Unfriendliness

I love Facebook. It is the new Christmas card. That’s the way I perceive Facebook these days. Whatever else it may be to me on a daily basis, I consider it at the very least to be the way I will stay in touch with people whom I don’t connect with very often. Instead of some ratty old scribbled-on, perpetually-incorrect and out-of-date address book like the one my mother has been dragging around for decades, Facebook lets me know where old neighbors, distant relatives, former colleagues, and middle-school girlfriends can be found if I need them, and often tells me what they are up to these days. Facebook gives me all of this without any effort at all. That’s why Facebook is cool.

But Facebook also gives me so much more. I can waste time during the day socializing with more current and geographically present friends, including those I do actually spend time with in person, when we are otherwise supposed to be working at our respective and supposed jobs. It reminds me of all the specials and events happening at my favorite local pubs. It updates my address book automatically with new profile photos of my friends, even the funny ones, so I see them on my phone when they call me. The other day I thought Duran Duran was trying to call me from the 80s, but it turns out my little sister just likes Duran Duran. Even if it means I sometimes have to be aware of how awesome Joe is at playing Mafia Wars, and how many barns Karen has on her virtual farm, it is totally worth it.

I once thought that having an Excel file with all my friends’ names, phone numbers, and email addresses in it was a big improvement over my mother’s address book, because I didn’t have to erase or scribble anything out to update it. I don’t have to update Facebook at all.

And even though this all happens more or less automatically, I still have options. I can choose whether to participate, and to what degree. I can post status updates, or just be nosey and read everyone else’s updates, commenting only when I have something mean to say. I can post pictures of my kids and/or my ridiculous drunken escapades while the kids are away with their mother, or not. I can post current photos of myself if I feel like it, or only old and awesome ones. I can look at photos of other people’s kids, and pretend I care by commenting about how cute they are, or I can make fun of them from a safe distance without hurting anyone’s feelings. I can keep separate lists of people with whom I have different kinds of relationships, and control what each of those groups of people sees. I can make sure that no one from work sees photos of my kids or is ever otherwise aware that I sometimes participate in wholesome family activities. I can make sure that my family members never see anything that might even slightly resemble professional activity. I can make sure that everyone sees the photos from outside the strip club. I have a very poor reputation to maintain, and Facebook helps me reach my goals.

I have some friends, henceforth referred to as “individuals formerly known as friends” because everyone knows that use of the term “friend” only applies to Facebook, who swear they will never use Facebook because of some deep-held philosophical, moral, or ethical convictions. I think that is a lot of bullshit. And I don’t say this only because I have no philosophy, morals, or ethics of my own. I also really mean it.
Some of these individuals formerly known as friends tell me that their disinterest in Facebook is a result of their preference to communicate “face-to-face” because it provides a richer and more meaningful interpersonal experience.

Bullshit.

If I avoided communicating with my friends and family except when there were time and opportunity to participate in a rich and meaningful interpersonal experience I wouldn’t have any friends or family at all. I spend time with people “face-to-face” when I can, but that time has never, to my knowledge, been described as a rich and meaningful interpersonal experience. Nor should time spent with me ever be considered such a thing. I am not that kind of guy.

Also, at least once, this concept of objection was explained to me via text message.

Still other individuals formerly known as friends tell me they are unwilling to make information about themselves available “out there on the internet” because they are afraid that something terrible might happen if a hundred old friends know what their new puppy looks like. Right-on. They just shouldn’t expect to hear from me very often. I am usually too busy removing tags from photos of myself to participate in any voice-based communicative exchanges.

But of all the new and unexpected social devices adopted by our culture as a result of our nearly universal embrace of social networking, my favorite is unfriending.

The Urban Dictionary defines “unfriend” as the act of removing a friend from your Facebook account.

I know there are a variety of different reasons for unfriending. I am not too concerned with the unfriendings that occur because you didn’t really want to share your life with an old acquaintance but you were too pussy to deny their initial friend request. I have done that, and sadly, have had it done to me. Likewise I get that you might want to unfriend people with whom you have had no actual contact for quite some time. I think this is especially popular with the kids these days who may have thousands of friends because they routinely add everyone with whom they ever come in contact. I can also appreciate more blanket unfriendings that sometimes occur as a reaction to a personal need for more privacy, perhaps in reaction to a stalker scare, or maybe because you want to share more information with fewer people. That is all good. I don’t have to stalk anyone. It is just a hobby.

The kind of unfriending that amuses me the most, is the angry unfriend. That one is going to be a classic.

The angry unfriend occurs when one person is mad at another person, and instead of, or perhaps in addition to an actual discussion about said disagreement, offense, or annoyance, one person removes the other from their list of friends on Facebook. That shit is hilarious. It is meant to be a punishment of some kind, and to send some sort of message. But it is the dumbest punishment ever, and typically sends no message at all. Still, it happens all the time.

It happened to me at least once that I know about. I pissed off my sister, and she unfriended me.

In my case the only reason I noticed at all is because my sister is one of those people who posts a lot of stupid shit on her Facebook wall all the time. Once upon a time I had to scroll past all her crap to get to any interesting updates from drinking buddies or good-looking women. One day I didn’t have to scroll at all. I knew immediately what had happened. And even though I don’t like my sister, and I was tired of seeing her horoscope or whatever crap she always posted, it still hurt my feelings a little. For passive-aggressive types, and you know who they are, unfriending might be the most powerful tool available.

But the thing is, it hurt my feelings in the dumbest way possible. I wasn’t actually hurt because she unfriended me, I expected that. We did have an argument in the real world. I was hurt because she didn’t even make the effort to actually tell me to fuck off. She could even have simply ignored me completely for a few years, and I might still have respected that. But unfriending me was just pussy.

The truth is that unfriending just doesn’t matter. It is pointless. When you unfriend someone they are not notified in any way. The person you unfriend would have to notice that you unfriended them. Typically I suppose this would happen if for some reason they tried to visit your page and were unable to access the information they wanted. But how often does that happen? For most of us, when you unfriend us, it just means you disappear from our newsfeed. Aside from the example above, I am not sure I would notice if someone disappeared from my newsfeed. People come and go all the time. I don’t regularly visit people’s Facebook pages except to get more information about something I saw posted on my newsfeed. I suspect most of us are like that. That is why we like Facebook. It is low-maintenance. It brings information to us so we don’t need to spend our time going out to gather it.

So what kind of ego is involved in unfriending out of anger? I think it assumes a level of interest in your own shit that may not actually exist. To even make the effort to find someone in your friends list and unfriend them you must assume that the former friend will notice the unfriending and therefore get the message with the intended impact. Why would you even bother otherwise? I don’t think I could assume that anyone would notice if I unfriended them. I imagine maybe I have been unfriended by more people than I realize. I don’t know. But I guess they showed me.

I try to imagine my mother, in years before the internet, being offended by a neighbor, or someone at church, and racing furiously to scribble their name, address, and phone number out of her address book.

Now that just seems silly.

Petroglyphs, Pornography and the Misconceptions of Human Nature

When I go to the bookstore, I am constantly barraged with reminders that I need to be writing rather than reading.


My favorite section in any bookstore these days is reference. This is where everything happens. It is always tucked away in a corner, because no one actually buys encyclopedias anymore (bookstores don't even stock them), and because people think it is filled with nothing but lexicons of all size and color. Perhaps, but, the reference section is the place to find the books I like to read these days.


Don't get me wrong, I do have lexiconological opinions. And, yes, that is a made-up word. I think the American Heritage Dictionary is the greatest dictionary ever created by man, and for seventy-five dollars it ought to be. I know what you "scholars" are thinking, but the people at Oxford English can suck my cock. Etymology is interesting, though highly subjective, and is good stuff at parties. But I don't really need it in my fucking dictionary. I need what American Heritage has. Also, it says "American," and I am biased. Oxford is for pussies.


However, in the reference section at most of the larger, highly-commercial bookstores we have all come to love, you will find all sorts of other interesting books of facts, lists, "forbidden knowledge," and what-not. Those books are my favorite. I pick up and spout off more useless knowledge than Cliff Claven. Some of my kids have even picked up this trait, and throw it back in my face when I talk to them on the phone each night. I have one kid who watches the Discovery channel, the Science Channel, Animal Planet, PBS, and the National Geographic channel all day long, remembers everything, and tells me every night everything he has learned, in great detail. I now know what it is like to be on the giving and receiving end of useless knowledge. And let me tell you, I am surprised I have any friends at all.


The thing about less-traditional reference books is that they make me think about other things. In my quest for ridiculously impractical knowledge, I find connections I might not otherwise have found. And as I sit and think through these things, usually in a pub somewhere, around noon, I am struck over and over again by how much we don't know.


Don't get me wrong, as a people, we have accumulated massive amounts of knowledge. We are smarter, more highly educated, and more articulate than any group of human beings has ever been – as far as we know, but it is probably true. But it seems odd to me how much faith we put in some of our theories and "traditions" that are so new themselves. Don't get me wrong, I am a man of science. I am a Darwinist, a Behavioralist, and consequently and Atheist. I believe in the out-of-Africa theory. I know in my soul that deep down inside we are all black Africans (Did you know, for example, that it probably only takes 20,000 years of living in Northern Europe to turn a people's skin from black to white?). But I do realize that they are just theories, and I am willing to believe anything new with better evidence. The point here is, we just don't know. And I for one am perfectly happy not knowing. I find great comfort in it. But I think that as a people, we have a quest to want to know, and be sure of everything, so even when we clearly don't know something, we make up a story, call it fact, and profess our faith in the theory, with little or no evidence.

We just want to be sure of something.


Since I was a child, I have often thought about the possibility that all this, our society, our cities, our technology, our way of life, might have existed before, right in the places where we live, and we would never know. I still wonder about this. I studied just enough geology and physical science to understand how extremely dynamic the surface of our planet is. And I fully believe, that all of this, or something very similar, might have all happened before, 20, 000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, and there may well be no evidence of it left whatsoever. And it could all happen again, and there would be no evidence of us whatsoever.


The point here is that everything we know about our own history we know by accident. We just happened to find a few things. But the facts don't match up. I don't think the logic is fully there. We have not connected the right people to the right information to come up with the right theories. Let me explain a little about what I mean.


We know that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) have walked the earth for at least several hundred thousand years. We know that we once shared space with other species of humans, most recently Neanderthals. We don't know whether we competed for resources with European Neanderthals, and killed them all off, or whether we just inter-bred with them, and they are still among us, so to speak. We also know that upright, bipedal, hominids (apes that stand up and walk on two legs, like us) have been around for at least four million years, though some bastards in Chad a few years ago discovered some remains that might make us as old as eight million years. And we know, that in all that time, many species of hominid, and perhaps other species of hominids that we might, having come face to face with them, described as "human," have existed, and perished on this here planet. And we know all that by fucking accident!


Imagine how much we don't know about our own story.


And today, we believe that only one species of human, and hominid, exists on the planet. And we think we own the fucking place. I don't know about you kids, but when I consider that a group of animals that was once as diverse as us finds itself occupying an entire planet with a single species, it isn't time to celebrate our accomplishments. It is time to put ourselves on the endangered species list.


But I digress. In contrast to our very long and extremely varied history (that we know of), we take great pride, and go to great lengths to protect many objects, traditions, values, and mores, to borrow a term from the sixties, that really aren't that old.


Did you know the piano was invented in 1700? Yeah that surprised me also. Doesn't it seem like something we consider to be so "classical," which we make a part of so many of our religious, cultural, and personal family celebrations should be older than that? The piano in my house growing up was almost sacred. It was as important a part of our spiritual and cultural life as clothes were to our physical life. But it has only been around for a few hundred years, so how important could it really be? How many generations of my family tree passed their lives as good people with no piano, or songs, or music at all for that matter? Music itself, at least the way we know it today, is a fairly recent invention. Yet music is so important to so many of us. It is such a major part of our identities it is ridiculous.


I think the point I am trying to make is that all of our current "rituals," whether they be practical, religious, political, or otherwise, the things we tend to take so seriously in our lives, are all relatively "modern" inventions, given the sheer scope of humanity's existence on this planet.


And this leads me to my next point. I think our modern scientists get a lot of theories wrong. I think Archeologists in particular, base a lot of their conclusions on the rituals and behaviors of modern man, rather than our instincts and emotions, which in my mind, are much more likely to transcend the generations of humanity.


I read the new every day. I have time for that. Every time I read about some new archeological discovery, whether it be a specific artifact, the foundation of some long-forgotten city, or a cave-painting, the explanation for the existence of said discovery is almost always a spiritual or religious explanation of some sort. I mean, sometimes these guys understand that the room with the hole in the ground was where these people took a piss, they often get the practical. But it seems that whenever a purely practical explanation for the existence of some new discovery can't be found, they automatically attach some religious or spiritual significance to it.


This doesn't work for me, because, assuming that my ancestors were much like me in the way they felt and thought every day, on a chemical-emotional level, I have to think, that much like we do, they sometimes did things, or built things, or invented things, or used things, because they thought it was cool, and for no other reason. I can assure you that everything in my daily life, which might one day be discovered by some distant scientist, can not be dichotomized into practical or religious. How might they explain the KISS belt buckle for example, or the massive bong, or porn?


I can only imagine what science will say about us one day.


Let's take petroglyphs as an example. When I lived in Utah, I had the pleasure of seeing ancient petroglyphs painted here and there on rocks and canyon walls about the state. I had read about them for years, and they fascinated me. What might they mean? What might this long forgotten culture be trying to tell us now? I spent much time thinking about them.


And then I had the pleasure of becoming a father to a pile of kids. As my kids grew older, and learned to reach the pens, pencils, and crayons in the places I hid them without permission, I began to see something positively amazing happen around my home. I saw little petroglyphs pop up on walls, doors, windows, floorboards, molding, refrigerators, dishwashers, everything. The similarities were unmistakable. They had geometric designs. They were placed in seemingly random places. They depicted people and animals in all sorts of varying activities. They demonstrated a distinctly primitive level of artistic skill. They seemed to be created with whatever drawing material was most locally convenient. And they almost always included some kind of handprints, hand-outlines, or "signatures" as archeologists who study cave drawings call them.


I never looked at petroglyphs the same way again. I am not kidding you. Every time I ever read anything about petroglyphs, some kind of cultural or religious significance was attached to each design. I don't buy it. I am willing to believe that almost all of the ancient cave drawings, etchings, or other petroglyphs we find are just kids, or drunk guys, fucking around with red mud, because they could. Those unmistakably male and female characters were not "sacred symbols of fertility." They were one kid saying "ha ha there is you dad with a huge boner." And his friend replying "well there is your mom with huge tits."


And speaking of fertility, recently I read a little bit about the origin of sculpture as an art form. The oldest sculpture known to man is a little tiny depiction of a nude woman, about 25,000 years old, called the Venus of something (all ancient sculptures of nude women are apparently a Venus of something or other), and is largely considered to be a sacred symbol of fertility to some ancient and unknown people. The reason that scientists and historians believe it to be a symbol of fertility is that some parts of her body are grossly exaggerated and out of proportion with the rest of her. You guessed it. She has huge tits, and a huge ass.


It occurred to me, and maybe I am wrong, I often am, that this might not be a symbol of fertility at all. I thought, just for a moment, that this might just been the earliest masturbatory aid known to man.


Now I know what the do-gooders and intellectuals are thinking. Why do I have to assign such crass value to something that might otherwise be considered sacred and beautiful? Maybe we haven’t met. That’s what I do. I also have to because it is much more likely to be the fucking case in my mind. Remember, I think it is emotions and instincts that carry better across generations of humanity than rituals. I suspect that these 25,000 year old bastards maybe never even heard of a "symbol of fertility." But I do know that people like to masturbate. I have no reason to think that has ever changed. I know that guys like big tits and healthy asses on women. I understand that every culture defines its own version of what is attractive, but big tits and big asses actually feel better when it comes right down to it. I have no reason to think that has changed.


Let's consider some more modern examples. Remember VCRs? We all used to have them. Anyone remember when they were new, in the late seventies? Did you ever have one that was the size of a coffee table, where the tape popped out of the top, and if you were lucky it had a big long wire stretching across the room for a remote? Remember when they cost way more money than anyone could really afford? That was in 1978. But only ten years later, by 1988, literally everyone had one. Think about that for a minute. What other technology has ever caught on that quickly? Arguably more important than a VCR, it took almost a hundred years before everyone had their own telephone.

Even television took 50 years to really catch on and become universal. Cell phones? They have been popular more than 20 years and I still know people who don't have one. So why did everyone have a VCR after only ten years? Simple. Pornography.


Everyone loves porn. And with a VCR, you no longer had to go to a nasty old theater and watch Pee Wee jack-off to see porn. You could have it any time right in your own home! Porn in the privacy of your own home must have been revolutionary back then. I kid you not. Pornography made the VCR a household device in ten years. Why do you think mom and dad always had a VCR in their room? They never seemed to watch movies or record shows in there, but they had one. Hmmm.


What else? You already know, the internet of course, and the home computer. Home computers were around for many, many years, and only a few people ever cared about them. Then, in the late nineties, everyone, literally everyone, had to have a computer in their home. What changed? The internet became widely used and popular. And the internet promised porn. There was tons of porn. More porn than would wear out eighteen VCRs. And again, it was all in the privacy of your own home. Even now, 25% of all search engine requests are for pornography. And we should be desensitized already. But we aren't.

Pornography drove two of the largest cultural revolutions western civilization has ever seen. I have no reason to think that things were any different for our ancestors. I think every "symbol of fertility" was more likely some kind of pornography.


So as I read through more useless fact and unimportant trivia. I continue to make larger connections to the world. We have to constantly question everything we think we know. And we have to constantly consider the things we are sure we do not know. And until we can connect all of our sciences, and really think through the little bit of knowledge we do have, we must remain somewhat skeptical. The truth might be out there, but right now at least, we have no idea what it is. But it probably has something to do with porn.

Have You Ever Seen Pulp Fiction?

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.

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.

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 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."

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.

So You Want to Watch Grown Men Play With Each Other...

I don’t watch sports. You should just know that about me right away. I don’t read about, talk about, or concern myself with professional sports in any way. I am not one of those guys. I don’t know what kind of guy I am. But I am not a sports guy.

It isn’t that I have anything against sports. I can sometimes see the appeal. I would never suggest that there is anything wrong with being a sports fan. It just doesn’t interest me. A large part of this is because it hasn’t been my example. My dad doesn’t watch sports. Neither of my grandfathers ever followed sports. Sports mayhem is not a trait that has been transmitted through masculine lines in my family. I guess we were always just more interested in other things.

I played sports as a kid. I was way into soccer. I ran track for a while. I played on the school football team in middle school. I often played football and basketball with my friends. It just didn’t hold my interest well enough to carry me into adulthood as a sports fan.

And in case it hasn’t occurred to you yet, I will just tell you, this makes me very different from other men my age. I spend a fair amount of time in pubs. I don’t watch the games. Most of my friends are sports fanatics. I rarely meet another guy who doesn’t think he absolutely needs a huge plasma TV on which to watch grown men play with each other in high definition. I don’t even watch the Super Bowl. It is just another Sunday to me.

I have been called a “fag” many, many times over this particular issue. Generally I don’t sweat it, because you don’t need to prove something that is true. It just becomes obvious. I have six children with two different women. I don’t generally feel a need to prove any kind of heterosexuality. But also it never really bothered me, because the idea that a man is gay because he doesn’t watch sports always seemed a little backward to me. Let me explain what I mean.

One of the newest crazes, which all of my friends seem to love, is fighting. Now fighting is not new, but I think it is enjoying a recent surge in popularity among sports fans. Boxing has been popular for many, many years. I have always disliked boxing in the United States because of its racist origins. I am not going to go into too much detail about that because you can look it up of you don’t believe me. There is nothing new about two black guys beating the crap out of each other while two white guys collect all the money. And yes, make no mistake, Don King is white.

But it seems to me that recently boxing must have become too tame for some bloodthirsty motherfuckers out there, and martial arts were maybe too gay, so they invented some other violent and crazy shit like kickboxing, professional wrestling, and the newest sensation epitomized by UFC. That’s right, the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Everyone seems to love this shit, men and women alike, except me. I hate fighting, and I don’t want to watch other assholes fight each other either. I can understand the primal fascination and all, but it seems like there is probably a good documentary on PBS at the same time, and I would rather watch that.

Don’t misunderstand me. I can and will fight when I need to. And I can get pretty mean. Just ask my ex-wife. In fact, not too long ago I had to run a couple guys off of her place on her behalf, and I didn’t think twice about getting right in their faces with some fairly menacing threats and body language. It was fun. And I could easily have gotten violent with them if the situation had called for it. But I don’t get off on watching two other guys fight on TV. That really doesn’t do it for me.

One of my friends, a woman, recently said to me as we were discussing the UFC phenomenon, “Watching half-naked, sweaty guys beat each other is just hot. It is the closest I will get to porn.” Fair enough, and I appreciate anything that turns women on, but does this mean that if she were going to watch porn she would watch gay porn?

Because frankly, gay porn is the only other medium I can think of for watching naked sweaty guys “beat” each other. Only it seems to me that before UFC, we didn’t call that a sport, we called it a “reach around.”

Okay so men like to let their inner rage come out, and watching fighting, or maybe sports in general does that for them. It makes them feel all tough, manly, and apparently not gay at all. But come on, doesn’t it seem pretty gay to want to spend all your time watching grown men play with each other? No? I guess it is just me.

You know what makes me feel all tough and manly? Spending all of Super Bowl Sunday in bed (or wherever) having mad, hot, crazy sex with a beautiful woman, and not watching the game at all.

Maybe we would see what was on PBS after it started to hurt.

But I guess I am the fag.

Wanted: One Gently-Used, Open-Minded Rebound Girl for Limited-Contact Sexual and Emotionally-Detached Relationship to Last Approximately 100 Days.

Note: I wrote this sometime around April 2007, shortly after I separated for the last time from my now ex wife. It was originally written for, and posted on an old MySpace blog I kept at the time. I still think it is funny. So I am also posting it here.

I am planning a divorce for the end of July. Rather, I am planning for my divorce to be final by the end of July. I realize that my profile indicates that I am already divorced, but that is because MySpace doesn’t have any designation for “separated.” I certainly don’t think of myself as “married” anymore, and “single” is a ruse. I need the viewers of my profile to realize at a glance that I have been around the block once or twice. “Single” just doesn’t seem to capture what I have been through.

Going through a divorce can be hard on a good man like me. I know because I have done this before. But that is a longer story and fodder for a different story. This time however, I have decided that this divorce will be much easier on me if I can manage to distract myself from the whole situation. I can think of no better way to distract myself than to get marginally involved with another woman. Such a distraction would be beneficial in many ways, all of which I will describe below.

This will not be the kind of divorce that gets ugly and nasty and drags on for years and years. It should be fairly quick and agreeable. Like I said we have done this before. My ex and I are both too tired to argue much, and we both just want to concentrate on raising these kids. We also have no assets to speak of. We should be able to have it all done easily by the summer. But I need a good woman to help keep my thoughts and attentions occupied and focused. The worst danger in this situation is for me to wax nostalgic about the old days and start begging the ex to give it another chance. Such behavior would degrade both of us. We all know men are the most likely culprits in such situations, and they almost always end in restraining orders. I don’t need that. The best thing for me is to keep my mind focused on future possibilities. I am a young(ish) man still, I am smart(ish), funny (in my own mind), and gainfully employed. Oh and I am a champion in the sack. There is no doubt about that whatsoever. So I like to think I have something to offer both to a rebound girl, and for future meaningful relationships.

I do have six children, and the amount of money I spend for child support and alimony is greater than the annual operating budget of a mid-sized corporation. They are all my children. But I have to be honest and admit something that I am not very proud of. While I am certainly their father, I can’t be exactly sure who their mothers are.

My position in this endeavor is simple. I need a woman who will enjoy my company, my rhetoric, my drinking, and my emotional outbursts. I can offer a good time sometimes, lots of laughs, plenty of late night phone calls, awkward text messages and obscene email.

My rebound girl should be free of husbands and jealous boyfriends. Emotional baggage is fine because I will be too self-absorbed to ever deal with it. She should be confident, because I like confidence, unless she compensates for a lack of confidence with loose sexual practices, which would be okay also. Having kids is a plus, because it brings a level of maturity I appreciate, but it is not really necessary because I will never meet her kids. Also she will never meet my kids. I don’t want to involve them in my “dating scene.” They didn’t ask for that. Oh and I spend a lot of time with my kids. So this relationship will be mostly a distanced one, which brings up another important point that needs some explanation.

I was married long enough that I am still at a point where sex with other women seems a little “gross” for lack of a better term. I don’t mean any offense by that. And I suspect I will get over it pretty quickly in the right situation. It is just that I have not been that close to another woman for a long time. And this explains the “limited-contact” sexual relationship described above. I am very interested in phone sex for example. I am interested in exchanging dirty emails and text messages. I might even try cyber sex. And if she has dirty self portraits to share with me she moves right to the top of the list. If she takes dirty self-portraits specifically for me – she wins. And if some of those dirty pictures could be “accidentally” emailed or sent to the ex wife’s cell phone, I would not be disappointed. But that is just childish.

If she lived near one of the two cities where I live it would be ideal. But since I don’t necessarily plan on having actual sex with her, it is possible we would never need to actually meet. So living near me is not critical.

Planning a divorce also means that I am planning a divorce party. And this party seems the perfect setting for a breakup. In the interest of honesty I am disclosing here that such a breakup will likely occur. I know that after spending a hundred days with a gem like me she will likely have fallen head-over-heels in love with me, but this is important. And being in love with me will only strengthen the drama of the situation. I couldn’t ask for more than that. Of course said breakup could be called off at any time if I fall in love with her. I am a fair man.

If you, or any woman you know is interested, please send a relationship resume with cover letter and references. All applicants will be considered, but only the hottest and smartest ones will be contacted for interviews.

The Hamster Surrendered

Sometimes it is really important to know when you are defeated. Sometimes it is a good idea to quit while you are still alive.

We moved to Utah in 1999, days after I completed my Master's degree in San Jose. We had been planning it for a while. After spending the first few years of our marriage in California, and having a couple kids while I gave teaching high school the old college try, we decided that Utah might be a better place to live. California at the time seemed too crowded, too expensive, and we weren't sure what our future there might look like. By way of contrast, my older sister had been living in Salt Lake City the last several years and had done pretty well, even as a single parent. She had been able to buy a house and everything. But now she was back in California to be closer to my parents. Utah seemed like the land of opportunity. We also knew it to be a nice community that was friendly to children. We already seemed a little strange in California for having two kids so close together, and only being in our early twenties. Utah was full of big, young families. We knew we wanted to have more kids, so Salt Lake City seemed like the place to be. We moved into the house my sister had not yet sold.

If you have never been there, you should know that as far as cities go Salt Lake City is a very nice one. It is beautiful. Set against a backdrop of ten-thousand foot rocky peaks, it is one of the cleanest and most easy-to-navigate cities in the country. It is a very nice place to visit during any season.

But you might not want to live there.

The only reason I say this is that Salt Lake City is the home-base of a culture that can be pretty difficult to interact with for any extended period of time. I am not talking about religion. If you only remember one thing you read in this essay, you should remember this. Never confuse Utah Mormon culture with any kind of religion. Utah culture and Mormon doctrine are completely separate. It turns out that Utah is actually one of the United States of America. It is unfortunate however, that the Mormons who live in Utah don't know that they are not really Mormon anymore. This is mostly because members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (The Mormons) who were born and raised in Utah have likely never read the Book of Mormon, nor studied their religion in any meaningful way. The good people of Utah, a majority of who claim to be Mormon, have been "phoning it in," religiously speaking, for the last hundred years or so. They don't really work at it. They don't think they need to.

Utah Mormons have created a culture that is very prescribed. They have created a culture that defines where they should live, what they eat and drink, and what movies or TV shows they can and can not watch. Their culture clearly defines the kinds of people they can and can not be friends with, what they should wear and drive, and who they should vote for in each election. They have created a culture that dictates everything they may ever wonder about, leaving them free to spend all their time thinking about nothing at all. If they do ever find themselves in doubt, all they need to do is pick up the newspaper, or tune in to any other local media source, and they will be told what they need to know. It is beautiful. Life is so simple for Utah Mormons.

The problem is that their religion doesn't tell them any of these things. Seriously. Go get yourself a copy of the Book of Mormon. Read it cover to cover. Then come back and tell me if anywhere in that book it says that you shouldn't have a cup of fucking coffee. It isn't in there. And therein lays the problem. Six or seven generations into the original "settlin" of the Great Salt Lake Valley by Mormon pioneers from the Midwest, these people are on autopilot. Because they all share the same culture, and they all share the same religion, and their parents all shared this same culture and this same religion, they have completely confused the culture with the religion. It is purely inductive reasoning, and it is human nature. If you are born and raised a Mormon in Utah, as a matter of conditioning, it is nearly impossible for you to see the difference between your culture and your religion. They can't help it. It would happen to the rest of us if not for that crazy first amendment. This kids, is the reason our constitution wants us all to have different faiths. We need something to fight about, to keep it real.
But I digress.

I can poke fun at them because I am one of them. I was born into this Utah-Mormon, suburban, whitebread, maelstrom. But then I was raised in California where we learned that culture and religion were two different things. At a Utah high school, being Mormon means fitting in. At a California high school, being Mormon most certainly does not mean "fitting in."

I knew growing up that Utah Mormons were different from other Mormons. We spent time with the extended family in Utah each year, and I knew things were different for my cousins than they were for me. My cousins had the same friends in the neighborhood, at school, and at church. They talked about church business and goings-on with their friends at school, and around the neighborhood. Church was integrated into everything they did. I had different sets of friends at school and at church. And even though we often went to the same schools, those of us who met up at church on Sundays pretended not to know each other the rest of the week. There was a stigma connected to being a Mormon kid in California, along with a lot of stupid questions (How many wives does your dad have?). We preferred to avoid discussing the matter. In fact we all spent at least a little time trying to hide the fact that we were Mormon. This was contradictory to what we had been taught to do. Every Mormon child at that time had drilled in to them the concept that "every member was a missionary." We were supposed to be proud of who we were, talk about it as often as we could, and try to generate in other people an interest in joining the fold. Mormons recruit aggressively. I remember sitting through a history lesson in fifth grade about western expansion. When the teacher got to the part about the Mormons moving west and "settling" (never mind the people who already lived there) Utah, Las Vegas, and several places in California he asked if anyone in the class was Mormon. There were three of us. None of us raised our hands. Then he went on to tell us what was wrong with the Mormons. It was just a different environment.

So I figured that as an adult, moving to Utah would be a pretty good idea. After all, these were my people. Never-mind that I had stopped going to church when I was fifteen. I was pretty sure that I understood this culture. After-all, I was a member of the fifth generation of my family to be born in Utah. There are a lot of people in Salt Lake City who share my surname, and with our polygamous past, I am related to most of them. Utah is the motherland.

As it turned out, we didn't fit in so well in Utah. Don't get me wrong. We did at first. But then something strange happened.

The first year or so we lived in Utah everything was fine. My extended family was everywhere. I have 32 first cousins with all associated aunts, uncles, etc. They all seemed glad to have one of their long-lost sons back with a new wife and a couple new little ones. Our neighbors were some of the friendliest people you would ever want to meet. I couldn't complain about any of them. But still, something seemed strange.

Maybe it was the old man who lived across the street who each Sunday after church came home with two hookers. Maybe it was the number of phone calls that came from the local elder's quorum, inviting me out to church each week. Maybe it was the missionaries who knocked on our door so frequently. The missionaries in Utah don't go up and down the street knocking on every door the way they do other places. That would only result in twenty free meals per day and fat missionaries. Everyone likes people who already see things their way. In Utah they work by appointment. They seek specific targets. They are like smart bombs. They only knocked on our door, and often.

And the old man with the hookers is really extraneous to this discussion. He was just funny.

I have come to refer to the strangeness we began to feel after our first year in Utah as "creeping unwelcome." Allow me to explain what I mean. It is the sense that people are "too" friendly. It is the feeling that people are only pretending to like you. It is the notion that no regular person could really be as interested in the lives of strangers as these people were with us. Eventually people began to ignore us. Eventually the phone calls stopped. Eventually we didn't even get a wave from the front yard.

And then it occurred to me that every member is a missionary. They were being nice to us because they hoped to convert us. We had in fact, been teasing them. We made it look like we would be an easy win. We were a young couple with a bunch of small kids. We drove a mini-van. I wore a white shirt and tie to work most days. And after all, I had been born there, and used to be Mormon. We led them on, and now they were feeling a little betrayed. It was taking too long. They were getting pissed.

One of the joys of being a parent of small children is keeping small pets for small children. When we lived in Utah, we had hamsters. They are funny little creatures. Their usefulness as pets can be debated. Their very existence needs to be questioned. We had one "wild" hamster of questionable breeding, and one very calm and friendly hamster of preferred stock. They lived separately, because hamsters like to kill each other when you put them together. They were both boys.

The nice hamster was played with constantly. It was the kind of hamster they called "black bear." Like most hamsters it was Russian in origin, with short, fine, black hair, and it looked like a very small black bear. The mean hamster was part goat or something. It had long shaggy white and orange hair. When handled, which wasn't often, it would alternately bite the shit out of you, or sit calmly and stare you down with beady little red eyes in an attempt to dominate you mentally. And it usually worked. There were mysterious nights I cannot recall on which I think I may have done that hamster's bidding.

The nice hamster was smart enough to never leave its home uninvited. It recognized a good thing, and let me tell you, as far as captive lifestyles go, a hamster's set-up isn't bad. The mean hamster was bent on extradition. He was a political prisoner as far as he was concerned. And he would not rest until the streets flowed red with the blood of the infidels. One day the mean one escaped. We were alternately relieved, because now we were not obligated to attempt to handle him, and scared shitless, because he was roaming free somewhere inside our home.

This was about the same time we began making an effort to send clear signals to our neighbors about our religious orientation. They weren't handling the mixed signals very well, and frankly, we didn't think we were being very fair by leading them on. We didn't fly a freak flag on the lawn or anything. We were more subtle. We wanted to let them know what we were about without throwing it in their faces, if you know what I mean. I started doing all my yard work on Sunday mornings, right around the time they were all driving to church. This ensured that they all saw me clearly disrespecting the Sabbath. I barbecued in the front yard on Saturday afternoons, always with a cold beer in hand. I chased off Boy Scouts every time I saw them creeping around. And we put obscene bumper stickers on the mini-van. My favorite read "I Love Mormon Pussy." You know, we wanted to send clear signals while staying under the radar.

I like to think it worked.

The hamster was missing for about three weeks when we spotted it bolting across the carpet in the basement one morning. It disappeared into the storage room. We were shocked that it was still alive. We had snakes all around our place that summer. I guess it realized that the basement was a safe little harbor. Still, it had to be feeling the stress. We had snakes drop into the window wells from time to time. A suburban Utah basement is not an easy place for a hamster to live on its own, even a mean one. We figured the kids dropped enough crumbs on the floor that it could eat pretty well indefinitely. What is it about little kids and crumbs?

Acting on a tip from the hot shot manning the register at the local pet shop, the old lady set up a trap for it with a stack of books and a bathroom wastebasket. I guess she didn't like the old spring-loaded trap I picked up from the hardware store. She caught him too. But that little bastard could not be held. He was gone in a day, and it was another six weeks before we saw him again.

The circumstances under which I next encountered that hamster were strange enough that, had I not witnessed it with my own two eyes, I would never believe it. And while I will swear to you that it is one hundred percent true and accurate just as I tell it here, I still don't expect you to believe this next part of the story.

The hamster surrendered. One morning I was making the rounds to check the status of toilet paper in each of the bathrooms. I walked into the basement bathroom, which was located right next to the storage room. I flipped on the light, replaced the roll on the holder, and turned around to leave when I noticed a small white and orange goat in my path. It was just standing there, on two feet, with its little front paws held up, staring at me. But this stare was in no way maniacal. This stare was desperate. I saw fear, pain, and exhaustion in those little red eyes. This was a cry for help. I simply reached down, and picked him up. He made no attempt to run. He did not scratch me or bite me. As soon as I held him, he looked generally relieved.

I carried him upstairs and placed him in the cage the kids had insisted remain prepared in case of his return. He spent the rest of his life there. He never bit, scratched, or practiced mind-control on anyone again. He was a model pet from then on. He knew when it was time to give up.

Later that week I was washing the car in the driveway. Two of the kids were out playing while I worked. I watched one of the neighbor kids walk by on his way to another neighbor's house. I knew from the time everyone was friendly to us that he was five years old. My daughter, who was about his same age, walked right up to him and said hello. She asked if he wanted to play with her.

Have you ever seen one little kid just plain ignore another little kid? I never had until that day. I didn't even think it was possible. This tiny little boy looked straight through her, dead-faced, and kept walking. She eventually fell away feeling confused and a little hurt. It occurred to me that no little kid learns to do that on his own. A parent has to really work hard to teach a five-year-old to ignore another five-year-old, particularly when that child's parents were no where to be seen. What must that kid have been told about us?

I figured the hamster had it right. I knew it was time to go. Within two months I accepted a new job in Texas, and we were on our way.

Utah is a really nice place to visit.