano player. He was drafted into the Army during the Korean War, but never went to Korea. I have also failed at all of my previous jobs, and while I have never been drafted into the army, I've always felt that I could have been.

Clint Eastwood once described his character Rowdy Yates from Rawhide as "the idiot of the plains." In sixth grade, Ross Jacobs described my breasts as being very much like "the great plains."

When Sergio Leone hired Clint Eastwood to play the Man With No Name in Fist Full of Dollars, Eastwood created the look of the character by purchasing the black jeans, the hat and the black cigars from various shops around Hollywood. When I had to recreate a scene from Macbeth on videotape for Ms. Pitchford's 10th grade honor's English class, I bought the severed arm we used in the climactic battle scene from Spencer's gifts.

In 1974, Eastwood teamed up with Jeff Bridges in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. In 1974, I teamed up with Jeff Bridges on earth. The results in both cases: electrifying.

I would give more examples, but I'm sure by now we're all agreed that no more are necessary. But let us to the point.

What is it that drives both myself and Clint Eastwood to be the living, breathing, scorching examples of free will that we are? What makes Clint and I so very here and now? One might look to our wanderer's nature. Our penchant for looking across the valley to the crest of the far-off mountain and saying, "Yes. There must go I." Others might site our complicatedness; our equal willingness to look at our fellow man and say, "If you don't get it, piss off." Still others might consider our close personal relationship with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as the root of our shared singularity.

But the truth is, gentle reader, that one might ponder Clint's and myself's self-actualizedness to the ends of time and still not come up with a full and satisfying answer. What I would impress upon you instead is to look inward. Ask yourself how you can find your own personal Clint or Carol somewhere within that very vessel that also sees fit to house the you that you've come to know so very not well.

In closing, let me put this one last thought out to the universe (and by universe I mean the world that Clint Eastwood and I have enjoyed calling home for a combined 113 years). Mr. Eastwood...Clint...brother in all things: Can my dad have a tee time at Teháma Golf Club? He'll kick your ass.


Acknowledgements: This post would not have been possible with out Wikipedia.