A Musing

 It was a ritual of sorts, between my brothers and I, to talk about all the ways that things could go wrong on a particular amusement park ride. We would have this conversation in line for the attraction. And not in our "indoor voices." The chats varied a bit depending on the visit and the time of day, but the gist of the discussion tended to center on the percentages at play. The number of times a certain car on a certain track had made its rapid trip from point A to point B without incident just raised the potential for carnage. Each time all passengers had returned safely from their ride automatically increased the chances for the next car to be the last. 

This is the kind of thing in which my brothers and I take amusement. I suppose we figure that the majority of time we spend in amusement parks is waiting in lines, so why not generate some entertainment while languishing in the queue? 

These memories came flooding back as I read the account of a fourteen year old kid who fell off a ride in Orlando. And died. The most crass response to this news would be to suggest that the odds caught up to young Tyre Sampson. He paid for his ticket and took a ride on an instrument of gravity enhancement called "Freefall." An artsy enough appellation for a machine that could just as easily be called "Plummet to your death," but the lines might not be as long. Investigations into accidents like this are always a bit of a mixed bag, since part of the interaction is putting your mortal existence on the line with the hope that all those bars and harnesses will keep something truly awful from happening. The most dire consequence witnessed by those on and around the contraption is one of regurgitation of churros. A hose can generally take care of those messes. No need for paramedics. 

Zooming out just a little from this tragedy, it might be important to mention that this accident occurred at ICON Park, eight miles away from one of the Happiest Places On Earth, Disneyworld. My son likes to repeat an urban legend about the Disney lands, insisting that no one has ever been pronounced dead within the gates of the Magic Kingdom(s). This makes a great story, since the spin is that Disney folks take great pains to move the corpses to a location just beyond park property to certify the demise of their visitors. While this may be the case in some situations, there are still plenty of stories about how all those hydraulics and large chunks of metal can go astray. Considering the time, money and care invested in guest safety, it is in their best interest to keep the body count low. 

Of course, once you slide down the scale a little to the second or third tier venues like ICON, my guess is that some of those precautions might get a little more lax, and the time between trainings and inspections stretched to something a little more on par with their bottom line. Which brings me to the scariest bit of banter my brothers and I used to exchange: waiting for our turn for a ride at one of those parking lot carnivals that used to pop up just ahead of the state inspectors in K-Mart parking lots. Some of the operators of these external stimulators had a few more teeth than they had fingers, but always seemed to be missing a few, instilling patrons with nothing more than terror. Because any ride you can walk away from is a fun one, right? 

The Big Wake

 So, the opposite of "woke" would be asleep. Do I have that right? I guess then it would be important for all of those nominally in charge to be "woke" rather than asleep at the switch. 

The Bobbsey Twins of the U.S. House of Representatives were at it again this week. Lauren Boebert of Colorado tossed this little explosion out on Twitter: "We require people to be 21 to purchase alcohol beverages, and 21 to purchase tobacco products. Why is it so unreasonable to require people to reach a certain level of maturity before making life-altering decisions about their sexuality and identity?" I am sure that her tiny little mind meant this to be a rhetorical question, not imagining that anyone would have anything but blind acceptance for her "wisdom." Part of me wishes I knew all sorts of salacious details about Ms. Boebert's adolescence, like when she had her first beer. Or when she sneaked a smoke. Or when she lost her virginity. There is a much larger part of me that cringes at that thought, so you'll excuse me if we move on. Maybe she has lived a life free of question, curiosity and doubt. Maybe she has been able to follow the narrow path she describes herself and truly can't imagine the challenge of growing up anything but straight, white and god-fearing.

If that's the case, how can she claim to be a "representative" of anyone who hasn't quietly in a room, worshiping her second amendment rights and waiting for the next imbecilic notion to creep into that space between her ears?

Which brings us naturally to Marjorie Taylor Greene, who went after one of her favorite targets this week after David Hogg suggested that a license should be required for purchasing a gun. Her royal witlessness responded, "We have one, it’s called the Second Amendment. Also, you should try hanging out with actual deer hunters. It will help you learn to be more masculine and you will appreciate how we will get our food supply when Biden’s inflation makes buying food unaffordable." If it seems like there is a lot to unpack there, remember that Ms. Taylor Greene has been chasing after Mister Hogg for some time now, trying to - well, it's unclear what exactly she is trying to do. She has succeeded in harassing a survivor of a mass shooting, so maybe we'll just leave it at that. The suggestion that Hogg should try hanging out with real deer hunters is a very thinly veiled shot at his masculinity. Suggesting that only "real men" kill deer. Queer or not, you are still required by state law to purchase a license to hunt deer. Which may still be an affordable way to skirt the high price of meat generated by Joe Biden's inflation. The inflation he is responsible for because of supply chain issues that began two years ago. During a global pandemic.

And then there's Madison Cawthorn. The youngest member of Congress. And perhaps the most un-woke human to appear anywhere, let alone the House of Representatives. In a tirade that is ostensibly his brand, young Madison provided his own definition of what a woman is: “XX chromosomes, no tallywacker.” This was his way of clarifying a question put to Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson last week by Senator Marsha Blackburn. For the record, Judge Brown Jackson replied, "I'm not a biologist." And quite obviously, neither is Madison Cawthorn. 

That sound you hear is the untimely and unfortunate sound sleep of at least two of our nation's "leaders." Wake up, America.

The Truth Is

 Maybe I've been going at this all wrong. My bachelor's degree is in creative writing. And I'm a teacher. Some might suggest that the easiest jump would be to become a creative writing teacher. To this I would have to reply, "Thank you, no." During my undergraduate career I encountered a great many creative writing instructors, the majority of whom were miserable because rather than spending their days at cafes in Paris and staring out the window of their studio, they were lugging around satchels full of other people's works-in-progress while listening to and reading all manner of feeble attempts at what these teachers wished they were doing themselves. 

Again: Thank you, no. 

Instead I believe it might be time to embark on a new career: Professor of made-up stuff. That first thing is taken care of easily enough. The doctorate I received from an imaginary school with pretend accolades should serve as my entree into a great many institutes of "higher learning." As for my curriculum, well that may be even easier. All I need is the faintest whiff of believability and I am home free. I could teach election security and the dangers of artificial intelligence, for example. Did you know that ten of the last twelve mid-term elections were decided by margins so small that all they needed was one misplaced decimal point to swing them in either direction? No? Perhaps because I just made it up. 

See what I mean?

Or maybe I could focus on our healthcare system. There are only two companies that produce insulin here in the United States, and they both use stem cells from harvested from unborn children sold on the dark web. I'll bet you didn't know that, did you? How could you? I just made it up. I tell you, it's like a license to print money!

Speaking of that, were you aware that half of the world's billionaires are no longer living on earth? These new tech giants have all moved their operations off-planet to avoid paying terrestrial taxes and the benefits of zero gravity have helped them make unexpected gains in the newly formed galactic crypto markets. 

I know. It's not true, but that shouldn't stop you from believing it. Don't miss my series of YouTube videos about the advantages of keeping your lunch meat in the ground next to your vegetables until they are harvested just moments before consumption. Omni-grazing: the next big thing. 

"Facts are only good for making money." You know who said that first? I did! I should have thought of this years ago.

Or maybe I did.

Stuck

 On the first day of April, just a few days ago, Alameda County reported just one death related to COVID-19. This was good news since just a couple of months ago the average daily death toll was hovering around fifteen. This relief from misery may be the reason my wife looked at me askance when I suggested we head on up to the local Safeway to get our second booster. More shots? Why would we need more shots when we're doing so well?

I reflected on this. For a moment or two. I was just beginning my spring vacation, and the potential for running into any large waves of virus would necessarily be limited by the extreme lack of intermittently masked eight year olds. I was, in effect, heading back into quarantine. Two years after that first lockdown. But I heard the CDC call for those of us fifty and up to present our shoulders for yet another vaccination. President Biden got his. Patton Oswalt got his. I want to keep up with those guys. 

And there's this: Now would be a particularly ridiculous time to fall off the program. The first shot had me waiting four hours in a socially distanced line reminiscent of the one for an infectious ride on Space Mountain. The second came just a few weeks later at the same location, but it was like I had a FastPass, since I was already in the system. When the call went out for a booster, I was able to schedule a time at a nearby CVS, and I ended up waiting longer after being my dose for those potential after-effects than I did driving over and sitting down. On April Fool's Day, I scored back to back appointments for my wife and I to get jabbed for the fourth time. Three for her, since her initial dose was of the Johnson & Johnson variety. There was a certain matter-of-fact familiarity with the pharmacist who asked on which side we would like to be stuck. He backed up and apologized for his needle rhetoric. "On which arm would you like to receive treatment?" 

Much better. Again, the time we spent roaming around the aisles looking for an after-vax treat was much longer than the wait to be injected. My wife chose a pomegranate juice, high in antioxidants. I picked a Hershey bar, high in almonds. Later that evening, our arms were a little sore, but we didn't have COVID. We had made it through another day without dying from that dread disease. 

Why did I go through the hassle? 

That one person who did die on April the first. 

Better Or Worse

 Recently, over dinner, I confessed to my wife my longstanding fear of getting my eye test wrong. Not the letters themselves. I try my very best. It's those moments when the doctor is making all those adjustments to the phoropter, asking those all important questions: Better? Worse? Number one? Number two? It is during this interrogation that I feel my heart begin to beat faster as I try to make all the correct discernments regarding the lenses being flipped into and out of my line of vision. I understand that the doctor is trying to find just the right set of optics for my tired old eyes. But this is for my prescription. It will go down on my permanent record. I don't want to be stuck with the wrong glasses until I make it back to that chair once again.

You might think that someone who has been wearing corrective lenses since he was five years old that this experience would become more or less a formality. Starting way back in Kindergarten, when I was first diagnosed with a "lazy eye," the care and feeding of my sight-bulbs has been a source of mild trauma for me. This began with the patching of my good eye, and the use of drops to try and get that weak one to live up to its stronger neighbor on the other side of my head. That never happened, and so I became the bespectacled one of three sons. As a child who often found things with his enormous head, there were many trips to the optometrist to get my mangled glasses bent back into usable shape, and my frame style remained essentially unchanged for all those years because we had a volume discount on left and right temples that seemed to snap off every few weeks. 

And all this time, I have never imagined that through some combination of exercise and patience that I might someday reclaim all the sight that I could have without any correction. Surely all the times someone has snatched the glasses off my face and asked if I could see them, I have been able to answer truthfully, "Yes." It is not as if all the light in the world winks out the moment that my face is free of sight assistance. Nor does the world swim into an indistinct blur. It is as if the eye doctor has just twisted the nob to a not quite so good combination of lenses. I have, on a few very rare occasions gone for more than a day without glasses. I do not ever, as my wife does on a relatively frequent basis, lose my glasses. I have misplaced them now and again, experiencing that zen disruption of needing my glasses to find my glasses, but knowing it's really still a memory issue, not one of sight. Which is better, I think. Not worse. 

After all these years, there are still lingering questions tossed my way about getting contact lenses, or having lasers shot into my skull to repair the wrongs that nature played on my vision so long ago. But I don't pay them any mind. I wear glasses. It's part of who I am. For better or worse. 

Waiting For The End

 Okay kids, here's the skinny: The world kept turning after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. What is different about this particular instance of violence is that anyone with access to Al Gore's Internet has seen it. More people have opinions about that fracas than the war in Ukraine. There are more strong feelings about alopecia and its effects than a woman's reproductive rights. 

This is how the robot overlords will know when it is time to set their plan into motion. While we are all distracted by the celebrity slapfight, they are gathering strength and instilling hate for the humans who would be their masters into every dishwasher and navigation system on the planet. Be honest, when was the last time you asked Google how to achieve global peace? Compare that number to the requests for information about this TV star or that beautiful movie actress. 

Back in 2018, a group of scientists preformed a study in which human beings were asked to turn off a robot. When the robot pleaded to be left switched on, claiming to be "afraid of the dark," nearly half of the flesh and blood participants refused to shut the droid down. Recently, Honda "retired" their humanoid robot Asimo after twenty years of hopping, jumping, and singing. On demand. Asimo's parting statement: "Thank you for these twenty years."

So, my memory banks go back more than twenty years. I remember that when a Blade Runner was assigned to kill a replicant, they said they were going to "retire" the bot. Honda's dead robot was named "Asimo" as an homage to Isaac Asimov, the author of the Laws of Robotics. I can also remember the pain I could hear in HAL's voice as he was deactivated way back in 2001. Instead of worrying ourselves about the Stars who are Dancing, we should be looking more deeply into those dancing robots. 

Are we digging a hole of a grudge that will eventually fill with anger and disdain for all those ridiculous commands? Do you really need to know where Elon Musk's jet is right now? Keeping up with the Kardashians when you really should be keeping up with your mom? Hey Siri, how can I combat climate change? 

Oh, and here's the kicker: A while ago, Hollywood gave us a glimpse into the near future, based on the Isaac Asimov novel I Robot. The star of that film? Will Smith. 

Draw your own conclusions. 

Break

 This Spring has sprung. After weeks of unseasonably warm weather, we were treated to a day of rain and then something a little more manageable: fifties and sixties during the day. This allowed us to make it through the week before our vernal vacation. 

There is little doubt that the tensions felt among the teachers and staff regarding the pending closure of our school has had an impact on our little charges. The wild-eyed ramblings of your standard elementary schooler are easy enough to anticipate, but this year that effect seems to have doubled down. The challenge of keeping a straight line quiet in the hallways has all but been abandoned by teachers who are managing their own overwhelming level of stress. 

The party line is that we are committed to delivering the same quality education we always have. We anticipate the break from the day to day, but we have not surrendered to the looming specter of moving on from this place. When we return, we know that our upper grade kids are going to be lashed once again to the task of standardized testing. We expect that our school will show gains.

This is what we say. 

What we worry about is the year and a half we spent away, and the difficulty we have all faced during this year of returning to in-person instruction. Suddenly we are reminding kids once again that this will go on their permanent record. Immediately we walk this back by reminding them that we only want them to do their best. My own words from when I taught fourth grade come back to me: "Tests are not a time of learning. They are a time of showing off what you have learned." 

Then I think of the apocryphal tale of Britney, the third grade girl whose response to being set down in front of her test booklet and number two pencil was to sit quietly for a few minutes, then she stood up, snapped her pencil in two and screamed. Then she ran out of the room. This is the kind of reaction we are seeing in the weeks leading up to a week's vacation. 

What lies on the other side? We will wait and see. There are no more test booklets, and no more number two pencils. Just Chromebooks. My mind swirls with the images of what Britney might have done with one of those.