Apologetically Yours

Before you start getting any ideas, let me tell you right now how things are shaping up around here: in short, your paranoia is founded, it seems, on solid ground, and the sooner we all realize that we’ve been wasting our time trying to pick up the wrong kinds of shiny baubles and asking the wrong kind of people what, in hindsight, look like exactly the wrong questions, let me take a minute to say that it’s been the pleasure of a lifetime singing this song with you, and All Things Considered (weekdays on NPR), I’d have done it again, even though you’re a professional opera singer from the big city, and I’ve only had vague (and entirely unfulfilled) aspirations in the direction of busking, during my quieter and more remorseful moments. But no matter: apparently, with no regard whatsoever to how incredibly good I’ve been at getting on your nerves, and incredibly bad at everything else (indeed, the two facts seem proportionate, and of a similar shape when seen from most angles), it’s just, simply put, over. No more! What’s next, you ask? What’s to come? Well, the first thing you’ll notice is how your shoe laces never stay tied the way they always do in the Motion Pictures, because you almost never see a Motion Picture Facsimile Person (of the Archetypal variety, if you’re into that sort of thing) stopping to tie their shoe whilst saving the world, do you? Anyway, while you’re down there tying you’re shoe in the most unglamorous way possible, you might notice (you might not) that the world’s not ending, and if it is, it’s doing so slowly, and in a way that you can’t seem to predict or have any impact on. It just does what it does, even when your shoes stay tied, and you catch your train, which brings up another point: who the heck rides trains, really? I mean, I guess I have ridden a train from Point A to the Point of No Return a few times, but who were all of those other people? I have no idea. They seemed (to me) to be acting as if nothing at all was the matter, or perhaps everything is. And now, a poem:

Streetlight mariner cries out “land ho” from the top of the Buick LeSabre
The day/morning brightly
But there’s no one to hear the Cacophony Champagne Fiddle Orchestra
Because the playbill was printed incorrectly
And took too long to read anyhow
Plus, you can bring a drunk to rehab but you can’t forgive him sometimes

On second thought: maybe nothing’s over. Maybe it hasn’t even begun.

Abstraction

I love maps. I haven't really given too much thought to why I love maps, but I suspect it's because they are an abstraction, a model of something that is real, but without the troubling overabundance of information that accompanies real things. Montana, for example, is ridiculous. It's a gigantic region of the surface of the earth, containing what is for all intents and purposes an infinite number of things. Rocks, trees, molecules, you name it. There's just too many of them for a finite being to take in. I can't look at Montana. That's where maps come in. They are finite things, which contain a finite amount of information, about something that is infinite. (Well, fine; maybe not infinite. Just very, very large.) Now Montana has visible boundaries, which distinguish it from the surrounding states. Now it's composed of a finite number (147,165 square miles) of things. Accept a given definition of a particular geographical feature (say, lakes, or mountains), and Montana has a finite number of them. Maps are a spectacular illustration (no pun intended) of how homo sapiens organize information: we categorize it. We put it into discreet, knowable packets. There are an infinite number of points between Billings and Great Falls, but there is a very finite number of miles. It doesn't really matter that there's an infinite number of points within a mile, merely that the mile itself is knowable. It doesn't even matter that the concept of a mile (5,280 feet) is highly arbitrary. What's a foot? Twelve inches, you say? What's an inch? It simply doesn't matter, so long as we agree on what it is, it's knowable. Why are Montana's borders where they are? Why aren't they somewhere else? It doesn't matter; they're knowable. We can comprehend them. We've put everything on one side of the line in the Montana-shaped box, and everything on the other side of the line elsewhere.

Both for work and personally, I use Google Maps somewhat frequently, which, given my love of maps, gives me a great deal of pleasure. Other users of the site will have noticed that the good people at Google have carefully stitched together a multi-layered quilt of photographs, taken by aircraft, spacecraft, and earth-bound photographers, giving their map of the world a terrific amount of detail. The thing is, I mostly don't use that part; there's too much information there. When I'm trying to get directions somewhere, I turn off all of the photo-graphical features, because I prefer the abstraction. I prefer the two-dimensional, simplified representation of the real thing, because it's more easily knowable. I do enjoy the photographs, and looking at places I've never been, but for actual information, I find the map too crowded when it contains every house and tree.

Getting back to abstraction (in the abstract), I do think it's funny when people (myself included) get hung up on our methods of organizing information. I shake my head every time someone drags out the old "platypuses (platypii?) are weird" meme, because to me they're really not more weird than giraffes, or for that matter, people. It's just that they have a particular set of characteristics which make them difficult to put into one of our (supposedly) clearly-demarcated boxes. People get hung up on the boxes. So do I, though: if there were a physical place on the surface of the earth which would be hard to draw on a map, I have a feeling that would make me terribly uncomfortable. It's quite strange to me, really, that humans have to try so hard to break down the gigantic universe of information into tiny, knowable chunks, and then we start to believe that the chunks are meaningful on some deeper level. It starts to matter that we've classified some people as a certain ethnicity, for example, and get lost in the fact that there are certain things that such classification does and does not tell us. In short, we can forget that we (or someone else) created the classification in the first place, because the reality was too complicated for us to comprehend.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way

US-12 goes right past the Michigan International Speedway, a massive structure located in what otherwise would be the middle of nowhere, but which on summer weekends can attract enough visitors to become Michigan’s fourth largest city. It’s worth pointing out that not only does US-12 go right past this cultural anomaly, its two paved lanes constitute the only road that goes anywhere near the place. I used to live in Saline, some 25 miles East of the speedway, and on race weekends I’d see bumper-to-bumper traffic headed West on Fridays and East on Sundays, all campers with lawn chairs strapped to the back, colorfully adorned with the paraphernalia of auto racing enthusiasm. I’ve never gone in for that sort of thing myself; never seen the appeal of it, really, but I’ve lived within a couple of miles of US-12 pretty much my whole life, so I guess something like the misadventure I had on Sunday was always in my stars, or cards, or entrails, or whatever. In any case, I should’ve seen it coming. It was a Sunday morning, though. I thought if anything, the hordes would be departing, a weekend’s revelry behind them, but no. At first, I mistook the roadblock for some kind of construction –related traffic control, an assumption which, in most other parts of the state during this time of year, would be fairly safe. All I saw was that my way was blocked by a multitude of state troopers and orange barrels. They would simply let me go once a backhoe or some such machine had finished working in the road, I thought. I was a fool, still whistling the fool’s optimistic tune to himself, oblivious to the cacophonous scratch of Nero’s fiddle. Sure enough, after a ten minute pause, they let me go forward, though barrels had been used to route my path onto the shoulder (which I thought nothing of at the time), and with the same having been done on the opposite side of the highway, all four lanes were sent to the West. I was beginning to wonder what they would do to accommodate the people who may want to go East, when I passed a sign which said “All Lanes Race Parking.” Sure enough, my makeshift lane was being diverted off the highway, and into one of the massive grassy fields used as parking lots for the Speedway. Not one of the lanes was left going Westward, towards my intended destination. I pulled up next to a state trooper who was directing me into the parking lot.

“You can’t stop here,” he said. He was all business, and his business was not courtesy.

“But I don’t want to go to MIS,” I said, ignoring the hand gesture with which he was waving me on, “I want to go West.”

“Well, you can’t. Move along!”The line of cars behind me began to honk their horns in unison. It was clear I had no choice. Once in the parking lot, I pulled up to a yellow-shirted attendant, who was attempting to wave me into a parking space.

“Do you have a pass?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I would like to leave.” He looked puzzled.

“Oh. Well, just head that way,” he suggested, waving his hand vaguely, and without giving the impression that he was at all confident in his prescription, “they’ll help you.” I ventured off in the direction indicated, closer to the speedway, and, I imagine, the more expensive parking, wondering who “they” might be. Having gone nearly a half mile, I pulled up to another attendant.

“Do you have a pass?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I would like to leave.”

“Oh.” There was a long pause. Evidently, no one had wanted to leave before. “Ok. Um, go up to those campsites, and take a left, and that’ll get you back out to 12.” Perfect. I didn’t see any campsites, but I guessed that must’ve been his quaint, parking attendant term for RV parking spaces. I found a driveway and took a left, and saw US-12 in all its glory, some hundred yards ahead. There was a booth at the end, probably only for checking people in, as it seemed that no one had ever tried to leave before. I drove right past it, waving at the attendant. I was through with his ilk, and would not be needing his assistance, thank you very much. I took a right at the end of the drive, and was on my way.

Damn.

More barrels, and a police car barricaded the road ahead. A cop waved me to the right, back into the speedway. I pulled up to the first attendant.

“Do you have a pass?”

“No, I would like to leave.”

“Oh. Well, you can’t go that way without a pass.”

“I don’t want to go that way. That cop sent me here.” I gestured behind me with my thumb.

“Well, you can’t go that way without a pass.” Apparently, whatever this guy’s job was, the training for it involved only one very brief session. He then suggested that I head East a half a mile through the parking lot, take a right, and the driveway would take me back to US-12.

“I already did that,” I said. “That’s what I was doing when the cop sent me this way. It’s a loop.”

Another cop approached the car. I thought about how they all had matching sunglasses.

“What’s the problem here?” He seemed like the kind of guy who takes being in charge very seriously, but in fairness to him, context might have colored my perception somewhat.

“I want to go West.”

“Ain’t gon’ happen,” said the parking attendant, in a tone that suggested he thought he was being helpful. His drawl seemed to deepen as he spoke. The cop nodded in assent.

“The road’s blocked. You can’t go West on 12.” I wondered if he used that tone of voice with his friends. I concluded that he must not, because no one who did so could have any friends to speak to.

“Well, what should I do then? I can’t go back East, either. Are you suggesting that I spend the day at MIS?”

“Not without a pass,” offered the attendant, smiling. I was enraged. I wanted to kick his teeth in.

“Not my problem,” said the cop, stepping away from the car, and waving me in the direction the attendant had indicated. He was ending the conversation on his own terms. He had no idea how to help me, so obviously the best thing was to tell me to piss off.

“Gee, thanks” I muttered, rolling up my window and heading for the driveway again. Once again at the start of the loop, this time I took a left, and headed towards the back side of the blockade at which my ordeal had begun.

Fortunately, before I got there, I noticed a small dirt road cutting off US-12 to the South, blocked by two cops, who were in the process of telling the driver at the front of a short line of cars that they couldn’t get to MIS that way, and had to take the long way around.

“Let’s pretend I’m an ambulance,” I said, rolling down my window. “How the hell do I get out of here?”

“Huh?”

“I want out.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Jonesville.”

“Well, you can’t take 12.”

“Uh huh. Figured that out on my own.” I regret the tone I took with him, because he actually seemed sympathetic to my plight (for a cop). Either that, or I should have been more hostile at the beginning of the ordeal, because hostility gets results. In any case, he was the first person I’d met who seemed to be able to wrap his mind around the fact that I might not be interested in staying at the racetrack.

“Well, you can head South, and when you get to a T-intersection, turn right, and that’ll take you back up to 12.”

“Will it still be blocked off up there?”

“Nope.”

“Well, thank you very much. Have a good day, officer.”

I rolled up my window and he stepped out of the road to let me through.

On the winding dirt road, going through what I believe to have been the Ozarks, and barely avoiding being run off the road by a near-constant stream of North-bound (and soon to be re-routed) race fans in (without exception) large pickup trucks, I called the state police office in Lansing.

“Hello,” I began, “I’ve just been stuck at Michigan International Speedway for an hour, while trying to drive West on US-12. I’m going to be traveling the opposite direction this evening, and I would like to know if the road is going to be blocked again.” The voice on the other end, who had identified himself as Lieutenant so-and-so (I’m terrible with names), sounded exactly like Ben Stein.

“Michigan International Speedway typically accommodates between fifty and a hundred thousand people on race weekends.”

“So, will the highway be closed?”

“Between fifty and a hundred thousand people will be leaving Michigan International Speedway this evening.”

“So, you’re saying I should take an alternate route?”

“Between fifty and a hundred thousa—“

“Thank you, Lieutenant” I interrupted. “You’ve been very helpful.” I hung up the phone.

I Am A Vigilante

Swinging the door open to my left, and trying not to think about the nature of the discoloration near the handle, I stepped into the restroom, and I saw him. I have you now, you bastard. He was there, as I imagined was his habit, using the middle urinal: the one that doesn’t flush properly. This hulking, lumbering oaf of man-like appearance was the one whose foul bile was left daily to pollute the lavatory with its loathsome odor. His back was to me, preventing me from seeing his eyes, but I could tell that they gleamed with hatred for all his fellow beings, whose every breath was poisoned with the reek of his abhorrence. Fair Justice had delivered him into my grasp; now was the time for action. I must strike now, and rid the community of man forever of this pest. But what was I to do? I am a man of thought, of feeling, of dreams and aspirations perhaps, but not of violence. Were I to attack the brute head on, unarmed and unaided, his fists would surely make short work of me. But what of Justice, bespoilt thus, and by such a creature? Had her cause left to it no champion? No defender? If I did nothing, did I not share in the guilt of my antagonist? Alas, while my heart wrestled thus with itself, the brute finished his vile work, and without seeming to notice my presence, brushed past me and out the door, without so much as casting a glance in the direction of the sink, soap and towels. (Disgusted as I was, I cannot claim to have been surprised to find that he was not among their votaries.) A short while later, having fulfilled my own purpose for venturing thither, and after disposing of his filth (for indeed, all that the middle urinal requires is that the handle be held down for a short while longer than usual), I pried open the door with a paper towel, dropping it in its proper place as I departed, and sulked back to my desk, cursing my cowardice. I had my foe within an arm’s length, and in my weakness had let him escape, to perpetrate perhaps still greater crimes against his fellow creatures.

Some two days hence, I once again found myself in that same place, for though it was with a heavy heart I returned, necessity compelled me thither with what, if you will excuse my use of the term, I shall call regularity. Little could I believe the vicissitudes of fortune, for there again was my foe, and unrepentantly committing his habitual crime! I have you now, you bastard! But wait: surely I was deceived, I thought, for this was not the same brute as before. Does there exist some confederation of beings so indifferent to the plight of their neighbor? Surely not, for what could such creatures desire in associating with one another? Could there be a more absurd notion than a community of the antisocial? Nay, what I beheld must surely go by another name, that of Anarchy. I was defeated. Perhaps, overcoming my cowardice and taking advantage of my superior agility I may have bested one man, but this was far worse. This wasn’t merely a crime, it was systematic misanthropy. It was chaos. Their habitual unruliness required not the narrow blade of Justice, but the broad, inescapable net of the Law.

What was I to do? Certainly, one man cannot of himself be Law, for that would amount to nothing less than tyranny, but mayhap, like Moses of old, insignificant man that I am, I could give Law. Yes! Give them the Law, and yea, let it be writ upon their very hearts! Perhaps their malformed consciences merely had need of some dictum to follow, to lead them down the path of clean living. Morally, I was presented with little less than a Divine imperative, both to protect the community in which I found myself from further misdeeds, and also to guide these wayward souls, that they may no more offend the dignity of their brethren.

My plan having been hatched some short while after the aforementioned second encounter, I arose from my desk, and stepping across the hall, removed my latter-day Stone Tablet from the laser printer. Grasping the Notice in one hand, and clutching in the other a scotch tape dispenser, I swiftly, and purposefully, made my way back to the restroom. Destiny, it seems (and there is no shortage of evidence to this fact), has a taste for the dramatic, for no poet could have composed a more fitting end to my sordid story but that I should find once again, and for the final time, the stink of human micturation wafting through the air! Emboldened in my purpose, I strode to the spot of the offense, determined that none might catch me, and learn from what ignorable authority came my Notice. Swiftly, yet with great care, I removed four pieces of the tape, and affixed the Notice on the wall above the urinal, a rallying cry of Justice in a world of wanton cruelty. In plain letters, it read:

OUT OF ORDER
DO NOT USE

Having thus giv’n the Law to the Idolaters, with a flourish of my hand I pressed and held down the handle of the troublesome urinal, banishing forever the cruel injustice which I and those of like conscience had before suffered in silence. Out, foul urine! Trouble no more the works of man!
Justice, be thou ever so well-served!

I Work Upstairs From My Wife

Occasionally, we walk across the parking lot to get the mail together. It was during one such excursion that the following exchange took place:

Wife: "[Wife's Boss] has been giving me a hard time about these "mail dates." He says he doesn't want us making out in the back of his car."

Me: "Why, is it unlocked?"

Wife: *Frowns*

The Beaurocrat

I have just been appointed to a small exploratory committee, tasked with investigating possible applications for pastrami sandwiches, with cheese and Dijon mustard. While preliminary results seem to indicate that this particular combination of inputs is highly effective in a relatively narrowly-defined setting (e.g., lunch), the committee is expected to recommend much more extensive testing over a long duration of time before a more complete evaluation can be made.

Hot Dog!

Lisa colored in Robosaurus! It is too awesome for words. If you'd like to see your own version of Robosaurus displayed on this very highly-respected website, click here, and then email it to dcous at hotmail dot com, or my other email, which is my first name dot my last name at gmail dot com.

Robosaurus is My President

This is, without a doubt, the Greatest Photograph Ever Taken. (I found it here.)

Update: A quick perusal of Google yields both this majestic image, and the best coloring book page in the history of ever.

If you color in that page and send a scan of it to me, I shall post it to this blog, and what's more I shall think very highly of you. Those two things are, in their own way, a modicum of both wealth and fame.

I Could Get Used To This

I'm currently eating some sort of cinnamon raisin bagel, whose top is adorned with brown sugar, slathered in hazelnut neufchâtel cheese. It is like dessert, except that it is actually lunch. My boss brought everyone bagels yesterday morning, the leftovers of which have served me as lunch for the past two days. Tomorrow, the company is going out for sushi.

For those of you keeping score at home, that is three free lunches this week. How long will these people keep feeding me?

This Is Why I Shouldn't Have a Blog

It's a new year, apparently, although as I write this the year has grown old enough that perhaps I should call it "slightly used," or even "Certified Pre-Owned." After all, the "new" year is nearly 1/12 spent already. I meant to get around to making a few resolutions, but then I didn't even succeed in my resolution to make resolutions, which is perhaps just as well, since you can imagine how long they would've lasted, had they ever materialized to begin with. Not that I consider it too late, mind you. I make resolutions all the time, some of which I even stick to. I hardly think there's anything particularly special about New Year's Resolutions, as my neglecting to make them has doubtless already suggested to your keen and calculating intellect. I've been dwelling on cognitive dissonance a bit lately, which is to say, on the apparent rift between what we (people, I mean) claim to believe, and on how we actually act. I try to do this sort of thinking in a removed sort of way, so as not to be too judgmental (so I tell myself), and also (not improbably) because removed, abstract thinking is less likely to induce any kind of self-examination, which is a terribly uncomfortable thing to find oneself doing, probably because even a cursory glance into the immense chasm of one's own intellect can yield the unwelcome revelation that, abysmal as it may be, it's really more of a dark, cramped little nook, like the one people have under their staircases, where they keep the tennis racquets and ski poles and other things that, if they emerge at all, only do so once or twice in a given year, and always accompanied by a disappointed, almost guilty little feeling, and the remembrance that you once told yourself that you were going to become quite the avid tennis player with all of the spare time that you were going to have now, because dammit, this year you're going to watch a lot less telly. As I said, it's best to do this sort of thinking without too many specifics, particularly if those specifics were to be drawn from one's own life and experiences. In any case, the point that I've come to, thinking about cognitive dissonance, I mean, is that people have two competing drives. (Keep in mind that this is just one way to think about this, if you'd like to think about it at all.) The first drive is, simply put, Instinct. It's a way of thinking which happens, if not completely subconsciously, so automatically that if you're not careful you'll find that you've been thinking and acting a certain way in spite of yourself. It's the part of you that eats the entire snack bowl of high-calorie rubbish before the rest of you even realizes what's up, because evolution strongly favors creatures that eat as many calories as possible, as often as possible, because it (historically) leaves those creatures with the energy they need to kill things and reproduce, sometimes simultaneously. The second drive is what I'll call Reason, which is roughly what Freud would call the Super-Ego, or what Jimminy Cricket called himself. It's the part of you that feels bad when all you do is behave instinctively. This is kind of weird, because instinct isn't intrinsically bad, or at least I don't think of it that way. It's gotten us pretty far as a species. So far, in fact, that eating the whole bowl of potato chips is actually a bad decision, because (at least in this part of the world) we're up to our ears in food. (Have I ever mentioned to you how bizarre I find the fact that a huge proportion of the fat and most of the sugar Americans consume comes from corn?) It also makes a lot of sense to me that built into the human organism would be the desire to be better than one is now, to transcend a purely instinctive existence. This does result in what is often called, and what less often (in my opinion) actually is, hypocrisy, but I'm of the mind that anyone who's able to perfectly satisfy their conscience on a daily basis probably has a poorly-formed one at that. Morality is a Platonic form, unattainable in its perfection, and it has to be; how would we get any better if we thought we were already there? Of course, people sometimes think that, too. Hm.

Speaking of nothing about which I was just talking, I just found out that J.D. Salinger died yesterday. The news itself wasn't a huge shock, since he was ninety-one years old. The funny thing is that just last night, before going to bed, I randomly picked up a small volume of his short stories, and read For Esmé-With Love and Squalor, which I thought was pretty good, by the way. Quelle Coincidence, non?

Speaking neither of hall closets, cognitive dissonance, nor of J.D. Salinger for that matter, if you're still out there, reading this thing, please feel free to drop me a comment. It doesn't really have to pertain to the post, if only because the post itself, like many of its predecessors, doesn't really pertain to anything either. It doesn't bother me if you're not there, mind you, I don't keep this blog for reasons closely related to my self-esteem, save that perhaps I think better of myself when I write things down occasionally, though it doesn't seem to matter a whit to me what I write, as the evidence (no doubt) bears out.