A Ghost In The Machine

LAX isn’t exactly the kind of place you go expecting to find an intersection with Fate, or Serendipity. Or really, anything else you’d want anything to do with. I’ve always found airports to be mildly disturbing somehow. At a bigger one like LAX, over a hundred sixty thousand people come and go daily. That’s like Pasadena moving through every twenty four hours. It’s a city in its own right, whose population experiences a one hundred percent turnover every single day; a river of humanity on its way somewhere else. Transience is its very nature, which implies a sort gypsy quality that I find crafty at best, and highly suspect. They must too, because LAX has its own police force.

All the tiny, single serving accoutrements that the distracted, stressed out people feed on like locust as they move through leave a detritus of styrofoam and cellophane packaging in their wake. They generate a metropolis’ worth of garbage and sewage twenty four hours a day, and just keep moving. A city of people who don’t clean their own bathrooms, who are all a mere hair’s breadth from not making it to wherever they’re headed. If even one thing goes wrong the dominoes start falling, and then there’s no stopping it.  Miss a connection, get separated from your luggage, just the smallest ghost in the machine, and everything predicated upon the folly of the world being predictable comes crashing down. Some butterfly’s wing in China is already helping to generate the hurricane that will destroy the Stardust Motor Court in Alabama. Chaos never sleeps.

When you’re flying, looking down on a town like Long Beach is kind of pleasant. The grid of streets, the green dots of park-space, the clusters of concrete, glass and steel monoliths. From the air, it seems like an accomplishment. It looks like someone is in charge. Like there’s definitely someone that knows what’s going on. When you’re in LAX, looking around you might even believe that the soaring vaults, clerestories, and walls of glass were an accomplishment. But there’s nothing more soulless than the beige badlands between the Sharper Image and Cinnabon, where the corporate industrialization of novelty creates a kind of interchangeable space, sanitized of any distinguishing characteristics. Like a sovereign capitalist nation with embassies in every airport in the country, if not the world. Could be LAX, SFO, Logan, O’Hare, doesn’t matter. If you woke up at any one of them, you’d have no way of knowing where you even were by the corporate landmarks. You could be anywhere.

The Long Beach Skyline

With that kind of animus, it’s a wonder I’m here at all. Looking for some wayfaring stranger I’ve never even laid eyes on, and whose name and flight number are written on a slip of paper I can’t find. My world is an avalanche of books and half-finished term papers, so I can’t possibly be expected to keep track of waifs from Wisconsin come to the big city. It was Mary-something, I think. Mary-Kathryn Gallagher, maybe. Superstar! I have no idea what she actually looks like, aside from the fact that she’s blonde. A blonde in LA. Yeah, that narrows it down. I got here early so I could track down her flight number based on incoming shuttles from Madison, WI. Turns out it wasn’t that hard, there’s only one per day, so now I have an hour to kill. I take a halfhearted stab at a textbook, trying not to think of the money I’m wasting on parking right now as I wait. Or gas for that matter, since I had to drive the International Harvester Travelall today. One point eight miles to the gallon. Downhill with a good tailwind, that is. But that’s what you get when you’re the last guy out the door at my house and have to take whichever car is left in the driveway.

Mary-Kate Olson—or whatever—is a senior in High School and a last-minute addition to the itinerary. I got tapped to come get her because it’s a school day, and I’m in my second term at college so my schedule is more flexible than anyone in the Youth Group. Spring Break is next week, so I’m just made of time. I’ve only got the biggest paper of the semester due tomorrow. All of this I said to Dan. But he’s working on his Doctorate of Divinity at Fuller Theological Seminary, and I’m an undergrad at Long Beach City College where my major is ostensibly Psychology or Philosophy, no one knows which. Only I’m aware that I’m adrift and actually majoring in Free Rent at home, while I wait for some sign from the Heavens to tell me what the hell I’m supposed to be doing with my life. But when you tell people you have a Major, it sounds like there’s a plan. Like your life is about something, so nobody needs to worry. So that’s what I do.  But Dan’s degree and workload definitely trump my schedule of Philosophy 101 and Underwater Basket Weaving classes, so here I am. Wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I could never say no to Dan Buis.

He came out of nowhere in 1985 when I was fourteen, and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and kept my life from going off the rails. I was a Freshman at an inner-city school, Washington Jr. High. The school was perfectly triangulated between gang territories with Islanders and Longos to the West, Tongs to the North and Crips to the East. I was a newbie, and a minority amongst minorities, just scared shitless. I came from a Military culture where the standard brand of pubescent chaos was manhandled into a cattle chute and funneled through at least to graduation, if not actual success in life. Washington was a Darwinian Thunderdome of neophyte gangsters, stoners and scared dweebs like me. The dropout rate was insane. Seriously, prisons do a better job.

Washington Junior High and Gladiator Academy

I soon found out that what they were teaching ninth graders at Washington was what they were was teaching to sixth graders at the DOD school I’d just been attending overseas in Naples, Italy. Returning home to the States, to this hellhole, I found a world more foreign to me than anywhere I’d ever been. It was not a good place for a pencil-necked honky to stand out. Even getting noticed was a great way to get your head lopped off. I’d carved out a little niche of comic book dorks and constructed a bunker of unobtrusiveness to ride out my time there. I was already suffering a kind of fatigue born of that bunker mentality, and things were degrading in my life as I spent every minute of every school day in actual fear.

Enter Dan Buis, Youth Pastor Extraordinaire.

When you’ve got actual problems, placebos and platitudes will not do. Churches tend to be social clubs that reinforce simplistic creeds and mottos to maintain the status quo. Stock phrases, pat answers, and polite shooshings were the order of the day. Which is fine when your mission is essentially crowd control for society, which is what all religions do pretty much interchangeably with each other. But when you’re in fear for your life you start to take ownership of it and do what needs doing and disregard the rest without apology. One look at the sea of lilywhite, middle class faces in the Church told me they were of no help, and therefore irrelevant to my life. I checked out immediately. 

I could give no voice to the fear. Not to my parents or anyone else. Partly out of a sense of shame at having to have mommy and daddy help, and partly because the experience was so alien and uncivilized that there was no way to explain it to someone who was not part of the psychological Blitz. My bland little middle class neighborhood was perfectly fine, a mixed race enclave of thirty-something professionals who were cobbling together the basis for nice lives. But that neighborhood in Long Beach was on the wrong side of some line on the map, which compelled my attendance at Washington, so I was through the looking glass and into a freefall of culture shock and post-traumatic stress. 

I’m sure my parents knew something was wrong, but at that age it could be anything. Raging hormones, girls, peer pressure, some formless angst. And of course it was all of those things as well, but on top of the six hour days at the gladiator academy. I think my parents saw Church as a mechanism for reaching me when they couldn’t. That’s why they forced me to go to one meeting of the Youth Group. Just one. If I didn’t like it, I never had to go again. Simple enough, since I already knew I wouldn’t like it. Problem solved.

I don’t know if someone briefed Dan on the situation with me or if, as I suspect, he could size things up with the best of them and took one look at me and just knew. For whatever reason, he immediately singled me out of a group of twenty-some-odd kids as the one that needed a unique brand of attention. Maybe because I was the one with the chip on his shoulder the size of Gibraltar, defiance written all over him. When you dislike someone, it doesn’t matter what they do, you hate it just because they’re the one doing it. They’re minding their own business and you’re like, “Look at that asshole, just eating crackers like he owns the joint.” Dan saw right through that and came straight at me, head on. 

He had a kind of hapless affect that was disarming in its amiable bungling. Medium height and build, brown hair and eyes; the perfect camouflage for someone to hide in plain sight. An affable guy who was perfectly comfortable being underestimated. He spoke three languages and didn’t need you to know it. Over time I came to realize that he was always four steps ahead of me, and was pretending to discover things at the same rate for the sake of my ego. Dan’s way was more artful, and minus the implied condescension, but still a variation on that theme.

The Youth Group meeting I’d been conned into attending was an overnight trip to a cabin in the Sierra Nevadas. It was rustic, but sizeable, and set up for groups like ours to stay and play, with hiking, fishing, water skiing, and swimming as diversions. We went up on a Friday evening and it was after dark when we got there. We played a couple of harmless ice-breaking games and then hit the sack. So far, so good, although I was pretty annoyed that what should have been a one-time, two hour meeting had become a two day event. I didn’t actually meet the Dan who would save my life until the next morning.

By some circumstance, which as I’m writing this begins to seem more and more like purposeful design, I wound up with a roll out bed in the alcove by the laundry room of the cabin. Everyone else was paired up as roomies or in bunk beds in a common sleeping area. So first thing in the morning, seven AM or earlier, there’s Dan, acoustic guitar in hands, singing a Beatles tune as reveille. Just jamming away with a kind of goofy glee, unassailable in his contentment.  “I Was Only Sleeping” was the first Beatles song he ever played for me, but it was far from the last. I rolled over and pulled the pillow up over my head. Undeterred, he sat down at the foot of the rickety bed and just sang louder. Clearly I was dealing with a lunatic.

“Dear, God! Why are you doing this to me?” I groaned.

“When I'm in the middle of a dream… Stay in bed, float up stream,” was Dan’s only reply. I knew this guy would be bulletproof in his resolve, so I sat up and glared at him blearily. Without break in his playing, he asked, “What’s your favorite Beatle song?”

“I don’t like the Beatles,” I replied, unwilling to give an inch to his dauntless charm offensive. Him just eating those crackers like he owned the joint.

“Sure you do. You just don’t know it,” he said and segued to “Ticket to Ride” with the kind of seamlessness that only a million hours of playing can give you.

“That’s the Beatles?” I asked.

“See?” He said, with a big ol’ toothy grin. “Everybody loves the Beatles, you can’t not. It’s inhuman.”

Stay in bed... float upstream

Sensing that I was beginning to thaw, I immediately returned to my crusty disapproval, but knowing somehow that the battle was lost. Unfazed, Dan moved into an Elvis routine. “Don’t be cruel,” he sang with authentic Elvis swagger, his lip upturned in perfect smirk. This ran into a pastiche of lyrics calling me a hound dog and urging me not to step on his blue suede shoes. I was chuckling pretty hard by then, having surrendered to this unrelenting assault on couth. When he started singing “Obla-Di, Obla-Da” as Elvis I dissolved into tears of hysterical laughter. Sacrilege! This guy had the irrepressible energy of a Labrador that can’t wait for you to get home. A Labrador with an IQ of one-fifty.  

It was almost a relief to be worked over by a master like that, like some Aikido sensei who lifts one finger and puts your ass on the mat. You know you’re being played, and you don’t care because it made it seem like someone knew what the hell was going on in life. After that it was pretty much over. He roped me into a million of his schemes, practical jokes and side projects. There was virtually never a moment of discreet teaching or lecture. Everything was on the job training, on the fly, by the seat of our pants. Car washes, bake sales, camping trips and movie nights. I helped him move pool and ping pong tables into the Youth Room at Church, at the end of which he had a monster pizza waiting. Anytime I showed up to help with something, there was always pizza and soda waiting, along with some new card trick or lame knock-knock joke. Crappy leather couches and bean bag chairs took the place of a lectern and folding chairs. Dan left his spare guitar lying around for anyone to jam on, and I learned a Beatles tune or two over the years. The fridge had an endless supply of A&W Cream Soda and Otter Pops. The whole Youth Group became a distinct world for me where there were no threats. Midnight scavenger hunts and toilet papering the Pastor’s house. Bowl-a-thons and cute girls.

Youthful shenanigans

It always seemed a bit like an episode of the keystone cops, watching Dan and his wife Kari manage the ongoing landslide otherwise known as the Youth Group. Volunteering to wrangle the lives of two dozen teens ought to qualify as temporary insanity, or at least a cry for help. At a time when the culture at large and all your friends are trying to get you to go one way, the Youth Staff was trying to get us to do the opposite of what every urge, instinct, and hormone in our bodies told us to. Keep it in your pants, don’t say that, be good, share, play nice with others. And they had to make all the cajoling, arm twisting, nudging, and correcting entertaining to us while we failed to thank them for it. The best you can hope for is to avert major disasters like pregnancies, dropouts, and suicides, and mitigate the minor ones into misdemeanors and humorous anecdotes for later. And don’t worry, we’ll be bitching about it the whole time.

Tent City, Estacion Coahuila, Baja Mexico

But the most important lessons are the ones you don’t know you’re learning; one day the knowledge is just there with no speeches or soapboxes, and no defined memory of when it snuck up on you. At some point over the past five years, I’d learned that I could be a person of faith, who still thought and questioned. Who doubted. But maybe more importantly I’d learned that there was fun to be had, and that all the stodgy imperiousness, the disapproval and judgment, did not have to be hallmarks of my life. I could believe and keep on with pitch perfect Dana Carvey impressions of the Church Lady and George Bush, just as Dan had his uncanny Elvis impersonations. I didn’t have to be about constructing a mausoleum for my soul, joining all those with emptiness behind their eyes, and dust in all their hearts.

That’s why I never say no to Dan Buis. Not ever.

All growed up?

So it’s 1990 and I’m all growed up, waiting in LAX for a blonde hick from the sticks. I’ve graduated High School, the training wheels are off, and I’m taking punches for real now. Not just rasslin’ with mock opponents who are actually on my side; this is not a drill. The mistakes I make now are being held against me for good. I’ve just lost my first job, had my heart truly broken for the first time, and college is kicking the shit out of everything I believe in. That’s growed up if you ask me, and it’s for the birds. 

The shit job that I’ve just lost is not really a tragedy, although it was hard on my ego, having never been fired before. Long Beach Seed and Pet is now hiring for a number two guy in the fish department, if you know anyone who’s looking. They won’t have me to kick around anymore. Apparently they take a dim view on college pukes like me insisting on taking Spring Break off, especially since I’m only part time to begin with. I tried to explain that it was for the widows and orphans of Estacion Coahuila, but those racists don’t care about anything going on in Mexico. So I sacrificed my very first tax-paying job to go off to Mexico for the annual Spring Break Mission Trip with the Youth Group. It’s trip number five for me, and the last of my career. I’m already a year out of the Youth Group, and only going in an “advisory” capacity. Which is a nice way of saying that Dan is throwing me a bone and not forcing me to grow up as fast as I should. So much for those training wheels.

This year Dan reached out to his old roommate from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan about the Mexico trip. The roommate’s name is also Dan, and they are currently both Youth Pastors on their way to being Big-boy Pastors someday. Other Dan is now at a little church in Madison, Wisconsin, and Dan Buis asked him if they wanted to accompany us down to the Orphanage where we would be spending the week building stuff and spreading the Good News to all the boys and girls. It’s kind of a cross between a lot of digging and busting rocks in the hot sun and putting on puppet shows for a bunch of underfed kids while we refrain from showering for a week. And a lovely time is had by all. So Other Dan says yes and drags a horrible phalanx of pubescence across two thousand miles of continent to get on a short-bus for the eleven hour drive through the Mexican desert with no AC. I mean hell, why wouldn’t you?

Minutes after a long-overdue shower. Clean at last!

The thing is, one of Other Dan’s kids got left behind in Madison. A straggler who apparently doesn’t even go to their Church, but accepted the last-minute invite from her friend in the Youth Group. The main group arrived yesterday and then spent today at Disneyland, and doing all the touristy stuff that Californians can’t stand. Which leaves Mary-Jane Watson to bring up the rear all on her own. The poor hick is on her way here to the big city to meet a group of teenagers she doesn’t know, to go to a foreign country to help a bunch of kid she’s never met, who don’t speak any language she knows. Over Spring Break, no less. Down there, we live in a huge tent city for five days with Youth Groups from hundreds of other churches all over the country, where there are no showers and the food is mass-produced cafeteria swill prepared in vats. The Youth Groups will disperse all over the area every day to work on different projects at schools, orphanages, churches and the women’s prison. We all get burnt to a crisp in the Mexican sun, and smell like the inside of a month old gym bag by the end of the week.

Mary-Mary Quite Contrary will have the opportunity to take a shower when we get back, then she’ll get on a plane back to Wisconsin and return to school more exhausted than when she left. Then she’ll spend the next week hearing about how much fun her friends had in Ft. Lauderdale or Daytona Beach. Then she’ll suffer through strange looks and sidelong glances when she tells them she traveled four thousand miles to a Third World toilet to help build an airstrip so food could be brought in to an orphanage by plane—instead of being boosted by roadside banditos and dirty cops before it could get to hungry mouths. Either her friends will hate her for do-gooding while they had fun, which makes them feel like shallow dilettantes, or they’ll think she’s crazy. Which of course she is. She would have to be, right? Oh, and by the way, that’ll be nine hundred dollars, please. Not including airfare.

This isn’t what the majority of our Youth Group will be doing over Spring Break. Barely a quarter of us sign up to go each year. On paper it sounds like the worst idea ever. But the payoff is not to be believed; the kind of gratification and fulfillment you get at the end of that week of punishing labor and Kumbaya sing-alongs can’t be bought for love or money. I look forward to it every year, and it’s why I don’t really care that much about losing the job cleaning out fish tanks and bunny cages. I’m both heartbroken and relieved that this will be my last trip. It’s the end of an era. You work shoulder to shoulder with some of the best people in the world, doing everything from working in soup kitchens to digging wells. Living together in tents and eating the worst food imaginable, while conducting panty raids and water balloon fights. Nice work if you can get it.

Morning assembly for our day's marching orders

But it’s also the kind of thing you can only sustain in a bubble of protected youth. Where there are such things as Spring Break and Youth Group. Where you are surrounded by allies who backstop your beliefs and reinforce your identity, providing direction and stability for your life. When it seems like the world is run by experts who know what they’re doing and somebody definitely knows what’s going on. When you don’t have pesky things like jobs and taxes, or professors trying to assassinate your beliefs. When you believe that a friend’s a friend forever and all dogs go to heaven. My bubble has popped, and I don’t know how much longer I can pretend otherwise, but I know it’s my job to keep pretending for as long as I can. What else is there?

I suppose this all sounds pretty cynical. I don’t think that’s how the people that really know me would describe me. Wisecracking, sure. Irreverent, check. But mostly as a happy little dipstick, with a ready smile, an easy laugh, a helping hand, or a joke. A guy you can talk to for hours who listens and never talks about himself. Always ready with a word of advice—whether you want it or not—and a bit of a know-it-all, eager to show how clever he can be. But couched in the harmlessness of a comic book nerd who believes everything is gonna be alright in the end. I wish to hell I knew where that guy was these days.

If I was the kind of guy who tells people stuff I might mention that I’d never been in love before, and now that I was and had gotten my guts kicked in on Christmas Eve, nothing had been the same since. Or I might say that I’ve got a college professor whose greatest joy in life is triangulating on young minds and destroying their belief systems so that they can be as miserable as he is. But I’m not that kind, so no one knows any of this. I’m the kind that always keeps a straight face and never lets on about anything. I would be a great spy because I operate on a permanent “need to know” basis, and could be relied on to take the cyanide pill rather than spill the launch codes. 

Whenever I tell the story of the girl I fell for, it’s always in a tragically-doomed-in-that-star-crossed-romantic way that makes for great movies but an awful life, because that’s how I think of it. Like I'm Ducky, from "Pretty in Pink,” who deserves the girl and is the only right choice, but doesn't get her. People tell me all the time how much I look like Jon Cryer, and it always pissed me off that Blaine winds up with the girl, like that was the happy ending. Ducky was the happy ending. But this was no movie, it was just a mess that I made. Any fool would have known better than to do what I did, because now I was left with neither the friend nor the girl. Truly, so much less than zero. So even though I was getting pretty much what I deserved right about then, it did nothing to mitigate the feeling that I was dropping headlong into an endless freefall where I’m forever gathering speed, but never hit the ground.

Spending these heartsick hours and days in school (or anywhere else, really) is like wading through molasses. Torpor and lassitude are my default setting now as I struggle to give a crap about pretty much anything. The course work isn’t helping things. Psychology is one thing, with all those giants arguing about what humans really are, whether we have souls or are simply evolutionary constructs of biochemical impulses; ids, egos, and superegos. But Philosophy is something else entirely. Questioning not only the nature of humanity, but of existence itself. Psychologists argue over models of behavior and the architecture of the mind, Philosophers argue over the basis of knowledge itself and what is truly knowable. Every question spawning other questions about the validity of even asking questions, never arriving at answers.

The two instructors that tag-team teach the class are a kind of Laurel and Hardy act. Dr. Wright, the psychologist, is a fairly laid back guy who can eviscerate your argument in an amiable fashion and leave you wondering what just happened. Professor Emerson on the other hand, is a cruel little man. The two of them have been teaching together forever and have the kind of friendly competition and disagreement that comes from a million hours of debate that never ends in anything, except perhaps respect for a battle well fought. Each one would take a turn teaching a class, while the other made cracks from the peanut gallery. Usually it was good natured and enhanced the experience of the class overall. But their approach to the class, while complementary, differed in some key ways. 

Dr. Wright asks questions and then extrapolates a student’s answer out to its logical extreme to illustrate any absurdities contained therein. As the student, having your beliefs and statements scrutinized and evaluated in this way can be painful and embarrassing, but it also results in interesting debates wherein you actually learn the foundational premises that your beliefs rest upon. Agree or disagree, whatever, but the heart of the argument is on the table, disassembled to its component pieces for analysis, decide for yourself.

Professor Emerson on the other hand, seems to be winding up to lower the boom on anyone dumb enough to engage. He isn’t exploring a thought or an argument with you, he’s leading you down the primrose path to a killing floor. He seems to take special delight in targeting the religious students and mocking their beliefs openly. He uses the statements of their beliefs as cudgels to force them into sophistic corners that no nineteen year old could get out of, religious or otherwise. It was like watching a Shao Lin Master beating the crap out of a ten year-old kid, and then strutting around like it was an accomplishment. 

The ideas I found the most interesting in Philosophy were always the ones that taught a person how to think, not what to think. And that is the basic difference between the two men. Dr. Wright always sought to make people see what the full implication of their philosophy or belief was, and how to evaluate a thought in such a way as to have a real command of what it truly means. If you could tear the engine apart and reassemble it blindfolded, his mission in life was fulfilled. But Professor Emerson seemed to need you to arrive at his conclusions in order to be correct. It felt desperate and mean-spirited. While I enjoyed being challenged by Kant, Locke, and Aquinas, Emerson covered them in a desultory fashion, out of necessity, but really lingered on what were obviously his favorites, Jean-Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche. Nihilists and Existentialists, and just depressing as shit. They were brilliant guys with enduring legacies, but they always felt to me like they’d begun with their conclusions and reverse engineered their arguments to suit them. Which described Emerson to a T. 

Nonetheless, they don’t just give those Professorships away, and Emerson was a formidable man, small in stature, but daunting and ruthless in debate. He used his considerable powers to advocate for the philosophical necessity of God’s nonexistence. Because if “He” existed and was indeed omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient then—the world being what it is—He was an asshole. Atheism is something I’m prepared to accept, but meaninglessness is something else entirely. Emerson would not rest until you accepted the reality that there were no vague metaphysical forces involved in the world, but it was instead a rudderless barge carrying us all to oblivion, and there was no meaning save what we chose to impose on the whole mess after staring at it for too long.

It was a hard time in life to be learning these lessons, and fending for myself philosophically. I’d been trained by Boy Scouts and then sent to a front-line position to take live fire. I hadn’t expected the world to be as big as it was, and had to adjust my degree of certainty about things I really knew nothing about. I guess that happens to everyone when they get out of the nest and find that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. It’s best if the cockiness and utter certainty take a blow early on. The world is too complicated to be so easily categorized, and if your philosophy fits on a bumper-sticker then you have no idea what’s going on. But being exposed to Emerson’s particular vision of the world had done more than open my eyes, it had poisoned me on some fundamental level. 

Some illusions are useful for a time, but pass eventually when they are no longer necessary. But the difference between being dissuaded from an illusion, and being disillusioned, is huge. Dr. Wright would leave me feeling chastened at times, like a bush-league amateur. Emerson was just purposefully demoralizing. Finding that foundational ideas upon which your world-view rests are be full of holes is an excruciating experience. Having a mentor, a belief, or some central tenet of our world invalidated creates a kind of vertigo that is existentially horrifying. My compass spins perpetually now, there’s no line on the horizon, and I don’t know which way is up. And true to form, the people at my Church were of no help in answering the questions they had never dared ask themselves. Polite shooshings are always the order of the day, and no one knows what’s going on.

So sitting in a beige hell like LAX, contemplating Existentialism for a paper due the following day, was a bad place to be. Picking up some hayseed from Wisconsin and then leading a group of trainees to a land where people had actual problems, and no time for pondering the meaning of it all, felt like a surreal exercise in futility. I have no business being in an “advisory” capacity. My advice is useless: Go back, don’t grow up. No one is in charge. No one actually knows what’s going on. There is no plan. Don’t open the Box, Pandora. It’s all a random lottery of meaningless tragedy. But holding the line and performing as expected is what I do, and waiting for the huckleberry from Madison was next on the list. Then I just needed to find the time to finish the paper on why God is dead before bedtime.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Fishing in my bookbag, I come up with the textbook I’m supposed to regurgitate my paper from. “Existential Foundations” feels like an anchor Emerson has handed me in hopes of finishing me off. Every turgid page is the same nihilistic suicide note as the last, and I can’t even remember where I left off. It probably matters, but I can’t think why. Maybe if I just turned in a suicide note of my own I’d get an A. Luckily for me, I’d left myself a bookmark. I open to the page to be greeted by a portrait of Nietzsche, the father of Bauhaus and Joy Division. I suppose I owe him some thanks for that. Love and Rockets, New Order, and a bunch of the other bands that circumscribed my culture were born of that mustachioed bundle of joy. I’m not really feeling grateful though, so I flip the scrap of bookmark over onto his vaguely brutish face. And there it is. The name and flight number of Mary Queen of Scots. 

The huckleberry has a name and it’s Marianne Westphal. Oceanic, Flight 815. So in thirty eight minutes I’ll try to pick her blonde head out of the couple hundred other strangers streaming out of the gate. It’s something of a relief to be able to approach her with at least a name to get us started. All the Wisconsin kids are being hosted in pairs at different homes from the church, to save them some expense. Since Marianne is the last straggler, I volunteered our house to put her up. Like most nerds, I have a soft spot for late bloomers and underdogs. The good news is that we’ll leave for Mexico day after tomorrow, so I won’t have to dream up too much touristy nonsense to keep her entertained. Just get through this one awkward evening and then she’s in the hands of God. 

I wake to the sound of chimes as people are beginning to pour from the gate. I feel a little drugged, like I’m coming off a mickey someone slipped me, but that’s probably just the OD on Nietzsche talking. I’m momentarily disoriented and waking up in the airport is no help. I could be anywhere. I get it together and start looking around a little frantically. What if I’ve missed her? What will the poor lamb do, lost in the big city? Only a few people have passed me and none of them are blonde, so I get ahold of myself and stand up, dumping all my books and papers onto the floor. As I stuff the crap back in my backpack, I’m scrutinizing each face I see.

There are more people than I’d expected for a flight like this, which shouldn’t be a surprise to me since there is only one per day, and it’s about to be Spring Break in LA. I’m quickly scanning the faces for the one who looks the most Marianne-like. I’ve decided that what constitutes Marianne-ness is: blondeness, aloneness, and nice church-girlness. There are a surprising number of blonde girls coming through the gate; I guess there are a lot of Scandahoovians in Wisconsin. I would’ve brought one of those cardboard signs if I had remembered her name. But I’m filled with a sudden certainty that I’ll know this one when I see her.

And I do. I lay eyes on her three steps out of the gate. She doesn’t pause, but scans once from left to right as she walks, like she was looking for someone. I make a beeline for her, becoming more and more confident that I’m right with each step. She sees me approaching, and gives me an appraising look.

“Hi. Marianne?” I ask.

She smiles and says, “That's me. What gave it away?”

She has the kind of whiskey-soaked husk to her voice that every guy loves. Her eyes are blue and the faraway look in them seems like it might be permanent. I’m suddenly self-conscious and flustered.

“You looked a little lost,” I say. “I can spot that from a thousand yards.” And I can. I see it in the mirror every single day. “I’m Brien.”

We shake hands and I offer to take her bag. The feminist in her hesitates, but she gives it to me anyway. I lead her to the baggage claim and then out into the California sunshine, suddenly a lot less sure of things than I was when I came in. Something I would not have imagined possible.

It’s always sunny in LA, except when it’s not. It must be the best place in the world; perfect weather, snow skiing and water skiing in one day. The ocean, warm as bathwater, sailing, surfing, rollerblading.  The entertainment capital of the world, with a twenty four hour economy. In & Out Burger. Who could ask for anything more? I’d been expecting some kind of home-court advantage as the cultured, big-city college man that I am. I’m from LA, and she’s from Wisconsin after all, which I have on good authority is the Czechoslovakia of America. If she is at all impressed, it doesn’t show. As we head to the parking structure the realization that I’ve driven the Travelall is dawning on me with horror. Back when I thought I’d be picking up one of the Hatfields or McCoys with a mostly-intact set of teeth, I hadn’t really cared. But as we’ve been talking her obvious intelligence and subtle, dry wit has altered my expectations.

What she doesn’t know is that we’re headed toward the biggest monstrosity of a vehicle on the road today, which is inexplicably painted Smurf blue. The horrible beast is appropriately named Lurch as it squeals and wheezes its way down the road, the rattles and shimmies like the popping joints of an old man trying to keep his trick hip from going out. The tape player is sporadic as hell, requiring a matchbook to be jammed in it like a shim, and the radio is worse. It randomly scans to different stations at a whim, like a thing possessed. The tires square off on the bottom when it’s been sitting for more than an hour so that you bump along like Fred Flintstone for the first couple of miles until the tires round out again. Lacking the anticipated California cachet, this thing is going to cost me, big time.

Inexplicably Smurf-blue

Case in point, Marianne noticed the flat on the front passenger tire right away. To think, I could have shown up in a very respectable 280-Z, or an even nicer Honda Accord. Another bummer about being the third guy on a match. It just doesn’t pay to be the last one out of the house. If Dad had gotten stuck with Lurch this morning, he’d have changed it already. There’s no way I’m doing that in an LAX parking garage while I pay by the minute. I shrugged it off and just hoped that since we’d never get above thirty on the freeway in LA traffic, we would survive. 

Marianne is soft spoken. Coupled with the slight hoarseness of her voice, and gentle lilt of her laugh and things are rolling pleasantly along. Her slightly sardonic sense of humor is a welcome relief from the Pollyannaish sensibilities of the other church girls I’ve known. She even used the word “Zeitgeist” in conversation. Throw in the fact that she speaks German fluently and I’m definitely working on a serious inferiority complex here. I mean, I took three years of Latin in High School and it’s still Greek to me, so who’s the hick now? She laughs easily and her conversation is peppered with little asides and pop culture references that make her dazzling high-wire act seem like the most natural thing in the world.

Somehow it comes up that Marianne’s dad actually knew Max Planck, the German Physicist, father of quantum mechanics, and contemporary of Einstein, which is a whole other world of interest in this far-ranging conversation. She finds ways to compliment and insult Lurch in equal measure, unique beast that he is. We have a number of overlapping musical tastes like the Wonderstuff and the Gear Daddies, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of conversation. Turns out she plays the cello, and the piano a little. I’ve been playing guitar for almost a year, so we go on about that for a bit. I’m working on “Norwegian Wood” now, partly because of the great bass runs, but mostly to be able to play it with Dan sometime, before the relentless march of growing up turns into growing apart. He’ll have grown up people to worry about soon enough, instead of kids like me.

There’s barely a dull moment, as we range far and wide with a natural flow. When the subject of my paper on Nietzsche comes up she apologizes for the German contribution to Philosophy. 

“Yeah, we aren’t a subtle people,” she says around a slightly raspy laugh. “Achtung!”  Which makes me jump just a little. “See? Our whole language is terrifying! You could be proclaiming your undying love, and it still sounds like you’re plotting world domination.”

I’m laughing and thinking to myself that this one is a keeper. Which is a bit of a surprise, since I’m not into blondes at all. I can’t say why, but I’ve only ever been attracted to one blonde girl in all the years of teenage hormones pulling me toward every girl on earth. Her name was Betsy Bina, and she was one of the great unrequited crushes of my life. Which is really saying something for a wistful soul like me; unrequited is practically my middle name. But that was a lifetime ago on another continent, and really nothing compared to the heartbreak of recent months. Like a firecracker compared to a nuke.

Still, Betsy was one of a kind, and it must mean something that I’ve never been drawn to another blonde in all these years. But if I let myself obsess on it, melancholy nostalgia might capsize my whole world. Betsy seems like the point of origin for a continuum of rejection that stretches out to the horizon line in both directions. Which isn't really fair to her, since she never had any idea how I felt, but there it is. It helps having an engaging soul here, someone not on autopilot but reacting to the world around her with a lively mind and nimble wit. For the first time in months, the plunging sense of vertigo subsides. I’m almost not sure what to do without it.

Now I have no idea how I’m going to finish that paper tonight. She offers to translate it into German, just to piss off Emerson. With ideas like that, we can’t help but get along.

I ask her to translate the words, “Nietzsche can bite me.”

“Ach du lieber!” is her response.

“I don’t think that’s it,” I say.

“Would you believe… Fahrvergnügen?"

So just when it seems like I’m digging out of the deficit of uncool that has been conferred on me by Lurch, the tape player goes wonky during my favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers song, “Taste the Pain,” and a strand of black magnetic tape spools out the front of the tape player like a tongue lolling out of a dead body. I hit the eject button in what I hope is enough time to save the mix-tape, and the radio kicks in automatically. The entity living in the radio has magically decided to be on KOST FM, which is the local easy listening station. I can’t imagine a more emasculating choice. The Carpenters are just beginning to sing, “Why do birds suddenly appear…” If I were wearing a dress it would actually be better than what was happening instead.

Mercifully, Marianne continues to make small talk to cover this unfortunate turn of events. “So… When do we pick up Christy?” she asks.

“Christy? I’m not sure who that is,” I respond, surreptitiously reaching for the tuning knob. C’mon, Lurch, help me out here, buddy. KROQ, KNAC… anything.

“Christy Chappell, she’s my friend from Madison. The one I know from Youth Group, who invited me to take part in this little odyssey,” she continued. She’s looking at me like I should know what’s going on. It seems like I should, but I don’t. 

“Well, there’s the meet and greet dinner tonight at the Pastor’s house, I’m sure we’ll see her there,” I venture, sneaking a look at my watch. At the rate we’re crawling down the 405, there won’t be time for me to do anything about the tire before dinner. “I’m not really sure why we would pick up Christy, though.”

“Aren’t she and I staying together?” she asks. 

“If there’s a plan, I don’t know about it,” I say. “Then again, I only found out you were coming day before yesterday, so what do I know?” The radio poltergeist decides to stay on KROQ for a bit. “But if you want, I don’t see why she couldn’t stay with us,” I venture. “I mean, that is if you don’t mind sharing a double bed with her. We only have my sister’s room available. She’s in the Air Force now.”

“That sounds good,” Marianne says. She seems a little relieved at the small comfort of a familiar face.

I decide not even to try to go home before the dinner, but get off and take surface streets to the Pastor’s house for dinner, wondering how much longer I can push the tire before it’s blown out and gone. When we arrive the group is already there, popping cokes and noshing on chips, our group and theirs hanging out together like they’re already old friends. They all went to Disneyland together today, with only Marianne and I being left out. The Wisconsin kids are a good looking bunch; fresh, friendly, open faces. Ready to go off and change the world. I’m not even three years older than the youngest of them, but it feels like a lifetime. I guess I’m supposed to be helping to lead this assortment of true believers, but what I want more than anything is to ask them how the hell they do it. I just need someone to remind me, but there’s no way to ask.

It’s strange to me that Marianne is meeting them for the first time as well, every bit the strangers to her that they are to me. A good time is had, and they’re exactly as they appear to be, which is a pleasant surprise in LA, believe me. They’re all corn-fed, a bit wide-eyed and earnest, and Marianne definitely doesn’t fit with them. They seem to know it. It’s subtle, and not unfriendly, but distinct. I can see why she would want Christy’s friendly face nearby. We play a series of the standard ice-breaking games that are part and parcel of life in Church settings. They’re harmless enough and usually accomplish the purpose for which they’re designed, making it easier to play nice with others. I’ve got one eye on the clock though, and at the first opportunity to get moving I grab Marianne, and now Christy, and make for the door. It hasn’t even dawned on me to alert my parents that there will be another guest in the house. 

As we’re headed back to the house I learn why Christy and Marianne are such a great pair. While Marianne is a soft-spoken in her irreverence, Christy is a full on instigator. She takes shots at everything from Lurch to the entire state of California. Lurch’s responds by spinning the Russian-roulette wheel to something that sounds like an AM polka station. Awesome. Her kinky blonde hair, coke-bottle glasses, and matter of fact tone seem like an armor, impervious to any kind of insult or peer pressure. She too doesn’t really appear to fit in with the somewhat goody-goody vibe of the Youth Group. Which is fine with me because if I ever did, I certainly don’t anymore. I find myself in good company, and trade barbs and sarcastic asides with the two of them all the way home. I can see I’m going to have a good time with them in old Mexico, which is somewhat of a load off my mind. At least I won’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not the whole time. Me and a couple of blondes, what would Betsy think of my unfaithfulness? 

We pull up to my house on Cedar Avenue, and I see that once again I’m assed-out on the vehicle situation. The Z and the Accord are already in the driveway, and I’ll have to park on the street. Which means I’ll be changing the damned tire in the gutter. Aces. I’m a gentleman and carry their bags into my sister’s old room and get them set up. Then introductions are made to my parents, where both Christy and Marianne slip into deferential charm mode and I leave them curtsying and making small talk with Larry and Linda while I head out into the street to change the tire.

Less Than Zero mixtape

A Travelall is a true behemoth of a vehicle. Lurch could probably scale the Great Wall of China if he still had any moxie left in him, which he doesn’t. Jacking up the old warhorse and changing the tire in the oil mired street is something I’m looking forward to slightly less than dental work. I sit down in the front seat for a minute, pulling out the mix tape from the stereo. “Less Than Zero” is scrawled on the tape label. I turn the key to the accessory position and Lurch’s radio wraith tunes to a random station while I use a Bic pen to rewind the mess of black magnetic ribbon back into the Maxell cassette body, careful to keep the kinks out of it. I think of trying the tape again, but I’m scared that Lurch will eat it for good this time as revenge for the cracks about his Smurfalicious paint job and neglecting his tire all day. KNAC, the local classic rock station, seems stable for the moment so I decide not to push my luck. I’ve got Lurch up on the jack stand and am most of the way through the lug nuts before I realize I’ve got an audience. I almost jump when I see the two of them out of the corner of my eye over my shoulder.

“Achtung!” Marianne says, playfully.

“Jawohl, fraulein,” I respond, exhausting my repertoire of German. 

“How’s it going out here?” Christy asks. 

I hold up my grease covered hands for inspection. “I must be doing something right, I’m dirty.”

They carry on like everyone does when they’re watching someone else work on a car and there's nothing they can do to help. Changing the tire is a one man job anyway, and while at first I wanted  to be left alone to do it—since I kind of suck at automotive stuff—it turns out to be nice to have  a couple of sardonic souls cracking wise about it all while I smear grease all over myself. I’ve had worse times. Lurch seems to find the whole operation agreeable enough and the poltergeist plays along by leaving the station tuned to KNAC. Christy reaches in to turn it up, which makes me cringe, but Lurch lets her have this one.

The classic rock tunes seem like just what the doctor ordered for working on a car. My usual effete fare of Depeche Mode, The Cure, and Oingo Boingo don’t really seem like the kind of soundtrack that a grease-monkey should be conducting business to. The handful of throwback classics from Jr. High are somehow perfect for the moment, heralding my last hurrah as a Youth Groupie before that whole universe of safety and self-assured confidence pass into my rearview forever. The sense that your better days are already behind you is a terrible thing, but could it be worse than at nineteen when most of life is still stretched out in front of you? It’s all uphill from here. So I grab hold of those nostalgic classics for all their worth, the hell with whatever future there might be.

Marianne is parked over my left shoulder in the grass meridian that runs along the curb and, despite my better judgment, Christy is perched up on Lurch’s hood above and to my right. The jackstand seems stable enough, and Christy is the only person I’ve ever met that Lurch seems to like, so maybe I won’t be crushed while working under him. The banter is easy and light, and the world feels like it does sometimes when cares are momentarily abandoned and a window of potential adventure is open. The sun lingers to the West where the Islanders and Longos make their home, and the spring evening is like a sigh of contentment. The spare tire is on, and I’m hunting around for the lug nuts which have scattered into the gutter when the song comes on. 

It’s been a while since I felt the particular pang of nostalgia that the opening piano chords of the song bring me this time. I’ve kind of moved out of the Journey phase of my life, and on to more abstract forms of angst, which seem like progress but are not actually preferable to the problems I had back then. I hope I didn’t actually close my eyes when Steve Perry began to sing, but I kind of think I did based on the hush that came on us in that moment. “Open Arms” is a monument to gratuitous schmaltz and mawkish sentiment. It blatantly tugs on the heart strings and doesn’t even have the decency to be embarrassed by it. I’ve never heard anything more beautiful in my life. I try to cover by spinning lug nuts back on, but both Christy and Marianne are quiet and looking at me. But rather than be embarrassed, I just go for it. 

“Man, I haven’t heard this song in forever!” I say. My face feels kind of hot. “Back in Junior High this was my favorite slow song to dance to.” I’ve got the tire iron in hand, ready to tighten the lug nuts. Maybe that’s why no one is offering a sarcastic remark. Rather than provide an opening, I plunge on. “Foreigner had some good ones to dance to, and Cyndi Lauper. But for my money Journey was the best. Whenever ‘Open Arms’ would come on I’d always ask the same girl to dance. I don’t know if she ever noticed that I always asked her during the same song or not, but it was kind of like a ritual for me.”

The unattainable Betsy

The two are silent, and staring at me with the kind of open empathy that only the best people in life can generate. It feels sympathetic, like we’re in this together, so I continue.

“Her name was Betsy, and she was the first girl I ever had a crush on in Jr. High. Or in life, really.  At least in any way I could articulate. She sat next to me in Social Studies, and had the most beautiful blonde hair. She was kind of tall, so when we danced we were eye to eye. I liked that. I always asked her when ‘Open Arms’ came on, but I wanted to ask her all the time. But then she might have figured out that I liked her, and then what would I do, you know?”

“She sounds nice,” Marianne says. Something in her tone is consoling, like she’s trying to help me, which I don’t understand. My eyes kind of sting, but I don’t want to get grease in them so I try to blink it away.

“She was the best. She was always really nice to me, but I think she was into one of my buddies, Fitzy. All the girls were, but he was too good of a guy to hold it against.”

Christy, who I barely know but have only ever seen be acerbic, is looking at me with a look that makes me feel innocent again. Like we’ve got something going on here, based on some random Journey song. It’s starting to embarrass me, so I just keep talking, hoping I’ll figure out what the hell is happening while I yammer on.

“Ah, the good ol’ days. Betsy Bina and Journey; three and a half minutes of heaven.” 

I’ve got the last lug nut snugged and I’m starting to roll the flat tire back to the tailgate when Christy says, “Betsy what?” 

I just look at her, confused by the question. Who cares what her last name was? It’s just some random story I’m telling to excuse yet another episode of my astonishing uncoolness.  “Betsy Bina,” I repeat.

She pauses for a long moment, sitting cross legged on Lurch’s hood. Her face looks like what I imagine a computer’s would look like if it had one as she scanned dusty memory archives. Finally she looks back at me and asks, “Was her dad in the military?”

“Sure, that’s how we met. My dad used to be in the Navy, and her dad might have been Navy or Air Force, I don’t know which. But we were both stationed in Naples Italy in the early eighties. Why do you ask?”

“Wow, you lived in Italy?” Marianne asks. “That’s so cool.”

“Do you have a picture of her?” Christy asks, totally ignoring both Marianne and me.

“Yeah,” I say, in obvious confusion and hesitation. “I think I could dig up the yearbook.”

Naples, Italy. Home of the Wildcats

She hops down from the hood and heads straight for the house like she owns it, with Marianne and me trying to keep up. She allows me the courtesy of leading the way into my room, where I rifle through the trunk at the foot of my bed. I dig the 1985 yearbook for Naples American High School out of an avalanche of comic books that I hope they didn’t see. “Life on the Boot, Wildcat Style!” is splashed across the green cover. I haven’t looked at it in years; it has a mustiness about it and the spine cracks audibly as I open it for the first time in forever. As I’m paging through looking for Betsy I’m surprised when Christy’s finger stabs at the page I’m skimming and she almost yells, “That’s her!”

And it is her. Betsy Bina.

“Oh my gosh, I know her!” Christy is saying as she bounces up and down on the balls of her feet. “We went to fifth and sixth grade together in Bedford, Mass!” She snatches the yearbook out of my numb hands. “That’s right, her dad was in the Air Force. Hanscom Airbase was two seconds away.”

If she’d pushed on me with her pinky finger I would have fallen over. I’m staring into nothingness in dumb shock. What was happening? The implications are beginning to dawn on me, and I look up at Christy. As I do, I catch sight of myself in the mirror. A stranger mired in grime, with unspilled tears standing tall in his eyes, looks back at me. How long had that glassy sheen of emotion been brimming there? Since Steve Perry sang “This empty house seems so cold...”? Some grownup. Bush-league amateur, more like.

Christy passes the yearbook to Marianne and we all stare at the picture of Betsy for a minute. It’s not the most flattering picture of her; it looked like it was taken at the first nanosecond of a blink. Certainly not the one she might have chosen if she’d known she was going to become an emblem for serendipity. And we’re exchanging looks of shock with our mouths agape as each of us processes the meaning of some random coincidence like this, and the staggering improbability of it. 

The odds of someone from Wisconsin knowing someone a Californian knew, but not from Wisconsin or California, but from Massachusetts by way of Italy, on a whole other continent, seem surpassingly remote. But that’s not the ridiculous part. First I had to meet a guy from Michigan who came to California for school, after I returned from Italy. And Christy had to meet a guy from Michigan, but in Wisconsin after she’d moved there from Massachusetts. Then, when a trip to Mexico via California triggered a call to Wisconsin between two roommates from Michigan who were both Youth Pastors named Dan, wheels were in motion. Granted, these are all seemingly unusual degrees of separation to find their way into connection with one another, but still only unlikely, not truly outrageous yet. 

Enter Marianne.

A stranger to the visiting Youth Group, not a member of their church, or even from Madison, but neighboring Middleton instead, invited to go at the last minute by Christy. Marianne is the reason we opened our house to host one of the Wisconsinites. Otherwise there were enough beds already, and I’m at home writing a paper on Nietzsche, not nodding off amongst the gypsies at LAX. Without Marianne at my house, there’s no need for Christy to come play security blanket to her friend, who would otherwise have been a waif from Wisconsin, come to the big city. Without Marianne, Christy and I—two strangers from the far side of a continent—would have spent a week rubbing elbows in the hot Mexican sun with no idea of our shared connection. Because that’s the absurd part. Not merely the connection itself; no doubt we live and move around people we have remote connections to all the time, unbeknownst. Perhaps not drawn together from so vast a circumference, granted; six thousand four hundred fifty two miles, and nine time zones to be exact. But what it took to bring the connection to light is practically a damned thermodynamic miracle.

I had a one in three chance of driving the vehicle that I did to pick up Marianne. Without Lurch, none of this happens. Without a flat tire, without a jammed tape, none of this happens. Without the ghost inside that shitty Audiovox stereo—badly installed by me—randomly scanning to KNAC, this all remains in the ether, some un-collapsed probability adrift out there with Schrödinger’s Cat. If some random DJ on the randomly scanned station puts any other Journey song, “Still They Ride” or “Don’t Stop Believing,” instead of “Open Arms,” none of it happens. To say nothing of the clockwork dance of conversations, traffic, and bowel movements that put me in the gutter working on Lurch at 7:18—just in time to hear it—instead of 7:02 or 7:20. There’s ten million ways that this preposterous thing fails to happen, and it still found the only way it could have occurred.

We never tell anyone about this, because there’s no way to make it anything but merely life-sized. And really what does it mean, anyway? It’s not like we had clairvoyance to find Jimmy Hoffa or win the Megabucks Jackpot. No problems are solved, and no one is made a better person. Just a connection. A slim thread. But still… Maybe that’s all you need. A pattern amidst the random lottery of meaningless tragedies. One so vast and complex as to be invisible to the naked eye. In the end, maybe timing is all the miracle you need.

We went on our trip to Mexico, and the world was probably a little better for a minute because of it. I never wrote that paper at all, which absolutely made the world a better place. Nietzsche can bite me. Or "Nietzsche können mich beißen," as Marianne might've put it. The less said about that asshole the better. I took a C in the class thanks to that, and felt pretty good about it. I never won a single debate with Emerson, not even close. I was nineteen for crying out loud. But I realized that he was just like me, just like everyone else; seeing what he wanted to see, and nothing else. And that was the version of the world he chose? Poor bastard. And just like everyone else, he has no more idea of what’s going on than I do. I’m less certain of the world than I’ve ever been, and my cocksure attitude has taken a beating, which is alright. I had that coming, believe me. 

Everything is a religion. A series of filters and definitions, a consilience of theories that explain things, of rituals and ceremonies that comfort and unite us. Some religions have deities as their basis, but some have philosophers and manifestos. Some have quarks and dark matter at the heart of their faith. It doesn’t matter if you call your priest Carl Sagan, Oprah, Elvis, Padré or the starting quarterback for the Niners. It’s all a way to impose sense on the world, or to comfort and distract ourselves when it makes none. A way of selecting our team. We choose to focus on some things and exclude others, protecting our view of the world, whatever that might be. Then we call everyone who doesn’t share our filters and definitions crazy, ignorant, or intolerant. But none are so blind as those that will not see. 

Each of us gets to decide what we want to believe about something like this. Is it sheer happenstance, signifying nothing more than what a million monkeys with a million typewriters might eventually produce, given a million years? Or is it a fleeting glimpse behind the curtain, revealing the gears of a clockwork world? One governed with unimaginable complexity by some Ghost in the Machine, who occasionally lets us know that there is a plan, a pattern, some kind of intention and meaning behind it all. I know what I believe, because I choose to believe it. And so, somehow during these days of disillusionment and broken heartedness, a demolished faith found the seeds of new life again, resurrected from an abyss that gazes also into us. Alive and well, but unrecognizable from the callowness of its youthful iteration.

It no longer fits on a bumper-sticker, and requires no shooshings. Because I can afford to admit that I have no idea what is going on, except to say that something is definitely going on. And someone knows what. Just not any of us. But this I know: We are not alone. We are, each of us, united and bound by the finest of threads, weaving a tapestry whose pattern is intricate and vast beyond comprehension, but cannot be seen by those who will not see. We are all connected, our lives woven together of chaos, heartbreak, love, and distance.

Either that, or I am secretly the Nexus of the Universe. This is far from the dumbest idea I’ve ever had. Believe me.