My Time as a Human

Tofu Pad Thai appeared as though by magic this afternoon at Thai Kitchen. I was already deep in conversation with Ann Graham, the co-founder of First Night. When the first event took place on New Years of 2006, I was so excited about the ant car, pirate ship of puppets, segue ballet, poetry and performance that filled downtown Austin with families that I wrote to the Austin Chronicle to publicly sing its praises. Despite massive crowds and universal praise, by the end of the second year their budget had been slashed and Ann had quit. While First Night continues to this day, I had to know how and why this story ended the way it had.

Most people realize the value of learning from past mistakes, but are often too rushed or lazy to put time into checking history before making decisions. Additionally some would rather make old mistakes again on their own. There was a hilarious slogan that trickled down from the top at my old software company. “We don’t use best practices, we invent them.” Pride meant that the wheel was held up before us time and again as a triumph of in-house creativity.

Some of this is human nature. When I was a kid and told not to touch the hot lawnmower, I still had to try it. There was no way I could truly internalize the knowledge without the intense pain that sent me screaming and hopping in circles around the back yard for the next hour. After that, I knew how hot a lawnmower exhaust could get. I believed.

When the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project failed many years ago, my father had been working on it for eleven years of his life. An important advance in human scientific understanding collapsed in a morass of political squabbling and pork barreling as dazed scientists looked on in awe, their ability to understand the laws of nature that shape our universe useless against the inconceivably irrational complexity of governmental and military bureaucracy.

In the months that followed there was plenty of finger pointing, but ultimately people retired, moved on, and began the process of forgetting. I wanted to dive in and start doing interviews a few years later. It was one of the most fascinating human dramas I’d seen in my lifetime and my documentarian urges were already building. Sadly it was felt that my association with someone who was deeply involved would just stir up the wrong kind of trouble. An author who had written a book about the cold fusion debacle was approached about chronicling this story for history. He was interested, thought it was critical that it be done, but couldn’t write it because it just wouldn’t sell.

And so more lessons sink into the sands of time as a fresh batch of humans struggle up the next dune. Maybe we’re children that have to know. Maybe the rules really do change and need to be constantly retested. (Modern electric lawnmowers are not nearly as hot.) I just wish there were more value placed on collecting this information for those of us who have already burned themselves a few times and are ready to skip a few steps ahead.

As always, click the photo to reach the photographer’s site on Flickr.com

Losing a hand always sounded to me like the perfect opportunity to learn to play trumpet. No matter which hand you lost, the other one could easily manipulate the three valves. The physical act of blasting lungs full of air through the thing also sounded like great therapy. Kind of like a more socially acceptable form of screaming. Earlier this week my friend found out that she may forever have limited use of her hand and arm and, worse, constant pain. Suddenly my many musings over the years became pertinent.

I’ve tended to think in terms of creative outlets first when I’ve thought about what I would do if I became disabled in some way. Blindness always seemed like a good time to become a guitar master. Deafness would be about photography and illustration. Losing limbs would mean picking other instruments, or focusing on singing. I looked up Curtis Mayfield a while back on a whim, wondering what had happened to him. It turns out that he had been hit by a falling stage light and paralyzed. He continued to write music by singing into a microphone.

The thing that I neglected to consider is the link between mind and body. Imagining myself happily trumpeting away ignored the massive psychological impact of having no arm. My body feeds my mental state, and even what I think about, in a whole variety of ways from adrenaline to raging hormones.

Certainly hormones and adrenaline have more immediate and obvious effects like the fight or flight reflex. Pumping bad food into my system makes me weaker and mentally dull. Not eating makes me cranky. Injury, though, has a unique effect in that it can be both physically painful and have psychological implications. When I broke my foot I became weak, incapable, shy, and fearful of the world.

Recently I met with a woman to discuss a documentary project about, well, her. She discovered that she had arthritis when she was in her early twenties. It slowly worked through her system until she had to have both hips and both knees replaced. Because it is abnormal to get this form of arthritis until people get older, her insurance company refused to pay for it.

All of her energy was spent learning how to walk again. She had to start all over again from scratch doing something she didn’t remember learning. Compress butt muscle. Twitch calf. Each muscle was a piece of the whole movement and each required individual attention and complete focus. She was psychologically drained and went into reclusion and depression.

After years of work, she has returned to the world and wants to push it as far as it can go. She still has a difficult time walking, but that isn’t enough. She wants to learn to dance.

In effect, her very real experience directly contradicted everything I had thought I might do. Instead of finding activities that fit within the new scope of her limits of movement, she is pushing singlemindedly towards the most difficult task she can find. I asked her if it was a quest for normalcy or the desire for a higher mountain to climb and she wasn’t sure. I’m sure it’s hard to know.

This daily column/blog has been quite a ride so far. I’ve been experimenting with the format and content a bit. I’ve also been trying to work out a schedule that both stays within my one hour time limit and doesn’t leave me squinting and scrambling to find keys late into the night after a long day.

One of the first conventions I picked up early in this process was that of using pseudonyms for people who appear in the stories. All the cool kids who write columns, articles, and public blogs use them. I finally decided that, to be safe, I should too. I realized that there was some danger of revealing something about someone that they didn’t want made public. Of course, I couldn’t just use pseudonyms alone (not cool enough) and had to work out this whacky scheme of using only names starting with Z, which is certain to kill me when I hit the 150th name and have to make it up at 2:00am.

There are other advantages to the Z names. If I can’t use full names, two people named “Frank” would cause confusion. If you like what someone you hear about says or does, you can always do a search in the blog for more stories involving that “character”. Z names are also inherently cool.

In practice, people are forever outing themselves by posting a comment with their real names. Recently, it went even further when my friend asked me why I was so good at attributing the photographers who’s photos I use on the site, but hadn’t given her credit for the web link she sent in!

In fact, let it be known that Throw Them Into the Deep End was spawn of a link sent by my dear friend Wendy Spies.

So now the conundrum: would people rather see themselves in print, or not have readers know that they’ve willingly spent time with me? Would I rather have people bummed that I used a fake name or suing me for using a real one? Fortunately I only have a few hundred readers at the moment and I’m not a mudslinger so chances of offending anyone are pretty slim. I have, however, become somewhat attached to the Z names. I think I’ll roll with this for a little while longer and see what shakes out.

[ed. Yes, this is a post begging for comments.]

Austin Texas is almost completely out of glass. Last night around 1:00 AM I was trying to finish up my next blog post when yet another hard rain, typical lately, started pounding on the house around me. When the hail kicked in I just let it ride, enjoying the typewriter hammering that began to immerse me and letting it fuel my furious writing pace as I tried to get the post out and get to sleep. Then it got louder. And louder. It was far more intense than the previous few storms over the last weeks and I decided it was time to go check it out. I headed for the living room, grabbing a flashlight on the way (instincts!) and by then the sound was deafening and water was rushing in through the tops of all of our ancient window frames. Housemates poured down the stairs as the power cut out and we all backed away from the windows. The floor around the front door and windows was soaked and everyone kept warning each other to watch out for glass. Finally the onslaught quieted, ultimately receding into the night. The rain continued to sprinkle lightly as though a child looking up in wide-eyed innocence to say, “what? I didn’t do anything.”

Stories of heroism followed. Zuuv had covered his girlfriend and pulled a blanket over her head just minutes before the windows above them exploded inward and sent shards of glass across the room. In a torrent of rain he lifted her up and carried her into the closet.

The carnage was fairly impressive, with sixteen windows broken out of our old house. The hail and glass shot completely across most of the rooms where it made its way in. Throughout the experience I kept having the slowly building sensation that things were not typical, somehow worse than I was used to, and that I should be reacting more intensely to protect my friends. By the end my brain had fired through a complete list of all of my survival equipment and their locations. Backpacks, flints, knives, flashlight backups and stoves.

I can only imagine that this slow build, this sense that things really can’t really be that bad is what the people in Burma or Katrina might have felt. As our earth’s climate continues to shift and ultimately begins to make these events more common, maybe we’ll be better able to react. Being mentally aware that, yes, things could be bad enough that we need to head for the roof and a canoe will perhaps make us more skilled at survival and lessen some of the impact of these events.

The last image cemented in my brain before heading off to sleep was that of Zanson, returned to his laptop, using the final bits of battery power and a candle to finish his PhD dissertation that was due the following day. I’m happy to say that despite the storm he got everything finished and printed the next morning.

Note: The photos here were about all I could get in total darkness with a flash. These little ice monsters from the sky were huge!