Not Even Not Zen 425: Biomythography - Note 136: On Generation X, Part III

Generation X, Part III

21. Gambling was illegal

"It's just immoral," was a phrase I heard a lot, growing up, about gambling. Legislatures had made nearly every form of gambling illegal because it was so obviously bad. Casinos, for instance, were designed to take money and give nothing in return. Of course they were against the law. Was your neighbor running a lottery? Well, it had ridiculous odds of hundreds to one, so it was also made illegal. Poker games with buddies? Well, playing for chips was okay but you couldn't play for money. That was the moral stance.

Horse racing? Well, it was legal. The inconsistency made adults frown. The stock market? It was also legalized and also frowned upon. Remember the Great Depression? Betting on stocks was immoral even when it was legal, and its immorality had consequences. After the stock crash of 1973, I heard many people say betting on stocks should be illegal.

The proponents of gambling said the moralists were simply being 'puritan,' that a little gambling fun never hurt anyone, and anyway the stock market was doing well again. New Hampshire started a lottery based on horse racing (to make everyone feel nothing much was changing, I suppose). Other states followed, many of them giving even worse odds and with no ties to horse racing. The state governments didn't offer odds of merely hundreds to one but thousands or millions to one. They promised more money for programs people wanted (like senior living homes and neighborhood schools) and the result was what our friends called 'math taxes' - that is, fees imposed on people who couldn't do math and hence played those lotteries.

22. Underage Drinking Started Getting Enforced

In the generations previous to ours, drinking while underage was normal. During Generation X, police started to enforce the laws more. A social movement against liquor got revitalized by Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD), which won quick success and received a parody movement in opposition, Drunks Against Mad Mothers (DAMM). But MADD was not kidding. Their members had lost children to something they felt was preventable. They kept at it. They succeeded in, among other things, raising the drinking age.

As a result, some members of Generation X could drink legally at 18, some at 20, and some at 21. Some folks (like me) got grandfathered in by our home state. Some did not. One of my college friends turned legal at 18, then illegal, then legal at 20, then illegal, then legal again at 21. People had to stop framing the issue in terms of morality because the community morals were so inconsistent. Instead, they discussed drunk driving and road safety. Those issues seemed to win the debate.

Enforcement lagged behind the laws, though, I was able to buy beer and wine when I was 15 years old. No one asked me for identification. By the time I was twenty every place asked for ID.

To be fair, lots of people had been driving drunk, many more than I usually see mentioned. There seems to be some revisionism going on. In a discussion nowadays, a person or two may reluctantly concede that folks drove drunk back when Generation X was growing up. If you ask for specifics, though, hardly anyone admits to driving drunk themselves.

23. Women's Liberation Hit During our Formative Years

I'm going to start off with an achievement that never gets mentioned: mental freedom. Women gained the ability to realize they were not broken or psychopathic. People seem too embarrassed to mention it. In retrospect, it seems too unbelievable to discuss, as well.

In 1973, Trident Press published a book called My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday. At the time, the medical profession treated female sexual fantasies as a sickness. Women could be involuntarily committed to treatment if they admitted to having them. After the fantasies were compiled systematically for discussion, though, psychologists started to back off their preconception of them as abnormal.

My Secret Garden gets sneered at even now. But the book was groundbreaking. It contributed to broader 1970s conversations about female sexuality and helped destigmatize women's sexual thoughts and desires. A lot of people apparently don't count that as any kind of freedom. I disagree because I consider it vital to have real freedom of mind.

More conventionally, our generation got the benefit of sex discrimination getting banned in education. We grew up with girls and boys getting equal(ish) opportunities to take classes and play sports. We benefited from the legalization of abortion, too, and increased access to contraception, which gave women control over their bodies. (These also led to a huge reduction in violent crime starting about fifteen years later.) We had the Equal Pay Act. In 1974, we got the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which enabled women to obtain credit cards and loans without a male co-signer. In 1978, we got the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which made it illegal to fire or discriminate against pregnant workers. We got the first battered women's shelters and the first treatment of domestic violence as a systemic issue, not just as a personal one. In short, the United States changed in fundamental ways. Generation X was the first to grow up with the changes.

24. We Were the First Generation Encouraged to Incur Debt

In previous generations, people often didn't carry any debts - because they couldn't.

Loans weren't available to most people except as layaway programs in department stores. Many women couldn't acquire debts at all in their own name. People of color faced similar challenges. Poor white men with the wrong types of job couldn't get loans. On top of everything else that restricted credit, many religions opposed interest charges as usury. When banks eased credit guidance and raised credit card rates, those churches initially tried to shut down MasterCard and Visa. They seem awfully quiet about usury nowadays.

I got my first credit card at J.C. Penny, a store card, when I was fifteen. I had a job, so I was eligible. I got a free plastic cup and pitcher set with my application, too. Two years later, I got my first government-backed loan for college. The terms of my college loans came at a reasonable discount compared to modern loans. When a typical mortgage interest rate was 17%, I paid 8% for college because the government guaranteed it for me. Now, when the mortgage rate is 4%, a student loan is still 8% and that's no longer a good deal.

25. We Had Student Smoking Sections

It's amazing how openly the country surrendered on the subject of child health. Tobacco companies had been fighting for decades to keep people smoking despite the consistent negative results of science research on lung cancer. They had been winning the public battle, too. Of course, we have similar fights going on today over microplastics, pesticides, glyphosates, PFAs, and more. The companies responsible will win for a long time. I don't know if we'll have the equivalent of student smoking sections in public schools on any of those issues, though.

I'm not even certain how official our student smoking sections were. I've never read a book of school rules. What I know is we had outdoor areas the teachers told us were for "only students to smoke." I bought cigarettes so I could go hang out there, where the hardcore smokers, some of them pretty girls, talked endlessly about how terrible a habit it was.

26. We Had Leaded Gasoline

This is a contender for crime of the century, even in a century filled with crime.

In 1921, an engineer for General Motors named Thomas Midgley discovered a compound called “tetraethyl lead” that stopped car engines from shuddering. Midgley led a conglomerate, the Ethyl Corporation, to make leaded gasoline. Cars and generators used his new formula, which caused catastrophic damage to the environment. As one of the effects, our nation saw a widespread cognitive decline. Childhood lead exposure impaired the development of our brains. We got an increase in cardiovascular disease and kidney failures from the lead. Higher exposures gave us elevated rates of psychiatric issues, including depression, anxiety, and neuroticism. In the 1970s, after legal wrangling, we started phasing out leaded gasoline in the United States. In 1996, we banned it outright.

The results of the toxic lead are persistent. It lingers in the atmosphere, so we still breathe it. It's in our dust, soil, and water and it always will be there. We will always be dumber and more neurotic than previous generations. We will always pay higher health care costs due to the lead.

27. We Carried Pocket Knives

At the age of ten, I was, at last, allowed to carry. I had won a Boy Scout pocket knife in a contest. It had a can opener, a blade, a corkscrew (so useful for ten year olds!), an awl, a second blade, and a flathead screwdriver. I carried it everywhere I could for the summer. No marshmallow stick was safe from whittling.

The tool knives were emblematic of a level of trust and responsibility. We absorbed the cultural rules: don't pull it out in a fistfight because it's more honorable to lose the fistfight; no threatening anyone; don't whittle toward your body; don't complain when you whittle toward yourself and get cut; don't unscrew the door jamb just to screw it back in; do unscrew the outlet plate to impress your friend but then, for heaven's sake, put it back.

We had BB guns. We had air pellet guns. We had rolls of gunpowder caps. We had fireworks. We had chemistry sets. Some older teens had hunting guns in their room. A lot of these things went to school. It didn't matter, usually. Because we were trusted.

28. Life Expectancy Was 20 Years Less Than Most of Us Got

“Men live to sixty two,” my science teacher told me in fourth grade. “Women get to sixty-seven. But of course those are only averages.”

“Why do women live longer than men?” I complained.

“I think no one knows.”

In fact the life expectancy calculations kept growing as we aged. Now we have life expectancies of 76 for men and 81 for women. We know more about what those numbers mean, too. We understand the averages are not only a measure of improved cancer treatments (remission for 20 years instead of none) but all other health improvements. We know that testosterone looks implicated in men dying a little earlier. Still, our generation grew up with the expectation that half of us would be dead by now. And it's not as bad as that. Our lingering in this world affects Social Security calculations. It affects decisions about retirement, bucket lists, healthcare, hospice care, and spiritual life in general.

Gen X has more chronic illnesses (like hypertension and diabetes) than the Boomers; we are currently the sandwich generation caring for parents and children both; and we suffer unexpected financial strain from the caring, too.

29. Unions Faded

As we were growing up, American companies moved manufacturing jobs overseas. The move had supply chain consequences affecting the shape of the world economy. The first consequence, though, was a crippling of American unions.

Unions fought for living wages and basic benefits like healthcare. As their negotiating leverage diminished, Generation X saw the loss of small tokens of workplace respect, usually enshrined in better office conditions. Jobs stopped keeping bank schedules. Workers lost paid lunch hours, then lost paid lunch half-hours, and finally lost smoke breaks. In some cases, the Boomer generation of workers kept the benefits while excluding Generation X and other, later hires.

We lost our pensions. In fact, we lost the idea of pensions. Companies moved pension funds into stock-based retirement funds. Corporations went from giving some loyalty and expecting strict loyalty in return to saying aloud, “anyone who believes in loyalty is a sucker.” We increased our productivity many times over but without the rewards seen in previous generations.

30. Healthcare Turned from a Non-Profit Service to a Profit-Making One

One of the worst consequences of this transition was complexity. I know it doesn't get mentioned often but the difficulty of figuring out what your insurance will cover while you're ill or dying is not trivial. Yes, the current system results in huge overhead costs, the largest in the world. It produces weird gaps in insurance coverage. Our system prizes efficiency in service delivery (not billing) over effectiveness. However, what we want most while ill is an effective treatment. But I think complexity is a real killer, sometimes literally.

Lack of transparency is perhaps the next-worst thing. We don't get to read Consumer Reports about the success rates of hospitals, surgeons, specialists, or nursing units. We don't know where the value is for our money and therefore we can't really make cost competition or quality improvements happen.

On the plus side, the American system results in profitable hospitals and good pay for doctors. Those aren't insignificant things. A few countries around the world experience doctor shortages more or less constantly because they don't pay enough to keep them.

Not Even Not Zen 424: Biomythography - Note 135: On Generation X, Part II

Generation X, Part II

11. We were a generation without serious childhood diseases

I had teachers who were partly crippled by polio. Others bore pock marks or scars from past diseases. Those were fairly rare to see but all the older adults I knew saw their friends and family members die around them or dealt with them partly crippled by disease. The younger adults and I did not.

12. We saw vast improvements in dentistry

My grandfather had all his teeth knocked out before he was thirty-five. My father had less than half of his removed. I’ve had only my wisdom teeth taken out. Over three generations, that's pretty good progress.

Once, tooth removal was the standard of care. Then dentists learned to do root canals. They figured out pain management, too. I experienced my first dentistry under the influence of laughing gas. By the time I was eleven, my dentist replaced it with novacaine. By the time I was twenty-four, I got topical novacaine, too.

Braces improved. Once, only the upper classes could get them. Then various stages of the middle class could afford to straighten their teeth. Now we have expanders to wear instead of knocking out teeth. And we have plastic, 'invisible' braces.

13. Some of us got contact lenses

This is one I wouldn’t have noticed myself. In ages past, someone like me would have wondered why a few others were so bad at fighting or sports. Even in more recent generations, sufferers from poor eyesight had to wear glasses. Everyone could see that you couldn't see.

When our generation reached its teen years, contact lenses became available. They made a difference, socially. They still do. In time, if U.S. insurance companies permit it, corrective surgery could replace contact lenses but we are still in a contact lens era.

14. The Cold War defined our expectations and its end confused us

We read popular books about nuclear armaggedon, prepared for atomic attacks, saw movies starring radioactive creatures, and listened to commentators describe the end of life on earth, which was more or less a weekly feature. Families built backyard fallout shelters. The church hosting my scout meetings had their own fallout shelter. Thanks to the Space Race, I learned binary, octal, and hexadecimal math. Children absorbed the stories about sudden annihilation, fighting the commies with lasers, and fighting atomic bomb survivors with rocks. We assumed the existential threat as background noise to our normal childhoods of playing outside, watching television, and going to school.

When leaders declared the Cold War over, it didn't seem believable. After all, the Cold War had justified our formative life decisions. As it turned out, I'd say we were right to be skeptical.

15. We Grew Up Assigned to Tribes

When Generation X was young, we found ourselves assigned to the European tribal labels or to the labels 'African," 'Asian,' or 'Indian,' each treated as a tribe even though the designations didn't make sense. I was assigned to the 'Irish' tribe because of my last name but, like most Americans, I was descended so thoroughly from a mix of everything European (and a little native American), it wouldn't have made sense to assign me Irish even if I'd grown up in Ireland.

As I child, I realized lumping the Chinese and the Japanese together as one label, when they were so different and very often still hated each other, made no sense. It didn't even attempt to make sense. The same went for Indians like the Hopi and Navajo, traditional enemies, or the Lakota and Pawnee. In fact, the term Indian was inaccurate on so many levels, it was weird to have a friend called an Injun in school. But he called himself an Injun, too. And I called myself Irish.

The way these old designations got replaced by newer dividing lines has given me (and perhaps many others in Generation X) a sense of them being arbitrary.

16. We had superstitions

It's hard to describe how pervasive they were. My uncles described the ghosts in their houses. Grown men in the neighborhood dodged black cats. Women inspected dropped items for omens. Seances were forbidden but popular. Tarot cards got banned. Neighbors put up horseshoes over their doors. Friends bought key chains with rabbit's feet at the end. People believed in luck. They believed in it deeply.

We had no easy way to test our superstitions. They ruled a noticeable sliver of society. I think it may have been all the Space Race education and the tireless work of people like Harry Houdini that brought our superstitions under control.

17. We had insects

Nowadays if you drive anywhere on the east coast, your windshield is clear at the end of your journey. 

That wasn't how my mother drove when I was growing up in Maryland. She hit dozens of bugs every trip. Thousands of them, large and small, died on our windshields every year. Then, one year, she noticed we had been hitting fewer bugs. We had been hitting fewer each year for several years, in fact. 

Finally, we stopped hitting them at all. 

18. We had birds

We had flocks of birds crossing the sky, end to end. I haven't seen flocks as large as those in a long time. You can't have flocks of thousands without food to feed them. The food has to include insects. Now we don't have enough insects. Even if the insecticides hadn't killed millions of birds directly, millions would have died anyway once we lost their food source.

19. We had broadcast television

Broadcast television used (and still uses, but on different bandwidth) radio signals to encode audio and video information. When broadcasts were introduced, coupled with the rasterization in cathode ray tube screens that let us see images, they constituted a form of magic. The television antennas picked up the radio signals, the television hardware decoded them, and we saw whatever shows the local broadcast towers were sending. 

"It's on! It's on!" Our parents would yell. And we came running back from the kitchen whenever we heard the call. We were captive to the timing of those broadcasts.

In my area, we got NBC, ABC, CBS, and an independent station on the standard VHF bands. With a switch on our set, we could move to the UHF bands and decode three stations there, as well. Those include an independent broadcast and two PBS stations. During our lifetimes, satellite television and cable television eventually grew into competitors for broadcasts. For our formative years, though, we saw only broadcast TV.

20. We obtained consumer freedom with videotapes

Plenty of people made video recordings of family birthdays and other, personal events. More, though, recorded shows from broadcast TV. Now VCRs gave them the ability to could build show collections. They could binge-watch the shows on their own schedule. They could fast-forward through the commercials, too. Naturally, the television business hated it. 

By law in the United States, videotapes and cassette tapes had to be sold with a fee included to compensate the authors and other copyright holders. The legislators assumed we would be making a copy not otherwise detectable but still covered by copyright law. It was, in their opinion, a special case and not fair use. Other countries enacted similar laws. They allowed creators to make some money based on societal assumptions. Videotape users hardly noticed since the fees were built into the cost of the tapes.

Later, though, the Supreme Court ruled that private tapes were fair use. This effectively eliminated the U.S. based video levies. 

I've never liked the consequences of removing the levies. They were a useful, civil arrangement. Now we have some people who (rightly) feel they should be able to buy something once and own it. What they do with it afterwards, such as copying it to a cassette, is their own business. We also have creators and copyright holders feeling (rightly, again) that people will misuse the ability to make copies. We could have a societal understanding about how to behave - but we have given up having even the hope of one, it seems.
 

Not Even Not Zen 423: Biomythography - Note 134: On Generation X, Part I

On Generation X, Part I

The defining trait of America's Generation X might be the presence of latchkey kids. Immediately preceding the early 1960s, a generation of mothers stayed home. During Generation X, in contrast, many mothers chose to work in offices. Of course, kids had always been a bit 'free range' in times before. Since the end of child labor, parents had told their children to play outside and not come back until dinner. But Generation X was more free than ever. Mothers no longer patrolled their homes or neighborhoods. Professional daycares had not sprung up. Kids had keys to their houses and the freedom (and responsibility) to care for themselves and their friends.

Normally, I don't see meaningful distinctions between generations. That is, I wouldn't try to single out the times in which people grow up any more than their religions or educational levels or economic situations. Those make some sense to talk about, though. Maybe it's worth thinking about whether there genuinely are lessons to learn from our times and places of origin. Occasionally, we might notice something quite serious to a generational difference, such as the Vietnam War, the killings at Kent State, the presence of latchkey children, or the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Here, in roughly a linear order, are factors I think might define Generation X. I would love to hear different opinions.

1. We raised ourselves as free range kids

As mentioned above, we went outside wandering, drinking through hoses, and meeting strangers in person. Getting lost and finding our way back were factors of our daily lives. Negotiating with other kids to play games was a regular occurrence.

2. We benefited from a civil rights movement

When I was young, grown-ups in the neighborhood got angry about mixed marriages. To them, that meant between Irish (low white) and Italian (colored). The adults stood in groups, berating those unions and the Catholic churches that permitted them. Once, a blonde woman said, "What about the Lovings?" meaning the couple in Virginia. The rest of the group laughed. A man replied, "That's not really a thing." They didn't consider the civil rights movement to be practical.

But they were wrong. It took too long to prove, but it turned out that treating people with equal dignity and equal rights under the law is, in fact, practical.

3. We witnessed assassinations

For sixty years between the killings of Presidents McKinley and Kennedy, Americans didn’t seem to think about eliminating political leaders. Suddenly, after Kennedy, guns became everyone’s solution to differences of opinion. Someone killed Malcolm X. They got the younger Kennedy. Then Martin Luther King. Someone crippled George Wallace. People kept on trying. They wounded Andy Warhol. They murdered Barbara Colby.

Sometimes, as with the plots against Ford, Carter, and Reagan, the shooters didn’t even seem motivated by politics. They simply had easy access to guns and to famous people. Next, a man shot John Lennon. It wasn’t social commentary. It wasn’t personal. Shootings became a form of expression for frustrated people.

4. We grew up naked or nearly so

This one, more than most, probably depends on local circumstances.

In my childhood, we wore very little during the summer. Running around nude was considered normal for babies. Some of us grew up partly in summer camp barracks. We got naked in locker rooms. These thing gave us a different attitude towards our bodies. They gave us a different concept of nudity, too, which wasn’t sexualized. I don’t know for sure if it was healthier or not but I suspect it was.

5. We learned through corporal punishment

While some aspects of society re-started with Generation X, like civil rights and assassinations, some ended with our generation, like being free range kids and receiving corporal punishment.

Beating children had been the main way parents modified behavior for millions of years. When my wife wanted us to join the generational trend of seeking alternatives to spankings, I felt we were taking a risk. And we were. It seemed to pay off. There may be unintended consequences yet from failing to be physical. Raising immoral children doesn't seem to be one of them, though. Our grown kids have good consciences despite a lack of corporal punishment.

6. We made our own meals

They were terrible meals. We made ketchup and cheese sandwiches. We gnawed on warm, mushy apples. We pocketed tangerines and peeled them later, on the playground. Everyone relied on peanut butter and jelly, even the kids who weren’t allowed to spoil their dinner.

I ate hard peaches and crabapples from neighborhood trees. (I threw up, once. You can only eat so many crabapples.) But although most of us didn’t learn much about cooking, we did learn a form of food self-reliance early. There's something to be said for eating plain foods, too. Lots of us were used to doing it.

7. We drew maps

This was a ‘free range’ skill, I suspect. We memorized paths and landmarks. We learned to follow the stream. We buried pirate treasures consisting of our old stuffed animals and cap guns. Then we located the X on our homemade treasure map and dug them up again.

We could glance to the sun and judge our cardinal direction. We knew our mealtimes without a watch. Sometimes we read paper maps. But always, even without them, we found our way home. We found our way around our houses in the dark, too. We hardly thought about it.

8. We didn’t use our safety belts

By the time I was in college, I made a habit of stopping at every car accident I saw to try to help. At an accident in Massachusetts, I met a panicked man marching the other way on the darkened shoulder of the road.

“She’s hanging upside down!” He pointed behind him. I thought he may have been the first bystander on the scene. “I don’t see how we can get her out.”

As I continued, I approached a turned-over sedan. It was resting with its roof on the grass between a guard rail and a strand of trees. Inside, I could see a woman looking anxious. I didn’t see how she could have done this to her car but I didn’t think much more about it, either. Obviously, she had made it happen somehow. I saved most of my amazement for the seatbelt.

It was bewildering that she'd worn one. No one ever did. For Generation X, it wasn't an option in the older cars when we were children. Seat belts came with new models, of course, but no one used them. They weren’t available yet in school buses or public transit. Yet here was a woman who had worn hers and she was lucky, maybe, that she did. She hadn't been thrown when her car turned over. After I talked with her, I realized she was feeling sick from hanging upside down. So there were problems with the system. Still, she decided not to try to get out of the belt until the emergency crew arrived to give us advice.

9. We were the second generation who didn't know where our food was coming from

We mostly didn’t grow up with local butcher shops, vegetable gardens, bakers, fish vendors, fruit stalls, or local specialty stores. They were all fading, economically. Instead, supermarkets popped up to replace them. The supermarkets effectively moved all the little vendors inside and gave them a big, protected place to partially exist.

Thanks to newish methods of freezing and canning, we didn’t have to worry so much about what was in season, either. Instead of meat or vegetables produced locally, we got perishable items from farther away. True, the food we ate got worse and worse. But it happened slowly. We hardly noticed. When we did, not enough of us cared. Perhaps in a few cases, we did care enough (for instance, I heard twenty-five years of complaints about tomatoes), but we discovered we had no power to change the system. Too many people were too willing to buy apples or tomatoes that looked good, even though they tasted terrible. And so our system produced more and more items that looked good but nutritionally and gastronomically were just colored cardboard.

10. Slowly, our rivers stopped catching fire

When I roamed the forests as a seven year old, I came across old tires, broken barrels, washing machines, smashed beer bottles, and abandoned cars. Sometimes I played in the abandoned cars. I found plenty of big trash in Piney Branch Creek. By the time I was eleven, grown-ups had cleaned up the creek. They made the open containers of chemicals disappear. They reduced the open sewage, too.

The Clean Water Act of 1972 regulated industrial pollution and water processing. People took it seriously. It was the law. Besides, we wanted to breathe. We scrubbed industrial smokestacks to clear the air. Governments stopped dumping radioactive waste into oceans and bays. Our cities sent men to gather up the old appliances left in our parks. They even hauled away some of the abandoned cars. We lived our childhoods during this turning point.

Not Even Not Zen 422: Biomythography - Note 133: Superstitions, Part I

Superstitions, Part I

When I was young, adults took their superstitions seriously - even when they said they didn't. Grown men froze when they saw a black cat. They told me they wouldn't cross paths with one even if it meant taking the long way around to where they were going. I don't think anyone does this nowadays but, as a child, I saw it done.

Sometimes my friends' mother would insist I throw a pinch of salt over my left shoulder when I spilled at the table. My friends, when we were looking up at the stars at night, wished upon falling stars with hope for their wishes being granted. We wished again when blowing out our birthday candles.

Men and women looked for omens in the gathering of birds. Adults feared crows so much they would walk away from a gathering of them. Others would exclaim, "Good luck" as they were hiking by my yard, stoop low, and snatch a four-leaf clover from the ground. Even when adults told me they didn't have any fears of magic, they entertained themselves with astrology, Ouija boards, or tarot (although tarot was somewhat openly feared). They expected bad luck when someone broke a mirror. They avoided cracks in the sidewalk for fear of "break your momma's back." They pulled out a keychain and showed everyone the lucky rabbit's foot they had attached.

People still do these things. The difference in how many people and how often has been tremendous. I've only realized it in retrospect, though. 

I used to visit the graveyard next to the house of my parents' friends. It was small and green. The trees around the headstones created a sheltered space to talk and play. I sang there. I whistled. But if an adult heard me making any sort of music, they would tell me to stop, citing the 'bad spirits' I might attract. (It wasn't even a comment on the quality my singing, apparently.)

"Don't open those umbrellas inside!" my grandmother would call from the kitchen to the foyer on a rainy day. "It's bad luck!"

If I started to open mine anyway, an uncle would leap in to intervene and repeat, "Bad luck! Bad luck!"

So I guess we all believed in luck. It was part of the age we lived in, although people's beliefs in the randomness of good fortune weren't consistent. My father scoffed at the idea that umbrellas could influence anything one way or another. He generally disdained superstitions not his own. However, whenever anything bad happened in the family he would mutter, "It comes in threes," meaning our misfortunes. Then he would stew over the problem until he thought of two other recent unlucky events. If he couldn't think of three in total, he would worry for a week or two until something bad happened, which he regarded as a relief.

This is a part of American social life no one talks about, which is the only reason it's worth mentioning. Superstitions were stronger going farther back in time. There were probably more of them, too. I remember a German friend of my parents who saw omens in fallen objects and the shapes they made when they fell. It was a superstition she grew up with. Plenty of people told me about lucky pennies - you have to find them head's up. If you pick up a penny when it's laying head's down, that's bad luck. It's why I decided as a teenager, still somewhat convinced of my bad luck, to pick up all the bad luck pennies I could. That way, no one else had to incur my sorts of misfortunes.

Three years running, my middle brother and I pulled apart the Thanksgiving turkey wishbone and made a wish. Eventually, the honor fell to my middle and youngest brother. (I think my middle brother won pretty much every time. He wasn't lucky so much as strong and smart enough to pick the best side. Luck, after all, favors the strong and the cunning - and the people who don't refuse their luck.)

For a few years, my father told me I had bad luck. (I had broken at least two mirrors although my father politely said he didn't know the reason for my misfortunes.) I possibly started my father's belief in my bad luck by complaining about it. In gumball machines, I would put in my penny and get, too often, no gumball. Then my younger brother would put his in, turn the crank, and get two or three. This sort of thing happened often enough for me to dread it, for my brother to laugh about it, and for my father to halfway believe in our luck situation. My brother and I would switch places in line suddenly, to try to fool the luck. We hardly ever did, it seemed. One time I put in a whole dime to get a Baby Ruth candy bar from a vending machine. Nothing came out. My brother put in his dime and got two candy bars.

For my father, who was watching us, this was a confirmation. He'd seen the bad luck in action too often. On that day, he offered to buy me another candy bar. (He didn't want to take the second candy bar from my brother.)

"I'll put in the dime and pull the lever," he said. "But you don't touch it."

I knew what he meant. My touch might transmit bad luck. Fortunately, luck didn't seem to be something I could give to others like a bad cold. It was mine alone.
 

Not Even Not Zen 421: Biomythography - Note 132: The Earring, Part IV

The Earring, Part IV

After Thanksgiving, college students had a couple days left on break. During my remaining time, I drove to the mall in our hometown. It was an act of boredom but also one of hope. I was searching for gift inspirations. I knew I had to do Christmas shopping before I returned to college. Of course, the mall was putting up their decorations. I saw a pair of workmen half-heartedly assembling a Santa's Workshop display, where lines of children would gather. I wandered through hundreds of glass-fronted shops on multiple floors. I rode elevators. I shuffled through music stores and the bookstores. And I made myself march through the department stores, the anchors at each end, for an hour. A few times, I took notes about my gift ideas for family and friends.

When I'd had enough, I headed to the eastern doors of the mall. As I passed the last hallway of displays, someone I knew from high school dashed over. She was a girl I sort of recognized although she had never talked with me much. Now, she didn't seem flirty or friendly. She wore the kind of urgent expression usually reserved for warning people about natural gas leaks near the house.

"A gang of teenagers has been following you," she said. She held a tiny, white purse in front of her. I could envision her holding schoolbooks in the same, protective way. I tried to remember more about her. "They want to fight you about your earring."

The comment made me laugh. Except for the occasional annoyance of pouring alcohol on my ear, I'd forgotten about my piercing. My father tried occasional comments but I filtered those out before they registered. My brothers had come down on the side of it being cool but, to them, I was just me. They didn't think much about fashion and they wanted to play card games or board games. So no one cared. Until now, and until these teenagers.

I asked her for her name and she nodded, looking slightly offended. Still, she wasn't totally surprised I'd forgotten. After we chatted for a moment, I remembered the teen gang.

"Who is it?" I asked. I turned and headed back where I'd come from, looking for them.

"I don't know their names." Her voice rose in alarm. "Why are you going back?"

"I want to see who it is." I knew I probably wouldn't know them but it would be interesting if I did. Next to me, I could her my friend's feet do a little dance.

"They want to fight," she reminded me.

The idea made me smile. After all, this wasn't about me throwing rocks at their car. I hadn't insulted their moms. It was about something so small I had literally forgotten it. And I was bored. I'd heard three or four threats this week with nothing coming from them. A fight would be something to do. As I approached the corner in the mall corridor, a set of five teenagers vacated it, headed the other way. They walked into the Hecht's department store. I didn't get a good look at them but they seemed to have the bodies of junior high school students. One of them was a girl, maybe, or had a blonde mullet and skinny arms.

Next to me, my friend gestured in their direction. Now I wondered, just for a moment, if she were putting me on.

"Are you sure they want to fight?" I asked as we slowed down. Beside me, my friend barked a nervous, slightly bitter laugh.

"Well," she said sheepishly. "Maybe not really."

So there was a theoretical gang of nearly-teens who might have wanted to fight about my earring but maybe not. Maybe they just wanted to talk tough. Maybe my high school acquaintance simply liked drama, too. Some folks like to play up every confrontation. Between my relatives and the fight threats, though, I decided I was going to keep the earring.

The gold stud had been nothing but an annoyance. It needed cleaning. It needed attention. It was like having a very tiny, very boring pet attached to my head. The moment someone — or possibly no one — wanted to fight me about it, though, I felt fine to go all in over it.

A day later, I headed back to campus and, in the morning after my arrival, I met a couple young women I knew. We lined up at the outside doors of the dining commons.

One was short and blonde, the other taller and brown-haired. I'd had a crush on the brown-haired one during the previous semester. She gave me a hug. The shorter one patted my arm. Both of them stood back for a moment as they studied me.

"Is that new?" asked the shorter one.

"Yeah."

We walked through the doors and into the warmth. My better friend seemed thoughtful.

"You look good," she said a moment later. The line of people ahead of us paused. She turned and gestured that she wanted to look again. I moved my head for her. She caressed my earlobe. "How do you like it?"

"I'm thinking of getting a gold hoop." Friends had brought it up. It wasn't really my idea. Now it seemed right, though.

"Like a pirate!" the other woman exclaimed. "Yeah, even better."

"Mmm." The fingers returned. My old crush touched my ear and neck. "Christmas is coming up. On you, the gold looks good. Maybe I'll buy you a hoop."

I remember realizing, oh yeah, I've made the right choice. 
  

Not Even Not Zen 420: Biomythography - Note 132: The Earring, Part III

The Earring, Part III

A few weeks after I got my ear pierced I headed home for Thanksgiving. My mother met me as I walked up the drive to the front stoop. Her big smile twitched, for a moment.

"What’s that in your ear?" she asked on the porch.

"Oh yeah, the earring." I shifted my bags to get everything under one arm. I touched the gold stud. "Remember, I got one?"

It's hard to scowl and raise an eyebrow at the same time. She compromised on a skeptical frown. I had mentioned the piercing to my mother on a phone call but, apparently, she had put it out of her mind since then. After all, she couldn’t see it. Now she had to look and reevaluate. It took a second. She shrugged.

My father had the same warning. But he didn't seem to know what to say. He avoided looking at the earring for a while. As it turned out, he was taking the time to think of scathing remarks. He was pretty good at them, usually, but this time nothing he said was memorable. I recall him turning red-faced but there was not a thought he expressed that I hadn't expected.

The next day we had to drive to the Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmother’s. She lived on Shiley Street, in Annapolis. At the time, Annapolis was small. It supported a population of about 20,000 people. If you didn't stroll through the six blocks of downtown next to the bay, you wouldn't realize it was the Maryland state capital. The government offices consisted of a few colonial buildings that didn't look much different than the taverns, which were also colonial buildings. In contrast, the Naval Academy dominated the area. It took up more square acreage, more housing, and more dock space than any other business, including the state government. I think the Navy tried hard not to ignore the town, but it was so big and powerful and the town was so small. The Navy often made decisions as if the town were not there and the residents simply gritted their teeth.

Some of the Annapolis residents were still farmers. Most folks weren't, though, and so they lived in small, single homes bordering a river, a stream, or the Chesapeake Bay. They worked for the Navy, the phone company, or the state government. Some held the types of jobs necessary to support the local infrastructure, including the fishing industry, which to my childhood eyes seemed to mainly involve standing around talking about fish.

And Shiley Street, our destination, lay not far from Tolson Street, which was named after my Great Uncle Harry. So we had an extra connection. The town had decided to name an entire neighborhood of streets in East Annapolis after the local boys who had gone off to fight in World War II. They had survived D-Day together. Then they had also died together during the German counterstrike three days later. My grandmother took me on walks to show me the street and to talk about her brother. This tended to put things in perspective, although obviously not a perspective that prevented me from getting an earring.

In the neighborhood, my grandfather gardened an empty house plot. The neighbors seemed happy to let him have a half-acre farm that the absentee owner didn't know about, nor care. During our Thanksgivings, most of our produce — at least the green beans, lettuce, squash, radishes, and cucumbers — came from his garden harvest.

During my family's drive, I read books and played card games with my brothers. At my grandmother's front door, a few uncles noticed my earring. They had each prepared a one-liner about it, or it seemed, but not much more. They wouldn't get another chance for an hour, either, because my mother's extended family was too big for us to all occupy one table.

On the other hand, they would have time  to think.

At my grandma's, we had to sit by age groups. We had a long table for adults and a round table for children. Despite being in college, I had a perpetual place at the kids' table, which was technically about half filled with adults at this point. Within a few years, I would start to grow grateful for the young adults table, where the conversations grew interesting. Even early on, I could see the potential.

The younger folks had a different reaction to my earring. They shrugged. The younger girls weren't allowed earrings yet so they asked if it hurt to get one.  

Our meal itself was cooked in English family style, which meant all the vegetables were boiled. To this day, I still like boiled green beans. I'm fine with most boiled or canned vegetables, not that I get to eat them much anymore. Butter was our main spice. However, we had personal access to more exotic seasonings, if by exotic you mean salt.

After the meal, I met Uncle Mike as we marched from opposite tables to converge on the pumpkin pie. It was the one vegetable not boiled and we were pretty motivated by it.

“That's damn sissy,” he said, looking at the earring. He jostled my elbow and I did it right back. I knew the main reason Mike had graduated to the adult table was that he'd insisted on it. He also got married, which helped. He had a sort of twinkle in his eye as he tried to tease me, though, because at his core, he sort of liked any form of rebellion even when he didn't agree with it.

“Mostly girls like it," I replied. "Guys think it’s queer, of course.”

“Of course. Don't you worry about that?”

I grunted but I knew he was looking for words so I added, “Why would I care what guys think?”

He accepted that summary. Like most of my relatives, he already knew what I thought of their opinions. I suppose it’s a lesson in laying the proper groundwork.  

“Have you got in any fights over it yet?” He clearly looked forward to them.

“Not yet.” We both laughed.

"You will," he promised. And he was right. We both knew it was coming.
 

Not Even Not Zen 419: Biomythography - Note 132: The Earring, Part II

The Earring, Part II

I woke feeling like I'd been kicked in the brainstem. But I felt like that every time I spent the weekend partying with friends. My world had returned to three dimensions (plus or minus a half) before I slept. My arms and legs rose with me, under my control about as much as they usually were. Most of my cognitive functions reported for duty. That was enough.

Even though Adam and I were in pretty decent shape for a Sunday, we decided to take the bus to the mall rather than drive. We had money in our pockets. We had seen a fancy-ish cigarette lighter Adam wanted to buy. And we knew the jewelry store kiosk manager would gladly shoot holes in our ears. 

We hadn't counted on her young assistant.  

The kiosk manager herself was probably in her late twenties, professional, and the kind of person who had done this eight thousand times. Her assistant, however, looked seventeen with the eager, slightly terrified expression of someone being given responsibility for the first time. She stood maybe five foot seven with brunette hair in a pony tail, nice jewelry, and an expensive shirt. She smiled longingly at my ear while holding her ear-piercing gun. It was brass colored and looked like a cross between a stapler and a nail gun.

"Who's first?" the manager asked cheerfully, as though we were volunteering for a fun carnival game.

Adam and I engaged in the time-honored male tradition of determining our actions through a complex series of facial expressions and half-gestures. The ladies stepped between us and started to speak. 

"There are two of you," Adam pointed out, raising a finger.

"Both at the same time, then," the manager concluded. 

Her young assistant led me to a chair. After a conference with her boss, the assistant returned. She told me her name and that this was her "first time with a guy." I laughed because I thought she was making a joke. She adjusted the light. She touched my jaw to put my head in the position she wanted. With hardly any fumbling, she loaded a gold stud into the gun.

"Just a second." She strode over to where her boss was working on Adam. I could hear they were making sure the pointy side of the stud was facing the right way and all that, just a young woman making sure she was doing things right. 

When she returned, she played with my left earlobe for a moment. She leaned close and I got a reassuring whiff of her perfume, which wasn't too heavy and didn't smell like I'd be allergic to it. A sigh escaped her lips. She raised the gun.

"Oh, you're really thick," she said. 

"Ha ha," I allowed, thinking again it might be a joke. 

But no, she disappeared. I blinked under the interrogation-room style of lamp. A moment later, her boss came to my side. The older woman watched as her assistant squeezed my too-thick earlobe between the barrel and the backing of her stapler. 

"Hold still," she said. It's a popular thing for people to tell you before they cause pain in a humorous way. 

She pulled the trigger. I felt a brief, sharp pinch, as if I'd been snapped by a rubber band. Now I was a man with an earring. When I blinked, Adam was already standing. I don't know for sure but I think his experience was roughly identical. Maybe one of us winced more gracefully than the other. 

"Don't pull out the earring," the manager said, launching into a speech she had given to countless young girls, and now to us. "Don't substitute another earring. Don't try to put a safety pin in its place."

Adam gave me a meaningful look.

"Clean your ear with alcohol every evening for a week," she continued. "Turn the post every day."

Her assistant stepped back and examined her handiwork. She put her hands on her hips and delivered her professional assessment, "You look good."

Like a barber showing off a haircut, the manager turned us so we could observe our new fashion statements in a mirror attached to the kiosk. I hadn't thought we would look any better or worse with earrings. I figured we'd look the same but with small shiny things stuck in our heads. In fact, we did look a little better. We approximated the style of the too-well-dressed guys around our college campuses. Chances were that some young women were going to like this. Adam grinned. His folks were going to have opinions but, at the moment, they didn't matter. For the rest of the trip, he didn't even worry about his folks back home.

Instead, I worried for him. It was a correct concern, as it turned out, but also slightly misplaced.
 

Not Even Not Zen 418: Biomythography - Note 132: The Earring, Part I

The Earring

or

Piercing My Flesh to Support Friends and Spite Relatives 

In 1982, men didn’t get piercings. Only girls did. Never mind that poking holes in your skin is otherwise kind of a tough-guy thing. Girls did it; therefore, guys didn't. 

On my college campus, which was a few years ahead of other colleges in social trends, some gay men got earrings. A few extra-good-looking straight men got them, too. The straight men wore them differently and it was always just the one. I didn't belong in either camp, so I ignored the trend and concentrated on writing my term papers. (And I started considering tattoos.)

One day in the fall, a friend drove seven hours to my college dorm bearing what he called "mind-altering substances." He also had a request: that we go get our ears pierced. Now, you might ask yourself: "Why would someone drive four hundred miles to another state to get an earring?" This is an excellent question and it suggests you grew up in an era when people pierced things willy-nilly including the willy and probably a nilly or two but I don’t want to go on about that here.

I and my friend, who I will call "Adam" to protect his identity, did not grow up in such an era. We grew up in the "hey, that guy wants to kill you for being different" era. Wearing a collared shirt would get you in a fight in the parking lot. (Most of the fights were anticlimactic, fists only, weapons also being considered unmanly.)

"Come on," Adam explained. "You were already talking about it."

Adam's logic, as he revealed over the span of an hour or so, went like this:

1. He wanted an earring
2. He did not want it done in our hometown
3. Therefore, he had traveled far
4. But first, we needed to get extremely stoned

It made more sense after we had started on step four. I was not clear on whether the substances were meant to provide courage or whether he wanted to get stoned and having a stud pushed through his bloody earlobe was the excuse. Either way made sense after we repeated step four.

"Where can we go?" he asked. 

"There's a place in the mall." Young college women had taken me to the mall in South Hadley. I'd even bought them earrings at two of the four jewelry stores there. That is, I'd spent money in the places a college student could afford. 

"I don't think you should drive." He rose and tested his balance. His hand shot out to the doorframe. "I don't think I want to, either."

"We'll take the bus." My words sounded confident but I knew we'd have to find the bus stop. Plus we'd have to recognize when to leave the bus after we got on. That would be up to me. The world looked fuzzy, like it did when I was breathing laughing gas in a dentist's office. I wasn't sure I was competent to ride.

"How much?" He glared at me for a few seconds before I figured out he meant money. 

"Buses around here are free," I pointed out. Part of me felt like pointing out I had already pointed this out. So I did.

"Oh, you goddamn hippies." He nodded, remembering. Then he had another smoke.

We staggered our way across campus with only a half-dozen stops along the way to lean against buildings. The path was a straight line I walked every morning but I managed to get us distracted and almost lost.

"Adam," I said when the bus arrived.

"What?" 

"The world has flattened." The news irritated me to have to announce. It would have alarmed me more if I'd been capable of feeling a normal sense of alarm.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, everything is two dimensional now." I'd always had perfect distance judgement before. Now, when I reached for the handle of the bus door, I missed. 

"That's a new one," he said as he clambered on. In my stated of flattened reality, I closed one eye, figuring it would help, and managed to step aboard by ignoring what I saw and paying more attention to the pieces of bus I could feel. 

To our fellow passengers, I imagine we resembled two people attempting to operate human bodies via remote control with a slight delay in the signal. Certainly, there was a young woman who expressed concern. Others expressed their amusement. Adam conducted a possibly coherent conversation with someone, a long-haired woman, I think. For my part, I concentrated on not minding my lack of depth perception. My sudden awareness of my brain bouncing in its cranial fluid made up for it anyway. That was a sensation I didn't normally have. Despite the distractions, I didn't forget to pull the rope for our stop. We reached our destination correctly and on time, an achievement on par for us with assembling IKEA furniture while wearing oven mitts. 

Every few minutes, even as we got off the bus at the mall, I reminded myself we were going to the mall. Even with the doors of the mall in my sight, I needed the reminders.

Inside, we spent a lot of time looking at lava lamps, reading paperback books, and entertaining ourselves with window shopping. Eventually, we managed to find the kiosk in the center of the mall. The woman running it raised her eyebrows at hearing we wanted to get piercings. Adam asked sensible questions. I asked about putting in a safety pin instead of a gold post. 

"I wouldn't advise that," she told me. 

"Because it's not sanitary?" I guessed because I wanted the safety pin and wasn't worried about germs.

"Some people have metal allergies," she responded. "Let's make sure you don't have any before you go doing something like that, first."

The idea made me pause. My body responded to a lot of things with high-powered allergies. Maybe I should rely on an expert, or so I guessed, especially when I hadn't been bothered to acquire any information before this. The lady led Adam and I through our best choices from her shop. We picked out a pair of gold studs to split. We were cheap about it but the gold was affordable even for college students. They had been designed to be extra strong as starters. As I checked out even cheaper possibilities, Adam chatted up the shop lady about appointments. 

"I didn't know we needed appointments," I remarked as I turned to them.

"You totally don't need appointments," the lady told us, speaking mostly to Adam.

"We're making them anyway," he insisted. 

"Okay." She shrugged. "Tomorrow, one o'clock."
 

Not Even Not Zen 417: Biomythography - Note 131: The Great McFamine

The Great McFamine of 1981

I am not saying that the human body contains a sophisticated alert system designed to warn you when you're about to do something stupid with your finances. However, I am saying if such a system exists, mine wasn't functional in 1981.

This was the year I attended the University of Maryland full time while working at fast food restaurants, which is kind of like saying I decided to go on a hike and then strapped a refrigerator to my back. And then I met a couple other hikers carrying refrigerators, too. 

I was paying for my classes out of savings. I was paying for my rent out of savings. I was doing the opposite of responsible living. My financial masterstroke was something later generations won't or can't understand. I ran up a monumental phone bill. Yes, this was a phone bill that cost approximately eight months' worth of rent.

You might reasonably ask: "What could you possibly have been doing on the phone that would cost that much?" The answer is: I was listening to my girlfriend break up with me. And I was hard of listening, so she had to repeat herself a lot. It cost me money. But of course I paid the bill, because that's what responsible adults do. A much, much more responsible adult would have bought a decent used car instead but I don't remember thinking about it. (I was seventeen and everyone told me it wasn't allowed anyway.)

I paid my tuition, paid my bills, bought a textbook, paid my rent in cash, and hiked to the bank to see how I'd done.

I had five dollars left.

This was not five dollars in spending money. Not five dollars until payday. I had five dollars and twenty-five cents TOTAL when five dollars was the absolute minimum the bank would allow before they closed the account and presumably repossessed my shoelaces. 

Okay, so I was young (seventeen, remember) when I got myself into this situation. But I wasn't clueless. At least, I wasn't totally clueless for a teenager, when the bar is low. I had a plan. Two weeks before, I'd ditched my Roy Rogers gig where the managers were stingy with food. Instead, I picked up extra burger flipping duties at McDonald's. During my shifts there, I could eat and drink for free. It was a foolproof plan.

Life can be very, very foolish, though, more than we budget for in our foolproof plans. 

First, the McDonald's payroll system broke down.

This was not the entire payroll system for all McDonald's restaurants everywhere, which would would be a failure with a certain dramatic grandeur to it. No, just the area payroll system broke and about a third of us didn't get our checks. Naturally, I was in the problem third. 

My manager reassured me the check would be coming by 'the middle of the week' and anyway, he knew I'd already paid rent so I'd be fine. I nodded and said yeah, because admitting I had no money for food seemed like a humiliating detail. 

The main thing was, I had my McDonald's shifts. I didn't have to admit anything to anybody, yet.

Here's where I should mention I had experience with fasting. At twelve, I'd fasted for a day (that's twenty-four hours for you cheaters, not dawn to dusk). Later, I'd made it two whole days with just drinking water. Then I succeeded at three days, although I got shivering cold at around the 70-hour mark. Finally, at sixteen, I'd conducted a four-day fast that left me not only shivering but feeling vaguely nauseous, as if my body was trying to express something profound but only had a limited emotional vocabulary.

The previous fasts had been formative experiences. I thought I was good at fasting. I thought I understood it. Fasting and I had reached a gentleman's agreement about how things worked.

Oh, but I was wrong.

On Friday after my shift, I looked in the fridge. My remaining food supply consisted of: one tangerine, two slices of white bread, and the dregs of a jar of mayonnaise my roommates considered empty but which I, in my creative approach to defining the word "food," did not.

By Saturday night, I would be eating my last meal, a mayonnaise sandwich. This is the kind of stuff that should make you reflect on the choices that brought you to this point, although in my case, many of my relevant choices involved listening to lengthy phone calls about feelings while someone in the AT&T offices gently but firmly kept track of my time.

When I rose on Saturday morning, I ate my tangerine and walked to work. There, I checked our posted schedule and discovered my manager had removed me from the first half of the week. Well, this was new information. I had no shifts on Sunday through Wednesday. Therefore, I would have no food after my Saturday morning double.

On Saturday night, I ate my mayonnaise sandwich, knowing there would be no more food until Thursday at the earliest, or until my paycheck arrived, whichever came first. 

Sunday: didn't eat. There was no point in calling about the paychecks because no one would try to start fixing the problem until Monday. I spent the day trying to achieve the right frame of mind for my fast. (A little late, since I'd already started.)

Monday: didn't eat. After a couple of calls, I got a manager who told me the payroll office was cutting checks and they would probably come in on Wednesday. The management didn't need more staff today. I thanked him and did not mention I was currently conducting an unplanned experiment. When I finished it, I would discover the difference between fasting and simply going hungry.

Tuesday: didn't eat. I couldn't resist calling McDonald's to see if they needed help or if the paychecks had arrived. They didn't and they hadn't. I began to understand why my previous fasting experiences, conducted with planning and purpose, had felt so different from this one. This was not a spiritual journey, really. This one was more of a hostage situation conducted by a broken printer and a courier service.

Wednesday: I dropped by my restaurant and the manager was surprised to see me. However, the paychecks had just come in. This coincidence was due to me thinking hard about the pay couriers' schedule.

"We're in a rush right now," my manager said, stating the obvious. He was running a pack of fries and two rolls of register receipt paper between the kitchen and the front counter when I caught him. "I can't get your paycheck out of the envelope until we hit a slow spot."

I waited like a person who has not eaten for four days waits, which is to say with calm, energy-conserving focus at a table where I could see the size of the customer lines. After a while, the lines diminished. The manager noticed me and invited me to the back of the restaurant. In his office, he rifled through the contents of the pay envelope. He found mine in the bag, to my relief. When he  handed it over, the clock on the wall told me it was at four in the afternoon.

I had plenty of time to hike to a bank. Inside, the branch office smelled of stale air and dust but I knew I reeked of cooking grease, which was worse. The teller frowned at my request but his bank had promised up front to cash paychecks, so he had to do it. He doled out a partial cashback for me, deposited the rest of my trivial money, and handed me my transaction statement. He did everything with a slight air of disgust. He could smell the fast food air on me. Then, with the wad of green bills in my hand, I hiked a mile up the road to the Safeway.

Since I was feeling budget conscious, I bought soup and bread. Those were the cheapest things I could get plus I knew I was breaking a fast and had to do it carefully. For dinner that night, after waiting half an hour to pass so I would make it to four full days of fasting, I ate tomato soup with toast. It was a ceremony I planned with care and conducted with reverence. I suspected it might be the first time in my life I liked tomato soup.

I was right. It was.

EPILOGUE: Were there any life lessons here? Maybe.

I told myself I should fast, under the circumstances. And I fooled myself into it pretty well. Still, it is hard to fool yourself completely. Every morning, I woke up wishing I had food. I would take a half hour or so to get into the mindset of going without. I've done single-day fasts since but I've never decided to go three or four days, not anymore.

Even food you hate will taste amazing after you go without any for long enough. That makes sense to everyone, I suspect, but there's a difference when you actually do it. 

In theory, I was taking college classes. I probably attended my Creative Writing sessions. I may have skipped French. At any rate, I mostly don't remember my classes for the week except for my hour of singing. The Chapel Chorus class was my least important one. But for me, it was the most welcome.

Also, as an obvious lesson, you should probably not spend eight months' rent listening to someone break up with you over the phone. It's not the stupidest decision a teenager ever made but I had to learn from it that running out of money has real consequences. Besides, paying up front for my classes and paying the rest of my bills did more to wipe me out than the phone company did. 

Not Even Not Zen 416: Biomythography - Note 129: Kicked Out of Boy Scouts

How I Got Kicked Out of the Boy Scouts

I want to be clear about something right up front: I was an excellent Boy Scout, if by that we mean I had mastered the essential skills of tying knots, setting fires, and eating s'mores.

In my younger years with the Cub Scouts and Webelos I had earned every single badge and the Arrow of Light, too, the very first in our troop history. I had written essays about atheism to fulfill my Religion badge requirements. I also did the required volunteer charity work, though I should note that "required volunteering" is a suspect term like "jumbo shrimp" or "easily cancellable service subscription."

In retrospect, those were enlightened times. I endured concerned questioning from a den mother and two different scoutmasters — one who wore office clothes (the "I Just Came From My Accounting Job" look), and another who wore an olive green scout shirt (the "I Take Scouting Seriously" look). Each wanted to make absolutely certain I was sincere in my atheism. They had to verify I wasn't just a lazy churchgoer trying to game the system, because apparently a thing worse than not believing in a God is trying to get out of a badge requirement. The Boy Scouts had their priorities.

After passing my theological exams, I went on to thrive in the Boy Scouts. I had fun crabbing on the Eastern Shore. (Crabbing means catching angry crustaceans with string and chicken necks. It's like fishing, but more likely to result in the overall sense that nature is disgusting.) I learned that a pot with three crabs does not need a lid and a troop of boys does not need free time or they will resort to pranks.

I even became a minor celebrity at the Boy Scout Jamboree, winning the archery contest and racking up various other minor successes. But apparently the Jamboree was the last hurrah for our old Boy Scout leader, who had the good sense to treat religion like a reasonable person treats a wasps' nest: acknowledging it exists, maintaining a respectful distance, and resisting the urge to poke it with a stick.

Enter: The New Guy

We then entered a bold new era led by a scoutmaster who was less pragmatic and more evangelical. I hadn’t known many like him. He had the kind of religious fervor usually associated with people who stand at airport terminals handing out pamphlets and giving everyone soulful, sad-eyed stares.

Our new leader wanted to start each meeting with a religious observance he had written himself. And when I say "written himself," I mean he had crafted a speech so profoundly, magnificently awkward it made a lot of the boys laugh. Out loud. Immediately.

They laughed so hard, we never quite heard the end of the speech. It remained forever a mystery. However, it contained a reference to "woodies," by which our scoutmaster meant cars, "rosy cheeks," by which our scoutmaster meant he didn't understand twelve year old boys, a reference to being "gay and carefree," a reminder to be "square and true," and the "stout-hearted breasts of brave, young men," by which he again meant he didn't understand what boys find hilarious.

I didn't understand why some of the phrases like, "we will make everything tight" got guffaws from the older scouts but I knew the trite phrases were outdated. I chuckled along in frozen horror, the way you might laugh if you saw someone slip on a banana peel but then realized they were about to fall down an escalator.

He announced — and it's revealing when you think about the bold confidence this required — that he wanted someone to give a big, dramatic reading of his religious masterpiece.

The boys were so openly, enthusiastically opposed to this idea that even the scoutmaster himself realized he had a rebellion on his hands. He pivoted. Instead of asking who wanted to read it (since the answer was clearly "nobody, not even for money"), he decided to hold a contest. The losing troop would get the honor — and I'm using that word very loosely here — of reading his speech aloud. 

Let me repeat that: We were now battling for the right NOT to have to read The Religious Essay.

Even now, this strikes me as a profoundly weird thing for a scout leader to allow to happen. How could he not feel embarrassed by everyone's reactions to his literary masterwork? But I suppose he was protected from shame by his religious certainty, which must have been like an invisible force field that deflects self-awareness.

At the time, I thought he might not be very bright. With the benefit of hindsight and my own adventures in raising children — during which I have learned that adults are morally just children who can reach high shelves — I am now absolutely certain that he did not understand people and probably not puppies who chew slippers, puzzles with more than 100 pieces, or himself.

But sometimes the Boy Scouts can't be choosy. They need warm bodies with driver's licenses. Someone who seems to have good intentions, no matter what his other drawbacks — poor judgment, questionable writing ability, the social awareness of a moose trying to mate with a rail fence — those good intentions might still be the best they can do.

The Great Athletic Competition to Avoid Public Humiliation

And so began a series of contests. Multiple contests. An Olympic-level cavalcade of contests, all designed to determine who would be forced to read this speech that nobody wanted to read.

Now, here's where I should mention something important: the other boys in my troop were not, generally speaking, what you would call "good athletes." I was better. Not Olympic-caliber or anything, just better than the average bunch of guys who had chosen to spend their free time learning about knots and earning badges.

I also fought harder, because I had seen the speech. I knew what was at stake. I won the sack race. I ran first in the relay race, powered by my purest fear of public speaking. I pitched curves in wiffleball that would have made a major league pitcher weep with envy. I hit a home run because my terror gave me strength plus the ball got lost in the leaves under a car.  

I scored all the goals in crab soccer, which is a game where you walk around on your hands and feet facing up like a crab, and honestly, the fact that we were playing it at all should have been a warning sign that things had gone terribly wrong. And yet somehow the teams kept playing until my team, despite our heroic efforts, finally lost the third tiebreaker activity.

This meant we had to pick someone from our troop to read the speech.

It was so spectacularly, magnificently bad that I outright refused. Just flat-out said no, not something I had done since throwing a temper tantrum (and getting beaten for it) when I was four. This led the troop to pick me anyway, because I was the youngest available. I still refused.

So they finally picked some other poor schmuck, and I felt genuinely bad for him, the way you feel bad for someone who's been selected for jury duty on a murder trial in which the murder suspect has already declared he's going to kill everyone “who’s gone against him” in revenge.

The Quiet, Quiet Incident

When the time finally came for the reading, we all gathered around with the grim determination of people about to witness a terrible but unavoidable public torture session at the stocks. The designated reader began. Almost immediately, one of the scouts started to giggle at some phrase like "our brave parts" or another innocently over-hokey, noble-sounding expression that absolutely did not land the way the scoutmaster had intended.

I was standing next to this kid, and I immediately started snorting — not because I wanted to, but because suppressed laughter has to come out somewhere, and my body decided "through the nose” was how we were going to go. I was suppressing so hard, my ears were whistling. 

The sounds I made were so ridiculous, the previously giggling scout couldn't suppress his laughter. And then others nearby started laughing because we were funny, which is how these things work. Laughter is contagious, like yawning, or panic, or unvaccinated children.

There's something about trying to hold in laughter that makes it worse. 

Within seconds, we became a brass band of nose-honkers, stifled chortlers, and choking donkeys. Bursts of sound erupted from our group like popcorn bangs in a microwave. The senior boy in our troop resisted but that only led to him to make noises like a dying goose. Next to us, the other troop of boys caught fire with forbidden humor, too, and they tried to contain their laughs but as a result they sounded like someone kicking a pile of Scottish bagpipes. 

Kids turned colors as we tried to calm ourselves. We gave our honest effort with "stout-hearted breasts of brave, young men" but we made the mistake of looking at each other, right in the eye. That was bad. When your friend looks ridiculous generally, he doesn’t look any less funny when he’s turning purple. We could not have been worse-behaved if we had applauded the speech using armpit farts. 

The Aftermath

I was kicked out of the Boy Scouts immediately. This was partly due to my being an atheist but also because I wouldn't apologize and blamed the scoutmaster for the laughter right to his face. (I don't remember the blaming part but a couple scouts approached me very quietly about it later, so maybe.)

The most unforgivable sin had to be making fun of what the scoutmaster had written.

Looking back, I regret nothing. Well, almost. I do feel bad for the one kid who had to actually try to read the speech while thirty boys giggled and drooled and spilled things and snorted. I think we mostly didn't look at the speaker, at least. We weren't making fun of him and we all tried not to make fun of each other as we turned colors.

I learned some valuable lessons from my time in the Boy Scouts: how to tie a half hitch knot, how to start a fire without matches, and how religious certainty combined with poor writing can create a situation so awkward that it becomes impossible not to laugh.

Scouting teaches us good stuff. These are all skills that have served me well in life.