A recent Saturday found me sitting in my car in the curbside pickup area at the Walmart just outside of town, waiting for the week's groceries to be wheeled out to me on one of those little flatbed carts. While I waited, I took out my phone and started typing what may be the longest and certainly the most aggressive text message I have ever composed.
Walmart is a cancer, of course, offering enticing conveniences like curbside pickup with one corporate hand even as, with the other, it crushes local competitors and tightens its grip on the dried husks of communities it has been hollowing out for a generation. One day, we must of course rise up, but on this particular Saturday I had weighty correspondence to attend to.
"Dear Ginny," I typed. "It's Otto. I live across the street from your Waldhurst house."
Ginny, who lives in California, had bought the house in question three years earlier as a residence for her granddaughter, Kara, a student at Waldhurst College who graduates this May. The previous residents had painted the house an eccentric shade of brown, and during Ginny's tenure as owner I had come to think of it as the Shit House.
At first, Ginny had rented out the house's other rooms to classmates of Kara's, then a few of the rooms had been listed on Airbnb, and then—with the onset of the pandemic—the students moved out and we grew used to seeing strange faces coming and going and unfamiliar cars clogging the street. We also grew accustomed to student parties, the one constant at the Shit House—not every weekend year-round, I will admit, but in spurts during signal college-party seasons: at the beginning and end of semesters, during the town carnival, on three-day weekends, in observance of fraternity and sorority high holy days, and so forth.
Lately there had been more parties than ever. The night before, as just about usual for the last few weekends in a row, Petra and I had been awakened at around 1:30 a.m. by the sound of drunk college students being disgorged onto the street under our bedroom windows.
Car doors slammed, bass emanated from car stereos, and the young Greeks—chronologically old enough to be taken for adults in the right light but actually on the four-year maturation pause known as the modern American college experience—milled around in the street, not yet ready to end their revels, nerve endings awash in hormones and Natural Light. The girls giggled and shrieked, the boys postured and barked, and our quiet little block became, for a half hour or so, a stage for the performance and sorting out of a dozen or so sets of stunted social aspirations, pathetic status anxieties, and disparate degrees of interest in mating.
Nothing out of the ordinary so far, in other words, I told Ginny.
"What was different last night," I typed into my phone, there in the Walmart parking lot, "was the guy who walked across the street, unzipped, and pissed on my lawn. That's new. Usually, when we witness public urination stemming from parties at your house (and yes, it's happened more than once), it's just on the front of someone's parked car or in their bushes. But this guy took it to a whole new level."
Indeed he had. Petra had been over at the window, quietly observing the scene while I remained abed and only half-conscious. Suddenly I heard her scrabbling at the lock and throwing up the sash. Lest I embarrass her, I will omit to record here the string of profanity she unleashed in amplification of her opinion that the baby-man in question should go flap his shriveled little member around somewhere else. I will just say that I do not think I have ever heard anything like this from her before. Something ticked over in me—after three years of periodic episodes like this, a sort of limit seemed finally to have been reached—and I woke on Saturday morning in the grip of a vengeful fury.
Then I found out about the Sigma Epsilon party planned for that very night.
There is a certain default level of irritation one can't help feeling at being prevented by others from sleeping, and then there is the incandescent rage that can arise from being kept awake for no good reason.
During my first attempt at college, there were several weeks when a construction crew began work just outside my dorm-room window each morning by 7 a.m. At that stage of my life, this was an hour when I preferred to be asleep. I remember regretting not being able to sleep in but I don't recall feeling genuinely angry about it. I don't mean to suggest I was a sage, calm young man in possession of a mature perspective beyond his years or anything like that. I probably just understood that this project was necessary and inevitable and that to rage against it would be like objecting to the arrival of a raincloud over one's picnic.
Perhaps getting woken up early in the morning is just different from being stymied at falling asleep in the first place, but the degree of vexation one feels when being kept awake also seems to depend on whether or not the culprits seem to be having fun. Warped as U.S. culture is by inputs like Puritanism and the so-called Protestant work ethic, we are trained from birth to consider the things people do for fun as discretionary. When we are not only being kept awake but being kept awake by something that feels unnecessary, it can feel as though our very status as human is being disregarded.
A year before the dorm renovation project, when I lived in another dorm on the other side of campus, I shared a cinder-block wall with Stacy, to this day the loudest human being I've ever known. She spoke at top volume in a strong New Jersey accent and possessed a howling, horsey laugh that I was eventually able to pick out even in the dull roar of the campus dining hall at mealtime. She was a techno fan, and her car, a severely rusted Camaro of advanced age, badly needed a new muffler.
I might not have noticed or minded any of this if Stacy hadn't also been basically nocturnal. She was some kind of art or theater major and all of her classes seemed to be in the evening—at any rate, she clearly wasn't on the same class schedule I was.
I was taking German Immersion, a demanding 12-credit course advertised as delivering two years' worth of regular-paced instruction in one semester. This class met daily for four hours and kicked off each morning at 8 a.m., so I tried to turn in by 10 p.m. at the latest. Stacy's routine, meanwhile, usually had her arriving back at her room—possibly from some off-campus restaurant job—around midnight, when she would get high and spend the next few hours listening to music at top volume and socializing with other night owls.
Initially, Stacy's wee-hours activities would wake me up, but eventually I grew to anticipate her arrival so tensely that I could not fall asleep in the first place. I just lay there in the dark, dreading to hear the throaty rumble of her Camaro's inevitable approach along the campus road, roiling with hot surges of hatred and resentment.
So there you are in bed in the middle of the night, seething at whoever is keeping you awake, and the question is what do you do about it?
Direct confrontation can be an amateur mistake, especially when intoxication is involved. When the noise is coming from a party or social event, one can also feel strongly obligated to just tough it out, as opposed to inhabiting the role of drab stick-in-the-mud trying to ruin everyone else's fun. Call the police? That's just being a drab stick-in-the-mud by proxy, not to mention that mature adults with fully functioning personalities generally feel ridiculous bothering police with something as trivial as a noise complaint.
Besides, one resents being placed in the unappealing posture of the supplicant. In a just world one wouldn't have to beseech or employ state coercion to force others to remember that one is human and has certain ineluctable physical needs, including not only food and water but regular sleep. The prospect of begging for such consideration tastes ashy indeed.
One's thoughts turn, naturally, to revenge. Inherent to any situation in which Person A is being kept awake by Person or Persons B is that Person A probably needs to get up relatively earlier the next morning. Thus Person A may be awake many hours before Person or Persons B would prefer to be, and a prime opportunity for turning the tables presents itself—if Person A dares.
Over the last three years of frat parties at the Shit House, many have been the occasions when I have lain awake fantasizing about pounding cop-style on the house's front door early the next morning to share feedback about the previous night's festivities with whoever answered. This never seemed like as good an idea in the cold clear light of dawn. I have long tried to live by the maxim that, where neighbors are concerned, one should overlook as much as possible and try one's hardest to forgive the rest. Tough it out, in other words.
I have from time to time taken revenge against people who have kept me from sleeping in the past, but my record on this score is a slight and impotent one. When I lived next door to Stacy, I made sure to be extra loud when I got up in the morning and at least once I actually kicked her door as I walked past it on my way to class.
Similarly, when I was recently kept awake in the communal bunk room of a hostel by the astoundingly loud movements of a late-arriving fellow guest who seemed to have everything in his backpack stored in crinkly potato chip bags and who spent something like an hour, around midnight, rearranging it all before going to bed—and then turned out to also be a loud, gurgling, gasping snorer—I made sure to slam the bunk room's door resoundingly when I checked out the next morning. (He was the only guest still in bed.)
In neither Stacy's nor the hostel snorer's case did I receive any indication that my retaliations even registered, however.
Then there an incident from the years when I lived in Miami, in an apartment that looked out onto a canal. One night—when I had to get up extremely early the next morning, to take the 24-hour in-port watch on the Coast Guard cutter where I worked—there was a party in the backyard of a townhouse on the other side of the canal. Something about the lay of the land between us functioned to funnel and concentrate the sounds of music, conversation, and laughter so that it was as though the party were taking place right in my bedroom.
The situation eventually grew so intolerable that I went out to the bank of the canal, and—with a weather eye out for alligators—tried to get the hosts' attention with a yell, but to no avail.
Another hellish hour passed. I began to fantasize about climbing onto the roof of my four-story apartment building with a dozen eggs and barraging the townhouse's backyard. I don't know if I really would have followed through, but I did reconnoiter as far as the fourth floor hallway only to find that the roof access door was securely locked.
I gave up, went back to bed, and—eventually, with a pillow over my head—fell asleep.
"I understand there will be a Sig Ep party at your house tonight," I typed.
I was still sitting in my car in the Walmart curbside pickup area. My groceries had already been loaded into the back of my Element, but the muses were singing to me and so I kept typing—long enough that, at one point, another "associate" tapped on my window to make sure I'd been served.
Earlier that morning, as I'd walked to my car preparatory to driving to Walmart, I'd seen two college-age boys with Greek letters on their t-shirts exiting the Shit House. I braced them on the sidewalk to share my feelings, at length and with a not insubstantial amount of profanity, about the previous night's episode of public urination. With the smarmy politeness of a school bully trying to charm the principal, they affirmed my opinion that this was unacceptable, disavowed connection to that party—and then promised that tonight's party would go better.
"Sig Ep parties are very organized, sir," said one of the little men, indicating the walkie talkies they carried. "That's why we have these. We're working the door tonight, and we won't let anyone like that in."
I did not ask exactly how one identifies a public urinator upon presentation for entrance to a party, nor did I share that, really, I didn't care if they let such a person in, as the real issue seemed more connected to what happened after they were let out.
To Ginny, I typed: "I will be moving one of my security cameras to the front of the house to monitor tonight's party, in case I need evidence to be used in seeking a nuisance-property designation for your house. [Waldhurst law contemplates no such designation, but I liked the thought of Ginny worrying about that and maybe wasting some time researching the possibility.] I will also call the police if I am awakened after 10. I believe I understand you plan to move here after Kara's graduation in May. I would think carefully about what kind of relationship you want with your future neighbors. You don't have a lot of fans on this block now."
Tingling with righteous fury, I pressed "send," then drove my groceries home.
Petra took Axl camping that night, and I went to bed wearing ear plugs, with one of the children's old white-noise machines exuding its electric roar. The next morning, I poured a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table with my phone to review what, if anything, my newly repositioned camera had captured.
I didn't know what to expect. I hadn't been awakened, so for all I knew the two Sig Ep boys really had managed to keep a lid on things. But no—apparently it was just that my ear plugs and white-noise machine had worked well.
A stream of motion-activated recordings from between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. showed cars and people coming and going. Highlights included three dip shits in basketball shorts (redundant, I know) expressing loud displeasure with another neighbor, visible on his porch after—he told me the next day—having threatened to call the police (1:30 a.m.); a figure urinating outside, this time with his back turned and on Ginny's property, for a change (2:10 a.m.); and the slow, ominous arrival of a police cruiser (2:30 a.m.).
I saved a selection of video clips and still frames, then attached them to a new text message, this one addressed to both Ginny and Kara.
"Frat infestation at the Shit House..." I began, before captioning my attachments and concluding with: "also shared with college administration, so Monday should be fun!"
These last words felt like something of an empty threat. Although I count the college's vice president of student affairs among my social acquaintances, and although I had indeed transmitted the same exhibits to him that I'd shared with Ginny and Kara, multiple previous attempts to interest him in intervening in this situation had been fruitless, suggesting that the college website's airy vision-statement verbiage about "challenging students to act with responsibility as citizens of multiple communities" was nothing more than marketing blather.
Yet, by Monday afternoon, he was informing me that Ginny had "kicked Kara out of the house" and that the college's athletics director had promised Kara would finally face "consequences" (she is a varsity "acro-tumbler," whatever the hell that is).
A few days later, I sent a conciliatory message to Ginny. Petra had pointed out that, compared to other possible outcomes, the best development we could probably hope for would still be for Ginny to move into this house in a few months, after Kara's graduation, as opposed to ditching that plan in favor of operating it as a full-time Airbnb flophouse or simply selling it to one of Waldhurst's slumlords. We didn't want to scare her off, in other words.
"Sorry for my harsh tone," I began my next text to Ginny. "Blame it on two sleepless nights in a row..."
This was a slight exaggeration, of course, but only because of my ear plugs and white-noise machine, which I shouldn't have needed to deploy in the first place. I have no idea if Ginny felt conciliated. She has yet to answer a single one of my text messages.
I don't feel proud of causing trouble for Kara, but—after so many unsuccessful attempts to get her to act with some consideration toward her neighbors—I can't say I'm sorry, either. Talking to the two young men on the sidewalk in front of the Shit House, I realized I'd forgotten how young college students are.
Having once been one myself and having, at the time, been quite satisfied that I and my friends were all grown up, I never lost the habit of thinking of college students as being at least just inside the door of adulthood. They're not, though—or at least, in the United States in the year 2021, it is not safe to assume they are, especially in the case of fraternity and sorority members. Kara and her friends are children, not adults, and in my experience this is unlikely to change before about the age of 30, if in fact it ever does. It takes a village, and all that, so just number me among the villagers and never mind my pitchfork.
Back in Miami, the morning after the party on the banks of the canal, I awoke bleary and exhausted to the sound of my alarm only a few hours after I'd finally fallen asleep. I showered and shaved. As I made my breakfast, my eye fell on a senescent tomato that had been overlooked at the back of the fridge.
When I was done eating and had put my dishes in the dishwasher, I took the tomato outside and walked down to the canal. In the grey pre-dawn light, I looked across at the aftermath of the party. Chairs sat willy-nilly, and a table was still covered with beer bottles and glasses. Apparently the hosts had decided to wait until the morning to clean up.
I took some deep breaths and swung my arm in a circle a few times to warm up, then—with a gesture not unlike a GI lobbing a hand grenade over a fortress wall or a basketball player attempting a Hail Mary shot from the other end of the court—launched the tomato in a high soaring arc over the canal.
I am no athlete and lack much practice throwing things, so I really had no idea where the tomato might land. I liked the thought of it crashing down onto the table full of bottles and perhaps causing one or more of them to fall and smash on the concrete patio. That would have perfect, because it probably would have woken someone up without causing any real damage. As the tomato left my fingertips, however, I found myself praying that it might somehow, improbably, actually smash right through what I hoped was the bedroom window.
I watched the tomato climb, reach apogee, descend—and land, with a satisfying splatter, square on the townhouse's grey-shingled roof.
It seems likely that the residents neither heard the tomato's impact nor ever noticed the result, but for the next week or so I enjoyed stepping out onto my patio after work, drink in hand, to gaze on my handiwork. To be kept awake by oblivious partygoers is to be in some essential way disregarded, to be treated as if you do not exist, much less matter.
Even if my tomato had not forced my actual tormentors to reckon with their offenses against me, the sight of its splatter on their roof shingle still made me feel better, as though I had stood up for myself in the face of an unfeeling universe, not to mention managing what had turned out to be a pretty decent throw, under the circumstances.
Then the summer rains came and washed the tomato away, and it was like none of it had ever happened.
Sunday, March 28, 2021
Welcome to the Shit House
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Opa and the A-Team
I was eight or so, my mother's parents were visiting for the holidays, and my grandfather—chronologically, a member of the Greatest Generation, but born in the wrong country—had apparently become a regular viewer of the blockbuster 1980s Stephen J. Cannell show.
If you don't know The A-Team—if simply hearing the name of the show doesn't cause you to hear the opening strains of its iconic and unforgettable theme music or picture a smiling George Peppard, cigar clenched between his teeth, chortling that he loves it "when a plan comes together"—it told the story of four ex-Green Berets, court-martialed "for a crime they didn't commit," who had escaped from military prison and begun operating as what you might call pro bono mercenaries.
The team fought crime, stood up for small towns oppressed by corrupt officials or invading biker gangs, rescued kidnapped children, and so on. Despite frequent car crashes and automatic weapons fire being sprayed in all directions, no one ever got hurt, and at the end of each episode the inevitably victorious team always drove off into the sunset—so to speak—in a perhaps unwisely distinctive black conversion van with a red racing stripe, driven by Mr. T, one step ahead of their pursuers, a team of MPs led by the evil Colonel Decker.
In other words, The A-Team was obviously the absolute pinnacle of commercial primetime television programming in the 1980s and possibly of all time. I was a devoted fan throughout the rest of my childhood; the show's catchphrases and more memorable plot lines became integral elements of the pop-culture common currency of the household; and it all started because of my grandfather.
To grasp the specialness of this experience, it may be helpful to understand certain contextual details. The year was 1982, so there were of course no such things as the web, on-demand videos, or digital streaming. We owned just the one television and did not own either a video-game console or a computer. My only other choices for amusing myself at 8 p.m. on a Christmas-break weeknight would have been to read a book or sit and talk with the rest of the grownups, so in other words there basically were no other choices.
It was, in fact, still something of a novelty that we had a television in the house at all. At the time of my grandparents' visit, we were only eight or so months into owning a small black-and-white set, which had been purchased for my mother's comfort while she was pregnant with my little brother. Prior to that purchase, and if you can believe it, we had lived entirely without television ever since the fateful day—when I was two or three years old—that a freak accident killed both our cat and the only television my parents owned at the time.
Watching a show picked by my grandfather would likely also have been good for an exception to the usual rather rigorous TV-watching restrictions enforced by my parents. Ahead of their time in holding strong concerns about the effects of too much of what we now call "screen time," my parents were by that point still limiting me to five hours a week, but they tended not to charge against this budget movies they felt I "should" watch: Chitty Chitty Bang, Around the World in 80 Days, anything starring Humphrey Bogart, etc. A show shared with my grandfather, whom I'd seen face to face perhaps twice in my life so far, would also likely have been considered off-book.
So, I settled down with my grandfather in our basement TV room. I can still remember him drinking a beer from a glass while he watched the show. The glass sat next to the bottle on a small table, and he only filled it a few inches at a time, a signet ring on one finger flashing in the light as he did. Later, I almost always drank my beers straight from the bottle, but on the rare occasions when I poured my beer into a glass I would always think of Opa in general and this particular moment I had shared with him.
As I mentioned, I loved The A-Team throughout my childhood, and that love has always been tied up with the fact that it was my grandfather—German, a World War II veteran, old and foreign and mostly incomprehensible to me—who introduced me to the show in the first place. Given the wide gulf that separated us in so many ways, the fact that we had this odd and oddly specific point of connection was always somehow satisfying.
The problem is that none of this actually happened.
I called my mother's parents Oma and Opa, the German equivalent of something like Grandma and Grandpa. They weren't "Grandma and Grandpa," though, they were "Oma and Opa," migrants from Germany to Canada and then the United States in the years after World War II.
Throughout decades in North America, they never assimilated, never became fluent in or even particularly comfortable speaking English, and never missed a chance to patronize German shops and eat German food. In 1986, the year when—on the occasion of the bicentennial of the opening of Ellis Island—there was official celebration of immigration and the contribution of immigrants to our nation's success and prosperity, they moved back to Germany.
A wide gulf separates most children from their grandparents, but the one between me and my Opa and Oma was especially yawning. There was the language barrier, because I did not grow up speaking German and my grandparents, as mentioned, never spoke English more than absolutely necessary. There was also the fact that both of them had had the unimaginable experience of living through two world wars—that is, they had not merely been alive during the years when those wars were being fought but had actually lived in one of the countries where both were fought.
Especially striking to me at that age was the fact that, during World War II, my grandfather had been an actual German army regular. This was a confusing fact to reconcile with my fledgling sense of World War II as the "good war," a war that the old black-and-white movies (many of which were among those my parents, or more specifically, my father, felt I "should" watch) portrayed as a conflict between good and evil. That is actually a fair portrayal, as far as it goes, except the movies naturally implied that this pure goodness and pure evil were actually embodied, respectively, in each individual American and German soldier, and then there was my grandfather, wearing the wrong uniform.
In a battle, you just keep your head down and shoot over the guys' heads, and then the guy next to you gets shot and suddenly you want to kill everybody on the other side. This, according to my mother, is how Opa had described the experience of combat to her.
My grandfather was a veteran of the Crimea Campaign, in which 30,000 German soldiers ended up dead, wounded, or missing. Fortunately for my grandfather, he was injured early in his deployment—he carried shrapnel in his legs for the rest of his life—and this injury got him sent home from the front to recuperate. He never returned to combat, and my mother was born two or so years after his return.
Opa and I never really talked. I wasn't raised speaking German, and by the time I'd built up reasonably strong conversational German skills through an immersion language program in college, my Opa was slipping into the mental fog of his final years.
On a solo visit to Germany when I was in my late teens, I kept Opa company in the living room while Oma was in the kitchen and listened to a story from the time he'd gone gold prospecting in Alaska. After rescuing an "Indian princess" he'd found being beaten by her father on the bank of a river, he had then been attended and assisted by her in his efforts to establish a gold claim. Don't tell your grandmother, he'd said, glancing significantly toward the kitchen. You see, he had never told my grandmother about this girl at all, much less that he had given her a significant amount of the money he'd earned from his claim when he returned home.
Opa's story was not quite as incredible as it sounds, for—in the 1950s, in the years just after my mother's family landed in Canada—not only had he been a logger and a miner, he had worked in an actual gold mine in the actual Yukon.
But no. When I related this story to my mother, wondering if I had stumbled onto some fantastic family secret, she said Opa had never been to Alaska, much less as a gold prospector. Frankly, she said, it all sounded like it had been lifted straight from one of the pulp western-themed adventure novels that were always his preferred reading.
My growing up years were spent in and around Washington, D.C. When I was born, Oma and Opa lived in Seattle, and then in 1986, as I mentioned, they moved back to Germany. My grandfather died in 1995, my grandmother in 2001. It strikes me now just how infrequently I ever saw them: perhaps a half-dozen visits, for a total of no more than a month's—maybe two months'—worth of days.
The first time I met them was when I was around three years old, in the late 1970s, when—inveterate tourists, in the German way—they took my mother and me on a trip to Hawaii.
The trip is now just a flurry of memory shards in my mind. I remember parrots and a dolphin show and a man who juggled flaming torches on a beach at night, then somehow ate the fire. I remember a woman at this same event wearing a coconut-shell brassiere. I remember thinking that this looked very uncomfortable.
I remember throwing paper airplanes off a balcony with a girl my age. This was during some kind of visit to another family's apartment or hotel in downtown Honolulu, the occasion for which I cannot remember or even really imagine. Family legend has it that, on the street below, there was a motorcade carrying Ferdinand Marcos, then still the president of the Phillipines, and that, as our paper airplanes came fluttering down, bodyguards swiveled mounted machine guns in our direction.
This was very likely the first time I was ever on the balcony of a high-rise building, and I do remember our little white airplanes dwindling to nothing against the dark buildings and the nightime street, far below.
I do not, however, remember the machine guns.
My grandparents' 1982 visit was a sort of stopover after a trip to Germany. The plan was to pass the week of Christmas and New Year's with us before finally heading home to Seattle.
This plan changed, first, after my grandmother severely sprained her ankle when our excitable Airedale, which she was trying to take for a walk, pulled her down the rain-slicked hill in our backyard; not long after, my grandfather suffered a relapse of the malaria that, along with several pieces of shrapnel in his legs, was one of his keepsakes from the Crimean Campaign.
Each of them ended up spending a couple of days in the local hospital, and their departure date was pushed out a week or so.
Opa and The A-Team were on my mind this week because I was going to use this recollection in another essay I'm working on. When I tried to translate the vague and shifting images and feelings of memory into concrete words on a page, however, there was something that seemed off.
The first sign of trouble came when I looked closer at my recollection that this experience had been my introduction to the The A-Team, that I had not even heard of this show until Opa tuned it in. This element had always been one of my favorite parts of this memory. It was somehow so significant to me that I'd not merely shared an episode of The A-Team with but actually been introduced in the first place to this decidedly modern, somewhat silly television show by my German, World War II-veteran grandfather. But when I tried to write this part down, I couldn't make it make sense. How could I possibly not have heard of The A-Team?
True, and as mentioned, we had only had a television for less than a year by the time of my grandparents' visit, but I was already a devoted student of the medium.
Each Sunday, I studied the Washington Post "TV Week" insert, not only to plan how I would use that week's allotted five hours of viewing time but also simply to read the synopses of pretty much every show and movie on offer on the three major networks, the local independent station (WDCA!), and PBS. (I also used to read and reread movie descriptions in the paper newsletter from Erol's Video Club. What can I say, there is evidence to suggest that I may have been a weird kid.)
So, I would certainly have been reading episode synopses of The A-Team, just as I would have been reading episode synopses of Knight Rider and The Fall Guy and Remington Steele. Presumably I would also have seen commercials for upcoming The A-Team episodes while watching other shows on the same channel.
Perhaps the explanation was that it had still been relatively new on the airwaves, I thought. Maybe my grandfather had become a devoted viewer over just a few months since the debut episode and I hadn't really internalized its existence yet.
One way to find out, of course. I googled, and I quickly found that I was correct, at least, in recalling that I had not heard of The A-Team by Christmas of 1982, because—as I learned—the show did not debut until January 23, 1983.
Not only would this have been at least two weeks after Oma and Opa departed for Seattle, it also gives the lie to the idea I always had that my Opa was already a regular viewer of this show, that he was in the weekly habit of settling down to watch it and so that was why we "had" to watch it on this particular occasion.
In other words, almost nothing from my long-cherished memory turned out to be true. If there really was something my Opa had had to watch on some night of this visit, it was probably a soccer game (if in fact those were even being televised in the U.S. in the early 1980s) or maybe simply anything, as long as it got him out of small talk in the living room.
For the kind of writer I am, memories are basically a stock in trade. When, from time to time, I have dabbled in fiction writing, I have found I am not satisfied by making things up. That's a reductive and in some ways completely wrongheaded gloss on the craft of fiction writing, I am aware—"write what you know," and all that—but my point is that one of the main compulsions behind much of my scribbling is to examine events from my past that are significant and worth a closer look (to me, anyway) mainly because they actually happened.
So it is disconcerting to the utmost to discover that something I've always believed happened actually never did.
There is some comfort in knowing I am not the only one so afflicted. Quick: Think back to that odious series of moralizing children's books featuring a family of anthropomorphic bears who are forever learning the importance of telling the truth, brushing their teeth, not talking to strangers, and so on. How was their last name—which also happened to be the last name of the husband/wife team that authored the books—spelled?
I was startled to learn recently that I am among a sizable number of people who remember it incorrectly, as "BerenSTEIN" when, in fact, all available evidence is that it is and always has actually been spelled "BerenSTAIN"—all available evidence, at least, in this "timeline."
Let me explain.
You see, the Berenstein/Berenstain mixup is but one example from a long list of similarly widely held but nonetheless apparently false memories. For example, the Fruit of the Loom logo never included a cornucopia; the absorbent undergarments are called "Depend," not "Depends"; the comedian Sinbad did not play the genie character in a 1990s movie called Shazaam because there was no such movie; and Nelson Mandela did not die in prison.
The phenomenon of these apparently false memories, which takes its name from the latter example (and the only one in the list I can confidently say I remembered correctly), is called the Mandela Effect. And the explanation advanced by some people for this effect is that these memories are, in fact, not false but are instead caused by some kind of glitch or leakage between the infinite number of parallel universes implied to exist by certain interpretations of quantum mechanics summed up under the heading of "the multiverse."
In the "multiverse," everything that could happen actually does, but in various parallel universes operating on their own timelines. Roll a six-sided die, for example, and somewhere there are five other universes where five versions of you each sees a different result from the one you see in this universe, but then—if I understand all of this correctly, and I really don't know if I do—there would also be additional complete sets of six parallel universes for each different haircut you could be sporting or shirt you could be wearing or name you could have been given, etc., ad literally infinitum.
In one of these universes, Mandela Effect believers would say, the bears/their creators were named Berenstein, and something happened that caused a bunch of us from that timeline to get sucked into this one. Or something like that. (Does this theory imply that there would also be a universe where the name of the authors and their bears is spelled Xhekdneidg, or is there some sort of quantum law of conservation of reasonably-related spellings?)
So I'm left with two possibilities.
Either my mind makes up stories to tell me about my past, or I've somehow been pulled from one universe—in which The A-Team, perhaps, debuted in January of 1982—to this one, in which it debuted in 1983.
Neither one of these possibilities is particularly reassuring, I must say.
Sunday, March 7, 2021
The Accident: On Becoming a Gaming Family
The other day, I checked in on the Facebook group for alumni of my era from the college I dropped out of in 1995. Top on the page was a post inquiring whether anyone else remembered the tempeh sandwiches that had in our day been available in the campus coffee shop. It seemed that the Sysco food-service tempeh on this sandwich was the best this person has ever eaten and haunts her dreams to this day.
The coffee shop's television, for example, was one of what I remember as only two publicly available sets on the campus. (The other was next door in the dining hall.) Several commenters remembered a sign posted on the coffee-shop television in October 1995, after I'd left and was in Coast Guard boot camp: "Reserved for announcement of O.J. verdict."
And then there were the video games. Ranged against an exposed brick wall at one end of the shop were two arcade-style consoles. In the years when I attended this college, one of these was Mortal Kombat, and the other was Galaga. These stood next to a pinball machine whose name/theme I cannot recall, because I never took any interest in pinball.
I took more interest in the video games, specifically in Galaga, but not much more. As a child of the 1980s, with parents who would never have even considered buying me an Atari, my opportunities to play video games while growing up had been limited to visits to one particular friend's house (he had a Commodore 64, and for a year we regularly played a game called Choplifter on it); the public console-style games available on infrequent family visits to movie theaters or bowling alleys; and a tabletop Pacman game in the McDonald's we frequented. I understood from movies like War Games and
This first attempt at college, straight after high school, was the point in my life when I had my first or at least strongest experience of noticing that the years were going by—noticing, that is, that I was now in a decidedly new phase of my life, that other phases had existed and were now over, that this would keep happening until I passed off of this mortal coil into dust, and that memory would be an essential companion and consolation as I moved through it all. (What can I say, I was a tad dramatic and pretentious at that age.)
In this frame of mind, noticing Galaga in the corner of the coffee shop felt something like running into an old friend. While Mortal Kombat was newly released and featured what then seemed amazingly advanced graphics and gameplay capabilities, Galaga was familiar as a preferred game from the desultory arcade experiences of my childhood.
In the five semesters I attended that college, in the early 1990s, I dumped quite a few quarters into that Galaga machine in what turned out to be, for all intents and purposes, the final phase of my career as a video gamer. After a final defeat at the hands of Galaga forces lo these two and a half decades ago, I don't think I ever again dropped another quarter into an arcade game.
Like most things in life, my failure to get sucked in by video games was probably as much coincidence as anything else. I was, after all, most definitely a member of the first video-game generation. Arcades exploded in the 1980s, when I was in elementary and middle school, and I suppose that my birthdate, at least, put me squarely in the target audience for Doom and the similar games that followed, not to mention Tetris and the other games available at first only on Game Boys, the third portable electronic device—after the transistor radio and the Walkman—to be lugged everywhere by teenagers, in an ominous foreshadowing of how we would come to live.
One important reason I didn't get pulled in by all of that is, probably, the same reason I didn't spend the first half of my twenties slumped on the couch, smoking pot and watching X Files like everyone else my age during the late 1990s. Those were the years I was in the Coast Guard, subject to random drug tests and spending most of my time at sea, where the only allowed mind-altering substances were coffee, tobacco, Dramamine, and ephedrine, and the only available electronic entertainments were the videotapes of Hollywood new releases being supplied to the military in those days.
Samuel Johnson said that "being in a ship is like being in jail, with a chance of being drowned," and I certainly saw his point.
In the late 2000s, as Petra and I began to consider bringing children into this dying world, among our many naive beliefs about what lay before us was the mostly unexamined/undiscussed assumption that we would not be a video-game household. Petra had also grown up in circumstances that tended to shield her from bleeping pixelated seduction long enough for other interests to become primary, and so we were well-matched in our inability to intuit just what the hell was so appealing about this activity.
Then, too, not being part of the video game world ourselves, we only became aware of that world's goings-on when they became of broader interest, which is to say when non-video-gamers were freaking out about them for some reason. Video games had really never stopped exciting a sort of low-grade background-noise level of moral panic since first being invented. But the 2000s saw the manifestation of a new, more intense level of concern around the "massively multiplayer online" games that were starting to become prominent, and one started to hear for the first time of people becoming "addicted" to games, playing them for 14 hours at a time, and sometimes even dying from deep vein thrombosis as a result of sitting so still for so long.
I would have understood the possibility of actually dying from playing video games as an extremely unlikely edge case, but video games that sucked you in for days at a time nonetheless seemed likely to have undesirable effects on one's life even short of disability and death. The 2000s was also when the archetype of the "neck-bearded basement dweller" grew current: pale, overweight, ungroomed, dowager-humped, totally lacking in IRL friends, and uninterested in anything but online pornography and when the next Call of Duty release would drop. Petra and I certainly didn't want our children to turn out that way, and so of course we just simply wouldn't allow video games in our house.
Such a prohibition was already easier to state than to enforce and would only become more impractical as time went by. In our formative years, if parents didn't want their kids playing video games, they didn't buy them an Atari or Nintendo console. By the time Petra and I saw those two pink lines on our first home pregnancy test, it was already the case that anyone with a home computer and a credit card could access the new generation of online games, and soon only one of these conditions would apply.
On a typical weekday, Axl and Belle spend at least 1-2 hours playing video games on our home computers; on weekends, this stretches out to as many as five. Other than eating, sleeping, and eliminating waste from their bodies, there is virtually no other activity they engage in so regularly. I tease them that they are bowing down to their "screeny master," but in the etymological sense they can be said to play video games truly religiously—that is, per my American Heritage Desk Dictionary, "scrupulously and conscientiously"—or as though adhering to a doctor's stern prescription.
How did this happen? Like most accidents, it was not the result of a single catastrophic event but rather a cascade of small errors.
From early days as parents, Petra and I were committed to limiting "screen time," which—during the children's first years—of course consisted entirely of TV shows and movies. Then Axl was in school, and—on the playground with his fellow kindergartners and first graders—he began to hear rumors about something called Minecraft.
The thing was, we didn't even need to let him play this game for him to become obsessed with it. The brilliant marketers employed by Mojang, the company that makes Minecraft, had had the idea to sell "mini-figures," or little plastic figurines of the game's characters and creatures. We did not at first see where acceding to his desire to start collecting these might lead.
There were also books, both non-fiction reference works and fictional stories set in the Minecraft world. Having long held the belief that it matters less which books children are drawn to than that they are drawn to books at all, we also did not resist when Axl expressed interest in these.
The other not-to-be-overlooked essential component of the video-game ecosystem these days are the many—let me say again, many—YouTubers whose accounts are devoted to videos showing them playing Minecraft and other games. The main action in these videos is the game itself, with running commentary provided by the person playing, the channel's host, visible in a little postage-stamp screen-in-screen in the upper left corner of the image. Videos like these further entranced Axl, and he absorbed the information they provided like a sponge.
Finally there came the day when Axl had been interested in all of these Minecraft adjuncts for so long and had learned so much about the game and wanted to play it so badly that it began to feel cruel not to let him. As a kind of consolation present on his sister's birthday one year, I signed him up.
I still remember how sweetly thrilled and grateful he was, how clumsily he attempted to manipulate the keyboard controls, and how good it felt to have made him so happy.
He readily agreed he would not ask to play it "all the time"; it would be for weekends only; and we were off.
One thing that made it easier to let Axl step into the world of Minecraft was that it was in the category of what are called "sandbox" games.
Among many striking developments between the first time I dropped a quarter in an arcade game, back in the 1980s, and the world of video games today is how few of the latter really feel like "games" at all. When I was a kid, video games all had objectives—some way to win, in other words, and of course also to lose, with the game simply ending once you did—and a restrictively prescribed path to be followed.
Even if, while playing Pacman or Mario Brothers, you decided you didn't really want to eat all the dots or rescue Princess Toadstool, there wasn't much else you could do, any more than if—while playing Monopoly or Candyland—you decided to stop rolling the dice and forego moving along the squares in favor of pushing your game piece around the rest of the board to check out the scenery.
Nowadays, of course, as a result of vastly expanded computer processing power and graphics capabilities, many video games offer players whole worlds they can romp around in. Some of these games, like Grand Theft Auto, still have objectives and a way to "win," but others—like Minecraft—simply present you with a fully imagined if strangely and stylistically rendered world in which to do as you please. (Actually, Minecraft can also be played in "survival mode," in which your character can die, but—in an eerie mirroring of real life itself—there still isn't really any way to "win" other than just, you know, living as long as you can.)
In the year or so leading up to that fateful day when I first set up Axl's Mojang account, I had become aware of both the open-ended nature of Minecraft and some of the more famous resulting uses of it . I remember reading in the newspaper about a West Virginia high schooler who had built an extremely—one might even say insanely—detailed model of the state capitol in the game. There were also apparently schools that were using Minecraft in class, for things like geometry lessons. (If you are familiar with the way everything in the game consists of regular-sized blocks, this will instantly make sense.)
So it was that, at the moment of decision, it was possible to rationalize that playing Minecraft was a creative and possibly even educational activity; that it was not—like Doom and Call of Duty—simply a consumer version of DARPA-developed tools for desensitizing young soldiers to violence and blood (although perhaps that's an urban legend); and that in many ways it might not even deserve to count as the "screen time" everyone was obsessing about because, although it involved a screen, it also involved thinking and planning, unlike a mere TV show. Certainly actually playing Minecraft seemed better than passively watching pale basement dwellers play it on YouTube.
And it must be acknowledged that both children did and do, in fact, use Minecraft in creative and idiosyncratic ways. Most of Axl's Minecraft time has been spent in so-called "Creative Mode" (i.e., your character can't die), building elaborate models and recreations of both the settings of other video games he'd heard about on YouTube but which we wouldn't let him play (mostly "horror" video games like Five Nights at Freddy's, Evil Nun, Baldy's Basics, etc.) and representations of his rapidly shifting real-world obsessions, such as the Reactor 5 building at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Belle's use of Minecraft goes in other directions and mostly reflects her fascination with animals and role-playing and fantastical dwellings: zoos, farms, and elaborate mansions with adjunct menageries.
Minecraft remains a solid favorite around here, but these days almost all of this household's game-playing action is on Roblox. Roblox is not a game but a "platform," a free-to-join website where you can find and play a massive variety of games as well as the tools and templates to build your own. How massive a variety? The corporate Roblox website boasts of offering "millions of immersive 3-D experiences," there seem to be somewhere north of 30 million daily users, and the company—which, it must be said, has benefitted immensely from the pandemic and associated quarantines and lockdowns—will go public via direct listing sometime next month, with a valuation of $30 billion.
We were willing to let Roblox into our lives because it seemed generally PG and didn't cost money upfront, although of course we've ended up giving money to Roblox nonetheless through the magic of "in-game purchases," the latest advance in the now seven-decade-long campaign to separate U.S. adults from their money via their children. The children periodically use their allowance money to buy $5 worth of Robux, the in-game currency, which is used to purchase new outfits and special abilities for their avatars. Once upon a time, allowing the children to spend real money on digital clothes and accessories felt like a betrayal of all that was good and right in the world, but—like frogs whose originally cool bath is gradually warming up—we're getting used to it.
Roblox's common development platform and programming language gives all of its games a similar, somewhat cartoonish aesthetic, but the games vary considerably in quality and content. Some are obviously made by children, but there are others that are clearly developed by professionals. The main categories of games are "obbies" (obstacle courses), role-play (total sandbox worlds, often tying into movie franchises or one or another young-reader graphic-novel series, as well as historical settings, like a World War II battlefield), and what I think of as "world of work" games, in which players essentially have jobs and earn points (another, less valuable, form of in-game currency) for doing things like fulfilling pizza orders or loading ore into cargo ships in collaboration with whatever other random players are present.
I feel I would be remiss not to also mention "Broken Bones," a game in which you fling your avatar off buildings and down hillsides and win points based on, as the name suggests, the extent of resulting injuries.
One of the undeniably fun-looking aspects of Roblox is the ability for kids to meet up and play games with their friends. When the children sign on, they can look at a list of other accounts they've "friended," including both people they know IRL and strangers known only by their Roblox avatar and user name, and join them in whatever particularly game they're playing at that moment.
Belle is the household's leader in this sort of social gaming. Last spring, not long after the schools closed down, one of her third-grade classmates moved to the suburbs of Salt Lake City, and the two girls soon developed a fast online friendship that was both genuinely heartwarming to see and, in combination with the psychological stresses and pressures of the pandemic, a major contributor to the upending of what had been our rules forbidding any screen time at all on weekdays.
We felt bad enough that our own kids were cut off from their friends, and then here was this poor girl who had moved across the country to another place where schools were closed and so couldn't make any new friends—well, you get the picture. Belle and her friend now "meet up" in one or another Roblox game pretty much every evening and sometimes also at noon on weekend days, chatting via video call on Facebook Messenger Kids while joining each other mostly in role-play games, where they act out their own make-believe storylines while inhabiting dragon or wolf or flying cat avatars. Axl's Roblox time is less social—apparently his friends just aren't as into it as he is—but of course we couldn't let one kid have daily screen time while still restricting the other, and so here we are.
Periodically, Petra and I grow frustrated with one or another of what you might call the externalities of this much screen time—Axl, in particular, has a kind of red dye #5 reaction whenever his screen time ends, turning loopy and hyper, and Petra and I both sometimes mourn that, for so much of each evening, we mostly only see the children from behind, tousled little heads silhouetted against their respective glowing screens. On the other hand, this often gives the two of us—our brains too frazzled by plague life for real conversation—the chance to curl up on the couch together to watch something of our own.
Like most of what looks like parenting "decisions," our choices related to screens have usually been made more out of exhaustion than anything else.
We were wrong to think we could avoid video games, or at least that it would be easy to do so. Were we also wrong to try to restrict screen time at all?
I was taken aback once to hear a friend mention how, after Halloween trick-or-treating, he tells his children to eat as much candy as they want and then offers to buy the rest from them for such a substantial fee that they never say no. He told me he does this with two purposes in mind: one, of course, is the hope that they will sicken themselves and develop a negative association with the stuff (one can dream, I suppose); and, two, he doesn't want them to spend the next two months getting used to eating even an allegedly "sensible" small portion of candy on a daily basis.
His approach makes a certain sense, if you think about it, in a way that raises questions about Petra's and my approach to screen time. Granted that the development of a healthy relationship with digital entertainment technology is crucial to a happy and fulfilling life these days, what's the best way to help children do so?
Looking back, I see that we behaved as though screen time was a potentially toxic substance that we had to limit from the start, but when I see how the children—especially Axl, as it happens—are drawn to screens like moths to porch lights and go to extraordinary measures to make sure they get what they clearly account for as their allotted daily doses, I can't help but wonder if this is not despite but because of our restrictions.
By taking such a hard line, did we make screen time scarce, in the economic sense, and thus inflate its value in the children's minds? Was it a mistake to try to limit it at all? Have we made screen addicts out of the kids just as surely as vegan hippies end up raising soda-swilling McDonald's addicts?
So far, it certainly looks that way.
Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Eventualities
My current job at Waldhurst City Hall is not my first in the service of this august city. Back in the mid-2010s, I was an honest-to-God city official—not a rank-and-file plebeian, as now, but the sworn holder of an appointive office.
I resigned from that position after four years, but—this being a small town—my successor was a neighbor and friend and we would chat from time to time about how things were going for her. During one of these conversations, she asked me about my mirror.
Whenever one starts a new job, especially an office/"information worker" position like this one, there are inevitably certain traces and signs—a sort of archaeological record—of the previous incumbent, and one cannot help but try to form a picture of that person. When I started in that position, I wondered about the preponderance of mechanical pencils in the desk drawer (I'm more of a pen guy, myself) and what seemed like a surprisingly small number of folders on the computer hard drive. Just how much had that guy deleted before leaving—and why?
What my successor was wondering about was the stick-on, wide-angle mirror she had found affixed to the wall opposite the door.
"Is that what I think it is?" she asked.
It was—that is, I admitted, I had indeed placed this mirror so that, even when I was facing away from the door, I might have some warning of someone entering, even if—especially if—they were trying to move quietly.
Not generally being one to discuss my own defensive measures, I didn't inquire what she planned to do if the mirror showed her that someone was trying to sneak up on her, but I will now disclose that, during my time in that office, I had made certain... preparations.
I kept a three-foot wooden stake leaning in a corner near my desk, for example. This was, in fact, a perfectly normal object for me to have around, because I was involved with the administration of city elections and we issued these stakes to our poll workers for posting those "no electioneering" signs around the 300-foot perimeters of their polling stations. Only the custodian would have noticed that this particular stake never seemed to get issued to anyone and instead remained in the same spot, within arm's reach of my workstation, year in and year out.
As for the can of pepper spray in my top desk drawer—okay, okay, you got me. Sitting every day in a public office in a city government building with no access restrictions and a security posture that halfhearted at best, I had eventually concluded that there was a non-zero chance that I might one day be physically attacked and did not want to be entirely without recourse.
If this sounds paranoid, consider that—on the day of my swearing in—the mayor's secretary pointed out the "panic button" mounted under my new desk. Pressing this button was supposed to alert the police department on the first floor and bring an officer running, she told me, then observed that the system didn't seem to work very well, "so don't count on it."
Although some people might have been surprised and unnerved to find such a system in place at their boring new office job—as opposed to at, say, a bank or a liquor store—I would have been more unnerved to learn that no one had considered this kind of eventuality.
A city hall, after all, is the locus of decisions that, considered from a certain angle, can be summed up as restricting the rights and spending the money of the local residents and business owners. I understood coming in the door that this is a relationship that can reasonably be expected to stir strange and ominous passions under the right (wrong) circumstances, and that it is not unheard of for these passions to manifest in violence against public officials. It seemed crazy to suppose this couldn't happen here, in a state with the motto "mountaineers are always free," where residents have proved to be above-average susceptible to the generations-long rightwing propaganda project painting government as evil and public officials as enemies of the people, and where the population is probably about as heavily armed as in any other state in this extraordinarily heavily armed country.
This was my take on the situation even before, on my second day, someone who had been described to me on my first day as a "nutcase" dropped by to monologue at me for the better part of an hour about what he considered a conspiracy enabled by my predecessor that had prevented him running for mayor ten years earlier and "destroyed his political career."
This was my take on the situation even before, within my first year on the job, I found myself being filmed by two "sovereign citizens" as they presented certain bizarre "legal" documents in service of their request to access certain police department records.
This was my take on the situation even before the public meeting concerning the imposition of a new public safety fee for everyone served by our fire department, when one objector in the audience fixed me with a silent, baleful glare for the better part of an hour.
This was my take on the situation even before another public meeting when I was just about shouted off the stage while presenting information about a proposed law enabling relatively mild regulation of and limited action against dangerously dilapidated structures, but which a group of protestors seemed to consider objectionable to an extent on par with the Nuremberg Laws (not that this particular group would have been likely to object to the Nuremberg Laws specifically, but I digress).
And this was my take on the situation even before I came to understand that, if more than a few longtime Waldhurst residents suspected the worst of their city government's competency and honesty, they could have come by these suspicions honestly. I can verify, based on what eventually became my intimate familiarity with certain dusty bankers' boxes of records in forgotten basement storerooms, that it really was once fair to say that this town was run by a "good old boys" network of buffoons, well-intentioned amateurs, and a small but influential minority of genuinely venal individuals.
When I was first appointed to office, I enjoyed a public image as a non-member of this network, an outsider who wouldn't be beholden to the town's long-established ways and patterns and might therefore have a chance of effecting positive change. After resigning that position and then, a year ago, returning in a communications role, I was surprised to learn that, in some quarters, the fact that I'd served the city before meant that I was now one of the good old boys. I could only have been hired, according to this perspective, because of a kind of nepotism—never for my skills and knowledge as a mid-career communications professional with deep prior knowledge of the organization I'd be serving.
The fact that people's suspicions about Waldhurst city government were seriously out of date even by the time of my original appointment doesn't seem to have registered widely. There is still and will probably never stop being a small but vocal contingent issuing a constant drumbeat of allegations of corruption and malfeasance against the city government on the letters page of the local paper or on Facebook. It is discomforting to see how readily others seem to agree with and support these accusations.
Then came the pandemic and its stay-at-home, closure, and mask orders, and I saw a side of many of my fellow Waldhurstians that I would have preferred not to.
It was with professional interest, then, that—during this last summer of Netflix and quarantine—I ended up watching a documentary called Tread. Released July 29 and becoming one of the platform's ten most popular offerings within days, Tread tells the true story of Marvin Heemeyer and the destruction he wreaked on the small town of Granby, Colorado one summer's day in 2004.
Heemeyer, a talented welder, moved to Granby in the early nineties and established a muffler shop on a 2-acre piece of land he purchased at auction. I am no expert on real estate pricing generally, much less in Colorado specifically, so I cannot say whether his $42,000 winning bid would have struck most people as a good price for this land in absolute terms.
However, $42,000 must certainly have seemed an excellent price to Heemeyer during the brief period of time when it seemed that his neighbor, a concrete company, wanted to purchase his land for $250,000 as part of a planned plant expansion. But Heemeyer kept raising his selling price, ultimately to $1 million, and eventually the company decided to proceed with its plant expansion without buying his property.
At some point during Heemeyer's subsequent and ultimately fruitless battle opposing a zoning change needed by the concrete company, the town council fined him $2,500 for his ongoing failure to connect to the town's sewer system. Given that making this connection would apparently have cost Heemeyer something like $80,000, his reluctance was understandable even as his claim of unfair treatment was not. It is simply the case that Granby town code requires property owners to pay for the installation of water and sewer service-lines from the main trunk to their properties, and Heemeyer would have needed to lay such a line across some 60 feet.
Heemeyer seems not to have considered that maybe he got a good price on two acres of commercially zoned land inside city limits precisely because it lacked a sewer connection and installing one would be expensive. Heemeyer purchased his land at auction, which raises the possibility in my mind that he simply showed up and started bidding without the proper due diligence. If he'd consulted first with a real estate agent or attorney, he have been reminded that this was just the sort of possibility that one needs to look into before waving one's bidding paddle for the first time.
On June 4, 2004, Heemeyer drove this bulldozer through the wall of his shed and, for the next two hours, blazed a trail of destruction through Granby.
Using the bulldozer, Heemeyer destroyed 13 buildings, including the library, the town hall, the house of the former mayor (who by that point had been dead for three years), various structures on the grounds of the concrete plant, the offices of the local newspaper, and a hardware store whose owner was one of the local power brokers he believed were conspiring against him.
Somehow he managed not to kill or even hurt anyone, despite also shooting at power transformers and several huge aboveground propane tanks, the explosion of which could have caused death, injury, and property damage across a half-mile radius.
Although the Komatsu crawled along at only about 5 mph, it proved impervious to small arms fire and was, at least given locally available resources, essentially unstoppable. Colorado's then governor has for some reason always denied that there was talk of dispatching an Air National Guard Apache helicopter to take out the Komatsu with an air-to-ground missile, but—if I'd been in his position—I'd be embarrassed to admit I hadn't considered such an option.
Anyway, in the end, Heemeyer's rampage was ended by his own miscalculation. In the heat of destroying the hardware store, he dropped one set of his bulldozer's treads into a small basement and couldn't get moving again. So, in one of the more common final acts of this kind of rage spasm, he blew his brains out with a .357, making of himself the only casualty in a rampage that resulted in more than $7 million in damage.
In the grand tradition of cartoon villains, Heemeyer could not resist explaining his motivations and grand vision. Over the course of the two months leading up to the fateful day, Heemeyer made what eventually totaled about two hours of diaristic recordings. To hear him tell it, he had been wronged, shadowy local figures were maliciously aligned against him, and his planned attack was therefore necessary and justified.
"I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to become unreasonable," he intoned, like some piss-ant Travis Bickle wannabe. "Sometimes reasonable men do unreasonable things. I became unreasonable."
Just like many of the worst humans throughout history, Heemeyer felt his actions had divine sanction.
"God built me for this job," he said. "God blessed me in advance for the task I am about to undertake."
Our nation is currently rotten with rotten people who believe they are doing God's work and who, as a result, believe they are constrained by nothing more than the imperatives of what they understand as their divinely assigned missions. We saw thousands of these people at a certain riot in January, and Heemeyer's recordings sound like nothing so much as a 2004 preview of the self-pitying self-righteousness that was already on the way to becoming the dominant attitude of the U.S. right today.
Law-abiding until they see it necessary to break the law, "reasonable" until circumstances force them to be unreasonable, these are people who—like a small child starting to learn how to play board games—are totally willing to follow the rules, as long as they are assured of victory anyway, as long as it seems to lead to them winning, as, after all, God wants. And when God is on your side, what matter are the laws (and even lives) of mere humans, after all?
Just as White House official Stephen Miller is perhaps best understood as a school shooter who used immigration policy instead of an AR-15 to lash out at a world that had so far failed to take due notice of his excellence, so was the entire Trump presidency a sort of up-armored bulldozer of its own, doing its best to reduce our institutions to rubble and also seemingly unstoppable.
I suppose, in this metaphor, the pandemic is the pesky sub-basement where the leviathan finally tripped over reality. I'll go ahead and say it: Just as most of us now accept that a certain number of Americans had to die in World War II to ensure victory in that existential conflict, so may future generations come to give thanks for this pandemic and its human cost as the price of avoiding the total collapse of U.S. democracy. (Fingers crossed that this is not simply a four-year pause before the real deluge, but let's just say I'm glad I have dual citizenship and I have prioritized securing similar status and passports for my wife and children.)
It is clarifying to think of the current Republican Party as consisting of two distinct factions, "breakers" and "gamers," as Tim Snyder sketched out in a recent essay about rightwing coup attempts recent, current, and future. I don't know how original this formulation is to Snyder, but it's the first time I've encountered it, and it makes a lot of sense to me.
The GOP does indeed seem to be divided between (1) savvy institutionalists—for example, Mitch McConnell—who have mastered the current system as it is and would be content to continue manipulating its cranks and levers to protect and benefit the rich and powerful forever, and (2) wild-eyed outsiders looking for paths to power other than through democratic processes, who more or less openly believe that only the votes of White Christians count or at any rate should be counted, and that the definition of an unfair election is any that their side loses. (See: God on one's side, above.)
In the breakers' insistence that the U.S. is somehow more their country than anyone else's, in their ambition to take it back, in their acceptance of the idea that America was once "great" and now should be made so again, there is the distinct echo of Heemeyer's petulant and utterly unwarranted high self-regard. A certain mood is on the march, and I can't say I'm not concerned that it might express itself in violence, even here in Waldhurst. As my experience trying to share basic public health advice concerning the pandemic through the city's social media accounts has reminded me, this community has its share of damaged personalities not dissimilar from Heemeyer's.
These are people who exalt rules and rule-following until a certain rule gets in their way. Then, quite naturally, they feel frustrated. But unlike the legions of grownups who are able to accept, say, adverse zoning decisions or the requirement not to shit in the groundwater, there will always be some who lash out, apparently thinking, say, that frustration and setbacks aren't things that God wants people like them to experience.
The disturbing thing is that people like this now have so many narratives to choose from through which to elevate their petty grievances into heroic stands against awful and even evil people. These dark delusions range along a continuum from the power-behind-the-throne "good-old-boy networks" that so many people find it so easy to believe are the real power centers in places like Granby and Waldhurst, at one end of the scale, on up to the shadowy international cannibal-pedophile cabals of Democratic politicians, Jewish bankers, Hollywood movie stars, and lizard people whom Q followers and their fellow travelers rave about executing in the streets.
On the Reddit board r/QanonCasualties, I came across the story of someone who lives in a small town in eastern Ohio. He related how, over the last year, he made a concerted effort to counter "Q" material being posted by family and acquaintances concentrated in the next small town over. The results: His car has been vandalized, he has been openly called a "pedophile" by that town's police chief, and a police officer friend recently told him he'd probably better not even stop for gas in that town anymore. He felt concerned enough, he reported, to get a concealed weapons permit and arm himself. If you are tempted to scorn him for that and have not (1) closely examined the way Q followers actually talk online and (2) experienced the dynamics of rural small towns, you should consider that you really have no idea what the view is like from his shoes—and I'll just point out that he's not even a government official.
He is probably safe, of course. Most people like those who threatened this guy are unlikely to ever take the steps necessary to turn their violent fantasies into reality, of course, because they are lazy. Of those who actually do start to make plans, many are too stupid to avoid getting caught. For every driven, coldly calculating self-styled avenger like Heemeyer, there seem to be no shortage of dipshits who end up trying to buy explosives from an undercover FBI agent.
It only takes one, though.