A Cheap Vonnegut Ripoff (08 March 2020)

A Cheap Vonnegut Ripoff -Rowan Price, March 2020

It’s possible that I don’t really like the winter as much as I think I do. This week, when the sun came out and the air started getting warmer, I realized a lasting feeling of ecstasy, as if a large weight had been lifted from my heart that I didn’t know was there. That was, of course, the tail end of the break. At the beginning, there was still snow everywhere, soaking up the sound and spreading its queer silence. Usually I find that silence to be a great comfort, the stillness and quiet and peace that comes with it. I don’t want to go back to school. I want to go be outside, or read, or lose myself in the lack of structure in which I have so often found myself paralyzed. 

There is a concept in information theory that follows easily from the second law of thermodynamics, or perhaps more easily, common sense. This concept can be most simply states thus: “Any manipulation of data cannot increase the amount of information contained within the original set.” No manipulation of a set of measurements can tell you more about the situations in which they arose than they already can. (We can infer, of course, from taking the average and standard deviation that they are distributed in a particular way that is easier to work with than just ten or ten million or so points and … I digress.)

I am impassioned by people. I want to write about them, build systems that work for them, make their lives easier, and on the whole, less full of suffering. In order to do that, I have to understand as much about as many of them as possible. Living in Ann Arbor, going to school every day of the week, staying home working every weekend, will leave me with a set of data incredibly limited in both its depth and breadth. I miss almost entirely the human lives of everyone around me. Mealtimes, every type of home imaginable, feelings. There does exist this infuriating and seemingly impenetrable bubble of academia in which I am trapped.

I visited home the other day; I wanted to visit my grandparents before my chances of killing them with a virus hundreds of miles away increased. On the way there, I looked around at everything I had spent most of my life getting to know: The Targets and Meijers and gas stations and freeways and schools and houses and roads. Looking at a parking lot, full of any number (say 150) cars at the base of a tall building. Instead of the usual John Hartford song coming to mind, I tried to imagine the depth, detail, intensity of each and every one of the human lives that led to those cars being there. The drivers, salespeople, factory line workers, engineers, designers, the miners that took the raw materials out of a hole in the ground, the folks working in the foundries that turned those raw materials into the parts of the cars: Doors, windshields, hoods, even the forgettable, meaningless parts of the cars like the visors or the button that, when you hold it down, will let you adjust the height of the seatbelt. Someone designed that button, put possibly an entire week of their life trying to figure out what it should look like, be made of, how it should be produced, where to source the plastic from. (I grew up an aspiring engineer in an automotive alley- I don’t like cars, but I’m comfortable enough with how they’re made.) The person that designed that button not only exists but has a life exactly like yours or mine, with the same level of detail, the same complexity with which I live mine. In the mornings, that person might eat cereal for breakfast- perhaps cornflakes. If you or I were to eat cornflakes, we would feel each and every piece of cereal in our mouths, complete with texture, taste, crunch. So would the button man, with the same level of detail, each and every flake. So would each and every person associated with that parking lot. In this exercise of extremely broad empathy, I must avoid thinking that I will never experience the cornflakes that the button man might eat in the same way as he does (or even at all, given that most cornflakes are only available to be consumed once). If I were to dwell on this fact, I may well lose my mind. 

***

It was the beginning of the day for Marlin Spokes. For other people, he knew it was early, about five in the morning or so, but he had learned to enjoy the early mornings like this. It was a time to enjoy some coffee, watch the city go from quiet to bustling. After a light breakfast, he went downstairs to his mailbox to see if he had gotten any mail since he had last checked, the night before. He always did this, even though the mail never came more than once a day (and sometimes zero times, but he still checked it twice on Sundays) because he liked the ritual of it, and, a little bit, the excitement of perhaps getting a package, a letter, or even a bill. From the mailbox, he got into his car and made his way to work.

Despite leaving before the rush hour really began, he always found himself stuck in traffic on I-95 towards the end of his journey; Although there was always some level of angst involved with waiting behind a car which he imagined had definitely left after he had, he usually took the time to think, letting the radio fade from the forefront of his ears to the background of his mind; While he drove, he usually thought about books he had read; while he was sitting in traffic, he had a game he played. The game started with imagining a car- any car that existed, perhaps a 2011 Volkswagen Jetta, silver, with a bicycle-height dent in the front passenger-side door. Then Marlin would make up a person, often similar to someone he knew, to drive the car. Sitting in traffic, he’d imagine the daily life of this person- a mother with three kids in the back, one of them carrying a deadly virus who didn’t know it yet, but would be sick in two days’ time, another whose big project is almost due, but isn’t quite done at all. They get up at 6:15 every morning, fight the clock to stay in bed, then reluctantly get dressed and pile in the car. Their mother is the last one in, to make sure she has everyone. They leave, merging onto the freeway- the mother could drive this route blind if she needed to. The kids are louder than usual this morning. There is a spider in the car. She swerves. The car rotates two hundred and seventy degrees counterclockwise, hits a pebble, and flips over three times in the direction of traffic. Marlin, two miles behind the real cause of the jam, sits in his car and winces, imagining every gory detail of the car’s interior. It’s not that he likes that part of the game, but it always happens, like his mind has decided to steal from him a perfectly comfortable traffic pastime. By now, he’s gotten used to the macabre part, and has gotten in the habit of checking his work. When the road gets moving again, he calmly presses the accelerator in time with the car in front of him, and anxiously awaits the cause of his daily delay. This time it was a semi truck carrying crayons, which had started to melt in the morning sun. Every car that passed the wreckage brought with them a smudgy mess of hundreds of different colors of wax. In three years, those melted crayons (mostly paraffin) would make their way into the sewage system and bring the whole city to a halt. The townspeople will have no clue as to the cause, but after three weeks and several deaths, an unsuspecting four year old, disillusioned with his newfound potty skills, will pour some vegetable oil down the toilet (in an effort to skip a step). To whatever extent, the mass of crayon that had by then formed in all of the pipes will be dissolved, and everyone’s sinks backfill with a slurry of oily crayon water, starting hundreds of very colorful house fires. Marlin merely drove through it. He had a button to design. 

Speeding along at 70 miles per hour (that’s how fast anyone who’s anyone goes on I-95, even though the posted speed limit is 55), Marlin Spokes let his mind wander to the side of the road- where did all of that roadkill come from? There wasn’t a forest nearby, and besides, what was there for those animals to eat on the road anyway? That was the last thought that went through Marlin Spokes’ mind. What went through Marlin Spokes’ mind next was his windshield, followed by the concrete that kept the highway separate from the ground. There was no funeral.

There was, however, quite a bit of traffic for several hours while they cleaned up the debris.