The Geiger Counter

Did you know that Steven Seagal wrote a book? To be honest, I would have been surprised just to learn Steven Seagal read a book, let alone penned one. But he did. Sort of. He had a co-author. Someone to hold his meaty hand while crossing various linguistic streets. I’m guessing the co-author did much of the heavy lifting.

I was interviewing a woman last week, when she said several things that struck me, like fists of gentle profundity. She was talking about 2020, but unlike so many people, she was laughing. Not an insecure guffaw or an affected chuckle, but a real laugh that bubbled up again and again, in the manner of the pure white froth on a freshly poured flute of champagne. 

“Stories are like prisms,” she said. “They allow us to see different perspectives.” These stories, she added, “work their magic” upon us, time and time again. 

It’s almost Election Day, and you know what that means: Every American needs to stop what they are doing, take a moment, and reflect seriously on the weird and mysterious way Edgar Allan Poe died. 

Oct. 3, 1849 was a rainy day in Baltimore. (Of course it was raining, because how could it possibly not be?) A guy who worked for a local newspaper was walking toward a pop-up polling site when he discovered a delirious little man, dressed in filthy second-hand clothes and lying senseless in a gutter. When he got closer, he was a little surprised to learn the man was a poet and critic who was very good at writing and very bad at life. When the man asked Poe if he needed help, the author asked for Joseph E. Snodgrass, who sounds like a character in a Dickens novel but was apparently a real person and a magazine editor. 

We stopped at a yard sale the other day, and my daughter asked if she could get a monkey. It was teal and plastic, and its little arms were permanently curved as if holding onto a miniscule tree, or, more likely, a child’s finger. 

“How much is it?” I asked. 

“It’s seven, five,” my daughter replied.

“Seventy-five cents?” I said. “Sure.”

Times are tough right now, money is tight, the economic landscape is bleak in a Mad Max kind of way. It feels entirely reasonable to suspect that by this time next year we will be wandering the side of a desolate road, wearing trash bags pulled translucent in places and tarps dotted by tattered holes, pushing shopping cart that contains all our family’s belongings and yet are not even close to full. Hockey and football pads will be dusted off and moved from the garage to the “everyday” and “casual” sections of our wardrobes.

But 75¢? That couldn’t possibly bankrupt us. Could it?

“Yay! Thanks dad!” 

Our daughter’s desk collapsed on her the other day, pinning her to the ground in a pile of rubble consisting mostly of magic markers, erasers and books of a most considerable heft. 

We had had to fashion an office for her, when it became clear there would not be in-person classes. Desks, my wife informed me, were sold out everywhere. So, after a little thought and a lot of rummaging, we repurposed an old piece of furniture whose provenance and initial intent is a mystery to me. It looks kind of like an inebriated table, an emaciated desk or a postmodern bureau. 

Late last night, sitting by the side of a snapping fire in a clearing in the black woods, my daughter hopped out of my lap, ran across the damp grass, and caught a firefly in her hands. She trotted back, tenderly opening her dirt-encased fingertips, just a little, to reveal the strange creature inside.

“Look, dad, a firefly!” she said. 

We gazed at it for a moment. We had no vented jar in which to put this being, so I urged her to let it go. She opened her hands completely, like ten pink drawbridges easing down from a fleshy castle, and the bug ascended and hovered in front of our faces in the night for a moment. 

“Hadley,” I said. “Because he was trapped, and then you let him go, this will be the greatest day of his life…”

As I finished my sentence, the firefly took off and plunged directly into the leaping flames of the fire around which we sat. 

“…Oh!” I said. “Never mind.”

Today, I read an anthology of anger in the form of Yelp reviews. A single person had rated a dozen businesses, and she had never given out anything higher than a single star, which is the lowest possible score. In addition to her ratings, she offered delightful accounts of her various experiences. She was like the keynote speaker at an outrage symposium. 

“I needed a right brake light replaced and had the misfortune to stop at [this mechanic]. Whilte the price of the light bulb was reasonable at $4.57, they then had the audacity to charge me $5.40 for two minutes of their precious time to replace it.  Oh, well, at least I know where NOT to go in the future. ;-)”

You might notice a few typos in these reviews, but I believe she is not a fan of my editing, so I’ll leave them as they are here. 

I was driving in my new old pickup truck yesterday, blasting “Land Down Under” and occasionally petting the plush, rust-red fur of the tiny puppy on the seat next to me. He looks like a little bear cub, and his squeaks and grunts have an ursine quality to them. 

Through the windshield, the sky was an ecstatic blue, with an unfettered July sun so bright the edges of the clouds gleamed as if imbued with magical power by a celestial deity. 

Within a few generations, I’m sure our human species will populate new planets, starting from scratch in our infinite attempts to establish the perfect civilization. If you look back at the route we took to get where we are today, it is characterized by one thing: We are always moving, always searching, always being chased by predators or chasing prey, as we make our way through life. It is only the occasional island population that ends up staying put, in some cases, and evolving in place for a few hundred or a few thousand short years.

I don’t know where this urge to move comes from. After all, we usually feel safest right here, in a place where we are familiar with the terrain and the places where danger might lurk. Perhaps it is a result of the fact that we live out our lives dancing atop a spinning orb, and therefore we spend our time here always beckoned to by a horizon and the mystery just beyond it.

My dad recently stopped watching the weather. When a retired farmer and avid gardener decides he’s done with these daily prognostications, it’s noteworthy.

He didn’t do it for the reason I initially guessed (that they are almost always wrong). Instead, he did it because of their relentless negativity.

Anytime there will be any rain, they inject their “report” with a splash of mopey personal opinion: “It’s going to be another dreary day out there,” they warn.

My dad, who is not one to go around picking fights on social media, even went so far as to contact a Madison meteorologist and explain to him that for farmers, gardeners, and anyone who cares about plant and animal life, rain is a gift. Throughout nearly all of human history, rain is something people literally prayed for. Not that long ago, they sacrificed people and animals to the gods whose fickle moods might bring them life-giving water from above.