Category: Chapters

I’ve been rapping for a loooong time, trying to make you guys smile and have a good time. But you guys always smile the biggest when I play the sad shit. What about the sad songs makes you guys so fucking happy?
– Atmosphere, Bonnaroo ’06

Rainy days are invigorating. When the rain is falling outside and the lightning illuminates the clouds outside, just being alive is enough. You don’t need to be accomplishing anything that will eventually change the world. A warm blanket, a cup of tea and closed windows are all you need to feel that you are standing strong against the elements.

You stood here and watched the storm with the greatest pride one can ever feel — because you are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren’t for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.
– Francisco d’Anconia, Atlas Shrugged

A sad song is kind of like the rain. It comes and spoils plans, changes outlooks, but it waters the plants. It can cause floods that destroy villages, but without it nothing would be possible.

When you listen to a sad song you’re reminded that not everything always works out in the end. Sometimes the boy doesn’t get the girl. Sometimes there is no 50th wedding anniversary. The good forces of Justice don’t always overcome the evil forces of Reality. So why does that make us happy?

Because suddenly we’re the ones standing in the rainstorm. We look out the window into the song and see pain, sadness and regret, and we recognize it. The man standing in the rain looks at us with longing, and we smile and nod at him because we stood in his place. Maybe ours was a light drizzle compared to his waterfall, but we still understand what it is to be wet.

I hear a sad song and I smile, because sometimes life is like that.

Throughout your childhood you have many defining experiences that stick with you for the rest of your life. It could have been the one time you were in a car accident, or the first time your mom caught you stealing from the candy bins at the grocery store. It doesn’t even have to be big, it could just be a sense of awe when you see an airplane or being scared of clowns.

Whenever I think of perfectionism, I think of trying to cross a stream.

I was brought up with a healthy love of the outdoors. My family has canoed, camped and climbed around most of the US, and the most beautiful areas in nature to me are areas where water meets rock. Canyons, jagged islands, alpine lakes and waterfalls all just do it for me. I can get by on rock or water alone, but the combination is the icing on the cake.

If you’re a parent and you want to let your kid fall in love with the outdoors, let them play in a stream. You can skip stones, swim in the deep sections, build little dams, check out waterfalls. It’s great. For me, the best part, the absolute best part of hanging around streams was trying to reach the other bank.

Take a wide shallow stream and litter it with boulders and little rocks, and then try to cross it without getting your feet wet. It’s like all the games you play in your living room jumping from piece of furniture to piece of furniture, except this time instead of lava you just have to worry about spending an hour drying out your socks. The challenge is still there.

As you get a little older the streams necessarily get wider and deeper. Your legs get longer and your wits somewhat sharper, and you get really good at figuring out what you’d need to do to cross a given stream. Some streams require jumping, others careful balance, some even a little acrobatics with the help of a low hanging branch.

The problem is that while you can always figure out how to cross them, you just can’t always actually cross them. Someone else might be able to do a jump onto that rock without losing balance, but I couldn’t (and didn’t). Someone else might be able to not fall over when they hit a rock that’s Not Quite As Steady As It Looks. Someone else might be able to do it, but not me. Not with these shoes.

For the rest of my life, that will be what I think of when I think about perfection. If you knew what rocks were solid and how good the traction was, and you ran as fast as you could and made all the right moves, you could make it.

It’s one thing to admit you can’t do something when you didn’t know how to do it in the first place. It’s something else entirely when you knew exactly what to do.

Public transportation is important for the environment.

It’s simple math. Ten people taking ten cars to work creates more air pollution than the same ten taking a common vehicle. Regardless whether you ‘subscribe’ to the idea that increased carbon dioxide emissions are a large component of global warming, it isn’t reasonable to argue that vehicle pollution doesn’t cause smog.

Public transportation is important for your health.

When you drive to work you deal with construction, accidents and idiots. You’re around 80 times safer taking public transportation than driving yourself, and knowing that has to help the nerves. I also have anecdotal evidence that letting your mind wander results in a longer, happier life.

Public transportation is important for drunks.

When it comes to the problem of finding your way home after having one or six too many drinks, your options are limited. You could:

• hang out with people who don’t drink
• empty your wallet on a cab
• try to drive and risk killing a family
• take public transportation

The winner in this situation should be clear to anyone without a party plate. Public transportation is also the only option which lets you practice your acoustic karaoke in front of a captive audience.

Public transportation is important for your soul.

Take a quick scan of the subway car. There’s Yuppie McMakesalot, standing next to Jose Minimumwagez, who just got out of his seat so that Minnie Nevausacondom can sit down with her two year old and newborn. Step onto the bus or the subway and you step out of your comfort zone and into the real world.

Not everyone works at your job or goes to the places you go to for lunch. Not everyone lives in your posh apartment or goes to the same bars you do. The best thing about public transportation is that, when done right, EVERYONE is there. Rich, poor, young, old, happy, sad, sane, otherwise, they’re all there and they’re real. Healthcare reform might not matter to someone whose world is populated solely by 22-30 year old male engineers, but when you see the kind old man with a cane struggle up the steps into the bus you might change your mind.

I might walk to work everyday, but if I didn’t you could bet I’d be taking public transportation.

Dear Sir or Madam:

This letter is my personal recommendation for Chase. I have been his housemate and coworker for the past 8 months and it has given me the interesting opportunity to see many different sides of his multifaceted persona. I’ve found him to be consistently adventurous and unabashedly curious, and I heartily recommend him for an English language teaching position.

When we started work together at the Patent Office, Chase arrived in Washington DC several weeks before I did. Having the apartment to himself, almost every day he ventured out into the city to explore and meet new people. He helped start a book club almost at the drop of a hat and has been a consistent member and contributor throughout its existence. A prodigious reader, Chase attempts to recruit me almost on a weekly basis regardless of how successful he has historically been.

All of this stems from an insatiable inner curiosity. From deciphering the unknown kanji character on our neighbors welcome matt to his trip to Japan, Chase is driven by the desire to learn and experience new things outside the realm of what is known and comfortable. In the words of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the best teacher is the one who inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.

To conclude, I would like to restate my strong recommendation for Chase. If you have any further questions regarding Chase’s ability or this recommendation, please do not hesitate to contact me by e-mail or phone.

Chase, welcome to the Internet.

Update as of May 6, 2006:

This is an actual letter of recommendation that was sent to a company seeking to hire Chase. He has since received an offer of employment for his desired position. Feel free to use this is an example of the power of my words.

Never doubt me again.

By most accounts, I’m a fairly pragmatic person.

When I broke my wrist in high school, I asked them not to use scissors to cut off the shirt I was wearing at the time. It was one of my favorites and instead I convinced them to just pull my arm through the sleeve slowly. This wasn’t interesting to me at the time, but to them it was indicative of possible brain damage. An inconclusive cat scan and a cast later, I requested jam on my toast.

That said, even with my pragmatic outlook on life, sometimes I get angry and depressed. Let’s work small to big.

The Patent Office has work flow problems which they cleverly counter by creating retention problems. Companies complain about pendency, the government complains about irregularity (take the RIM case), the union complains about the Office ignoring them and the employees complain about being treated like factory workers. In the end, the only benefit of the whole mess is that we’re driving more innovation to China and India.

Whether or not you like him is immaterial; it doesn’t matter. The President and his administration lie to us each day and every day and we barely do anything about it. The Democrats are too worried they will alienate red state voters by saying anything at all, the Republicans have been hijacked by the religious right (they’ve only recently begun to care) and the Libertarians are all buying plane tickets to Mexico. The War on Terror (take a hint from the War on Drugs, these things aren’t actually ever won) has been co-opted into an excuse for people to do things they really wanted to do before but weren’t allowed.

Iran is enriching uranium. Does this changes things that much? Most former Soviet republics had thousands of bombs for years, just lying around. Did we get them all? There’s no way to know, but we do know the technology isn’t going away. The reset button is out of the box. We have the capability to end cultures. Not just lives, but cultures.

Life has existed on this earth for billions of years, and in ways that are of interest to most of us for hundreds of millions of years. To examine the tree of life is to examine thousands more extinctions than success stories. A species basically walks a drunken walk down a pier. It might make it a long way, but sooner or later, statistically, it’s going in the water.

What if we beat the odds? What if we don’t kill each other, something doesn’t accidentally kill us and we manage to persevere towards eternity? Maybe not the us that we see now, but so that our branch doesn’t end. Depending on which flavor of modern physics you subscribe to we’ll be greeted by a big crunch, a big bang or maybe even the complete heat death of the universe.

When you get down to it, it’s remarkably hard to be content to sit at a desk staring at a computer screen framed by a white wall. If we’re all just going to die anyway, if I’m just an automaton rambling about without any ability to change the “system”, then what’s the point?

I feel kind of dumb for saying this, but sometimes things bear repeated. Even with all the above doom and gloom, I’ve managed to discover something that easily shocks me back to reality. Requiring no effort on my part, I’ve found a single thing that suddenly brings back meaning to my life.

A smile from a girl.

Pathetic? Maybe. Monumental? Yes. The fields of cosmology and politics don’t seem as important compared to a passing look from a girl on the street.