Focus

“Think fast!” Joe says out of nowhere.

Joe is the Joest Joe in the history of Joe-dom. There has never been a Joe as Joe-ish as Joe Perruccio. He’s built like a fireplug; squat, but all shoulders with cinderblock hands and a considerable thatch of Disco-level chest hair escaping the collar of his tacky Hawaiian shirt. He’s got a Bruce Willis receding-hairline, and just has to be from Jersey or New York with that accent. Right now we’re driving up Shell Hill in Long Beach, the steepest incline in the city, made legendary by the routine deaths of skateboarders and bicyclists who brave the slope every year. It’s like going up that first steep rise on a roller coaster, just chinking along one link at a time. My inner ear is telling me we’re about to fall over backward, and that only the space shuttle should point directly skyward as we are. 

Which is why I find it so alarming when Joe reaches over from the passenger seat and turns the key to the OFF position and pulls it straight out of the ignition.

I instantly jam my foot down on the brake, only to discover that a Reliant K has power brakes and steering, which do not function when the ignition is in the OFF position. The pedal is unyielding as stone and the steering wheel has become inert in my white-knuckled hands. I don’t have time to wonder what the hell Joe is playing at before my hands and feet begin to act entirely on their own, with knowledge I didn’t know they possessed. My left foot hammers the parking brake into the firewall, while my right hand shoves the drive selector into park, and then both feet stand on the frozen brake pedal, leveraging my hands against the useless wheel, forcing the pedal down maybe half an inch. I turn to look at Joe, out of my seat and fully standing on the brake. He’s smiling at me from under an epic moustache, his chuckle a low rumble like distant thunder.

“Just wanted to see what you had in you, chief,” he says, and hands the key back to me. “Not bad.”

At that, I look around and realize that I’d instinctively done exactly what I was supposed to do; the car is stopped and resting "safely" on the fifty-degree incline. No one is more surprised than me. When class began three weeks ago, I was literally the worst driver anyone had ever seen. When I got behind the wheel, the other three students in the back seat held their collective breath, and I was often the reason for their gasps of barely-restrained terror. At fifteen, I was the only one of the students to have absolutely no experience behind the wheel. The rest were taking this Summer Driver’s Ed class—offered through our High School—as a perfunctory training to qualify for their license. They’d all been driving with their parents for months already. 

On the other hand, I got my permit the day before class began. No experience of any kind. I’d never even started the car to warm it up. Nothing. So for example, I didn’t realize that when one turns the wheel to take a corner, you must turn it back to straighten out. Apparently, they do not autocorrect as I’d somehow expected. Consequently, my early turns were usually somewhere around ninety-four degrees, and often involved encounters with curbs and innocent garbage cans. After three weeks of training in the “state of the art” simulator—housed in a double-wide trailer behind the gym—and some truly terrifying outings onto the streets, I’d finally earned the trust of Joe Perruccio.

It dawns on me that Joe has a brake on the floorboard of his passenger-side seat in the specially-outfitted K Car Training Vehicle, so we were never in any real danger. I should probably be a little more pissed than I am, but his approbation is hard to come by. He doesn’t just give those “not-bads” away. Usually, silence was the best you could hope for. Add to the fact that he didn’t try that stunt on anyone of the other students and it finally occurs to me, this was actually a compliment of sorts. 

Joe is probably the coolest teacher in school, and Poly’s most celebrated baseball coach, too. But the fact that he was the only person in the vehicle to never break character, is the real reason I look up to him. He’s my Social Studies teacher during the school year, and was the kind of guy who had students show up in his class at lunch to eat, hang out, and episodically watch the R-Rated action movie of the week. Predator, Lethal Weapon, etc. He cussed in class routinely, but conversely had a very serious Catholic-based code of honor that he enforced strictly. You could say “damn” but not “goddamn.” He never seemed to pay attention to what the class was doing while he was grading papers, but would often walk the rows of desks looking over our work. A few times he threw people’s backpacks out the 2nd floor window if they were sleeping in class or were turned around talking to someone when they should have been minding their business.

One time, as he was stalking the rows, Joe discovered that a kid named Frank had brought a gun to school. He caught just a glimpse of the chrome .44 from down inside Frank’s backpack and then moved like lightning. Joe grabbed the bag first, and then Frank, and hauled him up out of his desk one handed like he was a feather. Joe was a former longshoreman and, with that gravelly baritone and noir-ish, hardboiled Mike Hammer-demeanor, for a second I thought both Frank and his backpack were going out the window. Because even though he was a teacher now, he still had the instincts and the stones to deal with a problem the roughneck way, like a Union Man should. Who knows what might have happened if he hadn’t?

Not sure why a hardcase like that would choose to become a teacher, especially on the heels of a lucrative union job. Could be he was in witness protection, or otherwise on the lam? I liked to think that maybe he’d killed a man. What can I say? I’m a romantic. He was a study in contradictions. Often terse, but loquacious when we got him off-subject, usually about some bar-fight he’d been in, or a skank what done him wrong.

But if he saw you about to make a dumb mistake in life, he went from a Guido to a proverb-spouting Yoda who’d occasionally refer to you as “Dumbass.” Usually because you were being a dumbass. He wasn’t above an endearing cuff upside the back of a guy’s head while he did it either. But he was always kindly and protective to the girls in class, often exhorting them dress and behave modestly, because boys only had one thing on their mind. When he was walking the rows, if he caught a guy with a comic book or a Playboy he’d tell him to put it away and focus, without embarrassing him. But when he caught me drawing pentagrams in my notebook and filling them with arcane Latin incantations, he ripped the sheet right out of my binder, held it up high and quite loudly inquired, “What the fuck is this?” 

So… tits and ass? Cool. The Devil? Not cool. Got it. Credit where it’s due, it did end the witchcraft phase of my life pretty much instantly.

I remember some of what we studied in class, but everything about the K-Car. Especially the times he told the candy-asses in the back seat to shut the fuck up while I was driving. Yeah, that was alright. While everyone else’s freeway test consisted of merging into one lane of traffic and then getting off at the next exit, Joe had me get all the way over into the fast lane to pass a bunch of cars in midmorning LA traffic, pushing it to almost 90, which is practically a miracle in an ’82 K Car. By the time we were done, I got my license with a 97 on the DMV driving test, by far the highest in the class. Thanks, Joe.

Within the year, I’d become quite the daredevil driver, my spatial judgment and reflexes making me a natural. Playing car tag with my buddy Phillip; outrunning cops and gangsters when we got ourselves into tight spots (which we did with alarming regularity); drifting through crazy turns riding the E-brake, mastering the old Starski and Hutch reverse power-slalom move. From humble beginnings to Fast and Furious in three easy steps. Not sure how he would have felt about me using those skills to ditch the cops so many times in my teens and twenties. Part of me thinks he would have said, “Nice one, chief.” But then I can also hear him calling me a Dumbass and telling me to respect authority, too. Joe’s passed away now, so I guess I’ll never know. 

I’m grateful though, because just this past Winter, as I was taking a cloverleaf exit from one freeway to another, all four of the wheels on our Camry lost traction with the oily, rain-slick pavement at the same time, and I took the old grocery-getter through the arc of the cloverleaf while pin-wheeling around backward. At the last second, I flipped the nose back around in the right direction two feet from the guardrail I was about to slam into. Never even came to a stop, just powered out of the backward slide and slalomed back into the lane. My hands and feet just did what they do, faster than a thought could go through my head. I saw on the news that day there were three wrecks at that same spot, one of which was a cop responding a previous accident, and winding up in one itself. Thanks, Joe. 

I guess the thing that stands out the most were his little aphorisms and insults. “Fell out the ugly tree, and hit every branch on the way down.” “Bad company corrupts good character.” “The Devil finds work for idle hands.” “Your mama got so many double chins she needs a bookmark to find her mouth.” “The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.” He was an endless repository of shit like that, which I always imagined him learning at the knee of his Mema—some hard-boiled, chain-smoking matriarch on the stoop of a Brooklyn tenement, as she cuffed him on the back of the head from time to time, for good measure. Probably while calling him Dumbass.

Of all Joe’s boilerplate proverbs, only one ever really made any difference to me: “Your focus determines your direction.” He didn’t mean it as a philosophical sentiment, but literally. Keeping the car headed straight, hands at ten and two, if you look out either side window for a count of five, invariably the car begins to slowly drift in that direction, no matter your efforts to the contrary. You move toward what you’re focusing on. Want it or not, like it or not.

I’d just about lost that thought to the sands of time, until I walked into a Church in Seattle, twenty years later. There, emblazoned in huge letters on the wall, were Joe’s words: “Your focus determines your direction.” Pretty sure it’s nowhere in the Good Book, but truth is truth, and it brought back that gruff, endearing old crowbar of a man with a wistful pang for the years gone by. It was odd realizing that I’d reached the age that Joe had been when he said those words in the old K-Car. I didn’t feel anywhere near as wise as he’d seemed to me then. Still don’t. But if I’ve gleaned any insight at all down the span of those years, it’s that nobody really knows what’s going on, and leadership is really just the ability to disguise your panic. We’re all pretending, clinging to traditions and folksy sayings, hoping for the best. Who knows, maybe Joe was, too? 

Then again, Joe sent twenty-six ball-players to the Majors, and one to the Hall of Fame. So maybe not.

“Your focus determines your direction.” I’ve thought about those words often since Seattle. Especially when the going was rough, when life seemed unfair, and the world threatening. I’ve just finished an especially challenging season, years filled with days like that. Hard disappointments, awful clients, dishonest business associates, and outright betrayals from longtime friends and mentors. Another dream down in flames. All things considered, a pretty awful chapter in life.

Or was it?

I mean, sure, my business broke up, but somehow the lights stayed on at my house. I found out that I’ve surpassed two of my mentors in terms of skill and integrity, and when my back was against the wall—the same as theirs before me—I made the choices that cost me dearly, while they just stole from people and moved on. And as bad a feeling as that truly is, finding out what you’re really made of is priceless. 

Joe used to say that in boxing, “Everybody's got a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.” Looking back, I think it means that we’d all like to think we’d make the right choice, but you never know who you really are until you’re down in it, and actually taking punches for real. I used to think that God brought tests into my life to see what I’m made of, but recently it’s occurred to me that who I am is no surprise to Him. Sometimes it is to me though, so maybe those tests are to show me who I really am instead. In spite of some pretty punishing challenges, I have to say I’m glad to have met the guy I was hoping I’d be.

“When you stop expecting life to be easy, it gets a lot easier,” Joe used to say. It’s easy to focus on all the negative things that happen in our lives. The monumental disappointment of losing my business, or all the travails it involved to begin with: Court proceedings to collect from some dirtbag clients who never even had the money to finish the project; or the trusted mentor who embezzled from us; the bungling morons at the IRS who wrongly seized the balance in our company bank account and virtually ruined us. The list of woes is as endless as I choose to make it. Or I could take a page from Joe’s book and say to myself, “The guy with no shoes complains until he meets the guy with no feet.” 

That same demoralizing season was also rife with surprising dividends I could never have predicted. I’ve renewed age-old friendships that I would have said were irrevocably lost to the ash heap of time and bad choices. I’ve seen the smiling faces, heard the sweet voices, and held in my arms those that I would have sworn I would never see again in this life. I come home every day to a house that resounds with laughter and love. And that’s either the metric you evaluate your life by, or it isn’t.

Right after I broke up with the first semi-serious (three whole months!) girl I dated in High School, Joe told me this story:

Two farmers met weekly at their fence. The first farmer says, “Heard your son fell from his horse and broke his arm. That’s terrible!” The second responded, “Who can say?” The following week the first says, “I heard the king is conscripting men for war with the neighboring kingdom. It’s good your son has a broken arm and cannot go off to war.” “Who can say?” the second responds. And again, “The war went well, and the men are already on their way home with an impressive load of spoils. A shame your son will bring none to you.” “Who can say?” says the second. Finally, “The king and army were set upon by ambush, ransacked for their treasure and killed to a man. How fortunate your son wasn’t with them after all!” 

“Who can say?” 

I’ve kept that one in my back pocket all these years, because I’ve almost always found that, in retrospect, the worst patches of my life were often a goldmine, yielding unexpected treasures of wisdom, patience, and humor. Not to mention some great stories to write about. During those seasons, there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have given to fast forward through to a smoother piece of real estate. But afterward, those periods became precious memories of the people, places, and times that taught me who I am. Trophies that I wouldn’t trade for love or money. Like Joe used to say, “It’s good for you. Puts hair on your chest.”  

And he would know. My God, that man had a lot of chest hair. 

There’s no doubt that experience is a cruel teacher. The test comes first, and then the lesson. But if history is any indicator, the day is coming when even that dark season will be all sepia tints and fond nostalgia. Like a badge of honor from the moment my mettle was tested and, by God, I passed. I guess it kind of depends on what I choose to focus on. While I’m pretty happy to have that patch of ground in my rearview, all things considered, I still believe that our best days lie ahead of us. As for the last chapter, perhaps it can still be redeemed. It might be that I’ll look back one day and number them among the best years of my life. 

Who can say?

Echoes

"I understand. Good luck to us all tomorrow. Whatever happens, however we might disagree as a nation and a people, the truth that I keep in the front of my mind, always, is that whether we rise or fall, we meet our fates together." -Nov. 7, 2016

Those were the last words I wrote to a friend before she silently unfriended me. I'd say it was for reasons unknown, but I think I know the reason all too well. We disagreed on something. Not on whether women should have reproductive rights, equal pay, or family leave. Not on whether we should be focusing our national resources on creating renewable energy sources, or reinvesting in our failing infrastructure. Not even on issues of immigration, education, or identity politics.

Just on who I should vote for.

There's been a lot of talk lately about "Fake News" and "Echo-Chambers." It seems that what everybody wants is for somebody else to do something about it. Even in the 21st Century digital-age, we're still trotting that old chestnut out. Everybody's all atwitter about how Mark Zuckerberg needs to do more to combat it, how Google needs to do more to curb it, about how a censorship algorithm is the answer. Whoah, that escalated quickly.

But a 2015 study of over 10 Million active American Facebook users who self-identified politically as Conservative, Liberal, or Moderate, reveals a telling trend amongst us. The study investigated how "cross-cutting" news stories (stories whose ideological bent or subject were different than the reader's own perspective) were disseminated, and found that three factors were involved:

1.) Who our friends are and what stories they shared.
2.) Which stories are displayed in our newsfeeds by Facebook's algorithm.
3.) Which of the displayed stories we actually clicked on.

2 out of 3 of those factors are under our direct control, meaning that almost seventy percent of your echo chamber is self-constructed.

When these cross-cutting stories are acquired "manually" (meaning that we seek them out of our own accord) 45% of Liberals see them, as opposed to 40% of Conservatives. But barely anyone goes looking on their own, human nature being what it is we don't want to leave our newsfeed any more than we want to get off the couch. So almost 65% of stories come to us by way of our friends sharing them. When that is factored in, the numbers change dramatically.

Just 24% of Liberals get cross-cutting news when based on their friends sharing habits, while 35% of Conservatives can say the same. When the algorithm comes into play, it shaves 2% more off of the Liberal numbers, and 1% from the Conservatives. And by the time we drill down into the stories we actually click on, as opposed to just seeing in our newsfeed, it's a 20/30 percent split between Liberals and Conservatives, respectively.

Hate to say it, but the algorithm isn't much to blame for that. And even when it is, it learned that from YOU. From your habits, from your clicks, likes, gifs and emojis. From who you chose to interact with, and who you ignored. Really, all of media learns that from you, just slower than Facebook and Google do. You teach the media how to treat you by what you respond to; in ratings, in comment sections, and with the buying power of your dollar and how you respond to their ads.

Sorry, kids, it isn't fake news and echo-chambers. It's us.

"Wow! I just read Lawrence's essay on Facebook, and I am so impressed about his writing abilities. I knew he was a smart guy, but I didn't know he was such a beautiful writer. His soul comes right through." -May 25, 2016

This is what my now ex-friend said to her son right before she sent me a friend request. We made it six whole months together before she unfriended me, citing the darkness that had crept into me over that time. She was rabid anti-Trump, and I was just regular anti-Trump, so I wonder if it was really me that changed in that six months. Or if just a bit too much light was getting in through the cracks in a self-imposed echo-chamber, one made up of palatable myths and comforting lies. And so her world is just a bit smaller today.

Before you decide someone is a Libtard-Snowflake-Nazi who must be removed from your life, at least take a peek outside at the actual world for a few seconds—instead of the one made up and sold to you for the purposes of balkanizing your power and fleecing you of your dollars. If you unfriend people for disagreeing with you, please don't then be so obtuse as to look around and wonder what the fuck happened to the world. You happened.

Of All The Gin Joints...

In 1967, a psychologist named Stanley Milgram designed and executed an experiment to test the degree of connectivity between Americans across a wide geographic and socioeconomic spectrum. Long before social networking was even a thought in any of our heads, Milgram was investigating human networks via the permutations of association and happenstance, with surprising results.

He mailed packets of materials to people he’d randomly selected in Wichita, KS and Omaha, NE. He asked the participants to send the contents on to one randomly selected individual in Boston, Mass, but only if they knew that person on a first-name basis. If not, they were asked to send it to someone that they were on a first-name basis with—any friend, relative, coworker or associate—that they guessed might have a chance of knowing the stranger in Boston. Each person in the chain signed their name on an included roster so that when the parcel got to its intended recipient in Boston, Milgram could track how many people it took to complete the connection. On average, it took six. On a couple of occasions, it was as few as two, but never once did it take more than nine individuals. He dubbed it Small World Theory, although it’s more popularly known today as Six Degrees of Separation. Or Six Steps to Kevin Bacon, if you prefer.

L-R: Me and Charles 

I’m pretty sure my cousin Charles wasn’t thinking about any of that when he invited me to come hang out with some of his friends up at McCredie Hot Springs in Oakridge, OR during the Fall of 1996. Oakridge is a little town nestled in the Cascade Mountains—population 2,200—straight out of Twin Peaks, and not any place you go expecting to find the Nexus of the Universe. It’s where you stop for gas on the way to the ski slope, or where you go to find a natural hot spring where you can toss the Frisbee, drink some beer, and soak your bones. Which sounded like just what the doctor ordered, since my long-time girlfriend and I were on the outs for the millionth time.

Charles and I had always been close as kids, born just five days apart, and had grown up to be quite similar in many respects—easy going, philosophical, kind of given to hippie pursuits— although we had different upbringings. I’d been raised a Military Brat and had lived in six states and one foreign country by then, while he was the son of a blue collar working family, born and raised his whole life in the same house. But he had actually finished his master’s degree, while I was still a semester shy of a never-to-be-completed AA in Underwater Basket Weaving. He’d been wandering a while, traveling and finishing graduate school in Iowa, but had recently come back to Eugene to settle down in the place he’d been raised. I, on the other hand, had been wandering my whole life, and had decided to make Eugene my home and finally put down some roots. 

Charles returned from Iowa with a friend in tow, David, who was looking for new adventures in life. He decided to accompany Charles back to Eugene in search of a world more tolerant to his identity as a gay man, which apparently the Midwest wasn't know for in the 90s. David and I had hit it off immediately and, along with Charles, we spent endless hours drinking coffee and beer together and hashing out the world’s problems. So, you know... you’re welcome. It turned out that David was going to be in attendance as well—along with a couple of new friends from the apartment building he’d recently moved into—which kind of sealed the deal for me, since David had somehow become the go-to guy whenever I was having girl troubles. Go figure.

The gorgeous Fall day was crisp enough to make lounging in the natural cauldrons of hot water a perfect counterpoint, and just what the doctor ordered. Everyone in attendance was a nice mix of laid-back but engaging, and it was an easy day of amusing diversions and effortless conversation. One person in particular stood out as being really bright and friendly, one of David's new neighbors, Leta.

McCredie Hot Springs, Oakridge, OR

As we lounged in the spring, it came up in conversation that Leta and I shared the same birthday, which got us going on a train of conversation that lead to a surprising revelation. I wish I could remember our exact path to this rather ridiculous sentence, but we both said it aloud together in stereo: “Keoki is Hawaiian for George.” We shared a sitcom moment of comic surprise, and then began tumbling over each other to figure out how two strangers meeting at a hot spring in Oakridge, OR—who shared the same birthday no less—could possibly both know a guy with the unlikely name of Keoki. The only thing more unlikely was the idea that there could be two guys in the world with that name. OK, probably there are, but we’ll never know, because it turned out we were both talking about the same guy: Keoki Wells.

Keoki played Right Forward on my soccer team in Jr. High, while I played Left Halfback. He scored way more than me, though often on one of my crossing passes. Leta knew him because he was her sister’s first serious boyfriend, back in the day. But the key element to this curious coincidence is that we both met Keoki in... Naples, Italy. We two—strangers at a hot spring in a town that’s just a wide spot in the road on the way to somewhere else, where neither of us lived—shared a decade-old connection from 5,997 miles, and nine time zones away. When you’re faced with the staggering unlikelihood of something like that, it’s pretty hard to maintain a disbelief in… some kind of intelligent design. 

I mean, we were only there together because my cousin from Oregon met a guy from Michigan, at college in Iowa, who somehow made friends with a Military Brat who’d been stationed to the same overseas posting as me, but on the far side of the world. And if she and I hadn’t shared the same birthday, it still might never have come to light. The more links in the chain, the more ludicrous it becomes. But this wasn’t the first time something this preposterous had happened to me. Years previous in California, I met a girl on vacation from Wisconsin, who had grown up in Massachusetts going to school with a girl that I also knew from Italy, Betsy Bina, who had been my first real crush in life. For the sake of brevity, I’ve glossed over the intricacies of that unlikely discovery, but it was a doozy, and really hard to accept as mere coincidence.  

So to have a second equally ridiculous event occur just a few years later (in a totally different state, mind you) was compelling, if a bit... disquieting somehow. Because it makes you feel like the Nexus of the Universe, or at least a spoke in some great, cosmic machine. Ultimately, it reveals nothing of whatever Grand Design there might be. I mean, for a brief moment, life seems crazy beautiful and intricately meaningful in ways you can’t find the edges of, but then you still have to go back to your workaday life and run your errands. 

The following day, I was invited over to David’s place for his apartment-warming party, where I unloaded my Ficus plant on him as a "gift." While I was there I got to meet Leta’s sister, Lori, who just so happened to be visiting from Seattle. Leta had already informed Lori of our interesting connection, and we immediately began to share memories of Naples. Their family had moved to there the summer of 1985, which was when mine was was moving back to California. We were the same year in school, and the time overlap was close enough that Lori and I knew a lot of the same people. We discussed Keoki for a bit, but while my eighth grade memories of him were pretty plain-Jane, he was her first serious boyfriend, so things were considerably less, shall we say, PG-13?

The talk of first loves/crushes brought up Betsy, but Lori’s memories of Betsy were sour, which bummed me out. Apparently, things changed quite a bit in my absence, like I should have expected, but somehow still didn't. People who I thought would be friends forever began hanging out in different crowds, circles drifted apart. I shouldn’t have been shocked to discover this—the center never seems to hold—but I still found it oddly unnerving to hear of people falling out, couples breaking up, and unapproved new players interjecting themselves into my narrative. The nerve of some people.

Cristy, Heather, Betsy and Ethan at Castel Nuovo, Naples

It was naïve to think that a bunch of adolescent tumbleweed Military Brats who moved every thousand days would remain steadfastly in the arrangements I remembered so fondly. I guess we all want our childhood world to stand inviolate as a museum of our lives and a monument to our existence. Instead, the diorama had advanced in my absence into something I couldn’t have predicted, and had no ownership of. Which left me with an incongruous sense of jealousy at having been left out of these changes. Like maybe I could have amounted to something if only I’d stayed in Naples instead of returning to the States.

Lisa & Ethan, 8th Grade Prom

I didn’t have the heart to hear any more, so I inquired about another soul uniquely dear to me from those long-ago days, Lisa Rizzo. Lisa was the first girl to say “yes” to me, kindly granting me my very first dance at the tender age of thirteen. It was platonic by necessity, because she was soon to be my buddy Ethan’s girl. But that didn’t stop me from transferring that fervent original crush from Betsy—briefly, but with dizzying intensity—to Lisa for a several endless-seeming weeks. They say you never forget your first, and while Lisa wasn’t my first love, she was the first girl to endorse me as being an OK guy. At least no worse than the next guy, which is almost as good when you’re thirteen. 

After I related the story of Lisa and my first dance to Lori—my eyes glazing over in rapt nostalgia, as they do to this day anytime I can corner some poor soul long enough to tell the story—Lori had the best response of all time: she instantly produced a picture of Lisa with her husband and baby daughter. There are few feelings in the world as gratifying as knowing that the people you’ve cherished in life are alive and prospering. Seeing Lisa as a grownup, still wearing that easy Italian smile, was immensely rewarding. And considering the preposterous lengths the Almighty had gone to get this information to me, it was all the more so. Although I was a little disappointed that she and Ethan hadn’t gone the distance from 8th grade, Lori assured me that Lisa’s husband Ray was good people, so I let it go. I can be very magnanimous that way.

Center: Lisa and Ray. Right End: Lori and Ethan

One might think that two such experiences in a lifetime is at least one more than anyone could expect. I mean, how many times can the lines of coincidence converge in one person’s life, especially when you consider the huge geographic areas that we’re talking about here? From Italy to Massachusetts to Wisconsin to Michigan to Iowa to California to Oregon. Could even Milgram have conceived of such a thing? 

But wait, there’s more. 

Over fifteen years after this experience with Lori and Leta, having never seen either of them ever again, I sat down to write these stories, wanting to reconnect with old friends. I reached out to Lisa on Facebook, to share the tale of our first dance, “Last Dance in the City of Ruins.” It was well-received, to say the least, and virtually overnight renewed a friendship that means the world to me today. In exploring these memories with Lisa, several unexpected things came to light. 

L-R: Ethan, Lisa, Me, Lori

First, her old beau from back in Naples—my long lost buddy Ethan—now lives in Washington State, not five minutes from where my parents retired. Ethan moved back to Kitsap County, WA after Naples, because that’s where he was originally from. Our family retired from the Navy in Long Beach, CA, having returned there after Italy. We only moved to Washington for work after the California aerospace industry went into the crapper following the end of the Cold War. Consequently, I spent a thousand days in the 90’s living, loving, and working minutes from one of my oldest buddies from a world away, and never knew it. I could have walked to his house. Hell, we probably went to the same crappy little video store at Kountry Korners, and I never ran into him once. 

Luke and Lori at the Halloween party where we met,
our Naples connection unknown to us.

Second, in the intervening decade, Lisa's friend, Naples Lori, whom I'd only met the night of David's housewarming party, had moved from Seattle to my little town of Springfield, and married the brother of my wife’s best friend’s husband’s best friend. If that sounds convoluted, that's only because it is. Allow me to belabor. My wife’s best friend, Kristi, is married to Tony. Tony’s best friend, Jessie, has a brother named Luke. Luke is now married to Naples Lori. As I was perusing Lisa’s pictures on Facebook, I recognized Luke from several parties we’d attended together at Kristi and Tony's over the years. Considering that none of my Oregon connections to Lori even knew each other, that’s a bit much. What a surreal feeling, sitting in my little Oregon town, scrolling through pics of a long-lost friend in Jersey, and seeing someone I knew from across town because of my wife. And by the way, just to keep it interesting, my wife is originally from Alaska.  

But wait, there’s more.

Since I published “Last Dance,” I’ve reconnected with numerous Neapolitan expats, and even made a handful that I’ve never even met in real life into friends. One of the latter kind, Jen, represents yet another thread that converges on my life with an uncanny degree of specificity. 

Jen was three years behind me in school, and was stationed in Naples after I’d left. So although we'd never met, Jen and I became friends on Facebook because of “Last Dance." Over time, I noticed some familiar names and places in her FB pictures and posts, including the Kitsap Regional Library in Poulsbo, WA, where my Mom worked for twenty years. It turns out that Jen had been shadowing me for years. She went to NAHS right after me, then to a rival high school of mine in Long Beach, CA, and finally to the same Community College as me. And we never once met. She then moved to England, returning to the US years later with a husband and family, only to settle in Poulsbo, just 10 minutes from my parent’s house. Upon further investigation, it turns out that our Moms have been friends for years, long before Jen and I even met. 

It’s hard to consider all of this and not feel the invisible turning of the clockworks, the cycles in an incredibly vast and intricate machine. One whose overall workings may be unknowable to us, but whose exquisite synchronicity is beautiful to behold, even for its own sake. Italy, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Washington, Oregon, California, and Alaska. My, what a tangled web we weave, Mr. Milgram. Or perhaps not so tangled after all. Because there have never been more than five people separating all of us from across six thousand miles and thirty years of silent distance. Milgrim had his six degrees, I have my stories. Either way, it’s a very small world, indeed. 

Charles once gave me a book purporting to explain the augury of the specific day you were born. Instead of a general calendar month Zodiac sign, it was like three-hundred-sixty-five individual horoscopes for each day of the year. I don’t put much stock in the metaphysical. Still, the one for the day of my birth has stayed with me all of these years: “You are the place where the lines converge.”

Okay, maybe I’m not the Nexus of the Universe, but seriously? Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world…

The Measure Of A Man

My first experience with death came when my Great Grandmother passed while she was visiting us at our home in Monterey, California. I was 5. I was outside playing in the back yard, showing off a new-to-me hand-me-down letterman-style jacket that I’d bizarrely paired with a turtleneck and shorts. Mom and Dad came out to tell us that Gram the Great—as we called her—had gone home to God. I didn't really understand what that meant, although I was instantly filled with a kind of numinous certainty that my sister’s bed would now be haunted because Gram had been sleeping there when she died.

That same vague certainty of her lingering presence haunting that bed stayed with me even into high school, although a dozen years had passed and we’d moved four times by then. Maybe it’s because of the awful prayers I was taught as a kid. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake…” Wait...could you run that last part by me again? I could die in my sleep?! What kind of bullshit is that to teach a kid? I inherited that bed frame once my sister moved out, and I took it because it was better than the old bunkbeds I'd been using. But believe you me, I hadn’t forgotten for a second that it had been the portal from whence Gram had exited this mortal coil to whatever may lie beyond.

Not being especially superstitious—but, you know...a little stitious all the same—I pushed those preternatural instincts aside and for the most part slept easy in the bed, which was really just the same bare-bones frame by that point, as the mattress had long since gone on to the great landfill in the sky. Even so, on the occasional uneasy night of slumber, I always had to push that same lingering uneasiness back into the dark from whence it came, reassuring myself of the nuts-and-bolts nature of the world. Perhaps owing to some racial memory encoded in my genes, handed down across ten thousand years of ancestral fears of whatever lurked beyond the guttering firelight.

CS Lewis said that if you were in a room and told that a hungry tiger was outside the door, you would feel a kind of apprehension specific to the level of danger that represents. But if you were told that there was a malicious ghost outside the door, and you actually believed it, the kind of feeling that might induce would be entirely different. The latter is the kind of fear that we reserve for Death—Capital D—as the great unknown. Not necessarily for a specific death—lower-case d—like cancer and car accidents (or a tiger) in its practical specificity. More like the approach of our inevitable demise at some unknown point in the future, which might be minutes or decades away. No way of knowing. 

If you’re a practical person, eventually those kinds of fears give way to more realistic concerns. You trade monsters under the bed for concerns about cholesterol and blood pressure, serial killers for car accidents, and post-apocalyptic nuclear landscapes for worries about your 401(k). We stop having time for boogeymen and statistically-improbable scenarios as we age, and the practical realities of the concurrent aging of our loved ones creates a kind of schedule of events we will have to deal with. Most likely your grandparents will pass first, then your parents and so on down the line. When my grandfather Bruce passed, it wasn't really unexpected. He was 97. At that age, everything is considered a “natural cause.” 

I had a complicated relationship with Bruce, and had from the very beginning. He was a complex man, who had never had it easy in life. Born in the 20s and raised in the teeth of the Great Depression, he’d been forced to leave home in his teens and bounced around from relative to relative and foster home to foster home. A ferociously intelligent guy, he was also a veteran of two wars and retired as a full Bird Colonel from the Army to enter into the world of business. He had four kids to support by then, and raised them in the Fear of God and himself—not necessarily in that order—which couldn’t have been easy, considering what a bunch of knuckleheads they are.

But he married the hardest working, most gentle and compassionate woman this side of Mother Theresa, and she raised their daughter and three sons in the reverence of their father, and guarded the empire of his reputation fiercely. She never had an unkind word for anyone, and certainly never tolerated anyone speaking ill of Bruce in the slightest. To this day, his kids—my Dad, aunt, and uncles—have nary a harsh word for him, although he died owing all of them tens of thousands of dollars each. His numerous failed business initiatives took their toll on the family and defined him for most of my life. The fact that he pursued these wacky import/export schemes even as his wife was dying in the care of his daughter—having not seen him for months on end—did not escape my notice.

As a kid, I knew none of the details of his awful, impoverished upbringing, nor any of the complexities of his relationship with his wife and kids. How could I? I just knew he was a mean old man. He hit me in the eye pitching a baseball when I was visiting him as a five year-old, and then found my crying to be an annoyance, and my shiner to be humorous. Another time, he spilled hot coffee on me when I was riding in the front seat with him on a road-trip and forced me to get into the back seat until I could get my tears under control. He always kicked us off the TV when he got home so he could watch Hawaii Five-O, while he at popcorn and drank beer. We could go outside, or we could shut the hell up. Preferably, go outside and shut the hell up.

By the time I was in my teens, I was pretty ambivalent toward him, if not actually hostile. I didn’t care to know the complexities of his life, which might have mitigated my simmering disdain, preferring instead my teenaged certainty about him and the whole world. As a feminist, my Mom was deeply offended by his imperious chauvinism, and constantly held him up as a cautionary tale on how not to live life. A lesson I was only too happy to glom onto, donning the mantle of virtuous disapproval quite proudly.

After Grandma passed, we were witness to Bruce marrying two subsequent women, essentially caretakers, who were substantially younger than him. They decimated his collection of antiques, unique artifacts from his globe-spanning business travels, and numerous irreplaceable family heirlooms, selling them off as they stole from him and even beat him occasionally. When he was finally too old to stop us, we moved him and his third wife—54 years his junior—almost forcibly up to our area so that we could keep an eye out, and spend the remaining days of his life in some kind of relationship with him. He made it about three more years before the end came to find him.

His 97th birthday was a pretty impressive shindig. It is literally the only time in my life that I have been in the same room with my entire extended family on my Dad’s side. We had a ball, renting out a conference hall and a wing of hotel rooms. His irreverent scalawag sons bought him illegal Cuban cigars and Playboy magazines. What those chowder-heads would do if they weren’t always out making themselves better citizens is anyone’s guess, but here was fine food and drink aplenty, professional photography, and a lovely time was had by all. As though he took it as a farewell sendoff, Bruce lapsed into a coma two days later.

By then, everyone had made it back to the various parts of the country they called home; California, Colorado, Washington, Arizona, and North Carolina. So when the call came at midnight, I was the one left to deal, which struck me as an unpleasant irony. Out of everyone, my Mom and I probably had the hardest feelings toward Bruce, and yet we’d been the ones to move him up to Oregon. It was like wrangling a kicking and biting mule into the harness, only to have to drag him the whole the way. At one point, I actually thought I might have to throw down with him to get him into the car, and I was only 70/30 on whether or not I could take the wiry old bastard. As part of the US Army’s Mounted Cavalry Division, he’d literally ridden warhorses into actual battle, and that’s a level of batshit crazy you can never entirely discount. Three years and a lot of hard miles later, I was the one headed to the ICU in the middle of the night.

When I got there, I found his wife in a heap of tears. She was a virtual stranger to me, essentially a hybrid of step-relation and employee, which made it more a relationship of familial obligation than any real affection. So finding myself asked to comfort someone I barely knew over the unsurprising fact of the passing of her 97 year-old ersatz spouse, whom I’d felt conflicted toward at best, I approached with a fair amount of stoicism. I had a plethora of pre-packaged platitudes at the ready, after which I was inundated with more medical information than I could process. The specifics of his brain and heart activity were instantly translated by my own brain into, “He’s old and dying.” Eventually, she asked me to pray for Bruce.

I’ve always worn the mantle of counselor, since I was in Jr. High. I have no idea how I came to find myself in the role, but it’s a natural one to me. So although I’m a carpenter by trade, I’ve spent many an hour on the phone and in person, listening, counseling, and praying with lost, hurting people. It seems honorable enough, so I’m alright with it; but being asked to pray for the recovery of Bruce hit me pretty hard where I live. The idea of interceding for him left a bitter taste in my mouth. But I always toe the line, so I stepped into his room, leaving my wife and his out in the waiting area.

As the door closed behind me, my eyes took a few seconds to adapt to the dim light in his room. In that moment I saw what a frail little bundle of bones was laying in that bed, and something inside me turned. Looking at him there, it was hard to remember what it was that I’d been so angry with him about. Or how someone so small and helpless could ever had held such sway in my life. It was then that I saw that regardless of what he’d done in life—whether or not he’d ever succeeded in business, whether he was loved, respected, or just feared—this was his end. Regardless of how hard his life had been, or whatever explanation there was for him to have behaved the way he had, he was meeting his end.

And I heard a very small voice in me, one that’s clear if I'll be quiet for a minute, telling me something I needed to hear. I like to think of it as the voice of Grace, and it lets me know when it’s time to shut up, when it’s time to apologize, and when I’m just being a dick. I think my life would be a lot better if I listened to it more often. There in the hush of Bruce's room, with only his monitors and labored breathing as accompaniment, I heard that voice quite clearly. Grace said it wasn't time to pray for recovery, but to say goodbye and send him on his way instead.

So I did.

I said goodbye to Bruce. I said goodbye to hard feelings and bitterness, and to the scripted drama of outrage, offense, and disapproval that I’d been rehearsing and rehashing all of my days. Because Grace told me that whatever fate I imagined him deserving, he was meeting his, just as I would one day meet my own. And whatever mercy he needed to compensate for his awful upbringing, or whatever judgment he deserved for all his selfish actions, were none of my business. He owed God one death, and he was delivering on that. As I myself would one day, which might be minutes or decades away. No way of knowing.

I thought of words dear to me: “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” I decided to let him go in the sincere hope that he be measured in Grace and Mercy, just as I will surely need to be. And how, brother.

Bruce passed two hours later, and I’ve never felt another moment of disapprobation or negativity toward him. In fact, I’ve since discovered that the old codger was on to something: popcorn and beer together are just about the best thing since sliced bread. Who’da thunk it? I read somewhere that holding onto offense and anger against someone else is like drinking poison and then waiting for them to die. That sounds about right to me. Forgiveness is for the living, and it benefits the wounded as much as the offender. Perhaps more. Whatever fate there is to meet, each of us will find our own in time.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will find mercy.”

A Thousand Days In The Life

A gaggle of girls was blockading my exit from the row of tables we sat at in class, so I took the long way around, past Ms. Bitchy’s desk, making my way toward the communal pile of textbooks to check mine out for the night’s homework. I didn’t like to pass so close to Ms. Bitchy, as she was the only teacher I’d ever hated in my life. To be fair, she started it. With scowl lines permanently etched into her face from a lifetime of disapproval, she always wore a no nonsense look that ranged from long-suffering patience to withering antipathy. Hard to fathom what a bunch of eleven-year-olds could have done to earn that, but that’s why we referred to Ramona Binci as Ms. Bitchy.

I probably shouldn’t bellyache too much about that gaggle of girls—although they were mysterious and terrifying to me for reasons I couldn’t explain—because skirting their chattering little group caused me to walk past the New Guy’s seat. As I did, I happened to look down and see that he was drawing on a piece of paper when he was supposed to be working on the math problems up on the board. I saw that he’d completed the assignment already, just as I had, which meant he was at least as smart as me, which was frankly unusual. 

It also meant he should have been getting up to check out his own textbook for the evening, just as I was. Instead, he was drawing a picture of a figure very familiar to me: Firestorm the Nuclear Man, possibly the best superhero ever. Not as badass as Wolverine or Batman, but powerful and unique in a way that would make an imaginative person almost omnipotent, which is a very appealing thought to a ninety-eight-pound comic book nerd whose life revolved around doing whatever Ms. Bitchy said and trying to avoid bullies. And terrifying girls.

The New Guy’s name was JB. Actually it was James, but since we already had two other Jameses in the class, Ms. Bitchy had decided that he would go by his initials—JB—which she’d decreed to the class by teacherly fiat, not to be questioned or rescinded. It struck me as odd since she’d previously decided not to let me keep my name—O’B—on the first day of class because it was just initials, and not my actual name. Except it was my name, a shortening of my middle name, O’Brien, which I’d gone by every minute of my life, right up until I came under the baleful gaze of Ms. Bitchy. When she’d decreed to me that I would be Larry instead, after my first name Lawrence, I acquiesced—in spite of my dawning horror at the idea of becoming a Larry—because of her invincible scowl lines and untamed eyebrows. Thankfully, my mother put that to right instantly and I went back to being O’B, while JB was left to his own devices. And so JB he was, and remains to this day, as far as I’m concerned. Thanks, Ms. Bitchy!

I had thus far not approached the New Guy because the last Newbie I tried to befriend had rejected me with extreme prejudice. So the New Guy, with his new and unwanted name, was on his own. See, that’s the thing about being a military brat and moving every two or three years. You get a new life every thousand days, and everywhere you go is a waystation on the road to the next place you’ll be from. You’re always the New Guy, and always on your own. A new town, a new school, a new group of strangers to fit into. Your impermanence, the fluid nature of your existence, is the only permanent thing about you. So you’re always looking for your in, so you don’t have to stand out as the one who doesn’t belong. Even though you don’t. Unless you were among your own kind, like I was there. Like we all were, because Pinetamare Elementary was a Dept. of Defense school, located in Naples, Italy. Everyone in the room was always the New Guy. It was the most at home I’d ever felt in my life. 

So when I passed JB’s seat and saw that picture of Firestorm he was drawing, I didn’t see a New Guy or a stranger, but myself. I saw myself at the desk in my room, diligently outlining the image of Firestorm from the splash page of issue eight on a sheet of tracing paper from a supply that was rare as plutonium. It so happens that it was the very same image that JB was rendering freehand at that moment. I saw a guy who, like me, didn’t get to keep his name by virtue of a capricious shrew, a guy who fancied the power of off-beat heroes. Just like me.

When you’re a kid, that’s all it takes. You walk by and see a comic book nerd just sitting there minding his own business, and out of all the heroes he could be drawing, he picks that one. Not Superman or Green Lantern, not Spiderman or Captain America. Firestorm. And that’s it; I looked down on my return trip with my math textbook, and all I said was, “Firestorm. Cool.” And for no other reason than that, we were best friends for years following. It’s almost though friendship was the default setting, and all we’d needed was even the slightest reason to not be strangers anymore. 

Over the next three years we spent countless nights at each other’s houses, comparing notes on Star Wars, comic books, GI Joe, and girls. We grew out of things together and into the next phase, sometimes with fits and starts and uneven pacing. He gave up the action figures before me, which created friction. He danced with a girl before me, beating me by an hour or so. It just so happened that she was the girl I had a huge secret crush on, so he unknowingly took his life in his hands by asking her to dance. But I cut him some slack because he was the first person to call me Brien when I changed from O’B to escape the incessant mockery. Plus, I was only fifty-fifty on whether or not I could take him, as I’ve been with every best friend since.

But inevitably, our thousand days expired and it was on to the next life, where I was the New Guy at school number six, in Long Beach, California. In that iteration, I was a scared little pencil-necked honky at a rough inner-city school. Fresh from the civilized, orderly world created by the DOD, I was dropped into the Darwinian Thunderdome of Washington Jr. High, where they were teaching 9th graders what Ms. Bitchy had taught me in 6th. If only she’d been there to cold stare that pack of wild animals into submission. Hard to believe I could find myself wishing for her imperious presence as a bulwark against all the poverty and chaos of this brave new world. 

For some reason, everyone kept asking me, “‘Sup, cuz?” At Washington Junior High and Gladiator Academy, nerdy rejoinders like “the sky” were not acceptable answers. And since I didn’t have the nerve to ask what a “cuz” was, every one of my answers was a hopeless non-sequitur anyway. After a thousand days in a foreign land, it was like I’d come “home” to 1985 America, only to find everyone had lost their minds. They had a gross new kind of Coke, I didn’t know what a CD was, I couldn’t figure out how to roll my pant legs correctly, everybody wanted some dude named Amadeus to rock them, and my old elementary school friends were now inquiring as to who my favorite wrestler was. With a blank look I said, “What, like…Greco-Roman?” It was then that I discovered that grown-ass men in spandex pretending to hit each other was one of a million little touchstones that I had no connection to. I might as well have been dropped off by aliens and told to blend into human society.

It was a world gone mad, and I really had no idea ‘sup.

Compared to the rigorous academic environment of all the DOD schools I’d attended, classes at the embattled and crumbling Washington Jr. High were ridiculously easy. So it wasn’t long before the outgunned teachers had me grading papers, and even administering vocabulary tests for them, instead of doing my classwork. I didn’t have the sense to hide that light under a bushel, and instead got noticed by some pretty scary people as the teacher’s pet—or even contemporary—and I instantly became a target for hazing and abuse. So school went from being a sanctuary where I thrived to a foxhole on the Seine, where I stumble shell-shocked from one glancing blow or narrow escape to the next. It was as I wandered aimlessly from one bolt-hole to another that I passed a group of three dorks out by the athletic field who were talking about what turned out to be a mutual friend of ours, Matt Murdock.

All I had to do was hear that name come out of their mouths on my way by and I was arrested dead in my tracks. If these guys knew that guy, then they were all right with me. Out of simple relief and a sense of recognition at an island of my own kind amidst this new sea of chaos, I butted right in on their conversation, without preamble. Anyone who considered Matt Murdock a friend was bound to be good people. My people. Because Matt Murdock is also known as Daredevil, the blind superhero and patron saint of lonely nerds everywhere. I jumped in with them and was welcomed with open arms, because all we needed was the slightest reason to not be strangers anymore.

We formed a nerdly cadre that somehow navigated all the treacherous waters before us, as they saved me from the slow death of a thousand cuts at Washington Junior High. They showed me the ropes, the nooks and crannies where dorks like us could not only survive in that kind of post-apocalyptic landscape, but actually thrive. We eked out a life and culture of our own, out on the edge where we were always only hanging on by our fingernails. We fought and backstabbed, we saw each other through California earthquakes, school violence, first loves, and the end of our collective innocence. At the end of our thousand days, we four had become two, and by the next thousand I was the New Guy again, but in yet another state when I’d run out of schools to attend.

Without that pool of ready-made, like-minded souls, held captive by common circumstance, I had to find a new way, and it wasn’t as easy as it used to be. I still found friends along the way to all the places I hadn’t intended to go—some of the sweetest and most enduring of my life actually—but it was harder. It was as though, at some point, all the rules had changed. More was required, and hearts were no longer open and given with abandon to the first person to share even a common thread. People weren’t looking for a simple reason not to remain strangers, but an abundance of reasons to reject one another. And they found reasons aplenty. 

That thousand-day cycle has continued all of my days. Careers began and ended, relationships came and went, every major change set according to the turnings of a great celestial clock, like some tidal biorhythm. Ended my last major relationship, then met my wife after one thousand lonely days. Married her one thousand days later, bought our first house two thousand days after that. Started my business in another thousand days, made it a thousand more before closing the doors. And the last new friend I made was a thousand days ago, at age forty-three, already fifteen thousand four hundred and seventeen days into my finite supply of thousand-day cycles. 

His name is Jesse. He swears in Klingon, loves TED Talks, and is the only person on Earth who does better Dana Carvey impressions than me. Not to mention he is literally the world’s best whistler. That might be a little Holden Caulfield of me, but I appreciate a good whistler. I met him at the start of another thousand days, the New Guy again, this time at a construction company. Jesse is my alternate self, almost like a mirror image. If I’d been raised without religion, or was of a different political philosophy, I would be this guy instead. Which means he didn’t fit in the construction world any more than I did, but the difference between me and Jesse is that he made no effort to be anyone other than who he is. So he didn’t fit in, everyone knew it, and he didn’t even try. Of course he didn’t reinvent himself every thousand days. Who does that?

Sometimes I think it must be a relief to be able to not choose which version of yourself to present to the world. Thomas Wolfe once wrote that “seeing yourself in another person is like coming home.” I couldn’t agree more, but it’s harder than it used to be. Harder than it needs to be if you ask me. It takes painstaking time, because there are all these rules now. You can’t be too into it, or try too hard, or move too fast. Nonchalance is the name of the game. There’s ten thousand ways to get it wrong, and about two point five ways to get it right. But it can still be done. After all, next week Jesse and I are having lunch together for the second time this year.

I’ve since left that job, and the construction industry entirely, but haven’t even tried to make friends at my new job. Sure, our department has a yearly barbecue one weekend in the summer, but that’s called team-building. And, yes, have a great time and a lot of laughs working together, but no one even pretends that we’re going out for beers together.  It hasn’t come up once in the year and half that I’ve been here. We’re just work friends. Or as Ron Swanson would say, “work-place proximity associates.” I guess that’s how it goes these days.

I don’t know when we all became such a bunch of specialists. Like each person is a boutique, refined to a series of inflexible likes and dislikes, and you either fit in with their brand or you don’t. Every path we take in life dictates to us all the people we will not accept as friends. Gives us another reason to reject them. If you have the right education, the right musical tastes, the right political views, have the right hobbies, like the right TV shows, and don’t do anything on the long, secret list of my pet peeves and dislikes, I can schedule you in for forty minutes, six weeks from now. The siren-song of a busy life drowning everything else out.

When a game of chess starts, there are literally more possible moves than all of the stars in all of the galaxies combined. The number is so big it doesn’t even have a name, just ten with one hundred twenty zeroes after it. But as the game progresses, each move rules out trillions of other possibilities. The further the game progresses, the fewer options remain, until there is finally only one possible outcome. And that’s us, always refining the infinite options until they narrow into certainties, finding trillions of ways to rule out more and more possibilities every day. And then one day we look around and wonder what the hell happened, how did we get so isolated?

One of the top five regrets that people consistently share on their deathbeds is losing touch with their friends, and winding up alone at the end. Google recently released these statistics: Every week in America over six thousand people ask how to make friends, and ten thousand ask how to mend a broken heart. The sum total of human knowledge at our fingertips, and these are our questions of the Oracle?

If only there were some reason to not be strangers.