Gathering Speed

I consider myself to be able to remain in at least the majority of control over myself at all times. Sort of like a Cirque du Soleil gymnast, who needs to balance himself horizontally in midair using only one arm while juggling flaming children with his feet. Exactly like that, only with my face. If something is funny, I can remain calm. Such is often the requirement of being onstage; there is nothing more obnoxious than someone laughing at their own jokes and few things worse than professionals cracking up. The Jimmy Fallon Syndrome (JFS) immediately vaults you from the land of professionalism to the dusty sub-basement of mediocrity. So I pride myself in being able to remain composed.

Sadly, there are anomylies from time to time. Cal Ripken’s streak had to end, Ken Jennings had to lose, and Samuel L. Jackson had to make “The Man” with Eugene Levy. Luckily, my waterloo came offstage, in the comfort of a workplace environment.

I’m also fairly tolerant of other cultures, especially when it comes to naming conventions. If someone wants to name their firstborn “SockDrawer”, I say more power to them. It is always a nice twist on the day to go to a restaurant and hear, “Hello, my name is Saladfork, and I’ll be your server.” I do try to ignore the corollary between these ‘unique’ names and their professions, but it is important to know that I’ve never met a CFO or stock broker named after any cleaning products, yet have definitely encountered a Giordano’s waitress with a nametag reading, “Lysolle”. You can’t judge. I do know that sometimes things are lost in translation; a lot can happen on the bumpy road to English. It is my exact tolerance of this that led to my downfall.

Sitting in a meeting, enjoying the witty banter that is usually associated with xml coding restrictions, one of the IT directors decided to list the new projects that the engineers were working on for us. It is important to note that none of the engineers were born in the United States). “So Deepak is working on something for the new LMS platform…and Shithead will be correcting the interface tools.”

Shithead.

Release the hounds.

My first reaction was complete and total surprise. You don’t often hear the word ’shithead’ in a professional environment. It’s one of those terms that is often frowned upon by the Upper-Ups. The second reaction I had was that perhaps this IT person has reached a level of comfort with us that she can a) make a joke about someone we work with and; b) expose her distain for someone we work with. It was on the level of saying, “The Lazy-eyed, cock-smoking ass-clown will be handling the xml certifications from now on and the 320-pound diesel dyke will handle versioning, you know, when she’s not buried in mammalian abalone.” Wow, it just got comfortable in this room.

Then…the third reaction hit…the most fatal. I came to the conclusion that there was someone in the office named Shithead, or named something pronounced similarly to Shithead. Like “Chi-thayed” or just “Siteed”. The tangential mind took over and I was doomed. I instantly thought of what it would be like growing up with the name Shithead. Christ, they called me Rotch at camp one year (as in Mike Rotch…My Crotch…wordsmiths). Forget the years of ridicule that poor Shithead would be subjected to by his peers. What about being a neighbor and going across the street for a cookout, and witnessing the matriarch of the household going, “Shithead! Put down that whiffle ball bat and wash up for dinner! I’m not going to ask you twice, Shithead!” You’d call Child Services. Or what if they used the traditional Dr. Spock tactic of ‘using the child’s full name when you’re pissed’, like “Michael Evan Rosolio, don’t touch anything in the museum” or “Shithead Smegma Jones, stop poking your sister!”

So, naturally, I started cracking up in the meeting. It was like I was front row at a Bill Hicks concert and a funeral at the same time, trying so hard not to laugh that muscles in my face I didn’t even know I had began to hurt like I just powercleaned a Mini Cooper. The only thing that saved me was that one of the IT directors had made a joke, and they were all having a little chuckle about code or something. So I released, confident that my thunderous laughter at the tragic expense of poor Shithead would be disguised with the rest of the chuckling going on in the room. The trouble was that the director’s joke wasn’t as funny as mine, so when the madness in the room died down, my own personal carnage continued to flow out. It’s was like trying to stop a river with a tongue depresser; I would have had to have been Moses to stop this one. The smiles on everyone’s faces soon turned to confusion, because their joke wasn’t funny enough for me to laugh that hard. I was saved, however, as the meeting ended only four agonizing minutes later. I confided in a colleague the source of my meltdown and he assured me that I had misheard the director say Shijev.”

The moral of the story is that there needs to be a director of common sense at Ellis Island. We need to protect the tired and sick of other nations who risk so much for a better life in this country from having a name that sounds exactly like an obscenity. I’m not saying we need to Anglicize everyone’s names, but if someone is standing at the registration desk with a name like Poopcastle or Asshat or Cloudydischarge, they need to give them a creative pronounciation to save them from inadvertant ridicule in their new homeland. I would expect the corresponding offices in other nations around the world to do the same for me.

After all, for all I know ‘Mike’ means ‘douchebag’ in Hindi.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper is the way T.S. Eliot’s world ends. A common interpretation is that civilization will cease to exist once people lose faith in it, and in all honesty, how can a rational human being be expected to maintain a solid loyalty to it during a power outage?

There are very few wakeup calls quite like a blackout. We are certain of our autonomy, our independence, our ability to exist on an island with nothing more than our wits and maybe a monkey in a pirate costume. We like to think of ourselves as intellectuals who do read, and choose intelligent stuff by authors who include their middle initials in their professional names. But the second the power goes out, we sit in the dark, wondering if it really is a full blown outage or just a prolonged flicker.

Like the stages of grief, you sit in your apartment, sometimes on the floor, because you no longer have the luxury of lights and figure you might as well go the whole way on the devolution train. You are tired, and would be asleep if the power worked, but since the lights are off without your consent, sleep becomes an impossibility. Anger is the first, and shortest, step of grief, and basically arrives in the form of a string of random obscenities indiscriminately spewed about concerning the reliability of the electric company.

Denial is the next step, as you try to act like it’s not that big a deal the power’s out. You decide to prop up a flashlight and read, like they used to back in the Gilded Age, but you can’t find the one flashlight you own and don’t have any candles. You turn on all four burners on your gas stove, wondering if the light generated is bright enough to let you see the pages if you read in the kitchen, and if that benefit outweighs the remarkable danger that a potential gas explosion presents.

Next comes depression. You’re lying on the ground now, actively considering falling asleep right there. After seeing Samara from The Ring a few hundred times in the darkness, you wander outside to the civilized world. It’s like going through a time machine, watching the life of convenience you used to take for granted pass you by in the form of busses and late night taco stands. Dejected, you go back into the crypt that used to be your building.

Then bargaining. You begin cataloging the number of things for which you are dependent on electricity, sorting out which ones are really all that necessary and which ones you could do without. After all, if you learn to live without it, you might be better adjusted for the next time this happens. Plus, this is clearly happening to you because of some sort of electronic karma, and if you cut down on the HBO, this won’t happen again.

Finally, the acceptance phase. This usually only arrives if the blackout is more widespread. You come to the conclusion that the power will never come back and you just will have to learn to live this way. Banding together a small group, you plan militaristic missions to the grocery store to feed the entire clan. Your official playbook becomes Lord of the Flies, which you re-read around hour four of the blackout. Many would call this an overreaction, but during the Hurricane Isabel situation of ‘03, the world was essentially Night of the Living Dead, and in 2502, four reasonably intelligent people sat with ties around their heads reenacting Charlie Steiner’s “Follow me! Follow me to freedom!”

Is this really the end? Are we really that dependent on electricity and artificial stimuli? Kick the Can was good enough for our parents; they’d kick that little bastard around for hours having a grand old time. Would we have to find a way to entertain ourselves like that again? Is civilization nothing more than a gigantic Las Vegas neon sign blinding us from seeing that we’re nothing more than helpless animals plugged in to a network that could fall at any time? Like that – foom! – enlightenment…sartori.

Then the lights go back on, as if the Gods of Light were waiting like Herb Brooks for the correct answer. And after all that philosophizing, the first question that runs through your mind: “I wonder if The Sopranos is available OnDemand yet…”