Everybody drops the dime

Every time I go through a toll booth that requires I pay some odd amount – $2.25, $1.75, whatever the case may be – I fork over a crumpled wad of singles and await my change, which usually comes in the form of quarters. Obsessive compulsive disorder demands that I place these quarters face-up inside my car’s cupholder, which means, as I’m driving away from the booth, I usually spare a quick glance at the jangling coins in my hand to make sure everything is copacetic (OCD is a cruel dictator, bossy and unrelenting). 

 

There, in light-refracting profile, is the face of George Washington. Most of us don’t give the guy much thought. Between quarters and dollar bills, he’s so ubiquitous that he’s become invisible, more symbol than man, and many of his famous exploits have been told and re-told so many times that they’ve taken on the waxy veneer of mythology. Everyone’s seen the painting of him crossing the Delaware River, but there’s something surreal about the image; maybe it’s the heroic pose. During the actual crossing, he was probably hunkered down in the boat with a towel over his head, shielding his face from the rain, and muttering rants about the British being a bunch of tosspot tallywhackers, or whatever passed for insults in 1776. The way it’s portrayed, you’d think he was about launch into flight like Superman and torch the redcoats’ encampment with his eyeball lasers.

 

Which would have been awesome.

 

So sure, there’s some exaggeration there, as there is with most of our heroes. But beneath that, he was undeniably a remarkable fellow. He changed the world. That’s how you get your face on money.

 

Imagine you’ve got a fistful of change and random bills laid out on a table in front of you. Look at the faces you see. There’s Washington and Lincoln, of course; they’re like the Lennon and McCartney of American presidents. If you’re lucky enough to have a $100 bill, you’ll see the mulleted mug of one Benjamin Franklin, inventor, statesman, and kite-flyer extraordinaire, the only man in history to so closely resemble a melted lump of cheese. Those of you at the helm of massive international drug cartels may occasionally catch a glimpse of a rare $10,000 note, with the sour face of Salmon P. Chase staring back at you – he was the country’s 25th treasury secretary, and by all accounts had a rotten disposition, perhaps owing to the fact that he was named after a smelly fish. At the other end of the moneybags spectrum is the Susan B. Anthony silver dollar, one of the rare instances that Yankee scratch is graced with the visage of an honest-to-goodness woman. 

 

Of the rest of the faces you’ll see on money, most are past presidents. All have some form of greatness in common, which, if you’re minting moolah, is the only sensible way to go. You don’t want people’s pockets weighed down by profile shots of Pauly Shore or the cast of “Three’s Company.” 

 

But there’s a problem. The most recent historic personage to be immortalized on currency is John F. Kennedy, whose chipmunk cheek bubbles boldly from the half-dollar coin. The U.S. Treasury seems to have settled in with a comfortable lineup of true-blood patriots for its array of bills and coinage, but Kennedy breathed his last in 1963; if there were ever a change to the iconic figures represented on American money, a new person added to the lineup, it would almost have to be someone who’s made a name in public life within the past 50 years or so – an acknowledgment that national history didn’t end with Kennedy’s cherubic smile.

 

The question then becomes: Who?

 

There’s hardly anyone that a majority of Americans would agree upon, or be comfortable with. You might think of Lyndon Johnson, who helped to pass landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s; but he’s often associated with U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which makes him too controversial to be realistically considered. Conservatives seem to have a near-embarassing man-crush on Ronald Reagan, but some of his economic principles are still a source of contention in partisan bickerings – plus, it seems unlikely that the visage of someone who starred in a Hollywood film with a monkey (“Bedtime for Bonzo,” 1951) would ever be used to buy Milk Duds at the local cineplex. Then there’s Obama, who broke significant racial barriers to reach the Oval Office, but then became an enormously polarizing figure, inspiring in some the kind of hatred usually reserved for bridge trolls and movie villains with curly mustaches. If it weren’t for their presidential pedigrees, these are men who might be earmarked for thumb-breaking by a thick-browed gangster named Knuckles.

 

You hear a lot about political divisiveness nowadays, and for good reason. Everyone’s hero is somebody else’s enemy. If greatness is determined by consensus, then there haven’t been any great figures in American public life since the days when journalists could smoke unfiltered Lucky Strikes at their desks.

 

If the Treasury were to overhaul its lineup with figures from the past half-century – figures most everyone could agree were cool and worthy – it would almost have to seek subjects outside the normal spheres of politics and public service. What a revealing mirror that would hold up to society. You’d probably see denominations featuring Bart Simpson, or Fonzie from “Happy Days.” Drinkers would tip waitresses with Super Mario and Spider-Man; high school graduates would get cards from their grandparents with the original lineup of KISS tucked in the fold and a message reading, “You’ve earned it!”

 

That’s about what it’s come to. Either that, or we take a cue from foreign countries and adorn our money with ducks and bears. To my knowledge, ducks have never ordered drone strikes.

 

All a passing, toll booth-inspired whimsy, of course. There have been no indications that the stern-faced gents on money will be welcoming new recruits in the near future – and that’s a good thing, given the lack of worthy candidates. It’s just disheartening that the country hasn’t yet produced another Washington or Lincoln, or even a Salmon P. Chase, for that matter. We’re overdue for a public figure of that caliber.

 

Unless of course we’re merely overlooking the obvious. I envision a bumper sticker reading, “Superman for President, 2016.” Kinda has a nice ring to it.

 

The voice

When I first landed a job in journalism – writing for sports, this was – I bought one of those handheld digital recorders, thinking I’d be able to quote people more accurately if I could just replay the entire interview and transcribe the interesting bits. I used it for about eight months; it’s now collecting dust in a kind of gadget graveyard, tucked alongside time-weathered oddities like my old cassette player and Virtual Pet keychain. If I were to put on my archaeology hat and retrieve these dubious treasures, I’d be more likely to play with the Virtual Pet than the digital recorder.

 

Because frankly, I’d rather flush an alien’s pixelated poop than hear the sound of my own voice.

 

I hate it. Hate hate hate it. It’s whiny, nasally and high-pitched, a Jay Leno-esque trill that makes nails on a chalkboard sound like Beethoven’s Fifth. I’d sooner let a family of white-breasted warblers build a nest in my ear than willingly listen to myself speak. I’d eat a battery-acid-and-shoe-polish sandwich, or ride across the Sahara on the back of a flatulent sumo wrestler, just to avoid that inauspicious fate.

 

Those piercing tones, that unfettered nerdiness. How can that possibly be me?

 

From the comments I hear, I’m hardly the first person to ask this question. Virtually no one enjoys the sound of their own voice, with the possible exception of pretentious blowhards and syndicated radio hosts (often these are one and the same group). What we hear in our heads when we talk is so far removed from reality that it’s easy to chalk it up to some biological prank, the auditory equivalent of a hip-slimming funhouse mirror. 

 

If I’d known I was destined to sound like a chattering chipmunk, I’d have taken a vow of silence and become one of those robed monks in Tibet, living in quiet meditation and silently washing my underwear in mountain streams.

 

I’m a science guy. Whether pondering my own speech or musing on the unnatural 

consistency of day-old pizza crust, I like to seek scientific explanations for things – mostly out of curiosity, partly because I still harbor the fantasy of cleaning house on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” And lo and behold! Science has an answer for why our recorded voices sound so different than the version we hear in our own minds.

 

There’s good news and bad news.

 

The bad news is that the recorded version of our voices is the reality. Those annoying tones that make us cringe when we watch home movies of wedding toasts in which we drop the F-bomb and insult the bride’s mother – that’s what other people hear when we deign to open our mouths and make noise. Sound, apparently, can reach our ear drums through two different paths, and those paths affect what we perceive. 

 

Let’s say you’re asking your friend for advice on the best place to score a half-pound of Columbian cocaine, right? When you talk, you’re disturbing air molecules around you – that’s sound in a nutshell – and those perturbed molecules enter your friend’s auditory canal, tickle his eardrum, and get processed by the cochlea, a fluid-filled spiral in the inner ear. Voila. He hears your request, and is horrified, because cocaine can cause addiction, poor health, and awful Motley Crue albums. 

 

You hear something different because you’re hearing the synthesis of two different frequencies. You’re getting the tones produced by the jangled air molecules, but those tones harmonize with the sound reaching your cochlea directly through your vibrating head. (I swear, this is totally real.) Your head enhances the deeper, lower-frequency vibrations of your voice. All this information, I should note, comes from a 2009 article in Scientific American, which is now the object of my wrath. Because instead of thinking I sound like George Clooney, like I do in my head, I know my real voice hews a lot closer to Roseanne Barr on a helium bender.

 

Did I say there was good news? I lied. There’s no good news.

 

About a million and a half years ago, sometime between the fall of Troy and the invention of pants, I hosted a college radio show called “Solid Rock.” Maybe this is common to all amateur jockeys, or maybe I’m just a narcissistic boob, but something happened to me when I sat in that booth and bellied up to the mic. I shed all vestiges of shyness and became Radio Guy, your wise-crackin’, glib-tongued guide through the world of screeching guitar solos and lyrics about werewolves. Every two or three songs, I’d do what all the other hosts did: Fill the airwaves with chatter. Blah blah blah, yakety yakety yakety, on and on about bands and classic albums and lineup changes and leather chaps with tassels. At the time, I thought I was pretty good at it – and except for one instance when I conducted an “interview” with my own lame impression of Kermit the Frog, I may well have been. No matter my level of skill, though, I’d be loathe to go back through the old tapes. Memory Lane can be a scenic road, but revisiting those on-air rants with my newfound knowledge of sound vibrations would be cringe-worthy at best, what with my high-pitched, Smurf-with-a-heavy-cold falsetto. Better to confine my ravings to the written word, where I can convince myself I sound like James Earl Jones and nobody’s around who can tell me any differently.

(Note: One of my editors just told me differently. Crap.)

 

It’s too bad, really. I’m sure if I gave the ol’ recorder a good re-charge and snooped around its digital vault, I’d uncover some half-forgotten fragments of time, the kind that would instantly transport me back to what now feels like a long-ago life: Ancient track meets, prehistoric basketball games, and me with my hesitant questioning, a rookie green as grass. Alas, wine glasses would shatter. So would my cognitive dissonance, which allows me to get up and face a day full of interviews and interoffice chatter without burying my head in blushing, ostritch-like shame. 

 

Oh, if only those Tibetan monks had room for one more. Come to think of it, I knew there was a reason why they’re always smiling.

 

I'm THIS many!

“You’re not as old as you make yourself out to be in your column, you know.”

 

This from our front office guru, Donna, whose real name I’m using because she’ll probably be thrilled that I mentioned her. (Hi, Donna!) She laid that one on me a few weeks ago, after I had written about Fuddy Duddy Syndrome, a condition that in fact knows no age requirements, and is marked by the slow metamorphosis from carefree youngster to crotchety cynic. Symptoms of this affliction include an aversion to modern pop music, a tendency to pee more often than is strictly necessary, and a borderline disturbing affection for warm socks. In my case, check, check and check.

 

But Donna’s right. I’m not as old as I make myself out to be. Fact is, I just passed my 33rd birthday – still young-ish, with (I hope) plenty of years left to do young-ish type things, like hitting the bull’s eye in a dunk tank at a roadside carnival with a screaming fastball. (I’ve never done this, but hey, fingers crossed.) If I can successfully avoid contracting terminal diseases, and assuming an overall-wearing, vodka-swilling accordion player doesn’t randomly hit me with a stolen tractor, then I’ve likely got decades of my life left to live. Plenty of time to put off worrying about elder-ish stuff. Ear hair, for example. Or going deaf and cranking the volume on “Seinfeld” like it’s Def Leppard.

 

There are two reasons, really, why I’m so hung up on the aging process. One is that there’s something darkly comic about it. I exaggerate my age-related woes because I find them funny, at least in a quasi-tragic, laugh-or-cry-like-a-soggy-diapered-baby kind of way. Either I chuckle at myself, or I despair over every gray hair, every bowl of doctor-recommended bran flakes. Plus, come on. There’s something enticingly silly about the mental image of a 33-year-old man hunched over a crossword puzzle, muttering to himself in a faded bathrobe that smells of stale cigars and whiskey farts.

 

The true origin of my fixation, though, probably owes to that disorienting, early-thirties limbo in which I find myself. It’s a state in which I’m just now starting to feel the effects of age, and how it will start chiseling away at my young person’s faux-invincibility. Put it this way: Ten years ago, I’d think nothing of playfully wrestling a friend to the ground so I could apply, in obnoxious fashion, an unwanted noogie to his head. Today, a noogie might cross my mind as an amusing whimsy, but the practical side of my brain will say, “Whoa, pull the reins up, man. You’re gonna tweak that thing in your back. And what’s up with your knees? Just flick a rubber band at him and call it a day. Oh, and your nose looks like the tip of an ancient spear.” That last bit has nothing to do with age. My brain’s just a jerk.

 

This biological foreshadowing is surely something a veteran athlete would recognize. And the more intense the sport, the earlier a competitor will start to feel his or her own limitations. A running back in football is a prime example. Drafted just out of college, these thunder-thighed freaks of nature are generally hailed for their speed, agility, and ability to model underwear on billboards (something we just happen to have in common). Then they hit their early thirties, and the doughy, suit-wearing commentators in the media booth start chiming in with comments such as follows: “Well, Jim, it’s been a productive five years for Marcus Mugglebritches, but you’ve got to wonder how many years he’s got left. He’s not as quick as he used to be, and opposing defenses are starting to catch up. Plus he looks like the lovechild of Bill Cosby and a giant sack of bird feed.” Turns out commentators are jerks, too.

 

Granted, I’m not swerving and leaping my way around defensive linemen – and it’s a good thing, too, ’cause I’d be flattened faster than you can say “bug-eyed Armenian ventriloquist.” But I do exercise, and when you’re used to pushing your body to its limits, you start to notice when those limits become more ... well, limiting. For most activities, this ol’ fleshbag is perfectly serviceable, but as a running back in the NFL, I’d be well past my prime. Let’s leave out the obvious fact that, even in my twenties, I possessed roughly the same level of athleticism as a drowning centipede.

 

Other changes, naturally, are mental. An increased sense of civic responsibility. An appreciation for the jazz stylings of Miles Davis. A disturbing tolerance for the goofy tapdancers on PBS reruns of the Lawrence Welk Show. These are the kinds of things that can be attributed to what I’ll reluctantly call “maturation” – a state I have yet to reach fully, given my predilection for loud bodily noises and faces besmattered with various pies. In this sense, I may always be young; few thoughts are as depressing as not chuckling while some poor sap is picking lemon meringue out of his eyelashes. Still, when you glare at teenage motorists for blasting their music too loudly, you know you’ve passed a certain threshold.

 

Everybody experiences this at different ages, of course. I’ve met 18-year-olds that were older, in spirit, than my white-haired hippie of a father, and I’ve met octogenarians that you’d swear were bra-snapping youths in their swashbuckling prime. Me? I’m at a precipice. Not old, not young, but in an uncomfortable state of in-between, clinging to the vestiges of a bygone era while leaning full-shouldered into a fast-approaching future. My consolation is that, given continued health, I’ve still got a good half-century’s worth of time to mark my progress through this weird and wild obstacle course, gray hair and ornery musings be damned.

 

That’s enough to make a fella feel young again.

 

Manifest destiny

It would be strange to suddenly be living in Idaho, not least of all because I know nothing about it. Ask any random person what they know about Idaho, and the answer invariably comes back the same: “Uh, they’re the ones with the potatoes, right?”

 

Right. But that’s not exactly helpful. That’s like a defense witness saying, “Oh yeah, the murderer. He’s the one with the knife.”

 

Fact is, aside from potatoes, Idaho as a state doesn’t have much of an identity, at least to us ignorant fools on the East Coast, with our croissants and drawled-out R’s. That Big Dipper-shaped oasis might as well be Siberia. For all we know, Idaho is crammed tight with bug-eyed Martians and anthropomorphic cows who stand upright and play solitaire by the light of oil drum fires. Its chief exports could be baby formula and crystal meth. We simply don’t know. A few quick keystrokes on our computers or phones may be enlightening, but then we’d be making our assumptions on the basis of knowledge, thus ruining Idaho’s identity of having no identity.

 

Places like that abound. They promise mystery solely on the basis of having no defining characteristics.

 

Daydreaming leads to such thoughts. For me, the wistful, stare-out-the-window fantasy was a common one: Dropping everything, leaving my life behind, and starting fresh someplace, with nary a string connecting me to the world I once knew. Many of us tinker with this tought from time to time. Mostly it’s an idle whimsy, a what-if scenario that removes us, temporarily, from our troubles and stresses. In this state of mind, nothing is a better balm for what ails than packing up, heading west, and settling in a one-horse town, our goals no loftier than opening a modest dentistry practice and collecting stamps in corn-stalk solitude.

 

When the daydream becomes reality, though, it’s rarely the corn we head for. Those of us brave enough to relocate into another life usually target the well-known meccas, the population centers caricatured and made accessible by movies and TV. We’re lured by the siren songs of honky-tonk bars in San Antonio, music festivals in San Fransisco, coffee shops in Seattle. There’s a false familiarity there, somehow no less valid for being false. The potato fields of Idaho are almost better as vague abstractions, mirages that shimmer and then disappear the closer to them we get. If they didn’t dissipate like steam, the appealing enigma would be lost.

 

Picture yourself in Worland, Wyoming. You can’t. You can’t because you don’t know where the hell it is, or what you’d find if you went there. Not even Worland’s Wikipedia page is much help. From it, I now know that it’s a town of a little over 5,000 people spread across four square miles in Washakie County, geographically situated in the north-central nowhere of this vanilla expanse. Average temperatures are moderate. The median age is 39.8 years. There’s a post office. That’s about it. Nothing about industry, which means it’s probably a bedroom community; nothing about nightlife, because there probably isn’t any. If the Space Needle and Golden Gate Bridge are well-known icons of otherness and new beginnings, Worland is a generic substitute for everything else – not a place you escape to, but the place where you do your dreaming, where wanderlust is bred in the first place. Paradoxically, that’s the very reason I wouldn’t mind visiting sometime.

 

I was in Australia once. For three weeks when I was 15, I was a student ambassador for People to People, an international organization dedicated to introducing young people to different cultures. Chaperoned but parentless, fortified by countless miles in a chartered bus, my experience was a crash course in the unfamiliar – mammoth cities of towering steel, rainbow choral in the Great Barrier Reef, Outback plains lit only by stars. One memory has retained more clarity than the rest. My delegation was being shepherded out of Sydney after touring a factory that makes opal pendants. Our tour guide, Bubbles – yup, that was her name – suggested to the bus driver that he pull over at a rest area so we fidgety teenagers could take care of business before the long haul to our next destination. The rest area was on a thin fingernail of grass bordering Sydney Cove, in full view of the Opera House, the inside of which we had seen the day before. I stepped off the bus just as a twilight sun had sunk below the waterline beyond Harbour Bridge, leaving residual smatters of purple and crimson streaking at corkscrew angles across a candy-colored skyline.

 

You know a moment carries a certain significance when nothing has to actually happen for it to stick with you. Aside from emptying an uncomfortably full bladder, it was a pretty unremarkable five minutes, all told. But between the view, the chilly late-autumn breeze, and my mood – tired from traveling, blank and unthinking – something shifted in me. All the pieces fell into place like the tumblers in a combination lock. I saw a life different from my own. It was like temporarily wearing the skin of a foreigner, seeing the world through their eyes; looking back, it may have been my first conscious moment of empathy. It was also the first time I seriously considered that maybe there were places in the world where the grass was greener. Still an idle whimsy even then, but fertile ground for a hungry imagination: I’d been there. I could picture it. My thoughts now had a point of reference; Sydney was no longer the great unknowable, a city lost in the metaphorical cornfields.

 

Maine is my home. I have no plans to leave it. But sometimes you look west, and wonder.

 

And is there a person in San Diego, or Fresno, or Portland, Oregon, who’s now looking east, wondering what’s on the other side of the horizon? I hope there is. I don’t know if I buy into the concept of a “soul mate,” per se, but I’m comforted by the thought that there are like-minded people out there – people closing their eyes and envisioning a life along the banks of the Mississippi, or nestled into the western mountains of North Carolina. They do it just to escape themselves for a little while. Because they can. It’s a source of nourishment.

 

Maybe they hop in the car, bid see-you-later to their Pacific bungalow, and hightail it toward the rising sun, not knowing what they’re looking for but expecting to find it anyway. Maybe I head west, looking for my next Sydney. And in a small pub in Worland, Wyoming – the only kind they have – we sit at opposite ends of the bar, make eye contact, and recognize each other. We smile and tip our drinks. The rest is up to us.

 

Someday.