Hard 2 Get

Does abstinence make the heart grow fonder? How about calmer?

As our “devices” own us ever more, we hear talk of digital fasting and abstinence. (It’s curious how in America the primary meaning of “device” is an electrical invention connected to the internet, a meaning that supersedes older denotations such as scheme, trick, plan, rhetorical tool, or signifying mark. It is also instructive that the roots of the word go back to both “discourse” and “division.”)

Don’t be alarmed. This is not a sermon preaching a Luddite message of unplugging, however worthy that be.

This is something else.

Does the less you connect make you that much more coveted? The novelist Thomas Pynchon is legendary for his elusiveness, his absence. Photographs of the author are rare. J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, was famously anonymous, to use an oxymoron, even though he was living in plain sight in Cornish, New Hampshire. Their unreachability presumably made reaching out to them all the more alluring. When we see a sign that warns us to avoid “WET PAINT,” we want to touch it.

I have a friend, who happens to be a writer, who has never had and does not now have a cellphone. That makes him singular in my universe. (Actually, not so: my mom, 101 years old, had a cellphone she never used and does not have one now.)

Does this lack of a device make such people “special”? I have my doubts. From my vantage, such folks surrender such status by relying on other cellphone users to breach the digital divide.

My personal history in this vein is inconclusive. I resisted owning a smartphone because I thought the device would own me. I surrendered in 2015. Although upgrading my phone had little to do with feeling either more or less connected, I couldn’t be special anymore by smugly declaring, “Oh. I don’t own a cell. You kidding? Not me.”

I would suggest that the business world and the personal world abide by different social norms regarding digital abstinence, fasting, and promptness — a category similar to fasting, though paucity and duration are different aspects.

As for my own personal world, my data set is a small sample: one person with a limited circle of family, ex-wives and girlfriends, friends, and acquaintances.

I aim for a daily text to my children. Some days I miss. If any of us were to go silent for more than a day, two the most, we would find a need to check in more actively.

What about intimate friends (there’s a euphemism if there ever was one)? What are the 21st century protocols — if any — for response rapidity and frequency? What is the fine line between playing hard to get and crossing over into the phenomenon of ghosting? Is the notion of “hard to get” an ancient artifact of another century?

If I am interested in someone, my obsessive personality makes it nearly impossible to refrain from checking my phone (ahem, device) for any morsel of communication at any hour of day or night or under any circumstance, time, or place.

Is this constant temperature gauging an infinite neurosis, or merely the commonplace anxiety of the modern age?

Send me a text. Now. Don’t leave me waiting.

Cone of Uncertainty

During hurricane season, we hear the term “cone of uncertainty” frequently, accompanied by graphics to show the projected path of a tropical storm or hurricane. The projection indicates the exact location of the storm accompanied by estimated tracking five days hence. The experts get it right roughly two-thirds of the time.

Cone of uncertainty.

We all live within in a cone of uncertainty. More than a cone, it is rather a sphere, bubble, or atmosphere. But the aura of uncertainty is pervasive and palpable.

As for certainty, we know we are born and we die, but the details elude us — especially at the mortality end of the spectrum.  We hold gigantic ice cream cones of uncertainty, either with dollops of sprinkles and syrupy flavorings or rapidly melting soupy disaster.

We inhabit a cone of uncertainty within each moment of each day.

These cones illustrate both practical and transcendent uncertainties.

On the practical side, the cone of uncertainty is applied daily to matters big and small. Will I be late for work? Did I turn off the stove? Have I locked the door? Will I get the report done, pass the test, make the plane, see the soccer game, or make it home in time to start dinner before everyone else gets home?

From the transcendent angle, we might ask: Is there a God? Is there life after death? What is good? Evil? Can I stay clean and sober today, stay off the cigarettes, not lose my temper, zip my mouth shut, safeguard that secret, keep that promise, stay on that diet, or be kind to strangers and loved ones?

If we were to calculate — or have someone or something else calculate — the uncertainties of these daily challenges, would we feel better or worse?

I vote for not knowing the precise uncertainties, or certainties, for that matter. Too torturous.

Besides, the models are not perfect.

Cone of uncertainty originated in cost engineering and project management on the premise that uncertainty decreases as a project moves along and more is known. Credit for the concept is given to the American Association of Cost Engineers in 1958. The weather-related term means virtually the opposite, starting with certainty and becoming more uncertain. Incidentally, officially it’s the National Hurricane Center Track Forecast Cone. Dull. Popular variations include Error Cone, Cone of Probability, and the Cone of Death. Now we’re talking!

I understand that the science of it all yielded the cone image, but what if instead the science took on a different visual vocabulary? Anyone for cornucopia, hand fan, or vagina?

What about the grander scheme of things? Would you want to pore over projections of how much life you have left, with all its probabilities? Someone has already done this for you and me; that’s why the insurance industry, Social Security, lenders, and medical providers have actuarial tables. (Isn’t actuarial a curious name for something not yet actual?) Experts are already estimating your life (or mortality) expectancy.

Are they within or outside of the cone of uncertainty?

There are other ways of looking at this. For tropical storms and hurricanes, a European intergovernmental approach considers 52 distinct forecasts. Lines that resemble strings or strands illustrate this method.

I am tempted to call these threads of uncertainty, with no strings attached. But I’m not sure.

to the eclipse

As I drove down Interstate 81 South, I spotted a hitchhiker in his twenties, either scraggly or merely “roughing it,” with a cardboard sign. His branding tool was of the sort that panhandlers on urban corners employ, with captions such as: “Veteran” or “God bless” or “Anything helps” or “Hungry.” This particular hitchhiker on this particular day sported a sign that read, “TO THE ECLIPSE. 

Good one!

This was 10 days before the predicted solar eclipse of August 21, 2017. Predicted? Yes, it had not occurred yet. Although NASA scientists can forecast precisely when and where the solar eclipse will be, it still has to happen on its own. Cue Little Orphan Annie to sing about the sun coming up tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow… only a day away, etc. 

I attribute my dose of skepticism to the epic letdown of Comet Kohoutek in 1973. Experts hyped it in advance as a spectacular, mind- and soul-blowing cosmic event. It was a dud.
Presumably, the pedestrian pitching for a ride was aiming to get to somewhere like Nashville, near or on the eclipse’s path of totality. But that’s an assumption. Maybe he merely needed a ride down the road to Marathon, New York. Maybe he wanted to hit up a Good Samaritan driver for a few bucks or a pack of cigarettes. I’ll never know — unless by some strange Reverse Kohoutek Effect he reads this and tells me.

The eclipse’s expected shadow swath through the United States was “kohoutekked” as a destination for a rare and spectacular event. Madras, Oregon. Casper, Wyoming. St. Joseph, Missouri. Nashville, Tennessee. Columbia, South Carolina. Let me pause here for a cranky disclaimer. For years, I’ve heard media reports claim that a notable eclipse, either solar or lunar, would be the last one so intense and dramatic in a designated area for the rest of our lives! And then inevitably the experts conjure up ANOTHER “last-chance-to-see-the-intense-and-dramatic” eclipse. I’ve grown skeptical. Or old. 

Can you actually go to an eclipse? Wouldn’t you have to go to the sun, the moon, and the Earth? Aren’t you just going to see the results of the solar eclipse? At its climax it is two or three minutes of darkness in daytime. Spare me. I’ve had more than two or three minutes of darkness in daytime plenty of times. 

Did the hitchhiker’s TO THE ECLIPSE request mean, “Take me to the path of totality”? Our stranger may have wanted to go where the hottest (figuratively; these days “literally” means “figuratively”) solar-eclipse action was predicted to be.

Path of totality? Don’t even. I’ve been on a path of totality since forever. I don’t know anything short of totality. The path of totality is riddled with casualties. And they want to sell tickets to it?!? Gawd. On my metaphysical Google Maps, the Path of Totality is a highway with two lanes, marked All and None. It has few exits and no speed limits.

Speaking of highways, in retrospect I should have swerved to the shoulder, picked up the hitchhiker, and driven him as far as he wanted to go. I could have asked him about his own path of totality: Did he have one? Was he seeking one? Was he fleeing one? 

Oh, the places we’d go, the stories we’d trade!

plus one

Plus One

The first time I heard the term I was confused. My friend seemed to be using it solely in a business context.

“Would you care to be my plus one at dinner Friday? My company is hosting this ritzy affair,” he asked an attractive female mutual friend. I was overhearing the dialogue, so I did not pay it much mind.

Not having heard of “plus one,” I assumed by the context that it was a sales term. I figured it meant something like this translated into non-drummer, non-sales-quota jargon (which had briefly been my world in the Eighties), “Would you please, please pose as my Number One sales prospect worth $23,500 in potential weekly revenue at dinner Friday? Because most of my prospects in real life are minus one, or minus one to the tenth, but don’t tell my sales manager.”

That explains why my sales career was of brief duration. If the company enforced the draw against advance they claimed I owed, I’d be a shackled indentured servant to this day, decades later.

Plus one.

I took it as code for elite. Like “A Team And Then Some.”

For those of you among the cultural cognoscenti, you already know plus one refers to a friend, date, companion, or, um, escort, that one brings to an event if you are the invited guest. Some sources say it dates to 2004. Don’t upbraid me for living under a cultural rock. I don’t get out all that much.

It comes from the format that guest lists or invitations employ: Jane Doe + 1. It serves a number of social purposes, some of them awkward. It allows a host to invite exactly one half of a couple. Why? Who knows. Reasons abound. The couple may be openly on the verge of fracturing, or in an open relationship. One member of the couple might be serving time in the big house or in rehab or undergoing a transition that is still unacknowledged. In plain English, maybe the inviter(s) just don’t like one member of the couple and never did. This affords an excellent opportunity to prevent the drunken, wild boor from wrecking the event.

Then, of course, there’s the lonelyhearts angle. This demographic would bristle at being a plus one. For them, it would be an embarrassing admission of authenticity, independence, self-gratification, and the inexplicable absence of co-dependent misery, signified by a scarlet letter “S,” for solitude. The shame! Alternatively, others would jump at the chance to be a plus one, roaming socially unfettered at the event in question. Besides, being a guest of a guest might hold the promise of the tables being turned at the next social event requiring invitations.

From a purely monetary or practical standpoint, the role of plus one offers the chance to enjoy a free meal — and more! (as direct-mail advertisements vaguely enthuse). The “and more!” might mean anything from new friends to life partners — or new chances at co-dependence or relationship failure. Seen in this light, the decision to be a plus one, or not, is laden with limitless permutations, a cosmic rolling of the social dice.

One side of you might say: “Go for it!” while your other self says: “Are you freaking crazy?”

Devil or angel.

So now I know. Plus one does not refer to sales tactics, clothing size, fertility methods, supersized drinks, erectile dysfunction solutions, threesomes, or unexplored spiritual dimensions. (Disclaimer: Any reference to any real product, trademark, entity, or proprietary method is purely unintentional and coincidental.)

Happy plus-one-ing!

The Envelope, Please

Awards shows create a dramatic pause by having the emcee intone, “The envelope, please.” Further drama is created by hesitations and teases before the envelope is opened. The award nominees and their entourages nervously await the anticipated announcement. “And the award goes to . . . 

Call it the envelope of tension. The tension envelope.

Years ago, I was arrested by the sight of a sign on a commercial building seen from Interstate 80 near Hackensack-ack-ack-ack, New Jersey. It's on the left as you head toward the George Washington Bridge.

Tension Envelopes, it declares.

It long ago inspired my own inner pause and reflection. Namely: the world does not suffer from a dearth of tension envelopes, does it? Aren’t we enveloped by tensions at work, at home, on the road, and in our hearts? Our inner landscapes are dotted with these tension envelopes, both individually and collectively. They come in all sizes, shapes, and colors.

Is our envelope of tension paper-thin or stretchable and impermeable?  Who affixes postage to it so that we can mail that tension to anyone, near or far? That’s easy. I’m the one in charge of dispatching my very own, specially designed, jittery-filled packages to anyone of my own choosing. Sometimes I send my tension envelopes C.O.D. (collect on delivery; capacity on demand; chew on dis; come, on dude!; change or die).

How do you send your tension envelopes? And to whom?

And are they received as “warmly” as mine? [Insert ironic emoji.]

Somewhere in the oceanic, discursive writings of Marcel Proust, I encountered his observation that the human body is a "nervous envelope." In remembrance of such a thing past, I bent the upper corner of a page. I don't know which one. But I can’t argue with Monsieur Proust’s take. We live in this envelope that begs for relief and inner peace. Our nervous envelopes seek serenity or release, distraction or diversion.

If our tension envelopes are empty, what do we fill them with? (They wouldn’t be tension envelopes if they were totally empty; by definition some tension electrons must crackle and roam around or reside there.) The candidate tension-reducers list is familiar to any wanderer of the modern world: sex, drugs, alcohol, food, work, danger, gambling, anger, other people-places-things, you-name-it ad infinitum.   

As I type it, I realize my tension-envelope mitigation (TEM) list is skewed toward the negative. It doesn’t feel complete or whole; it doesn’t possess enough dimensions for the 3-D world.

I can’t seem to connect the dots or check off the right multiple-choice answers. I need your help. Work with me here.

An alternative, or parallel, parade of TEMs might include the following: meditation, mindfulness, prayer, walking, running, painting, sculpting, gardening, woodworking, weightlifting, yoga, pilates, massage, or doing the dishes.

Agree? (Add your own.)

But I have a sheepish confession to make. The second list sounds a tad boring compared to the first. I’m embarrassed to admit this.

Does that make me “less than”? Does it reveal a personality best left kept private?

Or does it merely make me One of Us?

It All Depends

We all have them. We all have those infinitesimal moments when if the event had gone another way, everything in our life — and that means everything — would be different. In his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” William Carlos Williams uses the phrase “so much depends.” Although as an English major I had undoubtedly studied the poem, it took on new meaning for me when a friend used the phrase “so much depends.” Her cancer was in remission at the time, or at least was manageable. I had asked her, “Are you in pain?” She answered, “No. So much depends…” and went on to recite the poem word for word. Her point was: whether I am in pain or not matters. So much depends on that. She added that one reading of the poem suggested that it refers to a child hovering between life and death. The poet was a doctor.

So much depends between this and that, between being here or somewhere else, between saying one thing or another, between seeing that oncoming truck before you turn or not.

The King James Version has it as “in the twinkling of an eye.”

So I never forgot my dear friend’s lesson, even though we went our separate ways.

I can readily draw up my own list of personal turning points balanced on the edge of a razor blade. I am told I started life that way, as a preemie. (Today, with advances in medicine and technology my entry into the world would be unremarkable.)

Family lore has me being nearly run over by my father in the backyard when I was five or six. Unbeknownst to my dad as he was backing up, I decided to bolt out of the car. Where did I go? Why? We will never know. My dad assumed the worst. My brother ran up the steps to tell Mom, “Dad ran over Paul!”

I was fine.

Somehow.

Whenever the story was retold at the dinner table, Dad would say, “Took ten years off my life.”

And who is to say otherwise?

Some moments get lost in the tides of time, as if they are less significant with the passage of days, months, and years.

The concussive wind of a Manhattan taxicab zooming by as I daydreamed and nearly drifted off the curb.  

Falling asleep at the wheel only to be awakened by the tires rumbling on a rough surface.

Decades ago, driving drunk and not remembering it.

Which illustrates the interactive nature of this utter powerlessness. In other words, others are inescapably involved in our seemingly random, remote choices.

Turning blue, choking on meat, only to find the Heimlich maneuver my wife of that time employed didn’t work — until she said “stop fighting me.”

In a blog post years ago, I coined an amusing term for this phenomenon:

or - chasm - n. The immeasurable distance between one choice and another.

I labeled it a noun, but these infinite moments fraught with fruition or finality have their own grammar. They are gerunds and participles and most of all infinitives.

They bear the indelible signature of choice and mystery.

These moments are the “Either/Or” of Soren Kierkegaard, "The Road Not Taken" of Robert Frost.

Name these nano-pinpricks as you see fit: choice, destiny, fate, will, coincidence, providence, or Providence.

You have yours; I have mine.

Attention must be paid.

Reading Second Skins

We sat in tiny chairs at tables made for kids. In the school library, the tops of tables and the seats of chairs were closer to the floor than what adults typically experience. We paired off, a dozen adults and a dozen first and second graders. We were reading. We read to each other. The adult would say a word that the child stumbled upon. The child would repeat it.

Some children wrote letters on erasable white boards. One could hear the mysterious soundings-out of letters and their combinations, the gentle coaxings and coachings that shed light and pattern. Sight words, flash cards, stapled pages we called books. Voices blending. Encouragement. Ears yearning.

One boy, an eight-year-old second grader, reached out to touch my gray hair, grown over the ears in wintertime, straight and thinning. The boy, polite and energetic and eager, seemed baffled and amazed at my hair's texture, its novelty. Then he looked at my hand. This was not our first encounter in the school library; this was after a few months or more of reading sessions that were not quite reading yet but were tilled soil for later bloom. He observed the veins in my aging hand, noticing the blue riverine pattern on these hands holding the stapled pamphlets we use as books.

"My hand is a different color," the young fellow stated matter-of-factly.

The way he said those words, their surprise and frankness and tenderness, caught me off-guard. It arrested me. For a few beats, I didn’t know how to respond but feared no response would be a missed opportunity — for what I was not sure.

"Yes, I see that. Isn't it wonderful?" I quickly managed with a blend of his matter-of-factness and my mildly suppressed enthusiasm. We then turned to tackle another pamphlet, a level C or D “book.” The chorus of learning filled the room.

Upon much later reflection, I was grateful to my young reading partner for his honesty, authenticity, and directness. I recalled a moment decades ago in high school. Our teacher, a Catholic priest of the most progressive leanings, was commenting on Jesus’ oft quoted, “Suffer (allow) little children to come unto me and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” The only lesson I can summon some fifty years later is that Father Giuliani underscored and celebrated two qualities of children: simple and direct.   

Simple and direct. Yes indeed.

“My hand is a different color.”

A child’s uncomplicated observation of fact laden with a history unknown to me, just as mine was unknown to him.

Had I missed a deeper and more cogent opportunity? I knew the two of us were not about to engage in a candid discussion of Race in America. And I sought to avoid either preachiness or stilted speech. (Truth be told, I thought none of this. I had no time. Such considerations — and zillions more — rocketed through my brain before I uttered words.)

Those who parse such encounters might take me to task for these musings; they might posit a racial construct in my very questions.

So be it.

It’s what I had at that moment. In a country whose citizens rarely converse across racial lines, one to one, over bread or coffee or wine, it’s all we had.

The poet W.H. Auden wrote, “Love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.”

It’s all we’ve got.