I'm not a terribly introspective sort of person. I mean, I love to talk about myself as much as anyone does. But when it comes to taking a more careful and critical look at myself, well, I'd rather be reading a good book. So I approach this project with some trepidation. Part of me is worried that I'm going to dig up something greasy that I'll be forced to look at closely for once. And part of me is worried that in an effort to avoid such scrutiny I'll wind up writing a string of amusing anecdotes that may amuse but do little else.
But I'm safely past forty now, and another part of me is worried that I'm going to start forgetting things if I don't get them written down. Oh, how hard it is to teach myself that new trick. How many times have you considered something useful or important, and had the chance to make a note of it, but quickly decided, "Oh, why bother? I'll just remember. Why, it's practically committed to memory already." The next time the issue comes up you can only produce some foggy outlines. Phone numbers, passages in books, and the names of places, movies, albums, and people. And every time it happens again, even while I'm doing it, I think to myself, "But it's right there, crystal clear in my mind? How could that fade so quickly?" Perhaps it does help that I do have a pretty good memory, at least for things that I'm naturally motivated to remember. And of course when you're young it's so much easier to remember everything. Every decade or so, I can tell that my brain has gotten more cluttered, and new arrivals are ejected more quickly that the previous decade, to make room for even more incoming data, which in its turn will leave even sooner. Meanwhile the things I memorized in childhood remain firmly in place, as entrenched as ever. Whether it's how to ride a bike or the theme music to "The Lost Saucer", it's a permanent resident. It's like the newspaper comics page — the longer it's been there, the harder it is to get rid of it, regardless of its current relevancy. It's the clutter issue in reverse, I think. Once you turn six or so and you've sort of mastered the basics of communication and not getting killed accidentally, you hit this sweet spot where your brain isn't constantly absorbing new data just by being alive and moving around, and thus it has some spare time and energy to start learning just about anything you throw at it, regardless of its relevancy. It's eager to stretch it legs (so to speak), and it's yet to really get cluttered. Almost everything up there is relevant. It'll never again be as clean as it is now, presuming you avoid getting any lobotomies. It's like a bunch of college students arriving in the dorms for the new year: the early arrivals get first pick of the bed by the window. So much of what you learn during those choice years gets recorded permanently. Because hey! it's not like you're using those neurons for anything else, right? Not yet, anyway.
Mind you, I'm grateful to know that, no matter how many new people's names I have to learn, nothing is going to dislodge the multiplication table from my brain. It's just too bad that the price of this security is the inability to serve the plots of every episode of "Gilligan's Island" with eviction notices. Man, what a dumb show. I must have seen every episode at least three times. Sometimes having a habit is more important than what the habit is.
In college I once committed the entire text of the two Alice books to memory. I was rather surprised with myself at the time. Mind you, I was quite familiar with the books to begin with, and had already memorized all of the poetry in the books without really meaning to. (Except for the pronoun poem; that one's an absolute bear to memorize.) A fellow student challenged me to memorize the complete text as well. I wasn't sure it would even be possible, but my pride and curiosity pushed me forward. Not only was it possible — it was easy. In less than a week I had both books down pretty much solid. People tested me by picking a sentence at random in the book and reading it aloud. Typically before they finished the sentence I would have identified the passage and could recite what followed, for as long as they wanted to listen to me. Of course it wasn't a permanent resident: after I had successfully met the challenge and stopped rereading the books to refresh my memory, various passages began to fade, and within a month I was almost completely back to where I was before. I wish I understood exactly how human memory works. Hell, I wish anybody did. Sometimes just being a human seems to be a black art.
But anyway. Memory: It's not as reliable as I often fool myself into thinking it is. More than once I've caught myself short and realized that I can't remember which job I was holding down during certain critical moments in my past, which is pretty surprising when you consider how much waking time you spend at it. If there was a period of your life in which you forced yourself to sit in an empty room and watch paint dry for forty hours every week, I'd bet you quite easily remember which of your girlfriends you dated during that time. So when I find these lacunae in my recollections, they start to worry me, and I feel that I really should start writing things down now while I still have enough ancillary evidence to put things together. By process of elimination, if nothing else, I should be able to reconstruct enough of my past to make a coherent story.
No doubt the next time I have to type up a resume, I'll be grateful that I took the time to do this.
Plus, of course, there are one or two stories that are just plain interesting. I'll try to pull out as many of those as I can. If you're reading this now and you're not Brian Raiter, I hope this manages to rise above the crushingly mundane and keep you entertained. On the other hand, if it doesn't, too fucking bad. After all, it's not my fault if my life is boring to anyone who isn't me.
"When my father died, it was like a whole library burned down."
[Laurie Anderson]
Of course, there's more to my motivation that just helping me remember my own life. We are, each of us, like a little library. A very disorganized one, and definitely one that predates Gutenberg. The printing press of the cortex has yet to be invented: there's no easy way for me to run off extra copies of the books in my library. If I want to save anything before the final conflagration, I have to do it by hand. Like I'm doing right now.
Except that it's a lot of trouble, or at least it feels that way at first. And of course time spent copying books is time spent not adding to your collection.
Some people worry so much about that last fact that they spend all their time recording their thoughts and very little time enjoying their life. We consider those people neurotic. So do I, but sometimes I wonder. If you were a librarian and you knew for a fact that your library was going to be torched sometime in the next fifty years, wouldn't you be remiss if you didn't make try to make copies of all the important books as soon as possible?
Of course my analogy falls apart when you add in the consideration that there are six billion other such libraries on the planet, all in the same situation. And that a hundred billion such libraries have already been turned to ashes, with only the tiniest fraction of their contents rescued. It seems less critical to save your books when you consider coldly just how few of your volumes are likely to be noticeably unique. Yes, we're all different. But we all have a fucking hell of a lot in common, too. Chances are I would have to spend a lot of time going through my stacks to find some aspect of my brain that isn't shared by some other person who will survive my death.
On the other hand, it's all I have to offer the world. My writings and a messy home is all that I will leave behind, and the latter will just be an unwelcome chore for whatever friends I might still lay claim to. At least the former doesn't cost money to haul away.
A word of warning. One sentence in this narrative will be an outright baldfaced fabrication. I have to justify calling this a novel, you see, since this is a novel-writing month. This will provide my slender reed of an excuse.
I might as well start by getting some of the boring stuff out of the way. I'm at a loss as to where to start otherwise.
Born August 23, 1966 in Walnut Creek, California. (Walnut Creek is in Contra Costa County, a fact that I enjoy because of the role that county plays in some of Negativland's music.) I have no idea why I was born there particularly — if my parents actually lived in Walnut Creek, it couldn't have been for very long. We lived in a couple of different places over the first few years of my life. My father had an engineering degree (chemical engineering, I believe), and was still trying to get a good job. He eventually got a job with US Steel and we wound up moving to Hot Springs, Arkansas when I was two or three. My mother once told me that when we arrived there, it had only been a year or so since they had integrated the drinking fountains at Woolworth's.
At one point while we were living in Hot Springs, a black family was considering moving into an available house. The neighbors circulated a petition to keep them out — perhaps citing some excuse about property values going down, perhaps baldly stating that they didn't want to sully the pale purity of the neighborhood. I don't know. My mother was appalled (as was the black family when they got wind of this, and quickly withdrew their interest in the house), and essentially delivered an ultimatum to my father that we had to move. My father relayed this to his employer in some form or another, and eventually we wound up moving back to California, to a cul-de-sac in some distant residential suburb. My brother and I quite enjoyed the house because it was significantly larger (two stories!), and we could play out in the street. But the job that US Steel had promised my father back here turned out to be a chimera, and after living out there with no income for a few weeks, we had to leave. Before long we found ourselves living in my father's mother's back yard, in a camping trailer. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
My earliest memories are from Arkansas, although that may be simply because I can date them. Almost all of my memories before five or six are fragmentary and disconnected, largely without referents. I remember the morning of my brother Ted's second birthday (thus I would have been four years and ten months old), simply because I remember my mother telling him that. He was still in diapers and didn't yet speak much. My mother made something special for breakfast, and the fact that it was a special day inspired me to try stealing sugar from the sugarbowl, in the hope that that rule might also be different. It wasn't; I was rewarded with a glare from my mother, leaving me feeling that it hadn't been worth it.
But that's what childhood is all about, isn't it? You find out how the world works by formulating hypotheses and then testing them, and discarding the ones that get you into trouble. We all start out as amateur scientists. We haven't yet learned the scientific method, but a primitive version of it imprinted in our brains, leading us ever outward.
The earliest memory that I can positively date is from my fourth birthday. It was a nice day, and there was a cake out in a park — white with a miniature train on it. I wasn't particularly into trains, but what the heck. As we were driving out to the park, I was in a good mood (not yet having reached the point where being the center of attention made me nervous), and as I watched the clouds in the sky and wondered yet again about the fact that they followed us. Or seemed to. I think I was old enough to realize on my own that they couldn't actually be following us, because then what would other people be seeing? It's hard to say. It's possible that that bit of reasoning may be an addition to my memory added later. What I did think at the time was that if the clouds actually were following us, today was a good day for it, seeing as we were going to a party and all. It then occurred to me to share this out loud, as it seemed like something a child would say. (I realize that that last bit sounds a little too self-reflective for a four-year-old, but that was more or less my thought.) I was fairly certain that the clouds weren't really following us, but if so then an adult would surely speak up and tell me the real reason that the clouds seemed to be following us. And I did want to know the real reason. So I spoke up. I said, "Look, the clouds are coming to the party, too." Even as I said it, some small part of me recognized that I shouldn't be saying such things when I didn't believe them. As I'm sure you can guess without my telling you, this observation netted only laughter from the adults. They were instantly charmed by this statement, and I'm sure they felt that giving me an impromtu lecture on perspective (which might have just gone over my head anyway — at this distant remove I can't say) would only spoil the moment, if not actually endanger some childlike spark of wonder that still burned within me.
So I didn't get my answer. All I got was laughed at. Anger and humiliation flooded through me, enough so that I couldn't bring myself to just come out and ask someone to just explain cloud motion to me already. An approach that I now saw would have been more straightforward, but, you know. What if I had been right in the first place and the clouds really WERE following us around? The last thing I wanted to do was ask a question for which I had already figured out the answer! What are you going to say in that situation — "Yeah, that's what I thought"? That just sounds like bullshit, like you can't bring yourself to admit that you didn't know something. (Which I wasn't good at doing, of course, and it's something I still have trouble with, but that's just all the more reason not to have to swallow your pride on a situation when you really DID know.)
Anyway, I'm getting afield. Fortunately, it WAS my fourth birthday party, and there was cake, so I couldn't quite manage to stay angry for long. But I did remember the situation, and for many years I remained frustrated at the way that grownups seemed to think nothing of laughing in your face when you said something ignorant. I really couldn't understand how they could be so callous about it, and every time it happened, a small tongue of resentment flared up and burned bright within my breast.
I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my childhood normally. It wasn't a particularly painful childhood, but all in all I'm happy to have survived it and set up residence in adulthood. It's a little odd to be spending so much time thinking about this time period of disjointed memories. Please realize that I have only a vague desire to stick to a chronological order, and will skip around at will whenever I can think of something else worth writing about. This is a nanowrimo-style effort (except for the part where it's not fictional), and it's very unlikely there will ever be a second draft of this. So, disorganization is going to be the rule.
I was pretty much born a geek. If I had to sum myself up in one word, "geek" would probably be as good as anything. (I was very angry when Wil Wheaton titled his first book "Just a Geek". That was going to be the title of my autobiography, once I had done something interesting enough to attract a publisher. I still haven't entirely forgiven him. Then again, "Just Another Geek" might be a good second choice title.) I would be fourteen when I saw an actual computer program, so in the meantime my interests had to find other outlets.
Letters and numbers were my first fascination. Ah, the written word. I was a charter member of the Sesame Street generation: My mother read an article about the new educational television show, and sat my brother and I down for the very first episode. The animal footage was terminally boring, but pretty much everything else about the show was up my alley. My mother recalls that I learned to recognize the word "wall" that day, and pointed it out that evening when my father came home bearing a copy of that day's Wall Street Journal. I suspect that that was probably a later incident that has become intermingled in her mind, but in any case we watched the show pretty much every day it was on.
(It's funny how our minds automatically try to reorganize our memories so that they form better narratives, isn't it? Without our trying or even realizing it. You have to step back and dispassionately look out for stories that seem overly pat in order to find the spots where your own brain has been tampering with your records.)
When I was old enough to go to the library and check out books, I had a handful of locations on the shelves that the Dewey Decimal system led me to visit on a regular basis. One of these was the 411s: Writing Systems. In here I found books full of strange-looking symbols that nonetheless carried meaning. I wanted to be able to read everything ... especially things few others could read. At a relatively young age I made a list of several archaic number systems. (For example the Greeks and Hebrews re-used their alphabets, assigning letters in order to the values 1 through 9, 10 through 90, and 100 throught 900.) I also studied written languages to some degree, but this was much more daunting, particularly when one factors in the fact that learning a new alphabet was typically useless without also learning the accompanying language. Had the opportunity been available to me, I probably would have learned Russian or Arabic, just so I could read and write in their alphabets. The closest I ever came was with Ancient Egyptian. Their stylized hieroglyphs became a long-standing fascination with me, and thus I managed to learn a few rudiments about their actual language. But to this day I know far more Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs than Ancient Egyptian words.
Here's a little puzzle. Why was I so much more fascinated by words than by numbers as a child? While I would prove to be adept at handling either, I was more adept with the numbers. And yet it never once occurred to me that I could grow up to be a mathematician. Instead, at the age of nine, I finally realized that my destiny was to be a freelance writer. I held onto that belief all the way to adulthood, until I took a college-level course in fiction writing and discovered that the reality of writing was very different than what I had handwavingly imagined. Fortunately by then I had come to realize that I really, really liked math and computers, and maybe this was something in which I could find a career after all. Otherwise I no doubt would have had to graduate with no direction and go to Europe on my parent's dime for several months and probably decide to be a composer or something even more likely to make the rest of my life painful.
(And yet I have never forgotten writing! Here I am at the keyboard, trying to preserve a few more scraps before the inevitable fire. More on that later.)
I once told one of our regular babysitters (a young woman in her teens) my plan to become a freelance writer when I grew up. She expressed surprise, in a way that adults rarely did when you told them what you wanted to be when you grew up, and said, "I always thought you should do something in the sciences." At the time, I was merely vaguely annoyed that she hadn't seen how incredibly perfect a fit freelance writing was for me. But I wish now that her words had had more of an effect on me. While a career as a computer programmer has been a good fit for my skills, and occasionally been vastly entertaining, I do occasionally reflect on the fact that my efforts have pretty much been in the name of making money, and I wish that I could say that I had added, however minutely, to the vast and evergrowing edifice of human understanding. Just one peer-reviewed paper that included my name....
Well, enough of that. It's too early for me to be wallowing in regrets.
By the time we moved into my grandmother's back yard, I had already completed kindergarten and was ready for first grade. I don't remember much about going to school in California, but as I sit here and think bits and pieces come floating back. I remember very clearly reading aloud in school. The teacher would have us turn to a page and students would be randomly called on to read aloud. It was a maddening experience at times, listening to the other kids read. They were slow, but even worse, they would read in this awful monotone. They wouldn't put any inflection at the periods, or even pause sometimes. Good grief! Their normal conversation wasn't monotonic, so why did they talk like that when they were reading aloud? And they ALL did. Finally it was my turn to read and I was so relieved: now I could show them all how to do it properly. I launched into my narration at a normal conversational speed and with a proper cadence, and you will probably not be surprised to learn that this incited muffled laughter from my peers. I was astounded, of course — I couldn't imagine THEY were laughing at MY reading. Did I actually pause and ask the teacher if I was doing something wrong? I may have. In any case, all too soon my turn was over and the teacher passed the chore on to some other robot-voiced child. I was willing to accept that all the other children were too stupid to read as well as myself. (My first hypothesis had graciously been that they just hadn't realized that they were doing it wrong, but I was prepared to accept the possibility that I was simply smarter than everyone else.) But I couldn't fathom that my vastly superior reading skills had provoked laughter.
The fact that I had just marked myself to my peers as "not one of us" was quite beyond my ability to see at the age of six.
Do you remember not being able to read? I don't. I mean, I remember not knowing what "ostentatious" means, but I don't remember the time when I couldn't read basic words, or the time when a string of letters was nothing more than that. I have a vaguely tenuous memory of reading a short, five-letter word, and at the time remembering when I didn't know how to read that word, and thinking to myself that I guess that meant I could read now. But it's very vague, and I can't place it in time.
Of course I can recapture the feeling of not being able to read something by opening up a book in a foreign language. Russian works especially well, since I don't even know the pronunciation of most Cyrillic letters. But that's not the same, is it? As not being able to read anything. Surrounded by writing and literate people and not being one of them. Or not even really understanding, yet, the mechanism whereby abstract shapes arranged in sequences can talk to you.
It's so hard for me to remember this that sometimes I wonder if my brain didn't really get the idea of organizing memories until after it learned how to read. If the two are somehow connected. Maybe it just threw my memories into a big pile, like a dirty clothes hamper, and only later it got the bright idea of keeping them organized. Of course this idea is contradicted by the fact that I seemed to be a normal infant before learning to read, so my memories were probably organized in a sensible way. Also I've met plenty of people who can easily remember themselves before they could read. My ex, Laura, is dyslexic and wasn't diagnosed correctly until she was eight or nine; she well remembers what it was like to be unable to read.
So I think it's just a case of me having bad early memories. In fact, I've developed a new theory in recent times: that I have such poor memories of my early childhood because I simply never thought I would ever need them. Like most people, I have a tendency to assume that life will generally continue as it is now. Thus there's no need to think much about the mundane aspects of your existence, because they'll still be there tomorrow. Maybe I just threw all those memories away.
Of all the various aptitutde tests I had to take throughout childhood, a few stand out for being unusual and interesting. I remember one where the tester showed me various non-existent words, and I had to provide my guess as to their pronunciation. At the time I thought that was great fun, and was disappointed that there were only ten or so fictional words given, and only one or two were particularly challenging.
There was a test in elementary school where we were given a page containing nothing but an egg-shaped oval and were asked to complete the picture. After staring at it for a while and feeling uninspired, and starting to get worried that I was running out of time, I finally decided to treat the oval as the body of an eagle. Birds aren't normally quite so pudgy as that, but you know how hard it is to get past first impressions sometimes. The egg association had probably influenced me, but the longer I sat there trying to come up with something else, the more I drew a blank. I knew I wasn't a great artist, but I gave it a decent run, feeling a bit resentful that our artistic abilities were being tested. Then when that time was up, the tester asked us to make up a story for the image we had drawn. Argh! I can't even tell you I came up with. If I had known that was going to be next, I certainly wouldn't have drawn a fucking bird. I think I pulled something out about the bird attacking the people down below. I have this vague memory of even calling it a roc, in which case I was probably just regurgitating something I had seen on the Saturday morning cartoon Hercules. I don't think any of my reading had introduced me to the roc. (In fact, I'm still unclear where the roc fits into Greek mythology. It wasn't the creature that tortured Prometheus, was it? Pretty sure that was a vulture.) Of course, now I can look back on it and realize that that wasn't a test of intelligence or aptitutde at all, but was probably a psychological test. If so, then I can only guess at what my illustrated story demonstrated.
I was definitely above average in several areas. Besides reading and math aptitude, I generally did well in school. I was blessed with enormous amounts of uncalled-for confidence. I still am. But I don't think I've ever been accused of being unusually imaginative. I've been called creative, but you can hardly avoid calling a child creative, unless they're severely mentally disabled. But as a general rule, I'm not particularly given to flights of fancy. This is such a notable aspect of my personality that it actually feels a little bizarre that it's something I hardly ever acknowledge. But it took a long time for me to really see it as such. I'm smart; of course that means I'm imaginative! Right? And I do have an imagination, of course I do. But it's a cautious creature. It prefers to go out for short little jaunts, sticking close to known territory. The big wide world doesn't really call to it as such. Maybe it's scared of open spaces. Maybe it just lazy and can't see what's so great about being far away from home. Maybe it's missing a limb; I don't know. But it's a significant aspect of who I am. In fact, it feels like it's connected to my other significant personality aspects: geek and introvert. They all feel of a piece. For example, plenty of geeks are extroverted, but I suspect that introversion is significantly higher than in the rest of the population. Likewise, having a flightless breed of imagination may be connected with a preference for science fiction over other genres (and "hard" SF over the softer subtypes), or maybe even with things like decreased social skills. That's just a guess on my part; I'm sure a professional neurologist or sociologist would say that reality isn't that simple.
But realizing that certainly helped me understand some things about why I found my college course in fiction writing so hard. More about that later, maybe.
Here's a interesting potential case in point. I'm an atheist. More to the point, I became an atheist around the age of seven or eight, immediately after finding out that such people existed. I'm pretty sure that some would see this as suggestive of my having a below-average imaginative capacity. I'm not entirely sure they'd be wrong.
Few people are raised as atheists (or at least not until recent times). Like paganism and other religious faiths that fail to provide organizational hierarchies, there's not much in the way of intrinstically atheist cultures. (I'm not counting communist countries where atheism is imposed by an authoritarian government rather than being part of the preexisting folkways. It's hard to say what the dominant faiths in such places really are, anyway.) Atheism tends to be a belief system that one comes to in adulthood, after one has acquired a mature understanding of the natural world. When one has learned something about the history of human religions, for example, it becomes harder to assume the one you were raised with is somehow righter than all the rest. When one has grown out of the Tooth Fairy and Superman, and learns that even Robin Hood likely never existed, it becomes clear how little compelling cultural narratives require a backing of reality — and, by simple extension, all the religions you don't believe in. And if that eventually comes to include all of them, you call yourself an atheist.
"They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it. And damn it, I think they were right! It is corrosive of religious belief. And it's a good thing, too."
[Steven Weinberg]
This isn't every atheist's story, but I suspect it includes a lot of us. Some children are actually raised as atheists, by atheist parents, and I'd guess that in such circles the rate of children who remain solid atheists as adults is largely the same as any religious minority's rate. Far and away the best predictor of a person's religious belief in adulthood is the religion of their parents. On the other hand, my ex Laura was has two atheist parents, and grew up to believe quite strongly in a spiritual, supernatural world, and even in such things as astrology and Tarot. Of course they did not raise her explicitly as an atheist, but left her free to decide for herself. If anything, she was raised as a Unitarian. When you take all that into account, I'm not sure if she winds up forming a case for or against the majority.
In any case, my experience was different.
As best as I can remember, I was around eight years old, and I was looking through one of my parents' books that I liked. It was almost an accidental find, or at least I don't remember anyone showing it to me. I had discovered it on my own. I occasionally went through the large bookshelf my parents had, looking for something that didn't look terminally boring. On one such occasion I had discovered a Time-Life science book, titled simply "The Stars". The first time I ever looked at it, it was of course largely over my head, but every now and then I returned to it, and found more and more of it comprehensible, and more and more of it interesting.
I don't remember exactly when I learned that the stars were faraway suns, unfortunately. I wish I did. I do know that it wasn't too much earlier than this that I fully realized that each faraway sun might have a whole other set of planets, and that those planets might also have life. But I don't remember when I first learned that stars were anything but lights in the sky. (Why should any child wonder what the stars are? They're no more strange than the sun or moon, or even clouds for that matter. The sky is a place very different from the ground, and as a child it's only clear that it operates under a different set of laws. No wonder ancients had so many fanciful notions about it.)
In any case, this early-sixties era Time-Life book introduced me to such marvels as galaxies, globular clusters and supernovae. In later years it taught me about the Main Sequence, the carbon fusion chain, and the predicted fate of our own sun. The latter fact — that in only a handful of billions of years — was one of the first times I remember considering the fact that ultimately Earth was doomed but maybe it was okay. Of course people still occasionally fed my generation wild stories about The Space Age, so I probably also wasn't too worried about humanity being trapped on Earth by then.
(In fact, in middle school, I tried my hand at writing actual fiction for one of the first times, and completed a set of three science fiction short stories. The first one was titled "Earth" [the other two were named "Air" and "Fire" — I tried to work up a quick fourth story involving water but ran out of ideas and time]. It described a starfaring human race, billions of years in the future, who decided to seed the sun with antimatter and clear out the helium "ash" accumulated over the billion years of its life, so as to prevent its transition to a helium-burning red giant and keep the planet Earth intact. The story makes it clear that this decision is a purely sentimental one, and in fact I even had a brief go at trying to describe the grass-roots campaign for the ultimately successful project. Of course it ends with a cell suddenly coming into existence on an unnamed moon of Saturn and promptly freezing to death. All that was missing was a voiceover by Rod Serling.)
You wouldn't think that a pre-teen kid would get excited about a chart showing the Main Sequence, and of course at first I was much more interested in that short two-page chapter that described colliding galaxies, along with one dull telescope photo and an awesome artist's conception, showing two spiral galaxies passing through each other with red-hot gases where they overlapped. You know, it's great and all that we have so many beautiful photographic images to accompany science texts these days, but I think it's good to have the occasional "artist's conceptions" as well. Of course these days they're all done with computers so they're almost indistinguishable from photos, so maybe it's a moot point. But all I'm saying is yeah — keep those overexposed photos of galaxies with their feathery lanes of gas and dust and those false-color images of Io. I agree with those that say that such images should be marked as such, so that people don't get false ideas what everything really looks like, but it doesn't hurt to make sure the airbrushed stuff remains available. But anyway, the Main Sequence. I eventually became fascinated by this chart, partly because I couldn't quite understand it and I thought I should be able to. I was also taken by the fact that it appeared several times in the book, each time with a slightly different bit of data overlaid onto the same background showing the three or five regions that most stars fell into. One of those charts displayed the path of our own sun from birth to death, showing where it would be on the chart at each point of its life and how long it would remain there before the next stage. One summer day I took a piece of white construction paper, a pencil and a ruler, and made my own full-sized Main Sequence chart, showing the union of all the charts in the book. After I had copied all of the data, I went back and filled the regional bands with dots, as I had seen one of the versions of this chart do, as if to show all the various stars that fit into each location on the chart. It looked much better than my empty bands, so I set aside an hour or two one day to fill my bands with dots. I even had planned to go to the nearby convenience store beforehand and buy twenty peppermint patties, and dole them out to myself at sixteen evenly-spaced points in the process as rewards to keep myself going, with four more as celebration at the end. Unfortunately on the day that I had set aside for doing this, I arrived at the convenience store and discovered that they had once again run out of five-cent Yorks, and once again instead of restocking had replaced them with something else. This time, red licorice whips, at two for five cents. I didn't really care much for licorice, not even red licorice, but as I had little choice I bought twenty whips and took them home. By the time the chart was half done, I could barely stand to finish one whip before reaching the next checkpoint and earning another. I finished the chart with several left over and my already-feeble interest in red licorice completely doused, a state of complete apathy that proved to be permanent. (At least it still left me with fifty cents. I would rather have had the peppermint patties, though. I loved peppermint patties. Still do, actually. Wish I had one right now.)
But. Getting back to that one day when I was still roughly eight and the Main Sequence charts didn't even hold my attention. After admiring the colliding galaxies near the back, I was paging through it looking for more to read about, and I hit upon a two-page spread that described the early formation of the solar system. It showed a cloud of interstellar dust slowly collapsing from its own gravity, spinning faster as it became denser, until there was enough matter crammed into the center to be a sun, at which point it started to heat up. When pretty much everything had collapsed into a single ball, it was spinning fast enough that it threw off a bunch of extra matter at the equator, where the speeds were fastest (and gravitational attraction was weakest). The ejected matter began repeating the original process in miniature, with several different areas forming their own local balls of matter that eventually drew in everything nearby. Many of them even repeated the part where at the point of maximum rotational speed they threw off a bit of matter from the equator before stabilizing, which in turn eventually collapsed into other balls. Voila: sun, planets, and moons, with the last straggling bits of matter winding up as asteroids or comets.
Pretty typical as explanations go at that age, in that it seemed to raise a bunch of really obvious followup questions, like for example if it just formed out of a bunch of preexisting matter then where the heck did THAT come from? Still, it was very likely easier to explain where a formless cloud of dust came from than a fully formed solar system, so even at that age I could see where this explanation was helpful. It wasn't trying to do everything, but was just one piece of the puzzle. Too bad Time-Life hadn't seen fit to include the whole thing, but then again maybe it was just in one of those parts that I didn't understand yet. (Most likely true, in fact.)
I had read these pages before, of course, but on this one day something struck me about it. A light bulb went on within my head. I reread the text under the pictures ("artist's conceptions") to make sure, even though I already knew full well there was no mistake.
And indeed. Here was a description of the formation of the solar system (complete, for the part that it described) that made no reference to God. None. Not even to suggest that God had nudged the cloud into position, or had given some chunk of matter a bit of a backspin in order to get things started, or even that he had carefully watched over it without interfering.
Not even to apologize for not mentioning God. It wasn't even that relevant.
There were people, I realized, who didn't believe in God.
There were holes in my logic, I saw (if not immediately, then in the ensuing days). Just because these people contradicted the first chapter of Genesis didn't mean they didn't believe in God. They might still believe other parts of the Bible were right. Or they might believe that God created the interstellar dust, knowing that it would lead to the solar system and human beings. Or they might even believe in a different God altogether.
But none of those objections really mattered, I realized. This explanation for the formation of the solar system was printed in a regular book, after all, and meant for kids to read. Clearly it wasn't the work of a handful of lunatics trying to push their wild-eyed beliefs onto children before they were old enough to know better. No, this theory of the solar system's formation had to be pretty widely accepted by scientists. Or even if it wasn't, they at least were comfortable with the idea that it wasn't God just stepping in and doing it by hand. Clearly. And I knew that even if all those people still believed that God did exist, they couldn't speak for everybody. I mean, taking this idea to its logical conclusion was simply too obvious, too compelling. If you could come up with a plausible notion of how the solar system formed just by leaving a bunch of interstellar dust alone for millions of years, then surely the formation of everything else could be explained in a similar manner! So even if everyone who worked on this book believed in God, there were definitely other people out there who didn't.
And if it truly turned out that there weren't any other such people, well, there was one now.
If it had turned out that every adult I ever met believed in the Bible, then I wasn't about to rebel against that. Those are long odds, stupid odds. But something within me, even at that age, didn't find the Bible stories particularly compelling, and in fact they may have even pinged my nascent, still-forming bogometer. They were just too strangely skewed while at the same time trying to be too pat. (Pat in a way that, as I mentioned above, real explanations never seemed to succeed in being.) All I had needed was reassurance that I wasn't the only one who felt this way.
The moment I deduced the existence of atheists, I knew that I was one too.
I don't know if making a stand at that age is common or not. Some kids are just born serious, I suppose. Earlier I suggested that my atheism might have been encouraged by a lazy imagination, that I was unable to imagine ways that a deity could coexist with a world that grew from nothing more than insentient physical forces. But I think that's too simple an explanation. In some ways you need a greater imagination to accept that, just because a deity-free explanation for one step can be found, that the rest of it will almost certainly follow. Surely I must have been hard up to explain how all this life got here, human beings included, at that age.
On the other hand, childhood is really the perfect time for such leaps of imagination. Over a span of a few years you go from being unable to read, to being able to read simple words, to memorizing the times table. And you can see what the adults can do and know that they started out just as handicapped as you. Maybe at that age leapfrogging accomplishments is actually the easiest thing of all to believe in.
My atheism didn't create a stir in my family, in part because I felt no need to inform anyone of it. Mainly it didn't seem that there was any reason to, although it's possible that I also worried about people's reactions. My parents were not especially spiritually inclined people, and their beliefs can be summed up as general-purpose twentieth-century Christianity without a lot of church-going. At some point in the ensuing years, however, my parents became vaguely concerned at the lack of spirituality in the house, and over several years there were periods where they dragged us off to church every Sunday. My atheism had nothing to do with the fact that I found the sermons terminally boring — pretty much every child does at that age. Particularly with the bulk of each event involving sitting still and listening to a calmly delivered speech on matters too abstract to really engage a child's attention. I didn't much care for the hymns, but at least it gave you something to do. Argh. We went to a nice, low-profile, non-denominational Christian church, and sometimes there was a Sunday school which was usually only half as boring as a sermon. But more often there was no Sunday school, either for lack of money or volunteers, and before long I was too old to attend anyway.
I will say this. Such churches are a good way to encourage young atheists. Rarely was there anything compelling about the experience to make me think that I would ever feel that I was missing out on something. Church was simply a way to socialize, and when you weren't socializing you were being bored.
Later still, our church started a Sunday "evening school" for teens, and my parents sent me off to these for a while. Slightly less boring, and my one friend attended as well. One week we attended a Baptist church, so we could see what a different religion looked like. (An excellent idea, by the way, and an experience that far more people should have, especially while still young.) The preacher used much more of the fire-and-brimstone flavor than I had heard before: the recurring theme of the sermon was that if you walk out of here tonight without having accepted Jesus Christ as your savior, you will be "ninety minutes closer to Hell". And you never know when your number will come up, right? so that's a serious concern, or it oughta be, is the point. Afterwards the adult running the bit commented that she thought that was a really negative way to push religious belief, that people shouldn't believe in God out of fear. And while I generally agreed with her sentiment, I could also see how that sermon, with its rolling cadences and shouted delivery, felt more like something worth coming to see. Had I grown up in a Baptist family, I might have felt that there was something I was missing out on by not attending church.
(A brief aside. Hell? Seriously. How can anybody continue to believe in Hell in this day and age? It's just so transparently an bit tacked on in an attempt to keep people in line. The parallels between heaven vs. hell and Santa Claus giving you presents vs. coal are so blatant, and that's just for starters. Then you have to reconcile Hell and punishment for all eternity with a loving god. Good grief. How does anyone do it? You know, the Hebrews didn't have a God that wanted love — he explicitly was to be feared, not loved — and even they didn't believe in Hell.)
Meanwhile my mother seemed to enjoy her return to spirituality. (I suspect it was mainly herself, and only secondarily my brother and me, that she fretted over becoming to divorced from the spiritual world.) But she found Christianity not entirely satisfactory, and so began experimenting with various other ideas, a few of which would be popular among adherent of the future New Age movement. (She never went quite that far, mind you, but I think she still believes in reincarnation. Or at least considers it a possibility. I remember conversing with her once about life after death, which I had tentatively decided didn't exist but was hopeful that maybe would turn out to be true after all. I had to admit that reincarnation had a certainly aesthetic appeal, but if I couldn't remember having been someone else in previous lives, then it followed that my future lives wouldn't feel like a continuation of my self either, and so therefore how was this any different from dying as far as I was concerned? Of course I probably didn't say anything that eloquently, and I don't recall my mother understanding my indifference to the idea of reincarnation, but that's always been my main stumbling block with the idea. (Well, at least until I got older and learned that the existing evidence for reincarnation was on a par with the evidence for flying saucers.) My father's religious beliefs remained vague and pretty neutral throughout all this, I think. I wouldn't be surprised if he turned out to be agnostic more than anything else, but to be honest I really don't know.
My atheism only became an issue a couple of times in my pre-adult life. I once got into an argument with another kid at summer camp who was almost annoyed that someone could be so thick as to not believe in God. An otherwise perfectly normal peer, he was my first introduction to how pointless it is to try to engage a religious person in meaningful debate about their beliefs. Unless the person has actually come to you with a real desire to find out more about you, religious arguments rarely make room for logical replies.
At some point in my life our laid-back nondenominational Christian church started experimenting with performing a casual, laid-back communion once a month, after the sermon was over. They set up a folding table behind the "pews" with a loaf of unsliced bread, a bottle of wine, and a bottle of grape juice. (I should perhaps mention that this church was just a building with an auditorium-sized room. There were no pews, just lots of chairs set up in neat rows by church members.) The first time communion was introduced to us, I had never heard of it before, and was uneasy with not knowing what was involved. The pastor, in the process of explaining the idea of introducing communion, explicitly stated, "We invite you to participate; the ceremony is purely voluntary." I heard that and relaxed: I was off the hook. People weren't expected to participate. It wouldn't be a problem. So, after the introduction was over, everyone got up to stand in a circle around the table in the back. Lo and behold, to my honest surprise, I found that I was the only one who had elected to not participate. I kicked myself for not having foreseen this, but at that point there was nothing to do but to sweat it out in my chair until the damn ceremony was over. (Looking back on it now, and knowing far more than I did then about religious history, I suspect the pastor's comment in the introduction was mainly aimed at any potential hardline evangelical types, who would likely object to such a Catholic ritual.)
There were a few more communion events after that. I sat out one other; on a third occasion I participated because I wasn't up for making an issue out of the whole thing. I didn't really care if anybody knew I was an atheist or not; I had never intended to make a statement in the first place, and I was starting to worry that my sitting out might be coming off as rude. But that was about it; I either managed to avoid going to church on communion days until they stopped doing communion, or that was close to the time that I stopped going to church altogether. I don't remember now exactly when my parents finally decided they had pushed enough church on us and left us once again free to seek out our own answers, but at some point I remember being blessedly freed of the tedious chore that chewed up precious weekend hours.
The most fun I ever had during a church sermon was the day that I discovered how to make paper clips jump. Have you ever done this? I stumbled upon the technique more or less by accident. I played with paper clips a lot during my childhood. I had a paper clip collection, in part specifically because it was a silly thing to collect. Of course I didn't go out and buy a box of paper clips, but collected them from teacher's notes and such places. I kept a paper clip clipped to the right-hand pocket of all of my jeans (which occasionally gave my mother grief when they came loose in the dryer). Occasionally I would take my handy paper clip out and play with it in some fashion. One day during the sermon I had a paper clip in my hand in which the inner tongue was bent out at a visible angle from the outer part. I was trying to convince it to become a flat object once again, but I found the metal resistant to reshaping, unless I bent it so far that the tongue stuck out the other side. Frustrated, I bent the tongue sideways a bit so that it would push against the outer part, hoping that the friction would be able to hold it flatly in place for long enough that the metal would finally accept the new shape. I wound up having to bend it sideways a signficant amount, but eventually I got it to work, and as long as I didn't jostle it, the tongue stayed in place. Having accomplished this, I set the paper clip down atop the hymnbook sitting in my lap and turned my attention back to the sermon, or maybe my father's wrist, trying to get an idea of the time. And suddenly, the paper clip flew up off the hymnbook and landed on the floor, so fast that I barely saw it happen. When I retrieved it, I found that friction had failed, and the tongue had popped back out, apparently launching the paper clip into the air. Fascinated by the novelty of having a paper clip suddenly jump up several inches by itself, I experimented with it. I wasn't able to get the tongue to slide loose by itself while lying down, but I did find that I could jostle it loose by dropping it a few inches onto the hymnbook, whereupon it would jump back up into the air, ascending above the point where I had dropped it. My father was sitting next to me and after a few minutes of this curtailed my activities, but I played with my jumping paper-clip trick for years afterwards, even once presenting it some fellow college students as a simple magic trick.
In some ways, I almost would have preferred to have had a less wishy-washy exposure to religion. Not that I think for a moment that I might not have become an atheist, but understanding Christianity is a significant part of understanding our culture. The strange and occasionally uneasy relationship it has with the Jewish religion, and the rather stark contrast between the gods of the Old and New Testament, are useful things to have under one's belt in modern society. Just as I wouldn't recommend trying to grow up in Iran without understanding Islam, the religion permeates far more of the culture than you realize at first. Of course I eventually picked all of this up in college, but it would have been nice to have had more of a head start.
Of course, if I were seriously making wishes, I would instead wish that our society was less Christianity-focused than it is now. But hey, let's be realistic here. My original counterfactual just required time travel.
I have occasionally referred to atheism as being my religion, by that referring to the fact that it seemed to originate from somewhere deep within me, like an integral piece of my personality, destined to be true before I was old enough to understand it. Of course, I know that that isn't entirely true. Even if my original internal declaration of belief had been largely an act of faith (and let's face, it's hard to think of a better explanation for the certainty I felt at the time), I would have ultimately abandoned it had it failed to withstand the test of time. I've had to discard a lot of stupid beliefs that I embraced feverishly in childhood. In this particular case, however, my instincts seem to have failed to lead me astray. There is still a lot we don't know, and no doubt there are an astounding number of things that humanity will never know before it falls extinct. But good grief, I don't think I guessed just how much we would know by this point. I am often reminded of that philosopher, whose name I could not possibly produce at this point in time. He wasn't anyone terribly famous, but he wrote a passage once. While discussing the limits of humanity's knowledge, he chose a concrete example and said, "We will never know, for example, what lies at the heart of the distant stars." I have no doubt that that seemed at the time like a perfect example of something we could never hope to know. And how utterly incorrect that turned out to be! Good grief, we know the contents of the distant stars more precisely than we know the contents of our own planet's core. It's amazing.
We know that our grasp has its limits, but it's very hard to predict beforehand where those limits lie.
I dunno, though. I'm starting to wonder if maybe we blew it. This country, that is. I mean, the Bill of Rights is one of the most important legal documents ever drafted in our country's history, and like most people I'm an intense fan of the very first amendment, which hits it out of the park right from the starting gate. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble, and freedom of religious belief. It's nice knowing all that stuff is put there near the front where you can't miss it. And while freedom of speech is the real biggie in my mind, as a member of a minority religious belief I've appreciated the fact that freedom of religion is included with that. Given my experience, I can well appreciate that one's religious belief is in some ways not a matter of choice. Strictly speaking it is of course a conscious decision, but really it's not something that one can always just decide to have or not have, or change to suit your circumstances. And certainly I'm very happy that, despite such backsliding crapola like monetary mottoes, it is pretty broadly recognized that judging other people by their religious beliefs is often a bad idea.
But I'm starting to think that maybe this was the wrong approach to take. It's so ironic, but this may have just made matters worse.
It's been pointed out, most notably by an economist whose name escapes me at the moment, that by guaranteeing freedom of religion throughout the country, we created a sort of religious utopia, a Happy Hunting Grounds where all religions can prosper. Since the government doesn't favor any particular religion, they wind up competing with each other, like herbivores in a rainforest, or groundhogs on the open plains. Or, perhaps more pointedly, like bacteria cultures in a Petri dish.
Most religions don't directly try to "compete" for resources (i.e. adherent, particularly the tithing kind), of course. But some do. And in an environment where a new religion can spring up overnight and try to be taken seriously, well, natural selection invariably kicks in. Whether you like it or not, the mechanics of survival of the fittest come into play. (Or as in a capitalist, lassez-faire economy, to use the original author's analogy. I like mine better.)
One result of this is that America becomes the natural birthplace for whacky new religions, such as Mormonism. It's rather frustrating to me when I see how much effort the Mormons spend on proselytizing in other countries. They and American tourists are our de facto cultural ambassadors, by sheer force of numbers.
But a more pertinent result of this state of affairs is that America is also the natural birthplace for some if not all of the most virulent new religions of modern times. Consider the televangelists and the Church of Scientology — two excellent examples of lean, mean, money-grubbing machines. And I use the word "mean" advisedly: these religious pursuits has as their first priority the fleecing of their adherents, and gives them little or nothing in return. The money flows in one direction only, and what is not spent on the tiny inner circle is spent on strengthening the religion's claim to legitimacy (both legal and cultural). Scientology in particular strikes me about as close to real evil as you find in the non-fictional world, and I don't really know how you can neutralize its harmfulness without stopping it entirely. Which you can't really do in our society.
Compare this with England. Here's a country which has never seen a separation of church and state. There is a state religion, and in fact it is the Anglican Church. The Church of England. Founded by Henry VIII so he could get a divorce. (Okay, that's not entirely true, but it's orthogonal to the issue at hand.) And yet this country is one of the most secular Christian countries today. Thanks to the ties to other countries "forged" during their colonial period, they have a startlingly diverse population. And though the church is complexly entwined with the government, the reality is freedom of religion. Perhaps more importantly, the reality is also freedom FROM religion. Religion is not widely regarded as being necessary for a person's moral foundation (or at least not nearly so widely as in the USA), and a far larger number of people feel free to live their lives without religious guidance, and don't feel the need to hide it.
It's often been noted that public displays of religious belief are expected, if not effectively required, of presidential candidates in the USA today, while in the UK Tony Blair carefully concealed the depths of his religious convictions until after he was elected Prime Minister, knowing that it would doom his campaign if it became public knowledge beforehand. I look at that and I can't help but think, what's wrong with this picture? How come WE are the ones with the serious problem with religion running amok, while the church-mandated society is the one pulling itself out of the superstitious mud?
This is why I think my biological analogy is better than the market-economy one: I think England is vaccinating its children. They expose everyone to religion at an early age (via the state-run schools). Not a dangerously virulent strain of religious belief like Scientology, which attack people at their weakest points and works to divide them from vectors of rational reflection. Quite the opposite: the kids are exposed to a limp, watered-down flavor of Christianity that has lost much of its conviction over the decades and centuries of history and scientific progress and cultural growth, and now just presents those trappings that have been proven "safe" and unlikely to offend anyone. It's a milquetoast's religion, and the only people who are likely to get fervent about its tenets are people who find roller coaster rides too much for their nervous system, and whose idea of making the world a better place is to memorize the names of everyone in their parish rather than (say) setting off bombs in the Tube. (Incidentally, I can't bear roller coasters myself, so that's why I picked that for an example, but sorry if I offended you, whoever you are.) Thus, by the time a generation of children grows up and leaves school, they've already seen the insides of one religion, one that's not likely to garner a lot of fundamentalist-style support (or even much enthusiasm of any kind). They've had a chance to see the all-too-common disconnect between the official ideas of an organized religion, and the religion as it's actually practiced by its ministers and/or its general members, and the many things we've actually learned about the natural world via the scientific process. Voila: their mental immune system has been kick-started. Instead of coming into adulthood pre-infected, they've taken their first steps towards applying critical thinking to matters of faith. Regardless of what anyone set out to do, England is doing a pretty darned good job of building a society where the problems specific to widespread religious belief are being mitigated to an impressive degree.
Meanwhile our separation of church and state is being tested nonstop by a tiny minority of people who are unsatisfied with manipulating the rank and file for mere money, and now crave political power. And I can't help but think that we made the wrong choice, back in 1789.
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
[I Corinthians 13:11]
Sidewalks.
I have a love-hate relationship with people other than myself. Doesn't that sound like something a dyed-in-the-wool misanthropist would say? And yet I've never considered myself a misanthropist, not seriously, and would certainly object to the label now. But I think we all have a love-hate relationship with people other than ourselves; it's just not normally expressed in quite those words.
Linus: "I love humanity; it's PEOPLE I can't stand!"
[Charles Schulz]
On occasion I really enjoy being around people as long as I don't have to interact with them. When such a mood would strike me in college, I would go to the activities building (called the CAB at my college, short for college activities building, I think — what most other places call the student union) and take a seat on the upper floor overlooking the doors facing the center of the campus, and just watch people coming and going. In my reflective state, I found it encouraging and sometimes even inspiring to watch this flow of people coming and going, socializing with each other, acquaintances bumping into each other and chatting in the middle of the crowd's stream. And there was a tiny bit of bittersweet feeling to this mood, because of the feeling that I could only appreciate it like this by remaining outside of it.
Something like this also led me to move to the city. I grew up in a small town, and went to a college relatively isolated from the nearby town. When I first spent time in Seattle alone, and not in the company of several friends, my impressions were daunting, almost alienating. But I was led to Seattle because that was where all the software jobs were in this part of the country, and I quickly found myself very happy here. Within a year or less I was already thinking of it as my adopted hometown, and partly this is because of that same old impulse to be in the vicinity of people but not in their company. It's now hard for me to imagine remaining an introvert in a small town over a long period of time. It seems to me that they must deal with loneliness in a very different way than I do.
(It may seem strange to hear an introvert complaining about loneliness. But of course the reality is that we get lonely just as much as extroverts do. The difference is in how we go about dealing with it.)
Nowadays I rarely go out in public just to watch people going by. Partly this is because with full-on adulthood my needs have changed. I currently spend forty hours a week dealing with the same dozen people in an office, plus another handful of hours being on the bus, which gives me plenty of opportunity to watch people but without the same level of comfortable separation when something really interesting happens. I pretty much get all the exposure that I need right there.
And then there are the sidewalks. I may not go out to people-watch, but I do have to go outside for other reasons. And sometimes this is the aggravating thing. Sometimes I'm really not in the mood for dealing with other people, yet I need groceries or a light bulb or just want some coffee. In an ideal world I would be able to get those things without having to deal, however briefly, with dozens of strangers. It sort of makes me understand what drives people out to suburbs where the sidewalks are empty and no one goes anywhere without getting into a car first.
I'm overreacting, and most days I don't mind being out in public for brief jaunts from place to place. And I'm living alone again these days, so I'm prone to fits of loneliness, therefore it's good that I'm forced out into the public eye on a regular basis, even if it's just for iced lattes.
But on some days I resent it. I resent having to be around other people. I resent not having the option to be unseen as I walk home from the grocery store. And I resent the strangers who try to talk to me when I'm just trying to get from point A to point B.
I didn't start out like this. When I first arrived in Seattle I was going through a phase of relative extroversion, as one almost has to do in order to make a place for oneself in an unfamiliar city. Also, I was unfamiliar with the kind of people who typically accosted you in a big city. I remember there was a point in my life, about five years after moving here, where I was with a group of acquaintances, and we were sharing anecdotes about our most notable runins with street people, and I noticed with some surprise that everyone's best stories mine included, all seemed to happen to us when we were newcomers. It honestly took me a while to realize that this was not coincidental, that I had, without really trying to, learned how to avoid most such encounters.
Not all street encounters with strangers are bad, of course. I had one street encounter on Broadway Avenue, only a few months after I had moved to the Capitol Hill neighborhood. I was walking down the street listening to the Breeder's first album "Pod" on an oversized portable tape player. A dapper-yet-tastefully dressed black man nodded and waved me over as I walked down the street. And, though I can hardly believe it today, at a remove of fifteen years, I halted, removed my headphones and approached him.
Why didn't I just ignore him and continue on my way? Well, that seemed rude. I didn't know his reason for waving me over, so why assume the worst? Maybe he recognized me from somewhere, in which case he wasn't really a stranger. Of course I was a bit skeptical of his motivations even at the time, but I just didn't have city habits yet. Nowadays I would have continued on my way without a second thought. Hell, I was wearing headphones: I could have easily pretended that I hadn't even noticed him. Not that I needed to pretend anything — nowadays in my book he was requesting permission to interrupt my thoughts and, barring an emergency, I was fully within my rights to pass on the opportunity to interact.
(Of course nowadays I wouldn't be walking down the street wearing headphones, and certainly not when actual music was coming through them. Listening to music while walking was a habit that I had picked up during a brief interstitial period of living in a remote suburb where I had to walk a fair distance just to get to a bus stop. After a few attempts of doing this in the city I quickly stopped. Not only was it unnecessary — the areas I was now walking through being smaller and less barren — but I found it a far less comfortable practice when surrounded by people. I dislike the feeling of not knowing what's going on behind me. Interestingly, I mentioned this to my friend Don about a month ago. Don, who listens to music all the time while walking and busing, laughed at me, in that very loud and forced way he sometimes does when he wants you to understand that he's laughing in your face. "You don't pay attention to what's going on in FRONT of you!" he objected. By this he was referring to my propensity for not noticing acquaintances when I happen to pass them on the sidewalk. At least one of Don's boyfriends has had the experience of walking past me without my acknowledging them, which I found out about after they mentioned it to Don and asked if there was some reason I would choose to avoid them. And naturally I often don't see people's faces when I'm walking down the street. I mean, come on. Looking at people's faces just risks making eye contact with strangers, which is uncomfortable far more often than not. Especially between men: Making eye contact with a strange man can easily be interpreted as a sign of aggression. For some guys it frequently says, "I could take you if I had to." Since I could probably take your average quadriplegic on a good day, I'd just as soon avoid the whole arena. Also, I think avoiding eye contact is one of those traits not uncommon among geeks, related to that broad autism spectrum. That may be part of it. So, I often don't notice acquaintances. Not really a big loss — that just means that I miss out on some vague nods, waves, and maybe a word or two. But even though I pass on the eye contact, when I walk down the street I'm quite aware of where people are in relation to me. And I don't like the feeling that someone can walk up behind me without my noticing.)
So despite some vague misgivings, my instincts of the time led me over to the man smoking a cigarette and leaning against a newspaper dispenser. I pulled the headphones down around my neck and said: "Hello?"
"Hey man," he replied, "what you listening to?"
"Oh. Uh — The Breeders?" The guy didn't look like someone who listened much to that genre. "You ever heard of them?"
The Breeders' album "Pod" is actually a rather important album in my personal history. The cassette that I was listening to at the time was in fact the first rock album I had ever purchased, a few weeks earlier. I had only warmed to any kind of rock music in the last couple of years, listening mainly to various forms of classical music throughout most of my college career. I and most of my friends had become enamoured of the Pixies very quickly after being introduced to them, and had been introducing them to other friends in turn. One time when I had brought up the Pixies to a friend in a dorm room, a roommate had told me of Kim Deal's newly created side project, an all-female band called The Breeders. (Actually, the drummer for "Pod" was a male, but had used a gender-neutral stage name in the credits.) I was initially wary of trying out something completely new, but I did like Deal's vocals, and I was definitely intrigued by the feminist suggestions of an all-female band going by the name "The Breeders". So I had purchased the album on a whim at a music store, and had been completely undisappointed. It turned out to be more or less what I had hoped for — unusual and unhomogenous. At turns driving, unsettled, loud, quiet, jumpy, all with obscure lyrics. There was even a violin on one track. It didn't take me long to fall in love with it, and due to having purchased it on such a slim review ("It's got Kim Deal"), it's the first rock album that feels to me like it was my discovery.
"The Breeders? Nah, is that, like, alternative rock?"
"Yeah. Do you know the Pixies?"
"Yeah. Yeah, that sounds familiar." Standing nearby was a shorter man who, unlike the first man, looked like a street person. He wore a long coat and a bushy beard. Strung around his neck was a collection of various cards, such as a Seattle library card, a hole punched in the corner of each one. Apparently this makeshift necklace was used in lieu of a wallet. He was standing close enough to the first man that they clearly knew each other. "Yeah, I know who the Pixies are."
"Well, the lead singer for the Breeders also plays in the Pixies."
"Okay. Cool. I was just wondering. I saw you walking down the street, bobbing your head like so and I said, I wonder what he's listening to." He then mentioned some blues/jazz musicians that he enjoyed.
Well, that explained some things. It so happens that I have a rather long gait, which has the side effect of making my head bob up and down when I walk, more so than most people. I first learned of this fact in high school, when a friend made an offhand comment about being able to recognize me from a great distance by my walk, which elicited complete confusion from me at first. I have since had other people identify me by my walk, so it wasn't just him. I didn't try to explain this to this stranger, though, but I found him a bit confusing, which prevented me from politely ending the conversation and walking away. The man I was talking to didn't look like a street person, but nonetheless he was hanging out in the middle of the street, in no apparent hurry to go anywhere, and he did seem to have a street person as a companion, who was going through his coat pockets as we talked, presumably either looking for something in particular or just sorting them. No one was asking me for change, or anything else for that matter. But then why had he initiated a conversation with me? Was he really that interested in the music a random young white boy was listening to?
My curiosity drove me to experiment. I asked, "Could I bum a cigarette from you?"
He stared at me sideways. "Oooh, we don't use that word."
It took me a while to figure out what he was talking about. The phrase was so natural I hadn't even noticed it, and even then I had to think about how to rephrase the question. It seemed wrong to ask to borrow a cigarette, since I wouldn't be giving it back. I think I finally settled on, "Can you spare a cigarette?"
He graciously offered me a cigarette from his soft pack of Benson & Hedges. I hadn't quite started smoking at this point in time, but seeing him smoke had awoken a nubbin of attraction. Plus I knew that the etiquette of smokers had pretty much guaranteed that he would agree to my request. It was also a bit of an experiment, to see if these guys were in fact trying to get something from me. If so, now would be their best opening.
The shorter man had meanwhile produced an individually-wrapped Earl Grey teabag from one of his pockets. Apparently it wasn't something he felt he needed, for he wordlessly proferred it to me. I'm not a fan of tea myself, so I politely declined. He then offered it to his companion, who shook his head. "No, man, I don't drink tea. You see these pearly whites?" He grimaced widely to show off his teeth, which were perfectly average in color and could hardly be honestly described as "pearly white". "Tea will stain them."
The shorter man looked at him sharply. Returning the packaged teabag to his pocket, he spoke for the first time. "You smoke, don't you?"
"Yeah, I smoke, but you see, I got a trick for that. You see, every night, I take a little extra dab of toothpaste —"
The other man waved him off. "Don't tell me about it."
"I take a little toothpaste, and rub it around —"
"Don't tell me about it."
"Okay, I'm just saying —"
"Don't tell me about it." A little more insistent this time.
"Okay, I'm not telling you about it."
"Then stop talking about it."
"I'm not talking about it."
"Okay."
"Okay."
The conversation hit a lull, and I decided that it was time for me to move on. I made some polite noises, thanked the man for the cigarette, and went on my way.
So yeah: not all encounters with strangers on the sidewalk are bad things. But of course sometimes they are, and it usually just isn't worth it to me to find out which one it's going to be this time. And yet I recognize that the world would be a less colorful place if everyone felt the way I do. So even though I wish I could go to the store without having to risk dealing with people, I also recognize that I wouldn't necessarily like living in such a world.
It's a cliche, but sometimes computers really are easier to deal with than people. Of course, that's not at all the reason that I enjoy working with computers so much. But it's still the truth.
Computers are mathematics brought into the real world. A computer program is as close as numbers get to becoming actual objects. And a running program brings calculation to life, allows you to set it up and then sit back so you can watch it happening. And then make others things happen as a result.
I was destined to be a computer programmer. Had I lived before computers, I would have been an amateur mathematician. Or maybe even a professional one. I sometimes fret that the computer industry is sapping people like me away from academia, where we might have contributed however minutely to the body of mathematical knowledge, and into industry, where we mainly contribute to a corporation's profit margin. Still, I'm not at all sorry to have lived when I did, just as computers were falling into the hands of everyday people. Before my teens were over I had a computer of my very own, and needless to say it was my prized possession.
For many years I had only a vague understanding of what a computer was. They were machines, I knew, and from television I had learned that they were large, noisy, and generally used to garble account information and in general make life difficult for the common person. Or else they were incredibly intelligent yet communicated in fractured English. It's funny to realize that at the same time I understood perfectly well what a robot was. I also understood that they were purely fictional, and I even had a sense that if anyone succeeded in creating a real robot, they would be unlikely to have an emotional makeup so similar to our own. I don't think I quite grasped the idea that a computer was basically a very very very primitive robot, only without a body and real.
When I was in sixth grade a teacher told me (in response to what, I do not remember) that I should learn about computers, and that I would find them interesting. I knew enough at that point in time to think that he was just stereotyping me. (I had just recently learned the word.) So I didn't give his suggestion much credence.
In the late 1970s Time magazine's cover article was about the computer revolution. The cover showed a cartoon of a bunch of people with boxes and CRTs for heads, with C-3PO thrown in for laffs. Since it would be sitting out on the coffee table, I often skimmed through Time, looking for anything that might possibly interest me (i.e. not politics or fine art). So I read that issue, trying to get a handle on what computers were and why they were interesting.
I don't really recall anything about the article proper. I think I did grasp the idea that a computer was basically a machine that manipulated numbers better and faster than people did. I might have even grasped a sense of how number-crunching could be applied to diverse other tasks, by using numbers to represent other things. (But that may just be my memory being colored by later sensibilities.)
The article included a cartoon illustration that was labeled "How a computer adds one and one". The cartoon showed a small network of clear pipes and anthropomorphic boxes. Electricity was replaced with water for purposes of illustration: Hot water was shown as red (indicating a wire that was on) which the computer used to represent the number one, and cold water, representing zero, was shown in blue (indicating a wire with no electrical charge). The boxes represented gates: two AND gates, one OR gate, and one NOT gate. The text surrounding the cartoon showed how the two pipes going in at the left, both with hot water, became transformed into two pipes going out at the right, one hot and one cold. After some examination I figured out that the two pipes going in were the two numbers being added, one and one respectively, and the two pipes going out were a single number, made up of two digits in base two. (I had learned about representing numbers in different bases many years earlier, in my own readings about mathematics, so even though I thought base two was the most uninteresting base possible it at least was already familiar.) The article explained very briefly the rules that governed the inputs and output of each of the three gates.
(For those who are unfamiliar with logic gates, the AND gates has two inputs and one output. The output is always zero [or off, or cold] unless both of the inputs are one [on, hot]. In short, the output of AND is one if and only if the first input AND the second input is one. In a similar fashion, the output of the OR gate is one if the first input OR the second input is one, otherwise it is zero. The NOT gate is different from the others in that it only has one input. Its output is simply the opposite of its input.)
I traced through the forking pipes and the four gates, reading through the brief text, and finally convinced myself that, given the rules as stated, the output was indeed hot-cold, or 10, or two in decimal. But it left me unsatisfied at the end. It seemed such a complicated way to turn 1 and 1 into 10. Wouldn't it be simpler to just have a single NOT gate on the right-hand input? It would produce the same result. Furthermore, how could that be useful? If you wanted to turn your 11 wires into 10 wires, then why not just make them 10 wires in the first place? Unless ...
Slowly an idea formed in my head. Unless ... the illustration wasn't telling the whole story. Maybe this wasn't just a method for adding one and one: maybe it would add ANY two binary numbers. Like an ape before the monolith, I tremblingly approached this hypothesis. I worked through the tangle of cartoon pipes, but with the second input pipe carrying cold water instead of hot. One plus zero. The resulting output was reversed from the illustration: cold water in the left pipe, hot water in the right. Zero one. One plus zero equals one. I then tested zero plus zero, and zero plus one. At some point I had to get some scratch paper from the little stack by the telephone so I could work through them without getting confused by the now-incorrect colors printed in the cartoon. They all came out correct.
At that moment, I understood how computers worked. Yes, I only had the basic circuit for a half-adder (for that is what I was looking at, though it wasn't for some years that I was to learn the name). But this was the kernel of the whole shebang. The rest was details. And more importantly, I had been introduced to the idea of logic gates.
My understanding of computers remained at this level for a few years. Though I was fascinated by this fragment of knowledge, I had nothing further to connect it to, and so it lay dormant.
A year or two later — in seventh grade, I think — I was with my friend Rex in a Radio Shack. (Oh god, the stereotypy. It burns.) I had only a vague, low-level interest about the sort electrical gizmos to be had there. Rex was more knowledgable than I about electrical parts, and was generally more comfortable with building things than I was, so I had never really learned much beyond what a resistor was. (I did know about the color-coding of resistors, though. Naturally: it was a code.)
On one wall, they had individually packaged IC chips. I looked at this wall of blue cards with plastic bubbles hanging from hooks, each one holding a small rectilinear black insect with silver legs. And the label on one of them caught my eye. Quad 2-input OR gate. What?! I couldn't believe it. Of course I immediately recognized the term, written in all caps just as in the cartoon. I had never expected that one could just walk into a nearby store and buy individual OR gates. (Actually, they came in groups of four, thus the "quad" in the label. But you get my point.) The price? Seventy-nine cents. I was flabbergasted. Of course I bought it.
On the way home from Radio Shack, I discussed this thing with Rex. Did he already know what AND and OR gates were? Had he known that such things were purchasable? And so cheaply? Once home, I read over the technical specs several times, looking for information. The spec included a schematic of a single gate: It was a huge circuit of transistors, resistors, and capacitors. I couldn't believe that so much was needed to accomplish this when it seemed that one could just solder two wires together to do the same thing. (The reason this isn't actually true is that in logic circuitry, a narrow range of voltages are permitted to represent zero and one. Combining two wires to make an OR gate can produce invalid output levels.)
Over the coming months, I would start rapidly making up for my ambivalence towards electrical gadgets. I started learning about capacitors, diodes, and transistors. I studied the Radio Shack catalog, and found that there were several more types of gates that I had never heard of, such as NAND and XOR. I started reading up on how to build your own simple electronic projects. For a while, one of my favorite pastimes was to draw the schematic a circuit, with two inputs (a guy never forgets his first) and seven outputs. In between I would thrown down a random tangle of branching wires and logic gates. The seven outputs would then go to a seven-segment LED display (i.e. an LED segmented digit display). I would then draw up a table with four rows, one for each of the possible inputs, and carefully work out what the LED display would show for each. Of course I was mainly doing this because it was simply fun to do, but I think I was also hoping that I might accidentally stumble upon a circuit that would magically produce the proper displays of the digits 0, 1, and 2 correctly for each input. This was my favorite game for weeks, if not months.
Of course I spent my money on IC chips and LEDs, carefully budgeting my meager savings with the allure of the various parts that were available. I had great fun with my first seven-segment LED display. It was red, of course (the amber ones were much cooler in my opinion, but also more expensive). Over the next couple of years, I acquired a couple dozen chips and LED displays. The most expensive chip I owned was a great little number that converted binary to seven-segment. In other words, it took four wires carrying binary values for input, and output seven wires that displayed the correct decimal digit on a seven-segment LED display. My goal was to actually build the legendary circuit, my very own half-adder, and with a pretty decimal display to show the sum. I drew the schematic for it many times — it was a simple thing. The only complicated part was the part that would convert 120VAC to 5VDC, for I had gotten it into my head that I didn't want to use batteries, which were always inconveniently running down, but rather that I should be able to plug it into the wall. I loved the idea of little old me creating something that plugged into the wall.
Of course I never actually built the circuit. Setting aside the mess of complication I introduced by having to safely deal with high-voltage, high-amperage alternating current, the fact is that I wasn't nearly as interested in creating things as I was in thinking about them. As a result, I never got good at soldering, and the one or two things that I actually built never worked. I remained much more comfortable with my paper schematic diagrams, and imagining the things I might do with my gadgets were they to one day exist.
One day Rex and I were in Radio Shack. As usual we were looking at IC chips, or at least I was. Radio Shack had the lovely benefit of being right next door to an arcade. I had studiously avoided such places in the past, associating them with unsavory types of people. Much like rock music and automobiles. And by "unsavory", I mean the sorts of kids who bullied me in school. But the attraction of the new video games, teetering on the edge of a golden age, was too much to resist. So it was only natural to bicycle over there for an afternoon, and play a few video games and ogle the expensive LEDs. It was during summer vacation, or maybe at the tail end of the school year. Come September we would be starting ninth grade. High school.
Rex was suddenly excited. The Radio Shack had a computer on display. A bulky (by modern standards) keyboard set up in front of a small (again, by modern standards) black-and-white CRT. The fuzzy image on the screen was the word "READY" and a blinking underline.
I had never seen nor heard of this thing before. I had never looked closely at the computer section way in the back of the Radio Shack catalog (I was too busy lingering over the page with all the pictures of LEDS in various colors and shapes like it was a centerfold). Despite my fascination with logic circuits, I had little curiosity about computers themselves. I suppose I had assumed that they were too far removed from the stuff I found interesting.
Exercising what little knowledge he had about this machine, Rex typed the following sequence of symbols at the keyboard:
10CLS
He pressed the large white RETURN key and the blinking underline jumped down to the next row. He then typed in three more lines:
20?"REX";
30GOTO20
RUN
And suddenly the screen filled up with his name, which then slowly crawled from left to right, wrapping around again.
"How did you do that?!" I demanded. I hadn't really looked closely at what he had typed, figuring he was either being intentionally obscure (one of his favorite techniques of playing tricks on others) or was accessing some preset feature of the machine. The fact that the screen had done something interesting, and specifically with his name, suggested otherwise. Rex entered the program again while I watched more closely. It was close to dinner time and so we had to leave, but on the way home Rex explained that "CLS" was the "clear screen" command, the question mark was short for "print", and I got it.
Computers were at once the most important things I had ever encountered. Here was a machine built from logic circuits, but instead of manipulating the logic circuits directly, you talked to it. In a secret code. Which made things happen.
One of my greatest frustrations during my fascination with secret codes and foreign alphabets was having no one to share them with. Codes are only so interesting when you already know what all your encoded messages say because you're the one who encoded them. All my attempts to convince other people to share my interest and write me messages in code had flopped. Rex had never been particularly interested in codes for their own sake. He would have been interested in them if we had had the need to communicate privately, but that could be accomplished just by being alone. I was interested in things like codes for their own sakes; Rex was more interested in making use of things.
But now I had been introduced to a new secret code that didn't need another person to make use of. I could talk to the computer in the secret code, and it would do things as a result.
Immediately I wanted to know everything there was to know about the secret language of the computer.
Let me reiterate part of that, in case it wasn't clear already. I love computer programming for many reasons, but one of them is definitely my lifelong love of codes and secret writing. In short, things that not everybody can read. So part of my love of computers comes from my fascination with things that other people can't understand.
652 was another Dewey Decimal section of the children's library that I checked in on with regularity. Not that the selection changed regularly, mind you — I would just keep going back in case one of the books I had passed over previously now seemed more interesting, or to decide if I wanted to reread one of them. Usually the latter. I'm sure if you showed my parents a lineup of five children's books on the subject of codes and ciphers, they could pick out the one our library had, just because they saw the cover so often. Of course, one of the best parts of a good book about codes was the technique for cracking a substitution cipher. I loved the fact that this was even possible to do, and was frustrated as a child that I didn't have any ciphers around to practice on. It wasn't until several years later that I learned that crossword puzzle magazines typically included other types of word puzzles, including cryptograms.
I remember in fourth grade I got my first chance to really work through a hard cryptogram. It was given to me by my third-grade teacher, for what reason I cannot begin to guess. (If a reason was offered me at the time, I considered it unimportant.) It turned out to be tricky, partly because there were a few transcription errors (not uncommon when one is trying to copy a unsolved cipher). I quickly identified THE and THAT, but beyond that I couldn't make any progress. No doubt this was mainly due to my lack of experience, but in any case I was frustrated. One word in the cipher stuck out, and kept drawing my attention: a ten-letter word with four equally-spaced Es, and no other repeated letters. E**E**E**E. Almost all of the unknown letters appeared in other places in the cipher, and I knew that I'd be well on the way to a solution if only I could figure out what that word was. Finally, after much time spent looking elsewhere for a lead, I gave in: I pulled out our home's dictionary and began running through the E words in order.
That dictionary and I were already good friends by this time, of course. A good-sized two-volume set published by Funk and Wagnalls, I took pride in its dimensions. More than once I had flipped through it at random, looking up words as a way to pass the time (and when chosen in this fashion I sometimes found myself no more enlightened by the definition that from reading the word itself). Twice in my life I set out to create a code, i.e. a word-level code, in which each word is replaced by a symbol, instead of each letter. Almost impossible to crack by anyone but experts (or expert computer programs, but such machines were in the future still). The first time I launched on this herculean task, my plan was just to cover the words that I already knew. The symbols would be pictographic representations of the word's meaning, invented on the spot and entered into a diminuitive spiral-bound notebook with a green cover. (Or notebooks, really, depending on how many would ultimately be needed. I had no idea how many pages the finished code would take, but the notebooks weren't expensive.) I labored at this for many afternoons one summer, and in fact I got as far as "aha" before I abandoned it. That was actually a fair bit of effort. Consider how many words between a-ah you recognized as a child, and imagine drawing little pictures for each one. Many of my pictograms involved stick figures; I may have been influenced by international traffic signs and the like.
But the reason I quit wasn't because I realized that the project was hopelessly large. In fact, I was rather pleased with how far I had already gotten. No, the problem was that I realized that it wasn't large enough. For example, much earlier I had passed over the word "abdominous". The word was unfamiliar, so I didn't add it to my code. However, I couldn't avoid reading the definition next to the word, which was simply: "big-bellied". So there was no getting around the fact that I now knew the meaning of abdominous, but it was missing from my code. Furthermore, I was realizing that as I grew older I would be learning many more new words. My original thought would be that I could just create addenda, like the Encyclopedia Brittanica had. But I was beginning to feel that this was unsatisfactory, that the addenda would be too large and/or too numerous, and ruin the nice alphabetic ordering that I had now. Already "abdominous" was slated to be the first addendum entry. It frustrated me that I had to put several words on each page, thus making it impossible to cleanly insert new entries. All of this brewed in my head for many pages of writing, until finally I decided that these issues couldn't be ignored.
The answer was, of course, for the cipher to include every word in the dictionary. Eventually I would learn words that weren't in the dictionary, I realized, but it would take a lot longer for there to be enough to require an addendum. Now, that meant that I had to abandon my current system of creating symbols. My current system required me to know the meaning of the word. I knew I would never get through the dictionary if I had to understand every word. So I started over, afresh. I tore out the pages of my old cipher. (I think I actually threw them away, in fact. Such was my certainty that I wouldn't want to refer to them later. Ugh.) My new cipher worked by superimposing the letters of the word on top of each other, joining them to make a prickly oversized symbol, somewhat akin to the monstrous character that concludes Dr. Seuss's "On Beyond Zebra". My father had played a game with me once whereby he would create such graphical mutants and then I would try to ferret out the original word. It was actually a pretty good game, although pretty much impossible to win with words of more than four or five letters. The only one I remember puzzling over now is "bootnose", one of my father's favorite gentle insults; the reason I remember it still is that I spent so much time studying it, even after my father had told me the answer, until I could locate all eight letters.
So this was the schematic for my new code, one that was rather fun in its whimsical approach, and one that would not require me to know the meanings of the words as I went. I started over with "a" and went to work. I remember that "acanthus" was the first word in the dictionary that started with ac-. I got as far as that word. If I didn't stop there, I stopped very soon after. I don't know if I quit just because I lost interest, or because summer ended and I was distracted with school, or some other combination of factors. I suspect that I found my new process of creating code symbols less engaging than my earlier pictograms, and so the tedium of the process finally set in. Although to be honest, I'm not sure that's true, because I don't know at this late remove if I actually wound up creating more or fewer entries than with the earlier code.
In any case, it's a fine example of the vast disconnect between the envisioning of grandiose plans, and the execution of same. It's a lesson that we all must learn, which is in a real way very unfortunate, as it teaches us all to not follow throught with our dreams. I don't know when I learned to distrust that feeling, the compelling desire to launch upon some newly-hatched grand scheme, knowing from experience that it would be wearing thin long before the end was visible. I don't know when, but it couldn't have been too long after my failed attempts to create a code for the entire English language.
Experience. That was the word, by the way. The word with four equidistant Es in my former teacher's cryptogram. And yes, I did find it in the dictionary, so close to the end and having all but given up hope, figuring that I had gone past it without realizing, at one point giving up and going back to the cipher and trying to convince myself that my identification of E was wrong and it was actually some other letter, before deciding that that idea was even more hopeless and returning to my trudge through the Es. Almost at the end, I found my candidate, and it wasn't a horribly obscure word for some chemical but it was a perfectly common and everyday word, and certainly correct. I returned to the cipher full of excitement, and having the letters for C, I, N, P, and R, the rest of the cryptogram fell apart as fast as I could write. I returned to her with the answer, full of my own triumph.
Why was I so interested in creating a code in the first place? I blame it on the books I read. They were all careful to point out that a encryption scheme that operated on the letter level was technically not a code, but a cipher, and the former term was reserved for schemes that operated on the word level. I had created ciphers already, so how could I not attempt to stare down the challenge of creating a code? I did attempt it, at least.
I created quite a number of ciphers in my time, actually. It was another one of my little obsessions. In the back of our dictionary, were various appendices, including several collections of symbols, such as a list of editor's correction marks, meterological symbols, astronomical symbols, etc. Alongside the dictionary entry for "alphabet" was a table showing the Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabet. An old book I owned that gave a children's introduction to chemistry included a list of alchemical symbols with their meanings (presumably to show how the pre-science practice of alchemy prized secrecy rather than cooperation). Collections of symbols were to be found everywhere. I carried around a cheap pad of lined paper, and mined these tables to make up a new cipher. If there were more than 26 symbols, I would assign the remainder to numbers, punctuation marks, the space, or even short words like "the" and "and". If fewer than 26 symbols were provided, I would try to pad it out with a few of my own invention that still fit the source material, or else reluctantly pass over it and move on to the next set of symbols. And when these sources were used up, I roamed further afield. The labels on a calculator with more than 26 keys. The non-alphanumeric symbols on my mother's manual typewriter. A list of catalog numbers on the backing of my notepad, listing other products that were available. The full set of labels on the television, including VHF channels, markings on the UHF dial, VERT and HORZ, et cetera. In the end I had a file folder stuffed with literally dozens of these ciphers. This file folder went with my collection of "important papers" in the bottom drawer of my dresser, along with such things as my collection of transcribed non-arabic numbering systems. These things had an almost talismanic attraction to me. I don't think I actually ascribed power or importance to them — I simply found it entertaining to just sit there and look through them. Almost as much fun as rereading a favorite book, in part because I had assembled them myself.
One time I tasked my grandmother with writing me a letter in code. I was taking advantage of the fact that grandparents could sometimes be manipulated to do things that parents wouldn't. I had recently reread one of my favorite books describing the process of breaking a cryptogram, and I wanted desperately to actually try the process out. I don't remember now if I tried to write my grandmother an encrypted letter first. That seems like something I would have done, though, before realizing with a burst of inspiration that asking her to write me in code was really the way to go here. She acceded to my request, finally, and sent me a one page letter written in code. I realize that this must have been a slow and tedious process for her, to create this letter, but at the time I couldn't really wrap my head around the fact that it wouldn't have been fun for someone else. She had chose to substitute numbers for the letters, with little dashes between the numbers so I wouldn't be confused by the mixture of one- and two-digit numbers in each word. With a current of excitement flowing through me, I sat down and examined the letter. The first task, of course, was to count up the occurrence of each number and write out a frequency table. A tedious process, and my least favorite part of decoding, but necessary. Before I started that, however, I scanned the letter to rule out some obvious possibilities. For example, if she had simply used the cipher A=1, B=2, C=3, ... Z=26, then all the one-letter words would be either 1 or 9. With a sinking heart, I quickly saw that that was in fact the case. I looked again, and verified that there were a preponderance of 5s in the cipher, representing the letter E. I was crushed. I hadn't even gotten started and already there was nothing left to do. Looking over the letter some more, I noticed at the very bottom she had written a postscript: "PS: A-1, E-5, I-9, O-15, U-21."
I stared at it, dumbfounded. I could hardly believe my eyes. If I hadn't already cracked the cipher, that would have been a dead giveaway. (Yes, I already knew the numerical position of most of the letters of the alphabet by heart. When I finally sat down to read her letter, I did it entirely in my head, without writing anything down as I went.) And even if it hadn't, if she for example had used 26 arcane symbols with no clear ordering (much closer to what I had naively been expecting and hoping to see), being handed all five vowels right from the start would still have killed any hope of there being a challenge. The cipher would have fallen apart in no time. What had she been thinking? Once again I was reminded that adults just did not think like the rest of us.
The greatest cipher I ever invented was based on the Cherokee alphabet. This was several years later, in sixth grade or thereabouts. I was reading one of my library books and learned about this unusual writing system. It was invented from scratch by Sequoyah in the 1800s, who recognized that the lack of a written language was a serious problem for his culture. The Cherokee written language is not actually an alphabet, though; it is a syllabary, encompassing 85 symbols. I had never encountered a syllabary before, and I realized that using such an approach, where a symbol might stand for one, two, or three letters, and a sequence of letters could be encoded in more than one way, would make for a deadly difficult cipher. I quickly mined the Cherokee symbol set, assigning 26 of them to single letters and the remainder to various letter pairs and triplets. It drove me wild that I didn't have some I could actually give a message to who would then go crazy trying to crack it. So I made a encrypted letter anyway and gave it to my friend Rex to solve. I don't think he ever looked at it. I rather hope that he didn't, actually. Rex never had a strong interest in codes, so he didn't have a hope of breaking it. Frankly, I don't even know if the letter was long enough to be crackable; I don't know how big of a sample you need for a cipher of that nature. Probably more than a single page, though. Sigh.
As a result of these childhood frustrations, however, I wound up making several ciphers when my nephew was old enough to enjoy such things. Chace turned out to have a good head for ciphers, not unlike I would have had, I expect. For a couple of his birthdays I posed him a series of ciphers and puzzles, at the end of which he earned some grand present. They were occasionally frustrating, but the diligence with which he attacked them assures me that he had fun.
The puzzle that I set up for his twelfth birthday was rather elaborate. Twelve is a really nice age. If you're going to be a kid, twelve is probably one of the best choices. You're about as experienced as you're going to get before you lose control of your emotions and your world changes. Almost all of my favorite childhood books were written for that general age. So I set up a series of ciphers and puzzles, and with each one that he solved, I sent him a book that I had enjoyed when I was that age.
the first puzzle was given to him in an email. I provided an enigmatic text that I claimed had come from a fortune cookie. It read: "Search everywhere and read closely. Have faith, or reach your own understanding. Readily name a master's experience. PS: (Oh no, life is no expert.)" This was an acrostic; the first letter of each word spells out "search for your name (online)". I was taking advantage of the fact that as an employee of Google, working on the ads team, I had a low-budget ad account for doing tests with. Given the idea by a coworker, I had taken an ad out for the search term "chace raiter", which pointed to a special page on my website, which contained an encrypted text. This was a simple rearrangement cipher, which also contained an acrostic, which directed him to search for his grandmother's name. Another Google ad, another web page on my site, another encrypted message. This one directed him to enter an English word that had six consecutive consonants. (The one I had in mind was "latchstring", but my CGI script accepted several possibilities, including "catchphrase", which is the one that Chace eventually provided.) And so on. In order to buy myself time to come up with as many puzzles as I had books, I occasionally broke away from the web page pattern and sent him actual mail with further puzzles. The first such was a page covered in a grid of five-pointed stars, with certain points and line segments of each star highlighted in red ink. This made a relatively simple cipher, but the message decoded to a collection of unrelated sentence fragments: "what you do before you find / the first square that isnt itself / hes not your mother / add power to off / the shortest route from a to b". Each one was the clue to a word, not unlike the clues of a crossword puzzle, and when solved they spelled out "search for father on line". Searching for his father's name brought him another Google ad.
Along with each book, I included a slip of paper with a short note. The first book's note read "Congratulations on completing step 4/4 + 4 - 4." The next book's note read "Congratulations on completing step 4/4 + 4/4." And so on. Each book's note used four fours to indicate the next step number. And so, after Chace had completed step nine, the tenth and final step was to arrange four fours to equal ten. The whole four fours thing had been a late addition to the challenge, a last-minute bit of inspiration as I was looking for something to include with the first book to acknowledge its reason for being sent. So I was quite pleased with coming up with the idea to use it for the final challenge. The reason it made a good ending is that ten is the first number that can't be represented using just the basic arithmetic operators (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division). You need to bring in square roots, factorials, or something even more obscure. Chace, happily, was not stumped for any noticeable length of time, and quickly emailed me the answer 4*4 - 4 - sqrt(4). His final gift was a copy of the video game "Lego Star Wars II" — something he had asked for for his birthday but nobody had given him. In a final bit of inspiration, I inscribed the gift card with the note: "The fours are strong with this one."
It was a year or two before this that Chace asked me how many digits of pi I knew. We were at my maternal grandmother's funeral. She was the last of my grandparents to survive, by a significant margin. (The others had already died before Chace was born.) She had been living in Longview where my parents could take care of her in her final years. She had Parkinson's disease, but despite this obstacle managed to keep pretty clearheaded for most of her last few years. I myself never had to deal with actual death much during childhood, so I wondered how Chace reacted to it, having seen her deal with the last few years. I don't know if he felt much connection to her — I know my brother and I didn't feel terribly connected to the only great-grandmother that we knew. This was partly because she had some strict religious views that tended to the judgemental, but let's be honest: it was also because she was very much an old woman. When you're six or eight years old, that very fact is pretty off-putting. On the other hand, Chace wound up seeing more of her than I saw my great-grandmother, as she remained in California throughout her life.
I say that I actually didn't deal much with death, but there were one or two noteworthy exceptions to that. In the third grade, I knew a boy peripherally who died along with his family. Their father was a pilot, and one day they went on an excursion and didn't come back. Their airplane was lost at sea, never found. While I didn't know the boy at all (and in fact right now I can't quite remember his name), he had been unilaterally friendly to me once on the playground, an relatively rare event that I remembered. His death left me with vague and confused feelings. I didn't really know him well enough to feel a sense of loss, but I think it nonetheless impressed me as a memento mori. It didn't leave me feeling endangered, since I had never been in a private airplane and didn't really expect to be anytime soon, but it was a reminder that even children are vulnerable. It also left me worried that maybe I should feel sadder than I did, for I suspect that even at that age I felt that tiny sliver of relief that we all feel when an acquaintance dies: I'm safe for another day. It wasn't my turn this time. I attended the memorial service for the family, partly to get out of school for an afternoon, partly out of sheer curiosity, wondering how exactly services worked to make people feel better. For that was their function, no? Unfortunately, for me it was a crashing bore, as the service was naturally entirely about the adults, and the children were mentioned only briefly in passing. I had this vague notion that sometimes people were invited to come up to the podium and make speeches, and I wondered if that were to happen if I should go up, lest nobody speak for him, even though I hadn't really known him and would be hard pressed to say anything. However, there were no invitations for extemporizers, and I left the service relieved that I hadn't had to face that moral dilemma, but mostly just relieved that it was over. I certainly didn't leave feeling any differently about him or myself or anything, and after a while it passed on into the past, and life continued about its way. But there was a column of photos of everyone in the class by the door to the classroom, and now, there was a gap in that column, where his photo had been removed, leaving behind some sliver-shaped shards of glue on the wood. I don't know if it was removed to be given to some survivor, or if the teacher was disturbed by looking at it, or if it was just an admistrative action: his photo was removed because he was no longer a pupil in that class. For whatever reason, that gap in the column of our faces served as a reminder of his unplanned absence for the rest of the school year. A rather stark one at that, at least to my child sensibilities.
And I think I rather came to appreciate it, over time. We often overlook this basic truth, but it's comforting to be reminded of the dead, because it gives us hope that we won't be so quickly forgotten ourselves. We don't like to talk of the dead, and so they are rarely mentioned, brought up briefly every once in a great while, typically during toasts at special occasions, presumably with the idea that we are happy enough to survive the injection of somberness without totally bumming everyone out. We see this and some part of our brain knows that when we die, there will be a few days of mourning, and then most everyone will do their best to not think about us anymore. In that sense dying is like the ultimate social faux pas — do it and you're cut right out of polite society. It's a tough break.
Of course the living can't devote a significant chunk of their remaining life to remembering the dead. People have to move on; it's the way of life. So I'm not complaining, necessarily. But it's something we don't always consider with respect to ourselves. I often imagine that when I'm dead people will sift through all of my files. My writing, my code — someone will go through my entire hard drive, plucking out the nuggets of my creativity for posterity. And it's absurd. Who's going to find the time to do that? Fucking hell, if I can't be bothered to keep my files in order, what hope can I hold that someone else is going to do it after I've kicked it? And yet this idea persists, because I can't bear to contemplate too closely the likely truth, namely that a few scraps will be examined, and the rest will get tossed.
I sometimes wonder if we're going to have a crisis of people leaving behind too much of a legacy in the future, with electronic storage being so cheap. It's not like it used to be, when there was only so much room in the attic for Uncle Brian's scribblings. Everyone I know has gigabytes of storage on their desktop. Most of us never throw files away; we just get bigger hard drives. Somewhere on my hard drive are the contents of many of my TRS-80 floppy drives I carried around in high school, a mishmash of my earliest programs and writings side by side with pirated games in a disordered jumble. I'm not sure they're even in a form that can be viewed outside of a TRS-80 emulation program. Who the hell's gonna go dumpster diving for that stuff when I'm gone? I had a roommate in college named Chris whose grandfather died, and he spent the weekend helping his father clean out the house. Chris came back with stories; his grandfather had been an incorrigible pack rat. Like many people who remembered the Great Depression, but in his case it sounded more like a neurosis. The attic and basement were filled with useless objects, saved and even to a certain degree ordered. There was a giant tub of disposable pen caps. No pens; just the caps. There was the broken remains of a chair, with a old-style luggage tag tied to it with a date indicating when it was broken and moved to the attic. And so much more. The one thing that stood out for Chris was his collection of rocks. They weren't unusual rocks geologically, or even aesthetically: they were utterly plain rocks. Each one was labeled with a black sharpie indicating the place and date that it was acquired. One rock that he examined was marked: "DATE UNKNOWN: FOUND LOCALLY?" Chris was strongly impressed by this, not just because it was borderline crazy, but also because he recognized the echoes of this behavior in himself. Not long ago he had, to his annoyance, dropped his favorite bowl in the kitchen, and it had cracked into three pieces. As he was throwing it away, he had been briefly taken with the impulse to save one of the pieces. "After all, I thought, it had been my favorite bowl." He ultimately decided that this was a bad idea, for which he was now thankful, letting him believe that there was hope for him not to turn into his grandfather later in life. Now I myself am a bit of a pack rat as well, but this is generally counterbalanced by an aversion to acquiring items in the first place. Part of me feels that possessions all too often confer responsibility for them, if not outright stewardship, and so I am often hesitant to volunteer myself. But I do have my impulses, and it was only recently, at the age of thirty-nine, that I finally threw away a huge stack of college handouts, many of which I didn't care about when I got them. (But hey, you know, when you take tuition into account, they were pretty expensive to acquire.) Unfortunately, those impulses remain completely unchecked when it comes to intangible possessions like data, and so my hard drive is if anything worse than Chris's grandfather's house.
When I consider things in that light, I would actually feel bad for anyone who did feel compelled to sift through it trying to winnow out the interesting tidbits from the mountains of random crap.
Which is, of course, once again, part of the reason why I am sitting here at this keyboard. Trying desperately to put a tiny fraction of my thoughts and feelings into a semblance of order. Or at least putting them in one place. So there will be something of me that might survive the fire. I can't rely on someone else to do this for me. There are far too many other important things to do with a short life.
But so. Chace, at the time of my grandmother's funeral, was apparently going through a bit of fascination with pi, as many of us do when we first confront the idea of an irrational transcendental number, a number that can never be perfectly expressed in any sort of compact form other than to slap a name on it. He asked me how many digits of pi I knew. I can only pull out a dozen or so reliably, because for some reason I always get a little confused about a few of the digits in the part that comes after that, even though it's full of little patterns right around there. On those occasions when I am reacquainted with the number I get that section clear in my mind, and then a few months later it's hazy again. So I recited what I could reliably, and Chace took the opportunity show off, reciting a dozen or so more after that point. I then said to him, "Of course, if I were at my computer, I could have it print out the first five hundred digits of pi for me." Chace was intrigued. I got the sense that perhaps he wasn't fully aware that computers were pretty good at crunching numbers. He then said, "Can you send them to me?" I told him that when I got home I'd see what I could do.
Of course by the time I had returned to Seattle our conversation had mostly slipped my mind, and perhaps it had mostly slipped his as well. So nothing further happened on that front for a while. But every once in a while I remembered my promise. And that reminded me of my own youthful introduction to pi. Despite having a good memory with some things, there had never been a time when I was good at remembering digits of pi. This may be due to not having been exposed to it as much in childhood. The first time I saw more than (say) fifty digits at once was a poster in the classroom of one of my math teachers in high school. It was on a wall distant from where my seat had wound up (in the backmost row, ironically), and so I hadn't noticed it until rather late in the year. The teacher for that class, Algebra II, wasn't particularly inspiring, and I was further discouraged by the fact that there was no honors Algebra II, so I was, once again, spending a fair bit of time going over familiar ground. Unmotivated, I wound up expending the absolute least amount of effort and got my first B minus in math. (In fact, I could have sworn that I had actually earned a C plus, which would have actually succeeded in bothering me, having only ever earned Cs in PE and biology in my educational career so far.) But so one day I noticed the poster, which was covered with something like one thousand digits of pi. When I examined in more closely, I realized the bottom of the poster had some expository text about pi, in which I found the famous equation: pi/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 .... I was amazed. I had realized, of course, that there had to be some technique for calculating pi that didn't involve measuring actual circles. (Once, back in grade school, I had tried to figure out how to measure the circumference of a circle I had traced from the mouth of an empty glass jar, so that I could create my own approximation for the value of pi. I was unable to find a tool that would give me anything better than quarter-inch accuracy [except of course for the technique of measuring the diameter and multiplying by pi].) But I had had no idea that the formula was so incredibly simple. Reeling, I went home and wrote a Basic program to run this calculation in an infinite loop, printing out the running total (times four) as it went. Of course, this approximation, though justly famous for its simplicity, is a terrible one for practical purposes, as it converges extremely slowly. With the limited precision available to my simple Basic program, convergence to even 3.14 was never going to happen. Unaware of this I ran it for days, and was ultimately frustrated. (My first run was terminated when my mother turned the computer off while this calculation was still going, due to a misunderstood request.)
Looking back on that, I realized how little I actually knew about pi, even in high school, and was rather surprised. There was so much more to know, much of it quite interesting. So I was motivated to respond to Chace's request with something better than just an email full of digits. I went looking for a Windows program that would display digits of pi on demand, so he could see it running for himself.
Unfortunately I didn't really find anything that fit what I was looking for. The programs I found dedicated to computing pi were almost entirely written for speed. They were MS-DOS programs that dumped their output directly to a file, often not even a text file, but a pure binary format. After a round or two of frustration, I decided to write one myself. I hadn't been a professional Windows programmer for years, having left it for the Unix world back in 1996, but I did have a cross compiler on my Linux box that would let me build a Windows program, and I did have access to Laura's laptop for testing purposes. So I grabbed a very simple pi calculating program (the spigot algorithm, so named because once set up it produces digits at a constant rate, like drips from a leaky faucet), and set up a very simple window to go with it. And, because I knew he wasn't interested in files, I added a print command so he could print out the result. (That also gave me an excuse to add a font chooser dialog to the program, which was really just flashiness. But hey, far be it from me to force Chace to be satisfied with digits in Times New Roman if his heart was crying out for Tahoma.) Once I had finished the program, I stuck it up on my website for downloading, and then wrote Chace a letter (as in manually, with paper and pen), giving him a brief history of the search for methods to calculate pi, starting with Archimedes and going up to the 20th century. It was everything I wished that I had had.
Chace of course enjoyed the letter and the program. He printed out a full page of digits of pi, and the next day he took it to school to show his friends. Unfortunately for Chace, his friends reacted pretty much the way you might expect the average ten-year-old kid to react to a piece of paper covered in random digits: "So what?" Chace was apparently taken aback, and on the way home from school that day, he described his experience to my mother, crestfallen, and asked why nobody else had cared about his page full of pi. And my mother said, "Well, Chace, I don't know why, but when Uncle Brian was your age, he had the same problem with his friends, but he didn't even have an uncle to share them with. So at least you have him." This wasn't entirely true, of course. Yes, I was largely friendless, but I was also an introvert, so it was largely by choice. And I did have one fellow geek, namely Rex, and we kept each other company quite well all throughout our public school careers. But it was a nice thing to tell Chace. And, I thought, it did sort of make up for all those years of me having nobody to give me cryptograms to crack.
The next time Chace had a birthday, I sent him on the first puzzle-quest.
We moved from my paternal grandmother's back yard in Sacramento, California, to the right side of a duplex in Longview, Washington in the middle of first grade for me. Not long after I resumed my education in Kessler elementary school, we were removed from it. It was determined that all but one of the school buildings were not earthquake-safe, and would have to be rebuilt. We were scattered to the winds; my class finished out the school year in a spare room in a church, conveniently located just across the street from where we were living, now a rented house down the street from the duplex. (To my eye the house was painted the exact color of the blue-green Crayola crayon, so I referred to it as the blue-green house. My brother, still young enough to want to take my lead, called it the "blue and green house all mixed up", which my mother immediately adopted as a permanent name. Utterly without regard to my disdain for such an unnecessarily cumbersome title.) I remember little from that time. Near the end of the year the teacher introduced us briefly to the number line, and the concept of negative numbers. Their strangeness intrigued me, but I was not to learn more about them in school for several years yet. (So I wound up pursuing them on my own time.) Before my seventh birthday we moved again, this time to our own house, and my parents live there still.
Second and third grade were completed at Northlake, and by time time I was ready for fourth grade, the new Kessler was open for business, and so I returned there. The school was run in a slightly unorthodox fashion, and it wound up suiting me quite well. By the time I was in sixth grade I was about as happy as I would ever be with public education. The work was fun, the bullying was as present as always but relatively low-level and mostly under control. I enjoyed most of the teachers.
When sixth grade was over and it came time to move on to junior high school, I experienced terrible fear of the unknown. My parents, who often worried that they should have waited another year before starting me in first grade, leaving me young and easily bullied by my peers, permitted me to repeat the sixth grade despite having good grades. I had recently become friends with Rex, who had just moved to town, and we had quickly drawn together, recognizing in each other our proto-geek natures. (Living within two blocks of each other helped also.) Repeating sixth grade brought me into the same grade as him, so this had further appeal.
My motivations for repeating sixth grade were a bit different from my parents, but in the end they worked out well. Kessler was a flexible school, and I spent little time going over old territory. My feeling of comfort and acceptance were unusually high, and for the first time in my life I looked forward to Mondays, and always felt a little cheated on Wednesdays, when school let out an hour early. I don't for a moment regret spending a year skating by on my education. Junior high school was in fact pretty much as bad as my shapeless and irrational fears had made it out to be. That year the school district changed, from junior high and three years of high school to middle school and four years of high school. My little feint netted me an extra year in a superb elementary school and only two years in middle school hell.
My parents occasionally had ideas about me that I found strange. Of course I found almost everything about adults strange, as do most children I expect, so I just rolled with it at the time. But some of these things continue to strike me as strange even though I'm not significantly older than they were then.
In particular, I think my parents vastly overestimated my malleability.
I suppose this shouldn't be entirely a surprise. It was partly due to the times — Doctor Spock and Free To Be You And Me. Nature was out, nurture was in. And they were young.
One thing that frequently weighed on their minds was my lopsided personality. I was bookish, retiring, and had few friends. This last item in particular bothered my mother, who wished for me to be as popular as I wanted to be. What she failed to realize was that for the most part I already was. To be sure, I had my share of precocity, and they were perfectly happy about that. But they fretted over my lack of social integration and general inclination to spend time with books instead of friends. I remember one summer clearly, after first or second grade, when my mother laid down a rule that I had to spend two hours — two WHOLE hours — before lunch outside of the house. I couldn't just sit around the living room reading. I thought this was pointless and draconian, of course. But it wasn't unusual: adults were always telling kids to go outside and get some fresh air. Apparently it was good for you or something. In any case, I bowed to the inevitable and started taking my books out onto the back porch for the requisite time. Well, this lasted for only a few days, before my mother found me there. Much to my chagrin, I found out that it wasn't the being inside that she objected to so much as it was my sitting and reading. In other words, I had to spend two hours outside every day WITHOUT BOOKS. Apparently I hadn't known pointless and draconian.
This actually worked, much to my surprise when I look back on it. I was in fact forced to make vaguely friendly overtures to the neighborhood kids, and I eventually discovered that hide and seek could actually be a fun game when you played over an entire block. (It's a little tricky, because technically you can't enter other people's yards, so that just leaves the sidewalks and parking strips. But with experience, we learned the places we could go without getting caught, or yelled at by adults, and we made the most of those. But even so, playing hide and seek successfully meant that you had to keep moving. Stay in one place for too long and you would be found, sooner rather than later, just via the process of elimination. [I remember well an extended period one summer when we realized that one house on the far side of the block currently had nobody living in it. The backyard had an picket fence with tiny spaces between the slats, so you could lie down in the backyard and never be seen. The only reason we didn't hide there all the time was from a desire to keep it a secret from the other kids for as long as possible.])
In time, these hide-and-seek activities were happening regularly enough that my parents calmed down enough and stopped forcing me outside on a schedule, allowing me to return to my books when I wanted to. This made me a much happier person, for even though hide and seek was a pretty fun game, it wasn't fun enough for two hours every freaking day of the week.
It boggles my mind now, when I think about it, that my parents were upset with me for reading too much. It's not that they didn't value education; they were both college-educated. But they had this one odd little worry about my lopsided nature. And I think they worried that it was not because that's just the way I was put together, but because they were doing something wrong. I think something very similar was going on when they started dragging me to church every week. They were worried that I was becoming lopsidedly aspiritual.
The pinnacle of this came in fifth grade or thereabouts, when my parents made me try out for a sport. At that late date one would think they would have resigned themselves, but for some reason that wasn't the case. With tears in my eyes I picked soccer, as it seemed to be less popular than most other sports and I hoped it would therefore attract fewer of the bullying types of kids that I spent all day at school avoiding. The coach was a loud, vaguely crude type who kept yelling at us during games to stay spread out. "You're bunching up like a bunch of goldfish!" was his refrain. I despised every minute of soccer practice and soccer games. It was relieved only by the fact that I spent the absolute minimum amount of time required on the field, and the rest of it on the sidelines where I was merely cold and bored. The other kids on the team were kids who had chosen to play soccer and I did not make friends with any of them.
Thankfully, the experience was not required to be repeated next year, and I think somewhere around this time they finally started conceding that maybe, just possibly, I was pretty much destined to be the way I already was. Once they accepted that, I imagine, they remembered that I actually had a lot going for me already, and maybe they should just relax and let me find my own way.
I think maybe what it was that my parents had never had to live with such a huge geek before, and didn't really know what to do with me. But they did well enough, as parents go, and I've largely forgiven them even for making me play soccer.
Largely.
My mother sometimes describes me as a completely different person before the age of four. Apparently I was large-sized when I was born, covered in rolls of fat. Of course most babies are, and I was my parent's first, so it may have just been their lack of prior experience. But it's certainly true that at some point between then and the age of six, I became thin, almost scrawny. My mother was concerned enough one time to challenge me to get my weight up to seventy-five one summer, and while I did manage to reach seventy-five briefly after dinner one day, at the end of that summer I only weighed something like seventy-two, and so I didn't get the mystery present that she had promised me if I succeeded. Jeez. I should have at least earned a consolation prize. It felt like I was eating constantly that summer. Of course, in a sense I was. We all are constantly eating. It sometimes boggles my mind how frequently we have to eat, how little we can carry around and digest over time. (Of course we are actually capable of carrying around a lot more than we actually do, but it turns out doing so isn't great for one's long term health.) If I were designing living beings that needed to be able to form societies and work at jobs away from home on a daily basis, I certainly would have given them better-performing stomachs. I would have designed something more like food camels. Instead here we are, and we have to interrupt our work every day to go eat. AGAIN. And again and again.
Okay, maybe with that attitude you're thinking no wonder I got scrawny, but actually I don't think I developed this attitude until after I left home and had to prepare my own meals. I did turn out to be a very picky eater when I grew up, a feature of my personality that was only slightly ameliorated by adulthood. But I don't think that was the cause of my being scrawny. If anything, it's the other way around: I got picky because I could afford to be picky, because I wasn't really all that hungry. Or I didn't mind being hungry, not enough to put those green things in my mouth.
Anyway, it wasn't just the change in my shape. My mother tells me that I was outgoing and, well, extroverted when I was very young, and then sometime around four or so I became quiet and withdrawn. Again, I have to wonder how much to chalk that up to my just being the first baby she had to deal with on a daily basis. I mean, babies are naturally extroverted out of necessity. When an infant is withdrawn from people we don't say it's "introverted"; we say it's "autistic".
My mother once suggested that my personality change was due to my first learning the truth about death. She remembers me developing a brief but intense fear of being poisoned around that time. I wasn't worried about enemies so much as just the idea that something in my food could kill me and I would never know it until it was too late, or in other words I was realizing that there was only so much one can do to avoid danger.
Another shrink I visited once suggested that my personality change might have been due to the arrival of my younger brother, causing me to lose center stage in my mother's attentions. Maybe, but I doubt it. If I had to venture a theory, I would just hypothesize that I was becoming aware of the larger world, and starting to develop a sense of time, that actions have future consequences and all that. I became the kid that never shook his Christmas presents, because then I might figure out what was in them, and then where would I be when it came time to unwrap them and I already knew what was in them? No surprises, no fun. (Of course, that was back when I was still someone whom you could successfully buy presents for.) "Dare I disturb the universe?" is a sentiment that has always rang true within me, and I think my mother was seeing that sentiment's first flowering.
(My introverted nature, by the way, worked very much like my finickiness at the dinner table. I wasn't a loner because I didn't like the other kids; rather, I avoided other kids because I could afford to, because my desire to make friends was too weak to overcome the amazing heaping amounts of aggravation that is learning to socialize with strangers at elementary school ages.)
But anyway, to illustrate the change in my personality and behavior, my mother tells me stories about what I was like when I before, and I have to admit that they sound like stories about someone else entirely. If they came from anyone besides my own parents I would seriously doubt their veracity. She remembers that I was always talking to unfamiliar people and getting into things. One of her least favorite days was when I figured out how to reach into some of the higher cupboards in the kitchen, and promptly poured out a full container of vegetable oil out on the floor. While my mother was distracted, trying desperate to mop up the oil (which by the way doesn't really work very well, as mops sort of rely on water to do their jobs), I poured out a tin of instant coffee, sat down in the resulting pile and began throwing it around, for all the world like I was at the beach.
My mother swears that when I was four, when we had just moved to a new home (Arkansas, I'm guessing), I went around the neighborhood one day knocking on doors, and inviting the women them over to our house tomorrow afternoon for tea. Of course the housewives were completely charmed by this and showed up en masse. My mother was not dressed for visitors, and in fact most of our possessions were still in boxes, but she dealt with the friendly visitors with as much grace as she could muster, putting on a kettle of water and doing her best to provide seating, all the while wondering why everyone was showing up at once, until inevitably one woman told her, "It was so darling to send your little boy around to deliver the invitations in person!" I wish I had a better sense of what happened next, but the story ends there, and my mother's memory is hazy after that. (We humans seem to prefer our anecdotes to end on the punchline, but some stories just cry out for a full denoument as well.)
I wish I knew what I had been thinking that day, when apparently I went around and knocked on the doors of multiple strangers. Despite what I said above, I can dimly see how this fits with my personality. I mean, I probably knew that I was only going to be dealing with wives and mothers, not other children, so there was no fear of strangers. And my general approach to learning how the world worked was to form hypotheses and then test them directly, rather than (say for example) running them past someone with more experience first. I've always had this idea that I ought to be self-sufficient, or as self-sufficient as possible, and therefore relying entirely on other people's experience wasn't as attractive as trying things out for myself. I can't in good conscience recommend this attitude — I think it might have had something to do with my taking up smoking for eleven years, for example — but at the same time I can't imagine myself growing up and turning out any other way. At least not while still imagining it to be myself.
One of the nice things about regrets, at least for me, is that they necessarily erode over time. I have had occasion to mightily regret a few major decisions of mine. But with each passing year, your decisions become a part of who you are. Eventually you can no longer seriously entertain notions of the form "if only I had done that differently", because such a large chunk of your past would have been subsequently affected, no doubt including one or two things that have had a strong impact on shaping your current personality (and maybe even a few things in there that you're glad happened). You reach the point where to wish that some part of your past was changed is to effectively wish yourself to be replaced with a different person, one who you might acknowledge as remarkably simliar in many ways, but still inarguably not you. Since mooning over regrets has only limited utility, it's probably a good thing that it eventually becomes a self-defeating exercise. Sooner or later we square our shoulders and go on making do with who we are.
It was also around that time that we visited Olympus Mons: I've never been so bored in all my life.
I need to back up for a bit and do some chronology. I find that sort of thing boring, which is why I haven't been doing it, but part of my motivation for this process is trying to record an accurate timeline before I lose any more information to amnesia. I keep talking about things in vague terms of when they happened. I think we as human beings have yet to completely reconcile ourselves to the limitations of our unidirectional time dimension.
So it was in late 1972, early 1973, when our family moved from California to Longview, a small town in southwest Washington. I was six at the time. As I noted earlier, we lived in a couple of different places briefly before my parents purchased a permanent home. That happened a little before my seventh birthday, I think. Second and third grade at Northlake, then fourth grade back at the new Kessler. Since I did sixth grade twice, that puts me there from ... let's see:
1972-73 - 1st grade
1973-74 - 2nd grade
1974-75 - 3rd grade
1975-76 - 4th grade
1976-77 - 5th grade
1977-78 - 6th grade
1978-79 - 6th grade redux
1979-80 - 7th grade
1980-81 - 8th grade
1981-82 - 9th grade
1982-83 - 10th grade
1983-84 - 12th grade
Okay, that helps, having that all written out. I should note here that yes, I sort of skipped 11th grade. In reality, I just managed to earn enough credits to gradudate high school a year early. For my first two years I had taken German after school. There were only a handful of students interested in German, but the teacher (Frau Darby) really wanted to teach it, so she offered it to five of us on her own time after school. I hadn't been planning on graduating early; I was just taking the class because it seemed more interesting to me that French or Spanish. (Why? Why not. My father had taken it when he was in school. I liked the appearance of the old German blackletter. And partly because of my need to be different. You know, you have to make these decisions suddenly one day, without seeing the teachers or knowing anything about the language, and all kinds of trivialities necessarily determine your course. I'd like to say that German was a more useful language than French or Spanish for someone interested in the sciences, but I seriously doubt I knew that back in 8th grade.) But as I finished 10th grade and considered the fact that I would be eighteen before I started 12th grade, and how much I wanted to escape public education and move on to college, I decided I was ready to flee the nest. My original thought had been to just drop out of high school and go straight to college, figuring that my grades were good enough to get in. But I then realized that by the end of my third year I would only be short a few required credits. So I convinced a math teacher to let me take an extra math class at home, doing the assignments on my own time without benefit of lectures. (The class was introductory calculus. I probably shouldn't have gone that route, because although I finished the class with a decent grade, I didn't retain the new knowledge without the benefit of any classroom lectures or demonstrations, and wound up learning it all over again in college.) I packed my last year with two English classes and got a waiver to get me out of taking a second year of PE, a class I enjoyed about as much as getting stabbed anyway.
Of course I went to The Evergreen State College, who didn't really care much if I had a high school degree or not, as my grades and ability to communicate were already good enough to meet their lightweight requirements. Evergreen prided itself on being an alternative class. I think the only requirement they asked of you was to have been in the top 50% of your high school. Cripes. Of course as someone who was planning on freelance writing as my career, with computer programming being merely a hobby, a liberal arts college was exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.
I attended Evergeen from September 1984 to June 1990. Still not satisfied with following a standard educational career, I stuck around an extra two years to get a double degree. Really it was just an excuse to stay in college. It was possible to get a double degree in five years, but I had taken light loads during most of my spring quarters, out of a recognition that it's hard not to start goofing off more in the springtime, so I was a little short of the credits that someone taking a normal load for five full years would have had. Unfortunately my parents were getting a little tired of shelling out the cash for me to hang around college taking more classes, and so started cutting short the funds. I wound up only being able to afford tuition for eight credits during my entire sixth year, which only just got me my second degree. At least I got to actually starve for part of my college career. I thought my parents were being rather unfair, given how cheap Evergreen's tuition was compared to the colleges they had wanted me to go to, and that I had managed to pay for my third year in college without any help. But of course we had to agree to disagree on that. The reality was that my parents were somewhat shielded by the computer industry that was starting to grow with an explosive energy, and so were terribly concerned that I was never going to find a career. Certainly their fears would have been perfectly well-founded had I not come of age at such a time. But I had by then set aside my ideas about being a writer, and had rediscovered how much I enjoyed mathematics and how it related to computer programming, and seen that the market for professional programmers was in fact going to be more than just people writing budget management software on lumbering mainframe machines. So my goal was to stick around college and soak up the good life for as long as I could before I was forced to accept the real world.
I suppose I should discuss the rest of my school experiences at some point, seeing as almost everything I've written about took place before my teens, but let's just continue with the timeline stuff while I'm on it. I want to be able to go back and place other events within a consistent calendar, and so I need to start somewhere. My employment history seems like a good place.
Summer 1984: working as a programmer (sort of) at my father's plant.
Summer 1985: working as a programmer (more so), same place.
Summer 1986: ditto ditto, along with some sysops duties.
1989-1990: Worked for the college as a drop-in math tutor. Nice lax job.
Summer 1990: out of school, no job, and no money. The college didn't give me my actual pieces of paper because I owed them a few hundred dollars.
Nov 1990 to .. what? March 1991? something like that: A real live temp job, working as a software tester on Aldus Pagemaker 4.0 for Windows.
1991, June to August: god help me, an employee of Sealevel Software.
September 1991 to June 1992: documentation writer and treasurer for SynApps software (moving in the wrong direction here).
June 1992: employed by Adonis (later Connectsoft). My first real job, earned without anybody pulling strings, and as a professional programmer no less. I finally had made it into the real world.
1996, May to November: left Connectsoft and worked for Sealevel Software mark two.
November 1996 until summer 1998: remained voluntarily and blissfully unemployed, living off my savings and unemployment checks until I was poor as hell and forced to hunt for work again.
1998 and 1999: worked some brief contracts for Headbone and Speakeasy, neither of which worked out well. I don't have the discipline to be an independent contractor. I barely have the discipline to hold down a job at all, really. Sometimes it drives me crazy how difficult it is to motivate myself to behave like an employee.
August 1999 to January 2006: employed by Amazon.com. My first professional job as a Unix programmer.
May 2006 to the present time: employed by Google, still as a programmer. Let's hope they don't want to fire me yet.
It's a little breathtaking, actually, to cover my entire adult life so quickly. Each line in the above list brings forth a rash of memories. I can't begin to write them all down. Not here, anyway. And probably not anywhere else, for that matter. It'd be close to a full-time job, or else I would need to be the sort of person to whom such storytelling came naturally.
I'll never forget the first time I saw Isaac Asimov's elephantine two-volume autobiography, written when he was sixty. Now there, I thought, is the perfect job. Getting paid to talk about yourself. What could be easier? What could come more naturally to an egotist like us? But now I think back on those 700-plus page tomes and realize that it isn't nearly as easy as I had thought.
How is it I have so little to say here? I find it quite difficult to remain focused on the process of writing these things down. And yet these are stories that I've rehearsed in my head a thousand times. I frequently imagine myself telling my history to others, explaining the ins and outs of my commonplace-yet-unique-for-all-that life. All I'm doing differently this time is using a keyboard instead of my inner voice.
But that's all the difference in the world. It's the difference between hearing music in your head and being able to play it on the guitar. It's the difference between visualizing yourself performing a perfect backflip off the high beam and actually doing it. Your imagination is great at glossing over details that reality won't let you overlook. I've tried to keep a journal a few times in the past, thinking that all I need to do is to harness my natural inclination to cast my experiences into stories. It never works for very long; I lose the motivation to spend the necessary time writing down what's already happened to me, when there's still so much more to do. The habit doesn't stick and before long the journal is forgotten. I've known a few people in my time that can and have maintained journals over the years, and it boggles my mind. How do they keep doing it? Is it possible that they're even more self-centered than I am, spending several minutes every day thinking about their own life? Are they even more creatures of habit than me, able to set aside that time every day? I can barely manage to do my laundry on a regular basis, it all gets so tedious. Every once in a while I see how some famous person has written an autobiography, and the level of detail they can provide over extended periods of time make it clear that they kept a diary or journal. Boy, if ever do manage to do something that makes me famous enough to convince a publisher to buy my autobiography, I'm so going to be kicking myself.
That's part of why I thought this approach might work better: to force myself to get fifty thousand words of stories down all at once, instead of a little bit every day for the rest of my life. A strict deadline to keep me focused for an entire month. It has the advantage of not needing to work in the long term, because anything that goes against my habits doesn't work in the long term. But I still find myself short on motivation, especially at a point like here, where I realize I've passed the halfway mark and I've hardly ventured out of childhood. That's why I keep reminding myself of the impending fire. Please don't think that I tend to the morbid, because I don't. I don't think much about death at all, really. Which is part of the problem, you see. I need to think about it, in order to remind myself why I'm sitting here, recording these things. In preparation for the fire.
I suppose everyone remembers their first real jobs with some level of fondness. It's a difficult transition that most of us have to make, from the totally inexperienced to the gainfully employed. Most people depend on a little bit of sheer luck to make that transition.
My first job ever was at my father's plant, and while my father is generally above pulling strings, I think he sometimes let himself forget how much people deferred to him after his promotion. After working there for fifteen years or so, he became the plant manager. I suspect what happened was that, exasperated at my utter inability to even visualize looking for a job even though I was on the verge of finishing high school, he asked the IT head if it was possible that they had any jobs for a youthful guru, and he in turn made it his business to find a place for me. Of course, my personally-accumulated experience was entirely with the small home computers that predated the PC, and not at all with the mainframe computer that the plant depended on, but allowances could be made. I gave a good job interview, which I now know was probably mostly a formality but I did a good job anyway damn it. I did not finish the job they had hired me to do before the summer ended, unfortunately, and I have no reason to doubt that the project was entirely canned afterwards. But I made a good enough impression on my coworkers that I was hired back the next summer to do mainframe programming. Woo hoo, mainframes! Cutting edge, man! Actually I found the job to be a blast. I was given lots of little miscellaneous tasks, with the idea that they would throw things at me and see which ones stuck. I was never assigned a job that absolutely had to get done, by this date. The mainframe was old and overworked, and I just was creating tools to help them figure out how to keep the status quo. I loved the casual task sheet, and I loved learning the outdated programming and scripting languages of the mainframe. The tiny memory capacities of the old machines dictated a brevity bordering on the cryptic, but with bizarre moments of unexpected verbosity, typically signalling a language feature that was experimental at the time. Things now taken for granted were entirely absent, forcing you to adopt an alien thought process in order to arrange your program to meet the machine's needs. It was like studying Egyptian hieroglyphs all over again.
Alas, those were only summer jobs. After the third summer my father was no longer happy at his job, due to aggravation from higher up the chain of command, and so prepared to resign.
My first job that I can safely say that I obtained without strings being pulled was my final year at college, where I worked as a math tutor. There was a large room that a few of us just sat in and waited around for students to walk in and ask for help with their homework. We didn't get very many people, so it was a pretty easygoing way to earn a living. (Actually it wasn't quite enough to live on, thus my debt when I graduated.) I probably talked to no more than a couple dozen different people the entire school year, though a few of them became regulars. Once or twice I got a student who I was pretty sure knew more than I did about the subject in question, and then I'd have to stumble along as best as I could — that was the biggest challenge of my job. The only time I really didn't enjoy the job was when a student came in, an older woman, who was taking elementary statistics. Statistics can be a confusing subject, but at this point the woman was just covering the basics. The assignment in question was introducing the three common types of averages: the mean, the median, and the mode. The first two were pretty simple, and she didn't have a problem with that. The mode is also a pretty simple idea, and she mostly picked that up quickly enough. But the textbook then took a moment to dive into a particular level of detail concerning one possible situation when calculating the mode, that suddenly brought in a rather involved formula, and required one to recognize that statistics come with error ranges, if not explicitly then implicitly. Thinking this was only slightly more complicated than what we had been covering, I didn't sense her frustration and self-directed despair until she started tearing up. Of course being no more than a young student I had not the slightest clue how best to handle this situation and so I just went back over my explanation in a slower and quieter voice. We finished up the session and she did not return. I presume that either she found another venue for help or she just dropped the class.
Once I had left behind the confines of the campus where I didn't have to further justify non-revenue-generating activities, I wandered around lost for a bit before girding my loins and moving to Seattle. The idea of living in a city still made me nervous at that time, but it was clearly where more or less every last programming job in the Pacific Northwest was located, so it was either move to Seattle or move to California. That was pretty much a no-brainer, since I actually had friends living in Seattle. Well, that and also the fact that I actually prefer the damp, gently cool climate of this area over the heat. (My current favorite reply to people who can't understand a preference for rainy climates: "Water is the matrix of life! Rain is Mother Nature's way of saying she doesn't hate your guts!" I don't actually say this to people, of course; I just describe myself saying this to hypothetical people, so as not to offend the real ones.) So I came to Seattle carrying what I could cram into two small backpacks and two carry-on bags (I didn't own any real luggage). It drove me crazy leaving behind all but a handful of books and cassette tapes, but I was going to be living on someone's living room floor until I found a job and a place of my own. My friend Mike was working as a temp in an office that was 90% temps, and a coworker who was leaving in the middle of a project for a full-time job. They wanted to replace him quickly. Mike lied through his teeth about my experience, knowing that I could pick things up quickly enough to fake it, and as a result my interview basically involved having me come in to verify that I wasn't fictional. This was a job doing software testing, and at this point in time much of the software testing world involved hiring people to randomly bang on software and describe all the times it didn't work right. Some people in the company were better organized and methodical, but our team wasn't particularly. Mike was effectively biding his time while interviewing for programming jobs and I was just trying to keep a low profile. The job only lasted about six months or so until the project ended, and I actually liked it most of the way through. There were only a handful of concrete tasks assigned, and the rest of it was ferreting out nay unusual behavior to see if it blossomed into a bug. At this time I imagined myself as a baby parasite — a tick making a nest in the fur of a giant dog. As long as I didn't irritate the dog and draw attention to myself, it would continue to let me draw off the few drops of blood that kept me happily taken care of. I wasn't thinking about my career or the future at all at that point; I was just happy and relieved to have found a landing site in the city.
The first month or so of that job were very much like an adventure. I was sleeping on the couch of Mike and John and their roommate, the guy who had been living there before they arrived, who was distantly friendly but became a little nervous about me after two weeks had passed and I was still living there. I felt very lucky to have a job so quickly after I arrived, but I discovered that that alone wasn't enough to get me a place to live. Unfortunately it was a renter's market when I arrived, and not being someone naturally inclined to sell myself, I did a terrible job at convincing people to rent to me when they had options. So even after I had a job it took me another two weeks before I really got serious about hunting down my own place.
In the meantime, Mike and John and I lived together, and all worked in the same building, so we hung out all the time. Mike was the only one with a car, so he drove us to work and back each day. His car was a rather inappopriate hand-me-down from his father, a white Lincoln Continental sedan with suicide doors and automatic everything. Unlike most cars nowadays, the automatic windows rolled down even when the engine was off. In addition to the cigarette lighter on the dashboard, all four doors had their own cigarette lighter on the armrest (although not all of them worked). Not only did we find this hilarious, but since Mike and I were on the verge of taking up smoking, it soon became an actual convenience. Anyway, the point was: It was old, it was huge, and it gobbled gasoline. We were pooling our resources in order to get through the month. Even though as temps we were paid weekly, we hit a tight spot where it was Saturday and the week had just started, but none of us had any money that could be spent. Mike and John had to pay rent and I was still awaiting my first paycheck. Mike's fuel tank indicator was already on "E", and we had no idea how much longer we had before it ran out. We met in the living room, assessed the situation, and realized that all three of us were essentially broke at the same time. We didn't even have enough money to buy breakfast.
Mike, being the kind of person who quickly becomes focused in situations like these, led us down into the basement where he had a couple of boxes of books, mostly about computer programming. A few had suffered water damage but most were in good condition. He sorted out the ones he needed to keep, and we loaded the remainder into his car and drove to a used bookstore. It was a little bit farther away than was comfortable, given the uncertainties with the gasoline supply, but it was the one John deemed most likely to buy most of the books. They indeed accepted well over half of them, paying us over $50 for the lot. Mike probably had spent several times that amount in acquiring them, but nobody was complaining.
We quickly devised a plan: John and I would walk a couple of blocks up to Dick's and stand in line to purchase an inexpensive brunch for three, while Mike drove the car to the nearest gas station and filled the tank. I'm not sure why we split up at this point, unless it was to minimize the time spent getting food. In any case, Mike still hadn't returned by the time we made it to the head of the line and placed our order, and he still hadn't returned by the time we gave up on waiting and began eating. Finally, after we had polished off our share of the food, including the fries, we saw the giant white car cruise into the parking lot. As Mike ate, he told us that on the way to the gas station, the car had finally had it with us, and the engine had stopped turning over. He had managed to pull over into a parking lot, only a block away from the pumps. Mike thankfully owned a one-gallon gas can, so he quickly retrieved it from the trunk and hoofed the final block to the station, got his gallon, and walked back. He poured all but a cup or so into the tank and then tried to start the car, but it still refused to catch. Mike had heard from his father that when a car runs completely out of gas, the engine becomes "dry" and becomes balky, making it impossible to get it to turn over reliably. The remedy, apparently, was to pour some gasoline directly into the car's air filter, thus allowing some highly combustible fumes to permeate the lines and nudge things into action. Mike's dad is a bit of a character, but thankfully this time his advice was sound. Mike doused the air filter with the bit of fuel he had held back for just this reason, and after ten or twelve more tries the engine finally consented to turn over and keep turning. After Mike had convinced himself that it wasn't about to choke and die again, he drove it the final few yards to the pump.
John and I enjoyed the story and were glad to hear that Mike's caution had adverted further disaster, but we were a little put out when we learned that he had filled the entire tank of his mammoth car. We probably had needed only half that amount to make it to the next payday. But with a full tank of gas and our fast food feast, we had already spent half of our money.
So, from Dick's we drove to the grocery store, and spent the rest of our money on groceries. For the rest of that week John cooked all of our dinners, we ate sandwiches for lunch each day, and spent the evenings playing rummy 500 while listening to the Pixies on John's stereo. The week went by slowly, and occasionally I was nervous about not having anything but pocket change for money — what if something came up? But nothing did. And then payday rolled around, and we could once again indulge in such things as restaurants, and movies, and buying books and music.
Anyway. After three or four rejections from prospective roommates and landlords, I finally secured a small apartment. Not an apartment, actually, and not even a studio, as it didn't even have a private bathroom. The bathroom was shared among four such places — I believe the term for it was "sleeping room". It was just one room, not terribly small for a room, with a stove, refrigerator and a small sink. Fortunately the landlord was nice, and a kind-hearted person, and quickly took a liking to me. The building itself had a bit of a history, apparently, involving rampant drugs and prostitution. Since there was a high school just across the street, there had been some effort to clean the place up and start over with a clean slate. The landlord accepted my application, whether from a need to fill a rather unmarketable room or because he honestly saw that I was an earnest and guileless young man I don't know. I lived there for six or seven months, and it was an interesting experience. Maybe I'll share some stories about that later.
Perhaps if I had been a better software tester I might have found work at Aldus on whatever software project came next. But like Mike, I too was looking to be a programmer; software testing was just a means of survival until I could find some crack through which I might slip into the industry. Mike landed an actual programming job right around this time, in fact, which made him very happy and gave me hope for myself. Mike loaned me a hand-me-down book on Windows 2.x programming (he could now afford the updated book on Windows 3.0), and I began absorbing the fundamentals as fast as I could. Not having a computer of my own or a job to supply me with one, my first Windows programs were done in pencil on notebook paper, all the way down to the makefile commands. (I was determined.)
Mike frequently worked nighttime hours at his job, and occasionally he started bringing me along so that I could use a co-worker's machine. Finally I had a chance to build my test programs and see if they worked. I began working on a full-sized program to play Mastermind (a program that I had written before, for a non-graphical environment, since it's a very simple program to write while still being pretty fun to play). With this I was hoping to entice an employer, to show as proof that I could actually write a working Windows program.
Bizarrely, I never managed to entice any employer with that program, but I did wind up selling it. To this day it remains the only program of mine that I've sold outright. An ex-co-worker of Mike's, named Steve, had a line with a tiny company, essentially a couple of guys trying to become a respectable software outlet. They were putting together a couple of packages of Windows games. Steve was creating a simple dungeon-exploring game for them. He kindly passed on a copy of my game to them, and they offered to buy in exchange for a percentage of the profit. Their office was in Woodinville, a distant suburb with minimal bus service, so I had only a handful of possible times that I could go out to their office, visit with them, and make it back home again. I visited them once to talk with them and get a contract and some branding images to add to my program. I returned the following week with the new binary and a signed contract. And then, because I was starving, I brazenly asked if it was possible to get an advance on the profits. I felt terrible doing it, but I was already borrowing money from Mike in order to survive, and I felt desperate. Naturally, they balked, explaining that they couldn't promise anything ahead of time, they didn't really have that kind of capital, etc. I nodded my head; it was pretty much what I had expected them to say, but the disappointment still showed on my face. One of them suddenly chuckled, pulled out a wallet and handed me two $100 bills. Stunned, I thanked them effusively and got the hell out of there before his partner knocked some sense into him. I never bothered them again, of course, and I rather doubt they ever made enough money to cover that advance before they went out of business. The days of small businesses selling shrinkwrapped software written by amateurs were already passing at the time.
I actually found the software box that included my game on a shelf in a store once. (I was even with some other people at the time, so I had an opportunity to show off.) Had I been thinking at the time, I would have gone back to that store the next day and purchased it. One for the scrapbook.
All told, it would be a year until I landed a professional programming job that I could call my own. Pretty fast, all things considered, but it felt very slow to me, compared to the speed with which I was learning how to write Windows code. In the meantime, I landed an unprofessional programming job (rimshot). Jon Locke was a fellow Evergreen student who had held a couple of different jobs, including one in Silicon Valley before moving back to Seattle again. He was determined to be his own boss and to that end had started doing consulting work, back when it was merely fashionable and before it became ridiculously lucrative. For reasons that to this day escape me, he decided that he needed to expand, and so he expanded his one-man incorporation into an actual employer, and invited me to be his first employee. Odd, but I wasn't going to argue. He had a contract to work on some actual Windows code and figured there would be enough work for two. He was right about that. The company was Intermec, essentially a specialty hardware manufacturer. One of their products was a printer that specialized in printing barcodes. The printer was actually semi-programmable via a compact language that allowed one to describe the layout of a barcode label, then set the thing off to print however many labels, each one with a different barcode. The language was compact in order to fit in the printer's constrained memory resources, and therefore was cryptic. In order to make it more usable, the company had decided to offer a Windows program that would allow one to define the layout graphically and then upload it to the printer. (I occasionally described the program to others as PageMaker for Barcodes.) Sadly, since the company didn't have any Windows programmers on staff, and indeed the programmers they did have were more familiar with embedded assembly than with C, the program they had pulled together so far was messy, undesigned, and had several hard-to-find bugs. Jon had landed this contract because yet another fellow Evergreen student was working there, and had recommended him. Us, really. I started thinking of myself as being part of the Young Boy Network. We maintained that contract for a few months before we generated enough friction with the company, fueled in part by our utter disdain for the mammoth hairball that was the code base, to make it time to head out for greener pastures.
"Greener pastures" isn't exactly where I wound up, though. Still unemployed, still learning the basics of Windows programming without a computer of my own to work on. I managed to get myself involved with a collection of young men, all Windows programmers who like Mike had worked at Microsoft but as non-programmers, and were now ready to strike out on their own in order to get involved in the rapidly-expanding market of Windows software. I was invited along based solely on Mike's recommendation. The original plan was to throw together some very simple easy-to-write applications into a single package, and make a quick buck. It sounded overly simplistic to me, but what the hell did I know? Maybe if everyone involved had stuck to that plan, it might have actually earned some money. Again, what do I know? In short, the original idea wasn't ambitious; it was just to try to pass off some miniature applications. Minimize investment in hopes of doing better than breaking even. We came up with a list of programs that people could write or were currently working on, and picked out the ones that sounded salable. We brainstormed company names. I threw out "synergy" as the sort of cool-sounding word that would appeal to the group. Somebody modified that to make "syn-apps", a pun on "synapse", and thus was born the company.
Unfortunately, as the project progressed, and the lineup of programmers were shuffled around as people's other commitments came and went, the scope of the applications increased. Jon Locke decided to punt on his effort to become his own company and threw his lot in with us. Jon was a prolific programmer, and soon there was a bit of a clash with the other arrogant programmer of the group. I suspect that this helped fuel the increasing ambitiousness of the software package. Perhaps I was lucky that the programs assigned to me all fizzled, and I wound up volunteering instead to write the documentation, arguing plausibly that I had the best communication skills of the group. Several of the original programs planned for the package were ditched and newer ones were thought up. To be fair to everyone, several of the programs were quite impressive, and a couple of them involved some tricky hacks of the Windows operating system to do what they did. But to my eyes, as the programs became more impressive, the name "Synergy" began to look less like a sales gimmick and more like false advertising. Then Jon started designing a full-on scripting language for Windows, which pretty much increased the necessary size of the manual tenfold. I had my hands full documenting all the available functions. By this time Mike had managed to bring his boss into the project (yes, his boss at his real job) for doing sales, marketing, and most importantly, providing capital. As broke as ever, a small chunk of that capital went to me for keeping me fed. (Everyone else had other jobs or savings. It was a good time to have been a Microsoft stockholder.) We even hired a graphic designer to create a logo and a image on the box cover.
One time we were having a little meeting and discussing strategy. Mike's boss was talking about how he planned to get this out there, and he said something like: "To start we'll have a thousand boxes. Once we sell those off we'll have more options available to us. And if we don't sell a thousand, well — pfft. Then we're really doing something wrong." Having dismissed that as a serious possibility, he then went on to explain what we would do after that point. I heard that and thought, wow. Really? It seemed to me that, given how hard it was said to be for a totally unknown company to get shelf space in the stores, selling a thousand copies of this thing would be a cause for some serious celebration. But instead this man seemed to find it so implausible as to not warrant having a Plan B. Well, he was the guy who was supposed to know. Maybe this wasn't so far-fetched after all.
When the program was finally done and shipped, I think we wound up selling about twenty copies. I could be wrong. I don't have the numbers. (I never did. I'm not sure there were any numbers as such.) The remaining nine-hundred-odd boxes remained stacked up taking space in the office for many months. Finally they got rid of them to a foreign market. Apparently there were companies that would take just about any boxed software in bulk amounts, regardless of what it actually did, and sell it in Asia. Who knew?
In the meantime there was friction in the company. From my time spent working on the manual I had gotten used to working in relative isolation from the other programmers. As we waited for the software to start selling (heh) we considered what to try to sell next, I found myself unmotivated. I didn't feel comfortable trying to work alongside the egos of the other programmers. I didn't have the skills or the experience they had, and I didn't want to feel like I had to compete. I tried to get by with working at home, away from the office, but that erupted into problems soon after when I had little or nothing concrete to show them.
From the very beginning I had had little expectation that this thing would ever sell. I had gone along because I had no other prospects, and because I figured that whether or not anybody made money it would be a great experience. Now that ride was over, but I found myself still strapped in.
As it became obvious that the package wasn't about to start selling, Jon Locke began looking for work elsewhere. One day we were both in the office and he managed to get in contact with the fellow EVergreen graduate who had got us the contract at Intermec. After talking on the phone with him for a while, Jon hung up and said to me, "Wow. I have a job interview on Monday. He's working for a software company now and they're looking for people." I sat there, amazed. How did people like Jon do that sort of thing? I couldn't sell myself to save my life. I contemplated my standing at SynApps and considered that that might soon become more than just an expression. With an effort of will, bravery fueled by fear of remaining where I was, I spoke up. "Hey Jon, what about me? Do you think they'd be interested in interviewing me as well?" Jon said, "Huh. Let me see." He picked the phone back up, and talked briefly. Hanging up, he said, "You have a job interview on Monday."
I sat there, amazed all over again. Why was it so hard for people like me to do this sort of thing?
The company was called Adonis. Like almost everyone else in the software business in Seattle, they were located in a suburb. Specifically in a distant corner of Redmond, only barely remaining within the city limits. Jon gave me a lift out there, but I wound up taking a bus back and it took nearly an hour to get home again. I didn't mind, though. The technical interview had gone well. They hadn't asked to see any code samples; instead, they hit me with a couple dozen questions about the minutiae of the PC architecture and Windows programming? What were the two major modes that the Intel chip ran in? (Real mode and protected mode.) How much memory could a 286 in protected mode access? (16 MB; I didn't know that one but at the interviewer's encouragement I took an educated guess and got it right.) What was the most efficient method for drawing a solid rectangle in the current background color? (The ExtTextOut function, with an empty string of text. I didn't get this one, and they admitted that nobody ever got that one. It was an obscure bit of knowledge that their president had stumbled upon while debugging a video driver.) The fact that the technical interview had pretty much been the entire interview was also encouraging; it indicated that this was still a small company (they had something like 50-60 employees at the time), and the geeks were still in charge. The commute was a serious downer, but everything else looked good.
The next week they offered me a job. I was a professional programmer. The salary was $32K — significantly less than the going rate for someone with a college degree, but with my lack of prior experience I wasn't complaining. It was certainly enough money to meet my expenses and live comfortably. When I told my parents that I had a real job, my father immediately asked me what my salary was. When I told him he nearly choked. I think they must have given up on me ever having a viable career. Within a couple of years I was able to hand them a check for the money I had borrowed from them during my final year of college. They had written off hope of getting that back so long ago they didn't even know what I was talking about.
My first year of that job was one of the best years of my life. I was getting paid to do something I would have likely been doing anyway. I spent a fat chunk of my life sitting on buses winding my way through Kirkland, Bellevue, and Redmond. The bus routes were asymmetrical, I soon discovered: the last bus going from Redmond to Seattle left at 8:30 PM, but the last bus going from Seattle to Redmond left at 11:30 PM. With my natural tendency to wake up later each day, I frequently found it easier to go into work at night, on the last bus out. I would then work through the night and leave sometime in the morning when I started getting sleepy. The company even had a spare office in which were stored a pair of bunk beds. I utilized them a handful of times when I had misjudged my sleep schedule, or was working under deadline pressure. (I remember hazily one time, when we were trying to get some software into a good-looking state for a presentation to some press, coming into the room to crash and finding someone else in the bottom bunk, forcing me to climb into the top bunk as quietly as I could. And then an hour later someone else walking into the room and finding no beds left. "Damn it," they swore quietly, and went back to their office and fell asleep on the floor.) It became rare for me to work less than 55 hours in a week. Amazingly, even though we were salaried employees, the company paid us extra for our overtime hours.
I strongly suspect that I will never enjoy a job as much as I enjoyed that one. Partly it was the very real circumstances of the job and the company and the people, but I believe that part of it was also the bare fact that it was my first professional job. I've since noticed that many programmers speak fondly of their first professional job, when they finally achieved that golden moment where you were getting paid to do something you'd happily be doing anyway, and it seemed that life, or at least one very significant part of it, was a breeze.
If this were a real memoir, this would only be a first draft, instead of first and last both. I'd have an editor who'd be getting paid to read this mess, pick out the scattered nuggets that are actually interesting to large numbers of other people, and give them back to me to work over and expand upon until they filled the space currently occupied by everything else, and could be strung together in a sequence that generated a satisfying narrative. Safe to say that that won't be happening anytime soon, so instead here you are, reading this as I wrote it. I rather imagine it's a bit like some old man sitting in his living room, intending to tell a simple anecdote more or less relevant to the preceding conversation, but he gets sidetracked onto a sub-anecdote in the process of providing some background necessary to appreciate the main story, which then leads into a tertiary anecdote, which may be filling in yet more background or may just be getting pulled out because something reminded him of it, and after a while he seemed to have almost forgotten that there ever was a conversation, one involving multiple people involved in the familiar give and take, as if there are so much history crowding his brain that no story can be pulled free of itself but must come with a tangle of others, and so it goes, with the waterfall only interrupted when he runs dry and needs water, or has to stop and use the bathroom, at which point his children look at each other and begin to think that maybe it is time to consider a nursing home after all.
I need to jump back into the earlier history and start filling in a few of the gaping holes there. My two years of middle school were uneventful. My friend Rex provided pretty much all my introverted soul needed in the way of socializing. Rex was a more outgoing person, though. I wound up having two other friends in middle school, due entirely to Rex making friends with new arrivals and thus dragging me along, largely unwillingly at first, though eventually I calmed down and forged friendships with them individually. Shane and Max. Shane was another nerd like us, and in fact in later years our friendship was based entirely on Dungeons and Dragons, as Rex had only a short-term interest in the game, and Max never cottoned onto it much at all. But then Max wasn't really one of us. He was a social outcast, to be sure, but he wasn't really a geek. He played trumpet in the band; perhaps he was meant to be a band geek, but his growth in that direction got derailed when his parents moved and he wound up with us. I don't know if we were ultimately good or bad for Max. Certainly he did have some things in common with us, but there were many times he found us entirely exasperating.
By the time we finished middle school, however, Shane's mother moved again, and after that we only stayed in touch via the occasional weekend visit to play Dungeons and Dragons. That left Rex, Max, and myself to tough it out through high school. (Well, three years of high school. I guess I sort of ditched them for the final year.)
The one thing that really weighed upon me in middle school was just how little the administration trusted us. It was quite a transition, coming from elementary school, where we were largely trusted because there was only so much trouble one could get into at that age. Now I was surrounded by teenagers and there were all kinds of rules about when we could be in the halls or out of our seats. (The distinction became even clearer afterwards, when we were in high school, and suddenly there was once again a certain modicum of trust that the administration seemed to bequeath upon us. We were, once again, assumed innocent until proven guilty, and for me it made a big difference in my feelings towards the place.)
Bullies were always a problem in my career through the American public education system. However, early on I developed pretty good skills at ameliorating the issue, and it largely served me well. I had learned to be, not quite invisible, but uninteresting. I realized quickly that fighting back was just a good way to escalate a threat into actual conflict, and some reptilian part of my brain understood that appearing too easily intimidated was equally disastrous. The trick was just to be quiet and display perfect stoicism in the face of tossed insults. Give them nothing in return and only the most muleheaded kids will continue to attempt to start something. As a result I got tossed a lot of casual bullshit but very little beyond that.
Unfortunately, and this drove me mad with aggravation, Rex seemed to have no such sensibilities. He was no better at defending himself than I was, but he had little interest in taking anything lying down. There were times when I wanted to just not be around him, because he was making chinks in my safety armor. Of course Rex, had he been more aware of my process, would probably have felt it too cowardly to be borne. He had a measure of pride, I'm guessing, that wouldn't have let him get walked over so easily. Whereas my self-esteem was, for whatever reason, completely disconnected from the treatment I received from my peers. Now this is where perhaps we find the kernel of my introversion. Having a strong, resilient native self-esteem meant that I didn't need confirmation from my peers that I was a good person. (If not better than them — but that's getting into a different matter. Egotism is great for one's self-esteem, but one must learn early on not to trust it beyond that.) Stripped of much of one's need for peer validation, does introversion naturally follow? Or is this just another side effect rather than a root cause? I can't say either way, but I often do feel that my unflappable self-esteem, seemingly impervious to things like evidence to the contrary, is the part that is rooted more deeply in my personality and psyche that nothing short of neural damage would remove it. Whereas I have gone through periods of extroversion, and willingly so.
One time we were in the hall after lunch waiting for the teacher to return and open the classroom, when Mike C—, one of the obnoxious and I assume popular boys, passed us and called Rex a faggot. It was a casual insult, tossed off lightly, almost as if were pro forma, a minor chore like getting dressed for bed that one did routinely. Perhaps it was actually the casualness of his demeanor that made Rex choose to not ignore it; whatever the case, he replied just as casually with a recently acquired comeback: "If I'm gay, you're a Lesbian." (Ah, middle school, the land where gender and sexuality mean more than any other aspect of your identity. Oh, how much I don't miss you.) At this response Mike immediately came alive, yelling at Rex and shoving him in the chest, advancing on him so that Rex was forced to walk backwards down the hall. I followed at a very great distance, and I felt very guilty for not being more present, but my self-preservation instincts prevented me from getting any closer. Mike finally knocked Rex down, whereupon he laughed smugly and went along his way. Rex quickly got up and reported the incident to the nearest teacher. That's another thing I wouldn't have done; it just draws out a situation that needs to end as quickly as possible.
By the time of high school, that kind of bullshit largely faded, and though we remained on opposite sides of the battlefield, I felt much less like I had to stay in control to avoid risk of a physical confrontation. Battles stayed much more on the level of humiliation in high school. I've always assumed that this was just due to people getting out of their early teens and starting to mature, and maybe realizing that there were more important things to think about, like girls. But now I wonder if maybe the administrative tone had as much to do with the mellowing out.
By the time I had reached 10th grade, I was sixteen years old. Though I had naturally developed an interest in women's bodies, I had yet to be attracted to girls. To put it more simply, I was interested in sex, but had yet to experience anything like love. I had yet to have my first crush. To be sure, I was something of a late bloomer in life (my mother disagrees, arguing that this was a misperception caused by my starting first grade so young, but of course that was no longer a factor after I did sixth grade twice). Rex was as well, and so you see again why it's important for us geeks to stick together.
The fact that I was now sixteen and still had only an abstract notion of what love or infatuation entailed struck me as unusual at the time. But, and this is probably where I part company from many other people, I was very happy with this situation. I felt as if I was living in a blessed state, freed from the chaos and foolishness that accompanied this involuntary subservience to hormones and unsteerable emotions. I fantasized that I was some odd mutant who had been mercifully cut loose from the shackles of irrationality, and that I would be free to live my entire life in clear-eyed self-control. Life, in short, was good.
Of course in my more sober moments I acknowledged that this was no more than a fantasy, but on the other hand I couldn't see any concrete reason why this state would end. I mean, yes, it seemed to end for everyone, but it wasn't clear to me why it had to be that way. Popular culture was crammed to the gills with movies and music proclaiming that it was a good thing, if not the most important thing of all, so maybe everyone just let themselves be drawn into it when they didn't necessarily need to. Maybe in fact there were lots of people like me who never fell into the trap of being controlled by their own emotions, but didn't draw attention to themselves for fear of being shunned or discriminated against. Maybe.
In any case, I continued to live my life, distracted only by my increasing interest in women's breasts. At least I can say that I knew what I had while I had it, and consciously appreciated it. We often don't get to say that about those strange times in our lives — those prolonged moments when we stand suspended in midair over a ravine or a rushing stream or an immense canyon, and even though sometimes we're fully aware of our impossible location, gravity has yet to notice us. It's a wonderful experience when we're aware of it as it's happening. And we know that in the end gravity will assert itself, as it must, and draw us inexorably into the hurly-burly, sooner or later and more likely sooner. But for a moment we remain standing on a castle in the air, and the air is clean and cool, and the view is spectacular.
It wasn't until I was already in college that I really discovered music. It seems strange for something so basic to take so long. Me, I blame this entirely on my parents and their willingness to listen to AM radio. My younger brother should also take part of the blame here, but that may be unfair, since he was in part rebelling against the rest of us, as younger brothers who are completely unlike their older brothers need to do. The basic issue was that I rarely heard anything that I found particularly interesting until I was living on my own and could finally begin exploring my musical tastes.
I am simplifying a bit here. I listened to a fair number of my parents records when I was younger, and I certainly appreciated them at times. But they were a strange hodgepodge, and I'm not sure how much of that music would still find an emotional reaction now. Some of it was just due to being young and fresh to the world of musical emotions, of course. I remember John Denver and Joan Baez and Simon & Garfunkel and Don McLean and Glen Campbell. Many of these were on eight-track tapes, of course. I'm actually finding it a little strange, this experience of casting my mind back and recalling my nascent musical experiences. I've no doubt that listening to "Wichita Lineman" would still impel an emotional reaction from me today, even though I might try to hide it from anyone else who was present. And I mainly listened to Don McLean in an attempt to understand what "American Pie" was about (once again, the desire to understand the cryptic), but I was also attracted to a dramatic (probably melodramatic) song about a dying solider, and while my present self would probably not be moved much by the overdone lyrics, I would probably still respond to the musical parts. I can see in it reflections of the sorts of music that I most readily respond to today. I recall one summer afternoon playing with watercolors, and getting the idea to paint an illustration of this song. I could see a very detailed and realistic image in my mind, one that only a master of oils could have rendered. It left me quite frustrated, for the image was so clear in my imagination that it was almost impossible to believe that I wouldn't be able to create it directly, simply by painting what I saw. Not for the last time, and probably not for the first, I ran headlong into this great divide and fell straight to the bottom, sadder but not yet any wiser.
Likewise, I was drawn to Joan Baez in part because of her spooky-sounding music, and in part I couldn't understand what her lyrics were about. On the other hand, I doubt I could stand to listen to much John Denver now. (Cripes.)
Somewhere along the line I learned, or realized, or merely absorbed the notion, that one's emotional reaction to music (or anything really) didn't necessarily have to have anything to do with what the artist had consciously placed there. I remember a time in fifth grade, when I wasn't really enjoying school as much as I had become used to. Too many of my classmates seemed much, much older than me, and while they didn't harass me more than anyone else, their very attitudes toward the world and such left me feeling a bit nervous and alienated. It felt to me that, unlike most of my peers who were at least vaguely interested in learning, they were mainly focused on entertaining each other and getting through the day without getting in trouble. This was also a time when my mother was working afternoons and so I would often come home after school and have the house to myself for a while, my brother's school getting out an hour later. On one of these occasions I wound up listening to The 5th Dimension's album "The Age of Aquarius" (another 8-track tape), the usual suspects not appealing to me for some reason that day. While I found it generally acceptable, I wound up latching onto one song in particular, "Those Were the Days" (a cover of a song written a few years before). This sentiment, that the best was already in the past, was one that I found quite melancholy, and I could all but feel my chest tightening in empathy for the expressed loss. For a short while I found myself listening to this album almost every day, primarily just to hear that one song and feel sad. For no particular reason I felt it applied to me and my life.
And then, the song became overly familiar and lost a bit of its pull on me, and I shook off my fascination and went on with my life. Eventually I learned that this particular emotion, a melancholic contemplation of a heyday which I missed out on and is now in the past, is one that I am a wee bit suspectible to, and so when it comes over me, I revel in its bittersweet pang while maintaining a cautious distrust of taking it too seriously. Did I, in unwitting collusion with The 5th Dimension, plant this tendency in my own youthful mind, or was it always there and the music just rooted it out? Nick Hornby poses this essential question through his protagonist in "High Fidelity", and I'm no closer to knowing the answer than he is.
The first record album that I ever owned was one my parents bought for me, quite out of the blue. It wasn't a special occasion. They just came home from the store one day and gave it to me: the soundtrack to Carl Sagan's "Cosmos". It was a good choice on their part. Of course I had enjoyed the TV series immensely. I had first discovered it almost by accident, around the third or fourth episode. I was tuning in mainly for the science lessons and the pretty images of planets and galaxies, but I also gained an appreciation for certain snippets of music. I have very fond memories of watching it for the first time, or maybe the second time (which was the first time all the way through). It would come on every Sunday evening, for three months. It was duriing the fall or winter. We would watch it in the basement, and my mom would bake these little Pillsbury cinnamon rolls for dessert. If it was cold my parents would build a little fire in the basement. I would already be in my pajamas so I could head straight for bed afterwards, since it ended rather late. Ah, I could go on about the TV series, but let's set that aside. Right now I was talking about the soundtrack record. This perhaps gave me my first hint of something beyond what I normally heard in my environment, between my parents' casual AM listenings and my brother's pop music sensibility, none of which really worked on me. (I will never completely forgive that Portland AM radio station that started up around this general time period. All love songs, all the time. On long car rides I came to loathe it. Unfortunately when my parents conceded to my brother's tastes, we would be listening to rock and roll, which I had yet to cultivate any honest appreciation for. And on the occasions when my tastes were conceded to, I had nothing to suggest, except maybe turn the damn thing off. I didn't know what kind of music I liked, if any.
A few years later, "Weird Al" Yankovic suddenly became popular, and I wound up buying his first two albums. It was the first music I actively went out and purchased for myself. When I arrived at college, in fact, those two albums (on cassette tape) were the only music I owned. It was a little incongruous, because I had received a stereo from my parents as a graduation present. It was of pretty good quality, too, certainly more than I needed to listen to "Another One Rides the Bus". A month or so later, I obtained a cassette copy of Gustav Holst's "The Planets", bringing my album collection to three. (The Cosmos soundtrack didn't count: it was an LP, and as I owned no record player it remained at home.)
It was several months still before that stereo began to get any proper sort of use.
But it did eventually pull its weight, though. Holst's music convinced me to start looking into classical music. Maybe here was where I would find something that spoke to me. Also, during my first year of college I was introduced to Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach", and so among other things I was learning about the hidden complexity of Baroque music, as well as a few things about John Cage and 20th century classical music. Finally, by the time my second year of college began, I decided to set out and explore classical music. I began, naturally enough, with the warhorses: the Brandenburg concertos, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and the like. I then got the inspiration to start exploring the complete albums of music that appeared on my Cosmos soundtrack. In this fashion I also became enamoured of Vangelis and Synergy. Though I was still very much a novice, with a very narrow scope of familiarity, I had rapidly transformed into a serious music lover.
I also took advantage of the college library to cautiously investigate John Cage. I didn't want to buy an entire album of his music, but I was curious enough from what I had read to want to hear what it sounded like. Aleatoric music, John Cage's specialty, was literally made by flipping coins. How did that manage to hold his interest for decades? So I checked out a tape copy of an album, an anthology of some of his music for piano, prepared piano, and toy piano. I had of course never heard of a prepared piano, so this piqued my curiosity as well. As it turns out, I had selected an album that mainly covered the earlier range of his compositional career. I eventually learned that John Cage had only turned to aleatoric composing techniques in 1950-51. The music he wrote before that was sometimes opaque, but still very much composed in the usual style. And I discovered, to my surprise, that most of it was actually not very opaque at all. John Cage's interest in percussion had led him to focus on rhythm and timbre as his main focus in music, rather than melody and harmony. The Suite for Toy Piano, on the other hand, was written after 1950 but was still not aleatoric; instead it was a study in a very limited tonal range, and actually rather charming. I also learned that a prepared piano was a piano with foreign object carefully inserted between the strings, to coax a broader range of sounds from the instrument. Bacchanale, the first prepared piano piece he ever composed, was a dark piece — a brooding middle section bookended by dramatic outbursts, and not the least bit abstract or emotionally obscure. To be sure, there were a few pieces on the album that were exactly that. The opening piece in particular seemed to be painting a picture of two hands meandering up and down the keyboard with no particular goal, first slowly, then rapidly. But after listening to the ablum a few times, it seemed that I was beginning to develop an ear for what was actually going on. Once or twice I had this brief sensation of hearing a moment and suddenly thinking, "Well, yes, of course that's what should happen next." Suddenly it was much easier to believe that the music was not thrown together arbitrarily, but that it had an internal logic that I, if I chose to listen closely enough, could come to understand. Maybe even embrace?
In the end I made a copy of the tape before returning it to the library. And thus began, very slowly at first, my introduction to the genre of 20th century classical music. I didn't listen to the tape very much at first, but it remained interesting enough to occasionally draw me back. (Some may feel that was as much due to the quality of the rest of my musical catalog, rather than a positive trait of the music itself.) Meanwhile I began to find myself less drawn to the middle periods of classical music. Much of the music of late Classical and Romantic periods just didn't have the same pull for me. Bach's Baroque sensibilities seemed to me to be a fine balance of aesthetically beautiful music with an intricate analytical foundation, and I found that I could listen to it indefinitely, although I found that I didn't really glimpse more than a tiny fraction of the complex structural nature when I listened to it. Sometimes I wondered if anybody did, or if they all just listened to it because it was pretty. Was it enough to just know that the complexity was present, without being able to directly sense it? If the music has still been pretty-sounding and superficially intricate, but below that level structurally haphazard, would I be able to tell?
In any case, I continued to enjoy Baroque music, but found myself unable to appreciate much outside of that. I was quickly attracted to Chopin, but again Chopin made use of dense thickets of structures, though not as intricate as Bach. But composers like Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, etc. proved to be less reliably successful in capturing my ear. It may just be that I never game them a proper hearing, but it seemed to me that they were sometimes just ... trying too hard.
"I had just heard The Messiah with Mrs. Henry Allen Moe, and she said, 'Don't you just love the Hallelujah Chorus?' and I said, 'No, I can't stand it.' So she said, 'Don't you like to be moved?' and I said 'I don't mind being moved, but I don't like to be pushed.'"
[John Cage]
Meanwhile the world of modern classical music remained largely shrouded in mystery. The composers were not household names (with the possible exception of John Cage, maybe), and the music seemed to cover a much wider range of possibilities than any other classical music period. No one else I knew seemed to be familiar with this genre, if indeed it could be called a genre. I decided that I was going to have to be self-taught if I was ever going to find out if I liked it or not. I eventually found some non-textbook-style books that discussed the movement at large. I read the liner notes of the one or two albums I had found, looking for clues that would point to further discoveries. And I browsed through the shelves of the college library, looking at titles of albums and occasionally selecting one to check out and listen to, often based on nothing more than a curious-sounding title.
At one point I happened to read a science-fiction story by Kim Stanley Robinson. The protagonist was a blind mathematician, a couple centuries in the future, who had an attraction to 20th century classical music. Four or five compositions were mentioned in the course of the story, none of which I was previously familiar with, along with a one-sentence description. I eventually managed to track down and hear all of them. The descriptions almost uniformly turned out to be incorrect in some way, but nonetheless it introduced me to some unfamiliar composers. Henry Cowell's "The Banshee" was one, which Robinson's character described as made with fingers scraping along the high strings inside a piano. In actual fact it involves the low bass strings almost exclusively, as those strings have windings which can be scraped with the fingers. But I discovered that Henry Cowell was a very interesting composer in his own right. He is remembered mostly for experimenting with the piano, composing short works that required the pianist to produce "tone clusters" by playing a block of keys simultaneous with the palm of one hand or sometimes even a whole forearm. These compositions are not studies in noise and aggravation, as one might think, but often have the bright jangly texture of a distorted electric guitar. Bass tone clusters can produce a quiet foreboding background to contrast the melody in the right hand. I learned that John Cage was one of Henry Cowell's students. When Cowell first learned of Cage's prepared piano idea, he said, "Oh darn! I wish I had thought of that!"
Another piece mentioned in Robinson's story was Harry Partch's "Cloud Chamber Music". This one was described by the protagonist as floating inside big, glassy notes. I actually didn't hear this piece for a long time, commercial recordings of it being scarce, and while it is true that the cloud chamber bowls produce large glassy sounds, that instrument only plays solo very briefly at the beginning. The piece is scored for several instruments, the viola probably being the most prominent one in the short piece.
Now, Harry Partch is a name that I had already encountered at that time. I had listened to an album that had presented John Cage on one side and Harry Partch on the other. The liner notes were quite extensive, and from them I learned that Partch was a unique composer who had worked out his own scale that admitted 43 notes to the octave, from which he could draw a wide variety of keys. In order to play his music, he built his own orchestra of instruments (mostly percussion and plucked string, of course, as other types such as wind instruments are far more difficult to create oneself). The liner notes made for fascinating reading, but I was disappointed by the actual music. Most of the pieces involved only one or two instruments, often just a viola, and strange little snippets of poetry or prose, spoken carefully with exaggerated importance. The last piece on the album, finally, showed off a larger group of instruments — the liner notes seemed to indicate that it was the last composition of his life — but again the vocals put me off.
Another composer that I discovered was George Crumb. He originally came to my attention not due to his music, but due to his scores. Most of his musical scores are oversized, so they wouldn't fit on the library's shelves and had to be placed on the sides. The scores themselves were fascinating to look at, with dense areas contrasted by blocks of empty space, adjectives like "scintillating!" and "quietly, like a half-remembered tune" peppering the landspace, and footnotes on many pages giving directions for nonstandard techniques, such as placing a sheet of paper atop a piano's strings. His music was clearly full of sharp contrasts and dramatic atmosphere, and after entertaining myself by studying the difficult scores, I eventually had to listen to the actual music. Once again, I found it off-putting and unengaging.
It's frustrating, isn't it, how such an aesthetically pleasing set of instructions will lure you in and make you forget that this is no indication of the aesthetic qualities of the final product? I made that mistake time and time again, particularly in my forarys into avant garde music. It's perhaps more forgivable there, because one knows so little about an unfamiliar album at first. The genre covers an immense range of styles and philosophies, so the genre classification tells you almost nothing reliably. So perhaps it's inevitable that I would come to put too much faith in the liner notes, and the enticing descriptions of strange instruments, or familiar instruments played in unfamiliar ways, while deciding whether or not to devote time and/or money to a new piece of music. But that feeling, of putting on a fascinating-sounding album, and then hearing nothing that pulls in my interest, is just a little too familiar.
And yet, I came back to George Crumb and gave him a second chance, and soon found myself starting to understand and appreciate it. After a few years he became one of my favorite composers. Which is the other lesson I came to take to heart: often the music that becomes your favorite in the long run is the stuff you didn't like the first time you heard it.
A couple of years later, during my penultimate year at college, I found myself living in a dorm room with several fellow students, one of whom, Chris, was also interested in 20th century classical music. I think he may have been the first person my own age I ever met who had heard of George Crumb before I met him. Chris had this unusual vinyl record collection that he had inherited from a friend of his mothers. She had run an aerobics class, and as a result occasionally got free records sent to her from various labels. While she used a fair variety of musical styles in her class, the two or three dozen avant-garde records, with their odd (or nonexistent) rhythms, weren't really usable. He had Crumb's Makrokosmos II, which I had yet to find for sale in the music stores and so was jealous.
He also had a copy of a record titled, "The World of Harry Partch". Included within were some nice color photos of his unique musical instruments. Chris hadn't heard of Harry Partch, and so I quickly filled him in on what I knew. Intrigued, he put the record on. The first piece was "Daphne of the Dunes" for several instruments but no vocals. We both found it quite enjoyable, having variety and catchy rhythms without being too repetitive. Encouraged, we listened to side two, which began with "Barstow". This was a vocal work in eight parts, the lyrics coming from graffiti written on the side of a desert-crossing highway by Depression-era hobos as they waited for a car to stop for their outstretched thumbs. It was a strange piece of music, but compelling, and showing a sense of humor, and of empathy. Chris and I both laughed out loud at parts (number six in particular). That was the day that I really discovered the music of Harry Partch. I eventually kicked myself for not having explored his work more closely when I originally discovered him, assuming that I was (again) giving too much credit to interesting-sounding liner notes and not enough to the music itself.
I've heard very little of this music performed live, partly due to its rarefied audience and partly due to my reclusive nature. I did once see John Cage's "Bacchanale" performed live. It was a fine choice in my mind, being a emotionally resonant piece, and the piece of music that precipitated the invention of the prepared piano. The performance was in Seattle, at the Cornish College of the Arts, which is where "Bacchanale" was originally premiered. The concert was partly in honor of John Cage's upcoming 80th birthday. Both he and Lou Harrison were in attendance, and the concert included a wide range of Cage's compositions. When "Bacchanale" began, I remember hearing someone in the audience giggling, presumably at the unexpected sounds coming from the piano. I was surprised that here we were, listening to a piece of music composed over fifty years ago, and its unfamiliarity was still making people laugh. In the composer's presence, no less! But then, on second thought, it was entirely appropriate. John CAge had often referred to the experience of hearing people laugh at "The Perilous Night", a brooding piece for prepared piano, that had made him reconsider the presumption that music was a method for a composer to communicate (which he ultimately decided was not the case, and that instead music was a method for listeners to find their own meanings, and thus led him to aleatoric composition techniques, in order to remove his own ego from the music-creation process). Or there was the time in the 1950s when John Cage performed one of his aleatoric compositions, involving not only a piano but radios, duck calls, and a vase, on a television game show. The host mentioned beforehand that he was worried that people might well laugh during the performance. John Cage replied, "That's okay. I think laughter is preferable to tears." Sitting in that auditorium, I wondered if John Cage heard the laughter, if he still even noticed it, and if his philosophical convictions did in fact cause him to embrace it, as an honest reaction from an honest listener.
When the performance was over, Cage and Harrison walked up on stage for a round of applause. Cage looked quite arthritic, and I wondered how much of an aggravation all this was for him. Did he regret having allowed himself to become this much of an icon? Did he even feel that he had had any say in the matter before it was too late? I had brought to the performance my copy of the score for 4'33", but as usual I was too intimidated to actually badger someone like him. I was there with a friend, however, who had been the one to tell me about the show in the first place, and now he said, "C'mon, let's go down and see him." So I went down with my misgivings. John Cage was indeed there. Some tall nerdy guy was talking into his ear about some correspondence. Cage looked at me. I smiled weakly and, not wanting to interrupt, said nothing, but held out the score and a pen. Cage took it, laboriously signed his name while the other man continued talking, and then handed it back to me. I murmured a thank you that I'm sure he didn't hear and left. I hate meeting my heros. It's always like that; I can't bring myself to believe that I'm not annoying them with my presumption, and then I leave wishing that I had had the courage to stay and speak up more.
Six months after that John Cage died, less than a month before he turned eighty. So it goes.
(Some time after Cage's death, I learned that he had been gay. It was apparently something that was generally known in musical circles, but John Cage never referred to the fact, and so out of deference to him it was simply never talked about. Biographical notes might mention his divorce in the 1940s, but that was it. In fact, I found it a little surprising that a number of the 20th century classical composers that I enjoyed most turned out to be gay. Harry Partch, Peter Maxwell Davies — even Henry Cowell was bisexual. [In fact, Cowell wound up being arrested for having oral sex with a 17-year-old boy, and due to an overzealous district attorney wound up spending four years in San Quentin prison for it.] I keep waiting for George Crumb and Steve Reich to turn up gay, but so far they seem to still be happily married to their wives.)
Another composer I came to appreciate was Ingram Marshall, who happened to be a visiting composer at Evergreen while I was there, and so I have happened to hear the premier performance of a couple of his works. One of these was a piece called "Music for Many Recorders", in which he set four large shakuhachi flutists against a large chorus of plastic recorders. Since the part for the recorders required no special musical ability to play, Marshall recruited students from a class to perform the piece. One of those people was a recent friend, Andy. I found him just before the performance (which took place outside, on a warm fall afternoon). He was talking with Ingram Marshall, as it happened. Not knowing Andy very well at this point in time, I was therefore quite surprised when he said, "Mr. Marshall, this is Brian Raiter. He worships you like a god." Before I could protest that this was going to be the first time I had ever heard any of his music, ever, Ingram Marshall said, "Good! I'm glad somebody does."
As it happened, I eventually did become acquainted with his music, and while I don't like all of it, the ones I do like I like a lot.
A year later Evergeen hosted an conference on electroacoustic music, and so I got a chance to see and hear a few performances of odd, obscure composers. Mostly hear, as even the live performances involved a fair bit of prerecorded sounds, if not entirely. There was one piece I remember which was made up entirely of samples, only that term hadn't come into use yet, so they probably called it musique concrete, which was played by two men, each at the keyboard of a Macintosh. This probably sounds like a laptop performance to modern ears, but this was 1988, there was no such thing as a Mac laptop, and it was still unusual to see a musical performance that involved nothing but people at computers. Compositions, yes, but for performances usually people would try to work in some bit of actual activity so that the audience had something to look at. Not these guys. (Admittedly, this was at a conference of electroacoustic composers, so maybe they didn't feel they had to dress things up for their colleagues.) They sat on opposite sides of a table, facing each other although I don't think hey could see each other over their monitors. On the table next to one of them was a paper plate with the remains of a sandwich, and several cigarette butts. While the piece was enjoyable enough, I kept looking for signs that their constant mousing ever aligned with what was coming out of the speakers. They certainly seemed to be concentrating on what they were doing, like people engaged in a live performance, but there was in theory nothing stopping them from just playing back a complete prerecorded piece of music. (Well, except for the fact that the machines they were using probably didn't have enough memory to hold an entire 10-minute piece of music.) Then, at one point, just as the music seemed to be building up to something, one of the guys sat back in his chair, pulled out his cigarette pack, and lit up. I finally decided to just close my eyes and ignore the two guys. They were distracting me from the music too much.
At the end of the conference, they held a free concert in the dome of the state capitol building. There's a nice square marble floor directly under the dome, with stairs leading up to it in four directions, and balconies above that overlook the area. There were a few different performances, and each one made use of the space differently. The final piece of the evening was Ingram Marshall's most well-known piece, "Fog Tropes" for tape and brass quintet. Marshall conducted the brass musicians in the live performance, and the foggy ambience of the piece worked well in that echoing space. When the concert was over and people were milling around, I nearly bumped into an older man as I tried to find my way to the exit. I was surprised to see someone of his age here, as almost everyone in attendance, including most of the composers, was younger. I stole a glance at his nametag, and saw a blizzard of letters. As he vanished into the crowd, my brain jiggled the letters together to make "Vladimir Ussachevsky" — co-composer of "Sonic Contours", what is generally regarded as being the first serious composition using the reel-to-reel tape recorder, making use of speed changes, reversal, and tape reverb. By the time I had recovered he was gone. I later learned that he had been Ingram Marshall's teacher. Now there was someone I should have gone after and badgered for an autograph; I bet he wasn't used to groupies.
The college radio station's music library was another great place to educate and expose myself to new music. Floor to ceiling shelves, packed tight with vinyl records, crammed into a tiny space. I managed to get access there because I volunteered to do a weekly radio show. I did one of the spoken word hours, in which I read short stories on the air.
I have always loved reading aloud. Is this unusual? It's sometimes difficult for me to imagine that most people dont' feel the same way as myself. The pleasure of the experience is palpable. It's a bit like the attraction of being an actor, which of course draws many people into theater programs in high schools everywhere. But the simple, lowly means of reading aloud permit it to be a much less formal occasion, bypassing the need for rehearsals, tryouts, costumers, etc. You just pick up a book (preferably one you like) and start reading.
My parents enjoyed spending their vacations backpacking, hiking, camping out, and the like. As a boy I failed to really see the attraction of roughing it, of course. When one is only six or ten years old, one doesn't see what's so special about being away from the city and surrounded by trees for miles. One only frets about no television, a tiny tent, and having to walk so damn much. When I got older, of course, I began to absolutely loathe these trips. I campaigned mightily to be allowed to stay behind at home, but it wasn't until I was sixteen or seventeen that my parents would permit this. To this day I still hate cross-country skiing. Tedious tedious tedious. It was especially annoying when we had our own computer. Think of all the hacking I could have gotten done while we were out in the cold, miles away from electricity. But I'm digressing. When I was younger and merely vaguely inconvenienced by these expeditions, one thing that kept them enjoyable for me was that I would read books aloud to the rest of the family. Children's books, of course, since children comprised half of the audience (I include myself since these were usually books that I hadn't read yet). In the car, maybe even around the campsite if the sun was still up. We read much of the Great Brain series that way. And Lassie Come-Home: my mother remembers being near tears at the end. I loved doing that, and while I thought it was a little odd that it was me doing it and not my mom or dad, I appreciated that they were willing to let me have the fun.
I mostly read science fiction on my show. I had a fair-sized collection of books by this time. I also subscribed to two monthly science fiction magazines. (Though by subscribed, I really mean that I purchased every issue when it came out. When you're a student and your mailing address never stays the same for more than nine months at a time, subscriptions are less attractive.) Whenever a new one arrived, I would quickly check the table of contents to see if there were any stories in that magic range of fifteen to twenty pages, just about right for taking an hour to read aloud. If so, and if they were any good, they would be slated for the next show. On other weeks, I would page through my back collection of issues to see what could be found.
It sometimes struck me as a little funny that I was so introverted and yet looked forward to my radio show so much. The fact that I couldn't see the audience — that I never met the audience or indeed could be certain that there was one — seemed to make all the difference. I didn't really think much about the audience, in fact. I don't know if that's a normal thing for radio DJs or not, but I pretty much just needed to believe that my voice was being broadcast over the air. Beyond that, I didn't really need to know if anyone was actually listening or not. Of course, this was a college radio station, so the average audience probably numbered in the single digits, but it wasn't likely to actually be zero very often.
I even had a fan, for a while at least. A fellow DJ, who had a daytime blues show. Her name was Betty; the reason I remember that is because her show was called "The Betty Show". She was working in the radio station one day when I was there and introduced herself to me and told me she listened to my show every week. I was surprised and flattered. Had this happened slightly later in life, I might have even summoned the courage to ask her on a date, because looking back on it I think she would have been receptive.
(I'm kidding. If this event happened tomorrow I still wouldn't have the courage to ask for a date.)
I myself never developed an interest in blues music, so I never made
an effort to listen in turn to her show. However, at one point I was
taking a class in music, and we were informally studying jazz and
blues. I happened to tune into the radio when her show was on, and so
wound up listening for a few minutes before I had to leave for class.
The singer was female, and the song began with a long introductory
spoken section, where she declaimed in second person, describing how
I, or we, had gone out carousing and almost certainly being unfaithful
all night last night, when we should have known that that would be the
last straw, and now that it was morning here we were, crawling home
again, only to be stopped on the front porch when we discovered that
she had gone and gotten the locks changed before our arrival, leaving
us outside banging on the door endlessly until she is finally forced
to come forward and address us through the closed door. Having thus
set the scene, the music jumps out of its holding pattern, and the
woman sings, "Well you come crawling home at three,
Normally that kind of blatant innuendo would have turned me off, at just caused me to shake my head, but having been in the middle of studying this stuff, I had to admit that the innuendo was actually pretty funny. Certainly I hadn't seen it coming. I had to leave at that point, so I never heard how the song ended. Presumably the philandering lover was sent on his way.
One time at college I was called over to read out loud to a fellow student. Apparently she had just had a bad breakup, and was in need of something comforting to take her mind off her trouble. So I came over to her place with my copy of Alice in Wonderland, and read a chapter or so to her (and our mutual friend). It was a slightly odd event, as it made me feel a little paternalistic, even though it had been her idea, not mine. But she seemed to appreciate it. A couple of years later our mutual friend coaxed me into making a recording of myself reading both Alice books in their entirety. I was living in very simple surroundings at the time, so I had to borrow a portable tape recorded with builtin mikes from an audiophile friend to make the recording. I lacked the ability to do any kind of editing more involved than stopping and rewinding the tape, so breaks had to come where there were natural pauses in the narrative. It was hot enough in my tiny apartment that I had to keep the window open, which ruined one paragraph when an airplane flew loudly overhead. Damned airplanes. And, course, an unabridged book takes a fair bit of time to read. It's surprising how much longer it takes to read something aloud than to read it to yourself. Each book wound up requiring two 90-minute cassette tapes. I still have my copy of them somewhere. I have a lot of stuff on cassette tape, actually. Some of it I should get transferred before they fall apart completely.
One day I was coming back from a class retreat along with a couple of faculty, one of them being one of the other music professors at Evergreen. I was making so-so conversation, i.e. better than my usual awkward stop-and-go small talk that acquaintances usually get from me, and somehow we were talking about socializing. Was that it? It was some damn thing like that. It's all quite hazy now. I responded to some statement from him by commenting that I was an introvert, and so didn't really feel that what he had just said applied much to me. Or maybe I said I was a misanthrope. Like I said, it's hazy. He responded with a gentle shake of his head, saying, "Yeah, but that's kind of taking the easy way out, isn't it? There this sort of feeling like, okay I've got that figured out, now I can put it away and not worry about it anymore."
I'm not really doing this conversation justice. I realize that what I just wrote is almost completely opaque, but I understood exactly what he meant at the time. He was suggesting that calling oneself an introvert was an excuse to avoid the heavy lifting of having to understand one's fellow human beings. That it was, regardless of whether or not it was the truth, taking the easy way out. And while part of me objected to his suggestion that I was an introvert not because it was a fundamental aspect of my personality but because I was basically lazy, the fact that I instantly understood exactly what he meant by his comment — well, it gave me pause.
When I was very young, I had one of those epiphanies that only the very young and self-assured can have: that all or nearly all of the world's problems were caused by people misunderstanding each other. If we all just worked harder to see things from each other's points of view, the world would at once be a better place. Or, perhaps restated using a less ridiculously utopian angle, our natural tendency to champion our individual points of view, to the degree that it hinders our ability to see past our blinders and empathize with each other, causes a lot more problems than are strictly necessary. I still believed this in college, although I was cautious enough to dial it back to "a great many of our problems". So his words stuck with me for a while. I considered the fact that, even though I still believed that I was an introvert, perhaps I owed it to myself and the world at large to learn how to temporarily not be an introvert.
(These days, I've become a little more cynical about the nature of our problems. My new pet hypothesis is that most of the world's problems are caused, deep down at the roots, by the fundamental law that resources will always be scarce, and therefore people will always have something to fight over. The reason that some necessary resource must always be scarce is due to the fact that populations grow exponentially. Thus, if it ever the case that all necessary resources are currently abundant, the population quickly expands until something runs out again. It's not even a problem specific to humans; it goes all the way up and down the food chain, from great whales to bacteria. It's as unavoidable as death and taxes. Ergo, we will always be fighting with each other over something. So it goes. That said, I do think almost all of the people around me do a terrible job at seeing the world from each other's perspectives. Some people are so wilfully bad at it that it makes me want to slap them. Learning how to see things from other people's perspective is a skill that should be taught in the schools.)
Easier said than done, of course. After a while it occurred to me that one doesn't just wake up and decide to start being friendly to strangers. I honestly didn't know where or how to start. Too, it's the sort of change that's difficult to do with the people who already know you. If you've never tried to make a significant change in your habits or personality, you may not have noticed how much you've shaped your environment to fit you. Your friends expect certain behaviors from you, and if you violate those expectations, you will encounter friction. Even if your friends ultimately welcome the change, their initial reactions will tend to shove you back into your well-worn hollow in the niche you've made for yourself in the shared social ecology.
Not to mention the fact that I still firmly believed that I was fundamentally introverted, so behaving otherwise felt like an act of faithlessness, almost as if I was betraying my past self. And yet, and yet. I recognized that feeling, of resisting change because it felt like a betrayal of who I had been. I recognized it, and I was, very slowly, beginning to distrust it. Yes, it bothered me that I might undergo radical changes in my nature and personality over the years. It felt like I would be killing off my younger self and replacing him with someone he wouldn't be able to respect. But I was beginning to see that it could also be dangerous to hold my fidelity to a child's idea of who I was meant to be. In a sense that younger me was dead either way, for he was no longer around. I was older than he was, and so perhaps I was wiser too. Or if I was no wiser, maybe I needed to become wiser.
And then, I was given my chance to change in the very next school year (my fourth). Without really meaning to, I suddenly found myself smack dab in the middle of a large circle of new students, loosely united by the college mainframe's internal BBS. (And, perhaps just as importantly, by the fact that the college mainframe's internal BBS was only accessible in the terminal room. We were not just a bunch of online acquaintances; we knew each other by face and voice as well.) I cautiously tossed myself into the world of being a social creature, and found to my surprise that I actually did a pretty good job of it. It also fascinated me how it let me step back a bit and see my habits at work. I would find myself casually chatting with someone I was just beginning to get to know, and then they would invite me to join them and some other people for dinner (or whatever). And I would say, "Ohhh ..." as if I was thinking about it, to buy myself a few seconds of time while my mind concocted a plausible-sounding excuse so they wouldn't be offended by my turning down the offer. It would happen automatically; I realized that I had to interrupt it and actually stop myself, force myself to say aloud, "Sure, that sounds like fun." The first couple of times I did that it was a little bit terrifying.
Some of those people I met that year remain my closest friends to this day. Which is a good thing for me, because as it turned out I really am still an introvert. I did very much enjoy living life as the other half lives, but I couldn't keep it up indefinitely. Over time I found it tiring, and one by one my old habits came creeping back in. A good friend would invite me to dinner, and instead of accepting I would find myself concocting a plausible excuse, because I craved some isolation. And I have found that when I fall back into these habits, as sooner or later I must, it requires a conscious effort to shake them off once again. I have gone through a couple of different periods where I have adopted the disguise of an extrovert. Each time I have made new friends, and had a really good time. But it's ultimately an exhausting way to live, as anyone who's gone through a long period of time pretending to be someone they aren't can tell you. Even when you're pretending to be someone you like, or you wish you could be. Sooner or later you have to stop and just let everything come naturally again, or else you overheat and the police break into your apartment two weeks later to find nothing but a puddle on the floor.
In my fourth year at college I finally signed up for a fiction writing class. I had spent the last two years devoted to science (physics, chemistry, and calculus the first year, all things computer science the second year), and so I felt it was time to return to the arts. In particular, if I really was going to become a freelance writer, it was time to start writing.
I was introduced to the title "freelance writer" by a set of cards. You know those cards they used, back in the days before computers, with numbered holes all along the edges? All the cards had the same set of holes, but each had a different set of holes that were opened out to the edge of the card, so that when you took the pack of cards and stuck (say) a knitting needle into one of the holes, a subset of the cards would fall out, while the rest remained hanging on the needle. You kept the cards that remained, and repeated the process with a different hole. The numbers on the holes correlated with a multiple choice quiz that you would take, and the single card that remained at the end would show the result. For a while my mother was working as a career counselor for people who had never had a serious career before (e.g. divorced housewives), and she had a deck of these cards that helped people choose a career. I never saw the quiz that these cards went to, and my mother didn't use them. I think that these cards were found in some forgotten file cabinet in the office, and since they were useless without the corresponding questions, she took them home for me and my brother to play with. I was old enough to understand their purpose, and I read through all the cards looking to see if there was a real job that actually sounded appealing.
Either that or I was looking to see if cartoonist was in there. Cartoonist was the first potential job that I took seriously. Questions about what I was going to be when I grew up before that time were generally answered with almost any career that I knew existed, e.g. basketball player or fireman. But I loved the comics growing up, even though our local newspaper carried no more than a dozen. (And one of them was Apartment 3-G, which even with my commitment to the cartoons was unable to read regularly — not only was it not funny and glacially paced, but having never been an adult in the big city I couldn't really follow half of what was going on. After one abortive effort to follow it I gave up. Of course I don't really have the kind of mind that's good at coming up with original jokes. And I'm not very good at drawing people in a consistent fashion. And I'm not good at selling myself, so I don't rise to the top in a highly competitive market. So it's safe to say that I wouldn't have succeeded had I tried to chase that rainbow. But unlike, say, the firefighting career, I wish I had grown up to be a good cartoonist. Like the writing career, that one wasn't just a pat answer; it was real. (And yes, I realize that I'm dangerously close to contradicting what I just said up above about regrets. So I'll modify that slightly and say that I wish I had been a cartoonist who got into the business via some very lucky breaks. Hey, that's how Gary Larson did it.)
Well, cartoonist wasn't in the cards (har har), but "freelance writer" was. I had thought about being an author before, so that caught my eye. But I couldn't figure out what the word freelance meant, particularly without a full context. So I asked my mother what it meant, and learned that it basically meant that you worked for yourself, without a boss. Sounded pretty close to ideal to my nine-year-old understanding of the adult world!
Now I was nineteen years old, and I still hadn't actually written anything. Well, that's not strictly true. I had done some creative writing assignments in high school, but those were simply school assignments. Also I was twenty-one, not nineteen.
My high school output was rather uneven, actually. Sometimes a writing assignment would get a good grade, and lots of encouragement from the teacher. Other times my writing would just flounder on the shore that was my instructor's emotional sympathy. (Yes, I'm being silly on purpose.) One occasion was particularly sad. It was still early in the school year. I had done well on the last big assignment, and was feeling good about my abilities. The teacher gave us another assignment, which was to include a conflict but was otherwise completely unspecified. I was game, but found myself blocked. The assignment left me cold, and fully uninspired. (People who've read some of my Nanowrimo novels may be chuckling at this point. Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up, fuzzball.) After a few minutes of staring at a blank page, my classmate John noticed me. "Writer's block?" he asked. "Sort of. I need a subject." John, making one of his signature gnomic pronouncement, replied: "Consider ... orcs." And so I did. Specifically, I considered drawing on my D&D experience. Normally it never occurred to me to do something like that. There was one kid in our class who definitely did that; that was pretty much his goal, to tell stories set in the D&D world and no doubt based upon actual campaigns he had run, or played in. Though I enjoyed D&D and was abstractly sympathetic to his goal, I recognized on some mental level that this approach was not the best one and would likely not net him a good grade at the end of the year. Still, the teacher didn't actively discourage his goal as such (though he had plenty to say about his writing, which we all could see simply wasn't all that good), and though I had absolutely no desire to intrude and/or be seen on his territory, I figured I could leverage my familiarity with the fantasy genre to get me through an assignment that so far had eluded me.
So I threw together a scene of adventurers hiding in a dank cave from a battalion of angry orcs outside, as the characters discuss tactics. I was not interested in trying to describe an actual fight scene, since I found such things about as interesting as describing a root canal, so the conflict came from the adventurers' discussion as they reviewed their increasingly narrowing options. I was careful not to draw upon any actual D&D campaigns; it was all invented on the spot. Since I didn't need to follow through with these characters beyond this particular scene, I figured I could do the bit about making things look grim and hopeless just before the protagonists turn things around, without having to figure out how they were going to do that. So I ended the scene with them being attacked by a dragon, whose cave they had unknowningly taken shelter in.
I may have gone too far in making everything seem hopeless, in my attempt to invest the scene with dramatic tension. Or maybe I overlooked some obvious solution; I'm not actually sure. What I do know is that the teacher loathed it. It came back marked up with all kinds of comments, not the nitpicky kind like "this isn't how banks actually do business" but like "not believable; why would she do that?" I honestly don't remember what any of the comments were, though. I knew that a necessary skill of a writer was the ability to handle criticism and not take it personally; I accomplished this by not dwelling on it any more than was absolutely necessary. This allowed me to be very graceful indeed, but at the expense of not really absorbing the suggestions for improvement. Which became a problem as the year went on, since I now realized that I wasn't infallible but wasn't really sure about how to avoid repeating the same set of mistakes. I told myself that it was just a throwaway assignment that I had failed to take seriously enough, and that next time I wouldn't be so flippant and would do better. But I suspect that my failure to properly grit my teeth and learn from my mistakes when they were of a certain size wound up inhibiting much of my later writing in that class, if not later on.
Make no mistake; I'm very good at accepting criticism. I do it by running all of it past my ego first, who doesn't for a minute believe any of it. If it's a small thing, I can take it lightly enough to accept it and improve. But the big stuff just saps my energy, I decide that I'll work on that some other time when I'm feeling up for it, and move on. It is indeed necessary for a fiction writer to be able to accept negative criticism, because that's the most common kind that they get. But it's also pretty important that they actually learn from it as well, and that skill wasn't quite in place yet.
The next week, the instructor gave everyone in a different class a copy of my scene and had everyone criticize it. Apparently they tore it apart mercilessly. I found out about this from a friend of mine, who was in the class. "It was really bad," she said. I was flabbergasted. In my mind the scene had already been ceremonially burned, with a prayer said over it that ended with, "Now let us never speak of this again." I hadn't known that our writing was going to be shared with other people. Had the instructor said anything about that at the start of the school year? I didn't think so, but I couldn't rule it out. In any case, I liked the teacher, and I was still practicing sucking it up, so I didn't go to him in a fit of screaming and tears or anything. Real writers have their work seen by a lot more people than that, so this was all good practice, I figured. Still, I was taken aback by how it had all turned out, especially when I realized that if I had written a halfway decent scene the teacher probably wouldn't have shared it with the other class (since it wouldn't have been nearly as pedagogically useful).
Even so, a small part of me wished that I could have been a fly on the wall in that classroom. Not that I wanted to actually sit there and watch my reputation as a pathetic D&D fantasy writer get cemented firmly in place. But after all, I still didn't really understand why this story was so much worse than anything I had written before, and I wished that I did. Of course, by that point it would have looked even worse to publicly ask for clarification, so I took the easy way out, squared my shoulders, and moved on.
One assignment that did go well in that class was our humor section. The instructor brilliantly saved this topic for the end of the school year, restoring our enthusiasm at the point where our attention was most likely to wander. A friend and I together wrote a multi-page comic, somewhat in the style of a Mad Magazine feature. The format was that of a television documentary about the relentless march of progress of human civilization over time, which naturally became an obvious springboard to make fun of modern society — e.g. contrasting the primitive barbarism of neolithic battles with the more civilized humanity demonstrated by thermonuclear warfare. I did all the drawing, and the teacher responded well to almost all of our jokes. It wasn't quite the A plus I had been hoping for, but it was good enough. And of course I got to wallow in my latent cartooning without worrying about being dinged for my uninspired cartooning style, since the assignment was primarily about the writing.
In the end, I left high school with confidence in my writing ability intact, but a little concerned that I apparently wasn't quite the prefab genius I had originally suspected I was. But no matter, I was young and foolish then; now I was a college student and an adult. I had done almost no creative writing in the meantime. (I did submit one story to the college's magazine once, but it was a flimsy gee-whiz idea that was more in line with the style of The Twilight Zone than modern ideas about fiction, and I wasn't at all surprised that when it wasn't published.) As a young man I had once heard the maxim that the best way to learn how to write was to read. I had taken that advice to heart, finding reading to be a much less dangerous pursuit than actual writing. I read copiously. Now it was time to see if all that passive practice had paid off.
Not entirely, was the answer.
I'm being overly glib, of course. To be sure, I never was a bad writer, per se. I was well aware that I have a certain facility with language, nurtured by an early grasp of reading skills and a love of words that goes beyond their essential utility. These are the skills of craft, and while they aren't strictly necessary, they give you options. A person with no right arm can still be a carpenter, but their disability has to be worked around. It's a hindrance far more than it is an advantage. Just so the writer with a meager vocabulary, or a limited grasp of the language's rules and patterns. In short: I had already been given a nice toolbox for my birthday, and I had already learned how to use the tools, so now it was time to start building things and see if anybody wanted the finished products.
I don't know what makes me so hesitant to act. I have a bit of stage fright when it comes to real life. It's not that I'm afraid that I'll forget my lines, though. Instead I worry that my given lines are for another play entirely. All things taken into consideration, I'm pretty sure that the world will be no better off for my having meddled with it. If that sounds self-deprecating or defeatist, it's not meant to. I'm not sitting in the bleachers wishing I could be on the field. No, I'm at home reading a good book, wondering what motivates so many people to participate in that stupid game.
Except of course I'm not talking about football, but about life. So no doubt that still sounds like the self-negation of the clinically depressed. But it's not. If anything, it's closer to the relieved rationalization of a bystander who manages to convince himself that it's actually better if he doesn't get involved. That one may be a bit too harsh in the other direction, though. Okay, put it this way. I firmly believe that it's a very good thing for society that some people enjoy being cooks, accountants, and politicians, but I have absolutely zero desire to be any of those things myself. Brrr. (And again, this isn't a slam. I don't know why I feel I have to reiterate this, but I suspect that I do. Some people hear "I wouldn't do that" and think that means "I don't respect that". My father is a politician and I strongly suspect that he's a good one. And I would hazard a guess that my mother would rather be almost anything than a professional computer programmer.)
Some of my hesitancy to dip my toe in the writing waters was plain old fashioned fear, of course. Better to remain silent and be thought that you can't write than to take pen to paper and remove all doubt. I had been living with the conviction that I was destined to become a writer for a decade now. If it turned out to be wrong, I was screwed. But on top of that was this other thing, this inclination, this preference to be just outside the central business of life on this planet.
Of course, standing outside and looking in is actually a great vantage point for a writer, or almost any kind of artist. One often needs to be separate from what you're trying to portray in order to capture it honestly. I already had the outside part down pat; I just needed to start looking in.
My writing assignments for this class tended to simple scenes, capturing some small slice of activity, or a clash of personalities that remained subterranean, maybe threatening to reach the surface but never quite erupting. I described about two roommates who didn't really know each other and didn't really get along. One scene I particularly enjoyed writing was of a couple on the verge of an argument, started by some minor triviality, a poor choice of words (or tone of voice, in my mind, but as a writer one has to convey that through word choice) opening up Pandora's box in slow motion. An argument that was obviously a long time in coming and just waiting for a spark to land in the wrong place. A fair percentage of my writing, though, didn't even have that level of conflict. Some of it was just a quick snapshot of an everyday tableau.
We would regularly break up in groups of four, always the same group, to read one of recent assignments and critique each other. I'll always remember one time one of my fellow writers suddenly offered up a comment on my writing as a whole. "I like your writing, but it always starts off sounding so boring." There was nervous laughter all round at that, but I wasn't at all offended. Quite the opposite, I strongly suspected that he was on to something that I didn't know about myself, and I very much wanted to know what it was. "In fact, I think on the very first week, I picked up your assignment first, and read like a paragraph, and then actually put it down and read someone else's. I mean, your stuff does get interesting, but it takes a while to get there." Of course, that last bit may have just been added to soften the blow, or to focus attention on his main point, namely my failure to make use of any kind of hook, and not get distracted by the fact that my stuff was actually boring throughout. Regardless, I loved him for being so direct — as students we all tended to be very careful about negative feedback, never knowing when someone might take it personally. And I hoped his insight was indeed true, because I wasn't going to forget it anytime soon.
During my two years of science studies, I had become used to doing well in class. And when I wasn't doing well, of knowing exactly what I needed to improve in order to be doing well. Usually it was the amount of time spent studying, or in other words it was due to my own choice to pursue extracurricular activities like D&D. With the fiction writing class, I came face to face with the situation where I had to accept that I was only mediocre, and also I wasn't really sure what I needed to do differently in order to improve. On the one hand writing came naturally to me, and all my familiar skills kept me from stumbling over minor issues. On the other hand I couldn't string anything out into a longer sequence, which is to say I had no idea of how to find a plot. Or maybe I just didn't know how to tackle any aspect of writing that didn't come effortlessly. As the class wore on, I began to feel a bit discouraged. Our final assignment was to write a novella. Seventy double-spaced pages. I came up with an idea for a plot, fortunately. Unfortunately, I had just the one, so there wasn't really a "B" plot. The professor commented that in fact it read more like a seventy-page short story. I also never managed to come up with much in the way of a denouement. I figured that the story would tell me how it should end when I got there, but instead it just sort of came to a stop. The two main characters went their separate ways, with the implication that they wouldn't be seeing each other again anytime soon. Which might have been enough, had the two characters been very close friends to begin with. But, of course, they weren't. Don't you see? That would have been melodramatic! Better to keep it understated! Right?!
I think the problem there is that I hadn't mastered the fine distinction between understated and who the hell cares. And make no mistake, it can be a fine distinction, which is why a beginner like me would have been better advised to risk a bit of melodrama. But I was terrified of risking melodrama, which in my defense is a much more common error among amateurs. (I remember that during that class the college's quarterly fiction magazine came out with stories from no less than three of my classmates. Good for them, I thought. The next week in the college newspaper, there was a cartoon drawn by an artist friend that showed two nameless students discussing the fiction magazine. "Did you notice anything about the subject matter in this issue?" The other person picks up a copy and thumbs through it. "Let me see: dead dad, dead cow, dead friend, dead daughter, dead and dying horse, ..." It went on for all dozen or so stories in the magazine. "Yeah, so — did you notice any common themes?" asks the first person. "Let me guess: they all begin with the letter D?")
My novella came back with no more than the usual rash of red marks, but the observance that it was missing some pretty basic things, like a subplot, left me feeling disheartened and demotivated. I don't remember now if I harbored other reasons that I rationalized via the criticism, but in any case I was unable to motivate myself to do a second draft. The idea of doing major surgery on what was by far the longest thing I had ever written by an order of magnitude was too much. I lost four credits for not completing the final assignment, and began to wonder about my future as a writer.
A year or so later I happened to be chatting with a fellow student from that class. I mentioned briefly my all-but-lifelong conviction of my destiny to be a writer and the crisis of faith that had recently befallen me. And she suggested that maybe I had been more taken with the idea of being a writer than with actually writing. I quickly assured her that that wasn't the case — how could it be? I very much enjoy the act of writing itself, and I honestly didn't want to be a writer because I thought it would bring me fame and/or fortune. But even as I silenced her with my protests I began to see that her comment was eminently sensible. I had been nine years old, after all. It's a comfortable thing, to have a destiny. It simplifies certain aspects of life that usually involve making compromises, compromises that often feel unsatisfying, even when we know that we made the right choice. (A lot of life is like that, which is why stories and movies so often portray people with clear destinies who make uncompromising decisions and win.)
Of course, one of the first things I had to do was re-assess what I was going to do for a career, but that didn't take long: clearly it was meant to be computer programming. It was a strange feeling, being at this cusp in my life. For years now I had been living my life under the assumption that writing would be my career, while spending more or less all of my free time entertaining myself by programming computers. I had studiously ignored my parents' encouragement to look into computer programming as a viable full-time career, knowing that I was destined for something more important. Now that had been completely reversed, and I was considering the possibility that rather than being a fallback, computer programming was actually my better skill, and one that would actually be in demand. Not to mention being something that gave me unalloyed enjoyment. Of course the computer industry was still in the process of exploding outward at that time, so my childhood skepticism of ever getting paid for programming was a little more plausible back then. But even so. Why had I ever believed that I had a destiny AND that it lay elsewhere?
In the following years, I occasionally considered why I had found actual writing so much harder than I'd expected. As a general rule I don't like to dwell on my failures, so this sort of reflection had to wait until the sting had worn off before I could consider it too carefully. The feedback I had received about my tendency towards boring subject matter seemed to me to be a clue. One day I hit upon a way of explaining it to myself that seemed at the time to be right, if a bit simplistic and overly harsh on first blush: I didn't have anything to say.
By that I don't really mean that I have nothing worth saying. Once or twice I've shared this hypothesis with friends and the response is naturally, "Of course you have something to say. What a stupid idea." Well, yes it's true that everyone has something worth saying. I believe in that as much as the next person. Everyone's life is a story waiting for its storyteller, and there is much that is compelling in the everyday and superficially humdrum. So of course I have something worth saying. I have plenty that's worth saying. I'm just not particularly motivated to bother with saying any of it.
And make no mistake; it is a bother. People have their own stories and problems; they don't always want to hear about yours. You have to be willing to push your stories on other people in order to tell them — dress them up a bit, make them interesting-looking on the outside as well as truly interesting on the inside, impose upon other's politeness in order to get yourself heard above the rest of the people trying to get you to listen to them. In order to do any of that, you really do need to be motivated, at least a little bit. Where does that motivation come from? For some, it is just a burning desire to be a writer, in and of itself. You might think that would have been motivation enough for me, and to be honest I'm not sure I understand why it wasn't. But it wasn't quite. For others, the motivation comes from a deep certainty that what you have to say truly is important, not just to you but to others, maybe lots of people, maybe even everybody, that it truly will improve their lives and make them better people, or even motivate them to go out and make the world a better place. Now that's some serious delusion to have going on, and yet I think a fair number of writers believe that, or at least fool themselves into believing it enough to keep themselves trying. And here is where my strangely deep-seated ambivalence works against me. I certainly don't think that anything I do or say is going to make the world a better place. I would be just as likely to believe that, were the cells of my body conscious, that an individual cell could microscopically improve my health by maintaining a positive attitude about its work. Sure, once in a great while a single person dramatically changes the world for better or worse, in the same way that it's possible for my physical condition to be dramatically altered by the actions of a single cell. But these are the exceptions, and I mean really the exceptions, once in a great great while. And when it does happen, when someone is washed upwards by the tide of human events and suddenly finds that their grasp has somehow caught up with their reach, how often do they really make the right choice? and for the right reason? (For if you make the right choice for the wrong reason, then how does that make you any different from someone who makes the wrong choice? Besides being lucky, I mean.)
This is getting excessively fatalistic, and I don't really mean it to sound like that. My point isn't quite "oh we're all helpless pawns so we should give up trying," so much as it is "if it's physically impossible to change the chemical composition of the Crab Nebula by meditation, then maybe you should stop judging yourself by your failure to do so."
For the most part, our personal worlds are not global in size. They are smaller, more provincial, almost alarmingly so in fact. It's easy to look upon that fact as the source of many of our troubles, but you can play that blame game with so many aspects of our natures that it's almost pointless. I'd rather just say there are some things about ourselves that we can change, and successfully suppress, and some things that we can't. At least not yet.
Part of what it means to be human is accepting our limitations.
(And another part of it is defying them anyway. Don't get me wrong; I'm not looking down upon others for tilting at windmills. I just don't wish to be looked down upon myself for sitting in a coffeeshop reading a book while others suit up for another shellacking at the hands of windmills.)
I've wandered off into dense layers of personal philosphy, more than I needed to. Let's pull back a bit. My point is just that I doubt both my ability and the advisability of trying to change people's minds, and I think that's why I'm not at all motivated to try. Admittedly that sounds a bit simplistic, even to me. We all know plenty of people who think that everyone else is stupid, and hopelessly so, but who nonetheless jump at the chance to rail at those everyone elses, attempting to educate the benighted masses even though they will admit the effort to be futile. True, they may just be interested in having an excuse to heap insults on other people. But in any case, I'm definitely not like those people. So maybe there's more to it than that.
Still, you can see how this could be a fatal flaw in someone who wants to be a writer. If everything you have to say strikes you as trite, already said by others better than you, or just not worth anyone else's time, then what are you going to write about? Trivialities and little tiny events, it seems? Or maybe that's just me personally.
And of course part of the problem, which I've risked ignoring by focusing so much on this other hard-to-clarify thing over here, is that there is only so much time in the world. I can remember, as a child — not sure when exactly but I'm pretty sure it was before my teens — thinking about everything that interested me and realizing that, no matter how optimistic I could be about the future, there was simply, absolutely no way that I was going to live long enough to be able to study and learn everything I wanted to learn. The cold, hard facts made it clear that I was going to have to prioritize. And it wasn't just a case of deciding to be either a jack of all trades or a master of none — I was going to have to make that decision over and over, on a case-by-case basis. I was old enough to know (or at least correctly believe) that some of the pleasures of knowledge only came with mastery of a subject. I saw that, in the long run, my education was going to be one long, drawn-out story of triage.
Now, here I am, very likely more than halfway through, and I can at least have the small pleasure of noting that I was 100% correct on that score. Had I but more time, the studies I could pursue — but I'm starting to reach that point where it becomes ever easier to get set in my ways. More importantly, life isn't just about educating yourself. It's also about putting that knowledge to use, doing something. And that time has arrived, I think it's fair to say. I remember my history teacher explaining to us about the unreliability of birthdates for people such as the ancient Greeks. They didn't keep records of such things, back then, so most birthdates were estimates (indicated with question marks next to the date) obtained by assuming that they were forty when they produced their most famous work. And so here am I. And make no mistake, I am in the act of creation. Sitting at a keyboard and forcing myself to write. I have gazed upon my nature, and I have accepted the fact that this is just about the only way I work. When the deadline turns from days to hours, something in my breast deflates, and my thoughts turn away from "what needs to be written" and towards "what can be written". And then, finally, the thoughts permit themselves to leave the free-ranging veldt of my brain and let themselves be trapped in writing. When the chosen wordcount is achieved and the deadline has passed, I will look back on this, and part of me will still wish that I hadn't squandered the opportunity, that I had really put in the effort and written something better. Maybe next time, I think. Next time I'll remember this moment, and really do it right.
That part of me just doesn't get it.
But I suppose that's a good thing, isn't it? One can dream. One should dream. One can hardly not dream, actually.