Entries from October 2002 ↓

Graffiti Boy vs Chicken Massive (Part I)

Graffiti Boy was born at 3am on Tuesday, December the 12th, 1981. Disco was in its death throes, and Graffiti Boy’s creator, a young man by the name of Roger Malfeasance (the third) was out alone, walking the steets of downtown Chicago, eyes downcast, eyes on the hems of his flared white disco pants, scuffing the sidewalk, gathering dirt. He was The Disco King, was Roger Malfeasance (the third) and, like any king watching over the slow demise of his kingdom, he was feeling a little glum, a little out of sorts, a little suicidal.

He came to the end of the sidewalk, and eyed the curb, and eyed the 3 inch drop to the street. His palms grew sweaty. He lips grew dry. He knew that he had finally come to it, after a six month slide into oblivion, dance floors emptying out, jocks in Camaros hurling insults at him as he sat waiting for the stoplight to turn in his hot pink Discomobile, P-Funk nowhere to be seen, hitless for months and months. This was the moment of truth. This was the question: whether to die now, at the height of his powers, a flaming motorcycle streaking headlong into a brick wall, not shuffling off this mortal coil - NO! - but diving triumphantly off of it, leaping into the maw of the abyss with joy in his eyes, followed by streamers and confetti and the shouts and adulation of what remained of his loyal subjects; or whether to turn around and walk away, and hang on to the shadow of a life that his life would become, lurch wearily into the dull workaday routine of simple existence, breathing only for the sake of breathing.

In his heart of hearts, Roger Malfeasance knew that this decision wasn’t a decision at all. No. There was only one possible course of action. He drew his disco cape tightly about his body, and slid his sequined disco shoes right up to the edge of the sidewalk. He struggled to think of something appropriate to say. “Goodbye,” he began, and stopped, thinking the words that were to follow a little cliched. “I love you,” he began, and stopped, remembering that the Disco King loved only disco, and to profess love for the person to which he was about to profess love would therefore be blasphemy. “I think that I shall never see,” he began, and stopped, worried that the next line of the only verse he could remember might be a poem lovely as a tree, and knowing that to utter such words just before his death would be gay beyond measure.

He jumped.

The impact of his landing (0.00005 seconds later) sent a vibration thrumming up his legs, into his abdomen, up through his throat and into his mind. The vibration leapt synapses and spanned lobes until it found the very core of everything that was Roger Malfeasance (the third), and blasted it to pieces.

The Disco King was dead.

The Man Who Was The Disco King blinked slowly, mounted the sidewalk, and walked back the way he had come, because he had to get home, he had a paper due tomorrow, and there was band practice of course, and after band practice there was some hanging out at the mall. Somewhere, in the cavity where Disco King had once lived, something screamed. But it was barely audible, the soft breath of a dying breeze, and so no one heard it.

Graffiti Boy watched Roger retreat, his red eyes moving along the two-dimensional plane of his perfectly round head. The Disco King had scrawled Graffiti Boy on the wall of this tenament, using three cans of spraypaint, just before his death. Graffiti Boy knew that he was all that was left of The Disco King, all that was left of the Spirit of Disco.

He slid down the wall and leaked into the sidewalk, and began his journey. By tomorrow, he would be on the outskirts of the city. And the next day, Disco willing, he would be on the doorstep of the creature he must destroy, the creature that was the author of Disco’s untimely demise.

The creature named Chicken Massive.

I went for my customary walk at lunch today, book in hand, lost in readerly bliss.

I’ve just made four assertions. First: that I routinely go for a walk at lunchtime. Second, that I went on such a walk this afternoon. Third, that I was carrying a book, and reading that book, as I walked. Fourth, that I was enjoying it immensely.

Three of these assertions are true. One of them is not.

A bus driver got shot early this morning, standing on the steps of his bus. I’m fairly certain he wasn’t hatching any plans for world dominion at the time, or contemplating any crimes, or plotting to murder anyone. He was probably thinking dull, undangerous things. Man it’s cold out here. Wonder if winter’s going to be bad this year. Things like that. Maybe he was reading a book, or a newspaper, or a magazine. He certainly wasn’t doing anything wrong. By all accounts, he was a good man. Someone shot him anyway.

What does that mean? Does it mean anything? It’s been said often that the most terrifying thing about this sniper is that he picks his victims randomly; there’s no apparent pattern in who he chooses to kill. I agree, but I think there’s more to it than that. I think that the key to this man’s success in scaring the shit out of just about everybody within a hundred mile radious is his uncanny similarity to a much larger force. We’ll call it Fate, for lack of a better term. Or maybe the Universe. Or Chance. Whatever. It snuffs out thousands more lives than he does every day.

Here’s the problem: the Universe is a random senseless place where random senseless things happen to innocent people who don’t deserve it. We protect ourselves as much as possible from the truth of this through ignorance, denial, religion, defiance, or some mixture of all four. We concoct elaborate rituals to explain, justify, mourn the crazy things that the Universe does to us. But ultimately we know that we have no control. The sniper is a disciple of chaos, and that’s why he’s so scary.

I went for my customary walk at lunch today, book in hand.

The Great Gatsby ends with this line about how we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, yada yada yada, which sounds really nice, well written, but man what a bummer. I mean, why end a book like that? What’s the point? I think all stories should be happy stories, forward-looking hopeful stories — which is to say, they should be lies. I think we should spend our lives lying to ourselves about our mortality, our prospects, and The Point Of It All. The most popular way to do this, of course, is to take up with some religion (or, in the parlance of the saved, Find God), but there are other options: immerse yourself in your worthless job, watch a lot of TV, or find a Worthy Cause. Each of these pursuits will wear out eventually, get stale, lose their appeal, and you’ll have to find another False Purpose, but that’s fine. There’s plenty of them out there.

The point is to keep moving, don’t look back, only look forward as far as necessary to avoid injury. In my headlong flight towards death, I’ve just turned left off of The Avenue of Failing Youth (against my will, the street just ended god damn it, how can streets just end, who planned this crappy city) and am now hurtling towards The Boulevard of Middle Age as quickly as my creaking joints and atrophied muscles will allow. I pass empty storefronts on the way, crunch through seas of broken glass, soldier on head-bowed through sudden squalls and occasional periods of Scorching Heat.

Every section of town I pass through has little Allegory Markers posted near the street signs. Euphoria Way’s says “A moment of illusory joy”. The street is done up in bright colors and filled with happy people who really like me, I can tell, and flanked by rows of little shops selling Tinctures of Good Feeling and Scrolls of Extreme Self-Confidence. I pause here, slow down a little, this seems like a nice place, why am I running anyway? I go up to one of the people who admires me, a handsome fellow about my height with gleaming teeth. But he doesn’t respond when I ask him how he is, and he doesn’t chuckle or even smile when I tell him my little vapid Start of Conversation joke. Finally I plant the heel of my palm on his forehead and push and he tilts slowly backward, motionless as a life-sized movie placard of himself, and falls, lying in the same position, hand outstretched, smiling his convincing smile. I go through Euphoria Way and do the same to all my new friends, and all of them topple without complaint, lifeless frozen automatons. I run up to one of the flanking buildings and try to open the door but it turns out to be an ingeniously executed fake, just two-dimensional painted clapboard. I push it over too, and when it collapses (like a movie facade) I see blackness behind, filled with blinking red eyes. No good. I keep running. I’ve passed through several of these areas before, should have recognized this for what it is, maybe I did on some level, but damn it what if one day it’s the real deal and I just keep running, that would be Heartbreaking and Ironic.

Memory Avenue’s marker says: “The regurgitation of old events, largely altered by the effects of time and wishful thinking” There’s a billboard of me at five, full of potential, sitting at a table with a coke in my hand and a devlishly intelligent gleam in my eye, here’s a boy that’s going places, here’s a guy that’s going to change the world. I stop at an electronics store and watch tv through the window, it’s a show about a small family escaping from Certain Death on a big grey ship, speeding through the open sea. The commentator is speaking French and the subtitles are in ancient Aramaic but I can understand both, they’re saying that the boy is escaping not just from actual physical peril but also from the mindset of the Besieged carrying along with him Lessons about life and the preciousness of life and the atemporal nature of Love that he will never forget as long as he lives, and that he will always be grateful for the Second Chance that he has been granted and that this gratitude and this secret knowledge born of adversity will spur him on towards Great Things. But then I see a dark little shop situated in the basement of a dingy looking building, down twelve steps and through a heavy wooden door that creaks when I open it and into a claustrophobic little space. The man behind the counter doesn’t look up from whatever he’s reading. He says: “You sure you want to be here?” and I say “I think so” and he says “Suit yourself” and I shrug and look through the magazines on the shelf they have no titles and no pictures on the cover and each article is an episode in my life but not the way I remember it; and reading the first paragraph of each one I realize that they are unadorned accounts of The Way It Really was, all of the Bad Decisions and Poor Judgement and Cowardly Evasions and Failures of Will unfiltered unchanged unsanitized. I put the magazine down and back out of the shop. Stupid shop. What’s the point of shops like that anyway.

Stasis Court’s marker says “The end of your quest for Corporate Dronehood”. It’s a sudden cul-de-sac hemmed in by large gleaming buildings with the names of various companies emblazoned above their doorways. This sounds good. It’s not a quest that I was aware I was on, but the end of any quest, even unintentional ones, has got to be worth something, doesn’t it? I mean come on. I look down at myself. I’m wearing slacks and a nice shirt, a little rumpled but not bad for no ironing, pulled it out of the drier as soon as it stopped spinning. I’m wearing nice barely scuffed shoes. I go up to one of the buildings and look at myself in the mirrored facade, but all I see are the clothes, no head rising above the collar, no hands peeking out of the cuffs.

Well that’s no good either. Time to move on. But when I turn around the street I came in on is gone, there’s nothing but a solid wall of buildings all around, there’s no way out, how long have I been here anyway? I look up. The sky is dark, clouds gathering, but it’s the only escape. I need wings, is what I need. I check for wings. No wings. I sit down and wait. Waiting for things you want to happen to happen is the best way to make them happen. I’m sure it is.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “Damn, I wish I knew the names of more kinds of cheese.” Your ignorance is eating away at you, isn’t it? It’s dragging you down. It’s reversing your polarity, disrupting your biorhythms, dousing your karma.

Well, Glass Maze is happy to once again come to the rescue: here you go.

Fantasy football is the perfect game for a country that worships at the feet of capitalism. This is my second year participating in a fantasy league, and I’ve found that it’s completely changed the way I watch football.

A word of explanation: when you become an “owner” in a fantasy football league, you assemble your own team from existing players all over the league before the season starts. Then, every week, the performance of each of your players is evaluated on a point system. For example, a quarterback may get 5 points for every touchdown he throws, 6 points for every touchdown he runs in himself, and 3 points for every twenty passing yards. Something like that. Then, after the last game of the week, all your players’ points are tallied, and the total is compared to your opponent’s total. More points wins.

Anyway. Ever since I started doing this, I find that I don’t see a football team as a team anymore, but more a collection of individual players who just happen to be lining up in the same formation every play. My wife came downstairs during the game between Miami and Denver last night, and asked who I was rooting for. I said the Dolphins kicker. He was the only player in that game who I had on my team, and — therefore — the only player that mattered. I found myself in the strange position of willing the Dolphins to succeed until they got to their opponent’s 30-yard line; at which point I promptly switched allegiances and started rooting for the Broncos to stop them and force a field goal attempt; at which point I switched back to the Dolphins and started praying that Mare would kick it through the uprights. That’s three points for the Dolphins, sure, but — far more importantly — that’s three points for me.

Ick. Whatever happened to team loyalty? Whatever happened to team sprit? Whatever happened to the good of the many superceding the good of the few? The same thing that always happens to those outdated modes of thought — they got squashed by the steamroller of expediency and self-interest. Capitalism succeeds because it dispenses with all those pansy-ass notions of social responsibility and concern for the common good and focuses instead on the welfare and the success of the individual, to the exclusion of all else. Society is a construct that revolves around me and my needs, god damn it. Selfishness is a virtue! Ayn Rand lives!

I’ve about used up my quota of exclamation points for this year, so I guess I’ll have to stop there. Go Dolphins.

Kicker.

Well, they passed it. The power to go to war with Iraq is now solely in the hands of our appointed president and his merry band of coldwar jingoists. I am genuinely shocked by the number of Democrats in the Senate who voted for this thing. Yeah, I heard Daschle’s little apologia when he flipped, his claims that this is a “different” bill than the one that arrived from the Whitehouse. I think it’s great that Bush needs to report on the state of Iraq every 60 days. And it’s really neat that we’re urging him to pursue other diplomatic options first. No, honestly. That’s a real coup, guys.

What really raises my gorge, though, is the number of senators who stood up and spewed long and detailed criticisms of the resolution, then returned to their seats and voted for it. Witness some of Hillary Clinton’s pre-yes-vote diatribe:

Once the battle is joined, however, with the outcome certain, [Hussein] will have maximum incentive to use weapons of mass destruction and give what he can’t use to terrorists who can torment us long after he is gone.

This echoes the claims of a CIA letter, recently sent to Congress, asserting that Hussein won’t do anything aggressive unless we attack him first. The president didn’t comment on this in his little speech the other night. One thing he did say, though, was that he wasn’t “willing to stake one American life on trusting Saddam Hussein.” He is apparently, however, willing to stake the lives of thousands of US servicemen and women on not trusting him.

On a happier note, I’m pleased to report that Connie Morella, the representative for my district — and a Republican — voted against the resolution, as did both of Maryland’s senators, Mikulski and Sarbanes. Morella is trying to cling to her improbable 15-year incumbency in a district that is suddenly a lot more liberal than it used to be (thanks to some nasty redistricting shenanigans, recently pepretrated by the largely Democratic state legistlature), and, with their leftist constituencies, Mikulski and Sarbanes don’t have much to worry about in opposing Bush. Still, it’s something to cling to, I suppose.

But the conduct of two other Senators briefly made me wish I lived in their state, instead. Here’s Robert Byrd of West Virginia:

Thirty eight years ago, I, Robert C. Byrd, voted on the Tonkin Gulf resolution! For all those spouting jingoes about the need to go to war with Iraq now, go down on the capital mall and look at the Vietnam memorial.

A week ago, he also quoted from a letter written by Abraham Lincoln on the subject of Congress’ authority to declare war:

The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

Well said, tall dead guy. I’m also impressed with Senator Paul Wellstone’s No vote, which was risky, given the fact that he’s facing a tough reelection battle in a state that strongly supports Bush’s designs on Iraq.

After the vote, Byrd sounded dispirited. “I have fought the good fight,” he said. “I might as well talk to the ocean.” Which is an apt analogy, really, because this strange rush to war is just like everything else that’s happened since the Cataclysm of 2000; a series of bad policies that have crashed down upon an unsuspecting populace with all the force of a tidal wave.

Whatever. We’re now officially an aggressor nation. Good luck, Rest of the World. You’ll need it.

Last year I had an affair with a telephone. It was one of those old-fashioned rotary ones, with a huge heavy receiver that straddled and dwarfed its squat body and a massive analog bell that rang like Sunday whenever anyone called. It was made of marble and mahogany, and it smelled like old leather.

Besides bringing a whole new meaning to phone sex, my brief interlude with Belle taught me a valuable lesson about the continuing relevance of the old way of doing things. Sure, I could have taken up with one of those cheap plastic little GE floozies, with illuminated buttons and fifteen different kinds of rings; or a state of the art Nokia, smaller than my pinky, smarter than my computer, able to get a serviceable dial tone from an oubliette buried in the basement of one of Saddam’s deepest bunkers.

In her clunky, outdated way, though, Belle outshone all of those hot new upstarts. Sure, I could never fit her in my pocket, or use her to enter my account number when I called the bank. But she had a weight and heft and a permanence that the others could never have offered, much less understood.

Ultimately, though, she left me. She couldn’t fail to notice the gleam in my eye whenever we passed one of those sexy cell phone kiosks at the mall, or ignore the way my breath quickened whenever anyone mentioned internet telephony. I was inconstant and unfaithful, and she was too good for me. I woke one day to find her side of the bed empty, a note tucked under her pillow. “Don’t call me,” it said.

I never have.

Some arguments never seem to die, no matter how much we’d like them to. Is it less filling, or does it taste great? Did God make us, or did we make Him? How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood? Which is better, Federalism or Republicanism?

The forward to Joseph Ellis’ Founding Brothers doesn’t answer this last question, but it does make a fascinating claim about why we can’t ever seem to settle it. These two conflicting ideologies have ruled our country since its founding: the Republicans talk up individual and states rights at the expense of federal power, while the Federalists assert that a strong federal government endowed with certain powers to regulate the states is necessary to keep a country as large and diverse as ours from spinning out of control.

Ellis’ contention is that the framers chose to build this debate, which has bedeviled our country from the very beginning, right into the system of government that emerged from the Constitutional Convention of 1789:

What distinguishes the American Revolution from most — if not all — of subsequent revolutions worthy of the name is that, in the battle for supremacy, for the true meaning of the revolution, neither side really triumphed. Here, I don’t just mean that the American Revolution did not devour its own children and lead to blood-soaked scenes at the guillotine or the firing squad wall — though, that is true enough. Instead, I mean that the revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialog that was eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by the creation of political parties. And the subsequent political history of the United States then became an oscillation between new versions of the old tension. Which broke out in violence only on the occasion of the Civil War …
But the key point is that the debate was not resolved, so much as built into the fabric of our national identity. If that means the US is founded on a contradiction, then so be it. With that one bloody exception, we have been living with it successfully for over 200 years. Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776 We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.

Is this a form of political genius, an acknowledgement by the framers that there can be no reconciliation between the two schools of thought, and that any attempt to pick one over the other would either lead to the immediate dissolution of their fledgling country (in the case of pure Republicanism) or a monarchical/totalitarian/fascist system that violates the principles for which the Revolution was fought (in the case of pure Federalism)? Or is it just the very first instance of our leaders putting something off because they didn’t want to deal with it?

I suppose that persuasive arguments could be made for either case, but my (egregiously underinformed, I’ll grant you) belief is that they did the right thing. With one caveat: that the system they created depends for its survival on two opposing parties on either side of the issue, in a sort of everlasting tug of war that neither can ever fully win. This country can — and has, many times — survived temporary lists to one side or another; but if the shift lasts too long, if one of the combatants loses the will or the ability or the desire to fight, then the ship of state could capsize.

I wonder if this is already starting to happen. According to Ralph Nader, our neglected knight in rumpled armor — who has been has been tilting at the windmills of government and corporate corruption since before I was born — it is increasingly difficult to tell the two parties apart. They continue to differ on their signature issues, like as abortion and school vouchers, but have taken up substantially similar positions on the issues that Nader considers core elements of our country and our democracy. During his doomed run for the presidency in 2000, he claimed that Bush and Gore “are both so marginal on the great issue of the distribution of power and wealth, and the corruption of cash register politics, that whatever real differences they are willing to fight for pale in comparison to the major subjects they are exactly on the same page on.”

Hyperbole? Probably, to an extent. I, for one, would have far preferred to have seen Gore — despite his myriad shortcomings — shepherding us through our current crisis.

Or would I? My faith in the Democrats has been severely tested, lately. Witness the seeming inevitability of the success of the Bush Administration’s Iraq resolution. This egregious document is much more than a request to attack Iraq; it is the declaration of a new strategy of preemption that will allow our commander-in-chief and his coterie of belligerent cold-war hawks to attack anyone who they judge is a threat to our country. It is also, in its current form, an attempt to wrest control of the power to declare war from its rightful owners — the House and the Senate.

Nevertheless, it now appears that both houses will go ahead and approve this creature, and overwhelmingly. It is one thing to say that the Democrats need to grow a backbone and fight for something more than political position — but it may be that we’re seeing something much more serious than simple political cowardice here. This could be the first stages of the fusion of our two parties, a single political creature with two heads.

This scenario sounds far-fetched and alarmist, and it probably is. Our dilemma, however, is that we’re far too close to the situation to make any objective assessment of what’s happening. Will we know when our improbably republic beings to die? Can we know? Did the citizens of Rome understand what was happening to their empire as it slowly folded under the weight of its own unchecked expansion?

My father used a Mac Plus back in the eighties. I still remember the excitement of opening the box when it arrived (and distinctly recall the sound of angels singing in the background as we did so) and seeing that little machine, nestled in a bed of styrofoam, smiling up at us. Apple’s packaging skills (both physical and propagandistic) are legendary, and everything about this computer — from unpacking it, to setting it up, to using it — was designed to be simple, fun, and nonthreatening. First do this. Then unwrap that. Plug this in. You’re done.

And we were done. Besides being uber-cool, it was functional and reliable, and we stopped using it long before it was ready to stop being used.

I went to the dark side when I left for college — which is to say, I bought a PC, and followed in the footsteps of Microsoft’s rise to monopoly: MS-DOS, then Windows 3.1, then Windows 95. It wasn’t an entirely terrible decision, as it turned out. Apple was mired for years in an old operating system that was so far behind its times that it became something of a joke among the intechligensia. OS9, their latest (and, thankfully, last) incarnation of that monster still couldn’t multitask in any meaningful way, didn’t have protected memory, and crashed often. And it was apparently a nightmare to develop for. Windows stole all its best ideas from Apple (and, by extension, from Xerox) but it implemented them better.

That all changed with the introduction of OS X, an operating system that uses a Unix core as its basis and builds a lovely graphical user interface on top of it. It’s stable, it’s smart, and it’s so much better than its predecessor in so many ways that it qualifies as an actual revolution. For Apple, anyway: the core of this “new” technology is over twenty years old. But it’s still wonderful.

So I’m back. I’ve adopted the Mac as my primary platform, and — despite the fact that there are some things that are hard to do on my new machine (run the latest Linux distributions; play the latest games, etc) — I’m loving it. Even better, I recently came upon a news item by Dan Gillmor that further bolsters my convinction that Apple is the best game in town. To wit: in an age where most of the top-dog companies out there (Intel, AMD, Microsoft) seem to be selling out to the entertainment conglomerates by creating hardware and software that controls and restricts access to our own machines (a movement that is being newspeak-marketed as Digital Rights Management and Trusted Computing), Apple is holding fast to its assertion that the customer’s rights are what matter, first and foremost:

Unlike Intel and AMD, the big chip makers for Windows-based computers, Apple hasn’t announced plans to put technology into hardware that could end up restricting what customers do with the products they buy. Unlike Microsoft, Apple hasn’t asserted the right to remote control over users’ operating systems.
The era of Digital Rights Management, commonly called DRM, is swiftly moving closer, thanks to the Intels and AMDs and Microsofts. They’re busy selling and creating the tools that give copyright holders the ability to tell users of copyrighted material — customers, scholars, libraries, etc. — precisely how they may use it. DRM, in the most typical use of the expression, is about owners’ rights. It would be more accurate to call DRM, in that context, “Digital Restrictions Management.”
But Apple has taken a different tack in its rhetoric and its technology. As I said in an introduction to a panel I moderated Tuesday at a conference in Santa Clara, Mac OS X, Apple’s modern operating system, is becoming, whether by design or by accident, a Digital Rights Management operating system where the rights in question are the user’s rights — and they are expansive.

Amen to that. Apple is fighting the good fight, for whatever reason, and I’m happy to support them in this. America’s large computer conglomerates are trying to assert de-facto totalitarian control over the mindspace of the world’s consumers. They’re all claiming to have our best interests at heart, and promise never to abuse the power they’re granting themselves, but this is the slipperiest of slippery slopes.

The thing to keep in mind, here, is that they’re building their empire on very unstable ground: for now, at least, the success of this new wave of intrusive computing is based entirely on our willingness to pay for the privilege of having it shoved down our throats.

So don’t.

Last night I was reading the afterword of Eric Schlosser’s excellent Fast Food Nation, in which he addresses the meaning of Mad Cow disease, and what it says about the beef and agribusiness conglmerates, and their incestuous and customer-unfriendly relationship with the USDA. One thing he said caught my eye, though, and sent my thoughts in quite a different direction.

He said that, so far, about 100 people have died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human analog to Mad Cow) in this country, and that — although each of these deaths was tragic and unnecessary — they should be taken in perspective: that many people die every day in auto accidents on America’s roads.

Those words stuck with me as I was shooting down the highway this morning, on my way to the daily grid. There were cars all around me, all going 65 miles per hour, all of them one-ton battering rams that could, under the right circumstances, tear my modest vehicle to shreds. The contrast between my present — a fairly peaceful commute in pre-rush hour traffic — and my possible future — a painful and slow death wrapped in a burning heap of twisted metal — was shocking, and a little unsettling. I’m not old enough yet to think about my mortality on a regular basis, but it does rear its ugly head every so often, just to let me know it’s there, and getting closer every day.

If I were to subscribe to the Many Worlds theory, where every possible action you take is carried out in another, alternate universe that springs up just for that purpose, then I’ve already died a million million times, in various interesting, amusing, or tragic ways. I think that, from now on, every night, before I go to bed, I’ll light a candle for all my dead selves, and wish them well in whatever alternate heavens or hells they might find themselves.