Decisions, Decisions

Arrested Development on Netflix, or my new Community Season 2 DVDs?

Water, or homebrew?

Trim my beard, or be alone forever?

I tell ya, there's always another decision to make...

The Man We All Should Try To Be

There are many qualities I admire in people, and many (many, many, more) that I find irritating or even despicable.  It's impossible to divide the whole world neatly into two groups, one good and one bad, and still be in contact with reality.

If I were to create such a division myself, though, it would be this: Do you like answers, or hate questions?

People who like answers love questions, because asking them is how you find the answers you wanted, and one of the great things about answers is that they lead to even more questions.  It's pinball - your reward for playing well is that you get to play again, even harder.  It makes you willing, sometimes even eager, to admit you were wrong about something, because you want to be right.  It requires you to accept logic, to build ever better approximations of the world as it really is.  Wanting answers and going looking for them is what makes a skeptic, a scientist, a rebel, a gifted kid, a great artist or a friend of mine.

People who hate questions only have, want, or need one answer.  They may phrase it many ways, saying, "God did it," "The Furher commands," "Because I said so," or, "Shut up." They all mean the same thing: Stop asking questions.  It's chess - your reward for playing well is that you win, and the game is over, and you don't have to play anymore.  It makes you unwilling to ever admit you were wrong, because you always want to be right.  It requires you to bury your head in rhetoric, to build ever more elaborate illusions about what the world must be like.  Hating questions and seeking to stop others from asking them makes a denier, a zealot, a despot, a fool, a bigot, a follower, a pretentious artiste, and above all a crushing bore.

I have enjoyed a game of chess now and then, but I'd much rather play pinball.  Wouldn't you?

Note to Self

New beers are delivered to Wunderbar on Thursday nights, which means they need to clear out the fridge.  This is a task with which I am very much willing to help.  (I had a couple of Trois Pistoles on the way home from work tonight.  If I did that every night...  I'd be an alcoholic.)

The Difference

If it had been him, it would have gone differently.

Two attractive young women on the bus needed help figuring out the local train system on their way to a convention centre.  That system consists of only one train, but the pair of gap-toothed old drunks who were trying to give them directions made it sound more confusing than the London Underground with all the signs rewritten in Cyrillic.  It wasn't that they were giving bad directions - they were just in that stage of drunkenness where you're still coherent but think you're not, so they kept giving the same directions, over and over, slightly rephrased.  Each repetition made the out-of-town ladies look a little more lost.

You can't interrupt them, either, because that will only make it worse, so you have to wait for the ladies to get off the bus to tell them you're going the same way they are.  The girls are dressed very nicely, but not for business - not the skirts or suits I'd expect going to Rexall Place, more like slightly-more-respectable clubbing outfits (but no less revealing), stylish makeup and hair, and the very definition of fierce heels.  They're friendly and bubbly and very grateful for simple directions they can understand.

I can hear in my head the story he'd tell me next week, if it had been him.  They would have been high-priced call girls on their way to a convention of small arms dealers.  They would have been working for a corporate espionage firm as part of a complicated scheme to blackmail a middle manager into stealing some files.  He would have scored them some blow and in exchange, received a black business card with red printing - no name, just a picture of a spider and a phone number in Amsterdam.

But it was me, so they were just two nice girls in a strange town who needed directions.  I told them to get off at Coliseum, and follow the signs; I wasn't going that far.

Post Script, 3:00AM: I relayed all this to him, and he laughed, and then he pointed out that Rexall Place isn't a convention center, and the girls were obviously here to see Lady Gaga.  Kind of ruined it for me a little, not least because, dammit...  I could totally have scored with the brunette if I was thinking about what I was doing instead of what he would have done.  There's a lesson here, I'm sure.

Uchronia... Today?

Imagine a world in which Karl Marx was able to find space in a hotel so that he could actually use the ticket he bought to the first performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle.  Seriously.  Consider the implications.

Crazy, right?