prompt: toll, title: the experience paradox in "the next big thing" flash fiction

There’s nothing sexy or narratively compelling to being “discovered” when you’re thirty-eight and fat. No one near the reins of our current media culture believes there is, anyway. If you are twenty-four and lean and serpentine, fresh and edgy, sure, there’s something there, but you still must get quite lucky. This is a big part of the Experience Paradox in the entertainment industry, yes, but it’s hardly all of the problem. Another large chunk of this issue is that, unless you have vast wealth or connections to fall back on, most of those who luck into success do so by risking everything while young and dumb enough to not know how profoundly ignorant it would be to lay it all on a low-odds gamble like becoming rich and famous. You need to possess a powerful combination of naivety, recklessness, lust-for-validation and blind narcissism to consider that a reasonable calculus within the context of a human being’s lifespan. And it almost never works!

Interestingly, though, both these paths tend to wrap around to similar outcomes for the men and women who end up in that warm isolating cocoon of Fame, be it from an equivalent to winning the lottery when too young to even rent a car or from membership in the inheritance class. Both become trapped inside a lack of life experience, whether because they no longer need know the prices of milk or eggs or gas from being insulated by yesmen far too long or because they were born stupid-rich and never knew to begin with. Two separate doors in the same slaughterhouse, leading two lines of cattle to the same killfloor. The death of creativity in that echo chamber of surety and security and comfort. The local boy made good or Richie Rich dabbling, it takes its toll, a lack of new humane input leads toward repeating or reiterating ideas that long ago made your name. That’s the Experience Paradox: the longer you succeed, the harder it is to come up with anything new, that could connect with anyone other than the most pampered of rich twits.

Frank paused for a moment, taking in my little over-caffeinated rant. He tented his fingers over the tacky chain diner plate in front of them. “It makes me think,” he said finally, “of an old yeti children’s tale called The Sour Pinecones.” “Sour Pinecones?” I asked. “Yeah,” he smiled, “it’s almost exactly like the human parable of the sour grapes, except with sour pinecones instead.”

I stopped. “You’re making fun of me.” “Yeah,” Frank laughed, “of course I am. You sound like the fox or wolf or whatever, only after the grapes escaped him were they mouth-puckering bad. You just had the time to obsess over the idea and pretty it up.” “Just because I’m bitter doesn’t mean I’m not also right,” I finally let myself laugh, “a man can be both.” “Two steak dinners,” Frank admitted, “two lines to the slaughter. But no, man,” he added, “we don’t eat pinecones.”