Entries from November 2004 ↓

My memory is very, very bad. I can look at something that I need to remember to take with me when I leave the house — a library book, for example, or the mailbox keys, or that movie that I’ve been meaning to lend my mom for weeks — I can look at it, and say to myself: You will not under any circumstances forget to bring this with you. You have forgotten to bring this with you every time you’ve made this pledge before, but this time will be different, because this time you will (1) make a mantra out of it, (2) place the item in front of the door from which you must exit the house, and (3) exhort your wife to remind you to bring it with you.

I can say this to myself before I go about my pre-departure business, chanting the don’t-forget-it mantra under my breath: “Don’t forget the thing don’t forget the thing must not forget the thing don’t forget the thing” over and over again as I make my way up the stairs and into the kitchen, where the mantra becomes “Don’t forget the thing don’t forget the wow I’m hungry ooo look a banana don’t forget the jesus is that a cockroach how the hell did must not forget the thing don’t forget the thing.” And, after eating the banana and crushing the cockroach, I go up one more flight of stairs to my room, where the mantra becomes “Don’t forget the god I’ve got to pay these bills I can’t believe it’s getting dark already man I love bananas I wish more food was yellow.” And so on.

A few minutes later, I make my way downstairs again, humming a pleasant tune under my breath, nod agreeably when my wife reminds me not to forget about the thing, and then step over it on my way out the door.

I might remember it a couple of hours later, when I’m at the place where I needed to have it. Or I might not. It’s 50-50.

Having a bad memory is crippling. People don’t realize how crippling it is. I could never be a doctor, for example, because of all the extravagant memorization that’s required; all those body bits and diseases and disorders have names, and the names have to be memorized at least long enough to get you past your boards. I could never in a million years do that. I still remember, with real pain, the disappointment on my AP Biology teacher’s face when she told me, after grading a particularly grueling exam, that she had expected so much more from me. I had too. I really had. I loved biology. But love, for all its sweetness, is no salve for a poor memory. Just ask my wife, preferably on the day after our anniversary.

It’s also a social liability, of course. I have enough trouble talking to people as it is, but the problem is compounded infinity-fold when I can’t remember their names, or what they do, or how I know them. I very often can’t even summon enough facts to carry on a simple conversation: the name of the really big country that makes all the vodka, for example, or who won the recent presidential race between — um — the tall boring guy and — er — the dumb one; or what I do for a living; or, on especially bad days, what my name is. All of these things escape me at the most inopportune times, fleeing like startled deer when I need them most.

And it’s a problem at work. The internet, and the rudimentary search facilities that computers provide these days, have saved my life: as long as I’m sitting in front of a box with a network connection, there’s no programming fact that I can’t discover in a couple of seconds, leaving me free to forget almost everything I know. Which I do. On a regular basis. But still, it would be wonderful to have these facts on hand: it would speed things up immeasurably, and it would allow me analyze problems in toto, with all the variables and difficulties and solutions splayed out on the same surface, as it were, so that I could rearrange them at will. There’s no mulling when you have a bad memory. Anything mildly complex that you need to figure out, you figure out on paper, or you don’t figure out at all.

But I’m not complaining. Ok, I am complaining. But I should also acknowledge that failing to remember almost everything that’s ever happened to me has its advantages. I get to enjoy the same things repeatedly, for example, and can be surprised by the same good news over and over again. Hey! Check it out! The toaster’s fixed! I say, and my wife says: It’s been fixed for a week. You fixed it. You’ve been happy about it for a week. And I say: Oh, a little abashed, and leave the room. Then, a little while later, I come back in and say: Hey! The toaster’s fixed!

Also, I don’t remember bad news for very long, unless it’s crushingly bad news; the small bad things, the tiny demons, tend to fade away. Which is, in each case, a very tiny blessing; but they add up.

Still: I’m tired of forgetting everything. And as the bloom of my youth fades into the gloom of my middle age and, eventually, the doom of my dotage, the problem’s only going to get worse. If I’m ever to achieve my great and lofty ambitions — indeed, if I’m ever to discover what those ambitions are — then I need to figure out a way to retain something more than the difference between left and right. And, because I’ve spent much of the last sixteen years in front of computers, organizing ones and zeroes into — um — long string of ones and zeroes, and because when you’re a hammer every problem looks like a nail, I’ve decided that my salvation lies in computers.

What I’m after is simply this: a memory extension program. I don’t mean a memory enhancer, because my faculties are what they are, and, like the rest of me, remain remarkably impervious to improvement; I don’t mean a simple memory supplement, a formalization of the old expedients of scrawled lists and ubiquitous post-it notes; and I don’t mean a memory goad, strings wrapped around fingers, abecedarian menageries of impromptu mnemonics. I mean the real deal: something that extends my memory by supplying what it lacks.

But I haven’t been able to find anything quite like that. I mean, there are a lot of organizational tools out there, digital scrapbooks, computer diaries, stuff like that. And I’m sure they’re all quite good, but they all tend to nibble around the edge of the problem. Nothing really tackles it.

What I need is a complete mnemonic system, something that weaves itself into my life, insinuates itself into everything I do; something that archives all the data that comes my way, organizes it, and provides some sort of natural and effortless interface to retrieve it. A personal google that’s so integrated into my everyday routine that it becomes essentially indistinguishable from my actual memory.

There’s a movie called Johnny Mnemonic — based on the short story by William Gibson — that has at its center a courier whose memory has been augmented to accept huge payloads of data, which he ferries from place to place. Now, this is a very bad, no-good, terrible horrible not-watchable movie that you should avoid at all costs (it features Keanu Reeves attempting to — shudder — act), but I mention it because it points out the basic problem with all the memory augmentation programs I’ve seen: ease of use, and access. In the movie, the mnemonic courier had to use special machinery to implant and retrieve his payload, and has essentially no access to it while it’s in his head. The organizational systems out there aren’t quite that bad, but they have similar problems: it’s not effortless enough to store the data you need, and it’s not easy enough to access it.

So that’s the challenge. Invent a memory system that provides effortless insertion paradigms, and instant access interfaces. I have some ideas on how to do this, and, I must say, they’re absolutely brilliant. So I’m going to set them down here, before I forget them forever. That would be the supreme irony: failing to remember the principles behind the most perfect mnemonic system ever imagined, precisely because that system is not yet available.

And so, without further ado, my brilliant idea.

Ahem.

Um.

Huh.

Er.

Hmmm.

Crap.

There is a school of thought that maintains that everything that happens, happens for a reason. No matter how horrible, no matter how painful, no matter how apparently senseless, everything happens for a reason that will someday become clear; possibly in this life, more likely in the next.

And so, you ask, what’s the reason for World War II? Or cancer? Or Columbine? Or Vesuvius? Or Hitler? And even if there was one, how could it possibly justify the expenditure of horror?

And they answer: It is Ineffable.

And you say: That’s a little bit of a dodge, though, isn’t it? I mean, you’re saying that there is an answer, but we can’t possibly know what it is, because it’s ineffable. And even if we did know what it is, we couldn’t possibly understand it. Because it’s ineffable. That really isn’t an answer at all.

And they say: You must trust in the will of [insert deity/lifeforce/universal principle here].

And you say: Nothing. Because you’ve stalked off, annoyed.

But here’s the problem: some things do happen for a reason. Take my crippling inability to carry on a normal conversation with people I don’t know very well, for example. Somewhere around my tenth birthday, the conversation conduits in my brain began to shut down, one by one: they clogged up, broke in half, withered away, and I haven’t been able to put together two coherent words since. Whenever someone comes up to me and tries to start up a conversation, my mind goes into something like anaphylactic shock: it shudders, curls up into a spongy little ball, and begins to emit small meep meep noises. My eyes go wide, my face settles into one of those “Deer Caught in Headlights While Receiving Barium Enema” expressions, my eyelids twitch, and my forehead begin to ripple and jump like a flesh blanket stretched over tiny frogs.

Inevitably, at some point, the other person pauses, expecting me to fill in my end of the conversation. There is a silence, punctuated by muffled meeps from inside my skull. My eyes, dry now from all the not-blinking, begin to move back and forth, looking for the thing I’m supposed to say next, as if it’s some sort of creature that’s managed to slip its leash.

The silence continues. My conversation organ, a dessicated ruin of a thing shaped like a glob of melted rubber, hauls itself to its feet and casts about for an appropriate thing to say. It finds nothing, of course, and soon, having been informed by various sensory organs that the silence out there is becoming Very Awkward, sends up the only thing it can think of, which is usually something like “Ferret bones evacuate perestroyka,” or “Gleep! The udder!” or “Nnnnnngngnnngn.” Which is to say, something surreal, alarming, and apropos to nothing.

Eventually, the other person goes away, my brain expands back to its normal size, and I spend the next couple of hours being appalled at myself.

But it turns out that this clogged aphasia has a Purpose. There is a Reason. This afternoon, I had a short conversation with a friend who I don’t really see very often. The conversation did not go well. In fact, it was so mortifying, so horrible, so beyond awkward that I’ve just spent the last hour trying to stick my tongue in the garbage disposal. Sadly, I don’t quite have the necessary reach, so the tongue survives, curled up inside my mouth, back among the wisdom teeth, with strict instructions not to move lest it die a horrible death in a glass of very small piranas.

And that’s the awful truth: I was not meant to have conversations with people. At any moment, I’m not just liable but likely to say something annoying, insensitive, inappropriate, or brain-crushingly stupid. And so the Creator, having spotted this deficiency in the karmic soup destined to become me, added a dash of superglue to seal the passageways of speech, thus saving me from perpetual mortification. Not a curse, then. A Blessing.

Of course, the Creator could have just as easily corrected the problem, I suppose. But he chose not to.

I don’t know why.

It’s Ineffable.

I’ve just had a fairly heated argument with a friend over the latest ugly news from Fallujah: the footage of a marine shooting a wounded, unarmed man lying prostrate and helpless in a mosque. We both had the same visceral reaction to the pictures: horror, moral outrage, a sick sense of helplessness. But we disagreed sharply over what to do about the soldier who pulled the trigger.

I said he’s guilty as hell, and should be punished. All the arguments about the maddening chaos of urban combat and the uncertainty of asymmetric warfare notwithstanding, the video clearly shows a guy standing over a hurt and now-harmless enemy, and killing him in cold blood. There’s no arguing with that.

I got into a little bit of a self-righteous froth, spouting tired bromides about moral imperatives and Geneva conventions and slippery slopes. But there was a basic problem with my line of reasoning: reason doesn’t apply. We’re talking about a kid who’s been dodging bullets for days, faced every moment with the prospect of death or mutilation from behind every door, around every corner, under every corpse. What he did was definitely wrong, but — given the circumstances — perhaps understandable.

Intellectually, this makes a little bit of sense to me. Emotionally, I still can’t buy it. It’s hard to get past the image of a wounded (not innocent, certainly not innocent, but wounded and helpless) guy being shot dead by one of our own. Our soldiers carry with them not just the fate of our country but the weight of our principles, and seeing them jettison those principles so carelessly calls into question everything we stand for as a country, and as a people.

That’s a naive sentiment, of course. I’ve never been in war, never been shot at, never felt my life threatened by people hiding in the shadows, so I have no room to talk. But if you pull away from this specific incident, rise through the ugly, grubby muck of reality and try to see the whole situation from a moralist’s-eye-view, it’s hard to deny that this is quite a blow to our moral standing.

I think what scares me about this, and part of what makes me want to lay the sole blame for this incident at the soldier’s feet, is the secret fear that, were I in the same situation, I might have done exactly the same thing. I like to think of myself as a moral creature, defined by moral boundaries that I would never cross. But is it true?

Maybe not.

So there are actually two questions here: first, why did the soldier react as he did, under those circumstances? And, second, who’s responsible for creating those circumstances?

The answer to the second question, at least, is clear: it’s the architects of this terrible, unnecessary war; it’s the ones who beheaded Iraq and let it flail around in its death-throes before it came back to life as a shambling headless terrorist state, animated by fanatical insurgents whose entire worldview consists of fundamentalism and murder and tyranny, who hate us with a zeal unmitigated by reason. It is the people who created the situation they went to war to diffuse. It’s not the soldier, or his platoon leader, or the generals who planned this attack. It goes much higher than that, to the ones who conceived of this invasion in the first place, and then lied and blustered their way past all obstacles to carry it off, and then forgot to plan for the aftermath.

It’s the ones who created the monster they sought to destroy.

So it occurs to me that I’m playing right into these people’s hands by focusing my outrage on the soldier, alone — Bush and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Pearle and their ilk want all the blame to accrue to guy who pulled the trigger, despite the fact that he’s just the endpoint, the logical conclusion of a long string of misdeeds and incompetence for which they are solely responsible.

They managed to get away with this in the Abu Ghraib scandal: the grunts who did the deed are paying the price, as they should, but the ones who made the deed possible are still running the country,

They’ll probably get away with it this time, too.

We visited the new annex of the Air & Space Museum this weekend. It’s essentially a massive hanger filled with every kind of flying machine you can imagine, from hang gilders to Concordes to space shuttles. It was mindblowing, and very very cool.

But the coolest thing was up in the observation tower, a high room with glass walls and a nice view of Dulles airport: a 12-year old kid moving along the wall, watching a plane glide down toward the runway and muttering “Please crash please crash please crash please crash please crash.” And then, when it touched down safely, pressing his face against the glass and screaming: “Blow up! Blow up! Blow up!“

Ah, the sweet innocence of youth.

We here at Doodleplex Command will occasionally venture out among the general populace to take the pulse of the nation, as it were; to talk to our fellow citizens, record their thoughts, hear their opinions, understand their feelings. Mostly, the general populace tries to avoid us, because we are unkempt and slightly annoying, but we are persistent in our quest for Truth.

As part of this quest, we are embarking on a series of man on the street interviews. Our first was conducted last night, in the alley between Doodleplex World Headquarters and the local Dairy Queen.

Doodleplex: Hello, sir. We’re here conducting man on the street interviews about the outcome of this last presidential election. What are your views on the mandate that president Bush’s claims to have gained through his recent victory?

Man on the Street: I’m not a man.

Doodleplex: Do you think a 3% margin really constitutes a mandate?

Man on the Street: I’m not a man. I’m a dumpster.

Doodleplex: The mainstream media seem to be going along with the administration’s story on this. Do you think this is yet another failure on their part?

Dumpster on the Street: Look, either throw something in me or go the fuck away.

Doodleplex: But, sir, I think it’s fair to say that the president is stretching the definition of the word “mandate” when he uses it to describe his victory. It’s a majority, certainly, but …

Spent Condom on the Street: Is this guy bothering you, Clarence?

Dumpster on the Street: He won’t shut up about this Bush guy.

Spent Condom on the Street: Why don’t you move along there, Mister. Nobody cares.

Doodleplex: Perhaps, but I think we all have to think seriously about the consequences of re-electing a man so clearly bent on the abrogation of all the rights and liberties and values we hold …

Rat Turd on the Street: What are you, a communist?

Doodleplex: No! Just because I happen to believe that it’s worth defending the principles laid down by our founding fathers in the …

Rat Turd on the Street: Yeah, you’re a gay french liberal communist. I can just tell. Say “croissant”.

Doodleplex: What?

Rat Turd on the Street: Just say it, froggy.

Doodleplex: Croissant.

Rat Turd on the Street: See? Listen to that shit. Crwa-SANT. Definitely a Frenchy. Why don’t you go surrender to someone, cheese boy?

Doodleplex: But …

Dumpster on the Street: Give it a rest, Pierre. No one cares.

Doodleplex: It’s that kind of attitude that allows our administration …

Doodleplex was unable to complete the interview, due to a sudden, wholly unprovoked attack by a rusty phalanx of discarded appliances. Tomorrow, we venture into the mean streets of the local mall to interview our nation’s disaffected youth. And also do a little shopping, because we need new socks.

Delicious Monster, a company with perhaps one of the coolest names in the business, has just released what is perhaps one of the coolest products in the business. It’s a media organization thingy called Delicious Library, and it allows you to create a computer catalog of all your stuff: books, CDs. movies, tapes, games, whatever. Once your stuff’s suitably cataloged, you can sort, peruse, examine, eyeball, annotate, behold, and just generally gaze upon it. You can “check stuff out” when you lend it to your friends (”A Library of One”); you can ask the program to recommend other stuff you might like; you can even get it to put your stuff up for sale on Amazon when you’re tired of it. The interface is as beautiful as it is functional, and the design follows the Mac creed: as much as you need, and no more.

Notice I didn’t say that this is one of the most useful products in the world. Media libraries are something your average person can probably live without. But this one is very, very cool. Even cooler, though, is the ode to passion and vision that the company’s founder, Will Shipley, sneaks onto the site under the guise of a mission statement:

I believe the best software is written by small groups of people who have both passion and vision. Passion is easy to define; you care so deeply about something that it wounds you if it’s done poorly. Vision can mean different things, but I mean the ability to not just come up with new ideas, but to actually be able to see how they would integrate with people’s lives. Vision without passion gives you a guy who sitting on couch saying, “Flying cars! Wave of the future! Mark my word, the guy who invents that’s going to be rich… pass the chips.” Passion without vision gives you America’s current political situation, where we allow huge companies to destroy the world but pass laws to make sure nobody marries a turtle.

I just love that. I think it’s what all of us want: a job that does more than bring in the bacon, that melds so seamlessly into our own hopes and dreams and ideals that it becomes an expression of ourselves. I used to believe that this kind of transcendent job satisfaction is the exclusive domain of artists, but now understand that it applies to every profession, everywhere: from software development to widget fashioning to haberdashery. If passion informs everything you do, then you’re more than happy: you’re satisfied, you’re fulfilled, you’re content. You’re cool.

There’s been a real effort in the leftysphere, over the past couple of days, to figure out why we lost. The consensus, as far as I can tell, is this:

We underestimated the power of the red states, and specifically the power of “moral values” to eclipse more concrete concerns, such as the war in Iraq, the environment, the economy, health care, etc. If you look down the list of issues in this campaign, you’ll find that most of everything polls in the Democrat’s favor. But, in the end, it didn’t matter — or, rather, it didn’t matter enough.

We underestimated the weakness of nuance. Bush is a zero-virtue candidate, as far as I’m concerned, but he has the ability to take complex issues and boil them down to soundbite bromides that make him appear resolute and principled, when really he’s just dishonest and disingenuous. But, again — it worked. Kerry was all over the place on several issues. Part of that was standard politico-pandering, but part of it was that he understands that there is no simple answer to any of the problems we face. That doesn’t matter, either, though — in this day and age, nuance is a liability.

We underestimated Karl Rove. This is the big one, I think. A lot of people discounted his claim to 4 million evangelicals that didn’t vote last time around, and poo-pooed his efforts to draw them out. So the insertion of wedge issues into the national debate — abortion, stem cell research, and especially gay marriage — didn’t raise the alarm bells it should have. But it galvanized lots of people who care about this stuff much more than the issues that will actually affect their lives, and the lives of their children, in the years looming ahead of us.

It’s going to be a rough four years, no doubt about it. Bush was cockier than usual in the press conference he gave yesterday, smugly promising to expend his political capital to ram through the worst of his bad ideas. And he’ll get a lot of them passed. And he’ll get the judges he wants into the supreme court, and he’ll piss off the rest of the world, and he’ll sink us deeper into trouble with our allies and our enemies.

But I think the thing to focus on here is that this was a close election. Despite Bush’s claims to a resounding mandate, he only edged us out by a couple of points. A large chunk of the people who voted for him can’t be reached, of course, sunk as they are in their evangelical single-issue fervor, but a lot of them can.

So there’s a way out of this. Not a light at the end of the tunnel, granted, but at least a quality to the darkness that suggests the presence of light, somewhere. We just have to find it.

Andrew Sullivan has a series of posts up today about the effect that this election is going to have on gay couples. Eleven states passed ballot initiatives that forbid gay marriage and, in most cases, even civil unions. It’s hate and prejudice under a thin veneer of “moral values” and “concern for the sanctity of the family,” aided and abetted by a president who eagerly uses the specter of worldwide, mandatory, UN-sponsored homosexuality as a goad to his evangelical base. It’s all very sad, and very frightening.

But Sullivan ends with one of the most lovely paens to hope that I have seen in a long time:

The minute we let their fear and ignorance enter into our own souls, we lose. We have gained too much and come through too much to let ourselves be defined by others. We must turn hurt back into pride. Cheap, easy victories based on untruth and fear and cynicism are pyrrhic ones. In time, they will fall. So hold your heads up high. Do not give in to despair. Do not let the Republican party rob you of your hopes. This is America. Equality will win in the end.

I think this applies to everything we’ve lost in this election: because they can’t take away our hope, our will, our strength. We can only do that to ourselves.

Seeing in this election a chance to make a small contribution to the body of scientific knowledge, I resolved, through the process of empirical experimentation, to determine the weight of hope.

Yesterday, right before the returns started coming in, I got on a scale and wrote down my weight. Then I sat up all night, watching the news get worse and worse and worse. Then, this morning, I dragged myself away from the television and weighed myself again. I’d lost about 15 ounces.

So hope weighs 15 ounces. Or does it? I haven’t taken into account the weight of bitterness, anger, and incredulity, which entered by body in great quantities as the night wore on. Further experimentation is warranted.

When I have all of my results, I will publish them in whatever scientific journals survive the coming evangelical crusade.

In an early episode of the original Star Trek TV series, Captain Pike (Kirk’s predecessor) is crippled by a horrible injury, and confined to a wheelchair and a lifetime of pain and debility. All ends well, however, as Pike is placed into a permanent dream state, and lives out the rest of his life in a virtual reality in which he is a healthy, robust, uninjured man.

After last night’s election results, that sounds pretty damn good to Doodleplex Command, whose occupants are crushed beyond any hope of recovery. The nightmare has happened. Again. And so, instead of drawing upon our reserves of strength, gritting our teeth, squaring our jaw, and persevering in the face of adversity, we have decided to retreat into our own virtual reality, in which John Kerry won the election, narrowly, and will in two months time replace Bush and his vile minions in the White House.

We will cling stubbornly to this delusion, and any attempts to separate us from it will be met with incredulity, incomprehension, and, eventually, irritation. So don’t try it. We will be resolute in our weak-kneed retreat from the truth.

Goodbye real world.

[Activate Denial Mode]

Woohooo!!!! Two years of biting our nails and hoping and praying have finally paid off!! John Kerry is going to be the best president ever, he’s going to wage a real war on terror, based not on ideology but on facts, prudence, and wisdom. He’s going to create a real health care system, renew reasonable environmental policies, and repair relations with the rest of the world. He’s going to exercise true compassion, not the rhetorical kind that Bush uses to get elected.

We won, baby! We won!!!!