Not Even Not Zen 417: Biomythography - Note 131: The Great McFamine

The Great McFamine of 1981

I am not saying that the human body contains a sophisticated alert system designed to warn you when you're about to do something stupid with your finances. However, I am saying if such a system exists, mine wasn't functional in 1981.

This was the year I attended the University of Maryland full time while working at fast food restaurants, which is kind of like saying I decided to go on a hike and then strapped a refrigerator to my back. And then I met a couple other hikers carrying refrigerators, too. 

I was paying for my classes out of savings. I was paying for my rent out of savings. I was doing the opposite of responsible living. My financial masterstroke was something later generations won't or can't understand. I ran up a monumental phone bill. Yes, this was a phone bill that cost approximately eight months' worth of rent.

You might reasonably ask: "What could you possibly have been doing on the phone that would cost that much?" The answer is: I was listening to my girlfriend break up with me. And I was hard of listening, so she had to repeat herself a lot. It cost me money. But of course I paid the bill, because that's what responsible adults do. A much, much more responsible adult would have bought a decent used car instead but I don't remember thinking about it. 

I paid my tuition, paid my bills, bought a textbook, paid my rent in cash, and hiked to the bank to see how I'd done.

I had five dollars left.

This was not five dollars in spending money. Not five dollars until payday. I had five dollars and twenty-five cents TOTAL when five dollars was the absolute minimum the bank would allow before they closed the account and presumably repossessed my shoelaces. 

Okay, so I was seventeen when I got myself into this situation. But I wasn't clueless. At least, I wasn't totally clueless for someone at the age of seventeen, when the bar is low. I had a plan. Two weeks before, I'd ditched my Roy Rogers gig where the managers were stingy with food. Instead, I picked up extra burger flipping duties at McDonald's. During my shifts there, I could eat and drink for free. It was a foolproof plan.

Life can be very, very foolish, though, more than we budget for in foolproof plans. 

First, the McDonald's payroll system broke down.

This was not the entire payroll system for all McDonald's restaurants everywhere, which would would be a failure with a certain dramatic grandeur to it. No, just the area payroll system broke and about a third of us didn't get our checks. Naturally, I was in the problem third. 

My manager reassured me the check would be coming by 'the middle of the week' and anyway, he knew I'd already paid rent so I'd be fine. I nodded and said yeah, because admitting I had no money for food seemed like a humiliating detail. 

The main thing was, I had my McDonald's shifts. I didn't have to admit anything to anybody, yet.

Here's where I should mention I had experience with fasting. At twelve, I'd fasted for a day (that's twenty-four hours for you cheaters, not dawn to dusk). Later, I'd made it two whole days with just drinking water. Then I succeeded at three days, although I got shivering cold at around the 70-hour mark. Finally, at sixteen, I'd conducted a four-day fast that left me not only shivering but feeling vaguely nauseous, as if my body was trying to express something profound but only had a limited emotional vocabulary.

The previous fasts had been formative experiences. I thought I was good at fasting. I thought I understood it. Fasting and I had reached a gentleman's agreement about how things worked.

Oh, but I was wrong.

On Friday after my shift, I looked in the fridge. My remaining food supply consisted of: one tangerine, two slices of white bread, and the dregs of a jar of mayonnaise that my roommates considered empty but which I, in my creative approach to defining the word "food," did not.

By Saturday night, I would be eating my last meal, a mayonnaise sandwich. This is the kind of stuff that should make you reflect on the choices that brought you to this point, although in my case, many of the relevant choices involved listening to lengthy phone calls about feelings while someone in the AT&T offices gently but firmly kept track of my time.

When I rose on Saturday morning, I ate my tangerine and walked to work. There, I checked our posted schedule and discovered my manager had removed me from the first half of the week. Well, this was new information. I had no shifts on Sunday through Wednesday. Therefore, I would have no food after my Saturday morning double.

On Saturday night, I ate my mayonnaise sandwich, knowing there would be no more food until Thursday at the earliest, or until my paycheck arrived, whichever came first. 

Sunday: didn't eat. There was no point in calling about the paychecks because no one would try to start fixing the problem until Monday. I spent the day trying to achieve the right frame of mind for my fast. (A little late, since I'd already started.)

Monday: didn't eat. After a couple of calls, I got a manager who told me the payroll office was cutting checks and they would probably come in on Wednesday. The management didn't need more staff today. I thanked him and did not mention I was currently conducting an unplanned experiment. When I finished it, I would discover the difference between fasting and simply going hungry.

Tuesday: didn't eat. I couldn't resist calling McDonald's to see if they needed help or if the paychecks had arrived. They didn't and they hadn't. I began to understand why my previous fasting experiences, conducted with planning and purpose, had felt so different from this one. This was not a spiritual journey, really. This one was more of a hostage situation conducted by a broken printer and a courier service.

Wednesday: I dropped by my restaurant and the manager was surprised to see me. However, the paychecks had just come in. This coincidence was due to me thinking hard about the pay couriers' schedule.

"We're in a rush right now," my manager said, stating the obvious. He was running a pack of fries and two rolls of register receipt paper between the kitchen and the front counter when I caught him. "I can't get your paycheck out of the envelope until we hit a slow spot."

I waited like a person who has not eaten for four days waits, which is to say with calm, energy-conserving focus at a table where I could see the size of the customer lines. After a while, the lines diminished. The manager noticed me and invited me to the back of the restaurant. In his office, he rifled through the contents of the pay envelope. He found mine in the bag, to my relief. When he  handed it over, the clock on the wall told me it was at four in the afternoon.

I had plenty of time to hike to a bank. Inside, the branch office smelled of stale air and dust but I knew I reeked of cooking grease, which was worse. The teller frowned at my request but his bank had promised up front to cash paychecks, so he had to do it. He doled out a partial cashback for me, deposited the rest of my trivial money, and handed me my transaction statement. He did everything with a slight air of disgust. He could smell the fast food air on me. Then, with the wad of green bills in my hand, I hiked a mile up the road to the Safeway.

Since I was feeling budget conscious, I bought soup and bread. Those were the cheapest things I could get plus I knew I was breaking a fast and had to do it carefully. For dinner that night, after waiting half an hour to pass so I would make it to four full days of fasting, I ate tomato soup with toast. It was a ceremony I planned with care and conducted with reverence. I suspected it might be the first time in my life I liked tomato soup.

I was right. It was.

EPILOGUE: Were there any life lessons here? Maybe.

I told myself I should fast, under the circumstances. And I fooled myself into it pretty well. Still, it is hard to fool yourself completely. Every morning, I woke up wishing I had food. I would take a half hour or so to get into the mindset of going without. I've done single-day fasts since but I've never decided to go three or four days, not anymore.

Even food you hate will taste amazing after you go without any for long enough. That makes sense to everyone, I suspect, but there's a difference when you actually do it. 

In theory, I was taking college classes. I probably attended my Creative Writing sessions. I may have skipped French. At any rate, I mostly don't remember my classes for the week except for my hour of singing. The Chapel Chorus class was my least important one. But for me, it was the most welcome.

Also, as an obvious lesson, you should probably not spend eight months' rent listening to someone break up with you over the phone. It's not the stupidest decision a teenager ever made but I had to learn from it that running out of money has real consequences. Paying for classes up front and paying the rest of my bills did more to wipe me out than the phone company did. 

Not Even Not Zen 416: Biomythography - Note 129: Kicked Out of Boy Scouts

How I Got Kicked Out of the Boy Scouts

I want to be clear about something right up front: I was an excellent Boy Scout, if by that we mean I had mastered the essential skills of tying knots, setting fires, and eating s'mores.

In my younger years with the Cub Scouts and Webelos I had earned every single badge and the Arrow of Light, too, the very first in our troop history. I had written essays about atheism to fulfill my Religion badge requirements. I also did the required volunteer charity work, though I should note that "required volunteering" is a suspect term like "jumbo shrimp" or "easily cancellable service subscription."

In retrospect, those were enlightened times. I endured concerned questioning from a den mother and two different scoutmasters — one who wore office clothes (the "I Just Came From My Accounting Job" look), and another who wore an olive green scout shirt (the "I Take Scouting Seriously" look). Each wanted to make absolutely certain I was sincere in my atheism. They had to verify I wasn't just a lazy churchgoer trying to game the system, because apparently a thing worse than not believing in a God is trying to get out of a badge requirement. The Boy Scouts had their priorities.

After passing my theological exams, I went on to thrive in the Boy Scouts. I had fun crabbing on the Eastern Shore. (Crabbing means catching angry crustaceans with string and chicken necks. It's like fishing, but more likely to result in the overall sense that nature is disgusting.) I learned that a pot with three crabs does not need a lid and a troop of boys does not need free time or they will resort to pranks.

I even became a minor celebrity at the Boy Scout Jamboree, winning the archery contest and racking up various other minor successes. But apparently the Jamboree was the last hurrah for our old Boy Scout leader, who had the good sense to treat religion like a reasonable person treats a wasps' nest: acknowledging its existence, maintaining a respectful distance, and resisting the urge to poke it with a stick.

Enter: The New Guy

We then entered a bold new era led by a scoutmaster who was less pragmatic and more evangelical. I hadn’t known many like him. He had the kind of religious fervor usually associated with people who stand at airport terminals handing out pamphlets and giving everyone soulful, sad-eyed stares.

Our new leader wanted to start each meeting with a religious observance he had written himself. And when I say "written himself," I mean he had crafted a speech so profoundly, magnificently awkward it made a lot of the boys laugh. Out loud. Immediately.

They laughed so hard the end of the speech remained forever a mystery. However, it contained a reference to "woodies," by which our scoutmaster meant cars, "rosy cheeks," by which our scoutmaster meant he didn't understand twelve year old boys, a reference to being "gay and carefree," a reminder to be "square and true," and the "stout-hearted breasts of brave, young men," by which he again meant he didn't understand what boys find hilarious.

I didn't understand why some of the phrases like, "we will make everything tight" got guffaws from the older scouts but I knew the trite phrases were outdated. I chuckled along in frozen horror, the way you might laugh if you saw someone slip on a banana peel but then realized they were about to fall down an escalator.

Then he announced — and it's revealing when you think about the bold confidence this required — he wanted someone to give a big, dramatic reading of his religious masterpiece.

The boys were so openly, enthusiastically opposed to this idea that even the scoutmaster himself realized he had a rebellion on his hands. So he pivoted. Instead of asking who wanted to read it (since the answer was clearly "nobody, not even for money"), he decided to hold a contest. The losing troop would get the honor — and I'm using that word very loosely here — of reading his speech aloud. 

Let me repeat that: We were now battling for the right NOT to have to read The Religious Essay.

Even now, this strikes me as a profoundly weird thing for a scout leader to allow to happen. How could he not feel embarrassed by everyone's reactions to his literary masterwork? But I suppose he was protected from shame by his religious certainty, which must have been like an invisible force field that deflects self-awareness.

At the time, I thought he might not be very bright. With the benefit of hindsight and my own adventures in raising children — during which I have learned that adults are morally just children who can reach high shelves — I am now absolutely certain that he did not understand people and probably not puppies who chew slippers, puzzles with more than 100 pieces, or himself.

But sometimes the Boy Scouts can't be choosy. They need warm bodies with driver's licenses. Someone who seems to have good intentions, no matter what his other drawbacks — poor judgment, questionable writing ability, the social awareness of a moose trying to mate with a rail fence — those good intentions might still be the best they can do.

The Great Athletic Competition to Avoid Public Humiliation

And so began a series of contests. Multiple contests. An Olympic-level cavalcade of contests, all designed to determine who would be forced to read this speech that nobody wanted to read.

Now, here's where I should mention something important: the other boys in my troop were not, generally speaking, what you would call "good athletes." I was better. Not Olympic-caliber or anything, just better than the average bunch of guys who had chosen to spend their free time learning about knots and earning badges.

I also fought harder, because I had seen the speech. I knew what was at stake. I won the sack race. I ran first in the relay race, powered by my purest fear of public speaking. I pitched curves in wiffleball that would have made a major league pitcher weep with envy. I hit a home run because my terror gave me strength plus the ball got lost in the leaves under a car.  

I scored all the goals in crab soccer, which is a game where you walk around on your hands and feet facing up like a crab, and honestly, the fact that we were playing it at all should have been a warning sign that things had gone terribly wrong. And yet somehow the teams kept playing until my team, despite our heroic efforts, finally lost the third tiebreaker activity.

This meant we had to pick someone from our troop to read the speech.

It was so spectacularly, magnificently bad that I outright refused. Just flat-out said no, not something I had done since throwing a temper tantrum (and getting beaten for it) when I was four. This led the troop to pick me anyway, because I was the youngest available. I still refused.

So they finally picked some other poor schmuck, and I felt genuinely bad for him, the way you feel bad for someone who's been selected for jury duty on a murder trial in which the murder suspect has already declared he's going to kill everyone “who’s gone against him” in revenge.

The Quiet, Quiet Incident

When the time finally came for the reading, we all gathered around with the grim determination of people about to witness a terrible but unavoidable public torture session at the stocks. The designated reader began. Almost immediately, one of the scouts started to giggle at some phrase like "our brave parts" or another innocently over-hokey, noble-sounding expression that absolutely did not land the way the scoutmaster had intended.

I was standing next to this kid, and I immediately started snorting — not because I wanted to, but because suppressed laughter has to come out somewhere, and my body decided "through the nose” was how we were going to go. I was suppressing so hard, my ears were whistling. 

The sounds I made were so ridiculous, the previously giggling scout couldn't suppress his laughter. And then others nearby started laughing because we were funny, which is how these things work. Laughter is contagious, like yawning, or panic, or unvaccinated children.

There's something about trying to hold in laughter that makes it worse. 

Within seconds, we became a brass band of nose-honkers, stifled chortlers, and choking donkeys. Bursts of sound erupted from our group like popcorn bangs in a microwave. The senior boy in our troop resisted but that only led to him to make noises like a dying goose. Next to us, the other troop of boys caught fire with forbidden humor, too, and they tried to contain their laughs but as a result they sounded like someone kicking a pile of Scottish bagpipes. 

Kids turned colors as we tried to calm ourselves. We gave our honest effort with "stout-hearted breasts of brave, young men" but we made the mistake of looking at each other, right in the eye. That was bad. When your friend looks ridiculous generally, he doesn’t look any less funny when he’s turning purple. We could not have been worse-behaved if we had applauded the speech using armpit farts. 

The Aftermath

I was kicked out of the Boy Scouts immediately. This was partly due to my being an atheist but also because I wouldn't apologize and blamed the scoutmaster for the laughter right to his face. (I don't remember the blaming part but a couple scouts approached me very quietly about it later, so maybe.)

The most unforgivable sin had to be making fun of what the scoutmaster had written.

Looking back, I regret nothing. Well, almost. I do feel bad for the one kid who had to actually try to read the speech while thirty boys giggled and drooled and spilled things and snorted. I think we mostly didn't look at the speaker, at least. We weren't making fun of him and we all tried not to make fun of each other as we turned colors.

I learned some valuable lessons from my time in the Boy Scouts: how to tie a half hitch knot, how to start a fire without matches, and how religious certainty combined with poor writing can create a situation so awkward that it becomes impossible not to laugh.

Scouting teaches us good stuff. These are all skills that have served me well in life.
 

Not Even Not Zen 415: Biomythography - Note 130: Rationalizer Movements

Rationalizer Movements

In the late 1800s, my relatives in the Pond and Light families of Pennsylvania fell for evangelical movements. They believed the world would come to an end in 1869, 1872, 1874, and 1881.  The world kept not ending. They kept believing. Some of them sold off their possessions to fund their local movements. In the early 1900s, they refused to fly in planes because flying was "unnatural" and "against God." They refused telephones as "tools of the devil."

Every religion waxes and wanes with popular movements. None of our families are exempt.

In re-growth cycles, religious leaders often choose scripture passages, even changing them to emphasize popular points. These are winning methods to increase their numbers of followers. Rationalization of old views is a way of keeping religions relevant. It is also, to its critics, morally reprehensible as it involves cherry-picking from established religious tenets. Modern Christianity is already tremendously different from its beginnings as a cult in the Roman Empire. Popular trends accentuate the differences. 

Currently, there is a Christian view of when life begins as stated in the Bible, which is after three breaths. The Biblical view of life beginning with breath seems clear, as it is reinforced in repeated passages in the texts. Even the Book of Genesis highlights the breath of life. It's not a popular view with modern churches because life beginning with breath seems antiquated. To some church leaders, this means there needs to be a movement to rationalize the scriptures in order to remain both socially relevant and popular. 

The current rationalization movement may seem odd because its leaders don't reference the words attributed to their Christ but those words aren't what their modernization is about. Instead, this social movement seems, like all religious rationalizations, to be about reinventing the past and reinterpreting scriptures to suit what's popular. 

Leaders rationalize texts in every religion. All of them must keep up with the times, even when they say they are returning to tradition ('returning to tradition' is another cyclically popular movement). Religions can't help following social trends because, if they don't, they fade away. 

The rationalizer view, as always, involves ignoring unpopular parts of religious texts and finding passages that best suit a modern purpose. The act of picking and choosing becomes the central issue. As seen from the outside, this hardly looks like much of a religious debate but, from within, it is usually a furious one. After all, each argument is about how people should live their lives. The Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna schools of Buddhism split over points of emphasis, not original teachings. So did the Orthodox and Catholic faiths.  

Even now, the Islamic world faces movements to rationalize parts of their holy texts to accommodate believers who don't live in warm, desert climates and can't always follow an unadjusted lunar calendar. The Buddhist world rationalizes texts saying followers can take no life, not even to eat, because we now understand how plants, mushrooms, and other non-animals are alive and, in some cases, how they demonstrably think and learn. The Buddhist rationalization to 'cause no unnecessary suffering,' seems to me a good adjustment because it's in keeping with the original spirit - but of course not everyone agrees. 

These religious changes are natural and inevitable. The act of reading scripture, itself, lends itself to the act of interpretation. Different portions of text jump out to different readers as people seek confirmation for their views (a part of the process we could do without, maybe, although we're not going to escape it). Insights come differently to each person because we are all individuals with our own unique backgrounds. Reading the same text ends up with different results for everyone. 

It's too bad for my relatives who have fallen for such movements. It's inconvenient for me when I get caught up in our current ones. Rationalization movements, however, are a constant part of human history. They will continue adjusting our religious beliefs for the foreseeable future - for as long as humanity is in need of social consensus.
 

Not Zen 207: Goals and DIrections

Fennec Fox, Wikimedia Commons, Khonstan

Choosing Directions

On the day before she gave birth, a fennec fox dug deeper into the den. She had made her home in a bluff overlooking a dry stream bed. Her older sister lived an hour's trot to the west. When she delivered her pups, the fennec licked them clean to discover they were the color of the desert sands. 

"Beautiful," her mate whispered.

"And hungry," she replied. The four pups cried. She fed them, and then her mate fed her. 

For a week, the fennec stayed home in her den. Her mate brought her meals, morning and afternoon. But one evening, he did not return. What had happened, she didn't know. She was aware her territory included coyotes, wolves, bobcats, jackals, and bison. Any of them could have killed her mate. There had been a rain and a flash flood on the day he left, too. The water could have washed him down the streambed and into foreign territory.

She knew she had to hunt. On the day after her mate had failed to return, she ventured to a colony of cactus mice. They lived under a sequoia. She hovered in the shadows of nearby rocks and watched them. The mice dashed from place to place, aware of her gaze. She found them hard to spot as they made their sprints from hole to hole, cactus to cactus. After a failed attempt to grab one, she gave up and headed home.

In the den, she nursed her pups, aware her milk was running dry,

The next morning, she trotted to where young jerboa lived under a ledge near the stream bed. She heard one or two of them, either of which would have made a meal for her. Again, they failed to show except for a brief flash across the sands, which she missed. She grew impatient and returned home. 

When she got there, she discovered two of her cubs missing.

Frantic, she dashed across the expanse. She tried to track one set of paw prints in the sand, then another. A thought interrupted her panic and she dashed back home to make sure the other two pups still lived. 

"Ah, here you are," she murmured as she nuzzled one of the remaining pair. He cried and crawled forward to nurse. 

Her sister found her with the remaining pups drinking the last of her milk. The older vixen trotted across the stream bed with a lost pup in her mouth. She put it down at the entrance to the burrow.

"This is yours," she said. 

Hardly daring to breathe, the younger fennec clambered to her feet. She advanced to the entrance of the burrow and sniffed her child, now returned to her.

"Has your mate died?" her sister asked.

"I think so," she confessed, although she held out hope. "He has been missing for three days."

"Why have you not gone out to hunt?" The older sister studied her and saw how thin she had gotten and how low on milk. 

The fennec described her attempt at the cactus mice. She told her sister about her trying to hunt the jerboa.

"You didn't stay to catch anything," her sister pointed out. 

"True."

"You didn't even find your children. You traced them only part of the way."

"I feared losing more, yes."

Between them, the formerly-lost pup crawled down from the entrance of the den. He wandered deeper into the shade. He didn't cry for food like his siblings. She realized this was because he had nursed on her sister, earlier. She felt flush with gratitude. Her sister remained stern.

"Your mate has died, probably, and you haven't gone anywhere or done anything about it." The elder fennec made a decision. She stood taller. "My mate and I can help but you must commit to this, too. You've done nothing."

"I meant to hunt. Even now, I could find my other pup, maybe."

"No, you can't do everything at once. That's what you've been trying to do. You must make a choice. And you must choose only one or two things, not everything. Allowing yourself too many directions to try has meant no forward progress at all."

 

Not Even Not Zen 414: Biomythography - Note 128: The House Intercom

The House Intercom

Our house on Black Rock road had an intercom when we moved in. Our neighbors, the Ganleys, put it in with a 1960s style of wiring. At the time, it must have been very modern. Even so, I suspect there was something retro about it even when it gleamed. The control knob and the metal speaker grate were both putty colored. Intercom systems had been around in offices, after all, for thirty years. The Ganleys liked theirs well enough but they decided to build another house for themselves, moved next door, and sold off our place. Eventually, we moved in and inherited the intercom.

My mother caught on right away. She started pressing the intercom button to summon me.

"It's time for chores," she said. "Come to the kitchen."

My father didn't seem to like the system but the rest of us got used it. We kids loved it, at times. My little brother and I pretended to be spies via the intercom. We sent each other coded (ha, ha) messages over the radio. Never mind it didn’t make much sense. We were playing. The intercom was an ever-present walkie-talkie to us. Sometimes we were genuinely spies, too.

"Go up there," I hissed from my bed.

"Why me?"

"Because I've already gone a bunch of times. Mom is getting suspicious."

I would send my brother upstairs to report on what our parents were doing. This was partly to find out dumb things we could have simply asked about, like when dinner might be ready, but partly to slip out of the house without my parents seeing. Then my brother would give me his secret report via the intercom.

“You know I can hear you sending messages about me, right?" my mom told me one time.

“Oh, yeah.” I sat up straight. I had been caught!

As a spy system, the intercom had its drawbacks.

One day, I woke up to music coming over the intercom. It was a 1920s jazz band number with a lot of clarinets. I remember thinking, this is not a bad way to start the morning. I assumed my father had snuck a radio into my room. I tracked the sound to the intercom speaker and felt confused for a few minutes. When I got upstairs, things made more sense.

My father was standing between the dining room and kitchen. On the counter next to the kitchen intercom, he had placed one of his smaller radios. He had found a morning jazz broadcast on it. Normally, big band era music bothered me. The tunes seemed slow, overly simple, and even the lyrics got boring. Sometimes, though, the same broadcasts would insert a hot jazz age number in the playlist. This was one of those.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"It's nice," I admitted. It was dangerous to admit I liked anything. My father would use it as permission to repeat it endlessly, sometimes in the worst variations possible. (I admitted liking 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down' and it resulted in four years of 'Three Little Fishies' on my father's theory they were basically the same thing.) That came true this time, too, as for five days running we woke up to radio broadcasts on the intercom. Eventually, my mother spoke to my father about it.

A few months later, my father got interested in the intercom one more time. He heard me and my brothers playing. When he took the session over, he insisted I do an Abbot and Costello routine with him.

Me, prompted by my father: "Nicknames, nicknames. I’m supposed to say nicknames. Now, on the team we have Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know is on third."

My dad, gleefully : "That's what I want to find out. I want you to tell me the names of the fellows on the team."

Me: "I'm telling you. Who’s on …"

My dad, interrupting to say my lines, which are Abbot's lines: "Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know is on third."

My dad as Costello again: "You know the fellows' names?"

Me: "Yes, I know this, dad."

Dad as Costello again: "Well, then who's playing first?

Me: "Who. I mean, Yes."

Dad: "The fellow's name on first base."

Me: "Who is on first."

Dad: "Yeah, who is the fellow playing first base?"

Me, getting tired and trying to sound like an owl: "Hoo. Hoo."

Dad: "Hah!"

He had heard the routine hundreds of times and memorized most of it. Heck, he'd subjected me to it so much I'd memorized most of it against my will. And yet it still made him laugh. We could never go more than halfway through the routine without him stopping it with his laughter or him wanting to redo some part of our sketch to make it better. It was the most fun he ever got out of the intercom.

A few years after we moved in, static started to appear on the line. The power started to fade. Eventually, the system didn't work at all. Finally, during a remodeling effort, my parents covered up most the intercom speakers with paneling or backsplash tiles.

Not Even Not Zen 413: Biomythography - Note 127: Laundry Chutes

Laundry Chutes

My parents didn't have a laundry chute in their house. We experienced our indoor slides through the grace of my Aunt Jenny. By 'we' I mean me and my younger brother. We had access to her slide, or at least our cousins did. I wanted to try it so much I may have peed my pants a little while thinking about it. My parents didn't care.

As soon as we arrived to see my aunt's new home, I heard from my cousins about how great it was to play on the indoor slide. The metal ducting led down to a basket in the laundry room. When my Aunt Jenny gave her brother and the rest of us a tour, we followed her to every room, to the bathrooms, even to the attic. Jenny had a sparkling smile, great perfume, and the warm manners of a natural hostess. Her dark, auburn hair was beautiful. Everything she showed us was beautiful. A couple of my cousins lived in the attic and I envied the huge and weirdly segmented space they had. But the only place where I stopped and sighed was the tan-brown flip door to the laundry chute. I think the adults noticed.

After the tour, my cousin Annie took me aside.

"We can't play in the laundry chute while guests are here," she told me. "My momma says."

Her younger brother, Gary, nodded. He had heard the same orders. Gary was my age and one of my best friends. Annie was the voice of wisdom to us both. I slumped in disappointment. One of my older cousins, Bobby, was standing nearby. He saw my reaction.

"Maybe when the adults all go outside," he allowed.

"They might smoke on the back patio." Annie added thoughtfully. She was a rule-keeper. However, she was sharp about how adults worked.

Even when my understanding was limited, I knew enough to realize Annie was the best guide I had to the ineffable world of social rules. If she said grown-ups wouldn't care about us using the laundry chute if we didn't bother them about it, then she was right.

Although the adults did eventually walk out onto the patio to smoke, we didn't get to use the slide on our first visit to Aunt Jenny. The timing didn't work out. I got to romp around the house with Gary, though, so I wasn't too disappointed. Plus we played board games with my older cousins, who were understanding about my age and lack of understanding, and hence they were fun. As we left their house, I closed my eyes. In my car seat, I pictured myself next time, sliding down the inside of Aunt Jenny's house. The idea burned me so much I felt it in my arms and belly.  

But we didn't even get to look at the laundry chute in our second, brief visit. We had to follow a grown-up agenda. It was our third trip when, finally, we were granted sleepover privileges. The adults wanted to do their unknowable (or just unmemorable) things, whatever they were. I wanted to play with Gary, maybe Annie, maybe even Bobby or Jim or the neighborhood kids. With luck, we could read comic books at night. I'd almost forgotten about the slide.

In the morning after the sleepover, the adults abruptly drove off. They wanted breakfast out. Gary was the first to see the opportunity.

"Their car just pulled out of the driveway," he whispered as he approached me in the hall. Even when he was trying to be sly and conspiratorial, Gary had a wistful, abstracted smile. He was already looking forward to something. "We could slide down to the laundry for a while."

Gary organized it, so he went first. He laughed when he hit the basket in the basement garage. He clambered out, made some unseen adjustments, and called to me up through the ductwork.

"Okay, it's your turn!"

As I scrambled in, I held my breath. The space was smaller than I'd realized. The slide down shocked me. The laundry chute ductwork was big enough - and it was fast - but this was the first time I'd descended in pitch darkness. It was also my first experience with claustrophobia in a slide. The thrill of fear lasted a couple seconds. I popped out into the bright lights of the garage and plopped into the laundry.

I laughed until I held my sides. They really hurt. The panic, the relief, and then the fun of sailing through the air into the pile of laundry made me hyperventilate.

"Wanna do it again?" Gary asked. He leaned down to check on me.

"Yeah!" My body went from lying down, gasping, to springing up on my toes, ready.

"Let's go!" He raced through the garage side door and into the house. I hopped over the canvas-covered basket wall and thundered after him.

After a couple more trips down the slide, my younger brother discovered us. Naturally, he demanded a turn. And immediately after that, Annie found us all. She didn't approve. In fact, she worried about us, especially about my brother. Nevertheless, she agreed this was the right time to play. The adults had gone. Annie took over playtime and became our slide supervisor. She decided whose turn it was and if the laundry at the bottom was piled deep enough.

"You are not allowed to stop," she told my brother after he playfully halted himself in the middle of the laundry chute. He let himself fall again a few seconds later but the pause worried Annie. She focused on me because it was my turn next. "You, either."

She glared at Gary and her older brother Bobby, who had joined in, on the basis those two had likely given my brother the idea. (She was correct.) I was totally in awe of all three cousins. They didn't just have the best slide in the world; they had advanced themselves to the point where they did tricks while using it.

My younger brother raced up the stairs and announced, "This is the most fun I've had in a house!"

I knew what he meant. I felt like I could have ridden the laundry chute all day and all night. I would have happily slept in the laundry basket at the bottom. It would have been the best way to wake up early and slide again in the morning. We kept taking turns.

"I hear tires," Annie said eventually.

"They're here." Bobby spied out the window. "Hurry up, hurry up!"

Gary had been the last to slide down to the garage. That was good because he knew how to put the laundry basket back where it belonged. My three cousins skittered frantically in different directions all at once.

There's a classic cartoon in which Donald Duck panics and dashes around trying to fix all the messes he's made in a room before he's discovered. This was the same sort of thing but with three ducks quacking and hopping with worry. In the end, though, the cousins succeeded. Mostly under Annie's supervision, they restored the house to a reasonable level of neatness for adult approval.

My brother and I didn't get to visit again for nine months. The next time we arrived, I found the laundry chute door sealed. Amazingly, my aunt and uncle seemed to be working to remove it.

"What happened?" I asked Gary.

"Bobby got stuck." He waved impatiently at the laundry chute door. "It was kind of a big thing. The firemen came."

Gary liked firemen. He loved fire trucks, too, so he should have looked happier. As it turned out, the problem had been bigger than he admitted at first. He didn't want to talk about it. I had to get the details from Annie.

Bobby, my second oldest cousin, had hit a growth spurt. During it, he started to find it hard to fit down the laundry chute. But the laundry chute was fun. He ignored the rug burns (really, metal joint burns) he started to get from the slide. He ignored the two shirt buttons that one trip ripped off him.

After a couple more close calls, he resisted the impulse to go sliding for a month. But then he did it again. And he got stuck.

This was not a matter of getting caught in a cute way. Bobby wasn't left with his legs kicking comically in the air. He didn't get pinched by his fat like Winnie the Pooh and with his head poking out in the hallway at the top of the stairs. No, Bobby had no fat. He was a skinny guy, just grown too big for the ducts, which formed a kind of S shape within the wall. On the day he jammed, he made it through the curve at the top. Where it bent near the bottom, toward the garage, is where he got stuck.

1. Picture a tight space where you can't move your arms or legs.
2. Make it utterly dark.
3. And you're jammed so hard in the stomach and chest, you can barely breathe.

No, it didn't sound like a cute sort of accident. Bobby panicked. He yelled. His brothers tried to rescue him. They lowered knotted towels to let him grab on. They tried to pull him up. No success. They tried to pull him the rest of the way down, instead. Even worse. He jammed tighter.

Bobby's parents arrived and tried to rescue him. Again, they made it a little worse. At least they felt secure enough in their understanding of a nearly dire situation to call the fire department. Even the emergency crew, though, felt flummoxed. While they tried to figure out how to get the job done - cutting into the wall and the duct meant possibly cutting into Bobby - the young teen spent another hour stranded in a dark, narrow space. Eventually, the rescue team poured grease on him and pulled on his feet. Success!

"My momma says it's off limits," Annie concluded. After her story, I wasn't tempted.

Well, I wasn't tempted for about half an hour. My younger brother, the smallest of us at the time, felt the rule shouldn't apply to him. I sort of felt the same. When my brother learned the slide was getting blocked off and removed, he panicked. He begged me, got me to take his side, stomped his feet over the unfairness of the house rules, and appealed to Annie.

Later in the day, I trotted in through the garage taking a break from a game of freeze tag. My little brother popped out of the laundry chute and fell into a mound of laundry.

My mouth opened in outrage. When I advanced on Annie, ready to make my case about how unfair this was, she turned her back and disappeared.

I never did get to try the laundry chute again.

#

Laundry chutes were common features in multi-story homes between 1920 and 1970. Since then, most buildings have done away with them. Although children getting stuck was a factor in putting them out of style, the more important reason turns out to be house fires. Flames travel between floors faster when a house has a laundry chute.

There's no reason modern laundry chutes can't have safety features like their own sprinklers in case of a fire. It's probably easier to make people carry their laundry downstairs, though, so here we are.
 

Not Even Not Zen 412: Biomythography - Note 126: Lightning Bugs

wikimedia, Claudeverett

Lightning Bugs

When I was two, my mother flew with me from her army base in Germany to my grandmother's home in Annapolis, She and my father wanted to tour more of Europe, so she had to unload me somewhere.

Her mother was willing, even happy, to care for me. It's strange but there it is. That summer in Annapolis was the first time I saw a jar full of lightning bugs. At least, it’s the first I remember. My uncles filled a tall jar, half as big as me, with the blinking, glowing angels. I even caught one myself. (Well, it landed on me and an uncle scooped it off.) They made the jar a tinfoil lid with holes poked in the top.

"Now he'll sleep," said Uncle Mike. Apparently, I had started bursting into tears at bedtime because I was missing out on the lightning bugs. This was his answer.

All my uncles, even the adult ones, wanted a jar of lightning bugs anyway. I was their excuse to make one and keep it. They placed it on the floor next to my bed. As soon as everyone left, I crept down to lie on the floor next to the glass. I curled around it, the closest I could come to hugging the swarm, and I stared at the tiny bodies and their lights. They were beautiful. They were sacred. They were holy spirits so far as I was concerned. They were not a sign of anything, just a form of awe dressed in beetle costumes with wings. They inspired, in me, a trembling wonder.

In the summer when I was four years old and again when I was five, my parents sent me to live with my grandparents. The Stockett family bug jar tradition continued. I was twice as tall by then but the glass vessel still seemed reassuringly large. I think my grandfather and uncles may have resorted to an ancient pickle jug. Pickles meant 'whole cucumbers,' at least in my family at the time, and those required a container of significant size.

"We need to use a real lid," one of my uncles decided.

Apparently I had removed the tinfoil from an earlier version or one of my uncles had done it and blamed me.

"Put it up where he can see it," my grandmother told them. "Not on the floor."

My grandmother had found me sleeping on the bedroom floor earlier. She was determined to put a stop to it. She enforced her stay-in-the-bed rules by checking on me and the lightning bug jar every fifteen minutes.

I climbed down to be close to the jar anyway. I had discovered I could hear the floorboards squeak when my grandmother approached. If I paid attention, I could climb into bed and pretend to be asleep before she opened the door. This time, I discovered something more, too. My uncles had used an awl to make the holes in the lid. I had watched them do the job. But those holes were too big. The beetles could climb out through them, so they did. They flew around the room, blinking. Some of them landed on me to rest. It was wonderful.

When I was five, my little brother came with me to my grandparents' house. That year, we had a harder time collecting lightning bugs.

"Damn pesticides," my grandfather told us. "They're doing the job, killing bugs. But still."

No one really meant to kill the lightning bugs. Everyone noticed it happening, though. Every summer at Riva Road, we found fewer of them. At my parents house, in the grassy and wooded park, blank spots appeared in the lightning bug swarms. One year, they disappeared from the grassy fields. The next, a strip of creek came up barren despite running through the shelter of the forest. The year after, swaths of woodland fell dark. The next and the next, the few fireflies remaining around us grew sparser and harder to find. The only ones we could locate lived in the woods.

We also started calling the bugs 'fireflies.' I'm not sure why. Maryland is an odd state, linguistically. Once, it was southern. Over the years, we adopted northern terms here. Even more dramatically, Maryland became cosmopolitan and suburban, influenced by the big cities of Baltimore and Washington, DC.

We adopted modern insecticides. We built more, which meant we compacted our soils with bulldozers and heavy trucks. Compacted soils killed the lightning bugs and other insects that previously spent most of their lifetimes underground. We sanitized our yards and cleaned up the leaf litter many species of fireflies require to live.

The capture jars got small, then they disappeared. We stopped catching fireflies. Instead, we laid down in the dark, in the grass, to watch. Over the summers, the beetle mating seasons grew briefer. Several species of firefly seemed to disappear. There were too many types to catalog, at first, and we didn't understand the types or we didn't consider the variety to be important.

Now there are societies trying to track the destruction of the fireflies, just as there are groups watching butterflies disappear or birds go extinct.

#

What I'm hoping to do, where I am:

1. Is there a way to de-compact our soils? Maryland has lots of clay soils. Once heavy machinery has compacted them, I think the best way forward may be to create new, loose topsoil and spread it over our yards. I'm making topsoil with compost but the process takes years, at the least.

1a. Maybe I should buy some topsoil.

2. Create and stack leaf litter. This is a tough one to do artistically - that is, to ensure the neighbors like it. Leaf litter tends to blow around. Keeping it in spots around my yard may involve some mini-fencing. If I can do it, though, it would help some kinds of fireflies re-start.

3. Plant native shrubs and trees. We've been here only a few years but almost everything in our yard was non-native when we arrived. I tend to like fruit trees, too. Paw-paws and red mulberries are natives. They seem worth consideration.

4. Let areas of the yard turn to tall grass. Like stacking leaf litter, this will be tough but it should be doable.

5. Have a safe water feature in the yard for the species of fireflies that need water. Honestly, I'm not sure how to do this without having even more mosquitoes than we do. I may give up on this one.

6. Some fireflies feed on snails and slugs. Well, we've got that covered. Ugh.

7. Some fireflies feed on plant pollen or nectar. With buddleia and russian sage, we might have enough but, then again, we might need to plant native flowers for fireflies, not the ones we've got.

Not Even Not Zen 411: Biomythography - Note 125, Internal Mapping, Pt. II

Internal Mapping, Pt. II 

 College: 

I'm driving home in a caravan with friends, all of us bound for the DC area. Partway there, we grow tired. We had planned to stop at my house and unload stuff from my friend's Subaru wagon into my parents' house. Instead, when we talk at a rest stop, he says he'd rather drive straight home.

"Can you give me directions to your house?" Thomas asks. "A map? I like maps."

"Yeah, sure." I grab a blank sheet of paper and sketch out how to get to my house from the DC beltway. I deliberately foreshorten the 395 beltway itself and 70N as well, so I can draw a more accurate picture of Route 28 to Black Rock and, on the other side, Route 117 to Seneca to Black Rock. I've driven the areas close to my house in the light and the dark, sometimes literally (although briefly) with my eyes closed. These are roads I know. The map is quick.

A few days later, Thomas drives up to my house. After a shoulder-thumping hello - Thomas is not much on hugs, at least from other guys - he gawks at the woods around us. He laughs.

"This really is the middle of nowhere," he says.

"Told you."

"Yeah, lots of people say they live nowhere. But you literally have cow fields on every side. And then there's this forest." He flashes the piece of paper.

"The map worked," I observe.

"You fucking know this road. It's kind of insane. I came up route 117 and every turn is exactly where you drew it, every little church. Every big tree on Black Rock is right there, on the map. The creek. The bridge. Everything." We share a big smile and I realize he's driven from the center of a big city, Washington DC, for an hour to get to me, to here, to nowhere.

"The boxes can wait," I tell him. I motion to the house. "Come on in."

At this point my writing was improving but I hadn’t stopped drawing. Both sets of skill were finding a way to coexist. Although I blame my writing, hobby for my waning nonverbal mental skills, maybe the real reasons are more closely tied to giving up math, geometry, and drawing. Once, they were daily habits.

One year after college: 

I’m starting to feel my mental mapping skills fading. I've been to my friend Richard's apartment once before. It's in Rockville, not too far from his work. And once is usually all I need. This time, I get partway into Rockville and I start feeling uncertain. His apartment complex has a bunch of tall buildings, all alike. 

Naturally, I hadn't asked him for directions. I had just said I'd meet him there at four in the afternoon. With three minutes to go, I pull into the wrong apartment entrance.

When I eventually find the building and enter the lobby, I wish I had looked at his apartment number. I had counted on finding it by its location in my memory, as usual. I know the feeling of the floor, the kind-of-stained carpet, the beige walls.

When I get to the right place, I tap on the door. It feels wrong. I look at it more closely. This isn't the right knocker. It's brighter colored. When I wander a little farther down the hall, I recognize the wear on the metal, the peephole above, the room number. This is it. I take a longer look at the number, really trying to remember it for the first time.

When I step inside, I glance at Richard's wall clock. I'm at seven minutes past the hour

"Sorry I'm late," I say.

"It's only a few minutes." He shrugs it off. 

"I got disoriented. I figured I could duplicate how I got here last time but I had to double back when I didn't recognize a turn."

"Well, what roads did you take?"

"I don't know the names."

We chat for a while. It turns out I missed all the landmarks he uses. He brings up a bunch of them to see if I'm paying attention to the landscape. Apparently not, because I can't picture a single one. He orients himself by stores, signs, statues, and skyscrapers, none of which I ever notice. I passed by them dozens of times and I never caught a glimmer of their existence. And of course I don't know the names for any of the roads, although I'm aware of a couple of their route numbers.

"Never mind how you got here," Richard snorts. "If you don't see the landmarks and don't know the names of any roads, how do you ever get anywhere?"

I shrug, struggling for a way to explain the maps in my head. 
 

Not Even Not Zen 410: Biomythography - Note 125, Internal Mapping, Pt. I

Internal Mapping

As a child and a teen, my world was more visual than it is for me now, a more sensual place in general, full of smells, internal or external sensations like kinesthesia (feeling acceleration) or proprioception (awareness of body organs) that I didn't have names for but which affected me strongly and constantly. Nowadays, like everyone, I get to filter more of the world through learned behaviors, like language, logic, or conditioned reflexes.

"If your eyes see fine, how can you get any more visual?" someone asked me a month past. I'm trying to explain. 

Years ago, I didn't have to see with my eyes to know where I was or where I was going. Karate, baseball, and basketball gave me a sense of motion and a mental map of the consequences. I learned to fall and not be hurt. I learned to anticipate a pass. I learned to track a curveball. Similarly, house construction with my father gave me a sense of how three dimensional objects rotated and how they fit together (and sometimes failed to fit).

Moving anywhere, in any way, gave me a map in my head of where I had gone and therefore how to get back. If I walked down a trail in the woods, even if I went off-trail, I walked back the same way. How could I not?

Writing changed this part of me, over time. Devoting myself to verbal expression dampened my visual sense, I think. Some of the changes became obvious.

Fourth grade: 

In a geography test, Mrs. Kramer assigns the homework of drawing the continental United States. It takes a while but, unlike most homework, I can do it while listening to the television. It's fun. I use two-thirds of a box of crayons and when it’s done I hand in a map as big as my younger brother.

A couple days later, we have a test.

"You'll draw the United States from memory," she says. "Don't worry, you won't get them all. This is just to see how much you remember."

She allows us most of the class time for it. My drawing goes fast. Only the middle of the southwest gives me problems. Confused, I get dimensions wrong and find it's hard to make Colorado and Utah fit just right. But soon enough, it's done. I list all the state names. I include all the state capitals except for two. (In South Dakota, Pierre makes me laugh.) Most of my time, I spend coloring. I love shading the rivers deep blue. I love marking the forests green.

The next day, Mrs. Kramer hands back the tests. I don't get my page back.

"Where's mine?" I ask.

"Next week, we have parents' night," says Mrs. Kramer. "I have to hang yours on the wall to show your parents. Did you look at a map during the test?"

"No?" There was no way to do it, sitting in the middle. Besides, it's hard to make Colorado and Utah fit right even with an example.

She nods.

"The capital of Nevada is Carson City," she tells me. "Don't feel bad. Only the new girl got that one."

Tenth grade: 

I'm in a calculus class. The teacher starts drawing a problem on the board. It's new to us, two trains moving toward each other on train tracks. He draws curves representing the varying accelerations. In an instant, I see the answer.

"It's seventeen!" I blurt.

The teacher pauses. He turns to stare at me. The rest of the class turns to look, too. A couple of them had been writing notes. I had no pencil, no notes, no book open in front of me.

"How did you get that?" the teacher asks. His voice seems stern.

In response, a kinetoscope of slides re-plays itself in my head. I don't understand the pictures completely. They have something to do with the areas under a curve I've been picturing. When I make the rectangles for the estimates narrower, the answer gets more accurate, I know. I see where it's all headed. It's definitely seventeen. I can't explain it, so I shrug.

"Well, that's correct," the teacher says. Now he sounds disappointed. "But the rest of us are going to step through the problem. I hope you do, too."

The summer between tenth and eleventh grades: 

One of my friends likens the IQ test to a barometer. This feels wrong.

"I've always thought of intelligence as having a multi-dimensional shape," I tell him.

This isn't strictly true. I've thought this way for a couple of years. But it's entirely true I get pictures in my head for different personalities. When I concentrate, I see cross-sections of their heads interspersed with graphs and diagrams for the different features of their minds.

Some are yellow, geometric cores with green galaxy-graphs. Some are pale blobs with a bluish arrow running through. Some of the mind-views are in constant change as different personalities come to the fore during a conversation. Most of them are this way, in constant change. Some of the people who get called dumb seem very bright-minded in this view, albeit they are sometimes bright in a specialized way. Some of those called intelligent seem very rule-following and timid.

Some people, whatever their other traits, seem to have a part like a bicycle chain, a systematic approach, a logic, chug, chug, chug, which is sometimes slow. But it's inevitable, too.

By this point in my life, my mental maps are emotional. I don’t mean only that I get a mental shape of each persons mind when I concentrate. The maps come with emotions, too. My mental traversals of trails in the woods are reassuring. They smell wet.
 

Not Even Not Zen 409: Frenemy

Frenemy

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me

(sing ska background music) 

If you win yourself a Darwin prize
I'll lay the funeral wreath
If you need yourself a dentist 
I will rearrange your teeth

Your friends are no damn good, you know 
I make them all commit
Your foes have no respect for you, 
Don’t tell you when you’re shit 

But I will 
But I will

If the cops decide to kick your ass
You'll take one in the plumbing
Then I'll kick their ass right back
Because they got it coming. 

I'll slap you in your cigarettes 
Cause they’re bad for you
And punch your friend who helps you smoke
He's got it coming, too.

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me

You know that she don’t love you 
It's the other one who does
And if you make a dumb mistake
I will remind you, cuz

And the next day I'll remind you
And next and next as well
And when the wrong one leaves you
We will laugh at you in hell

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me

When you brag about the stuff you did
I'll say I never noticed.
When you tell your friends how you are scum
It's a 'yes' until you protest.

You think I'm not so nice
because my morals are askew
But I'll make you do the right thing,
it's the right damn thing to do!

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me

I'm always hanging out there
when you give the club a whirl
I'm not there with the other punks.
I'm dancing with my girl.

I'll knock down you when we slam dance.
Because I'm not your friend.
I’ll be there to put you down 
And to pick you up again.

(tag) 

I think you tripped, you stupid bastard
You're such a fool, you stupid bastard
You're wrong again, you stupid bastard

You can depend on
You can depend on

I'll pick you up, you stupid bastard
You can depend on me 

 

-- copyright 2025 by Eric Gallagher