Extraordinary things just happen to me. I suppose they happen to all of us. They happen sometimes, not very often, but they happen regularly enough to be noticed.
This is one of the reasons I can’t do any serious long-term planning. It never works for me. I do love to imagine what the future might be like for me. I love to set goals and plan for things. I almost always have an idea in my head about what my life may be like in five years, or three years, or ten years. I set goals, determine probabilities, work around potential obstacles, and predict the most likely situation for me given current events and other predictable factors. I go as far as to imagine certain future scenarios. I have conversations in my mind with my grown children, friends, and siblings. I really like to plan, predict, and imagine what my life will be life a few years down the road. I am sure we all do this to a certain extent.
Unfortunately it never works. Well it mostly never works. Recently, when my oldest son graduated from high school, I did have an actual experience that was eerily similar to one I had imagined and predicted many, many years ago. I was also able to say something to his mother that day, that I had imagined saying to her for many years. The fact that I said it in a text message instead of in person did not diminish the experience (at least for me, she may not love text messages as much as I do). It turns out I didn’t accurately predict the popularity of text messages eighteen years ago, when I was a scared-to-death, punk-ass kid. I don’t know what I was thinking.
But something always happens. Fucking life does its thing. The unknown and unpredictable factors and forces go to work, and before long, something extraordinary and unexpected happens, and things begin to change.
Of course unexpected events aren’t always life-changing experiences. Sometimes they are just plain amusing. Sometimes, if like me you constantly process and evaluate everything around you, when something both unexpected and innocuous occurs, it can be just hilarious. And sometimes you have to write about it.
Have you ever found yourself in a specific situation, where you had opportunity for metaphysical sojourn, and you were able to just step back from yourself and consider the very moment? This happens to me all the time. I make a point of it. Sometimes I find myself some place inconceivable, doing something I never imagined, maybe with someone with whom I never imagined I would ever be doing something inconceivable. I like to step out of context for a moment, ignoring events that may have led to such a moment, and just appreciate the situation. I love to say to myself “I never would have imagined that I would be here right now doing this.” Sometimes it is hilarious, sometimes it is disturbing, but it is always amusing.
These are the things that keep life interesting. And oddly enough, these are exactly the things I was thinking about that night in line at the gas station mini-mart, in a seedy part of town, across the street from my favorite breakfast joint.
Marcus and I were out for something. My memory is a little hazy. I was either buying beer, or buying ice for beer, or buying something else entirely. We may have been coming from, or going to the strip club nearby. Or we may have just stopped by that gas station on our way to someplace else entirely, because it is convenient from the freeway. In any case, if I was buying beer, it must not have been the first beer of the evening for me. It was a Saturday night, and the line was long. Marcus was nearby, maybe in the car, but not immediately with me. All the same, I am calling him a witness.
The point is, I am not sure how I got there, or what I was doing. But there I was.
I was second from the counter. I was waiting patiently while my mind wandered around abstract notions previously described in this essay, when I noticed something strange. The man in front of me had turned around and was looking at me as he leaned against the counter waiting for something. I noticed this because I am a fairly inconspicuous guy in a crowd and I don’t normally attract a pile of attention. Furthermore he was looking me up and down and appeared to be licking his lips, which actually never happens. This was new for me, and I was not sure how to react.
Additionally, to risk the use of a stereotype, this guy looked a little tough. He was taller than me. This isn’t hard to do because I am not a very tall guy. He was maybe six feet. He was wearing a pale blue tracksuit with a plain white t-shirt underneath, on top of which lay a large gold chain with a medallion that appeared to be the Mexican flag. His hat was white, and in purple, airbrushed letters it read “Chicano.” The tattoos on his hands and neck indicated he was a fan of, and was perhaps somehow affiliated with the “Norteño” half of a popular gang rivalry in California.
His appearance made his current actions that much more perplexing. I checked again. He was definitely looking me up and down and was licking his lips. He was also apparently not buying his first beer of the evening. I was glad we had something in common.
I decided to be cool and assume he was just being friendly, so I gave him the universal “what’s up?” nod that guys my age always give each other, though I actually said “hey man, how’s it going?”
He asked me “Hey man, have you ever seen Pulp Fiction?”
This was the moment where I paused intellectually, backed up out of myself, and considered the situation for what it was. It was amusing to me, because I hadn’t expected, nor had I imagined when I woke up that morning, that later in the evening I might be standing in a mini-mart with a Chicano gang-banger discussing cinema at all, let alone the works of Tarantino.
I decided to go with it. But before I could respond, he continued. “You know what I mean man? Oh yeah. You know.”
I can safely say that I did not know.
So I said “Sure man, Pulp Fiction is one of my favorite films. I love the unlikely dialogue, and the part where Vincent Vega brings the comatose Mrs. Wallace back to his dealer’s house because she accidentally over-dosed is one of the most intense cinematic moments I have ever experienced.”
I was having a good time. I made a mental note to strike up random discussions on random topics with random people in random places more often.
He didn’t consider my assessment very long before he retorted with “I like the part where they fuck the guy in the ass.” He added “you know what I mean man? Oh yeah. You know.”
It was my turn at the counter. I made my purchase as I considered his position.
“I also like the part where they accidentally shoot Marvin in the face” was all I could think to say as I walked out somewhat perplexed but trying very hard not to laugh.
He followed me a little way to my car, and must have seen Marcus sitting in it, because he wandered back to his friend and their car, oddly enough a late-model Chevy Impala with 22 inch wheels. I laughed and told Marcus the story as they passed behind us twice and finally drove away.
What the hell?
I was glad I realized the unexpected nature of the situation while I was in it, and that I was able to be immediately amused by it. That made me happy.
I do love Pulp Fiction. It remains one of my favorite movies of all time. I don’t know about the anal sex though. I guess I hadn’t fairly considered it within the larger social context. For example, I never thought of using it as a way to hit on people. I guess I hadn’t thought of any movie in that particular context before.
But maybe next time I see an attractive woman standing in line somewhere I will ask “Hey baby, have you ever seen Knocked Up?”
I am just waiting to see what the extraordinary will do with me next.
Thursday
New World Literacy
My mother was a secretary. That’s what they used to call the women who do all the work in your office. She worked in this capacity about half of the years I was growing up. She took a lot of pride in her work. And she seemed to be particularly skilled at it.
My mother insisted that all of her children acquire two skills. We had to learn to play the piano, and we had to learn to type. She was sure that these two skills, even if we mastered no others, could provide for our continuous joy and sustenance. I can see her point.
As a child, I technically learned to play piano. I took lessons for a couple years. I played in at least one informal recital that I can remember.
I quickly forgot everything I learned and picked up a guitar. My mother must have seen this as a compromise of sorts. She really disliked my subsequent interest in heavy metal music, but she encouraged me to play.
I never learned to type.
My mother pleaded with me on this matter. All of my siblings took a year or more of formal keyboarding classes in high school. I never bothered. I was interested in other things. Even when it was a requirement for graduation, I just dropped out.
My mother told me with sincere earnest and great conviction that I could never graduate from college if I didn’t learn to type. It was absolutely critical, she assured me, because of the sheer numbers of lengthy papers I would be required to produce. She also assured me there was no way in hell she was going to type anything for me.
It wasn’t that I was opposed to typing specifically. It just seemed like the kind of skill I could pick up later if the need arose. I hadn’t really needed the skill before then and so I didn’t want to spend my time on it. I was busy with other things at the time, like getting girls pregnant.
Also, I reasoned that given the seemingly exponential technological growth of the late 80s, when so many people were using computers, something better was bound to come along. I mean the year 2000 wasn’t really very far away, and everything was going to be different by then.
My dad, for example, was an early adopter and advocate for speech recognition software. These are the programs that let you just talk to your computer while it writes down what you are saying automatically. He has been using this stuff as long as I can remember. He has convinced entire companies to adopt its use. I can only imagine how his zeal for this technology must have made my mother feel. But for him, it maybe had more to do with necessity than wanting to replace the secretarial pool. My dad doesn’t have any fingers to speak of on his left hand. I have never thought of it as a disability, because he is the guy who used his hands to teach me to fix almost anything around the house with my hands. But I suppose it may have prevented him from becoming a concert pianist, and perhaps from typing very quickly.
Like the old man, I reasoned that typing was somewhat archaic. As a people, we had already been doing it far too long. It just didn’t seem practical. Our brains are our primary tools of communication. We should not be so dependent on our hands. I was sure science could, and would, come up with something better.
I also like to stick it to “the man.” And I wasn’t going to be told what to do by anyone, particularly my mother. So I showed her. I graduated from college, with a major in ENGLISH, without ever learning to type.
Sure, I spent more time in a computer lab than anyone else I knew. And yes, there were late nights where I cursed myself for being so stubborn and unable to get the thoughts out as quickly as they wanted to come. I cursed science for so proficiently failing me. I hunted and pecked and spent far more time looking at the keyboard than I did looking at the screen. I really wished I had majored in math.
But near the end of my undergraduate career, something happened that changed everything. I discovered the internet. More to the point of this story, I discovered email and instant messaging.
These were technologies I could use. Back then we had to pay money for phone calls outside of the area in which we lived. I had friends, family, and more importantly girls to talk to all over the place. This new technology allowed me to talk to them for free! That is, provided we both had computers with modems and were connected at the same time and using the same software or messaging service and knew each other’s screen names. It was so simple! I could also chat randomly with nameless and faceless people whom I had never met. We could say anything we wanted to each other and we never needed to be accountable for our actions in real life. Sexting has nothing on early instant messaging. The 90s were a wild and dangerous time.
These services instantly became a major part of my daily routine. For years I eagerly anticipated the moment each morning when I was able to check my email and see what good things awaited me. Back then email was almost always something I wanted to see. Instant messaging became my primary mode of communication with almost everyone. By the early 2000s I was carrying a two-way pager with instant messaging capabilities. By 2005
I required all my employees to have and use instant messaging, and they knew it was the way to get to me no matter where I was or what I was doing. Throughout my now-failed marriage, almost every significant and important conversation I ever had with my wife about our relationship occurred via instant messages. I realize now that this was a sign I maybe should have noticed and to which I might have paid more attention, but whatever. The point is instant messaging rules.
Today I don’t do nearly as much instant messaging as I once did. When I began using the technology professionally, it lost much of its original perverse and subversive appeal for me. All of that communication has now migrated to text messages. But instant messaging gave me something texting never could have.
I no longer look at the keyboard.
I don’t know exactly when, or even how long ago it may have happened. I do recall, just a few years ago, someone waiting in my office as I was sending an instant message telling me that I type really fast. The idea was so foreign to me, given my experience with my mother, that the comment took me by surprise. But that person was right. Somewhere along the way I began to type as quickly as the best secretary, and I didn’t even notice it. I owe it all to the internet, obscenity, and particularly instant messaging.
I think the internet has given all of us something we didn’t expect.
No, not that. We expected that.
The internet has made us more literate.
My story is just an example of the internet teaching a dumb-ass to type. I am sure there are a lot of other good stories out there about things idiots learned because of the internet. We all agree that the internet has changed the way we communicate with each other. And despite all my naïve expectations about science inventing a better way for us to do it, it is still just a lot of reading and typing.
Everyone has a computer now. And everyone is connected to the internet, if they want to be. Most of us spend half our day at work reading and responding to email. Facebook is currently the premiere tool used by many of us to communicate with friends and family members, all with words and pictures. Reading news online is more popular than watching the news on television. And even with two billion videos a day being played on YouTube, we still must read and write at least a little to find the kinds of porn we like best. People in our society who would otherwise never read, and who historically have never read, people who in fact would insist they hate reading, now read volumes every year in small pieces. As a natural extension, many of us prefer texting to actually speaking on the phone. Teenagers were for decades stereotyped as constantly talking on or arguing with their parents about use of the telephone. But kids these days, who each have their own phones they carry with them wherever they go, prefer to write tiny letters to each other, constantly, instead of talk.
Literacy has never been more popular, or more universal.
We will probably eventually pass out of this phase, again preferring audio and video to written forms of communication. This might just be our renaissance. Think about that for a minute. We may right now be in the golden age of literacy for our culture. Right now everyone is doing it.
I find that thought oddly comforting. I am glad I am here to see it. And I don’t really care about my unborn grandchildren.
My mother insisted that all of her children acquire two skills. We had to learn to play the piano, and we had to learn to type. She was sure that these two skills, even if we mastered no others, could provide for our continuous joy and sustenance. I can see her point.
As a child, I technically learned to play piano. I took lessons for a couple years. I played in at least one informal recital that I can remember.
I quickly forgot everything I learned and picked up a guitar. My mother must have seen this as a compromise of sorts. She really disliked my subsequent interest in heavy metal music, but she encouraged me to play.
I never learned to type.
My mother pleaded with me on this matter. All of my siblings took a year or more of formal keyboarding classes in high school. I never bothered. I was interested in other things. Even when it was a requirement for graduation, I just dropped out.
My mother told me with sincere earnest and great conviction that I could never graduate from college if I didn’t learn to type. It was absolutely critical, she assured me, because of the sheer numbers of lengthy papers I would be required to produce. She also assured me there was no way in hell she was going to type anything for me.
It wasn’t that I was opposed to typing specifically. It just seemed like the kind of skill I could pick up later if the need arose. I hadn’t really needed the skill before then and so I didn’t want to spend my time on it. I was busy with other things at the time, like getting girls pregnant.
Also, I reasoned that given the seemingly exponential technological growth of the late 80s, when so many people were using computers, something better was bound to come along. I mean the year 2000 wasn’t really very far away, and everything was going to be different by then.
My dad, for example, was an early adopter and advocate for speech recognition software. These are the programs that let you just talk to your computer while it writes down what you are saying automatically. He has been using this stuff as long as I can remember. He has convinced entire companies to adopt its use. I can only imagine how his zeal for this technology must have made my mother feel. But for him, it maybe had more to do with necessity than wanting to replace the secretarial pool. My dad doesn’t have any fingers to speak of on his left hand. I have never thought of it as a disability, because he is the guy who used his hands to teach me to fix almost anything around the house with my hands. But I suppose it may have prevented him from becoming a concert pianist, and perhaps from typing very quickly.
Like the old man, I reasoned that typing was somewhat archaic. As a people, we had already been doing it far too long. It just didn’t seem practical. Our brains are our primary tools of communication. We should not be so dependent on our hands. I was sure science could, and would, come up with something better.
I also like to stick it to “the man.” And I wasn’t going to be told what to do by anyone, particularly my mother. So I showed her. I graduated from college, with a major in ENGLISH, without ever learning to type.
Sure, I spent more time in a computer lab than anyone else I knew. And yes, there were late nights where I cursed myself for being so stubborn and unable to get the thoughts out as quickly as they wanted to come. I cursed science for so proficiently failing me. I hunted and pecked and spent far more time looking at the keyboard than I did looking at the screen. I really wished I had majored in math.
But near the end of my undergraduate career, something happened that changed everything. I discovered the internet. More to the point of this story, I discovered email and instant messaging.
These were technologies I could use. Back then we had to pay money for phone calls outside of the area in which we lived. I had friends, family, and more importantly girls to talk to all over the place. This new technology allowed me to talk to them for free! That is, provided we both had computers with modems and were connected at the same time and using the same software or messaging service and knew each other’s screen names. It was so simple! I could also chat randomly with nameless and faceless people whom I had never met. We could say anything we wanted to each other and we never needed to be accountable for our actions in real life. Sexting has nothing on early instant messaging. The 90s were a wild and dangerous time.
These services instantly became a major part of my daily routine. For years I eagerly anticipated the moment each morning when I was able to check my email and see what good things awaited me. Back then email was almost always something I wanted to see. Instant messaging became my primary mode of communication with almost everyone. By the early 2000s I was carrying a two-way pager with instant messaging capabilities. By 2005
I required all my employees to have and use instant messaging, and they knew it was the way to get to me no matter where I was or what I was doing. Throughout my now-failed marriage, almost every significant and important conversation I ever had with my wife about our relationship occurred via instant messages. I realize now that this was a sign I maybe should have noticed and to which I might have paid more attention, but whatever. The point is instant messaging rules.
Today I don’t do nearly as much instant messaging as I once did. When I began using the technology professionally, it lost much of its original perverse and subversive appeal for me. All of that communication has now migrated to text messages. But instant messaging gave me something texting never could have.
I no longer look at the keyboard.
I don’t know exactly when, or even how long ago it may have happened. I do recall, just a few years ago, someone waiting in my office as I was sending an instant message telling me that I type really fast. The idea was so foreign to me, given my experience with my mother, that the comment took me by surprise. But that person was right. Somewhere along the way I began to type as quickly as the best secretary, and I didn’t even notice it. I owe it all to the internet, obscenity, and particularly instant messaging.
I think the internet has given all of us something we didn’t expect.
No, not that. We expected that.
The internet has made us more literate.
My story is just an example of the internet teaching a dumb-ass to type. I am sure there are a lot of other good stories out there about things idiots learned because of the internet. We all agree that the internet has changed the way we communicate with each other. And despite all my naïve expectations about science inventing a better way for us to do it, it is still just a lot of reading and typing.
Everyone has a computer now. And everyone is connected to the internet, if they want to be. Most of us spend half our day at work reading and responding to email. Facebook is currently the premiere tool used by many of us to communicate with friends and family members, all with words and pictures. Reading news online is more popular than watching the news on television. And even with two billion videos a day being played on YouTube, we still must read and write at least a little to find the kinds of porn we like best. People in our society who would otherwise never read, and who historically have never read, people who in fact would insist they hate reading, now read volumes every year in small pieces. As a natural extension, many of us prefer texting to actually speaking on the phone. Teenagers were for decades stereotyped as constantly talking on or arguing with their parents about use of the telephone. But kids these days, who each have their own phones they carry with them wherever they go, prefer to write tiny letters to each other, constantly, instead of talk.
Literacy has never been more popular, or more universal.
We will probably eventually pass out of this phase, again preferring audio and video to written forms of communication. This might just be our renaissance. Think about that for a minute. We may right now be in the golden age of literacy for our culture. Right now everyone is doing it.
I find that thought oddly comforting. I am glad I am here to see it. And I don’t really care about my unborn grandchildren.
Monday
Hey Man, Do You Know Where I Can Score Some Heroin?
Once upon a time I was a community college student. And though I was not very good at it, I kept doing it. I persisted in this occupation for three and a half years.
The community college system in the United States, particularly in California, is a very interesting system. Sometimes called “Junior Colleges,” these institutions serve primarily returning students (i.e. old people in college for the first time) and slackers who couldn’t, or wouldn’t go to a real university after high school, and who still lived with their parents. I belonged to this second species.
When I quit high school at sixteen, I had a job delivering pizza and playing poker in the relatively small community of Salinas, California. Ill-content to resign myself to this fate eternally, and thinking it a good idea to provide some kind of example to my one-year-old baby son, I decided to enroll in courses at the community college. A small part of me thought it was cool to “buck the system” and start “college” at sixteen. There was no way “the man” was going to tell me where to go to school.
Starting classes at the community college was a great experience for me. It gave me the excuse and opportunity to take steps toward actions that later in life would prove to be critical for defining my character. During those years, for example, I had lunch with my mother almost every day. And after a troubled adolescence she and I were able to form a new and strong relationship which endures to this day. But that is the topic for another essay. These years ushered me into the world of frequent travel that may very well have been prophetic for the odd life I live today. I lived in Salinas, my son lived in another city roughly a hundred miles away, and many of my best friends had gone to real college in other cities even further away. Community college schedules afforded me the opportunity to frequently drive my own miniature version of Kerouac’s amazing triangle. My parents never knew where I was. And finally, after ten years of having older friends, and wishing I had been placed two grades ahead, I found myself there. I reunited with, and spent much time with many of my older friends from high school who had legitimately graduated the year before.
One of these friends was Omar. Omar had been “that weird punk kid” in high school. He was the only child of an otherwise traditional Chicano family in Salinas, and was a musical genius. He played guitar, in the words of Sublime, “like a mother-fucking riot.” That is the best way to describe it. He had been playing since he was about four years old. And having been a wannabe guitarist since my early teen years, I envied his skill. He could play anything and make it look easy.
Not having any good ideas for his future after high school Omar also took a stab at community college. And we became infrequent friends. Because I was always driving from one city to another at this time, all my friends (and girlfriends) tended to be infrequent. The people who really connected with me though, always knew where to find me. And many of them would travel with me sometimes from place to place. Omar was one of these friends.
Omar had a band called Illegal Cable Box. Illegal Cable Box played once or twice a month at the small all-ages clubs in Monterey. They, and Omar, who really was the band, specialized in the new and emerging grunge scene, but maintained solid roots in punk and acid rock. Omar was a little crazy and unpredictable. He frequently made a scene at his shows, by yelling insults at the crowd, or taking his clothes off, or throwing things. In his spare time Omar worked at Subway, building sandwiches, with his girlfriend. And he began to take fewer and fewer classes, eventually dropping out all together. Omar defined love in very simple terms. He often told me he knew he loved his girl because if she asked, he would not hesitate to pick her nose for her. I think he makes a good point (weak pun unintended). He knew she loved him because she put up with him. Omar didn’t do drugs. He barely drank. But he had the best line, the best ice breaker I ever heard. Whenever he met someone new, whoever it was, he always asked the person the same question. He said “Hey man, do you know where I can score some heroin?”
He reasoned that an individual’s response to this question would instantly tell him everything he really wanted to know about them. He would know immediately whether he wanted to continue a relationship with said person in any way. He used this line often. He was not, of course, actually looking to score heroin. He couldn’t have afforded it if he had been answered in the affirmative. I saw him do this many times. And the thing I loved about it the most was that he never got an affirmative answer, not even as a joke. Apparently the question was so off-putting upon initial introduction that it even caught smart-asses off their guard. The responses always ranged from an obviously shocked “NO” to a casual “nah man sorry.” The second answer was the one he was looking for. Those people were his friends. I loved that guy.
About this time I was entering into a little custody battle over my oldest son. His mother found an older guy to marry, and was under the impression that a sixteen or seventeen-year-old dad was something her baby could do without. Her new husband in his late twenties would make a fine father. But because my name was on the birth certificate, they had to hire a lawyer to try and get rid of me. Having been a loving father to my son thus far, I decided to give them a run for their money, and stake my claim as a legitimate parent to the boy. I figured that at the very least when he grew up he would be glad to know that loser wasn’t really his father.
Because of the impending drama, I decided to go a little more legitimate with my fledgling career in pizza and poker. And although poker had paid my rent once or twice, I decided to give it up to take a job as a night time attendant at a gas station convenience store. This job was supposed to allow me time to get all my homework done on the job, and get to class after work in the morning. It worked fairly well. I was able to carry 18 units, work full-time, and maintain a 3.5 GPA. My grades might have been better were it not for the fact that it also afforded an opportunity for my friends to find me, and come visit at any time during the night when all other smart people were sleeping.
Friends near and far came to see me at all hours. The guys from the bay area would get a bug up their butt and drive down to see the ocean, and they knew where to find me. We spent hours inside that box in those days, filling it with smoke (one memorable Christmas night in particular), filling it with laughter. It was certainly one of the best jobs I ever had. One of my most frequent visitors was Omar. He would come by “the box” with his portable stereo with music in it that he absolutely needed me to hear. He introduced me to Nirvana, Blue Cheer, Iggy and the Stooges, and Greenday when Dookie was new. He sometimes brought his guitar and would just hang out for hours talking about his girlfriend, music, his band, and the joys of masturbation (he may have been a little OCD). Once he brought his band, and we used 8mm camcorders to record a video in the convenience store. We had the drums set up by the beer coolers, a bass player wandering the isles, and Omar standing on top of the ice cream freezer. After reviewing the tapes they weren’t satisfied, and later we found that the grainy security camera footage made the best music video of all. So we stole the tape.
Having nothing better to do, Omar began to travel with me after a while and met all my bay area friends. He was an instant favorite of theirs as well. Sometimes he would drive the 200 mile round trip with me to pick up my son for the weekend. I will never forget the day, near the end of our long and drawn out custody battle, that I introduced Omar to my son’s mother. She and I had not been talking much since her marriage. I think she had really hoped to simplify her life by getting married and having her new husband adopt her son. I think that having a seventeen-year-old around every other weekend to take the kid away was becoming a real nuisance for them, and it screwed with her plan for simplicity. She was looking for any good reason to keep me away.
We walked to the door with cautious looks around. Her husband and I were likely to exchange words at that time. I hoped he wasn’t there. Before we could even knock the door opened. Both of them were there with my son. As my little boy ran to give me a hug, I introduced Omar. Before I could even think about it, and as soon as they pretended it was nice to meet him, through ears that didn’t even feel like mine I heard “Hey man, do you know where I can score some heroin?”
I have never in my life secured a child in a car seat and driven away so quickly with what I swear was a single motion. It must have been quite a sight to the shocked observers in the doorway. We laughed for at least sixty miles. Our next day in court was two weeks away.
Good times.
The community college system in the United States, particularly in California, is a very interesting system. Sometimes called “Junior Colleges,” these institutions serve primarily returning students (i.e. old people in college for the first time) and slackers who couldn’t, or wouldn’t go to a real university after high school, and who still lived with their parents. I belonged to this second species.
When I quit high school at sixteen, I had a job delivering pizza and playing poker in the relatively small community of Salinas, California. Ill-content to resign myself to this fate eternally, and thinking it a good idea to provide some kind of example to my one-year-old baby son, I decided to enroll in courses at the community college. A small part of me thought it was cool to “buck the system” and start “college” at sixteen. There was no way “the man” was going to tell me where to go to school.
Starting classes at the community college was a great experience for me. It gave me the excuse and opportunity to take steps toward actions that later in life would prove to be critical for defining my character. During those years, for example, I had lunch with my mother almost every day. And after a troubled adolescence she and I were able to form a new and strong relationship which endures to this day. But that is the topic for another essay. These years ushered me into the world of frequent travel that may very well have been prophetic for the odd life I live today. I lived in Salinas, my son lived in another city roughly a hundred miles away, and many of my best friends had gone to real college in other cities even further away. Community college schedules afforded me the opportunity to frequently drive my own miniature version of Kerouac’s amazing triangle. My parents never knew where I was. And finally, after ten years of having older friends, and wishing I had been placed two grades ahead, I found myself there. I reunited with, and spent much time with many of my older friends from high school who had legitimately graduated the year before.
One of these friends was Omar. Omar had been “that weird punk kid” in high school. He was the only child of an otherwise traditional Chicano family in Salinas, and was a musical genius. He played guitar, in the words of Sublime, “like a mother-fucking riot.” That is the best way to describe it. He had been playing since he was about four years old. And having been a wannabe guitarist since my early teen years, I envied his skill. He could play anything and make it look easy.
Not having any good ideas for his future after high school Omar also took a stab at community college. And we became infrequent friends. Because I was always driving from one city to another at this time, all my friends (and girlfriends) tended to be infrequent. The people who really connected with me though, always knew where to find me. And many of them would travel with me sometimes from place to place. Omar was one of these friends.
Omar had a band called Illegal Cable Box. Illegal Cable Box played once or twice a month at the small all-ages clubs in Monterey. They, and Omar, who really was the band, specialized in the new and emerging grunge scene, but maintained solid roots in punk and acid rock. Omar was a little crazy and unpredictable. He frequently made a scene at his shows, by yelling insults at the crowd, or taking his clothes off, or throwing things. In his spare time Omar worked at Subway, building sandwiches, with his girlfriend. And he began to take fewer and fewer classes, eventually dropping out all together. Omar defined love in very simple terms. He often told me he knew he loved his girl because if she asked, he would not hesitate to pick her nose for her. I think he makes a good point (weak pun unintended). He knew she loved him because she put up with him. Omar didn’t do drugs. He barely drank. But he had the best line, the best ice breaker I ever heard. Whenever he met someone new, whoever it was, he always asked the person the same question. He said “Hey man, do you know where I can score some heroin?”
He reasoned that an individual’s response to this question would instantly tell him everything he really wanted to know about them. He would know immediately whether he wanted to continue a relationship with said person in any way. He used this line often. He was not, of course, actually looking to score heroin. He couldn’t have afforded it if he had been answered in the affirmative. I saw him do this many times. And the thing I loved about it the most was that he never got an affirmative answer, not even as a joke. Apparently the question was so off-putting upon initial introduction that it even caught smart-asses off their guard. The responses always ranged from an obviously shocked “NO” to a casual “nah man sorry.” The second answer was the one he was looking for. Those people were his friends. I loved that guy.
About this time I was entering into a little custody battle over my oldest son. His mother found an older guy to marry, and was under the impression that a sixteen or seventeen-year-old dad was something her baby could do without. Her new husband in his late twenties would make a fine father. But because my name was on the birth certificate, they had to hire a lawyer to try and get rid of me. Having been a loving father to my son thus far, I decided to give them a run for their money, and stake my claim as a legitimate parent to the boy. I figured that at the very least when he grew up he would be glad to know that loser wasn’t really his father.
Because of the impending drama, I decided to go a little more legitimate with my fledgling career in pizza and poker. And although poker had paid my rent once or twice, I decided to give it up to take a job as a night time attendant at a gas station convenience store. This job was supposed to allow me time to get all my homework done on the job, and get to class after work in the morning. It worked fairly well. I was able to carry 18 units, work full-time, and maintain a 3.5 GPA. My grades might have been better were it not for the fact that it also afforded an opportunity for my friends to find me, and come visit at any time during the night when all other smart people were sleeping.
Friends near and far came to see me at all hours. The guys from the bay area would get a bug up their butt and drive down to see the ocean, and they knew where to find me. We spent hours inside that box in those days, filling it with smoke (one memorable Christmas night in particular), filling it with laughter. It was certainly one of the best jobs I ever had. One of my most frequent visitors was Omar. He would come by “the box” with his portable stereo with music in it that he absolutely needed me to hear. He introduced me to Nirvana, Blue Cheer, Iggy and the Stooges, and Greenday when Dookie was new. He sometimes brought his guitar and would just hang out for hours talking about his girlfriend, music, his band, and the joys of masturbation (he may have been a little OCD). Once he brought his band, and we used 8mm camcorders to record a video in the convenience store. We had the drums set up by the beer coolers, a bass player wandering the isles, and Omar standing on top of the ice cream freezer. After reviewing the tapes they weren’t satisfied, and later we found that the grainy security camera footage made the best music video of all. So we stole the tape.
Having nothing better to do, Omar began to travel with me after a while and met all my bay area friends. He was an instant favorite of theirs as well. Sometimes he would drive the 200 mile round trip with me to pick up my son for the weekend. I will never forget the day, near the end of our long and drawn out custody battle, that I introduced Omar to my son’s mother. She and I had not been talking much since her marriage. I think she had really hoped to simplify her life by getting married and having her new husband adopt her son. I think that having a seventeen-year-old around every other weekend to take the kid away was becoming a real nuisance for them, and it screwed with her plan for simplicity. She was looking for any good reason to keep me away.
We walked to the door with cautious looks around. Her husband and I were likely to exchange words at that time. I hoped he wasn’t there. Before we could even knock the door opened. Both of them were there with my son. As my little boy ran to give me a hug, I introduced Omar. Before I could even think about it, and as soon as they pretended it was nice to meet him, through ears that didn’t even feel like mine I heard “Hey man, do you know where I can score some heroin?”
I have never in my life secured a child in a car seat and driven away so quickly with what I swear was a single motion. It must have been quite a sight to the shocked observers in the doorway. We laughed for at least sixty miles. Our next day in court was two weeks away.
Good times.
Sunday
The Gradual and Fundamental Effect of Affective Probability
Knowledge is found everywhere. What you do with it determines wisdom.
The second half of my undergraduate career was spent in a warehouse. Sure I went to class most mornings. But the real knowledge I collected during those two-and-a-half years was much more worldly than the theories of water imagery in T.S. Elliot's poetry that worked so hard at prolonging my hangovers.
During those years I majored in vulgarity, profanity, and obscenity, with special emphasis in "what I did with your mother last night." I may never have enjoyed a job more.
Of course my second, and less legitimate major at the university, which seemed to distract me from good times, was English. And I struggled with it. I spent the first half of my undergraduate career in Salinas, as a Behavioral Sciences major. And I excelled in those courses, transferring to "the big school" in Sacramento with a lofty GPA.
But I had a lot of responsibility at the time. I indulged my pride in my ability to support myself, pay child support, and keep a full-time job. I didn't think I would ever realistically be able to do the field work involved in becoming a real anthropologist or sociologist. I didn't have the same kinds of freedoms as other people my age.
And to make things worse, a friend of mine, on whom I had a major crush at the time, made the mistake one night in San Francisco, of referring to me as an "intellectual." I don't think I really knew what it meant at the time. But I liked the sound of it. And my ego soared at the notion that I could be one. I decided then and there to change my major to English, because I wanted more girls to think of me as "intellectual." I was sure that a wide and varied knowledge of classic literature would do it for me.
I had also decided that I wanted to be a teacher. And English seemed like the best subject to teach. As far as I knew, English teachers were the coolest old hippies ever. And I wanted to be one of them.
When I arrived in Sacramento to start this new chapter in life, I had no job, and I didn't know a soul in the city, aside from my roommate, who had tagged along with me from Salinas. He was a childhood friend whose parents had died, and I had sort of been taking care of him for a while. We had been best friends for many years. He didn't really have anything else going on, so Sacramento seemed like a good idea for him also.
Enlisting my killer work ethic, which had gotten me as far as I had at nineteen, I found a great job in less than a week. I was to stock shelves at an auto parts distribution warehouse for $7.50 per hour. This would be plenty of money to pay my rent ($230), pay child support, eat, put gas in my car, and buy beer. I would work the swing shift, leaving my mornings open for classes. After several years of working many odd jobs to try and make ends meet, this would be the only job I would have for the rest of my undergraduate career.
Probability is something I have always been fascinated with. Even during my short stint as a high school student, probability was something that always got me thinking. As I avoided math classes during my undergraduate years, discussions of probability were something to which I always paid attention. It always seemed like a fairly simple concept, but somehow incredibly far-reaching. I remember realizing, talking with one of my instructors in Salinas one day, that when it comes to buying lottery tickets, I could choose the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. And as absurd as it seemed to me at the time, and to most people, I would have exactly the same chances of winning the jackpot as anyone else with any other set of numbers. Probability defied intuition. And yet, it so clearly explained so many truths that I thought otherwise went unnoticed. I started to wonder if an understanding of probability might not help me achieve a level of enlightenment I might otherwise miss. I realized that probability is always at work in the universe, and yet, in our culture, we rarely consider it. Slowly, probability began to become a larger and more important part of my world-view.
I employed my rudimentary knowledge of probability in my new job. Because I was determined to one-day graduate from college, and because I was worried that I might not actually do it, I determined that my greatest chance of succeeding in life was to diversify my abilities and experience.
English proved to be a much more difficult major for me. I had also met a girl, who would, during this time, become my wife, so I was plenty distracted from my studies by the real world. This is when I began to embrace the real world.
I learned, and worked at, every job I could in that warehouse. I started stocking shelves, then moved to checking and verifying special orders, pulling parts, shipping special packages, processing damaged returns, driving forklifts, loading trucks, and toward the end even moved into the front office for data entry and purchasing work, and to show the managers how to use Excel, which was just catching on in this world. Some nights, after my regular shift, I would even go out on the overnight delivery routes with the truck drivers into Nevada, for an extra $50 and the knowledge of what it takes to be an overnight truck driver. I even began working on a commercial truck-driving license, because you never know. Probability had convinced me that the more practical knowledge and experience I had, the more likely I was to be able to maintain some level of success in life, and continue to meet my growing obligations, regardless of what happened with my actual college education.
But my major was doing its work on me. I did learn to love John Donne and the metaphysical poets. I got a little recognition for my own poems of war and heartache. I was all over Shakespeare. I particularly loved American fiction. And I even saw the voice of a generation in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I knew indeed that in the rooms the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.
Another important thing I learned was a little bit of grammar and usage. And this knowledge fell hard on me one day, literally.
When I spent time processing damaged returns at the warehouse, which is just a fancy term for a job literally breaking stuff, I had to stamp certain types of invoices with a rubber stamp, which had been carefully procured on my behalf. It was one of those self-inking kinds, with bold red ink and block letters that read "Does not Effect Stock."
Now, let's imagine for a moment, that the capitalization scheme used on this stamp made any sense at all. I was willing to look past that. But as time went on, I became more and more offended, that my employer would ask me to support such flagrant disregard for the English language as this use of "Effect." After all, I was now a man of words. I had respect for the language. I felt deeply that in order to communicate as clearly as possible one's meaning, certain rules needed to be followed. After a few months, I couldn't stand it anymore. I walked into the office of Sandy, the warehouse manager, with the offending tool in my hand.
Sandy was not a reasonable person in any way. She had been born and raised in warehouses such as these, and had endured a hard life. She also had a superiority complex, and no tolerance for a smart mouth. She also didn't like me very much.
I very sincerely and earnestly explained to her that "effect" is a noun, not a verb, and that what she was looking for, in this fragment, was in fact a verb, in which case "affect" would do nicely.
She stared at me blankly.
I made my case about the importance of clarity in communication, and how I understood that effect and affect were commonly mistaken for one another. I said I understood completely, but that I could no longer participate in this sort of activity. I would be requiring a new stamp. I knew she could get one ordered for me quickly.
She continued to stare at me.
I gently placed the stamp on her desk in front of her, turned my back and began to walk out of her office, to look for the deepest darkest hole in the warehouse in which to hide for a while.
I had barely made the door to her office when the stamp hit me squarely on the back of my head. I didn't even look back. I simply picked it up, and returned with it to my post. Sandy never said a word.
Lesson learned. And I should have known from my studies in probability that no one likes to be corrected. Probability suggests that if one is an arrogant ass in the face of others, those same people are likely to be asses in return.
This simple notion now forms the basis of my world-view. It is very similar to what some people refer to as Karma. I dig the notion, and buy it completely. I just approach it from a less spiritual point of view. Rather than assuming that there is some intangible force out there wreaking havoc on assholes and piling rewards on altruists, I think of it as simple theoretical probability. If you are an asshole, chances are, someone will be an asshole back at you. If you are a generally caring, helpful, and selfless individual, chances are, others will react to you accordingly. In fact I can very simply agree with any Buddhist that Karma exists, but another name for this force at work in the universe, is probability.
Seeing my world in terms of probability gives me a basis for making decisions that might otherwise be completely uninformed. This is how basic religious beliefs work for other people. Many Christians make decisions daily based on their understanding of the bible and belief in a set of morals, theoretically based on that scripture. The same is true for any other religion or world-view. My belief in probability allows me to experience "miracles" as well, for lack of a better term. And I have. Before my youngest son was born, when the doctors sat me down to tell me that I would lose either my son or my wife, they explained to me the situation in terms of probability, which I understood and greatly appreciated. I knew that the odds were stacked against survival for both of them. I also knew that if they could save one of them they would, and that the probability of survival would be higher for my son than for my wife. Because I understood the difference between theoretical and experimental probability, I knew that the combined chances of each of them surviving, or the probability that they would both survive, was very, very low. And I prepared myself for this. I did not find God. I left my faith in probability, and the hands of the surgeons and pediatricians.
When they both survived, and both came home, I experienced a miracle. Understand that there is no difference between my explanation of a miracle and the traditional "Christian" explanation of a miracle. Both occur when the probability of something happening is very, very small, and it happens anyway.
And I continue to find other connections between probability and larger sciences, which for me serve to confirm my simplistic notions.
I went on to study math, statistics, and probability in a much more in-depth fashion in later years. I learned that either our system of geometry is inadequate for really explaining the universe, or, the universe is internally infinite (Try constructing a right triangle, say out of wood, using the Pythagorean theorem to make your measurements, where the length of the hypotenuse becomes the square root of 2. Use any cutting device you want, but you will never, ever, cut any material to exactly the length of the square root of 2.), while I know from my later studies of physics that it is externally finite, as Dr. Hawking tells us, because the sky is dark at night.
The relationship between probability and Karma was reaffirmed for me not too long ago, when I was reading an article about more modern studies in anthropology, and scientists now believe that altruism is a very valuable trait to possess when it comes to natural selection. It seems that recent sociological and anthropological studies have shown that the people, or animals, in most groups who give the most, also receive the most, and are therefore more likely to survive. Altruism, or a sense of "conscience" may just have been an important trait, like opposable thumbs, in our own journey to the top of the food chain. It will certainly be important to keep us going. And it seems that probability is the driving force behind this notion. The more we give, the more we receive.
One of my favorite confirmations of my belief in probability as the driving force behind our universe, and one which I still do not completely understand, and consequently spend much time thinking about, is in the relatively new field of physics known as quantum mechanics.
One of my more recently acquired hobbies has been teaching myself to understand physics, and what humanity knows about the laws and forces at work in our universe. Any of you who are physicists will have to excuse my amateur and over-simplified explanation of this very complicated phenomenon. One of the most fascinating concentrations in physics is quantum mechanics, or quantum theory. Quantum theorists are physicists who spend their time looking for, and researching, the smallest building blocks of our universe. Currently, they deal in quarks. Because we have not yet found anything smaller, quarks are currently believed to be the smallest units of matter in existence in the universe. Everything is made of quarks. But quarks are interesting because no one knows exactly what to make of them. Physical science has a long tradition of predicting all activities in the universe with the use of a set of physical laws, believed to be constant and unchanging. However, Quarks don't exactly fit this mold. While we can predict the movements of planets and stars with a level of certainty that allows us to send probes out billions of miles and know where they will end up, we cannot predict the movements of quarks. Quarks react a little differently every time we do anything to them. There is no pattern. In fact, one of the ways quarks are classified is in terms of probability. The only way to predict the movement of a quark is in terms of probability. There is no rule, and no pattern to a quark's reaction to outside stimulus. Quarks can only be defined in terms of the probability that they might move a certain way, or react some other way to a given stimulus.
Einstein could not accept this idea. It is the source of his famous quote "God doesn't play dice." And yet, in all the years since Einstein's death, this odd characteristic of quarks has been confirmed over and over again.
The most fundamental building blocks of the universe can only be explained in terms of probability. I love that. And I have not fully considered the implications of this in my simple world-view.
I have very fond memories of the years I spent in that warehouse. And now that I am back in Sacramento, I drive by from time to time and always remember the lump on the back of my head. I only regret that I never had the chance to tell Sandy "That isn't how your mom reacted when I gave her my stamp last night."
The second half of my undergraduate career was spent in a warehouse. Sure I went to class most mornings. But the real knowledge I collected during those two-and-a-half years was much more worldly than the theories of water imagery in T.S. Elliot's poetry that worked so hard at prolonging my hangovers.
During those years I majored in vulgarity, profanity, and obscenity, with special emphasis in "what I did with your mother last night." I may never have enjoyed a job more.
Of course my second, and less legitimate major at the university, which seemed to distract me from good times, was English. And I struggled with it. I spent the first half of my undergraduate career in Salinas, as a Behavioral Sciences major. And I excelled in those courses, transferring to "the big school" in Sacramento with a lofty GPA.
But I had a lot of responsibility at the time. I indulged my pride in my ability to support myself, pay child support, and keep a full-time job. I didn't think I would ever realistically be able to do the field work involved in becoming a real anthropologist or sociologist. I didn't have the same kinds of freedoms as other people my age.
And to make things worse, a friend of mine, on whom I had a major crush at the time, made the mistake one night in San Francisco, of referring to me as an "intellectual." I don't think I really knew what it meant at the time. But I liked the sound of it. And my ego soared at the notion that I could be one. I decided then and there to change my major to English, because I wanted more girls to think of me as "intellectual." I was sure that a wide and varied knowledge of classic literature would do it for me.
I had also decided that I wanted to be a teacher. And English seemed like the best subject to teach. As far as I knew, English teachers were the coolest old hippies ever. And I wanted to be one of them.
When I arrived in Sacramento to start this new chapter in life, I had no job, and I didn't know a soul in the city, aside from my roommate, who had tagged along with me from Salinas. He was a childhood friend whose parents had died, and I had sort of been taking care of him for a while. We had been best friends for many years. He didn't really have anything else going on, so Sacramento seemed like a good idea for him also.
Enlisting my killer work ethic, which had gotten me as far as I had at nineteen, I found a great job in less than a week. I was to stock shelves at an auto parts distribution warehouse for $7.50 per hour. This would be plenty of money to pay my rent ($230), pay child support, eat, put gas in my car, and buy beer. I would work the swing shift, leaving my mornings open for classes. After several years of working many odd jobs to try and make ends meet, this would be the only job I would have for the rest of my undergraduate career.
Probability is something I have always been fascinated with. Even during my short stint as a high school student, probability was something that always got me thinking. As I avoided math classes during my undergraduate years, discussions of probability were something to which I always paid attention. It always seemed like a fairly simple concept, but somehow incredibly far-reaching. I remember realizing, talking with one of my instructors in Salinas one day, that when it comes to buying lottery tickets, I could choose the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. And as absurd as it seemed to me at the time, and to most people, I would have exactly the same chances of winning the jackpot as anyone else with any other set of numbers. Probability defied intuition. And yet, it so clearly explained so many truths that I thought otherwise went unnoticed. I started to wonder if an understanding of probability might not help me achieve a level of enlightenment I might otherwise miss. I realized that probability is always at work in the universe, and yet, in our culture, we rarely consider it. Slowly, probability began to become a larger and more important part of my world-view.
I employed my rudimentary knowledge of probability in my new job. Because I was determined to one-day graduate from college, and because I was worried that I might not actually do it, I determined that my greatest chance of succeeding in life was to diversify my abilities and experience.
English proved to be a much more difficult major for me. I had also met a girl, who would, during this time, become my wife, so I was plenty distracted from my studies by the real world. This is when I began to embrace the real world.
I learned, and worked at, every job I could in that warehouse. I started stocking shelves, then moved to checking and verifying special orders, pulling parts, shipping special packages, processing damaged returns, driving forklifts, loading trucks, and toward the end even moved into the front office for data entry and purchasing work, and to show the managers how to use Excel, which was just catching on in this world. Some nights, after my regular shift, I would even go out on the overnight delivery routes with the truck drivers into Nevada, for an extra $50 and the knowledge of what it takes to be an overnight truck driver. I even began working on a commercial truck-driving license, because you never know. Probability had convinced me that the more practical knowledge and experience I had, the more likely I was to be able to maintain some level of success in life, and continue to meet my growing obligations, regardless of what happened with my actual college education.
But my major was doing its work on me. I did learn to love John Donne and the metaphysical poets. I got a little recognition for my own poems of war and heartache. I was all over Shakespeare. I particularly loved American fiction. And I even saw the voice of a generation in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I knew indeed that in the rooms the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.
Another important thing I learned was a little bit of grammar and usage. And this knowledge fell hard on me one day, literally.
When I spent time processing damaged returns at the warehouse, which is just a fancy term for a job literally breaking stuff, I had to stamp certain types of invoices with a rubber stamp, which had been carefully procured on my behalf. It was one of those self-inking kinds, with bold red ink and block letters that read "Does not Effect Stock."
Now, let's imagine for a moment, that the capitalization scheme used on this stamp made any sense at all. I was willing to look past that. But as time went on, I became more and more offended, that my employer would ask me to support such flagrant disregard for the English language as this use of "Effect." After all, I was now a man of words. I had respect for the language. I felt deeply that in order to communicate as clearly as possible one's meaning, certain rules needed to be followed. After a few months, I couldn't stand it anymore. I walked into the office of Sandy, the warehouse manager, with the offending tool in my hand.
Sandy was not a reasonable person in any way. She had been born and raised in warehouses such as these, and had endured a hard life. She also had a superiority complex, and no tolerance for a smart mouth. She also didn't like me very much.
I very sincerely and earnestly explained to her that "effect" is a noun, not a verb, and that what she was looking for, in this fragment, was in fact a verb, in which case "affect" would do nicely.
She stared at me blankly.
I made my case about the importance of clarity in communication, and how I understood that effect and affect were commonly mistaken for one another. I said I understood completely, but that I could no longer participate in this sort of activity. I would be requiring a new stamp. I knew she could get one ordered for me quickly.
She continued to stare at me.
I gently placed the stamp on her desk in front of her, turned my back and began to walk out of her office, to look for the deepest darkest hole in the warehouse in which to hide for a while.
I had barely made the door to her office when the stamp hit me squarely on the back of my head. I didn't even look back. I simply picked it up, and returned with it to my post. Sandy never said a word.
Lesson learned. And I should have known from my studies in probability that no one likes to be corrected. Probability suggests that if one is an arrogant ass in the face of others, those same people are likely to be asses in return.
This simple notion now forms the basis of my world-view. It is very similar to what some people refer to as Karma. I dig the notion, and buy it completely. I just approach it from a less spiritual point of view. Rather than assuming that there is some intangible force out there wreaking havoc on assholes and piling rewards on altruists, I think of it as simple theoretical probability. If you are an asshole, chances are, someone will be an asshole back at you. If you are a generally caring, helpful, and selfless individual, chances are, others will react to you accordingly. In fact I can very simply agree with any Buddhist that Karma exists, but another name for this force at work in the universe, is probability.
Seeing my world in terms of probability gives me a basis for making decisions that might otherwise be completely uninformed. This is how basic religious beliefs work for other people. Many Christians make decisions daily based on their understanding of the bible and belief in a set of morals, theoretically based on that scripture. The same is true for any other religion or world-view. My belief in probability allows me to experience "miracles" as well, for lack of a better term. And I have. Before my youngest son was born, when the doctors sat me down to tell me that I would lose either my son or my wife, they explained to me the situation in terms of probability, which I understood and greatly appreciated. I knew that the odds were stacked against survival for both of them. I also knew that if they could save one of them they would, and that the probability of survival would be higher for my son than for my wife. Because I understood the difference between theoretical and experimental probability, I knew that the combined chances of each of them surviving, or the probability that they would both survive, was very, very low. And I prepared myself for this. I did not find God. I left my faith in probability, and the hands of the surgeons and pediatricians.
When they both survived, and both came home, I experienced a miracle. Understand that there is no difference between my explanation of a miracle and the traditional "Christian" explanation of a miracle. Both occur when the probability of something happening is very, very small, and it happens anyway.
And I continue to find other connections between probability and larger sciences, which for me serve to confirm my simplistic notions.
I went on to study math, statistics, and probability in a much more in-depth fashion in later years. I learned that either our system of geometry is inadequate for really explaining the universe, or, the universe is internally infinite (Try constructing a right triangle, say out of wood, using the Pythagorean theorem to make your measurements, where the length of the hypotenuse becomes the square root of 2. Use any cutting device you want, but you will never, ever, cut any material to exactly the length of the square root of 2.), while I know from my later studies of physics that it is externally finite, as Dr. Hawking tells us, because the sky is dark at night.
The relationship between probability and Karma was reaffirmed for me not too long ago, when I was reading an article about more modern studies in anthropology, and scientists now believe that altruism is a very valuable trait to possess when it comes to natural selection. It seems that recent sociological and anthropological studies have shown that the people, or animals, in most groups who give the most, also receive the most, and are therefore more likely to survive. Altruism, or a sense of "conscience" may just have been an important trait, like opposable thumbs, in our own journey to the top of the food chain. It will certainly be important to keep us going. And it seems that probability is the driving force behind this notion. The more we give, the more we receive.
One of my favorite confirmations of my belief in probability as the driving force behind our universe, and one which I still do not completely understand, and consequently spend much time thinking about, is in the relatively new field of physics known as quantum mechanics.
One of my more recently acquired hobbies has been teaching myself to understand physics, and what humanity knows about the laws and forces at work in our universe. Any of you who are physicists will have to excuse my amateur and over-simplified explanation of this very complicated phenomenon. One of the most fascinating concentrations in physics is quantum mechanics, or quantum theory. Quantum theorists are physicists who spend their time looking for, and researching, the smallest building blocks of our universe. Currently, they deal in quarks. Because we have not yet found anything smaller, quarks are currently believed to be the smallest units of matter in existence in the universe. Everything is made of quarks. But quarks are interesting because no one knows exactly what to make of them. Physical science has a long tradition of predicting all activities in the universe with the use of a set of physical laws, believed to be constant and unchanging. However, Quarks don't exactly fit this mold. While we can predict the movements of planets and stars with a level of certainty that allows us to send probes out billions of miles and know where they will end up, we cannot predict the movements of quarks. Quarks react a little differently every time we do anything to them. There is no pattern. In fact, one of the ways quarks are classified is in terms of probability. The only way to predict the movement of a quark is in terms of probability. There is no rule, and no pattern to a quark's reaction to outside stimulus. Quarks can only be defined in terms of the probability that they might move a certain way, or react some other way to a given stimulus.
Einstein could not accept this idea. It is the source of his famous quote "God doesn't play dice." And yet, in all the years since Einstein's death, this odd characteristic of quarks has been confirmed over and over again.
The most fundamental building blocks of the universe can only be explained in terms of probability. I love that. And I have not fully considered the implications of this in my simple world-view.
I have very fond memories of the years I spent in that warehouse. And now that I am back in Sacramento, I drive by from time to time and always remember the lump on the back of my head. I only regret that I never had the chance to tell Sandy "That isn't how your mom reacted when I gave her my stamp last night."
Wednesday
Green Like Me
I have spent a lot of time in my adult life talking about things I hate, like coconut, other people’s kids, Eskimos, and the environment. Now I am going to write about those things. Well, I am going to write about one of those things. I am sure I don’t need to explain the rest of them. You understand.
The environment is not really that great, and I am tired of people trying to convince me that it is.
Historically, Americans have seen progress as a good thing. This is our legacy. It makes sense. For millions of years, human beings were nothing more than large, clever animals. Sure we could talk, but birds can do that. We could make and use tools, but chimps and otters do that. There was nothing particularly special about human beings until we learned to master fire, burned down a forest, and put in a Starbucks. That is when progress was born. And to this day, as intelligent and highly organized as we imagine ourselves to be, the only thing that separates man from beast is mastery of our environment. All other animals live and die at the mercy of their environment. They are powerless to do anything other than adapt to changes, or die. Not us. While the other animals get their asses kicked daily by fundamental changes to their environments, we made the whole world our bitch.
Hell. Yes.
That’s why we are cool.
But lately our culture has become bent on the notion of being “green.” We think every tiny thing we do must somehow involve saving the environment. It took a really long time for this to happen. It started with hippies. I blame the hippies. As the baby boomers began to realize exactly how massive a failure their little counter-culture experiment had become, some of them got jobs. Many of them didn’t want a real job, so they became teachers. Those teachers began spewing their hippie propaganda all over kids like me. It was us, generation x, the kids who went to school in the seventies and eighties, who got the guilt treatment about how awful we were being to the earth. The hippies told us it was true, and we believed them.
Stupid hippies.
Unfortunately, another common American trait is that few of us ever question the things we were taught as children. Now that we are the target demographic, eagerly awaiting our turn to control the world once the last of the baby boomers have driven their RVs into the sunset, generation x continues to believe, and teach our children the same hippie propaganda we learned as kids.
The problem is that it is all bullshit.
We never stopped to think about it. Conservation and environmentalism in any form seem intuitively positive to us. So we never really think a thing through. If something seems “green” we like it, no matter what.
At first I started saying I hate the environment because I thought it was a funny thing to say in the face of everyone in my generation being so concerned about whether or not there was a recycling bin next to every trash bin in the entire fucking world. There were protests about it when I was in college. I didn’t really hate the environment, I just thought the people who were so bent on saving it were stupid, and I wanted to make fun of them. That’s what I do. See at the time I noticed what I thought were some fundamental flaws in their philosophies as they related to their demands. For example, the recycling bins were made of plastic. This amused me. I thought that a desire to recycle materials was necessarily reflective of an overall desire to reduce pollution and man’s impact on the natural world. So it seemed odd to me that you would produce vehicles to aid in such efforts which are constructed from a material which is particularly good at polluting the environment, both in its production and in its existence, particularly the spectacular ability plastics have to clutter up the natural world for projected millennia. I also thought that eventually the pseudo-activists pushing for such things would realize their own contradictions, and the matter would resolve itself in coming decades when we all laughed together about how funny the nineties were with all the flannel shirts, Doc Martens, and crazy ideas like recycling.
But I was wrong. I was wrong about people realizing the inherent contradictions in recycling. I was also wrong in assuming that the desire to recycle was a manifestation of a broader concern about man’s impact on the natural world. Apparently the desire to recycle is only a desire to recycle.
It has been demonstrated over and over again, by researchers and investigative reporters, that all the recycling we do, of cans, and glass, (and now even plastics), paper, etc., all the time we spend sorting it (when it could otherwise be “business time”) and placing it in those big plastic containers in front of our houses on trash day, is in vain. We know this. I don’t even need to explain it because you can Google it quickly. It is a fact, that the energy used to process the materials collected in all of those recycling bins creates more pollution, and a greater ultimate impact on the environment than would the production of the very same new materials. Also, recycling is way more expensive, and a total pain in the ass.
But we do it anyway, even though we know it is bullshit, because our teachers told us to, and we loved those old hippies.
Strange right?
Now I really do hate the environment. But I have a healthy respect for it. I am afraid of the earth. I don’t generally spend a lot of time trying to protect things I fear. As a Darwinist, I believe that this world created us, and when it wants to, just as it has done to so many species before us, most of which we will never even know about, the earth will kick our asses. It isn’t the other way around. I don’t believe that global warming is something humans can control, and consequently, I don’t think global warming is something we can cause either. I saw Al Gore’s stupid PowerPoint presentation. But I know the difference between a correlation and a causal relationship. I also like to think I know propaganda when I see it. But what I definitely know is how little we really do know about anything, let alone our own planet and how it works and changes over time. We are not nearly as smart as we think we are. I think it is vain and short sighted for us to think that we, a bunch of clever apes who learned to burn shit down, have the ability to destroy a planet that created us, which existed long before we did, and which will exist long after we are gone. The earth could simply erase us any time, or we could erase ourselves, and in a hundred thousand years, maybe less, there would be no noticeable trace that we had ever existed.
You don’t have to believe what I write. You probably shouldn’t anyway. I am notoriously misled.
But I am not all bad. I do a number of green things myself.
I ride an electric train to work every day. Not that kind of electric train, a big one. I ride Sacramento’s municipal light rail system. Public transportation is considered very green because of its perceived efficiencies. Multiple people on a single vehicle is way more efficient than a bunch of individual cars on the road, right? Maybe. I started riding the train because I am cheap and lazy. My new job doesn’t pay for parking downtown. So riding the train is much cheaper and easier than searching for and ultimately paying for parking. It was hard for me to decide that damaging the environment had just become too expensive for me. I guess life is full of trade-offs. I like to ride outside of typical commute hours when the trains are mostly empty. A train is way bigger than any car, and sometimes I am the only person riding. That is my favorite. I like to think about how much coal is being burned at the local power plant to produce all the electricity it takes to run that train for the 25 or so miles I ride, with all the stops, and making cars wait at intersections when we cross, idling all those emissions into the air. And then it just keeps going after I get off, even if no one is on it. Riding the train is awesome.
When I am not riding a huge train alone, I drive an old truck with a lot of miles on it. Again, I do this because I am cheap and don’t want to make car payments. I plan to drive it for as long as I possibly can. I know this doesn’t seem particularly green, but consider that driving an old car is the ultimate form of recycling. I maintain that even though my truck is huge, and gets terrible gas mileage, and that I never have anything to haul around and it probably doesn’t even make sense for me to have a truck, I am creating far less an impact on the environment with my old truck than you are with your new hybrid. But I am glad you have a new car. Do you know how much energy it takes to make a new car? Those shiny new things aren’t made from recycled materials, and they are almost all plastic! I love to think about all the chemicals that go in to manufacturing new cars, with all their toxic pollution and industrial waste. I maintain that I could drive my truck around, all day, every day, for the next ten years, getting 12 or 13 miles per gallon, and I would still have less an impact on the environment than the manufacture and sale of a single “fuel-efficient” new car, even a hybrid. I loved that last year everyone thought it was so good for the environment to turn in cars that already exist, to purchase new cars that had to be manufactured. Awesome. That was plastic recycling bins all over again. And then we just dumped all those old cars in a landfill or something. Sweet. That was good for the environment. And what happens when the hybrids wear out? What are we gonna do with all those giant batteries with all their toxic chemicals? Those will be good for the environment also when we dump them in a landfill. Because by then we will all want electric cars, to be as green as possible. I am sure no one will conveniently forget, as mentioned above, that the vast majority of electricity in this country, which we will use to charge all those even bigger batteries in our electric cars, is produced by oil and coal-burning power plants. When mine stops working I will probably just buy another old truck and drive it as long as I can, because I am an environmentalist.
I carry and use a re-useable aluminum water bottle. I do this mostly because I ride the train at odd hours, and I figure I can bash a crack head in the face with it if one gives me any trouble. Aluminum water bottles hurt more than plastic ones. Any impact this may have on the environment is purely coincidental, but still worth mentioning.
I shop at Costco where there are no plastic grocery bags. That’s right bitches. I go to the biggest store I can find with no windows to buy a lot of shit I don’t need and will ultimately throw away anyway. There are so many lights on in Costco that even on the brightest sunny day my eyes never need to make that awkward adjustment – you know the one I mean. Plus I never have to wonder what the TVs might look like in my house, running the risk of wasting fuel to return one because the picture wasn’t huge enough. Costco conveniently keeps all of the televisions turned on inside the store all the time. Now that’s thinking green.
And lastly, I urinate outside any chance I get, particularly if I have been drinking. This saves a lot of water, not to mention chemicals that are used to treat waste water, and it helps feed plants and grasses to produce more oxygen. I think this is a guy thing. It feels good to take a leak outdoors. It is almost primal. Maybe it is our way of marking our territory. A lot of us do it all the time and the people around us have no idea, particularly women, because it is more fun to keep it a secret from them. Also, it is super convenient, and a simple little reminder about how awesome it is to be a guy, which is a human being, who cares about the environment.
The environment is not really that great, and I am tired of people trying to convince me that it is.
Historically, Americans have seen progress as a good thing. This is our legacy. It makes sense. For millions of years, human beings were nothing more than large, clever animals. Sure we could talk, but birds can do that. We could make and use tools, but chimps and otters do that. There was nothing particularly special about human beings until we learned to master fire, burned down a forest, and put in a Starbucks. That is when progress was born. And to this day, as intelligent and highly organized as we imagine ourselves to be, the only thing that separates man from beast is mastery of our environment. All other animals live and die at the mercy of their environment. They are powerless to do anything other than adapt to changes, or die. Not us. While the other animals get their asses kicked daily by fundamental changes to their environments, we made the whole world our bitch.
Hell. Yes.
That’s why we are cool.
But lately our culture has become bent on the notion of being “green.” We think every tiny thing we do must somehow involve saving the environment. It took a really long time for this to happen. It started with hippies. I blame the hippies. As the baby boomers began to realize exactly how massive a failure their little counter-culture experiment had become, some of them got jobs. Many of them didn’t want a real job, so they became teachers. Those teachers began spewing their hippie propaganda all over kids like me. It was us, generation x, the kids who went to school in the seventies and eighties, who got the guilt treatment about how awful we were being to the earth. The hippies told us it was true, and we believed them.
Stupid hippies.
Unfortunately, another common American trait is that few of us ever question the things we were taught as children. Now that we are the target demographic, eagerly awaiting our turn to control the world once the last of the baby boomers have driven their RVs into the sunset, generation x continues to believe, and teach our children the same hippie propaganda we learned as kids.
The problem is that it is all bullshit.
We never stopped to think about it. Conservation and environmentalism in any form seem intuitively positive to us. So we never really think a thing through. If something seems “green” we like it, no matter what.
At first I started saying I hate the environment because I thought it was a funny thing to say in the face of everyone in my generation being so concerned about whether or not there was a recycling bin next to every trash bin in the entire fucking world. There were protests about it when I was in college. I didn’t really hate the environment, I just thought the people who were so bent on saving it were stupid, and I wanted to make fun of them. That’s what I do. See at the time I noticed what I thought were some fundamental flaws in their philosophies as they related to their demands. For example, the recycling bins were made of plastic. This amused me. I thought that a desire to recycle materials was necessarily reflective of an overall desire to reduce pollution and man’s impact on the natural world. So it seemed odd to me that you would produce vehicles to aid in such efforts which are constructed from a material which is particularly good at polluting the environment, both in its production and in its existence, particularly the spectacular ability plastics have to clutter up the natural world for projected millennia. I also thought that eventually the pseudo-activists pushing for such things would realize their own contradictions, and the matter would resolve itself in coming decades when we all laughed together about how funny the nineties were with all the flannel shirts, Doc Martens, and crazy ideas like recycling.
But I was wrong. I was wrong about people realizing the inherent contradictions in recycling. I was also wrong in assuming that the desire to recycle was a manifestation of a broader concern about man’s impact on the natural world. Apparently the desire to recycle is only a desire to recycle.
It has been demonstrated over and over again, by researchers and investigative reporters, that all the recycling we do, of cans, and glass, (and now even plastics), paper, etc., all the time we spend sorting it (when it could otherwise be “business time”) and placing it in those big plastic containers in front of our houses on trash day, is in vain. We know this. I don’t even need to explain it because you can Google it quickly. It is a fact, that the energy used to process the materials collected in all of those recycling bins creates more pollution, and a greater ultimate impact on the environment than would the production of the very same new materials. Also, recycling is way more expensive, and a total pain in the ass.
But we do it anyway, even though we know it is bullshit, because our teachers told us to, and we loved those old hippies.
Strange right?
Now I really do hate the environment. But I have a healthy respect for it. I am afraid of the earth. I don’t generally spend a lot of time trying to protect things I fear. As a Darwinist, I believe that this world created us, and when it wants to, just as it has done to so many species before us, most of which we will never even know about, the earth will kick our asses. It isn’t the other way around. I don’t believe that global warming is something humans can control, and consequently, I don’t think global warming is something we can cause either. I saw Al Gore’s stupid PowerPoint presentation. But I know the difference between a correlation and a causal relationship. I also like to think I know propaganda when I see it. But what I definitely know is how little we really do know about anything, let alone our own planet and how it works and changes over time. We are not nearly as smart as we think we are. I think it is vain and short sighted for us to think that we, a bunch of clever apes who learned to burn shit down, have the ability to destroy a planet that created us, which existed long before we did, and which will exist long after we are gone. The earth could simply erase us any time, or we could erase ourselves, and in a hundred thousand years, maybe less, there would be no noticeable trace that we had ever existed.
You don’t have to believe what I write. You probably shouldn’t anyway. I am notoriously misled.
But I am not all bad. I do a number of green things myself.
I ride an electric train to work every day. Not that kind of electric train, a big one. I ride Sacramento’s municipal light rail system. Public transportation is considered very green because of its perceived efficiencies. Multiple people on a single vehicle is way more efficient than a bunch of individual cars on the road, right? Maybe. I started riding the train because I am cheap and lazy. My new job doesn’t pay for parking downtown. So riding the train is much cheaper and easier than searching for and ultimately paying for parking. It was hard for me to decide that damaging the environment had just become too expensive for me. I guess life is full of trade-offs. I like to ride outside of typical commute hours when the trains are mostly empty. A train is way bigger than any car, and sometimes I am the only person riding. That is my favorite. I like to think about how much coal is being burned at the local power plant to produce all the electricity it takes to run that train for the 25 or so miles I ride, with all the stops, and making cars wait at intersections when we cross, idling all those emissions into the air. And then it just keeps going after I get off, even if no one is on it. Riding the train is awesome.
When I am not riding a huge train alone, I drive an old truck with a lot of miles on it. Again, I do this because I am cheap and don’t want to make car payments. I plan to drive it for as long as I possibly can. I know this doesn’t seem particularly green, but consider that driving an old car is the ultimate form of recycling. I maintain that even though my truck is huge, and gets terrible gas mileage, and that I never have anything to haul around and it probably doesn’t even make sense for me to have a truck, I am creating far less an impact on the environment with my old truck than you are with your new hybrid. But I am glad you have a new car. Do you know how much energy it takes to make a new car? Those shiny new things aren’t made from recycled materials, and they are almost all plastic! I love to think about all the chemicals that go in to manufacturing new cars, with all their toxic pollution and industrial waste. I maintain that I could drive my truck around, all day, every day, for the next ten years, getting 12 or 13 miles per gallon, and I would still have less an impact on the environment than the manufacture and sale of a single “fuel-efficient” new car, even a hybrid. I loved that last year everyone thought it was so good for the environment to turn in cars that already exist, to purchase new cars that had to be manufactured. Awesome. That was plastic recycling bins all over again. And then we just dumped all those old cars in a landfill or something. Sweet. That was good for the environment. And what happens when the hybrids wear out? What are we gonna do with all those giant batteries with all their toxic chemicals? Those will be good for the environment also when we dump them in a landfill. Because by then we will all want electric cars, to be as green as possible. I am sure no one will conveniently forget, as mentioned above, that the vast majority of electricity in this country, which we will use to charge all those even bigger batteries in our electric cars, is produced by oil and coal-burning power plants. When mine stops working I will probably just buy another old truck and drive it as long as I can, because I am an environmentalist.
I carry and use a re-useable aluminum water bottle. I do this mostly because I ride the train at odd hours, and I figure I can bash a crack head in the face with it if one gives me any trouble. Aluminum water bottles hurt more than plastic ones. Any impact this may have on the environment is purely coincidental, but still worth mentioning.
I shop at Costco where there are no plastic grocery bags. That’s right bitches. I go to the biggest store I can find with no windows to buy a lot of shit I don’t need and will ultimately throw away anyway. There are so many lights on in Costco that even on the brightest sunny day my eyes never need to make that awkward adjustment – you know the one I mean. Plus I never have to wonder what the TVs might look like in my house, running the risk of wasting fuel to return one because the picture wasn’t huge enough. Costco conveniently keeps all of the televisions turned on inside the store all the time. Now that’s thinking green.
And lastly, I urinate outside any chance I get, particularly if I have been drinking. This saves a lot of water, not to mention chemicals that are used to treat waste water, and it helps feed plants and grasses to produce more oxygen. I think this is a guy thing. It feels good to take a leak outdoors. It is almost primal. Maybe it is our way of marking our territory. A lot of us do it all the time and the people around us have no idea, particularly women, because it is more fun to keep it a secret from them. Also, it is super convenient, and a simple little reminder about how awesome it is to be a guy, which is a human being, who cares about the environment.
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