Saturday Writing Prompt: Dying Houseplant (FICTION)

Jesus, I feel like an idiot.

Not just one of your bargain-basement, everyday idiots.  No, I feel like a top-shelf, A-one, America’s-Got-Talent idiot.

Because I’m talking to a houseplant.

Specifically, I’m talking to a Asparagus Densiflorus, or Asparagus Fern.  I know the Latin name for you, you ungrateful little bastard, because I have traveled to the far corners of Google trying to figure out why you, one of Sunset magazine’s “Top Twenty Unkillable Houseplants,” are completely choking up on me.

I can only assume that it’s personal.  Everyone told me that Asparagus ferns are hardy and strong, and durable.  That’s what the guy at the plant shop told me, the nursery.  Yeah.  The librarian, the botany teacher at the community college, they told me that you guys just need a little water once a week and some indirect sunlight and you green right up.

Nothing.

I went down to the home center and asked one of the dudes working there.  He said maybe you needed a bigger pot, and some special soil, and these plant food spikes that cost more than a dinner at Olive Garden.

You just sit there at the bottom of your new terracotta home and turn browner by the minute, you little jerk.

I even called the plant guy on the radio.  You know, the one with the funny accent.  I dunno where he’s from, Norway or Wisconsin or some shit.  I was on hold for like three hours, snotty intern producer asking me all sorts of questions, finally he tells me that maybe the environment in this home is toxic to plants.  Like I haven’t heard that before.  

So I cleaned everything up.  I vacuumed, and moved all the boxes and stuff out.  I bought a little stand at that fancy shop so you could sit there, like a fucking boss on your little throne, and why won’t you stay alive?

…

Yeah.  Yeah.  No.  We’re good.  It’s cool.  I’m fine.  

Look.  Plant.  I’ll tell you something.  You know, she didn’t leave me because of someone else.  She didn’t leave me because I was a jerk, although I guess I kind of was.  She didn’t leave me because of abuse.  I never hit her, and I never hit Noni, either.  And I didn’t do any of that “Emotional abuse” stuff, either.

She didn’t leave me because of the drugs or drinking, I guess.  I guess I know that because she didn’t come back when I stopped doing drugs and drinking.

You listening, plant?  ‘Cause now I’m talking to you.

I think she left me, and took Noni with her, because according to her I never finished anything I started.  Which is bullshit, I think.  I made it all the way through real estate agent training, and insurance agent training, and travel agent training, and that motel management course, and getting my limo license so I could drive town cars at the airport.  That’s a lot of stuff that I finished.

It’s not my fault that none of those things ever worked out.  I had big plans.  I was gonna do stuff, you know?  I was gonna sell some houses and then maybe buy one for us, fix it up, get Noni her own room-

Yeah, give me a minute.  No, just give me a second.

I guess it’s okay that I’m crying in front of a plant.  I’ve been talking to you for a half hour, right?  That makes us old pals.  

See, I guess Noni has her own room, now.  It’s at Children’s Orthopedic.  I guess she’s got one of those rare kinds of.  Rare kinds of.  Um.  It’s rare.

And, see, I don’t have anything left of them.  Caroline took everything when she left, not that we had much.  And she took all of Noni’s stuff, too.  So I don’t have anything to remind me of my baby-

There I go again.  I guess I can’t be all that “emotionally hollow,” huh.

See, she left you here, which is weird.  Caroline always liked having plants around; she loved to take Noni to the park and show her different flowers and such.  I guess there just wasn’t room for you in the car, plus you were kinda sick to start with.

But I’ve got a plan, plant.  See, if you can get healthy, if we can make you healthy, then that’s like a metaphor thing, right?  If you can turn it around, if we can turn you around, then I can take you right up to the hospital, all green and healthy, and it’ll show both of them.  It’ll show Noni that she can make it, if she tries hard, she can be healthy again.

And it’ll show Caroline that I can fix something, that I can see something through.  I can bring you back to life, I can bring our marriage back.  

We can be a family again.

Just, you know, work with me here, is what I’m saying.

Please.

Interfaces: Tableware

This is part of a larger series involving the interface of consumption. How it will all link together I'm not quite sure as of yet.  I don't know if you have worked this out or not, Dear Reader, but one of the rules I've set for myself in writing on this blog, no matter what series it is, has no predefined structure or draft writing, apart from thinking about it for the 45 minutes I'm on the elliptical at the gym beforehand.  This is me winging it, just to get this stuff out of my head; any editing I do is on the fly.  When and if I write properly, later on, I'll have all this to use as reference.  For now, Blithering Ahoy.

I've already talked a bit about the very basic interface of doors a little while ago, and now I would like to discuss another physical interface we use in consumption, that of tableware.  The manner in which humans consume their daily nourishment says a lot, I think, about their cultural relationship to said nutrition, and we can learn from examining it.

There are, to my mind, four basic utensil systems for the consumption of food.  The first and most basic, and most likely still the most prevalent worldwide, is to use the utensil systems with which we have been issued at birth: our hands.  I can't think of anyone, in any society anywhere, that doesn't eat at least some foods by hand.  There's even a common English name for it: "Finger food."  Every day, we eat something by simply picking it up and shoving it directly into the face hole.  I myself, not five minutes ago, ate a banana by this method.

It's really one of the benefits of having hands, as any simian can tell you, or will if the speech center of their brain is properly developed.  Hands are brilliant, and can do so many amazing things.  You can form a scoop to eat a biryani right from the dish, or make that weird inverted-pyramid thing with your fingers that we do when we grab a piece of cake directly from the serving plate, or, if your fingers are small enough, you can stick a pitted olive or a Bugle corn snack on the end of each one and nom them while watching Speed Racer.  Or that might have just been me at age 5.

Just barely one step removed from eating with one's hands is the concept of wrapping the food in another food, held in one's hand, and eating that way.  This is where we get sandwiches, wraps, harumaki, and other delectables.  Tuna salad, for example, is messy and problematic to eat with the fingers.  So is Ossetra caviar.  But wrap that tuna and mayo in a lettuce leaf or put that fishy jam on a toast point, and you can eat it for days without spilling a drop.  This is also the source of the pinnacle of modern cuisine, the taco.

So the first two utensil systems aren't actually utensils, per se. The third one is, although just barely.  Chopsticks are used around the world, and have been in use for at least 6,000 years.  It's not hard to see the evolutionary line that goes from stick used to poke/stir/subdue food in the pot, to using two sticks for better purchase, to eating with said sticks to prevent burning your mouth, to using them to scarf down a Spicy Teriyaki Chicken with a side of Gyoza from Paul's Teriyaki in Federal Way, Washington, arguably the finest teriyaki shop known to mankind.  (You would think that, living in Japan, it would be easy to find proper Seattle-style teriyaki here.  You would be wrong.)  Every day, millions and millions of meals, possibly billions, are consumed using chopsticks.

Finally, we have the Western knife-fork-spoon combo, the most recent of the group at only a handful of centuries of age.  We Westerners tend to think of this setup as being the best of the bunch and the easiest to use.  We enjoy using the Sharp Cutty Thing, the Stabby Gimmick, and the Tiny Bowl on A Stick for all our foods, as it gives us a wide range of options for quickly transferring food to mouth on those occasions when simply grabbing a fistful of Lobster Thermidor and mashing it into one's head might be seen as somewhat gauche.  It's also quite difficult to eat Kix with milk without a spoon.

These are all tools that serve to establish our relationships with food, in some way.  Some of it has to do with material availability.  Most households had access to some wood and rudimentary carving tools, so making chopsticks wasn't difficult.  Western utensils started with the aristocracy and worked their way down as materials such as stainless steel or silver plate became cheaper.  I think the history of Western utensils seems to indicate a desire to keep food at a remove from one's person.  For quite a large period of Western history, eating was seen as a rather revolting and physical act.  Given the state of both the average set of teeth and refrigeration technology at the time, they might have had a point.  Food was meant to be consumed quietly and carefully and in dainty, controlled bites.   The same went for many Asian cultures, as well.  Keeping your food at the end of a long stick might be the best.

Of course, the people in the street just kept on doing what they've always done, buying and eating food straight from one hand to the other.  There's a weird dichotomy here, and it all revolves around that most confusing of customs, table manners.  The closer we physically are to our food, the more sensual it becomes, and the more it seems to control us.  Keeping our food at the end of some sort of implement seems to create a barrier in our interaction.

Saturday Writing Prompt: The Worst Thanksgiving Ever

(NOTE: Yeah, this is a slightly fictionalized version of events. But not by much.)

My favorite holiday, for as long as I can remember, has been Thanksgiving.  

From the time I was a little kid, Thanksgiving was always the BEST holiday.  Mom started prepping for the big day in advance, with a special trip to Prairie Market to pick up the turkey and all the stuffing and the pumpkin pie ingredients and everything.  Special kitchen equipment, only used a few times a year, was dug out from the back of the cupboard.  Large serving trays and dishes would be brought in from storage in the garage.  The house began to smell GREAT, with the aroma of baking and cooking going on for a few days in advance.  

I was the youngest (and I still am, by a considerable margin), so by the time I was in elementary school, my siblings had moved out, but they would all return for Thanksgiving.  My oldest brother would return home on leave from the Navy and stand around looking cool, occasionally vanishing for extended periods of time.  My other brother came home from college looking like a hippie, with his guitar case painted with the word “Peace” in many languages.  My sister and her husband and their baby would come by, and my sister would help cook while I either kept the baby occupied or stopped her from destroying my Legos.

You got FOUR WHOLE DAYS OFF FROM SCHOOL at Thanksgiving, and you got to eat turkey and mashed potatoes and olives and fresh baked rolls and pumpkin pie with Cool Whip (or whatever the five-cents-a-plastic-tub-cheaper equivalent was called).  You got to go outside and play football with the big kids, and there was football on TV.  Uncles and cousins and other relatives might turn up, and Mom and Dad never kept booze in the house so we never had any embarrassing family squabbles.

Thanksgiving evening was the best.  You had turkey sandwiches and pie, and we would play a board game (we could even play Monopoly or Risk without it turning into a major crisis), everyone was in a tryptophan coma, and Mom would pull out the Christmas records and we could start listening to Christmas music.  That was the rule: no Christmas music in the house until Thanksgiving evening.  (The Christmas tree was usually put up the first Sunday in December.  I don’t know who made these rules.)

Every single one of the first seventeen Thanksgivings of my life was pretty awesome, even when I was fifteen or sixteen and fully wrapped up in Sullen New Wave Teenager Mode.  (“Life is nothing but nihilism and pain, and you bourgeois OH HEY IS THAT CRANBERRY SAUCE?  YEAH, I want some!”)  Most of them were at our house, just because it was centrally located and often the only place with enough space, but as the kids got older and had their own homes, sometimes we went there for the day.  Each one was total bliss.

Until 1981.  In that year, I graduated from high school, and, since it was 1981 and no one in the country had a job, I decided that I might as well join the Air Force and ride it out there until either the economy improved or the Soviets started World War III.  It was pretty much even money on either one.  I was accepted and sworn in and told to report for boot camp in April of 1982, but then Ronald Reagan got an itchy trigger finger or something and it was decided that a bunch of recruits should be called up early, and so I turned up at Lackland Air Force Base a few days before Thanksgiving 1981.

I’d like to say that I learned a lot about myself and my potential while in Basic Training, but mostly what I remember was being shouted at a lot by enormous men in silly hats and having to learn a lot of ridiculous mnemonics to explain various aspects of this weird new world I was in.  I am 53 years old and I can say that I have had a lot of fun in my life, so much fun that I sometimes can’t remember, for example, my address.  But I can still remember the mnemonic device, “How Many New Airmen Will Get Sore Feet?”  It stands for: Headquarters; Major Command; Numbered Air Force; Wing; Squadron; and Flight; the command structure of the Air Force (and one that is no longer in use, no less).  I can remember that I was in the 3702nd Basic Military Training Squadron, slogan: “Second To None,” and that our CO was Major Irby, who sounded just like Richard Nixon.  I can remember almost all of that useless crap, but I have less than a thirty percent chance of remember which side of the road I’m supposed to drive on. (The other one.)

And I would sure like to forget that first Thanksgiving at Lackland.  Holidays in boot camp are weird.  As a recruit, you’re not allowed to go off base, but most of the instructors and staff have the day off, so there’s nothing to do.  The best thing would have been just to leave us alone for a day and let us rest, but anyone reading this who has ever been involved with the military knows that’s not how that works.  Instead of blasting us awake at 5:00 with reveille and making us scream downstairs and be dressed and in formation in three minutes, a voice came over the intercom at six shouting at us to get out of bed.  We did so, got dressed, and were shortly told by an instructor that we were on our own until 6 PM, when we had to return to the barracks.  

“Can’t we stay in the barracks and just sleep?” said one brave recruit, asking the question we all had.  

“No, you may not,” the TI responded.  “You would just make the place messy.”

In the end, it turned out that we were allowed to go to the nearby cinema, or to the recreation hall.  I forget what movie was playing, but I remember that it was boring enough to make the rec hall seem like a good idea.  I figured that I would go there and use the pay phones to call my parents, and then… I don’t know what.  Read a magazine, or something.

I got to the bank of payphones outside the Thunderbird rec hall and realized that pretty much every other recruit had had the same idea about calling parents.  I got in line and waited.  Some time later, I finally got into a phone booth and dialed home.  

“Hi, Mom,” I said.  “Happy Thanksgiving.”

“We’re sorry,” the voice said, “all lines are currently busy due to high traffic.  Please try again later.”

There was a pounding on the phone booth door.  “Give somebody else a chance, foo,” a patient and helpful fellow recruit said.

I visited my fellow airman with a traditional Air Force benediction and went back into the bowling alley part of the rec hall, which had a snack bar.  I bought a cheeseburger and a banana pie, and a Big Red, and that was my 1981 Thanksgiving dinner.  I ate it without too much enthusiasm, and looked around.  

I spotted a videogame machine in the corner.

“Hey.  Tempest,” I said to myself, and got five dollars’ worth of quarters from the cashier, and spent the rest of my Thanksgiving playing Tempest, smoking Winstons, and listening to the worst butt-rock that 1981 could possibly generate being blasted out over the shitty snack bar sound system, and thought to myself that maybe atomic war with the Soviet Union might not such a bad thing, after all.

Marketing: We Got BOTH Kinds

There is a scene in The Blues Brothers, which in my opinion is one of the three greatest movies ever made (the other two being The Magnificent Seven and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension), in which the band, trying to land a gig, find themselves in a redneck bar out in the deep woods.

"What kind of music do you usually have here?" Elwood asks.
"Oh, we got both kinds here," the bartender responds chirpily, "we got Country and Western."

This is the kind of attitude one sees when marketing restaurants in Japan.  There are two kinds of successful restaurants here: Japanese restaurants; and foreign Japanese restaurants.

Allow me to explain.  If you visit pretty much any food court in any Japanese mall or shopping center, you're going to find two types of restaurants.  The first type sells exclusively Japanese cuisine.  They might specialize in a certain sort of Japanese cuisine, such as udon, soba, tonkatsu, sushi, or what have you, but it's going to be unapologetically Japanese food made for Japanese people the way that Japanese folks like to eat it.

The second sort of place is basically some sort of "foreign" cuisine, but with varying degrees of alteration to suit the Japanese palate.  The most popular sort is, of course, Chinese food, with ramen shops being right out front.  Most ramen shops bear about as much resemblance to traditional Chinese food as an Olive Garden in Lynnwood does to a cafe in Siena, that is to say, very little.  The food has been changed to suit Japanese tastes.

This is true for almost all "foreign" food in Japan.  Japanese Italian food is nothing to write home about.  Japanese French food is okay if you're spending $300 on a meal but notso-hotso if you're trying out a little bistro. (The atmosphere is quite nice, though.)  Japanese Indian food is fairly common, although very few actual Indians have restaurants here, the vast majority of shops being owned by Nepali or Bangladeshi immigrants.  Japanese British pub food is about like you would expect, and Japanese Mexican food of any real quality is so rare that people jealously guard the locations of their favorite spots so that they don't get "spoiled."  ("It's called 'Taco Bell,' in Shibuya.  It's great; go try it.")

It seems to me that when Japanese people go out to eat, they aren't making the same decision that a Westerner makes.  We start off by deciding on a cuisine, then selecting from whichever place we like best.  Japanese people, on the other hand, begin by asking themselves, "Do I want Japanese food tonight, or foreign food?"

Restaurants in Japan often have a somewhat unique feature: realistic plastic models of each meal, artfully designed and colored and placed on display out front of the shop.  It's like having a life-size menu to look at.  (I actually think it's a great idea, because you can get an accurate idea of the serving sizes of Japanese meals, which can be at times somewhat... non-intuitive.)  Customers will walk along the corridor lined with restaurants and look at each one, before deciding on actually going in.  If there is a foreign restaurant, you can expect the display models to be so carefully scrutinized that they practically have eyeball marks on them.  Even a simple and common foreign food, such as Pizza Margherita, will get the impassive yet thorough Examination of a Million Eyes.

Japanese people, like people from just about every country, are innately suspicious of any cuisine not their own, but they also recognize that sometimes it can be a little adventure to experience food from another country.  The trick with this is that foreign restauranteurs have two options. They can make their food as authentic as possible, with ingredients, preparation, and flavors straight from the old country.  This results in an amazing dining experience, for the eight months that the restaurant is in business before it goes under.  Importing food items from overseas into Japan is insanely expensive and features at its core a Customs inspection process that would not have surprised Franz Kafka.  At its core, the Japanese economy is not designed for the easy and streamlined import of most things.  Not only that, but an authentic taste miiiiiiiight just be a little too unique for the average Japanese palate, which is tuned somewhat differently than others.  Your restaurant will get good business at first, as everyone wants to try the New Thing, but you won't see a lot of repeat customers.  Yes, your national specialty is uniquely delicious.  That's why we're only going to eat it once.

The other thing a foreign restaurant can do is change their menu to appeal to local tastes.  My favorite example of this is Denny's, which can be found fairly easily throughout Japan.  What can't be found at a Japanese Denny's is a Super Bird, or a Grand Slam Breakfast, or nachos, or pretty much anything that you would find on the menu at an American Denny's.  In fact, the only thing that the two menus have in common, and I am not making this up, is: Coca-Cola.  Denny's changed their entire menu in Japan, every last item, and now they do a pretty good business here.

Okay, there's a third option: you can just lie.  There was a rumor spread around Tokyo, when McDonald's first came to town, that eating there would give you blond hair and make you look more "American."  KFC altered their whole menu to suit Japanese tastes while claiming to be "authentic."  Domino's Pizza sells tuna and mayonnaise as toppings.

So what is a foreign franchisee to do?  You've gone to all the trouble, scouted your location, had your grand opening.  Sales spiked, and then have been sliding downhill ever since.

Here are some tips:

• Don't lower your prices.  If you're a table-service restaurant, all lowering prices will do is reduce your revenue.  Remember, the question the customer is asking is, "foreign or not?"  They aren't asking about price points, because they don't care.  If they're concerned with price points, you've probably already lost them, as you always eat more cheaply at a Japanese restaurant.  Also, there's a difference between price and value, and the typical customer is keenly aware of that.  A good value brings in the customers.  A cheap price implies a cheap restaurant.  If doing promotional meals, do things that add value, like a free dessert or salad.
• Don't assume that promotions that are successful elsewhere in the world will be successful in Japan.  Even if those promotions have been successful elsewhere in Asia.  Even if they were successful in Korea. I don't buy into Japanese exceptionalism; the next time someone tells me, "You know, Japan has four seasons," I might very well be moved to violence.  But, when it comes to restaurants, the cultural differences here cannot be ignored.  Some people assume that Asia is Asia and that all Asian cultures are the same.  Wow they so totally are not.  Take a careful look at what your promotion is saying and how it's being said.  Especially take a look at the language of the promotion; things that might seem friendly and innocuous in another country might be terrifying, off-putting, or outright hostile when translated into Japanese.  You're not just translating text; you're translating culture.  
• You don't have to change the whole menu, but you're going to need to meet halfway.  Do you not offer properly cooked white rice on your menu?  You do now.  White rice is part and parcel of the Japanese meal experience, and some customers simply refuse to eat a meal without it.  Is everything on the menu slathered in molasses BBQ sauce or loaded with Sriracha?  You probably need to dial the EXXXXXTREEEEEME back a notch or seven, or offer those sauces on the side.  Pay attention to portion sizes, as well.  Some items that might be a single serving dinner in other markets might be better positioned as a sharing platter for families here.  Watch carefully what the customers order and how they eat it.  If there's a dipping sauce that never gets used, or a vegetable that doesn't get touched, make a note.  If there's an odd side dish that always gets ordered with a particular entree, consider making that a local combo.
• Pay attention to the competition.  There is a chain of steak shops in Japan.  I'm not going to name them, but they are pretty well-known.  Every time I walk past one, especially around lunchtime, there is always a line out front, even though the place is half empty.  I can look inside and see open booths.  I asked a friend once about a similar shop in Kyoto.  "Oh, that place is very famous," she said.  "People always line up out front."  "Oh?" I responded.  "Why do people line up?"  "Because it's very famous," she replied.  Not a word about the food or the service or any sort of special anything.  As an American, I assume that a regular restaurant with a line means that I am about to have a less-than-amazing dining experience: a line at the door means poor staffing inside, an understaffed kitchen, poorly laid-out areas, noise, crowds, et cetera.  For Japanese people, a line means that the place is great.  Just set out some ropes and a signup sheet in front of your restaurant.  Make people wait a couple of minutes, and watch the line build up.

This is all, of course, very, very generalized.  Not all Japanese people are wary of foreign food.  A lot of Japanese people actively seek it out.  But when you're trying to market to the general public, you're trying to hit as broad a target as possible.  Keep that in mind.

Interfaces: The Narrative

I was recently an impartial observer in a bit of an old foofaraw that took place, as so many great foofaraii do, on the internet.  I'm not going to give even the vaguest details of what went on or how it all went down, for a variety of reasons.  Of primary importance is to protect the privacy of all involved, of course, but also because it's just not that relevant.

What was important, I noticed, was the need for everyone to tell their version of what happened.  This need to control the narrative seems to be very important to humans for some reason.  We have an overwhelming need to control the story.  "History is written by the victors," it is said, usually by a card-carrying member of the winning team.  We wrestle vigorously for control of the narrative.   Abraham Lincoln did his sums on the back of a shovel with a piece of charcoal, our childhood history states.  Then, as we get older, a new story emerges: that story was made up by a writer in the 1920s to romanticize Lincoln's homely forest upbringing.  I'm sure there's a third story emerging, that there's a grain of truth to the shovel story after all, but it wasn't sums, it was Latin.  Sic semper fabula, as it were, and I'm sure there's a historian to tell me Lincoln would have appreciated that dark humor, and another to tell me he wouldn't have done.

There are even whole narratives about the narrative, in a wonderful meta that feeds on itself.  Rashomon is a great movie in which the story is not so much about the events, but the different versions of the narrative that surround them.  This has the wonderful effect of taking the narrative out of the realm of device and essentially making it one of the characters of the story.  We grow more and more familiar with this new character in much the same way we do with other characters in a tale; by observing the way other characters interact with it.  This makes the narrative in Rashomon a very real interface.  It changes and is changed by those with whom it interacts.

Historians have a very personal relationship with this particular interface, and the very best ones treat it with the respect it deserves.  Properly trained historians (and I know a few) tread carefully in the narrative of the past, observing it with scientific detachment.  They treat history as though it's under investigation by the FBI.  "These are events that we know to have happened," they say.  They require multiple sources, like reputable journalists.  They require verification with the assistance of other scientific disciplines.  Proper historical research will use just about any scientific discipline you care to name in its quest.  Pages from a manuscript are subject to chemical testing.  Inks and dyes are recreated using manufacturing techniques known to have existed at the time.  Metals are refined to see if they might have been commercially viable.  Animal bones are exhumed and studied.

There are two stories about exploring the narrative that fascinate me a great deal.  The first involves the famous case of Otzi, the 5300-year-old man found frozen in ice in the Tyrol Alps.  If you haven't read about this guy, go and do so.  Heck, the Wikipedia page is a great place to start.  He was found in 1991, and research has been ongoing since then.  I can't help but think that if we had found him even thirty years ago, we wouldn't know anything about him.  But microscopic examination of this well-preserved corpse has advanced what we know of the narrative of human life five millennia ago beyond imagination.  (Spoiler Alert: they really weren't all that much different from us.)  Otzi is a great example of not destroying the narrative with conjecture, or with the desire to control the past.

My other favorite story involves a horrible tragedy.  Apollo 1, originally called AS-204, was meant to be the first in a series of manned missions meant to meet President Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon.  On January 27, 1967, during a test on the launchpad, a fire in the spacecraft took the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

There were two investigations that almost immediately formed.  The first was led by Washington DC administrators and a congressional committee, with Senator Walter Mondale on board.  This committee effectively had as its focus a single question: "Who is to blame?"

There is a problem with questions like that, namely, the logical fallacy petitio principii, "begging the question."  Asking, "who is to blame," creates an expectation for the outcome.  Blame will be found, and assigned, and those guilty will be punished.  The focus is thus no longer on the truth of the narrative and instead on the control of it.  It does not admit of the possibility that there might be no blame to apply.  There must be blame; otherwise our entire investigation is invalid.  This is not because Congresspersons are inherently evil, necessarily.  It more than likely has to do with the blindingly obvious fact that Congress deals in law, and many of its members are attorneys, who, again, it must be said, are not evil in and of themselves.  But these are people who deal in blame and guilt, so naturally their investigations would expect them.

The second investigation was composed by top scientists from NASA and academia, and also by the astronauts themselves.  Anyone who's read that Tom Wolfe book will come away with the idea that astronauts were a bunch of crazy risk-taking test pilots who chased women and drove Corvettes the wrong way up the interstate and what have you.  This description has some merit.  Both pilots and aviators could share stories of adventure and fun.

What everyone forgets about the astronauts, however, is that just about every single one of them had at least a bachelor's degree in some sort of engineering discipline, and a large percentage of them had advanced degrees in the field as well.  When you think of a bunch of hard-drinking, hard-partying woo-hoo rednecks, you also need to see thirty crew-cut heads in short-sleeve shirts bent over desks while furiously working away at slide rules.  These were not, by and large, men of great imagination, prone to works of poetry and a love of opera.  These were men who had a serious vested God-damned interest in exactly how many foot-pounds of torque that alloy bolt would take before it sheared right off, taking your wing with it and leaving your wife and kids with a tiny pension to survive on.

These people had no interest whatsoever in controlling the narrative; they let the narrative speak to them.
"What the hell happened?" they asked, and got to work.  They disassembled the entire AS-204 command module, down to the individual bolts, and photographed and examined each part.  If there was a discoloration or something the engineers didn't understand, they refused conjecture; they handed that part of the investigation off to an expert who did understand.  They ran tests on identical parts, and identical spacecraft.  They took the entire ship apart, figured out what went wrong (the story is too complex to go into detail here, but the main culprit was an electrical short in a pure oxygen environment), and then used their data to completely redesign and rebuild a much safer and ultimately successful spacecraft.

Beware people who spend too much time looking for someone to blame, because they will inevitably find someone, and it won't be them.  Instead, focus on the truth of the narrative.  Ask yourself, and the world around you, these two questions:
"What the hell happened?" and
"What the hell is happening?"
Remove yourself from the need to control the narrative and instead allow yourself to simply understand it.  Knowing what is happening is almost always more valuable, and is easier to navigate.

Saturday Writing Prompt: What Can Happen In A Second

“What can happen in a second?”

Although this might appear, on the face of it, to be a ridiculous question, the truth of the matter is that it is not.  “What can happen in a third,” now that is a ridiculous question.  We all know what should have happened in the fourth, namely that Pete Carroll should have given the ball to Marshawn Lynch, and everyone who has ever truly experienced The Blues can tell you that nothing good comes out of a fifth, especially if it’s Four Roses Bourbon.

Of course, the question doesn’t refer to ordinal numbers, but to the unit of time, commonly held by humans as the shortest basic division of this shared illusion, this scaffolding within which we construct our lives.  Sure, there are shorter measurements of time, such as the Fleeting Moment or the One Damn Minute, but these are not calculated against any sort of universal or natural constant, for example, the decay of a carbon atom, or the numerical relationship between an NBA player’s salary and the distance they must move while carrying the ball before being called for traveling.  (LeBron James: 4.8 kilometers.)

So, this second, this one-Mississippi that is the basic building block of our entire concept of the space-time continuum.  What can happen in it?  What tasks can one fit in between two ticks of the clock?  What events can occur in 1/3600th of an hour?  

Well for starters, a photon can cover 299,792,458 meters in a second.  That’s pretty darn fast, and kind of impressive, until you consider that photons get slowed right down to around thirty miles per hour or so when passing though a Bose-Einstein condensate, which is basically supercooled helium.  Which tells you right there that that whole business about the speed of light being a universal constant is pure bollocks.  I can travel faster than the speed of some light; all I need is a Honda Cub.  Those’ll do forty easy if you’re light and on a downhill grade.

Some people will also try to tell you that it only takes a second to fall in love.  Usually, these people are writers of pop songs, who deal in these sorts of platitudes on a daily basis and purchase them wholesale.  These sayings used to be handcrafted by men named Jerome and Herman, solid American craftsmen who worked in the Brill Building; nowadays they are churned out at a tenth of the cost by factories in Shenzhou.  This is why we no longer have songs like “Just One Look (That’s All It Took),” and instead have, “Mightily Forward The Day!  Profoundness!”  This would be a powerful statement on the sad decline of pop music as an art form, except that it never was one.

Having said all that, is it possible to fall in love in one second?  Probably not.  I live in Tokyo, Japan, which has one of the largest populations of any city in the world, and a large percentage of that population consists of attractive females.  I used to think that I was falling in love quite frequently and rapidly, as often as twenty or thirty times per day, possibly more if I was in Shibuya and it was summertime.  With age and wisdom, however, I now realize that I was, in fact, falling in lust, not love.  Love takes a long time to develop and cultivate, and requires that the two parties really get to know one another and establish a real commitment.  Feh.  Who has time for that these days?  I’m more concerned about getting good WiFi than falling in love.

I think the best thing we can do with this sample second, therefore, is grab it, hold it tightly, and do something useful with it.  For example, let’s try attaching it to the one that comes directly after that.  Then, let’s do that again.  And again, and again, sixty times.  

This reveals the truth that has been concealed from us up until now.

What can happen in a second?

We can begin to build a minute.

From a minute, we can build a hour.

From hours, we can build days, months, years, a lifetime.

If that second, that first second, has a seed planted in it, the other seconds will, too.  We can change, create, destroy, or rebuild.  We can move, or stop.  We can become what we most desire, or embrace stasis and eventual entropy.

We only ever have one second.  The ones behind us are gone, the ones ahead are as yet undelivered and exist only in potentia. 

What can happen in a second?

Choice.

Interfaces: Generational Labels

The concept of nomenclature as interface is not a new one.  There is an old saying to the effect that to name a thing is to control  that thing.  In changing the name of an object, person, or concept, you can in fact change the perception of that object.

For example, very few people ever wanted to eat the lowly (literally; it's a bottom-feeder) toothfish, and with good reason: it is one ugly sumbitch.  Toothfishes look like a slime-covered reject from the Jim Henson Creature Workshop and come in a variety of colors ranging from black to lighter black.  Not only that, but their name is grammatically problematic.  What is the plural of a toothfish?  Toothfishes?  Teethfish?  Toothenfishen?  Feh.

However, fishermen kept catching the damn things and having to throw them back.  So the Toothfish Marketing Board, or another entity whose name I did not just now make up, decided that the easiest possible thing to do was to stop trolling the bottom of the water and come up with new and less-invasive ways of catching the fish that they really wanted.

I'm kidding, of course.  The marketing board just changed the name of the toothfish to the "Chilean Sea Bass."  Have you ever eaten Chilean Sea Bass?  I have.  Did you pay a lot for it?  I did.  Do yourself a favor and Google an image of the toothfish.  Yum.

Observe now as I circle around back towards some sort of a point.  If something so simple as a name change can convince people that a hideous toothfish is in reality a gourmet treat, what then are we to make of generational labels, those names slapped on us by...

...By whom, exactly?  Who establishes the criteria and labeling of generations?  Is there a Generation Labeling Authority that issues position papers and directives regarding these things?  Is there someone with a master calendar somewhere, carefully guarded and controlled, assigning labels to every American (these days, every Westerner) as they are born?  Who decides what the generations are and when they begin and end?

Well, you won't be surprised to discover that it was originally advertising and marketing executives in the 1950s and 1960s, hoping to tap into the disposable income of the postwar "baby boom" generation.  Granted, there had been some advertising directed at children prior to the war, but most of it had been of the gee-whillikers-fellers-lookit-this-swell-bike-I-got-from-selling-Grit-variety.  In other words, it wasn't until after the war that selling to kids ut res ipsa became a thing.  Before that, advertising and marketing to kids was literally a nickel-and-dime business.

Here's where we get into marketing theory a little bit.  In order to sell to a group, the obvious first order of business is to have a group.  Now, it's pretty easy to sell to some groups.  The elderly are easy as hell to market to, for example.  They have a shared set of general physical attributes, behaviors, and emotional triggers that can be broadly manipulated with a simple set of symbolic appeals to pathos, as expressed in the simple and perfect advertising line: "I've fallen and I can't get up."  This simple strategy works well with the elderly, who grew up in a "less complicated time," rife with subtle class distinctions, racial discrimination both great and small, heavily controlled media and limited information dissemination, sexual repression, gender inequality, outmoded concepts of science, little to no understanding of educational theory, monetary and banking systems that created wild swings in the economy, religious dominance, multiple wars, and polio.  ("Less complicated," my ass.)

The strange bit is that the baby boomers are now well and truly getting into that elderly group, and advertisers are having a rough time figuring out how to deal with them.  I have two older brothers who are both retired.  How do you sell Lotrimin to guys who still have ticket stubs from seeing It's A Beautiful Day at the Paramount in 1969?  These new old people are problematic.  Do we sell them as physically active?  Are they (gasp) sexually active?  Do they go hiking and jump out of airplanes and go surfing, or do they sit at home and shout at Fox News like the other old people did?

The answer lies in that marketing theory stuff that I was talking about a few paragraphs back and that you thought I forgot.  The key to these groups is the key to all magic: naming a thing defines the thing.  Once you have given a name to a group, the person or persons doing the naming has a certain measure of control over that group.  Just ask any internet fanbase that has ever existed.  If you are a Doctor Who fan, or a Trekkie, or a Marvel fan, or a Legophile, or an orchid enthusiast, or a breeder of exotic antelopes, there is a group somewhere that decides on your behalf: in or out.  Someone, somewhere, is the gatekeeper, and decides who gets to be in the group and who goes.  The group can be very small.  There have been, to the best of my knowledge, five humans who were members of XTC, at various times.  The group can be very large.  The VFW has about 1.2 million members as of 2016.  The criteria can be as arcane as you like.  Prairie Prince played drums on three or four XTC albums, but he's not a member of the band.  I'm a veteran, but I can't join the VFW because I wasn't lucky enough to get shot at overseas.

If there's a group, then there's someone minding the door.  If you're a marketing group or advertising consortium, the best thing you can do is create a group of your own, and make it really attractive.  Are you a baby boomer?  Then you should like the Beach Boys and feel bad that you didn't make to Woodstock and have some guilt about making it home alive from Vietnam when all those other guys didn't.  You should also have an affinity for Volkswagens, Whole Foods, NPR, craft beer, granola, Greek yogurt, and higher-end domestic red wines and Rieslings.  If you're a Gen-Xer, you like skateboards, tattoos, Snapple, green tea, Subarus, and you tell everyone that you saw Weezer on their first tour at a small bar near your college but really you saw them at a festival around the time Maladroit came out when Rivers was being all weird.  If you're a Millennial, who cares what you like because you don't have any money.  We guess that you like eating at Panda Express or Chipotle or maybe Panera Bread if you're feeling posh.

A label is more than just an easy way to name something or someone.  It is a contractual interface.  It wasn't created by the guys who invented "Keeping up with the Joneses," but they certainly put a keen edge on it.  When you agree to be labeled, you tacitly agree to conform to a certain set of expectations and boundaries.  You wanna be part of our group?  You buy these products, you share these tastes, you sing from this hymnal.  Calling someone a Boomer, or an Xer, or a Millennial, might seem, on the surface, to simply assign a age range to a person.

What it really does is diminish them, in a Huxleyan classification system that reduces all of a person's unique attributes, qualifications, and experiences to a minima that serves no other purpose than to catalog their habits of consumption.

But then, what do I know: I'm a Taurus.