Masters of the universes

In a parallel universe – beyond the reach of any telescope, accessible only through our imaginations – there exists another version of me, you, and everyone we know. We inhabit a world much like this one. The hallmarks are all there: a planet we call Earth, Lean Cuisines stacked in grocery store freezers, and auto mechanics named Butch who smoke Lucky Strikes and listen to Steely Dan. At first blush, everything seems to be in order, a perfect replica of the reality we wear like clothing.

 

But take a closer look. Your Aunt Sylvia, the one with the Chuck Norris mustache and inexplicable crush on Dwight Eisenhower, is a poker millionaire; she won her fortune in those tournaments they air on ESPN2, sandwiched between Beer League Bowling and the Maxwell House Collegiate Interscholastic All-Psych-Major Women’s Softball Championships. She’s given you half her winnings, which you’ve invested in a business that makes sesame seed bagels shaped like the cast of “Saved By The Bell.”

 

Me? I’m a millionaire, too. I’m the founder and CEO of Bottombook, a social media website on which the only acceptable profile pictures are of peoples’ butts.

 

Here’s the part that’s a real gas. (Pun intended.) If the science is somehow true, then this parallel world – digital derrieres and all – actually exists.

 

I know, it seems farfetched. And it comes with about a thousand caveats. For one, the science of parallel universes is far from proven; lacking direct evidence, the strongest support for their existence is that they’re an essential component of other unproven theories, at the awkward crossroads of science and faith. The ground beneath them, however, isn’t as shaky as you might think. There are few things as exciting as a possibility, and the “multiverse” theory, as it’s known, is rife with them.

 

Somewhere, I’m a rodeo clown named Bingo with the word’s largest collection of antique cookie tins. True story.

 

The subject of alternate universes first caught my attention a couple of years ago, and reading “The Hidden Reality” by Brian Greene just added gasoline to the fire. Greene, a professor at Columbia University, is a physicist and string theorist who has the gift of distilling complex mathematical phenomena into an easily digestible form; in other words, he explains things such that even a relative dummy like me can understand them. The details aren’t important – and besides, there are way too many of them. There are a thousand different ways in which these other realities are possible, most of which require the cognitive ability of a Star Wars-level android to truly comprehend.

 

What’s important is that, if these other worlds do exist, then anything that’s a mathematical possibility, no matter how outlandish or absurd, is a reality, somewhere. These universes are infinite, fulfilling every hope, fear, dream and aspiration of which humankind is capable. That novel you wanted to write? A version of you has written it. The lottery ticket you scratched that was one number away from the jackpot? Elsewhere, it was a winner. Conventional wisdom once held that life was a series of forks in the road; choose the left path, and the right is closed off forever. What the multiverse does is fulfill those unchosen paths, and while we may not see them fulfilled in this reality, there’s something comforting about the thought that, in a sense, every wish comes true.

 

Somewhere, I’m an Oscar-winning actor with a pet ostrich and a house made of Almond Joys. No joke.

 

It’s understandable that Greene would want to devote an entire volume to the subject – it’s fascinating stuff, and I’m probably not doing it half the justice it deserves. But physicists’ ongoing study of duplicate mes and yous begs a question: Who cares? Why is it relevant?

 

In this universe, I attempt an answer.

 

The easy explanation is that researching topics like this unlocks the secrets that make the impossible possible; it wasn’t until Einstein’s special theory of relativity was published in 1905 that scientists developed technology to manipulate light particles, and that eventually led to the first television set. The general public may not care much about the constant speed of light, but take away “Project Runway” and they get feistier than a starving pitbull outside a butcher shop. Science matters.

 

It’s more than that, though. Students are exposed to a variety of topics throughout their academic careers, but reading and math are given the heaviest emphasis, as though a person can achieve fulfillment in life simply by reading Twain and teasing out the value of x. Not that those subjects aren’t vitally important, but look around. Technology reigns. We’ve got gadgets that pump blood through the bodies of people whose hearts are missing; we have telescopes in low-Earth orbit that detect water on planets in galaxies light-years away. Heck, we can use our phones to turn on house lights while we’re getting soused at an Atlantic City gambling table. Any future economy will depend heavily on technology, and those best prepared for it will raise generations that are, at the very least, scientifically literate. That means capturing the attention of children.

 

The multiverse fits the bill quite nicely.

 

Some of us have shelf lives on our imaginations. We spend the bulk of childhood wading through dreams and fantasies, embryonic visions of what we’d like the world to be. Then the hard-headed practicalities of adulthood turn us into pragmatists and cynics. The multiverse theory is a microcosm of one of science’s unique abilities: to resuscitate our capacity to redefine what’s possible. In a parallel world, racial harmony, political unity and world peace are all taken for granted, established principals which guide our greatest civilizations. That was achieved because the people of that world – the other mes, the other yous – imagined it into being. If they were able to make that a reality in their world, we can do the same in this one.

 

Somewhere, I’m laying on a hammock in Puerto Rico next to a bowl of grapes and a dog-eared copy of “Great Expectations.” A contented smile creases my lips. Everything is right with the world, and as a pink-orange sun slips below a line of cyrillas, I sigh and close my eyes. Then a humanoid robot massages my feet while playing “Peaceful Easy Feeling” on an external stereo system shaped like Drew Carey’s head.

 

True story.

 

Supersilly

Writer's note: This ran in the Journal Tribune on Friday, March 13.  Let's pretend all the references to "today" still make sense, whatya say?  

 

And start column... NOW.

 

Profound thought for the day: Our stories and anecdotes, when strung together, comprise the narrative of our lives. I’ve been drinking my Deep Juice.

 

Every time the 13th falls on a Friday, I think of my father. He’s reached the age at which his anecdotes have been sorted and filed into various greatest hits, and one of his favorite tidbits to share is that he celebrated his 13th birthday on Friday the 13th. He may call me with this information today. Often, factoids like this expand with age, swelling into grandiose adventures replete with narrow escapes and heart-pounding derring do – the fodder of dime-novel swashbucklers. Not this one. The eerie coincidence is enough.

 

Dad’s a superstitious guy, so the lack of embellishment is surprising in a way. I still half-expect that interesting little seed to someday blossom into a yarn bursting with black cats, snake eyes, and a fate-altering trip through the underbelly of a ladder. How does that work, exactly? Is there a God of Superstition sitting somewhere in the clouds, harp sitting neglected beside a weathered XBox controller, just waiting for someone to walk through the wrong space? I picture a computer programmer with angel wings watching us all on an array of Batcave-like screens, finger hovering over the “ruin day” button.

 

No, Timmy, don’t step on that crack! Ian the God of Weird Beliefs is gonna break your mother’s back!

 

One thing we should establish right off the bat is that superstitions are complete bollocks. Not to be nerdy and invoke the name of science, but if there were any truth to these claims – like Friday the 13th being an unlucky day – there would have been evidence by now, some data to make the whole thing plausible. Planes would be dropping from the sky. A million souls would trip and fall on a million misplaced banana peels. Pauly Shore would land a starring role in a movie. Bedlam.

 

Only those things don’t happen. Someone somewhere is surely having a bad day, but someone somewhere is always having a bad day, regardless of the date. Heck, just two Sundays ago I was struck by a bout of sneezing that lasted longer than a flight to Europe; my only recourse was a box of Alka Seltzer and a pile of tissues so massive it could’ve collapsed the roof of an Army barracks. That was a bad day. And there wasn’t a black cat in sight.

 

Yet people still believe this stuff. There could be any number of reasons why. Perhaps they were still impressionable children when they were told, for example, that it’s bad luck to open an umbrella indoors; it’s tough to shake parental warnings, even as we age and leave childish things behind. Sadly, those who avoid opening umbrellas in a crowded train terminal are missing the priceless looks on peoples’ faces. Judging from their horror, you’d think you slaughtered a lamb in offering to the pagan god of soggy socks.

 

Since most major superstitions trace their origins to ancient civilizations, it’s tough to determine how they actually took root. One such belief is that it’s bad luck to spill salt; worse, it’s supposed to “let the devil in,” according to a website called Psychic Library. Now, the fact that the site is called “Psychic Library” may mean it’s worth taking this information with a grain of salt (zing!), but it doesn’t seem farfetched to suppose that people once ascribed satanic connotations to the spillage of this venerable steak-enhancer. 

 

I remember learning about this particular superstition from my grandmother. We were eating at a McDonald’s when I was about 6 or 7, and when I knocked the salt shaker on its side, she promptly instructed me to take a pinch and toss it over my left shoulder. This was supposed to “cure” the concomitant bad luck. At that age, I thought nothing of it; I inhabited a world in which pro wrestling was real, reindeer could fly, and bears could dance and sing showtunes. Now I recognize it as being a relic of antiquated times. The origin probably went something like this: “Hey Kush-Ta, check it out. I totally spilled salt all over my sandals. Yeah, the nice ones with the rubies in the heels. But wait, that’s not the messed up part. Right after I spilled it, my daughter told me my beard was ugly, I stubbed my toe on a barrel of mead, and a donkey named Horace drop-kicked me in the groin and laughed ’till he couldn’t breath. Also, I’ve kinda got the hots for your wife. That’s gotta be Satan, right? It’s all about the salt, dude, I’m tellin’ you.”

 

Except it isn’t.

 

These wacky superstitions are amusing, and quaint, but it seems difficult to find any relevance for them in a world in which we can, for instance, sew fake hair into the scalp of a human head. We’re no longer cave dwellers, cowering in awe under the light of the stars, lost in bafflement at the mystery of what lurks in darkness. It’s amazing, really – in a few short centuries, we’ve gone from ignorant tribes of wide-eyed survivalists to slightly less ignorant civilizations that can send probes to alien planets and build robots which vacuum our Cheetos crumbs. Lingering superstitions are simultaneously a marker of the progress we’ve made, and of how much further we still need to go.

 

The Psychic Library claims that, in contrast to other civilizations, ancient Chinese and Egyptian cultures viewed 13 as a lucky number. Egyptians in particular believed there were 12 stages of life, each one a step closer to spiritual enlightenment, with 13 representing the eternal afterlife. Maybe my dad’s got a touch of the pharaohs in him. He maintains that his 13th birthday falling on Friday the 13th was a stroke of good luck, and that all such Fridays are similarly earmarked for good fortune. I don’t subscribe to that theory myself, but I admire his optimism. It’s rosier than the doom-and-gloom, black cats and dark clouds view of this still-ominous calendar date.

 

Tonight, I’m going for a drive – a late-winter jaunt to wherever whim may take me. I wonder what ill fortune might await. My guess? Nothing at all.

 

Under siege

There’s never a good time to get a cold. Rarely do you hear someone say, “Hey! You know what would be a real gas? Coughing ’tlll my throat catches fire, leaking from the nose like a broken faucet, and sneezing uncontrollably while driving on a traffic-clogged two-lane highway!” Anyone caught sputtering this nonsense is either supremely sarcastic or certifiably insane. Either way, they’d probably make for an entertaining dinner guest.

 

Yet it seems as though the common cold has a certain innate intelligence – some buried sub-animal instinct that lets it know the precise moment when it would be the most inconvenient to strike illness in its prey. Colds never assault us on lazy Sundays, when the only activities on the docket consist of slurping whipped cream from a can and watching “Golden Girls” marathons in our dinosaur jammies. Being all mucus-y may take the fun out of Rose and Dorothy’s trip to the aquarium, but at least we’re not at the office, buried to the tops of our filing cabinets in tissues and lozenge wrappers.

 

Cunning devils, these viruses. They know better than to wait for our boring stretches. They always ninja-kick our immune systems right before a big event, like a date with the cute gymnast from down the street with the knobby elbows and cockatoo-shaped birthmark on her neck. To cite a totally non-specific example.

 

I got sick way more often when I was a child, which I’m sure is a common theme among most adults. The younger we are, the less fortification our immune systems have against all manner of bacteria. Ever sit next to a sick kid in a public space or at a family gathering? It’s like sitting in the front row at a Gallagher show and being sprayed by chunks of smashed watermelon.

 

Not that it’s the child’s fault; it’s just what happens. Probably the worst instance from my own childhood came when I was about 12, as I was sucker-punched by an influenza virus that was the bacterial equivalent of a swollen-jowled baseball freak juiced on steroids. It laid me out with the kind of high fever that could power a generator. If I’d had raised lettering on my forehead, a farmer might easily have used my face to brand a cow. I was hot, is what I’m saying.

 

What made the incident even more vexing is that I was afflicted during my school’s Christmas break, which is absolutely not when a 12-year-old wants to be flattened by a bug. If a pre-teen could choose a time to be sick, it would be during a particularly challenging school week, one with a lot of algebra lessons and a history unit about the inventor of the button fly. But that was never my luck. I’d be mule-level robust during 99 percent of the school year, and then I’d get a week off and start hacking more violently than the Marlboro Man in a room full of burning asbestos.

 

Ah, 1993. What a year to get the flu. A popular video game for the Super Nintendo console, “Star Fox,” had just been released. I was expecting it as a gift. The game centers around a talking fox who pilots a spaceship through intergalactic landscapes littered with jacket-wearing gorillas and robots that look like centipedes. (You know, that old premise.) I had been reading about it for weeks in my nerdy fan magazines. Apparently, the game featured graphics so advanced that it was a whole new level of immersion, just a few strands of DNA removed from virtual reality. By ’93 standards, of course, this meant a bunch of crude polygons were assembled in patterns that could cause epileptic attacks in unsuspecting seizure bait.

 

I was pumped. Stoked. Frothing to play this game. Then, just a few days before I expected to board my spaceship and shoot a bunch of androids in their stupid android faces, I was leveled. Picture the worst headache you’ve ever felt, combined with the worst fever you’ve ever had, coupled with an inability to keep food down, and then throw in malaria and a stubbed toe for good measure. That was roughly the level of my incapacitated state.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time, what with family dropping by for the holiday, and the Andromeda Galaxy waiting to by saved by my awesomeness. But see, that was all part of influenza’s plan. The flu, the cold ... they know when it’s time to pounce. They’d make good military strategists, come to think of it. The U.S. Army’s next high-ranking general should be a petri dish filled with boogers.

 

A streak was recently broken. I hadn’t fallen prey to so much as the sniffles since just before Thanksgiving in 2012, when my unabashed food gorging was sullied by a nose stuffed tighter than a hit man’s car trunk. It was an impressive run. That run was obliterated last weekend by a bout of day-long sneezing which pinned me to the couch, helpless to do more than watch History Channel documentaries about the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler. It was an enlightening, in a throat-clogged, kill-me-now kind of way.

 

It wasn’t a full-blown flu, but it was still a stumble over one of winter’s hidden hazards. Everyone talks about the snow, as well they should – it’s by far the season’s biggest inconvenience, and we can measure it visually, peeking out our living room windows and taking instant stock of our immediate peril. But viruses are our silent assassins. They scheme and plan and make their offensive when we’re at our most vulnerable. Here we are, an advanced species capable of boring holes in mountains and making star-shaped raisin cookies, and all it takes to render us useless are dirty doorknobs and tainted air molecules. Lame.

 

Which is why we need to mount a counteroffensive, a biological version of the Normandy invasion. General Hand Sanitizer will oversee strategic operations. Staff Sgts. Nyquil and Alka-Seltzer will hem in the enemy with a two-pronged pincer attack, and Admirals Multivitamin and Grape Juice will coordinate movement on the ground. 

 

It’s March. The enemy’s on the ropes. Now let’s deliver the decisive blow.

 

Lies and the liars who tell them

“I cannot tell a lie.” This quote is often falsely attributed to George Washington, a man who’s presented to schoolchildren as a pillar of honesty and integrity – not to mention high fashion. (Powdered hair? Flared-out pantaloons? I do declare, Miss Scarlet, methinks I’ve got a man-crush.) 

 

The irony is that not only was Washington capable of lying, he did it often. And he was good at it. As commander-in-chief during the Revolutionary War, Georgie-boy had a heavy hand in the art of espionage, overseeing a massive network of spies that infiltrated British-occupied American cities. They fed him information about the redcoats’ movements, and in return he helped found a country that would become an epicenter of freedom, heroin-fueled jazz, and the Whopper.

 

He’s a revered man, obviously. Yet if he were around today, and still as deceptive, Americans would probably find a reason to hate the guy.

 

That’s because you can’t get away with dishonesty like you used to. 

 

Everything is now recorded and documented, immortalized in ones and zeroes. Absolutely everything. College students can’t streak across campus wearing Uncle Sam hats festooned with lit sparklers without the incident being uploaded to YouTube. People take pictures of their bowel movements for posterity. Heck, I can’t log onto Facebook without seeing old high school friends’ videos of their children sounding out the words to “Green Eggs and Ham” for the first time. If ever someone in my circle decides to wear Superman pajamas to their son’s first soccer game, I’ll find out about it, whether I want to or not.

 

This makes our leaders’ backtracking and false claims all the more curious. Late in 2013, as components of the Affordable Care Act were enacted, it came to pass that a handful of Americans would not be able to hold onto their then-current health insurance, despite President Obama’s earlier claims to the contrary. With the media in a tizzy, Obama stood at a podium, flag pin affixed patriotically to his lapel, and stated, in essence, “Uh, I never said that.”

 

Yeah you did, dude. Roll video.

 

There have been a rash of these incidents lately, with one coming just a couple of weeks ago from would-be presidential contender Rand Paul. Paul – whose hair, apropos of nothing, looks like a French poodle that’s been flattened by a bank safe – claimed never to have made comments skeptical of the efficacy of vaccines. Yet all one has to do is type “Rand Paul vaccines” into Google, and the first link is to a story in which he’s quoted as 

saying that vaccines can cause “mental disorders.”

 

In today’s political climate, it’s almost understandable that Paul would want to modulate certain of his positions; far from targeting merely the foil hatters and gun hoarders of his own party’s base, he’s now got to appeal to the whole dumb lot of us, and that means riding along on the safe middle road of compromise. But why wouldn’t he just say, “I’ve changed my mind?” Or, “I’ve learned something, and am no longer a blithering ninny?” He might as well toss his credibility into the Hudson with cement blocks on its feet. Maybe it’s the vaccine talking.

 

It’s not exactly the best era for any pretender to the throne to be out of touch with his or her constituents. In decades past, a public figure could be moderately uncoupled from the national zeitgeist, and citizens might only have an inkling, a trace suspicion, that the person in question was a raving boob. That era has gone the way of bell bottoms and swooshing wolf-man hairdos. Ever since home computers started connecting people to troves of information, accessible through a few keystrokes, the American people have made it clear that there are two things they want above all else: straight shooting from their elected leaders, and streaming videos of dogs dancing the “Macarena.” Not always in that order.

 

I’ll say one thing about digital pictures and video – they’re great for settling bets. This is where I make the embarrassing admission that I’m one of those dweebs who’s constantly taking snapshots, creating a cohesive life record that rivals anything on the scale of reality television stars and long-dead presidents. Occasionally, this record proves handy. About a year ago, I was shooting the breeze with a friend of mine, and there arose a disagreement over when he first started dating his wife; he said 2007, I said 2006. With my trusty laptop at the ready, I delved into my impeccably organized archives and unearthed some photos of the two of them taking gargantuan sips from a giant bowl of liquor in the mold of a constipated dragon. Subsequent images showed them dancing on a bar in Portland, hips swiveling in a manner that I’m pretty sure is forbidden on daytime television. The shots were from 2006. “What do you know,” he said. “You were right.”

 

Point being, if even my non-famous friend can’t escape from reality, then a public figure has no chance at all.

 

Politicians have always been a step or two behind the people they’re elected to represent. Americans list to starboard, and so do they – eventually. But not before railing against the immorality of starboard, denying the popularity of starboard, and calling starboard’s mother a cross-eyed goon. Then opinions “evolve,” and for about two minutes everything’s copacetic. It’s those two minutes that our tie- and pantsuit-wearing officials need to learn how to navigate. Disillusionment with the process is endemic, and it’s due in no small part to the backtracking, equivocating, and I-never-said-that evasions which are exposed so readily by our honest technologies. There’s no longer any place to hide. Better for these people to just shrug their shoulders and say, “You know what? This used to be my stance and now it’s not. Deal with it.”

 

It may not be on a par with the cherry tree fable, but with shooting that straight, even Washington himself would be impressed.