Everyone changes to some degree as they get older. Some get wiser, some just get older. Others, like P.J. O’Rourke, have to cope with wrenching career changes:
After the Iraq War I gave up on being what’s known in the trade as a “shithole specialist.” I was too old to be scared stiff and too stiff to sleep on the ground. I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for 21 years, in 40-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq.
Michael Kelly, my boss at The Atlantic, and I had gone to cover the war, he as an “imbed” with the Third Infantry Division, I as a “unilateral.” We thought, once ground operations began, I’d have the same freedom to pester the locals that he and I had had during the Gulf War a dozen years before. The last time I saw Mike he said, “I’m going to be stuck with the 111th Latrine Cleaning Battalion while you’re driving your rental car through liberated Iraq, drinking Rumsfeld Beer and judging wet abeyya contests.” Instead I wound up trapped in Kuwait, bored and useless, and Mike went with the front line to Baghdad, where he was killed during the assault on the airport.
[. . .]
Apparently shorts and T-shirts are what one wears when one is having fun. I don’t seem to own any fun outfits. I travel in a coat and tie. This is useful in negotiating customs and visa formalities, police barricades, army checkpoints, and rebel roadblocks. “Halt!” say border patrols, policemen, soldiers, and guerrilla fighters in a variety of angry-sounding languages.
I say, “Observe that I am importantly wearing a jacket and tie.”
“We are courteously allowing you to proceed now,” they reply.
This doesn’t work worth a damn with the TSA.
Then there’s the problem of writing about travel fun, or fun of any kind. Nothing has greater potential to annoy a reader than a writer recounting what fun he’s had. Personally — and I’m sure I’m not alone in this — I have little tolerance for fun when other people are having it. It’s worse than pornography and almost as bad as watching the Food Channel. Yet in this manuscript I see that, as a writer, I’m annoying my reader self from the first chapter until the last sentence. I hope at least I’m being crabby about it. Writers of travelogues are most entertaining when — to the infinite amusement of readers — they have bad things happen to them. I’m afraid the best I can do here is have a bad attitude.
