you're fired!

After my preceding blog post about my experience as a food-delivery driver, I got axed! In the middle of the night. 4:47 a.m. to be exact. Coincidence?! You'd think someone or some-thing-or-it-or-algorithm had read my blog piece with its albeit anonymous references to an on-demand food-delivery service. Coincidence?! The reason for being fired? Some balderdash about not meeting minimum customer rating and minimum completion rate ... which is literally laughable (LL) because unless the app was acting up, I was always on time or early. I mean, c'mon! If that's how DoorDash wants to play they can go fuck themselves. And, no, I don't care if an algorithm, robot, human, or humanoid fired me. Who'd want to be part of such a clusterfuck anyway?

deus or dea ex machina

In case you didn't take four years of Latin in high school, the title of this blog post translates to "god or goddess out of the machine." Without googling it, if memory serves right the expression refers to a playwright's trick: to solve a plot dilemma the author injects a solution out of left field, as if a god or goddess had dropped out of the sky to make things right. Something like that. Close enough for my purposes. (I refuse to look it up while writing this. Go ahead. You're sure to look it up now, after this tease.) In this instance, the god or goddess in the machine is the notion of digital commands. I recently signed up with a food-delivery service. I installed an app on my phone and went through the required steps to be a valid delivery person seeking to make a few extra bucks at times of my own choosing. If I put myself on the clock, it makes me available for orders. I digitally inform the molecules or bits or bytes or electronic pulses -- I honestly don't know what -- residing in the app that I'm ready. The app knows where I am by GPS. If I receive a notification of a delivery order, I have 60 seconds to accept or decline the chance to go to the food merchant to pick up the food and then deliver it within a specified time to the person ordering the food and its delivery. A clock image in the upper-right corner of my phone screen starts ticking away the countdown. If I don't accept, someone else gets it. No pressure? Some pressure. Concurrent with this, I receive matching texts from the app. Messages like: "New Order: Go to XYZ (East Moses)." If I get to the food merchant and tarry in the parking lot, I start getting pestered by texts. Where are you? Choices are given, such as "waiting in line," "getting the food," "problem encountered," or "go fuck yourself." Yeah, yeah, I threw that in last one in there. Or if you accept the order and start driving, you might get a text saying something like, "You don't appear to be heading towards the order. Do you need help?" This annoys me because I know damn well where I'm going, thank you. If you fail to respond to an order -- typically because the app is frozen or acting up -- you are scolded. "You missed a delivery opportunity, which will now be offered to the next available PrancingReindeer." 

This digital hectoring wears me down. Who needs the cajoling, scolding, insinuating, needling, pressuring, belittling, and merciless nagging? Not to get too psychoanalytical about all this, but it dredges up the worst memories of growing up. It's a parental-memory nightmare-flashback. For the first time, today I encountered a fellow PrancingReindeer (my name for the delivery squad). He corroborated the woes I had encountered with the app. He was irate, ready to give up on this particular delivery vendor. 

But this person confirmed something I had been considering for a blog topic.

We treat the app like a person or persons.

He kept on using the personal pronoun "they" as he described his frustrations with the app. They said this, they did that, they told me this, they warned me about this, they didn't understand this.

I was thinking the same way.

Then a light bulb went off in my head.

"They" can't go fuck themselves because there is no "they."

I am learning to be calm when I am digitally hectored by the app by reminding myself there is no one behind the curtain, no Wizard of Oz. It is simply an algorithm or whatchamacallit responding to bits of data received or gleaned from me across the ether. It is very easy to think someone is twiddling their thumbs, timing us, watching us, waiting by the door ready to remonstrate us.

Surely the app has oceans of data on my timeliness, responsiveness, accuracy, speed, distance, heart rate, urinary frequency, attire, political views, browsing history, et cetera ad infinitum. And lakes of data are collected on the merchants and food merchants too. No doubt "they" know everything, and are using it to refine the app, I suppose.

But there is no person monitoring my delivery successes or failures. Is there?

It's all just automatically triggered prompts programmed in. 

Right? 

Are you sure?

save it for a rainy day

We've been having summer showers today. They make for a delicious invitation to nap. I declined only because I slept so late into the morning, not that that eliminated the possibility of napping. We need the rain. People seem to say that when it rains, whether it's true or not. It's just part of the script. Like, in old Westerns someone would mutter, "It's a good day for a hangin'" and some tumbleweed would roll by across the parched main street of the town where the gunfight was supposed to take place. A good day for a hanging? That's rough. You would hope most think the opposite, as if no day were good for a hanging. Not if you were the hangee, that's for sure. Rarely, if ever, would the black and white movie depict a hanging. And if it did, the execution would be sanitized and visually bowdlerized so as not to acquaint viewers with anything resembling the real act, for fear of ruining that line about its being a good day and for fear of having viewers throw up and just maybe walk out of the theater, or the living room, opposed to the death penalty. The sound of rain on the metal roof of a car while you sit inside and watch the rivulets form on the windshield and wonder if there's a pattern to it, and then you don't care but just enjoy it. The Beatles had a song about rain, eponymously titled. Bob Dylan wrote and sang "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," but the words "rain" or "rainy" never show up; "stone" and "stoned" appear about 347 times. The Beatles song derides those of us who shun direct contact with nature, be it rainy or sunny. Has there ever been another song about rain itself, as opposed to rain involving romance or remorse or love or love's loss? When it rains it pours. Then it's pissing down, in the United Kingdom. If you want to get biblical about it, "...for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." (Matthew 5:45). Save it for a rainy day. Save what? The sunshine, allegorically? Save the rain from the last rainy day? No, save money, they say. To mean: in halcyon or sunshine-imbued times, sock away some cash for the less-sunny, the rainy, times. As if people do. Most don't in American society.  I have read that Germans are adept at saving it for a rainy day. Save it for a rainy day doesn't quite work for attributes of beauty, fertility, pleasure, or luck. It's not as if you can horde it, whatever the "it" is, until a time comes for splurging. But we try. I do. As if that one great time, thing, event, person, episode, or instance can be cast in amber and later melted or have its DNA reconfigured for later cloning. Like those rivulets on the windshield and the saturating symphony on the car roof. 

promises, promises

We all make promises, don't we? "All" is extreme. Let's say that many of us have made a promise or two at some time or another. In some Christian traditions, we make a promise of faithfulness as infants. The promises are made on our behalf since even in that tradition it is acknowledged that a newborn, an infant, or a toddler is incapable of making any sort of valid promise. When I became an Episcopalian, arising from the birth of my third child ("just bring the baby; we'll baptize it"), I came enamored of a bit of wiggle room in the Rite of Baptism. The presider, such as a priest, asks the baby a series of questions as part of the baptismal covenant, the agreement that incorporates a series of faith-related promises. The congregation answers for the child, saying: "I will, with God's help." Granted, many readers will find the whole enactment surreal, even Monty Python-ish. For others, they proceed with a voluntary dollop of suspended disbelief. (Did you know the phrase comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? He was writing in 1817, advocating for fantastic elements in poetry: "willing suspension of disbelief.") As for our congregants making promises for a child, we might describe their surrogate promises as willing affirmations of belief in an aura of suspended disbelief. Something like that. "I will, with God's help." To me, the vow was refreshingly human. Maybe I'm the only one who heard it this way, but I felt it served as an asterisk that pleaded: "I will, but God, help me, because this is a tall order; I may not be able to keep this vow; in fact, on my own I know I can't. So help me out."

Promises.

The most notable and common promises are the ones that people make when they get married. Traditional marriage vows in Western societies tend to be just that: vows. Promises. We publicly promise to love and cherish each other, whether rich or poor, sick or well, "till death do us part." Civil ceremonies are light on promises and heavy on legal practicality declaring that each party is not still married to someone else and is free to marry.

The divorce rate serves as its own comment regarding marital promises. As time goes on, some of us revisit, revise, or reconsider those promises in the light of living history. The broken promises spectrum can run from violence and abuse to unfaithfulness to mental illness to simple incompatibility. A skeptic or a critic might say a promise is a promise; breaking it comes from making an excuse. Being twice divorced, I recuse myself from further comment. No judgment here.

But you have to wonder: Does a promise carry any weight in this day and age? Has the notion of a promise lost all gravitas?

We assume that politicians of all stripes break their promises. We accept it as a given.

"I promise I'll call you or text you when I get there." Do you believe it?

"I promise I'll be on time." Depending on personal history and personality, you recalculate. I, for one, tend to run late. It's another topic for another time. I'm working on it. I've explored the reasons for it. I'm getting better about it, or think I am. Other people are the judge of that. Knowing this about myself, I don't promise on-time-ness without some seriousness. I don't want to erode the fragile credibility I have, if any, in this arena.

"I'll call you or text you. I promise."

After a first date, any promise from either party is fraught with doubt and healthy skepticism. If "promise" is invoked, it becomes a test.

Promissory notes legally bind one to a promise. You have no choice but to keep the promise, or else you face unavoidable consequences.

"I promise I'll pay you back on Tuesday."

"The check is in the mail. I promise."

"I promise you, this won't hurt."

"I promise not to . . . "

"On my way." "OMW." Please. That's a promise to promise to promise to walk out the door, maybe, sort of, pretty soon.

The etymology of the word "promise" offers some wiggle room of its own. If you go back deeply enough to its Latin origins, to its neuter past participle and beyond, the word, more or less, means: to release, let go, send, or throw in front of or before. 

See? Even the word "promise" throws some doubt on its own fulfillment or expectation. It lets go and releases even as it binds.

And yet I can't promise you this isn't a richly embroidered rationalization.

duck duck geese

I paused at the light, ready to turn right on red. I spotted a gaggle of geese attempting to cross the three lanes of Bridge Street, a street so named that fails to bring to mind any sort of bridge whatsoever, except a patch of roadway over a tiny stream. A gaggle of geese. The collective noun derives from the linguistic attempt to imitate the sound the geese make. Just so you know: the geese are not called a gaggle if they are flying. They become a skein if they take flight. These geese were jaunty and persistent in their effort to cross the busy road on a sunny afternoon in July. It seemed they had a leader, perhaps a few leaders. Presumably, the leaders would be the first to perish if the crossing proved fatal. It would remain to be seen whether such tragedy would thwart the efforts of the remaining gaggle. I turned right. In my rear-view mirror, I noticed the geese were making progress. They were getting cars to stop or slow down as they waddled across, more or less a few steps forward, a few in retreat, then another sally forth. The geese were causing risk to the drivers bearing down upon them. A sudden slowdown heightens the chance of a chain-reaction collision. As for my own driving risk, I had to avert my eyes and proceed forward on my own passage. 

We wholesomely respect such matters as "animal rights" in our society. Some places post roadside warnings: GEESE CROSSING or DUCK CROSSING. We do it for deer, too, though such warnings are more a matter of alerting drivers to be cautious with respect to deer gamboling across the road. In our public square, we champion and protect the rights of animals such as geese or ducks. We do so even at the risk to ourselves. After all, most drivers don't see geese or ducks in the road only to step on the accelerator and plow into the gaggle, exploding it into feathers, flesh, and blood. We're not like that. They are poor, innocent creatures. They have no say in their own safety, they had to cross the road for some reason, perhaps for food or water, maybe to go home to a nest. 

Humans? Forget it. We beep the horn. We get angry at a person or persons for being in the road, impeding our progress, especially in the midst of a travel portion, outside of a defined crosswalk. We might give the finger to the "gaggle" (horde? gang? clutch? group? crowd? tribe? remnant? family?) of humans. Add factors such as migration, race, mobility, behavior, size, attire, et al., and you alter the atmosphere and the attitude of some drivers, possibly increasing personal anger or vehicular speed. 

O, to be a skein in human skin!
 

can I have one for free?

At first, I thought the sign said MUG SALE. Then I figured: RUG SALE. Two simple rows of letters were crudely and sloppily painted on some beat-up plywood, on a sandwich board, off to the side of the roadway. It could only have applied to one of the few stores on the other side of the heavily traveled road. I was driving by, so these were fleeting thoughts my brain was rapidly processing. MUGS SALE? Plural? Who'd give a shit about that? "Hey, let me grind to a stop, put my left-turn signal on, and get on over there and buy a car full of mugs!" I don't think so. Rugs? Possibly, but how many do you need, and how often? And you would need a store larger than the ones I saw, to make room for the rugs, unless they were bath mats or welcome carpets. The mind tries to fill in the blanks in order to make a familiar and expected word. 

Aha! That first letter is an H! The topmost first three letters, all caps, sans serif, and SALE below it were in white paint over a yellow background, which partially explained the readability challenges. HUG SALE? Wrong again. The sign painter or painters splashed on an E after HUG, a dark gray-black E, as if the E were an afterthought, or a correction.

Now I get it! 

HUGE SALE.

Incidentally, I noticed after a subsequent drive-by that the E was painted over a white background, which seemed to indicate that the E indeed was a correction. Omigod, what could the earlier version possibly have been? HUGG? How many ways can you misspell HUGE anyway?

So, they're having a huge sale over there. We don't know if the hugeness refers to the size of the items for sale (bulldozers? semi-tractor-trailers? railroad freight cars? aircraft carriers?) or the quantity of items, be they large or tiny, or the amount of alleged discount. 

Either way, it did not interest me in the least, not enough to swerve left.

HUG SALE would interest me. Wouldn't it interest you? Maybe not. Some people shy away from direct physical contact. They want their private space. They just happen to be like that. No law against it. Such individuals would keep driving. But some people undoubtedly would turn left for a HUG SALE, especially if the store had tawdry and gaudy neon lights, evoking an aura of illicit activity. On the other hand, the hug emporium could just as easily be family-friendly, in fact radically friendly, welcoming one and all, no matter your race, ethnicity, gender, social status, education, age, history, talent, background, mental state, physical condition, health, political persuasion, religious or secular beliefs, marital status, mobility, legality, sobriety, cordiality or hostility. (Did I leave anything out?)

HUG SALE.

How much would a hug cost? After all, no hug is truly free. Both the giver and the receiver invest immeasurable doses of time, vulnerability, physical exertion, emotional risk, social capital, and spiritual energy in the act of hugging. Oh. You were thinking in monetary terms. I suppose you can let the market determine that. (Is hug even the right word? Is a hug the same as an embrace? The sign had no room for that longer word, which invites its own misreadings.)  

Who would be the huggers and who would be the huggees? Couldn't the roles be reversed?

What would be the optimum duration of each hug?

I would limit it to one hug per visit, then get back in line if you're that hug-hungry.

What would be the appropriate firmness of the hug? Both arms? Slapping on back?  

No words exchanged?

Hug Monitors (HMs) would be able to sort out these practical matters, right?

open sesame

You approach the doorway. It is a public thoroughfare for walkers, the entrance to a department store in an age when no one knows exactly what a department store is or should be. Nevertheless, you walk through the portal. Actually, you intend to walk through the entranceway (or exitway, if you are proceeding out of the building), and to do so, you must first open the door, since you cannot proceed through the glass as if by osmosis or by sci-fi, special-effects walkthrough. But wait. Someone is ahead of you, pioneering their way into the building. The person in front of you breezily opens the door. You are a few steps behind the person, maybe a step or a half step in back of the person who just opened the door. You expect the forerunner to hold the door ajar for a moment so that you can hold the door open for yourself. You anticipate a mumbled "thank you" from your own lips and perhaps, though not likely, a "you're welcome" from the other. "You're welcome" is a dying phrase, even more so than "thanks" or "thank you." But the door is not held open, so those are moot points. The person in front of you, the one who countered your blithe expectations by not holding the door open, proceeds briskly into the store, the door left ajar, left to do what it must: close in your face unless you and your hand intervene. They don't look back. You wonder: did they know that you were a mere step or two in their pedestrian wake? Couldn't they hear your footsteps? Didn't they see your reflection in the glass of the door? Didn't they catch a whiff of your expensive, recently purchased fragrance? Should you have cleared your throat or coughed to alert them to your presence? This line of conjecture riles you. You tell yourself you are blaming yourself for another's rudeness. You are making an excuse for someone's incivility. True, you argue, you can't conclusively discern nor prove the motives of the person who walked before you and failed to hold the door open. You fully admit that the other person may not have even been aware of your presence in the aftermath of their footsteps. But that does not let them off the hook so easily. Were they unaware of you as a result of self-absorption? Or were they unaware of you because they were in a hurry, a mad dash, under a deadline or in need of a restroom? Possible, though not likely based on their speed of walking and the expression on their face as you caught a glimpse of it, a side glance, as the person turned, pivoted, after opening the door and letting it close by itself. You even generously allow the notion that the person who was in front of you was lost in a reverie, a dream of sorts. You consider the chance that a loved one was gravely ill or had just passed away; maybe a pet had shuffled off its mortal furry coil. You say this to yourself, but, no, you don't really believe it, not for a second. Who knows, you imagine, maybe the Recalcitrant Door Person (RDP) was mentally rehashing, or preparing, an argument with a friend, foe, spouse, lover, politician, driver, colleague, boss, subordinate, or stranger. But you doubt this as well because the person was not gesticulating nor were their lips moving in silent rehearsal or silent reenactment, a phenomenon you used to witness when you worked in Manhattan, as employees de-stressed on the sidewalk as they walked to Grand Central or the Port Authority. You resign yourself to the fact that you will never know the answers to these questions, not unless you see that person as you walk through the store, or as you exit, fearing a repetition of dour doorness. Besides, you doubt you would raise the issue with the stranger, even if you were certain it was the same person. Where and how would you begin? "They say that when one door closes another one opens up." If you were to utter that platitude, could you do it without irony at best and sarcasm at worst? And then what, you imagine, as you walk toward the exit on your way out the door. 

sultry summer #haiku

not a leaf turning

birds chirping in slow motion

pavement steam rising

forwards and backwards and backwards and forwards and . . .

Palindromes. 

They are amusing, clever, and challenging. Spelled the same forwards and backwards, palindromes have a rich history. It is said that Ben Jonson coined the term in the 17th century. The two most famous examples that pop (there's a palindrome!) into my mind are: "Able was I ere I saw Elba" (referring to Napoleon's exile to an island in the Mediterranean) and "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama." Palindromes also refer to numerical sequences. Palindromelist.net is an extraordinary, active, live resource for this phenomenon. Stunningly, it presents a "longest palindrome" that takes up thousands of words! I would imagine that either a computer crafted it or some version of crowd sourcing collaborated to create it. 

Imagine a "Twilight Zone" or "Black Mirror" episode featuring characters who speak only in palindromes. What a challenge for the screenwriters! Just browsing through examples under "A" at Palindrome.net, one sees ratings-inducing, albeit inappropriate, bits of dialogue such as: "A car, a man, a maraca," "A slut nixes sex in Tulsa," "Ah, Satan sees Natasha!" and "Acrobats stab orca." (Don't get steamed at me; I didn't make these up; just quoting here.) Picture (aurally) the characters conversing palindromically, yet it takes a while for them to discover that is their only manner of discourse. And when they have to think about it, instead of letting it happen naturally, the characters find it impossible to speak fluently. Furthermore, viewers watching this episode are at first unaware of the palindrome dialogue. Would viewers using closed-caption subtitles catch on sooner?

In observing my mother, who is 100 + 1 years old, I see a painful-to-witness version of life's palindrome. Her regression to a simple, childlike state is not precisely a palindrome, but it has parallels. Life's video is spooling backwards, until it reaches the zero we begin with. Since the pattern is rougher and less formally precise than a palindrome, consider it a squinting palindrome, a parapalindrome. (This is not the least original on my part. It's another version of the Riddle of the Sphinx.)

Is the parapalindrome the organic sequence that humans typically experience?

In other words, is this what happens not only to our lives but also to our relationships, our jobs, our promises, our mind and body? 

Is progression-regression-progression-regression the "normal" march of time?

I think not.

That's too tidy a reckoning, not zigzag enough.

Agree?