atoms into suns

For the past several months I've been taking a drive a couple times a week, one that takes a little over an hour each way. This adds up to a lot of time alone in the car with little to entertain me. Music doesn't keep my brain engaged; it's too easy to slip into a semi-comatose state. So I've been listening to a lot of talk radio.

At first it was something to keep me entertained, but morbid curiosity kept me coming back for more. I scan through the stations, listening to whatever the radio settles on next. The sports and Spanish-language stations I flip past, but I find myself listening to more and more of the political talk programs. Mostly I'm curious to hear what the hosts are ranting about this time. I like to listen to other people's reasoning and opinions, and since the US is so divided these days it gives me a little insight into what people are so enraged about.

That's a nice way of saying that the hosts are abusive, egotistical, rude, abrasive, extreme, and divisive.

As I drive I listen to hosts yelling about half-truths and imagined faults of those they disagree with, stating opinions as facts and shutting down any attempt at debate by abusing their opponents or just turning the volume down on the callers so they can shout over them.

I got my first taste of Air America. I had hoped that, as the answer to right-wing radio, they'd be reasonable and balanced, but they're just as abrasive.

Then there are the religious stations. I find myself listening to these more and more, in part because while they are often just as opinionated about current events, at least they're more polite about it. The other reason I listen to them is that, again, I love to hear how people think. I grew up Catholic, so even though I have a Christian background and know the stories and the history, a lot of the evangelical movement that's so strong now comes at these from a different perspective.

Interestingly enough, there's a unifying factor in all these different stations: the commercials. There are tons of commercials on all these stations outlining shaky business advice (invention and patent help, abusive commercials about how stupid you are and how you won't be successful until you Buy This Book!), investments (buy gold!), and questionable health supplements (anti-aging, hair loss, supplements made with everything from seaweed to cartilage to vitamins that don't exist). It's funny to hear the same commercials on all these stations with such different views, to hear the right-wing and left-wing hosts both telling me to buy gold. Advertisers, shrewd students of human nature that they are, seem to know that even if the politics are different, the listeners are otherwise the same.

Which makes me worry, since I've been listening to this crap voluntarily, several hours a week, for months now.

Next stop: the library's book-on-tape section. There's got to be something better I can be feeding my brain.

• Everything is gray or dark blue. Even the sky.
• All buildings are concrete or gray stone.
• Men's hair is slicked back. Women's hair is pulled back into a tight, headache-inducing bun.
• Furniture has only square corners and mirrored surfaces. It all looks uncomfortable. Desks have no drawers.
• Men and women wear identical clothing, which looks like a loose suit. They all have either exaggerated collars or Nehru collars. Gray or dark blue.
• Nothing is plastic.
• No one has friends. No one has family besides a spouse and two children, preferably a boy and a girl.
• No one eats or drinks. This is handy, because there are no plants or animals to eat anyway. (Or maybe they live on Soylent Green?)
• Regular doses of state-distributed drugs help to maintain order. Everyone takes these drugs without question.
• Everyone lives in the city, which is composed of a huge mass of high-rise buildings. People are the only living things in the cities.
• Everyone has a white-collar job.
• Everyone has steely eyes, chiseled cheeks, and twitchy jaw muscles.
• Emotion is best dealt with by splashing water on one's face, then looking in the mirror.
• The Great Leader never exists, but is only a mythical figurehead.
• Ceilings are always at least 50 feet high.
• Walls are always bare. No artwork exists.
• However, the real leader always has artwork and colored walls.
• No one has personal possessions besides clothing and a watch.
• Everything is always in perfect order, even though no one ever cleans.
• No one talks unless it's required to advance the plot.
• There is supposedly never any crime. Any criminal activity is dealt with immediately by a squad of heavily armed riot police with a really imposing vehicle.
• Propaganda is constantly playing in the background in public places and workplaces, and no one ever has trouble concentrating.
• Everyone has identical pajamas, which look nearly identical to daytime clothing minus socks and shoes.
• No one needs sheets or blankets.
• Beds are all twin-size and look uncomfortable.
• Guns apparently synthesize their own ammunition on the spot, since they go through vast amounts of it without having to reload.
• Guns are fine for most of the fighting, but the last fight is always with bare hands or samurai swords.
• No one has hobbies or interests. No one reads or watches TV.
• There is no music.
• Everyone works every day, without vacation or weekends.
• Everyone is in excellent physical condition, with chiseled muscles, despite never exercising (or eating). No one ever gets sick.
• No one has a soul or a life.
• There is an underground resistance movement that breaks nearly all of these rules and is therefore considered a dangerous menace.

Update (9 July 2005 0048): Anumod (neurohavoc) is trying to come up with movies that defy the list above.

You know you've just gotten an email from a hip Australian Muslim when the email starts out, "Salams and g'day lovely bods". :)

(I'm working on the interview questions, Maryam, and will post them as soon as I can.)

It'd been too long since I just hopped in the car, found a trailhead, and started walking, so we did just that.

In the space of a couple hours, we threw pebbles in the water, played Poohsticks, learned a bit about the cycle of life and death while looking at a huge cottonwood tree that had fallen over, and speculated on what caused it to fall. We watched horses and bikes and runners and walkers and prairie dogs and birds.

I greeted a woman walking along. She was friendly enough, but barely said hello. As she went past, I noticed something looped in her hand like a leash, but she didn't have a dog. I looked closer and saw tassels and beads and finally realized they were prayer beads. I made a mental note to be as quiet as I could when we passed her wherever she decided to stop. It wasn't until later that it occurred to me that she was doing her prayer/meditation while she walked.

And when we got back to the parking lot, we learned that one should never park under a tree full of birds.

Footnote:
Is it just me, or do these guys take Poohsticks way too seriously? And an official World Poohsticks Championship? (Today, even!) Come on.

There's an article in the LA Times about the town of Monowi, Nebraska, population 1, and its library. (Found on boing boing.)

Presumably this little town is so interesting because it's just so incomprehensible to those writing about it. (I have good evidence that anything between the Arizona line and the Hudson River is inscrutible to most LA residents, but that's another story.) But reading the article gave me all sorts of warm little feelings of home.

I grew up in a town of 1500 or so in North Dakota -- a metropolis, really -- but there are little towns not much bigger than Monowi all over ND. Just up the road is a little town that consists of a few houses, a grain elevator, store, and bar. My great uncle and aunt owned the store and bar, which are right next to each other. Just outside were gas pumps that haven't been used in decades. In addition to being the store proprietor and bartender, my great uncle was the constable, postmaster, and probably a zillion other things, too. The store is smaller than most modern convenience stores. The post office is a roughly 3x3 foot room in the corner of the store, complete with Wanted posters on the wall. I remember staring at all those posters as a kid, wondering what Interstate Flight was and checking out the fingerprints.

Living in a small town, you get used to the idea of extended family. Only a couple generations ago it was common to have 10 kids in a family, which makes for lots of cousins down the line. Seemed like each time I met someone new my mom would explain to me how we were related. "Your great-grandpa's brother Billy had a son named Jack, who married Helen, and they had six kids. Two of them died of scarlet fever when they were pretty little, and then Helen died and Jack married Martha and they had five more kids. Jack and Helen's included Frank, who married Frances, and they had..." You get the picture. Before I got married I asked my mom several times -- partly in jest, partly seriously -- if she was absolutely sure Bill and I weren't related somehow. (No, we're not.)

Whenever we'd get everyone together for a family reunion or wedding or somesuch, we'd often all naturally congregate in the bar. Everyone could have their drinks and socialize, there was plenty of room for everyone, you could stay as long as you wanted, and the kids could be right there, playing with all their cousins.

Between the two towns were my grandparents' farm and the farms of all those great-uncles and great-great-uncles -- another part of the family history to remember. Each time we'd drive down a gravel road we'd get the story of which of our ancestors used to live there, who lived there now, and more bits of family history. Not far from the farm was the one-room schoolhouse my dad went to and the church where a lot of family events took place. I think we spent as much time in the basement of that church as we did in our own. We had lots of great times racing around between gravestones and church pews with cousins, too.

The article's description of the library itself, though, reminds me of my grade school library.

The radio station bit was spot on, too. There were only a few radio stations around, none of them geared toward the high-schooler demographic. We listened to KFYR a lot. I got a wakeup call -- broadcast to five states and two Canadian provinces -- from the KFYR morning guys on my birthday during my freshman year of college. (That was before the station was bought by Clear Channel and turned into a right-wing talk-radio unbearable spewfest.)

I'm not really that old, but reminiscing like this makes me feel like I belong more to my grandparents' generation than my own. My peers in other parts of the country went to high schools like those in John Hughes movies. I went to a grade school with probably just over 100 students in the whole place and played kick the bucket and cowboys and Indians with neighborhood kids. In another bar in another tiny town, I remember watching Zorro on TV while my parents socialized. What time warp was I living in?