The Taco Traveler

I wrote a lot in college, but that was way before blogs so I have notebooks somewhere crammed full of ink. I worked at the downtown San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina, and I'd head down to work early and sit at The Upstart Crow Bookstore & Coffeehouse, next door at the touristy shopping village, and amongst the books, at a table between the poetry and the philosophy, I'd write about everything. I'd describe people and the things they were doing as practice in observation and detail. I'd pull a Bukowski off the shelf and read and then I'd scribble my own odd and over-caffeinated poetic ramblings. Then I'd go to work and serve expensive wine and nice meals to tourists and business travelers in crystal goblets and on bone china plates.

After graduate school when I got all technical and started making money from being all technical, I quit writing for the most part, and only really took it up again after my divorce a few years ago. In recognition of this return to something that really makes me happy, my ex-wife bought me a divorce gift: an onyx and silver Mont Blanc pen. When she gave me this pen she said: "Someday you'll be sitting in a coffee shop or something and this pen will be a conversation starter. A pretty girl will see it in your hand or in your shirt pocket. She'll see that little white peak and she'll know it's a Mont Blanc." Sure, it's a little bit pretentious to assume that a $200 pen would make a significant difference, but it's just a simple fact that I like more sophisticated, more wordly girls. Maybe it's not a key indicator of worldliness and sophistication, but it's an indicator nonetheless.

I've used that pen for three years now, both sailing and ashore. My notebook and my pen are my loneliness crutches -- they're what I did while alone on my boat or now when I'm alone in a cafe or a restaurant and want to keep myself busy and not just stare at my phone or a bar's television. I've filled notebooks, ships logs and travel journals with roughed-out blog entries, sailing adventures, poems, screenplay ideas and even some novel outlines. I've done a lot of writing practice and when offshore I've even pre-written emails I'd transcribe later when I felt like turning on my computer. I've gone through six or seven refills.

This re-immersion in writing and creativity has made me an exceptional online date. I have a great story that includes lots of travel, passion, adventure and the pursuit of a better sort of life. I can write and talk about almost anything; I said in a dating profile once I can talk "from huntin' to Hemingway, Joseph Campbell to nanoscience, which makes me great arm candy at holiday parties. Plus, I own my own tux!" I photograph fairly well (from some angles better than others). I'm kind and generally friendly, and when I'm intrigued I can talk on the phone for hours like a teen-aged girl.

So what's the problem? The problem is I'm actually too good at online dating - at sharing my cool story and listening to cool stories, becoming too interested too soon in someone I've yet to meet, and twice now in the last few years I've flown to different corners of the country to meet girls I've been fascinated by in email, IM, text, phone... only to find at the very first glance (or smell, or touch) that there was absolutely no chance of anything working out longer-term. And in the end, the in-person failure of this deep virtual connection always hurts one or both of us.

I was in San Diego, November of 2007, when I saw S_'s online profile at Match.com. She looked amazing -- cute and sassy with her perfectly-formed sentences and textual wit. She appeared on my screen as a suggested match after I'd written someone else ("Here are some other users you might like..."). But she was all the way back in Seattle. I read her profile and was intrigued but bummed that I hadn't seen her profile before I'd left Seattle. But I emailed her anyway, something to the effect of: "I'm out of your range, both age-wise and distance (I just left Seattle a month ago on my way down the coast), but I just wanted to let you know your profile made me smile. You sound amazing and cool and sweet. Best of luck to you. Take care." And she wrote me back, her tone almost arms-crossed-pouty, harumph (which is the perfect way to get to me) about how it wasn't fair to write her something so nice but to be so far away and on my way farther.

But we didn't let it go. We emailed a few times, and email led to instant messaging, which led to texting (drunk-texting, even), and finally, while IM-ing and wondering what we'd think of each others' voices, I just called her. For the next few weeks we talked nightly, sometimes for hours, or sometimes she'd not talk at all and just listen as I rattled off anything -- I'd make up a story about nothing or I'd recount a sailing adventure as she drifted off to sleep. She loved my voice and wouldn't let me stop. She'd sigh contentedly and I'd lay there on my boat and enjoy the sound of her contentedness.

I was visiting my boys in Florida when S_ and I decided we'd had enough -- we absolutely had to meet. It had been five or six weeks of... yes, really, falling in love without even ever having seen the other person. I wrote her a poem because she'd never had one written for her, which I thought an injustice; every girl, by the age of 29, deserves at least one poem. This was hers:

And another, an untitled, never-delivered haiku:

I re-routed my return trip to San Diego to make a three-night stop in Seattle to meet S_ and also get into the office. Because we had a meeting with investors my company even picked up the hotel room.

When I first saw her at the airport, she was amazing -- everything I'd hoped. She was wearing white jeans and a light blue shirt. She had big gorgeous brown eyes and amazing hair to match. She was just as fit and as glowingly beautiful as she appeared in her photos. I could go on and describe every detail, but the only detail that mattered, ultimately, was this: upon the first kiss and the follow-up first hug, I knew immediately that I didn't like her smell. And it wasn't her fault -- she wasn't dirty or neglectful. It wasn't her perfume, shampoo or soap. It was pheromones, body. It was smell you can't wash off or cover.

There was some research done that I'm too lazy to look up right now, but basically there were ten women and ten men. The men worked out in these t-shirts and when the shirts were good and sweaty, they handed them over and the researchers had the women smell them one-by-one and rate the attractiveness of the man who'd worn it. There were some likes, some loves, some ho-hums and some turn ons, but one result was surprising because of how utterly distasteful this smell was to the woman. It turns out the woman and the man were related.

I'm positive I wasn't related to S_. I didn't recoil and I wasn't even offended, but there was something about that most key of senses that wasn't working for me. I tried my best to work through it because I so wanted her to be as perfect there as she was in every other way, but in the end I had to end it because it felt somehow like nature was trying to tell me something. How do you tell someone "I don't like your smell"? Well... you don't. You spoil the night and the weekend at 11:45 on a drunken New Year's Eve, after she'd taken the train down from her family's visit to LA to see your boat, your home. You tell her that you've decided for certain that you don't want to have any more kids.

Since I've been here in Panama City, Florida, I haven't met a single girl I've been interested in dating. This is an exceptionally churchy town in a county that voted 70% for McCain this past presidential election. Those are two fairly significant impediments to finding a girl who won't despise me and my beliefs, let alone be a soul mate. So I set up a profile online and set my location to Washington D.C. (which is where I'll be, starting sometime around mid-June).

Less than a week after I set up that profile, I started talking with E_. Smart and artistic, we hit it off right away, and in less than a week we'd already exchanged enough emails to believe that there was something good there. We talked for hours on the phone, and after just two weeks I cashed in some miles and flew to D.C. to see the city I'll be moving to soon and to meet a girl. It was almost like I'd completely forgotten about S_ and the whole idea that you simply cannot fall for someone until you explore way more than what you can share in text or voice. This first meeting, too, in the metro station outside the airport, was much less than expected, and this time without even a hint of physical attraction.

So after all of this, once again I've got mixed feelings about the whole idea of connection-creation via remote communication. It would be great if someday those over-blown expectations would be met, but I've taken a significant step backward and modified my approach (if you can call it an "approach" at all). I hid my D.C. profile and have decided to just stick it out here in Florida, solo and content until the actual move. But if nothing else, my trip to D.C. for that date showed me what a great city and what amazing and beautiful people await me. After the failed date I spent two days walking around the National Mall, seeing the sights and museums like a tourist but feeling like that city -- if it were a bit warmer -- would be just the place for me.

I heard the sounds and smelled the smells of a city, my good shoes clomping past drum-beat buskers on the Chinatown sidewalk and Rodin busts at the Hirshhorn. I felt the echoes and marble-slab vibrations at the Lincoln Memorial.

And yes, of course, while out at dinner one night I even met a real-live girl. Beautiful and brilliant and even more world-aware than myself, she was there with a friend as I sat down a couple seats away at the sushi bar. I pulled out my journal and my pen and began working on something -- maybe it was the beginning of this entry, which started as simple frustration over yet again unfulfilled expectations. At one point her friend went to the restroom and I said something about the fact that they'd been speaking Spanish. Maybe I said something about Mexico. We talked for a couple of minutes and I told her I was in town for a failed blind date but happily looking around anyway as I'd be moving there soon. Her friend returned and they got back to their food and their conversation; I got back to my writing.

A little while later, as she and her friend were trying to sign their checks, rushing to make a late-night movie, the waiter's pen failed them. "May I borrow your Mont Blanc?" she asked, saying Mont Blanc with a perfect French accent.

She signed her check, pulled out a business card and wrote her number on the back. "That's my non-work number, if you have any questions about the neighborhood...."

I smiled, thanked her, and remembered how nice it is to meet a real person as the first step towards connection -- to know right away that the attraction part is there. Most of all, it's nice to know that no matter how meaningful the words may be later, how sweet the voice on the phone if that happens, how pretty the two-dimensional photo, how perfect the giggle, there's a real, physical frame of reference that your nose, your eyes and your body have already pre-approved.

TT

Ashton Kutcher won the race to a million Twitter followers because of his enthusiasm, his star power, his likability, the fight against malaria (and future causes to come), his supportive and co-tweeting wife and just enough tech savvy to make the whole story compelling. After last week’s stretch run he’s been crowned the de facto king of Twitter, and will hold that title unless and until Oprah gets up to speed and starts engaging with her followers rather than just making announcements.

Throughout the chase with CNN, we heard a lot on Twitter and on his streaming video channel (especially in the excitement of the night, with friends and other celebs crowded around him at his desk) about how this accomplishment was a validation of the “social media revolution.”

“I actually see this as a historical day,” he said as he began his broadcast. “I mean it’s truly the television versus the web.”

But it’s not television versus the web; you can watch television on the web. The Internet is a little bit of everything; it’s not accurate to exclude television as a completely separate medium. It’s another part of what makes the web… the web.

What he said at another point, and the more important message, I think, is that it’s about the dissemination of messages (original posts, RTs and @-replies) by the same people who consume those messages, versus the one-way type of communication that has defined television for the past sixty years:

“At the end of the day, what’s this about? This is about the changing of the guard, from the old way of consuming media to the new way of consuming media. We, together can decide… can make the news on our cell phones, on our iPhones, on our cameras, on our video cameras. We can edit the news. We can broadcast the news and we can consume the news. We can decide what news we want to hear, how we want to hear it, when we want to hear it, and we can get it faster on the web. That’s all we’re saying.”

While the idea of a “social media revolution” is an interesting thought, and Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others (is MySpace still online?) have done much to move forward the idea that this medium can be the breeding ground of many millions of Butterfly Effect messages and follow-up actions every day, with the incredible potential for good, I’d like to suggest that the momentum behind the Twitter-based part of that revolution is unsustainable because of its most basic nature – the fact that it’s just text. Real people are more than their byline, their quotes or their description. Moreover, we don’t know the real intentions of the people who helped Mr. Kutcher get to a million. We don’t even know if they are real people – Twitter doesn’t require an email address before you start posting so theoretically someone could sign up a million times. The person who won a prize as the millionth follower, at the time he started following Mr. Kutcher, had no avatar, zero followers and was following nobody else. More significantly, why, we have to ask ourselves, do people even have thirty thousand or more followers and why do they follow those thirty thousand or more people back? Are all thirty thousand that interesting and important or is it just a numbers game? How can they possibly keep up and truly interact with that mass of humanity, the twenty, thirty, fifty messages every minute? It’s a system of dissemination that is so filled with noise that in the good tweets we are clearly seeing only the tip of the iceberg. It stands to reason that too often the important messages or the brilliant, insightful tweets are not seen or acknowledged unless they happen to be re-tweeted by an @aplusk or @mrskutcher, a @guykawasaki or maybe, eventually, an @oprah.

In an off-handed but telling statement in the heat of his pursuit of 1 million followers, Mr. Kutcher said he knew we were getting tired of all the retweets and the “follow @aplusk” posts, but that soon we’d be able to get back to telling people what we had for breakfast or that we were on our way to the doctor or etc. It was meant to be funny and he knows as well as anyone that those aren’t the sort of updates that are generally useful or encouraged on Twitter, but still, they’re there in abundance. Add to that all the people who follow new people all day long in hopes they’ll follow back, who openly state that their profession is “Internet Marketing” or “Success Coaching” which means they rely on Twitter and other social media to disseminate information about their new ad-splashed blog entry or their “make money online” e-book. And there it is in a nutshell – amidst the amazing accomplishment of one million plus people following one famous person’s short messages, amidst the fight against malaria and human trafficking, there is simply a huge amount of noise made by an astonishing number of Twitter accounts, and the noise is crippling Twitter (literally, “fail-whaling” it much of the day, every day) and crippling its ability to do much good.

The messages that do matter, however – the tweets that somehow lead us to care about the people affected: the children fighting for their lives against malaria, for example – have to point to something more than just text if they’re going to make us care. Just like at some point along the way in SEO / Internet Marketing there *has* to be a purchase to pay for the advertising upon advertising, the razor-thin margins in arbitrage that make the Internet go, at some point along the mechanism of caring there has to be a real person. And Twitter in and of itself is not going to present us that real person or even make them relevant. There are cases where text is all it takes to get involved, but it’s not real emotion. To feel real emotion you need to not just follow but also see the web site of the real-life story of a boy fighting brain cancer (@jonthanjay). You need to see dozens of follow-up messages and thank-yous from someone who maybe threatened suicide on Twitter but was coaxed back from the brink due to a sudden outpouring of support, and inevitably the community will seek out and embrace that person in real life (“I found her MySpace page. Looks like she lives in Indonesia”). Bottom line, to become emotionally engaged we have to see images and video or at the very least read passages longer than tweets. And we have to see and hear good stories because in the end, Twitter is less powerful as a motivator than the images and commercials provided by Jamie Lee Curtis and the Save the Children Foundation.

Mr. Kutcher implicitly acknowledged this when during the stretch run he moved from Twitter to his video broadcast. Twitter in and of itself is simply not enough – there has to be a audio/visual component (if not an in-person meeting) in order for people to connect and to believe. You cannot have a revolution with one hundred and forty characters of text. Enough words have been said about the other big story on the web last week, the emergence of Susan Boyle into our consciousness and our hearts. But I’d like to reiterate what we all know: that it wasn’t simply her exceptional voice. It was the person, the dramatic and very well-done editing (the over-mascara’d “ohmygod”, the sighs, tsk-tsks and “yeah right”s in the audience), the eyebrows and the sweetness, the frumpiness and the never-been-kissed that turned a beautiful and well-sung song into a performance that has literally changed the lives of so many people.

So where does this leave us? I certainly do believe that social media can do great things, but like anything there’s a coordinate system that contributes to those great things, and Twitter is just one of the cogs in that system. It’s a means to mobilization and maybe with some better search filtering it can be a better accumulator and more accurate disseminator of information. But it’s not yet and never will be real, engaging, human communication. What did Ashton Kutcher do after the Twitter million? He went on Oprah. He went on Larry King Live. And he brought those shows – their star power and their viewers – into his realm. He integrated the power of the separate mediums, the separate networks of people and ideas, and showed Larry and Oprah and the world how the Twitter cog works. And that coordination – not the negation of one of its pieces – is where the revolution lives.

TT

There's not enough time to be brave and aggressive, sometimes. And when there's only a second, both of us flying around a bend in the bike path and a sudden smile of surprise attraction, it's even harder. For me, it was a smile that validated the quality of a movie - a happy ending in difficult times - the young carny + carny summertime fling that turns into more.

I'd smiled twice already on that bike ride back to my boat. There was the older man who'd warned me - before the movie in the theater lobby - about the amount of salt I was putting on my popcorn, his concern for my heart and health fatherly with a bit, maybe, of just wanting someone to talk to. And as I left the theater and started down San Diego's Broadway there he was again, crossing the street in front of the bus I'd stopped next to. I smiled again but he didn't see me as he was preoccupied with whether or not the bus was going to stop at the light or run him down.

A couple miles later I smiled and held up a "peace" sign to an old homeless man who was staring as I approached, my arms dangling lazily at my sides as I rode casually along the sea wall. He waved back, but with a bit of a smirk like "yeah, fella - you're gonna kill yourself or ride right into the bay like that."

And at the turn where a year and a half ago I would have turned, too, when I was berthed at Harbor Island instead of the America's Cup Harbor, you came around the bend and presented me with a split-second "do I smile" decision (yes) and then you were past and there was the "do I chase and ask her to coffee" decision (no, another day). You had short, light brown hair, a bit curly, sassy, bike-wind-tussled, and even in the short time I saw you I could see that your shy smile dimpled your cheeks in a perfect and beautiful way.

We passed, I stopped at the light and looked back and you were already around another corner and I was left with the regret of a moment good but gone. I started writing to you immediately, composing this, imprinting your look on my left brain so my right could share it later, or now.

I sit at my favorite Starbucks, near my marina. I locked my bike again next to the same two bikes that have been there since I returned to San Diego in January. The bikes never move. They are matching beach cruisers, inexpensive but new not too long ago, one red and one blue. The red has a mass of cobwebs connecting the rear brake to the rear tire and the blue has an open and empty tool kit. The girl working the Starbucks didn't know the story behind them, so I suggested a scenario: There's an old couple, both sick, in pain and incurable, who for Christmas bought each other the bikes for a last ride to their favorite Starbucks. They locked their bikes out of habit, then went inside and sat, held hands and watched each other across the table for that one last coffee. And after that coffee they walked up the street to the bridge and went out of this world together, the bikes a legacy of their act.

Real is what we make it. I choose to believe in good stories because they make me feel good. The couple in the movie will live together, he'll work himself through graduate school and she'll finish at NYU and they'll be happy. The older man at the theater will return home after his careful walk home and defend himself in a friendly and loving way saying "Yes, I had some popcorn but I didn't add any salt, dammit." The old homeless man, for a while tonight, will feel a little less invisible. And you... I guess I'd like to think that somehow I'll see you again.

I was leaving the salon as you arrived. You were walking from your car in the parking lot as I walked to mine, and even from a distance, from across the lot, I knew there was something amazing about the moment we were walking into. It was obvious you were gorgeous, but as we approached each other it wasn’t your being generally beautiful that drew me; it was your smile. Our eyes locked, we smiled, we passed, and though you were gone I couldn’t stop smiling.

This was 1997 or '98, when the Internet was just beginning to explode and I worked as a developer writing code for a news site. I worked hard, but I'd also take an occasional day off to go fishing or sailing or snowboarding. I drove a cool red Jeep. I was 30 and single and for the first time in my life I had extra money. Occasionally I'd spend a hundred bucks on a massage and a hair cut at a nice downtown salon, and if the stars aligned (which they did exactly once), I'd share a smile with a beautiful girl in the parking lot.

After we saw each other, I was a mess. For the next half hour I couldn't get your smile out of my head. I went next to an appointment just down the street to give blood, and I even told the nurse about you and how I regretted not saying something or stopping, forgetting my blood-donating appointment altogether to ask you to put off your hair appointment for a drink or a cup of coffee. And the nurse said, "She's probably still there, right?" Yes, girl hair takes a long time, I remembered.

I'm blessed with huge veins for ease of blood-giving and a slow-beating but large and efficient heart. The greenest lab tech in the world can find the vein in my left arm and have a pint of my blood in about eight minutes, poke-to-cookie. In this case, I may have squeezed the ball extra hard to fill the bag in five. I got that blood out and wolfed down my cookie and glass of juice and was out the door before considering how little I'd eaten that day. But the situation called for an immediate gesture, and once the idea got into my head....

I sped to a grocery store that had a good floral department and had the girl arrange a spring bouquet, orchid-heavy, while I wrote. What did I say on the card? I have no idea. I suppose I would have said:

Can't get your incredible smile out of my head. I hope you'll call.

And my name and number.

As I was writing the card I got dizzy and hot. I almost passed out from lack of blood, lack of food, dehydration and a rush of whatever other chemicals your smile had put into my system. The flower girl saw I'd turned white and had me sit on an upside-down bucket in the walk-in refrigerator for a few minutes to cool off, to get my head together. She and the manager brought me some water and asked me to stay longer, to be sure I was okay before driving, but I didn't want to miss you.

When I walked into the salon again, still a little dizzy, carrying the flowers, I think you were sitting there at the other end of the place but I didn't know for sure, your hair in curlers or foil or something amongst five other girls in curlers or foil who also could have been you. You told me later on the phone that your heart skipped when I walked in. You thought I was bringing the flowers for someone else. You said to your stylist: "I wish those were for me." I didn't want to look right at you, didn't want to give myself away or risk smiling again at the wrong girl. I made a quiet attempt to describe you to the girls at the front desk. I remember their blushes, their knowing, conspiratorial smiles when they knew for sure who you were.

I wish I hadn't been so eager to know you better. I wish I hadn't known so much about the Internet. That night, after our nice talk on the phone, the short but perfect conversation of two people who don't know each other but are willing to learn, I wanted to write you. I searched for your company, saw how they formatted their email addresses and guessed yours. I sent you a short note. Just a Hi, is this you? Looking forward to seeing you again. To you, this was invasive, creepy. Maybe it was; I was still a little off and lacking blood - the donated pint having been previously assigned to my brain. Your reply questioned how I'd gotten your email address, as if I'd hired a detective or something. And in the end you said you were getting back together with your ex boyfriend anyway.

I think about you often, or at least sometimes a vague idea of you floats in and back out of my head, and I don't think I'll completely forget you or that day. Not just because I learned you can only push a romantic notion so far before it's creepy, but because you represent what I think is greatest about being single: the opportunity for spontaneous infatuation, and having fun with life and maybe even the prospect of finding love. More than anything, though, you're a reminder of what a beautiful smile can do.

I was stranded, waiting for better weather to cross the bar and make my way south around Cape Mendocino. Tired of my canned Costco boat food, I somehow found my way to Hurricane Kate's ("Dining with a twist") in downtown Eureka. It was an amazing lunch, and I was so immersed in my sweet potato fritters that I almost didn't notice you come in, but the host and the chef made a show of welcoming you at the door, like they knew you well, saw you often. You may have been a starlet in the fifties, and even at seventy, eighty, you carried yourself like a princess in the best sense of the simile - the Grace Kelly / Diana sense.

Your hair was mostly white. You wore expensive gray pants and against the backdrop of a black turtleneck you wore delicate and sensible lunchtime pearls. The host seemed to ask you with a look of concern: "Where is ... today?" and you smiled sweetly, looked down a bit. You might have suggested that he was under the weather. But somewhere behind your smile there was a bit of sadness, like his weather was somehow, brutally, more permanent. I couldn't help thinking of a story from several years ago on This American Life: a couple is together for over fifty years, and when she dies he follows, naturally, the next day, exactly as he said he would. It's hard to believe, sometimes, that sort of love exists.

The host seated you alone at a table by the window, and for several minutes I just watched you. You stared out the window as if you were waiting, and I wanted to join you or ask you to join me, to listen if you wanted to talk, even if not about him but about anything. I was sure you had stories to tell.

In the end, after all, you were joined by someone who must have been your daughter, and I stopped thinking about you as much and started considering what it would be like to be so loved, so taken care of, so fussed about before you dressed and reluctantly left my bedside to meet our daughter for lunch. And even if I only conjured him, creating the backstory of his sickness and inferring your concern, to be able to imagine the accomplishment of something like your love was well worth the walk from the marina and the price of a long, thoughtful lunch.

I arrived just before kickoff to a house full of people I didn’t know, and when I saw you in the driveway it was immediately obvious you were the star – that there was something about your orbit that made people want to be in it. Your moon was little M_ - so happy, giggling and smiling, cupcake-frosting-nosed. Even when pouting she couldn’t hide how happy she was – how good her life is and how satisfied you make her.

You were the most beautiful person in a house full of beautiful people, and after we’d met and talked just a bit I couldn’t wait for the next time. A bit later I met another girl who introduced herself as a muse, and after exploring the idea a bit – asking whether she inspired anyone or any genre in particular, had she maybe had a screenplay written for her – I said, just to be funny, that I was off to write some poetry. And I found myself just minutes later having another perfect conversation with you as your daughter slept in your lap.

Sure, I romanticize moments. I remember as best I can but then sometimes knowingly take the events and the contexts and recreate, re-engineer feelings to create potential. Today, though, I didn’t need to do that; there was nothing I would have done differently or said differently. There wasn’t anything to gain, romantically. You had someone, M_’s father, waiting at home for you both, so today I was just a sailor and under-employed software architect having a good conversation with a beautiful and fascinating girl. And for me, having not actually acknowledged or celebrated the new year when it came, offshore somewhere on my way north from Cabo, something like that is enough to build a year upon.

We text. We IM. We email. We IRQ. We blog. But we don't connect. We walk blithely by others without seeing them because we're busy texting someone across the world. Middle-aged men, in realizing their Star Trek dream, go sunrise to sundown wearing Bluetooth headsets that isolate them from their surroundings no matter how loudly they talk.

While many advances have brought us together (transportation, for example), and many technologies have made communication easier, since the dawn of man advances in technology have mostly served to remove us from our human-ness. I'm no Luddite, and I don't want technological innovation to stop (I make my living as a software architect), but if you look at many advances you'll see how real, true human connectedness has been dulled through technology.

The gun made it possible to kill from far away. I've never been in combat, and I imagine that there are some brutal, gruesome things that happen even with guns - even from far away. But consider the ease with which we can see a life disappear on television when it's just a small hole in someone's body. Consider how it dulls us to kill in a video game (and consider further why video games may be the military's best recruiting tool). Compare those feelings (or lack thereof) to the reaction you had while viewing or even just hearing about the ancient and brutal way in which Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl (and many others) were killed.

I had a dream last night where we had developed a Terminator-like soldier shell that could absorb any blast. A soldier would be fired upon from a rooftop and rather than firing back, he'd track the would-be assassin. He'd walk into the building and climb to the rooftop. He'd find the person and whether he was being shot a hundred times it didn't matter; the bullets would just bounce off. Our soldier would crouch down in front of the guy and he'd say: "So, we're friends now, right? No more shooting me or my friends, right?" And the guy would drop his weapon and he'd never fire another.

Yes, it's a silly dream, and one that at its core relies on scare tactics and intimidation by a technological superpower who says, essentially: "Look at me. You're going to have to give up, or you're going to have to develop better weapons." But that doesn't stop me from wishing that what made the assassin drop his weapon was the face-to-face connection with his enemy. It's an idea (a strategy?) that's been in use in Iraq for a while now: troops handing out soccer balls, candy, pencils and paper. Connecting.

While "connectedness" isn't something the government or anyone can legislate, the idea benefits by being far removed from your typical "sustainability issue." In being so removed, it's an idea that won't completely turn off a third of the population who think "environmentalism" and "sustainability" are dirty words. Computer models have shown us that the earth will recover after we're gone. If there's a sustainability issue we need to address urgently, it's us and our relationship to each other. Will everything else magically fall into place? I don’t know. But a good place to start, I think, is by removing your Bluetooth when you’re not on a call. When you sneeze, pull out one of your iPod headsets so you can hear and thank somebody who says “bless you.” Make eye contact. Share a smile. Reconnect.

At least I made her smile. It was a decent day in San Diego – nice and getting nicer, and I was out for a big weekend bike ride from my marina downtown to my favorite coffee shop in La Jolla. It’s a twelve mile bike ride each way – a long way for coffee, but it’s also the exercise, the sunshine, the ocean and sometimes, occasionally, a girl like her. She was just sitting there alone on the sea wall, Pacific Beach, either waiting for someone or contemplating something very deep and important. As I saw her I slowed my pace, trying to decide if I should say something, if she looked like she wanted to talk or maybe just needed a smile.

The night before my bike ride, I'd gotten an email from my dad. I’m not generally a fan of huge email attachments with the crazy stuff that makes its way around the Internet, carrying viruses or at least building a big list of emails for spammers to harvest (clip the previous recipients before forwarding!). This was a huge download and something that’s been around for years – a PowerPoint document often called “Life is Beautiful.PPS” (the virus-free version) with inspirational quotes and suggestions – little things that make each day a better day, and if done in bulk – by everyone – would make the world a much better place. One of those slides flickered into my conscience as I saw the girl on the boardwalk, and the words grew clearer as I passed her by: “Make three people smile today.” That’s what I tried to keep in my head as I turned my bike around.

For many men, it’s not easy to approach women we don’t know. Though I’m not shy, in many ways I’m the anti Tucker Max. Despite the biological imperative and the acknowledgment that a relationship has to start from something, I always feel a little bit disgusted with myself when I start talking to a girl where the premise of the conversation is just simply to meet so that a conversation or two later we may be having drinks, a date, maybe more. It's as if I feel like a relationship has to start with real feelings already in place. I’m so the opposite of Tucker Max that I actually wrote an “I Saw You” entry that re-imagined his meeting with Miss Vermont – one of his more famous / infamous stories. I know how my writing voice sounds. How soft and sappy my prose feels when I try to write about what it’s like to see beauty in a moment or in a subtle interaction. It feels like I’m from another time; pack me in a capsule and send me to the 1700’s and I’ll write an epistolary novel. Sometimes I’d like to write stronger, more arrogantly, more macho. I’ve considered Tucker Max and his success, and the (usually) misogynistic hilarity of his odd and fascinating life. Would it be fun to re-write his stories, to completely change how he depicts the events and instead to write those events like I see them? Probably not, but I once gave it a try for a few paragraphs of his Miss Vermont story, anyway:

I Saw You: The Girl at The Athletic Club, Boca Raton

I was just working out, not looking to meet anyone necessarily, and in that place you stood out for the spandex you weren’t wearing. You didn’t look like the rest of the girls at the place; where they treat the gym as an opportunity to flaunt everything, you seemed to be hiding your beauty, as if you were really there to work out: your hat pulled down low so I could barely see your eyes, loose t-shirt, loose-fitting basketball shorts....

Because I went to Duke for law, the logo on your shorts opened an avenue to conversation, and when you were between sets I approached. I don’t remember what I said because the words didn’t matter; what was important was your face, your smile, the way you brushed back a few strands of hair and tucked them behind your ear....
“You hungry,” I asked?

It’s far from the “Dude, let me tell you about this chick from last night” voice of Tucker Max. It’s a long way from the “hills were purple in the distance and Greta looked at Jack in a way that said he would be better off if he were fishing or wrestling or running with the bulls like he’d talked about earlier that summer as they sat at the café on the Rue Montparnasse” Hemingway brand. But I think I write in the same way I see the world. I’d much rather be someone who, seeing the girl on the boardwalk, so beautiful and yet so sad sitting all alone looking out at the ocean, thinks first about whether there was anything he could do to help rather than seeing her sadness as an opportunity. So I approached her. I rolled up slowly on my bike and removed my sunglasses. Though I was right in front of her, I’d almost stopped before she even realized I was there.

“Hi,” I said, simply.

“Oh, hi.” She was a little surprised. She forced a shy smile.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “I’m sorry to bug you... you just looked like you have something very heavy...”

Like many men, I’m slightly red-green colorblind, so subtle shades are sometimes lost on me. A dark purple from a dark red, say. But it was clear that she blushed, and I knew right away that either she was completely fine and just a little hung over or otherwise not quite herself that morning, or she was embarrassed that her sadness was so obvious a stranger would ask if she’s okay. She may have even bit a little mad. I helped her get rid of me as she started to explain she was fine – “Just meditating,” I joked, suggesting it as her excuse. I smiled and she smiled back, however forced. I told her to have a great day, then turned and slowly pedaled off down the boardwalk.

Maybe it's just me, but it feels like it’s going around, this resurgence of caring. This interest in making things better for people whose body language seems to say that a minute of friendly conversation or a true, honest smile could help them through their day. The last time I left the States for Mexico I’d just left my two little boys behind in Florida after being with them for about five straight weeks. And as I sat there at a bus station in Phoenix waiting for the Tufesa bus to Guaymas, a Mexican man - a worker at the bus line - approached me and asked how I was doing. “Todo bien?” he asked, with a slight look of concern. “Si, si. Todo bien, gracias.” We talked a few more minutes but I didn’t go into any details. More than anything it bothered me that my sadness was so obvious, so I resolved to fix my outward appearance on that trip even if I was hurting inside, missing my boys and wondering how long I’d be away. A few hours later on that bus ride I helped some new friends get their tourist visas at the border and get safely and officially down to Guaymas / San Carlos. In return, they offered their couch for the night since it was three in the morning and my boat was in the middle of the harbor with no dinghy at the dock. Far from the guy on the bus depot bench who looked like he needed a kind word, I’d become, once again, the helpful one, and I was helped right back.

Nobody needs any reminders that times are difficult; we see them every day. But somehow it feels like a better, more hopeful sort of bad lately. It can’t just be the presidential changeover, can it? I don’t know, but we've all seen how an entire company can take on the personality of its CEO. It’s brought us down in the past, but this time, in this case, I think people should get used to being confronted when they're sad. The world really seems different – like a nicer, better place already since a more caring president has taken office. It’s okay to listen, now. Okay to be conciliatory. Okay to admit mistakes and failings. More than anything, as he and his family say with everything they do and everything they are to each other, it’s okay to feel. And certainly, it’s okay to ask a stranger if there’s anything you can do to help, even if all they need is a smile.

I needed to get outta Dodge, today – to make my way to a quiet cove away from the bustle of San Carlos and the constant stream of sportfishers and tour/dive boats heading in and out of the bay. I’m at a cove called Caleta Lalo, less than two or three miles from the entrance to San Carlos Bay, just to the north.

This morning, though, before I left the Bay, I picked up my tanks, which Gary’s Dive Shop was kind enough to fill and even deliver back to their dock for me so I didn’t have to transport them on my bike to their shop a mile or so down the road. After I had the tanks back on the boat, I went “war boating.” With my laptop and wifi antenna, I took my dinghy around the bay seeking the best free Internet, and discovered that no one place was better than any other for the one signal I was able to consistently connect to. Still, I’ve been working so much, I needed a break from having Internet. Internet is a momentum grabber; as soon as I get going on a nice piece of writing (whether code or … writing writing), I feel this evil need to check Real Clear Politics again to see if any new battleground polls have come in.

I left San Carlos Bay around 11 am, hoping to get anchored at a safe spot before the afternoon onshore breeze picked up – lately it’s been blowing up to 25 knots in the Bay. I popped the fishing line in the water for the short hop around Punta Doble, and then it was a straight shot to Caleta Lalo. As I was getting close, I started to reel in the line, and hooked a little “shaker” on the way in. It was a Jack of some sort; I didn’t see the black spots, so it might have been a good-eating white skipjack, but it was so small I didn’t want to mess with it. I just grabbed his tail and gently twirled the barbless hooks out of his mouth and tossed him in and away he went, and I was back to directing Chemistry into the cove.

The cove was (and is) completely empty, boat-wise, except for us, so I spun around at a good spot, backed down on the anchor in 23 feet of water, and within ten minutes I was in the water with mask, fins and snorkel to dive on the anchor and refresh myself in the warm water. The anchor was about as buried as buried gets – no worries at all. After I dried off, I grabbed my camera and took a trip into shore and for a spin around the cove. It’s a shame there’s so much trash on the beach. People…. I’ll pick up a bag full before heading back to the Bay tomorrow afternoon.

I remember when I was 9 or 10 and my sisters and I went and visited my dad at his condo on Maui. Just offshore, anchored right off the beach were these big beautiful sailboats. And I thought that must be the life. Now I see my own boat from the beach, and I’m reminded just how lucky I am to be here, to have this beautiful boat, and to be able to live such a life so relatively young. At forty I still feel 30, maybe 28, and the only thing I can imagine that would be better than this would be to have my boys with me and have no financial worries whatsoever.

It’s 8:45 and I just came in from the deck before I started writing this entry. I was laying on the bow, looking up at the stars, the planets, the bats flitting past my anchor light at the top of the mast, and it dawned on me that having young children makes it so much easier to imagine the immensity of everything around us because I consider detail-by-detail how I would describe it to G and T if they were here with me. In that context, it underscores the relative unimportance of all the things that make life distressing for so many. When you start to think about describing the universe to a child – the tens of thousands of stars just that we can see, the millions of others that create the light of the Milky Way, the thousands of galaxies contained within every small square degree of even the darkest part of our sky (with enough magnification) – it just intensifies the feeling of our smallness. For me, it makes it hard to consider wasting any time. It makes Wall Street stupid. It makes war even shittier.

But it really is luck that I’m here, and I appreciate that it’s the money of Wall Street (to a degree) that allows me to be here, the security of our world (to a degree) that keeps me safe here, and the cruising guide that brought me here in the first place. And this would be a less interesting place without the partiers on the beach, the music of my iPod playing in the background (Buddha Bar, Vol III, CD2: “Joy”), the book to read (Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk).

We are so alone, and yet still so dependent.

I was napping this afternoon (I’ve been getting up at dawn and napping after lunch), and I was awakened by a frantic call on the VHF. Someone from across the Sea of Cortez was taking on water, and though he’s over sixty miles away, he’s apparently got a good VHF. I heard his panicked, high-pitched voice yelling “MAYDAY MAYDAY” amongst the whine of his engine as he tried to give his location and somehow get help from someone. He was six and a half miles offshore, off Santa Rosalita on the western side of the Sea. One fellow, very calmly and authoritatively, eventually took control of the situation over the VHF, and in a very reassuring voice asked the man everything that anyone needed to know if they were going to help him and then relayed that information to the nearest marina and the vessels nearest this man’s location.

When you’re utterly alone and taking on water, you have to take a second to assess the situation. All this man knew was that he was taking on water, but from what I could gather with the noise of his boat and the static of the distant transmission, he didn’t seem to know why. I’ve never been in this situation, but with enough sailing I’m sure one day I’ll encounter something like it. First of all, taking on water, in my opinion, isn’t a “Mayday,” it’s a “Pan-Pan.” Especially since it wasn’t yet so high that it had drowned his engine. After alerting other vessels that you *may* need assistance, the very first thing to do (assuming you’re wearing a life jacket and your life raft is ready to deploy if necessary) is figure out why you’re taking on water. I’m not sure what ended up being the issue, but as he was approaching the Singlar marina at Santa Rosalita he seemed much calmer, as if he had the situation under control. One person - in the rash of confusion before the one man took control of the radio rescue - had suggested he feel the temp of the water, and if it’s very warm it’s probably an exhaust leak, and instead of expelling the warm water after using it to cool the engine, it was spilling it into the engine compartment (and therefore filling the bilge/interior). Solution: shut off your engine. The other likely possibilities were a burst hose below waterline (check all of them, close the seacock – because you know where every single seacock is on your boat), a bad through-hull (put a plug in it, literally, from outside if necessary), a messed up shaft seal (dive under, plug a bunch of crap in there to slow the flow, and pray) or, worst case, he hit something big (like a shipping container) and it put a big hole in his boat (get ready to deploy the life raft).

Problem was, this man seemed more intent on crashing his boat at full speed into shallow water to “save” it, or hustling into the safe, waiting slings of the Singlar haul-out yard than actually finding the problem he needed to fix, and it was frustrating to all who were listening from around the Sea.

We all hope we’re cool when it happens, so ready, so level-headed, so well-spoken and efficient and just... together. But sometimes we need that reassuring voice on the line to help us lower our own pitch, to remind us that yes, we know what we’re doing and we’re ready for something like this. Somewhere, out there in the stars, amongst the millions of galaxies and the trillions of stars, it’s nice to think there might be other things – to think that maybe they’re listening, that maybe they’re someday going to tell us to calm the fuck down, to stop killing each other over different beliefs and stop fretting about the stock markets, and that somehow they know us well enough, and it’s in our nature to get through this.

TT

Fittingly, this essay entitled "Endings" is the last in this "Old Stuff" series. I don't have a lot to say about it; it stands pretty well on its own, I think. Published 1994 with my masters' thesis.

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Endings
But we do not want to get anywhere.
We would like only, for once,
to get to just where we are already.
-- Martin Heidegger

The Triumph of Beginnings
Beginnings are over-rated; they're so much more often the start of good than the start of bad. We often credit them with being the first step on the roads to success, to grand schemes or projects, and to anything that will eventually Be. Endings, however, though they can signal the conclusion of something horrible (say, for instance, war), are rarely celebrated with as much vigor as what begins from that same ending (peace). Sex generally feels good, and birth, the occasional end result of that sex, always hurts. After a birth, when the woman is finished hurting and sweating and screaming at her husband: "You did this to me!" the couple celebrates, not the end of a pregnancy, but the "defining moment:" the beginning of their child's life.

We define things by their boundaries, and those boundaries help us to find the broader meaning and purpose in those things. A hole is not a hole because of the air it contains, which, if you raise it out of the ground would be nothing. Rather, a hole is a hole because of the walls of dirt that define the hole. In the same way, we define ourselves and each other by the car we drive, the community we live in, the job we perform daily, our race, our sex, the closeness of our family, or even our clothing style or musical preference. Any definition of us necessarily reads like a game-show introduction: We are a teenager from Long Island who likes to play roller-hockey; we're a retired social worker from Waterloo, Kentucky who hunts pheasant and collects stamps; we're a Sagittarius; we're an all-American college basketball player from Duke. We're defined by the greater context of the "things" and circumstances that make up our lives.

Einstein called this greater context a "co-ordinate system"--the frame of reference that determines the position of any body at any given moment in time. For Einstein's purposes, the earth (its physical properties and laws) provided the frame of reference for his experiments and theories. The earth was his coordinate system. In one illustration of his theory of relativity he used a room (as a more accessible representative of the earth) to illustrate how the exact same event can occur at different times for two separate observers.

Religious philosophers attempt to define the human soul by making God into a stable, relative system. Western religion gave Him a name: Jehovah. They gave Him a sex: male. They gave Him speech or the power to speak through humans and write books through them. They gave Him a human body so if one of his followers wants to pray they pray to an image and not just an idea. This image of God is so tacitly and completely acknowledged as the westernized system of religion that He even appeared once on "The Simpsons." It's the same God I saw, when, as a child I needed to ask forgiveness for having squashed a slug on my sister's new dress. In my mind (and on "The Simpsons") I saw a kindly old man with a full head of long, white hair and an equally long, white beard. He wore a flowing white robe tied at the waist with a golden rope, and on his feet he wore Birkenstocks.

With the possible exception of ultra-dedicated scientists and the clergy, however, our everyday lives don't usually revolve solely around either a scientific or religious system. Rather, it is the coordinate system of beginnings and ends, as vague and undefinable as they may be, that we use to frame our lives, our bodies, and our minds. We measure our lives by beginnings and firsts: when we were born, when we spoke our first words, when we started driving, when we could legally buy alcohol, when we began to be a part of someone else....

I fell in love with a friend. I cannot say, at what point in time this actually happened; I just looked closely one day and found myself falling or already fallen. Perhaps it was a sunny Sunday morning and I woke earlier than she did and just watched her as she slept. Maybe I realized, just then, as the soft glow of morning sunlight ignited her face: 'Yes, I love this woman.' But when did it actually happen? When did we cross the line between whatever we had before to the absolutely undefinable concept of "love?" Who knows? All I know is this: In the beginning I was happy; in the end I was sad.

Paradoxical Science

Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody
is not its goal, and yet if a melody has not reached
its end, it has not reached its goal. A parable.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

If you hold a piece of string between your hands you have an "end" in each hand, but in more ways than one each end can also be called a beginning: The beginning of the string, the beginning of the transition from string to hand, or the beginning of the transition from string to air. Quantum physics has taught us that nothing is absolutely any one thing. The string--be it nylon, hemp, or cotton--has electrons, and those electrons, busy critters, move, flux, and orbit, constantly redefining the space of that piece of string. The electrons of your hand, too, constantly shape and reshape your "personal space" by their activity. In the resultant intermingling of the subatomic parts of your body and the string you become, to some extent, an extension of that piece of string and it becomes a part of you.

Astronomers speak of a similar idea called "The Mediocrity Principle." This idea says that, at this time, the view of the universe from earth is no better or no worse than from anywhere else in the universe. As Chet Raymo says in his book The Virgin and the Mousetrap: "We're cosmically mediocre." But because the universe continues to expand, there must have been a time when it began to expand. Though with today's technology they have no way of knowing when exactly this occurred, astronomers have formed a hypothetical idea called zero time. Even this, zero time, is not the beginning of the universe, however; that's just when it began to take its current shape. You can trace the evolution of a loaf of bread back to when it was just a lump of ingredients, and you can trace it to a time when the ingredients came together, but even beyond that all the ingredients were still there; they just hadn't come together yet. Cosmologists differ on what they think the universe was before the ingredients came together or how they got there in the first place, but even the strictest of evolutionists believe in the literal truth of at least one bible passage: Ecclesiastes 1:9: "That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which will be done: and there is nothing new under the sun."

For the past twenty-five years or so Chaos Theory has been one of the hottest, most interesting fields of scientific study. Edward Lorenz was one of the founders of this new method of scientific inquiry, and the founding idea of chaos theory is what he called his "Butterfly Effect." In studying the earth's weather systems, Lorenz proved through a series of differential equations that even the tiniest fraction of error in the measurement of weather patterns could lead to drastically different effects. His term for this phenomena, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, is one of the most important characteristics defining chaotic behavior. For example, if a measurement was rounded off at the twentieth digit and placed into his equation, the result would vary considerably from the same measurement rounded off at the twenty first digit. His "Butterfly Effect," then, says that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil will significantly affect the weather in Texas, eventually. What begins as a wing-flap today may someday be a hurricane. A ripple in the ocean may someday be a tsunami. What this says is that nothing is self-starting; the physical world is powered by inertia. The butterfly that causes the hurricane in Texas flaps its wings to escape the little Brazilian girl chasing it with a net. A surf contest is won in Hawaii by someone who got lucky and caught the best wave of the day--the wave having been started eight days earlier in Alaska by a young boy skipping stones.

Because nothing can be called simply one thing or another, this sensitive dependence on initial conditions is applicable to more areas than just physical scientific theory. Because beginnings and ends form a type of coordinate system for human lives, slight variations in the characteristics of those points can also be the difference between love and hate, or getting or losing an important account. Because of the complexity and immeasurability of human emotions we can't even round off at the equivalent of the second digit, let alone the twentieth. But if first impressions are everything, wouldn't it be nice to know which glance, if properly given, would be the butterfly flap that accelerates into love?

Continuance

I cried, and I burned in that cry.
I kept silent, and I burned in that silence.
Then I stayed away from extremes--
I went right down the middle,
And I burned in that middle.
-- Jalaluddin Rumi

Death, while in many respects an "end," actually serves as more of a beginning for all but the most pessimistic of religions or philosophies. Even Socrates, at one time near the end of his life, at least, felt this sort of hopefulness. According to Plato, on his deathbed after having drunk the hemlock, Socrates mumbled these last words to Crito: "I owe a cock to Asclepius; do not forget it." In his time it was customary to offer a cock to Asclepius, the God of Healing, upon recovering from a sickness, so at a time of impending death Socrates was actually thinking of healing in one way or another and beginning anew. When he confronts the idea of his own death earlier, however, in Plato's Apology, he says: "If I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbor in any respect, it would be this: that not possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it." On his deathbed, then, Socrates seems to be offering the cock just in case, a common reason for religion for many dying people.

All religions have death rituals or hopeful ideas of where they will end up after their death: Hindus seek to escape repeated reincarnation by practicing yoga, by adhering to Vedic scriptures, and by devotion to a personal guru; Buddhists seek a state of living Nirvana by following the path of righteousness--if they are not perfectly righteous then they repeat another lifetime that is either good or bad depending upon their actions (karma) in their previous life; Christians believe that if they take Jesus Christ as their savior they may gain access to heaven after their life on earth. Joseph Campbell believed that all of the world's religions are tied together by the similarity of their myths. Stories of creation, holy trinities, resurrections, deaths, and heavens repeat over and over again in slightly different forms. He believed, then, that all the world's religions are the same, but they're cloaked in different masks that betray the prejudices of the culture. One thing all religions have in common, however, is this: When we die, we all go somewhere else in one form or another.

The beginning of a thing is its birth. The end of that thing is its death. Within the broad framework of our lives--the coordinate system that begins at age zero and completes some sort of cycle when our bodies stop breathing--we experience an infinite number of beginnings and ends. But like the electrons that float from hand to string to air, those points are enigmatic. We cannot label them; we just live them and live through them. At these times we may feel gain or loss, sadness or exhalation, weakness or strength, but all we can do is loiter within the realm of our knowledge, our personal universe. Like anything else, the edges of that universe are undefined, but one thing is certain: Now is less than an instant and then it is gone. All we can do is snap pictures of Nows. The pictures say this: beginnings will sometimes be happy; endings will often be sad. This is an ending. We continue.