Category: Chapters

“I’m writing a new book,” he said as I sat down.

“Is this what the e-mail was about?”

“Yep. I need your help. You’re good at this. I need a main character, and not just any main character either.” He looked around the cafe, and took a sip of his coffee. “I need a sink.”

“A sink.”

“Yes, a sink. The opposite of a source. I need the ultimate steadying force, the cool, calm center of the universe. I need a man with no battles to fight and absolutely nothing to prove.”

“Well,” I said as I stirred my latte, “you’ll want a white guy. There’s not much left for them to prove. Already conquered everything.”

“Okay.” He pulled out a notepad and started to scribble.

“You’ll probably want an American too. They’re pretty content with the status quo, and a bunch of them aren’t really proud to be American anymore than they’re proud to be human. Maybe make him a bunch of European ethnicities to the point where the only real history he carries with him is the Internet provided entomology of his last name. Plus with the American angle you can put him in a nice and healthy nuclear family, make it a happy one, and then he doesn’t even have a reason to rebel against them.”

“Hell, make him an atheist, then he can’t even rebel against his religion. Move him around a bunch as a kid so he doesn’t have a hometown, but make it for some reason other than being a military brat. He could be homeschooled through middle school, so that way he doesn’t hate humanity too much.”

“Don’t make him the best at anything, but don’t make him the worst either. He’ll go through life thinking he could do anything, but without actually doing much. Give him the triumvirate of relativism, rationalism and pragmatism. That way he won’t get in any fights but he’ll also be single basically all the time.”

His notepad was filling up. “You meet this guy in real life or something?”

“No, I can just picture him.”

“If you had to give my sink a name, what would you call him?” He flicked his pen to the top of the page.

“Oh, I don’t know, it doesn’t even have to be a strictly masculine name. I might go with a name that doesn’t come up very often, but isn’t exotic at all. A name that everyone knows at least one of. ”

“… like …?”

“Sam. I might call him Sam.”

All of the following applies to the Great American Road Trip, an adventure undertaken by myself and Mark.

1. Distance driven between July 8th and August 6th: 7,697 miles
2. Amount by which this increased the mileage of Mark’s Civic: 20%
3. Difference between this and the Earth’s diameter: 229 miles
4. Number of loops around the Capital Beltway the trip represents: 120
5. Length of time this would take a Segway if it never stopped: 27 days
6. Total amount of money spent on gasoline: $894
7. Highest price paid for gasoline, and location: $5.50, Yosemite National Park, California
8. Lowest price paid for gasoline, and location: $3.50, Iowa
9. States driven through, in order of first appearance: Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland
10. Total new states bagged for Mark (his rules, not mine): 9
11. Number of nights spent in hotels, campsites and homes, respectively: 10, 8 and 10
12. Number of prior acquaintances with whom we visited: 24
13. Portion of the nights we spent drinking: 59%
14. Number of consecutive winning Craps rolls thrown by Sam at Casino Royale, Las Vegas: ~12
15. Maximum speed achieved, and location: 106 MPH, Bonneville Salt Flats
16. Maximum temperature recorded, and location: 120 °F, Canyonlands National Park
17. Number of chain eateries we ate at more than once: 0
18. Number of songs on the iPod we listened to more than once: 0
19. Outstanding legal issues that will possibly lead to an arrest warrant being issued by the state of Texas: 1
20. Judgement of the trip as being surprising, boring, dirty, exciting, straining, memorable, lonely, frightening, repetitive, (philosophically) romantic, noteworthy, stressful and unbelievably fulfilling: totally

I’m an atheist, and I’m pretty sure I always have been. There wasn’t a moment that shattered my faith in God, or an experience that made me question the presence of a greater being. I’ve always been aware of him as a concept, but it was never something that made sense to me. Growing up without a deity wasn’t difficult. I don’t remember any great confusion about the meaning of life, morality or anything else of that nature (at least until after college). The duo of rationality and objectivity got me by just fine.

Except for this one time.

My very first year of public school, 8th grade, was spent in Nova Scotia. I was moderately popular, made some good friends, and attracted my very first girlfriend, Ashley*. When you’re fourteen years old, emotions are fiery creatures that can seldom be contained by patience or parents, and we became very attached. Sadly, at the end of the summer my family moved to Pittsburgh. Moving is seldom easy, but leaving her behind was heartbreaking. I knew I had left her forever, and that eventually life would go on, but for a long time after I made it to Pittsburgh we would stay up all night talking on the phone, writing each other letters. It was nice being missed.

One day I came home from school to find that her mother had called. There had been an accident. Ashley had suffered a bad concussion and was in the hospital. She would be okay. Don’t worry, she’d be okay.

I tried calling her house, but no one picked up. I tried putting on music, but it was just irritating. I tried walking around outside, but it was too windy. I tried watching TV, but it felt like hiding. I tried everything I could think of, but none of it fixed the feeling. She was in the hospital 900 miles away and I was helpless. There wasn’t a single thing in the world I could do to make it better.

I laid on my bed, unable to sleep, staring out the window. The night was clear, the stars bright, and the window framed a perfectly full moon. I realized that I was looking east. Nova Scotia was east. The moon that I saw shining through my window was shining on my ocean town 900 miles away. It was probably shining on the very same hospital that she was in.

It was there, framed in the moonlight, that my moment of madness struck. I don’t remember my thoughts leading up to it, but I remember the moment itself. I turned towards the moon, and in a whisper, said, “I don’t know who I’m saying this to, or what I think will happen, but just make sure she’s okay. I’ll make it up to you, I don’t know how. Just make sure she’s okay.”

The moon offered no reply, just continued to shine through the trees outside my window, making shadows on my bed. I lay there for a moment, unsure what I had just done, what personal boundary I had just crossed. Before I knew it, I was fast asleep.

The next morning I woke up refreshed, though I couldn’t shake a sort of shameful feeling, like I had done something wrong. The feeling you get when you rationalize a questionable action and know you shouldn’t have. Eventually I heard from Ashley; she was fine, if a little medicated, and was resting at home. Even though she was okay, I realized I hadn’t asked a favor of the moon for Ashley’s sake, I had asked for my sake. It was a mental placebo, something that let me medicate the feeling of helplessness. I asked the moon to take care of her, and that was enough to calm me down.

The whole experience unnerves me to this day. I normally pride myself on my grounded mental state, the ability to remain calm and rational in almost any situation. But here I had subconsciously invented a lunar mysticism in order to deal with my girlfriends concussion. Hardly the act of any bastion of mental fortitude.

And there you have it. My one run in with mysticism, God and religion. To say I don’t believe in mysticism is somewhat misleading. The instantaneous relief I felt from helplessness upon asking the moon to take care of Ashley was not only real, it was wonderful. But it was also a falsehood, a mental placebo that I swallowed willingly. Far worse to have been told by my mother, “Just ask the moon nicely, Sam, he’ll make sure Ashley’s okay.”

I’m inclined to say at this point that I don’t mean to disparage anyone’s faith, but, then again, maybe I do.

(names have been changed to protect the irrelevant)

This story takes place around my junior year of high school. Anna and I met while working at Wal-Mart, and through several awkward exchanges had been out to eat a handful of times. She was cute, if a little reserved, and was generally excited to see me. I was somewhat tired of being single, and was curious to see where all it would lead.

Doing some homework up in my room, I heard my mom yell that someone was on the phone for me. We had talked on the phone a number of times before, mostly to make plans, but any longer conversation was invariably cut off when she ‘had to go’. I’m a pretty forgiving person, so I didn’t read much into it.

“Hi Sam, this is Becca, Anna’s friend.” I had met Becca before. A little spastic, but fun.

“Oh hey, Becca. What’s up?”

“Not much, I’m just hanging out with Anna at her boyfriends house.”

Reality came crashing to a halt. Somewhere, a thousand records were unceremoniously halted mid break, and a thousand speakers mimicked the sound that came squeaking out of my throat. Upon further inquiry, Becca revealed that yes, Anna did have a boyfriend, and that she had had one for a while. Shockingly, Becca didn’t understand why I was annoyed. After a small bout of self-righteousness, I called it quits and hung up.

I thought to myself, “I don’t understand women.”

The conclusion that women are inscrutable or are somehow off limits to the fields of reason and rationality is comforting. The presumed insanity of the opposite gender is the safety blanket of singledom. It lets us cease discussion and chalk it all up to forces outside of our control.

It’s also invariably wrong.

Women aren’t inscrutable. Men aren’t impossible to understand. We’re all actually fairly simple creatures if you allow yourself to fully consider what could possibly be going on. When we say “I just don’t understand {other gender}”, we’re occasionally just hiding from an obvious, yet uncomfortable truth.

I was led on, and mostly by myself. Simple as that. At best Anna was probably fairly ambivalent about her boyfriend, and played off any meals we had as just being among friends. I created the entire ‘relationship’ out of thin air, because that’s how I wanted to see it. She might have been casually looking around, but eventually decided “Nah”.

Certain things are unknowable under our present levels of knowledge. What caused the Big Bang? Does P = NP? Is every finite presented periodic group finite? Understanding why she dumped you is not unknowable, and isn’t confusing merely because there isn’t a rigorous set of research institutes set up to deal with the problem. Even if you’re willing to forgo any in depth analysis of “Why?”, keeping track of observable phenomena and the eventual consequences is a fairly handy habit. Science lets you understand the world through analysis of observable evidence, and there’s no excuse for ignoring women just because they’re ‘hard’.

I don’t have it all figured out, and there are certainly things I don’t understand. However, when she says “No, we don’t need to do anything special for our anniversary”, she isn’t lying; the universe will not end if you don’t. But make it happen, or she’ll be pissed. This isn’t shocking, you’re just dumb.

Warning: not for the faint of heart.

I walked into the bathroom at my office and was preparing to take care of business at the urinal when I heard two men walk in. They were chatting about something, but ceased conversation to head into two stalls next to each other.

I finished up, and headed to the sink to wash my hands. One of the men solemnly announced to the other:

So, I just want to apologize for what’s about to happen, and I hope you can still respect me as a person afterwards.

There was an awkward silence for a few seconds. Then it happened.

At first I thought a bomb had gone off. It was the sound of dynamite exploding inside of a cement mixer made of titanium. The sound a gallon can of beans makes when left in a fire until the pressure builds up to a point where the lid is blown off and the can is launched 50 feet into the air. A sound not unlike the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man’s semi-liquefied remains violently impacting the street of New York City. I saw the beginning of the universe and the death of all creation.

And all the while, over the incredible cacophony of gastrointestinal ejection, I heard the other man screaming:

OH GOD NO! OH GOD! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST DUDE THAT’S … OH GOD STOP!! MAKE IT STOP!!

I left quickly.