Things That Worry Me Which Probably Shouldn't

I'm concerned that solipsism is real, and that everything I see is just a figment of my imagination.
   Because if that's the case, then, man am I f*cked up.
   Think about it. If anyone reading this actually exists, that is. What if everything I see and experience is actually just a figment of my imagination? All my friends, all my family, everyone I've ever met or talked to is just some aspect of my unconscious mind. I've met some pretty weird people in my time. I mean seriously whacked-out individuals who should have been institutionalized, or probably had been. What if I made them up? What if they were nothing but me with idle time to spend coming up with something insane? Scary.
   Or what about every situation in the world? How completely screwed up am I if the mortgage crisis, the end of the space shuttle and the Japanese tsunami are all stuff I just made up. What kind of person thinks up those kinds of things?
   Here's a brain twister. Serial killers. If no one but me exists, that means I made up the concept of serial killers. How deviant is that? And, to put the icing on the cake, if no one else exists, then the serial killers are really parts of me looking to do away with other parts of me. Me stalking myself, as it were. A grand ouroborous of disordered thinking.
   For my money, I hope all you other people are real. Even those of you who smoke. Because the alternative is that I'm just one great big, hyper-imaginative mess.

The Small Man

It was just somewhere to be for a year. Maybe two.
   That's what Stan told himself when he took the job. He didn't know what he wanted to do or where he wanted to go or what he intended his life eventually to become. But he knew this job wasn't it. Two years, max. Hell, six months if he could find something else that paid a little better.
   At the one year mark he told himself he had six months to find another job or else quit. He told himself the same at the two year mark. Then at the three year mark he stopped giving himself six months to quit.
   Stan got married in the summer of his eighth year on the job. His first son was born in the winter of his tenth year. He and his wife bought a house six months later.
   By the time he'd reached fifteen years at the same job Stan was going gray at the temples, and he wondered where the time had gone. Fourteen years longer on the job than he'd intended, and still no end in sight. There was college to plan for, and weddings for his three kids, and then retirement. His one year on the job looked like it was going to stretch into thirty.
   Then the economy tanked and Stan got laid off while some overpaid bastard took home millions in undeserved income. Stan foundered on unemployment - he'd never learned a skill marketable outside his company - and let himself feel emasculated while his wife shouldered the burden of being the family breadwinner.
   But one day Stan realized something. He wasn't shackled any longer. He was a free man. He could do anything. Literally. Follow his bliss. Find his passion. Indulge in the way he never had before. He found a new career.
   Stan never made millions, but he provided for his family and he held his head up and answered proudly when people asked him what he did for a living. And that was something he never could do before.

Sims Echo Park

When I was driving home today I was stopped at a light watching a phalanx of people trotting across the intersection. An old guy, a pregnant woman pushing a stroller, three women in office attire, a fat guy wearing a too-short shirt and pajama bottoms (I suspect he was an escapee from the hospital on the corner), two students with backpacks, and several men and women running for the local bus. Quite the collection. I could hear their conversation, but since I was in the truck I couldn't make out the words; it sounded like the nonsense sounds the Sims make.
   Then it hit me. Maybe they really were Sims. Maybe I was a Sim. Maybe the words I was speaking, thinking, and writing made no more sense than the gibberish the Sims used. Maybe I only thought I understood myself because my delusion was internally consistent. Like dream logic that makes perfect sense in the moment but doesn't stand up to scrutiny when you're awake.
   Thoroughly freaked out, I drove on when the light changed. Did I think in pictograms that only some at-a-distance observer could see? Was my existence a figment, and only in-progress when some person started a program? Was I just a copy of some piece of code, trapped somewhere in a larger algorithm?
   Then I realized that I was starting to think I was in the movie Tron. Or maybe the Matrix. Probably Tron because that's way cooler, and they're coming out with a sequel next year.
   But that brief two-block episode did bring me back to my college days and discussions in philosophy class. How do we know what's real? How do we know that we are experiencing what we think we are?
   I honestly don't remember the answers to any of that. Probably there aren't answers. But I would say that if I can sit behind the wheel of my truck and have a brief solipsistic crisis, then I have too much time on my hands. The fact of the matter is, real or imagined, there are other people in the world, and it's connections with those other people that matter the most. Any one of those people crossing the intersection this afternoon might have made a great friend. Or a terrible enemy. Or maybe they just had an interesting story to tell, or a tragic one, or an hilarious one. Thing is, I'll never know because I had the windows rolled up.
   I need to fix this. I need to get out more.

Psychic Bizarre

I saw a sign on Highland Ave. today, a bright neon yellow rectangle of cardboard taped to a light post. Since traffic at 5 PM on Highland crawls like a drunk sorority chick on a Saturday night, I had time to read the message closely. On it, in a decidedly feminine hand, were the words:

   Psychic Bazaar & Clothes

Intriguing to say the least. A psychic bazaar... what would that be? A marketplace of psychics? How could anyone make any profit? You could read the shopkeeper's mind and find out how much he paid for each item. Conversely, it would be difficult to haggle if the guy behind the counter knew how much money you had in your pocket.
   I was also intrigued by the '& Clothes' part of the sign. Are they psychic clothes? And if they're not, why are they selling them at the psychic bazaar? Or is it the case that even psychics need pants so they might as well sell to a captive audience? Do psychics wear cargo pants? I have nothing but questions.
   The best part, though, had to be the fact that there was no address or phone number on the posterboard. So I suppose you really did have to be psychic to know where the Bazaar & Clothes is.
   Now I'm inspired. I think I need to create a web site on which I'll sell high-priced items at a steep discount, but only to psychic people. You send me money, and I'll telepathically beam the pickup spot to you. If you don't receive my psychic waves, obviously you weren't meant to have those items, and you should probably work harder on developing your mental powers. I'll keep the money until you telepathically tell me your powers are strong enough.
   Yeah... that's the plan. You... the one who thinks you might have psychic powers. Yes, you. I'm talking to you... with my mind. Send me money. A few hundred dollars will do. For a start. Yes... money... to me...

Leonardo Walks Into A Bar...

Hey, buddy, that's a pretty cool drawing you got there.
   Yeah... just a thing I've been working on. You got anything bigger than a bar napkin?
Sorry, that's about it. What'll you have?
   Got any mead?
Ah... no.
   Chaculato? Sack? A little violet water?
We got none of that. How about a beer?
   Well, if that's all you have...
Those are pretty eclectic tastes. I like that accent, where you from?
   Italy.
Huh. I thought Italians were more demonstrative. Happier. You seem pretty down.
   I am. But I don't want to burden you with my ills.
You wouldn't believe some of the stuff people tell me.
   You sure? Okay, but remember this was your idea. I'm feeling a little down about the state of modern science.
What are you talking about? Science is everywhere. Did you know they have an electric razor you can use in the shower?
   That's exactly what I'm talking about. Who gives a crap about that? So what?
It is kind of neat.
   But the guy who invented that could be working on a cure for cancer. Or a way to extend Einstein's theories. Hell, a way to refute his theories. Anything but figuring out how to make an electric razor work in the shower.
Don't get me wrong, but what concern is that of yours?
   Hello? Father of modern science here. Leonardo.
Hey. I'm Harvey.
   So it doesn't bother you, Harvey, the trivial uses that people put science to these days?
Nah. The little things just make life worth living.
   Fine, say I agree with you on that, small things are good. What about the abuses of science? What about Google eavesdropping on wi-fi traffic, or taking pictures of people on the street without those people knowing about it or agreeing to it? Or violating copyright on thousands of books by digitizing them without the authors' consent?
Jeez, why are you picking on the nerds at Google?
   Okay, forget that whole evil empire, they carry with them the seeds of their own destruction. People aren't going to put up with their crap for much longer. What about this whole global warming thing?
Yeah, see, now that's a problem.
   Is it? Really? How do you know?
Well, that's what they say on the TV all the time...
   Doesn't it bother you that this concept has gone from a vague notion to unassailable dogma in a matter of a few years? Doesn't it bother you that anyone who might question the science behind the research becomes demonized and vilified?
But if everybody says it's true, those guys shouldn't say it's not.
   That's not the way science works. Scientists are supposed to put forward a theory, then other scientists discuss it, pick it apart, and put it back together to make a better theory. And then the whole mess happens again. Over and over and over, it's never done, it's never something set in concrete. Science isn't a talking point, it's not a bullet on a Power Point slide.
But a lot of people say global warming is true.
   Science isn't a popularity contest either. Something isn't true just because it's on the cover of Time magazine. Especially not science.
Sounds like you got a bug up your ass about this one.
   Yeah, well... it just pisses me off. All this work I did creating the modern concept of science, and a few douchebags with a good PR engine throw it all to hell.
Ain't it always the way?
   Bastards. I'd like to invent a siege engine that would thin out their ranks a little.
A what engine?

Creepy Little Guy

There's been a little man haunting my dreams lately.
   Seriously, the past week or so I've been seeing the same little guy in my dreams with alarming regularity. His face is thin, he has a bald head with 5 o'clock shadow on his face and scalp, big ears, and a toothy... well, not exactly a toothy grin so much as a he's showing his teeth like he's at the dentist. He's wearing a butterscotch-colored suit with leather shoulder patches that seems too large for him. His legs are about 2 feet long but his torso and arms are regular-sized. He's not a sinister figure, but he's not exactly comical either.
   The first night I saw him he was a background figure, just a guy in a crowd scene but he was odd enough that I remember him and not the dream. The next night he was a little more prominent, and then night after that he was almost a featured extra. With no lines. That's when I realized that I'd seen him the previous two nights. Then the fourth night came and went and he wasn't there. But he was back the fifth night like an under-five player the producers have taken a liking to.
   I don't know why he keeps coming back. It doesn't matter what kind of dream I'm having, he shows up. And I don't even remember the context of the dreams, but I do remember him. I'm getting concerned.
   I haven't been eating badly, no hot sauce before bedtime so I don't think it's indigestion. I don't have a guilty conscience about anything so it's not that. For the life of me I can't figure out why I would keep seeing the almost-creepy little guy in my dreams. It could be that I expect to see him now, and so I do.
   So far he hasn't said anything, and I'm not sure if I want him to or don't. He might make some sort of crazy pronouncement, like telling me to found my own nation or something. Which would fit in with a prior post of mine but would, honestly, creep me out like nobody's business. We'll see if he makes an appearance tonight.
   Why couldn't my dreams be haunted by a supermodel?

Better Than I Remember

A while back I wrote about something that was not nearly as good as I remember. Visits to things from your past are sometimes dangerous journeys onto wind-tossed shoals of memory, where one wrong move can drive your fond recollections onto the sharp rocks of reality. But not everything you remember fondly from your past is doomed to turn out poorly in the present. Today, for example, I was pleasantly surprised.
   I'd just finished fencing and was driving home in the hot rod when some Jethro Tull came on the radio. Even though Tull was a regular part of my youth, it's been quite a while since I've listened to any of my old favorites. Sure, the songs are on my iTunes list, but the last time I was really into Tull I had to listen on a cassette tape.* And that's quite a while ago.
   Gotta say, I remember why I liked them all those years ago. I was jamming out on the highway to 'Aqualung,' which is about a 6 minute song, so I got pretty far down the 134 with Tull blaring, almost like when I used to pop the cassette into the player in my '72 Chevelle on my way to pick up my friends for a night of mischief. Good times, good times.

So not everything I liked when I was a kid is crap. It's a good thing I thought parachute pants were stupid back in the day, or I might have more to regret than Heavy Metal the Movie.


* Kids, cassette tapes replaced 8-track cartridges in the national zeitgeist and were co-existent with vinyl LPs, which themselves were like big, fragile, black CDs. CDs are what your older brothers and sisters used to buy back before iTunes.
** also, Jethro Tull was a real person a few centuries ago. Sounds like a Dickens character.

Just Call Me Sgt. Schultz

I have been trying to re-examine the way I interact with the world. Lately I have noticed that I'm not noticing things, or at least not looking at things with the same kind of critical eye I used to. This is part of growing older, I suppose, but it's also part of growing lazier. Adults are used to having the answers, experience has taught us what things are and what they are not. At least most of the time.
   But I think it's better to stay ignorant sometimes. Or, at the very least, to let go of the idea that I need to have all the answers all the time. I need to be able to pick something up, turn it over and around and upside-down and get to know it for what it is, not for what I think it is.
   Little kids do this automatically. Toddlers, especially, discover something new all the time, every hour of every day. Things that adults know and have dealt with for years are things they've never encountered before. Corners on coffee tables, dust bunnies under the bed, fringe on carpets, tupperware, it's all new, all something to be examined and re-examined, broken and put back together again.
   So that's what I'm gonna do. Break stuff. Metaphorically, of course, some of my stuff would be pretty expensive to replace.
    note: for those of you who have no idea who Sgt. Schultz is, he was a character on Hogan's Heroes, which you can probably catch on Nick at Night. If that still exists, I don't know I don't have cable any more. His motto was 'I know nothing,' which is amazingly Socratic for a TV sitcom Nazi.

Tales From My Past - Dot-Com Madness

Do you remember the good old days? 1999? Back when Y2K was making people dig holes in their back yards? When the Euro was new and worth less than a dollar? When Brandi Chastain stripped for America at the World Cup? When the dot-com bubble hadn't yet burst, when companies who made nothing and provided no service were trading for $50 a share? When people who had no business playing in the stock market got their own personal accounts and traded their salary like it was Monopoly money?
   Ahh.... good times.
   Back then I worked for a soul-less, privately-held corporation - which is different from a soul-less public corporation in that it's easier for the private corp to lie - that was spending money as if they printed their own. Which they may have been doing. They were just figuring out the power of the Internet to drive their business, and one of the projects I was working on was creating a centralized customer database. I used specific software to get this done, and that software company held a 'user's conference' every year, which was, as we all now know, just another sales call and an excuse to spend far too much money. But since I was overworked and underpaid I got to go. Score one for Don.
   The software company rented out Universal Studios in Orlando, FL. The entire place, just for four hundred or so conference attendees. They had plenty of food and performers in costume and all the rides were open. It was crazy and fun, and had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the software product. Even though I felt a little guilty about it, I did eat their food and ride their rides and talk to the guy dressed as Captain America.
   Our regional sales manager took us to a very expensive Italian restaurant and picked up the entire tab, liquor included, for seventy people. When they found out I used to work at an Italian restaurant they made me pick the wines, and when I balked at the $90 bottle - we'd have needed at least six bottles to cover everyone drinking, minimum $540 - they just laughed and told me to get what I thought was best. So I did. I'm sure the liquor tab alone was over $1000.
   We got tons of branded crap. Empty notebooks, scratch pads, pens, watches, spiral-bound ledgers, and acres of slick product marketing junk. All of it free to us, none of it free to produce.
   When I think of the money that one company wasted in just four days, and how much better their financial position would be right now if they hadn't spent it...
   Aww, who am I trying to kid? I want those old days back. The spendthrift, crazy dot-com days, when a simple analyst got treated like a king, on the off chance that he might tell the decision-makers at a company to keep using a product they'd already bought. Come on, people, whatever happened to irrational exuberance?

Makeup Sponges and Cigarette Butts

When you do a job, any job, you generate a certain kind of debris. Working in an office you generate sheets of paper (especially in a 'paperless' office) and pens with no ink. If you're a chef you generate compostable wet garbage like the ends of carrots or chicken bones, if you're construction worker it's sawdust and stray nails. Every profession generates its junk, even the performing arts, it just took me a little thinking to find out what that was.
   Given my status 'between assignments' I've had to drop acting classes; yes, oddly enough for someone in LA, I'm an actor, you can see my tour de force here. Anyway, it's been a month or more, and it took me a while to notice what I wasn't noticing, if you catch my drift. Since an actor doesn't produce anything - besides pure genius, I mean - I didn't think there were any by-products to the process. Then I realized the weeks since I'd been backstage at a theater was the exact same time since I'd seen any discarded makeup sponges or cigarette butts. The place used to be a wasteland of beige filter tips with matching foundation-stained sponges, like crab apples dropped from a gnarled, twisted stump of a tree. And if the theater played host to young Hollywood, with its one-note emoting and abominable line readings, you'd likely end up hip-deep in debris. But that hasn't been a problem since I dropped my classes.
   It's been a while since I've seen anybody smoking at all, as a matter of fact (except the H-1B workers behind an office building), when I used to see actors smoking all the time, especially the young, greasy, desperate wanna-bes. And I haven't seen a used, carelessly discarded makeup sponge at all since I last left the theater.
   Does this mean that actors in general and young actors in particular are dirty, thoughtless people, more concerned with how other people see them than with picking up after themselves? Of course it does. Does that make them bad people? Only the sloppy ones, the rest of us are pretty decent folks. Unless they're more successful than we are, then they're evil bastards.

Not Cool Any More

This morning I was thinking about what to have for breakfast and I realized that all the options I considered were healthy. Good for me and heart-smart. Special K cereal, apples, a whole wheat English muffin, for God's sake. Time was I would have been looking for cold pizza, or Doritos, or cookies and ice cream. And I would have found them, too.
   What happened to me? When did I finally start listening to my mother?
   Somewhere along the line I became concerned with eating properly, with lasting long enough to see another sunrise. No more living fast and damned be the consequences. If I wasn't so lazy that I like to walk to work, I'd probably live out in the suburbs somewhere, on a cul-de-sac with everybody else, concerned about property values and whether my neighbors mowed their lawn the way I liked.
   I'm not cool any more. And for those of you who know me who might say I was never cool, I say 'shut up,' let me have my moment.
   There's another thing. Back in the day, when I was cool, I used to be able to pack all my stuff and move in 24 hours. Nothing I had that was important to me, or nice, or expensive was more than I could stuff in the back of my truck. That's not the case now. I have nice furniture, appliances, office supplies and equipment. I have an iced tea maker, for cryin' out loud, and I like it. I'm not going to leave it behind.
   I spent ten years as a corporate weasel, and I think some of it rubbed off on me. Either that or I got old. Nah, I'm blaming the corporations. The bastards co-opted me, made me one of them. One of me.
   I have the feeling that the me from eleven years ago would probably want to kick my ass now. And he'd be right.

Things That Worry Me Which Probably Shouldn't

Sometimes I find myself wondering if maybe my life could be the figment of someone else's imagination. It's hard to believe that everything I've done, everywhere I've been, everyone I've met could all be just... chance. So of course it must be that I'm a work of fiction. What other answer is there?
   You may recognize this idea from the movie Stranger Than Fiction, a Will Ferrell movie from a few years back. That film itself was a rip-off of a pulp sci-fi story written by none other than L. Ron Hubbard. Yes, that L. Ron Hubbard, the Scientology guy. Before he invented a religion he was a B-list writer for the pre-war pulps.
   I've been entertaining this idea for quite a while, though, long before I knew who Will Ferrell or L. Ron Hubbard were. Whenever I wrote a story I imagined the characters' lives so fully and completely it was as if they were alive to me, as if I weren't inventing it so much as just recording it. That led me to wonder what my characters were doing when I wasn't watching them. Which in turn led to me wonder if maybe someone else wasn't doing the same thing to me. Writing about me writing about my characters, and wondering if someone were writing about them too.
   Yeah, I'm gonna stop now, my head's hurting...