HOW DID WE (I) GET HERE?

“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-well...how did I get here?”
(“Once In A Lifetime” lyrics by David Byrne)

So, I’m sitting here writing a blog post for random people to read and thinking, “Is this not strange?” It feels strange, but evidently it’s not – there are over 100 million blogs on the internet – roughly one for every sixty people in the world – that makes what I’m doing now far more ordinary than, say, owning a bird or eating pizza (and I thought that I was being unique and interesting – too bad) – whenever something seems strange, but turns out to be ordinary, one has to ask, “How did we get here?” I’ve been thinking about technology a bit lately, and not just because I’m using it to write to strangers on the internet – in fact, that’s not what I’ve been thinking about at all – rather, I’ve been thinking about a much more fundamental set of technologies such as food, shelter, and clothing – it started when I began reading The Road, by Cormic McCarthy. In the book, a father and son are traveling south, down a highway, in a post-apocalyptic world – the majority of the text is spent on them trying to avoid starvation, hypothermia, and murder (by the other survivors in the post-apocalyptic world) – the book was quite well-written (it won the Pulitzer) and it started me thinking about all the things we take for granted. Soon after I finished it, I went on a solo hiking trip. I wasn’t in danger of starvation, hypothermia, or murder, but I was uncomfortably cold – all of my water was frozen solid and I had great difficulty even breaking it into chunks small enough to thaw with my stove – similarly, we’ve been in the midst of an ice storm this week – everyone lost power for a while – some people still don’t have power – and again, I started to think about technology and all the things we take for granted – the same basic things: food, shelter, electricity, and heat.

The human species has been around for a while – something like 200,000 to 400,000 years – most of those years were spent in a manner much more similar to the experiences of the father and son in The Road than anything I’ve ever experienced. According to Steven Pinker, “For ninety-nine percent of human existence, people lived as foragers in small nomadic bands” (How the Mind Works 42). It’s difficult to imagine, but even if we take the more conservative estimate of around 200,000 years and consider that humans only began to develop agriculture around 10,000 years ago – that means there were more than 190,000 years that our species spent doing little more than trying to find food and trying not to become food – personally, I’ve never had to search for food – neither have I ever (to my knowledge) been in danger of being eaten (or even killed for that matter – that is, if you exclude my daily highway time which I think it best never to consider too closely – evidently, cars kill two people every minute) – my point is that while what I’m doing here may not be all that uncommon, it is a least a little bit extraordinary – in fact, nearly everything about our lives in the U.S. at present is a little bit extraordinary when we think about it in terms of the rest of human history. Think about it, at least 200,000 years of basically no changes in the way people were living. Put that (basically no changes in the way people were living for 200,00 years) in the context of the changes that have occurred during the last 200 years or even just the 20th century. In the context of 200,000 years, no one even came up with a method of writing till around 5000 years ago – we’ve only had books for about a thousand years and ordinary people have only had access to them for a couple of hundred years – we’ve only had cars and planes for around 100 years – is this not amazing to you (in light of at least 200,000 years of basically no changes in the way people were living)? I can’t stress this enough: we are living in a very weird (clean, safe, easy – as opposed to “nasty, brutish, and short”) time and place – weirdness is always a result of change (old weirdness becomes comfortably mundane) and like the expanding universe, the length, breadth, and pace of the change in our world is rapidly accelerating.

This is a post with a job to do – if you think of the last post as a sort-of disclamatory preface, you can view this post as a introduction, thinking about how I’ve come to be here writing this post and considering what I wish to accomplish in posts to come – in light of human history, it could be viewed as odd that I’m sitting here at all instead of foraging for food with the rest of my small nomadic band of compatriots – in light of my personal history, it could be considered equally odd because I possess little affinity and even less aptitude for using a computer – thinking back to the context of the last 200,000 years, this whole personal computer thing has only just taken place during my lifetime – I distinctly remember my first computer experiences (I doubt my daughters will be able to say anything remotely similar). It was in the 4th grade (1980) and I was ten years old. In the school library there were a couple of Apple II computers. They had green screens with big rectangular cursers. I remember playing Oregon Trail and some sort of fish game on them. Is it not crazy to have moved from that to this in 28 years? – sometime around then my uncle bought an Atari 2600 – again, everything was rectangular – remember pong? – that was a big deal – who would have guessed that we would end up where we are today? After fourth grade, I don’t think that I used another computer until 8th grade – again, it was mostly about games – they did try to teach us some programming basics, but honestly I didn’t learn anything – it was another four years before I used a personal computer again – this time it was the word processers in the computer lab when we were seniors – so, quick review: I used a computer in 4th grade to play games – I used a computer in 8th grade to play games – and I used a computer in 12th grade to type papers. I also used computers to type papers in college and that’s basically it (there was this accounting class, but the less said about that the better). So, from 1980 to 1998, all I used computers for is to play games and type papers. [Interesting note: I was standing in the office at junior high where I work – on the counter there was an electric typewrite with the cover on it – a student asked, “what’s that?” – the secretary said, “it’s a typewriter” – the student asked, “what’s a typewriter?” – the secretary said, “it’s what we used before computers to type papers” – the student crinkled his nose and asked, “when was that – the 50s?”]

In 1998, I started teaching high school English and had to learn about email. I’d heard of email before. In college there were people who talked about email and the internet, but the first time that I even saw the internet was during my student teaching – I wasn’t very impressed – the computers were slow and it didn’t seem like there was anything there worth my time – obviously, in the last ten years a lot has changed – computers and connections are faster – the internet’s better and all of us (I assume) must use email all the time – even so, for years I only used the computer for work – sometime after the millennium, I started to occasionally receive and send personal emails – most of mine were the sort of single sentence replies I now receive so often from my friends. Then in the summer of 2003, a close friend of mine from high school called me out of the blue (I think he’d found my number in an old date book and decided to try it) – we’d lost contact for over six years – he also had contact info. for other friends – I vowed not to lose touch with them again – also around that time, other dear friends of ours from college moved to Spain – similarly, a close friend from college was living all over the place (Amsterdam, Hawaii, Slovinia, India) – I decided that a semi-regular group email would allow me to maintain contact, so sometime in 2003 I started writing – at that point it was a semi-monthly thing, but as I was writing, more and more people were added to the list and it became more fun to write – in 2005, I started to try to write a group email nearly every day – I made some simple rules for myself: these rules included one that stated that I only had to write for ten minutes and another that stated that I didn’t have to think about grammar, mechanics, or usage – no editing – just write it and send it – these rules (especially the two listed above) were extremely liberating and it made writing much easier – last year (2008) I made it a goal to write at least one ten minute entry for each day of the year – I ended up writing 376 entries – some of them weren’t too bad. Similarly, these posts are mostly written in ten minute chunks with very little thought given to the rules of grammar, mechanics, or usage.

I believe in the power of writing – I believe that it has the power to shape our thoughts and transform our lives and I’ve been trying to write daily for decades, but it never worked – I lacked the discipline to do it and without an audience, my writing tends to degenerate into platitudes and pontification – something about the method I used in 2008 made the whole thing actually work for the first time and the success was inspiring enough to make me want to try something new – as I’ve mentioned, the friends I’ve been emailing have been telling me that I ought to write a blog (which may be a nice way of saying, “stop sending us all these bloody emails”) – before the 2008 success, it just seemed pointless – but now it has begun to seem interesting – I have no delusions of grandeur – as far as I know, only four or five people (including myself) have read the first post, but this sort of anonymity is rather liberating. I can write about whatever I want without worrying about alienating my audience (because there really isn’t one). This, I suppose, brings me to the point where I ought to introduce what I intend to do with this year’s ten remaining entries.

Sometime in 2004 (or 2005 – I can’t remember), during a period when I was not writing, I received an email from my friend in Spain – he asked how I was doing – I responded that I was great – he asked what was so great about being alive in my shoes and I rattled off a smart ass top ten list of what was so great about being alive in my shoes – this silly list inspired me to write a bunch of emails elaborating on the list – and every time after that when there had been a writing lapse (and there were many, many writing lapses), when I would start up again, I would begin with the top ten list – I used it for years – I used it all the way into January 2008 and then I ceased to have writing lapses and I don’t use it anymore – I love the top ten list because it reminds me of how good my life is and this seems like a good place to retire it. It’s changed over time from the original smart ass bit to a more legitimate list of what is really great about my life. The following is the present list:

TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:
#10 WORK: WAL-MART TIRE & LUBE EXPRESS AND TEACHING
#9 OUR CHURCH
#8 INTERNET (FOR EMAIL, SHOPPING, AND WHATHAVEYOU)
#7 THE SHED
#6 LEGAL DRUGS (CAFFEINE, NICOTINE, PHARMACEUTICALS, ETC…)
#5 THE INTANGIBLE ECSTASY OF MAXNESS
#4 BOOKS
#3 FAMILY, FRIENDS, EASE, COMFORT, ETC…….
#2 MARIA, AURORA, AND VIVIAN
#1 GOD (THROUGH WHOM ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE)