My Time as a Human

The rhythmic thumping of our running shoes hitting pavement kept time as barbs on the barbed wire fence clicked by beside us. My friend Zeim and I wound our way through miles of moonlit streets training for our high school cross country team. As we ran we talked about running and cars and then, suddenly, he laid it on me. It was a statement so profound and life changing for nerds like us that it should have been followed by a thunderclap. “This year we’re going to homecoming,” he said, “and we’re going… with girls.”

We laughed at first and broke stride for a second but the knot in my stomach was set. What girls? How would I find one? If I did, what was I supposed to do with her during this sacred ritual of American life? My complete lack of a television set had not prepared me for the rite of passage to come.

Mysteriously, I found myself at a dance later that year with an adorable redhead who had an unfortunate last name that rhymed with “yard”. She was willing to look past the David Byrne sized sports jacket I’d borrowed from my dad and wrap up the night with me as the sole pair of slow dancers still on the floor in a particularly well-publicized moment. It was the same jacket I later wore to MC the homecoming rally and a friend of hers couldn’t help but raz me with, “I’ll bet you’re wearing that same thing to homecoming, aren’t you?” I blushed, but could say nothing, because it was true.

[ed. What the... how did I get convinced to MC homecoming?! I remember cue cards, terror, and badly improvised jokes but not how a shy geek like me ended up on that stage in the first place!]

My ride at the time was a luxurious 1974 Chevy Chevette. I had pried off all of the exterior trim, added fuzzy seats and a cheap cassette stereo, and hung a toy fish from the rearview mirror. In conversation I called it a “‘Vet” and in the town where I grew up, people quickly made the wrong assumption and shrugged. I spent all afternoon shining it until the baby blue paint gleamed and then collapsed exhausted into bed.

There is a unique form of pain, a powerful crushing force to which I’ve become accustomed when waking. It hits like a sledgehammer to the gut and arrives with the instantaneous realization that something extremely important has been forgotten. At that time in my life it was usually homework, but this sledgehammer was in the form of a flower: the corsage.

The store where I’d reserved this crucial piece of the homecoming puzzle had long since closed and only the diligent love of a mother was powerful enough to repair this: my first blunder. She found an open grocery store while I showered like a panicked rabbit and I picked them up on my way to arrive late for the first inspection.

Maybe the extra time was just what they needed, or maybe they’d been waiting for hours, but her entire extended family was crushed into her tiny living room waiting to meet me. I did the rounds of handshaking and photographing as quickly and politely as possible and passed well enough to get us out and bolting for the restaurant… which was full. I only knew of one restaurant, as my family didn’t do much eating out, and in the few times we’d gone I’d never had to learn about “reservations”. My first experience was a tough one, as we had a flower-wilting 45 minute wait ahead of us.

She was a good sport about it, giggling about the whole thing and perfectly willing to partake in another very American suburban ritual: driving around and talking. The thing about suburban areas is that, in order to make every home feel like an isolated pod in the wilderness, streets are intentionally designed to meander and end and in no way form a coherent grid. The thing about suburban houses is that they are built virtually identically, be they tiny ranch houses or McMansions pressing up against their lot boundaries like overweight gentlemen in tight suits. The thing about me is that, when talking, my taxed brain switches to the “survival only” driving plan. Within twenty minutes we were hopelessly lost.

This fact didn’t occur to me until another twenty minutes later when we both realized we were already late for the restaurant a second time. Fortunately, two hours later when we arrived, the place was nearly empty and so there was no trouble seating us for an extremely tasty Chinese food meal.

The official policy stated that after a certain time in the evening, no one was allowed to come back into the high school gym. The vice principle was sitting out front to enforce this very rule and he made me to run through the whole story. Fortunately, he also knew me and was willing to let us in with a grin and a shake of his head. This impressed my date and I got a few points there, but in reality I owed yet another round to my ever-present blessing and curse: to be known as the lovable, blundering kid with promise. We hurried in to see what was left.

Right before a cell divides the DNA duplicates split and move to either side of the cell, forming two separate nuclei. This is what it looked like in the gymnasium when we arrived. Broken streamers dangled like DNA strands from the ceiling while boys clustered on one side and girls on the other. Apparently the guys had become “boring” and “clingy” and so the girls were done with them. This meant that, as the untainted newcomer, I got to dance with all of my friend’s dates as they gushed about much better I was than them; so much less clingy and annoying. They went on and on as I held each one tight, swaying to the music and nodding.

Afterwards we went to a diner where the girl squad, in one quick move made possible only by complete teenaged girl mind meld, saturated a booth. The boys were stunned for a moment, then shrugged and grabbed another booth where we immediately began shooting straw wrappers at each other. Despite sticking to her crew, the girl with the unfortunate name made a point of swapping glances and grins with me between the tables and I knew that everything was going to work out fine. To my delight her braces were no trouble at all. The kiss at the end of the night was breathtaking and leaves me, to this day, transported by the smell of new leather jackets and dry fall leaves to a cute redheaded girl and a time when I was a blundering kid with promise.

Photos link to photographer’s sites on Flickr.

[ed. Wow. How sad that during my search there were so many more pictures of soldiers returning from Iraq than of people dressed for homecoming dances.]

Woah. This website is both fascinating and… a little evil. (In the same way that all advertising intel on how to exploit the masses feels a bit evil.) That aside, their claim about millennials, true or not, is worth some thought. The idea is that kids have been too coddled, and now the trend is to let children run free and learn from their mistakes. There’s one story about a parent who left their kid in a department store and let them find their own way home. Maybe that’s what I ran into at Maker Faire last weekend?

When I was a kid my dad used to blindfold me and drive out into the countryside. After an excruciatingly long time he would pull over to the side of the road and park. When I could finally take off the blindfold I would look around at some completely unfamiliar farmland or suburb. “OK,” he’d say, “tell me where to go to get home.”

This would typically take place on a Sunday after we’d left church and so I’d have all afternoon to wander aimlessly, in desperate hopes of catching my dad either wincing or grinning out of the corner of my eye so that I’d know where to turn. Sometimes I got lucky and spotted a landmark, but often the whole affair ended in shame and exasperation.

When I built my hot rod Miata years later it was in part so that I could make faster U-turns and catch exit ramps at the last second, to make up for my still completely inept sense of direction. My ability to get around hasn’t improved much, but I have adapted by learning to be comfortable on long, meandering drives across town. I remember one particularly spectacular high school homecoming where I drove my date around, completely lost, for several hours.

We did a lot of trekking when I was growing up and so a similar scenario played out at the campfire each night. My dad would hand me a single match and say, “here you are. You’re trapped alone in the wilderness. All you have is this one match…” I would carefully build a little teepee of twigs and arrange the heavier sticks nearby. Putting the match head against a stick I’d lean in close and then run it across the wood. My body was as tense as that matchstick and I’d struggle to hold it just right so that it would get enough traction to light, but not snap in half. Each time I put a little more pressure on the matchstick and it put a little more pressure on me. By the second try I would hold my breath and try not to shake. Suddenly, with a sharp stzzzzzzzt, fire appeared. In a panic I would immediately swing it in towards the pile of sticks, only to see the flame vanish into a thin thread of smoke that wandered up from my hand and away.

My dad would sigh and let his shoulders drop for a second, and then reach into the waterproof film canister for another match. “OK, here you are. You’re trapped alone in the wilderness and all you have is this one match…”

On this front I’ve been a little more successful later in life. I’ve taken some survival training and at least have the basic skills to start a fire with a pair of sticks. The disappointment I felt at not being able to meet those early expectations was always brutal, though, and I think I was still shaking that when taking the class and expecting that somehow this was something I was supposed to be able to do. I think the compromise here is in giving a kid a few pointers and the expectation that they shouldn’t be able to succeed the first time, but that they can learn. This gives them more room to fail and feel exhilarated when they finally do succeed.

Click on image to find photographer’s flickr page

Lisa Makes Soap!

The cost of my plane ticket to San Francisco was a weekend helping my friend Lisa of Feto Soap teach hoards of eager human young how to make soap. We set up a booth on the grassy square at the center of Maker Faire and lined it with hand made soap examples and a pile of her fetus soap and razor blade soap (for the emo kids).

Everyone who came through had a chance to make their own soap with a choice of mold, color, fragrance, glitter and embedded horse head, spider, or other random toy. The frogs did really well, as did glitter covered horses. When things got rolling, they didn’t quit. In the end more than 150 bars of soap happened while Lisa and I were furiously chopping at our 25 lb block of soap, melting soap, measuring soap, showing tiny kids how to use a pipette, extracting colorant bottles from hot soap when misjudging a young human’s motor skills…

People’s choices said some interesting things about the changing demographics of the San Francisco area. In Austin, there were dozens of people asking for “natural soap base” and extremely concerned about what was in it. Lisa brought out a huge pile of it just in case and we debated quite a bit about how much to bring. I felt like not only would the event be larger, but San Francisco’s being be the accredited hub of all hippiness would mean even more concern about “naturalness” etc. As it turns out, I gave out two cards with ingredient lists and not a single person muttered the word, “natural”.

Exhausted by the first half day, I welcomed the moment’s peace that came with a trip to the bathroom to wash the soap base off of pipettes and stirring sticks. The beauty of washing them being, of course, that they were already covered in soap. This worked out wonderfully when a tall hip looking guy in shades walked in covered in yellow paint. He had been teaching screen printing in another craft area. The paint on his hands was so thick that even though I was pouring my leftover soap over them every few minutes, the only stuff he was only able to get off were the smudges that covered the sink, mirror and wall around him. “Oh man…” he muttered, looking around helplessly and holding his yellow hands out in front of him like a surgeon. I imagined similar moments of wreckage were happening in parallel all over the faire grounds as various mad science projects came face to face with the reality of big crowds and untethered children.

By the end of the adventure I had completely forgotten how to stand up. I had a few minutes to run through all of Maker Faire and catch my favorite fire breathing robots, amazing screen print design work and kite-based remote photography. In one hall an old trailer housed a series of restored pinball machines and here I found it, my old friend and nemesis: The Cyclone.

Several times in my life I’ve made an active decision to get into something for the very sake of getting into it. I wanted to understand the excitement about sports and so I threw myself into keeping up with the Chicago Blackhawks because hockey was what I already loved to play. Of course once I got into it, I loved it and used to follow the games on radio. I did the same thing with pinball, and between classes I went to the student union to play the game I’d carefully chosen to obsess about. It was a carnival game built before there were digital displays, but had voices built in that would shout, “riiiiide the cyclone!” and, “riiiiiide the ferris wheel!” It had this gloriously satisfying rumble when the ball shot up and around the ramp. From halfway across the room, I heard it call me.

I ran up to the machines on the side, my heart pounding. “Hurry hurry hurry. Step right up!” There it was in all its orange carny glory! I stood behind the little boy working the machine and tried to remember all of my best moves. He lost the game and started the next. He was playing really badly and talking and shouting to himself while wildly batting at the flipper buttons. After the third restart I walked up and said, “hey, mind if I take this next game?” He jerked away and wrapped himself even tighter around the machine shouting, “come on!” as he continued to beat the buttons mercilessly and pretend I didn’t exist. I stood paralyzed, frozen without a set of behavioral options to choose from.

When the kids had been coming through the line waiting to make soap, they may have been impatient but they were eager to learn and were fully aware that we were the gatekeepers of the personal soap making experience they so craved. When I told them not to pour all of the glitter onto the table or use only drop from the pipette, they listened. It was too easy.

The thing about kids is that they often exhibit the same behavior seen in adult human beings… the ones we jail or fine. Yet somehow the same greed, selfishness and violence are tolerated or even seen as adorable in children. Worse still, in trying to interact with them I am bound by a mysterious undefined set of guidelines set by parents I likely don’t even know. Any move I make might be in direct violation of these guidelines and lead to outrage and perhaps even incarceration. Some parents insist on physical discipline. Others on verbal discipline. Still others on elaborate, carefully worded reasoning.

Being California I had to assume latter and, not having the energy for either hand to hand combat or a battle of wits with a six year old, I decided it was better that I just leave. I felt defeated and irritated with myself for not knowing these games better, but the idea of having this kid’s screaming bring down the hammer for my having abused or mistreated a child was too loathsome.

In the end this defeat simply left me determined to learn a few of the socially acceptable tricks. The rest of the event, while physically exhausting, had been quite fun and seeing small humans ratcheted up into a creative frenzy gave me hope for the future. TV is dying. People are learning at a young age to seek out interactive and creative amusements and the growth of Maker Faire exemplifies the trend. I can only hope that in our robot-laden future, most will be built at home!

Kai Makes Soap!

There was no way I could leave San Francisco without having some kind of a supervegan meal and so we found a religious commune of sorts full of beaming people serving dahl with zing and chick peas with zang. Zikk got into a healthy rant about the fact that we are all Monkeys and I gleefully fed it with my own philosophies on the subject. Yes, we are all monkeys munching bananas, but once we have food there’s nothing more or less valuable about throwing feces at one another and spending our days talking about nuances of artistic expression.

Maslow’s Hierarchy keeps coming up lately, perhaps because whenever I talk about my recent trip to India where I was surrounded by people with real needs, the Americans around me uncomfortably check their fussing about music or complaint about modern art. I keep trying to point out that just because some people don’t have the luxury of spare time and energy to devote to philosophy doesn’t make its pursuit any less legitimate. It’s what we do. We’re monkeys.

Something that always astounds me about air travel is that, well, we call it “air travel”. We forget something amazing… it’s flight! I look out the window and suddenly we’re rushing along the ground at incredible speed, and then there is a jerk and we are pulled up into the air! We’re flying! Beside me a guy in a business suit is trying to get coffee and a hipster is futsing with an iPod. Can’t they see that we’re experiencing something incredible?! This is a moment humans have dreamed of for thousands of years! They jealously watched birds overhead and dreamed, planned, and fell off of countless cliffs in desperate attempts to join them. Now we complain about peanut allergies and turbulence.

Of course, once I got over the fact that I was in a two ton tin can floating over the earth, I had time to study Go and the chance to meet a cool actress. I really appreciated her deliberate approach to her craft and we talked about the similarities between the mental states required for writing and acting. When I write fiction, I often have the experience best described by Ray Bradbury. He would go to sleep thinking about his characters, and when he woke up they would all be talking in his head and he would write down what they said.

While I don’t always have this immediate an experience, stories and characters always take on a life of their own. The better I get to know them and their stories and voices, the more they take over and tell me what they will and will not do. The story wanders off in new directions and I have to be open to where it wants to go, and to craft it into a coherent tale once I’ve felt it out. In many ways this process involves becoming (in the method acting sense) these characters for a while. It also requires the very immediate, open, empty mind of the improv actor who responds immediately to each new idea or change as it occurs. Because each new fact that is revealed changes the context of the story, it can’t be written out in any one actor’s head beyond the current moment. (This stems from the “yes and” rule of improv.)

And so I’ve returned to Austin, another flying, philosophizing monkey typing furiously in the dark in hope that other monkeys will nod or spit some kind of emotional response to my analysis of my experience. There are certainly worse things I could be doing with my time.