The Geiger Counter

As I sat at our dining room table Monday, trying to write stories about the global pandemic that is bringing out the very best, (and sometimes the absolute worst) in people, my daughter, who was coloring a picture of a fairy while repeatedly bumping my elbow, abruptly yelled: “Alexa, Play Christmas Carols!” 

The speaker behind us began blasting a pop/rock version of the Latin song “Gloria In Excelsis Deo” (in French) while I tried to write a serious story and the world outside, which usually bustles with life, was still and strangely silent. It felt uniquely eerie and fairly festive, sort of like the way I imagine a Batman villain spending a quiet evening at home. It also felt just about right considering the way the world is trending. 

Two days later, the snow started to fall and we made a snowman in the backyard, fitting him with a hat and scarf and a button nose, while I thought about the end of the world. 

Snow brings with it newness, changing the world so completely in just a few hours that we are forced to actually see our everyday surroundings. And when we see them, we are so often amazed by their splendor. 

Our daughter wanted bunk beds for ages. She loved the idea of having a guest bed in her room, and she was intrigued by the fact that it’s essentially a fort frame that’s ready to turn into a ship or a castle at any moment. There is also an undeniable primal safety to sleeping six feet off the ground. I admit I often fall asleep on the top bunk while reading bedtime stories to her. When I do, a little, atavistic part of my monkey brain always thinks: “I can sleep safely up here, just out of reach of the wolves.”

My wife purchased a used bunk bed, doing so with more faith in our marriage than was prudent. She went and picked it up, managed not to get murdered by the person selling it on Facebook, and returned home. 

“They lived in a mansion,” she reported back to me. “They were definitely rich, so I think this must be a good bed.”

It’s become fashionable these days to chastise people for their charity. The critiques, which have accusatory titles and acerbic adjectives galore, spread like wildfire on social media. They allege that people who do charitable work are doing it wrong, or doing it for the wrong reasons.

The specific nature of the charges varies, but the idea is always the same; that holiday giving is a fraud, and the love people suddenly feel for one another is a fraud, as well. Each article asserts that people are all greedy, and those who appear to help others only  do so in their own self-interest. 

I was reminded Wednesday of how fragile and thin the veneer of civilization is. 

This was not one of my quiet, plodding, vaguely philosophical realizations. It did not come with a slow nod or a breathy “aha.” No, this came with the crack of a gunshot slicing through daggers of sleet. This came with the thud of a dead body hitting the muddy earth. And just like that, I was up to my arms in viscera, having literally the most visceral experience of my life. 

Primitive is relative

I somehow failed to rinse all the shampoo out of my hair the other day. When I noticed it later, my daughter ran her little finger through it and exclaimed: “It feels like dry wetness!”

A few days earlier, when I told her she had to wait 30 days to get something she wanted, she lamented: “Thirty days?! But 30 days is 100 days!!!”

It’s easy to think ‘No, 30 isn’t 100,’ but to do so is to miss the point. Because when she said those words, when she told me that little story, she wasn’t showing me the world; she was showing me herself. She gave me a glimpse into her inner emotional life. It was only 30 days, scientifically speaking, but there is so more to life than cold, hard facts.

Our entire lives are spent going in and out of buildings. 

By leaving the wide-open sky and the vast globe, in an unfathomably large universe, and passing through a doorway into a building, we immediately make ourselves feel bigger. Inside a hut, or even a mansion, we sense that our size, in relation to our surroundings, is concrete, large, and meaningful. 

These are the actions around which the rest of our lives are constructed. Into a house, out of a house. Into a school, out of a school. Into an office, out of an office. Into a store, out of a store. Into a movie theater, out of a movie theater.

“This statement is a lie.”

If the above sentence is true, then it’s a lie. And if it is a lie, it is true. 

It’s called the liar’s paradox, and it’s a response to the people who contacted me after my column about Xeno’s paradox (“Achilles and the Tortoise”) a few weeks ago. They worriedly told me they didn’t “get” the paradox I was writing about. It didn’t make sense to them, and they were confused by it. 

My answer, of course, is that’s the point. If you don’t understand a paradox, then you understandthe paradox. If you don’t get it, you get it. That’s the whole idea. Paradoxes being impossible to comprehend is like cakes being sweet or toddlers being young; it comes with the territory. 

The relentless optimism of conspiracy theorists is inspiring. They possess the admirable ability to believe people can dream up and execute complicated plans! The quixotic idea they embrace is that someone, somewhere can keep a secret. They harbor the wonderful but completely unjustified belief that human beings can communicate with each other, listen to each other, and follow through with their plans. They think people can do what they set out to do, and they can do it without trying to take credit immediately after the fact. 

I was devoutly unenthusiastic when we arrived at the circus. 

The diminutive red and white candy-striped tent stood there, underwhelming me in the forlorn Midwestern parking lot of an out-of-business Toys-R-Us store, with portable bathrooms resting atop weed-dotted and crumbling asphalt. This was the kind of place where the R on the sign, which was always backward before the company became insolvent and shuttered its doors, would inevitably look rusty and sad, as if it were about to fall down and face the correct way. A more depressing, less playful, more down-to-earth letter than it was before the harsh realities of online shopping sunk in.

The atmosphere, there in the wreckage of what had been like a holy shrine to me in my childhood, was decidedly post-apocalyptic. All that had once been was gone; a big, dazzling temple of bright new toys reduced to a collection of gray detritus. I got out of the car and stepped into an apt graveyard for my youth.