The trouble with the maples

Origin stories fascinate me. Everyone and everything has one; they have to, or else nothing that is would be. (Huh?) But the geneses of certain things are shrouded in mystery and probably always will be, which makes them both enticing and deeply frustrating. Like a gorgeous woman who wouldn’t notice me if I was on fire and wrestling a polar bear.

Lately I’ve been pondering the origin of maple syrup. Partly this is due to the current maple season and a crack-like addiction to pancakes, but it was a recent trip to a nearby sugarhouse that made me wonder: How the hell was this stuff discovered? Not even the Internet can say for sure, and that’s how you know you’ve got a Holmes-level mystery on your hands.

It’s not like the stuff is easy to make. Production of the viscous treat is such an involved process that its discovery couldn’t have been pure chance; it’s unlikely that someone stepped in a puddle of sap, accidentally set their boots on fire, licked the bottom ’cause they were a weird goober and then said, “Hmm, this is actually quite tasty. Start production immediately!”  There’s way too much science in play, requiring a heap of shiny equipment that looks as though it could power the lunar module of Apollo 11.

One of the contraptions employed by a lot of modern maple producers is this thing called a reverse osmosis machine, and no, that’s not a device Lex Luthor uses to read the minds of Superman and the Justice League. In basic terms, it removes moisture from the raw sap so it can boil at a temperature higher than the boiling point of water. Apparently this is important. Exactly why, I couldn’t say – it sounds super technical, so it must be – but it reflects an understanding of the syrup-making process which is the end result of centuries of the craft’s evolution. The first person to make it certainly wasn’t using a reverse osmosis machine, but they understood something about maple sap that, once refined by subsequent generations, culminated in a gizmo that rivals the complexity of an early car motor.

And that’s pretty amazing.

Which makes the fuzzy origin even more vexing. There’s comfort in knowing how things started; it gives us a frame of reference, some orientation. Peter Parker became Spider-Man because he was bitten by a radioactive spider, giving him arachnid-like abilities, such as scaling walls and breathing through a thick film of cotton underwear. Cell phones became smartphones when late Apple CEO Steve Jobs decided that people were making way too much eye contact on the subway. These are things that have clear, definable beginnings. Heck, even the origins of the universe itself are less mysterious than those of maple syrup; once an infinitely hot and dense nugget of plasma, it exploded into being, giving rise to galaxies, stars, and J. Edgar Hoover. Tie it up with a bow, Mavis.

The best we can do with maple syrup is trace it back to the indigenous people of northeastern North America. Archaeological evidence suggests that these natives were processing sap long before Europeans arrived in the region; when the Europeans did come, they apparently liked the sweet goo so much that they set to work refining production techniques. Good thing, too, because by that time most of the natives were sick with influenza.

But there are no authenticated accounts of how it first crossed someone’s mind to boil sap into syrup. Wikipedia, my lazy source for most of this information, says that various origin myths and legends exist, most of them involving mystical spirits or anthropomorphic squirrels. As much as it pleases me to imagine a talking squirrel boiling sap in a pan over a roaring campfire, I’m more inclined to believe in a tooth fairy, or a fast food burger that doesn’t taste like a foot.

There are a lot of things we enjoy in everyday life whose stories have pages missing from their inaugural chapters. Beer was brewed at least as far back as the ancient Mesopotamians, but it’s not like there are historical accounts of some dude named Billy Beernuts deciding his fermented cereal grains had a nice kick to them; scientists had to pin down the general era of beer’s inception by performing chemical tests on old pottery jars. Coffee, same deal. Like maple syrup, mythical stories of coffee’s origin abound. The most interesting concerns a Yemenite Sufi mystic named Ghothul Akbar Nooruddin Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, whose insatiable appetite for consonants resulted in a name longer than most of the puzzles on Wheel of Fortune. “Joe,” as I like to call him, allegedly spotted birds of unusual vitality while traveling in Ethiopia, and after consuming the berries the birds had been eating, got a jolt that’s surely familiar to anyone who’s stayed up all night playing Nintendo and guzzling Mountain Dew. A cute story, but it smacks of B.S. Like other staples of modern life, its beginnings have been fuzzied by the sands of time.

The appeal of these mysteries is that they may never be solved, but that’s also what makes them so maddening. We don’t think about why we douse our pancakes in syrup; we just do it, as part of a practice handed down to us by the ancient mists. The way I see it, I’ve got two options. The first is to build a time machine and dedicate my life to pinpointing the long-lost genesis of maple syrup, skipping through the decades like a stone on the surface of a pond. The second is simply to shut up and enjoy my damn waffles.

It’s settled, then. Please pass the Eggos.

The Days of Grays

It finally happened. I knew it was going to eventually. It’s an unavoidable rite of passage, and unlike other milestones, like a first kiss, or first shave, this particular life event has an ominous quality – a whiff of age, and the future promise of joint pain in a living room that smells strongly of butterscotch candy.

Standing in front of the mirror, gazing at the untrimmed growth on my chinny-chin-chin, I spotted them, peeking out at me innocently betwixt the usual follicles of familiar brown.

Gray hairs. Two of them. Side-by-side and at attention, like well-trained members of a military corps dedicated to overthrowing the regime of careless youth.

Crap.

When you’re young, you look forward to seeing certain signs of aging. One of the hallmarks of childhood is relentless impatience; you hear older kids speak with those deepening voices that sound like the unstable crackle of cellophane, and you think, “Man, my voice is too high.” You see lanky teenagers with peach fuzz over their lips and wispy sideburns hugging their jawline, and think, “Man, my face is too smooth.” Each stepping stone along the path of maturity is a small victory, because rather than enjoy our fleeting childhoods – which only seem fleeting in retrospect – we will ourselves into grown-up status with alarmingly grim determination. The first time I shaved, it was like, “Okay! I’m ready for my cognac and my copy of the Sunday New York Times. Be a dear and fetch my slippers, ma! Tonight I settle in with a cigar and a dirty movie!”

What inevitably happens, of course, is that at some point we cross the threshold from c’mon-hurry-it-up to whoa-slow-it-down. And instead of victories, each crow’s foot or random nose hair is just another of Father Time’s merciless gut punches. He’s a jerk, that guy.

Granted, as markers of age go, gray hair isn’t exactly reliable. It happens to everyone at slightly different stages of life, so it’s not like you can spot someone’s cotton-ball mane and pinpoint exactly how old they are. It’s unique in that sense. Consider other phenomena: If someone is peeking at a dime novel through a pair of bifocals, there’s a pretty good chance the person in question isn’t too far off from a qualified membership to the AARP; a person using a walker to get around is likely an octogenarian. Contrast that with Richard Gere, who I’m pretty sure was graying at the temples while learning how to use the potty, and it’s easy to see how freaking out over two silver follicles can seem a bit over-the-top. It’s not like I need sponge baths from a nurse. Although if the nurse in question is a sultry brunette with a smoky barroom voice, I’d consider it anyway.

But see, what’s alarming about the whole deal is that I’m now in the Gray Club. This is kind of like Fight Club, only there’s no fighting, no Brad Pitt, and everyone’s in bed by ten. So I guess it’s not like Fight Club at all.

The reason Gray Club is so distressing is because it acts as a sort of dividing line. To illustrate what I mean, think about the people and groups who are not in Gray Club: College students, YouTube sensations, trendsetters, Katy Perry, and 98 percent of professional athletes.

Now look at the people who are in the club: College professors, cable access hosts, Floridians, Larry King, and the two percent of professional athletes you wish would just give it up already.

To be clear, this is not to knock Gray Club in any way. There are some truly awesome members of Gray Club. Patrick Stewart. Metallica. Gandalf. Me. You, maybe. Betty White, definitely. Harrison Ford. The list goes on. Far from being a mark of shame, Gray Club can be considered an honor, in a sense; it means you’ve made it, you’ve survived X number of years without choking on a hot dog or getting hit by a van full of meth tweakers. 

Thing is, as inconsequential as admittance to Gray Club actually is, nobody wants their first membership card. It forever cuts us off from the young’uns, with their sparkly belly buttons and carefree shenanigans.

A friend asked me recently if I would consider dying my goatee. I don’t know if I believe in that. The natural look is just more honest; I figure if I’m slowly going white, then I should wear it proudly, defiantly. Besides, it connotes experience, and I’ve always been more comfortable as a grizzled veteran of something rather than a wide-eyed rookie on the make. If I can con people into thinking that I’ve “seen things,” or “been through stuff,” or “been around the block a few times,” this can only work to my advantage. Especially if I’m staring down a gunslinger through the smoky air of a 19th Century frontier saloon. This seems unlikely, but I’m a believer in being prepared.

So yeah, mixed feelings, for sure. Mostly what I’m dreading is the next marker of getting older: Standing in a bathrobe on my front porch and yelling at my neighbors to turn their music down. Hopefully that’s a ways off.

And now I’ve got to go into hiding for a while. Because I’ve broken the first rule of Gray Club: Don’t talk about Gray Club.

Like you didn’t see that one coming.

Race to the finish

I want to tell you about a guy I’ll call “Ron.” That’s an alias. I didn’t pick a goofy one, because Ron’s story isn’t particularly funny.

 

See, Ron is a racist.

 

What makes that difficult to admit is that Ron and I have a history going back to grade school; we’ve got one of those rare bonds that’s forged through the sheer accumulation of years and common experience. Our friendship dissolved just before the holidays, not with a climactic blowout but in a quiet, melancholy moment which passed sadly at the site of so many of our shared memories.

 

I was back home for Christmas. A mutual friend of ours, “Ken” – a non-racist, and absolute sweetheart – was paying me a visit. As we were sitting at the kitchen table, swapping war stories over foamy microbrews, Ken got a text. “Ron’s in town,” he said. “Do you mind if he pops by?”

 

It was easy to say yes. Months had passed since I had last seen Ron. Years before, he had attended law school in Florida, and after passing that state’s bar exam, got a job with a firm just outside of Miami. Distance, and his commitment to his career, had prevented us from engaging in the kind of laugh-laden backslapping that was typical of so many moments in our now-distant youth. It also prevented me from witnessing just how much he had changed.

After exchanging a few pleasantries and chuckling over some old tales from our high school days, the talk turned to politics, world affairs, and education. We shared the view that the educational system in America was in dire straights. We did not agree as to why.

 

“There are so many minorities in the Florida school system,” he said. “They drag the white kids down. They’d be learning at a much higher level if only the other kids could speak English.”

 

Sometimes a comment hits you with the force of a violent thunderclap, jolting you into a moment with crystalline clarity. And I didn’t say anything. To my shame.

 

“A black guy, a Hispanic guy, and an Irishman walk into a bar.” A lot of jokes start off that way. I’ve chuckled at a few; told a few. Maybe you have, too. I’ve always justified it by claiming that the humor in such jokes can be found in the fact that their very basis, the logic on which they’re built, is spectacularly untrue. Hyperbole is funny. Mentally, I always wiggled my way out of guilt by telling myself that if a black guy, Hispanic guy, and an Irishman did happen to walk into a bar, they would be judged on their relative merits, and not on the odious stereotyping that provides the punchline. That’s easy to do in a region that’s overwhelmingly white; there are fewer tests of character, fewer opportunities to rise to the promise of enlightenment.

 

You coast on cognitive dissonance. And then you encounter a serious comment so disgusting, so morally reprehensible, that it shocks you into contrition. 

 

Some will tell you that racism is no longer a problem in this country. Look, they say, at all the advances that have been made. Jim Crow segregation, internment camps for Japanese-Americans, slavery – all dusty relics of a distant and bygone age. Those were historical blips, they argue, with no residual effects, no need to ensure that the long march of progress doesn’t stumble and fall.

 

It’s a fool’s argument. In a nation where all people are supposedly presumed equal, it’s difficult to realize that some are still considered less equal than others. The signs are more subtle. But that’s exactly why it’s important to not become complacent. You don’t ease up on the gas when the finish line is still so far away.

 

A few years ago, my mother backed up some old home movies to DVD in an effort to preserve them digitally – an invaluable resource for miners of personal history. I watched one of them recently. It featured footage from my sixth grade graduation ceremony, a folding-chair event in a gymnasium awash in orange light. The principal, Mr. Whitfield, was handing out certificates for various accomplishments, like high grades or good attendance. One by one he read our names, and one by one we walked to the podium to collect our prizes. At one point, he called Ron’s name; and a few seconds later, out of the edge of the frame, a 12-year-old boy appeared, all gangly limbs and goofy smile. My heart broke. Because I could see our future: Joyrides in his boat-like Lincoln, nighttime tennis in a misty rain, school video projects filmed at the kitchen table. The very table where, 20 years later, he would reveal a sad and sorry prejudice.

 

I’ll never know if the grinning boy in that clip was innocent, only to be warped by an ignorant tribalism, or whether the seeds of racism were already sown. I’d like to think that bigotry is learned, that we’re born free of pernicious worldviews, but who can say for sure? It’s hard not having an answer to that question.

 

I’ve been fortunate enough to make some close friends in my life, and collectively they hold wide-ranging views on a variety of topics, from politics to religion and the nature of morality; and that’s fine. In many cases, our differences make our friendships stronger. There comes a point, though, when you have to acknowledge that someone has chosen a path you simply can’t follow. Your values have just evolved in different directions. And that’s painful. It’s unfair. But it’s life.

 

Most everyone has heard the old Edmund Burke bromide: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” When Ron dropped his bombshell, I had a chance to say something and didn’t. But I do have one action left to me. If Ken once more sits at the table and asks if Ron is allowed to visit, I can simply say no.

 

A black guy, a Hispanic guy, and an Irishman walk into a bar. I forget the rest. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Feeling testy

There was this kid I went to high school with who got a perfect 1600 on his SAT exam. Everybody hated him for about a week.

 

The brains hated him ‘cause he outshone them at their own game, storming his way to the top score en route to becoming King of the Teacher’s’ Pets. Everyone else hated him because it briefly made him a pseudo-celebrity. I remember stopping by my locker one afternoon, probably to ditch my pre-calculus text in exchange for a gruesome zombie novel, and seeing a TV station’s camera crew following him through the halls – as though he were a hard-luck Hollywood actor called to task for drunkenly driving his Bentley through the dining room of a Chinese restaurant. It was like going to school with Lindsay Lohan, except Lindsay Lohan couldn’t get a perfect 1600 if she was three-months’ sober and coached by physicist Stephen Hawking. 

 

I belonged to neither of these camps. Frankly, I never cared that much, since his score had about as much impact on my life as a donkey fart in Siberia. But I remember being impressed. The SATs were hard.

 

Well now, not so much. In a recent article, AP Education Writer Kimberley Hefling reported that the iconic test will soon undergo some revisions, which, judging from their nature, should make it an easy, breezy affair, the stuff of pasta collages and spelling tests with words like “crayon” and “ham.” 

 

One of the changes is actually positive: It restores 1600 as the test’s top score, which has been out of vogue since the last series of updates were made in 2005. Now granted, since the requirements of the SAT periodically change, this is less important than it could be. Contrasting a current class’ test scores to that of previous generations sounds helpful, until you realize it’s akin to comparing an NFL quarterback’s stats to those of somebody who played in the 1940’s, when helmets were leather and guys played with broken bones and polio. When standards change, comparisons become less meaningful. Even so, there’s something reassuring about the number 1600; it restores a tradition that somehow perfectly encapsulates the unmitigated terror of doing the actual deed. If memory serves, fear was one of the best incentives to do well on the SAT. It can be a powerful motivator. Just ask Stalin, or Lex Luthor.

 

Other changes seem designed simply to lower the bar, which is never a good idea, especially in a country preoccupied with cheese-stuffed pizza crust and the diplomatic achievements of Dennis Rodman. It’s well documented how far America has fallen educationally when compared to the rest of the world; we’ve gone from being a mecca of academic excellence to a nation that considers a top score on “Wheel of Fortune” to be a high intellectual goal. Our reading levels are far behind other first-world countries, and our math scores are even more abysmal; in a worldwide ranking, I’m pretty sure we rate just below that tiny Pacific island where the locals make toothbrushes out of the blubber of dead sharks.

 

Which is why it seems like a bad time to remove penalties for wrong answers. And make the essay optional. And replace challenging vocabulary words, such as “prevaricator” and “sagacious,” with easier fare like “synthesis” and “empirical.” Those, according to Hefling, are among the changes that are slated to take effect by 2016. 

 

College Board President and bespectacled sea turtle David Coleman said the test should offer “worthy challenges, not artificial obstacles.” He asserted that the changes are more reflective of what students study in high school, and the skills they’ll need in college. No word yet on whether the new test will have questions about keg stands or making bongs out of plastic water bottles. Something tells me there are certain skill sets that have to be acquired in the field.

 

I understand the desire to take academics in one hand, and the SAT in the other, and get them both pointed in the same direction. Makes sense. But if there’s a gap between what children are learning and what they’re tested on, heightening the standards of academics seems to me a nobler goal than lowering the standards of the test. Sure, you’ll see improved scores, but what will that mean, exactly, for the next kid who lands a 1600 and thereby gains admission to Harvard or Yale? It’d be a shame for some poor student to be accepted into a top-tier university, only to flunk out before learning how to paddle a rowboat in a polo shirt, or smoke a corncob pipe pretentiously.

 

If kids today don’t know the meanings of “prevaricator” and “sagacious,” let’s teach them. The brain is a muscle, so even if they don’t use certain words or skills in real-world scenarios, at least they’ve given the ol’ fleshbag a good workout, the mental equivalent of the training montage in all 27 Rocky movies. American high schoolers are going to have to compete globally, so if we want them to perform on the level of, say, the Bavarians or the Brazilians, then we need to expect more of them. That means holding them to a higher standard, but it also means teaching them better.

 

Whew! Quite the view from this high horse, lemme tell you. Blue skies for miles.

 

One more point: The whole culture of fear surrounding the test is unwarranted. Not that it isn’t important to study hard and do well – it is – but the impact of any given student’s score is consistently overblown. Mr. Perfect 1600, the last I heard, was a stand-up comedian.

 

Nothing wrong with that, by any means. Some of me favorite people ever are stand-up comedians. But it goes to show that you never know how people’ll turn out. Take me, for example. My score was far from perfect. But at least when I crack wise, I get to do it sitting down.

 

Tat attack

Whenever I see Mike Tyson, I feel this strange motherly urge to spit into a handkerchief and wipe that gray muck from the side of his face.

 

It always takes me a minute to realize that the weird muck is actually a tattoo. I remember watching him box back in the day, before he went off the rails and started telling his opponents that he would eat their families, and he looked more or less like any regular dude. Assuming any regular dude has a gap in his teeth and pectoral muscles that could be used as sandbags during a Biblical flood.

 

Then he just appeared one day, without warning, with this trippy design etched onto his mug. Extending down the left side of his face from his brow to his chin, it looks like some skeletal dragon that’s trying to gobble his eye. It’s the kind of thing that would be fun as a temporary tattoo – maybe as part of a Halloween costume depicting the head-shrinking tribesmen of the Amazon rainforest – but as a permanent marking, it makes it hard to take Mike Tyson seriously. The man can punch a hole through a car door, yet it looks like he just had his face painted at the circus.

 

I may never understand face tattoos.

 

On other areas of the body, they’re fine. Depending on taste, execution, and location, they can be downright cool. Sometime during the past couple generations, there’s been a shift in peoples’ thinking about body art; back in olden times, before a pill could cause a four-hour erection, tattoos were considered the province of criminals and ne’er-do-wells, a sign meant to convey a person’s hard-edged toughness. They were often acquired in prison, where getting one’s ink was a nice way to break up the monotony of lifting weights and spooning with men named Shirley.

 

Now, so many people in my age group have tattoos that when I get together with friends of mine, there’s a fairly high likelihood that I’ll be the only one at the gathering without some kind of body art. And they’re not ruffians, these people. They don’t use spittoons or smell like motorcycle leather. They wear T-shirts with video game characters on them and watch “Dr. Who.” At some point, people like that became the patrons of tattoo parlors, which must have been confusing to the needle-wielding artists, so accustomed were they to inking up pool sharks and big-bicepted sailors.

 

Even I came close to having a tat of my own. I was in college (of course I was), and was strongly considering getting an emblem permanently grafted onto my upper arm. The design was a four-sided star that’s become a logo of sorts for the metal group Metallica; it was perfect, I thought, because it would be located in an easily-concealable spot, and represent a genuine passion of mine without resorting to off-putting imagery, like a skull with a mullet dripping blood from its eye sockets, or Satan flipping the bird to a basket of puppies. 

 

In the end, though, I decided against it, for the simple realization that I’d just never have the chance to show it off. My lumpy, oddly-constructed body is like a solar eclipse, in that you probably don’t want to look at it directly without the aid of protective goggles. I’d have to make a special point of bringing the tattoo up in conversation, at which point I’d roll up my sleeve to display it, and realize that I just dropped eighty bucks to see people politely nod their heads. 

 

Also, I do have to admit that I was influenced by the whole it’s-going-to-look-terrible-when-you’re-80 argument. You’ve heard (or even spoken) this line of reasoning: “Sure, your tattoo may look nice now, but gravity always wins, and when you’re old it’ll look distorted and weird.” That made sense to me ten years ago, but over time I find it less and less persuasive. Yes, at 80 years old, any tattoo’s you’ve got will probably look bad, but then again, so will the rest of you. At that point, what does it matter? When you reach that age, it’s not like you’re still trying to pick up women on spring break by sucking in your gut and preening like a peacock. At 80, relax. You’re done. Mission accomplished. If you find yourself single and looking for a companion, I don’t think a mere lumpy tattoo will be that great a hindrance. Chances are your potential honey-bunny has plenty of interesting topography themselves, whether they had ink done or not.

 

So I guess a tattoo is still on the table, potentially – less a compulsion now than a wistful bucket-list item. But if Mike Tyson has taught me anything, it’s that the face is a bad, bad place to put one.

 

As mainstream as they’ve become, I think there’ll always be a stigma about placing them there. And there should be. Tatted-up or not, people don’t identify us by our upper arms or lower backs or calves or ankles; it’s our mugs that get us in the door. They send a message to the world. Sullied by an artist’s needle, that message is: “I will eat your family.”

 

My dad’s got a tattoo on his forearm. He’s had it for over 50 years, and had it done during an era when the technology wasn’t on par with today’s standards; you can tell that it’s seen better days. It’s either an anchor, or two seals making love on a gondola. I’m not positive. But as rough as it looks, it’s still preferable to anything that would rouse the spit-and-wipe instincts of hygiene-oriented parents. 

 

Personally speaking, the only above-the-neck ink I’d consider would be a scalp tattoo of a full head of hair. Really turn peoples’ heads. What do you think, should I stick with the natural brown, or change it up, be audacious? I’d better choose wisely. Once there, it’s there forever.

 

Bit by bit

Let’s say all of humanity suddenly vanishes from the face of the planet. Maybe the rapture comes, which would probably settle some bets among the most pointy-hatted of religious purists. Or maybe there’s a hot sale on scented candles at a Bed, Bath & Beyond in the Andromeda galaxy, and every last person on earth decides they just can’t live without the smell of cinnamon-tinged eucalyptus leaves.

Okay. So what do we, as a species, leave behind?

That depends.

Certain things will remain long after we’re gone. Cities will eventually crumble and decay, but not for millennia, so whoever takes our place as the dominant species – hyper-intelligent giraffes, perhaps, or cockroaches who learn to manufacture conveniently-priced kitchen items – will have their run of the joint. Escaped zoo orangutans can play the craps tables in Vegas for the next several centuries, ’cause they’ll be there for a good long while, and maybe while they’re at it the buggers can figure out how the hell one actually plays craps.

Statues and stone monuments, properly shielded from the elements, will endure. Drawings and paintings, especially those preserved in museums, will last. You can eliminate people, but you can’t eliminate most of the artifacts they leave behind.

Digital files, though. That’s another story.

Life is increasingly digital, whether we want it to be or not. Bank transactions, correspondence, streaming movies on demand, and pictures of cats that look like Merv Griffin are all inescapably computerized; this ensures that an ever-greater percentage of our lives are lived in a kind of virtual hinterland, an ethereal ocean of interconnected ones and zeroes. We’ve grown comfortable with this. So comfortable, in fact, that we think nothing of consigning our personal data and life’s history to this great intangible mass. Humankind’s latest monument is a bank of humming computer servers at Google headquarters, guarded by pimply coders who power themselves through their workdays on the steam of meat lover’s pizzas and pitchers of high-octane Mountain Dew. In other words, the new stewards of human history are clones of me in high school, only better paid and less prone to nosebleeds.

Digital media, though, only lasts for about ten years, on average. That’s about the life expectancy of a stray dog, or an unwrapped Twinkie.

As long as we keep backing up our data to new storage devices, that’s not an issue. But consider a giant asteroid that collides with the earth and causes humans to become extinct, as likely happened with the dinosaurs. Poof, gone in two blinks. Centuries later, an intelligent species from the planet Dingleberry touches down on Earth to study the ghostly remnants of our civilization. What will they find?

With computer storage gone the way of woolly mammoths and Nicholas Cage’s career, the traveling Dingleberrians will think that human civilization reached its peak around 1996. Thousands of years of evolution, centuries spent in the pursuit of betterment and achievement, and to the alien archaeologists, our best accomplishments were glow-in-the-dark Nerf balls and “Seinfeld.”

I’m not knocking computers. While it’s true that they’ve spread like chlamydia at a frat kegger, they certainly have some great uses, like Photoshopping your enemies’ heads onto the bodies of obese hippopotamuses. But the actual, physical information stored therein, the means of holding onto data, is alarmingly fleeting; PCs, tablets and smartphones are loose piles of sand just waiting for the one stiff breeze that sends ’em all to hell. 

People are a funny lot, constantly building edifices that stand as testaments to their own greatness. The pyramids, the Sears Tower, the world’s largest ball of twine in Cawker City, Kansas: These are all attempts to leave behind something important, a series of peacock feathers meant to say, “Yeah, we’re pretty awesome.” The urge is understandable. On an individual level, most of us feel the need to make some kind of mark – it’s why we have children, write books, knit sweaters, and carve our initials into the desk when the teacher isn’t looking. We want to endure. Centuries after the final human has breathed his last, bathroom stalls from Rio to Amsterdam will still be riddled with etchings of cartoon genitals. What a legacy.

But the things we now rely on to mark our moment in history – blogs, social media feeds, vicious YouTube arguments between lobotomy patients – those will all evaporate like water. When clipboard-toting Dingleberrians studying your living room observe your wall-mounted photo prints, they’ll know that you once spent part of a summer taking scuba lessons from a freckly ginger with a birthmark on his chin that looked like Scandanavia. With the rest of the photos from that trip tucked away digitally in some now-defunct hard drive, they’ll never know that you and the instructor ended each day holding hands at sunset and smoking hash out of a hollowed-out apple. That little detail will be gone forever.

One wonders whether all of the permanent markers of our race have already been built, left to tell a story rooted in antiquity. It’s the price of transitioning from the real world to the virtual one. Let’s make a pact, you and me: If astronomers detect an asteroid that’s on a collision course with Earth, we’ll gather up humankind’s digital detritus, hop into a rocketship, and head to a planet on which we can preserve our collective history: our Facebook posts and digital music and videos of birds dancing to Van Halen. It’s not much, and it pales in comparison to the greatness of Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China, but it’s what we have. It would be a shame if it were all lost to time.

I suggest a place somewhere in Andromeda. I hear the sales there are spectacular.

Gone from the charts but not from our hearts

Out of the mouths of babes emerge comments that make me feel like an old fuddy duddy.

 

One of the occupational hazards of being a photographer is that, occasionally, I run into kids who remind me that I’m no longer one of them, and they would know. The latest instance occurred a few weeks ago when I was grabbing some shots at an after-school youth program in Biddeford. I was chilin’ with a couple of fourth- grade girls in a study lounge – do kids still say “chillin’?” – when the conversation turned to music. 

 

Music is a subject that’s right in my wheelhouse, so I thought we were covering safe terrain. But when I asked one of the girls what she enjoyed listening to, her answer left me positively flabbergasted.

 

“I listen to a lot of stuff, like Eminem and Shania Twain,” she said. “I like a lot of different kinds of music. I don’t really like heavy metal, though. It’s old people music.”

 

Wait, what?

 

It wasn’t a response I was prepared for. I was shocked. Stymied. Mystified. If my jaw had dropped any farther, I would have whacked myself in a sensitive man area, and spent the rest of the day cursing my fate, all in the voice of Mickey Mouse taking massive tokes off a helium balloon.

 

See, I’m a metal guy. Like the young lady, my tastes are varied – gimme some smooth jazz or classic rock any day of the week, brother – but when I hear a crunchy guitar riff that could singe eyebrows from across a football stadium, that could peel the paint from a sports car, that could melt the wax holding together Joan Rivers’ face ... well, it does something to me. Something primal. It stirs up my innards with an iron finger, stoking a joyous rebellion that would shame the warring Scotsmen of “Braveheart.” If it were in any way socially acceptable, I’d respond to the opening riff of Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” by felling a mountain lion with my bare hands, hosting it above my head in the town square, and yelling “Freedom!” until my vocal chords were so much charred meat. Then I’d slink away for about a week, because that would be stupid.

 

But you know, I look at some of my metal heroes today, and while they still rock the house, you can see the crows’ feet and gray hairs sprouting like dandelions. Dave Mustaine, the frontman for Megadeth and a legendary drug fiend, is starting to look like a rumpled mail sack. Time makes fools of us all; that’s true for musicians and fans alike, except for the members of the Rolling Stones, whose organs are preserved under a thick crust of cocaine.

 

When the girl spooked me with her old people comment, that’s when it occurred to me: If I can make it to old age, I’ll be listening to this stuff in a retirement home. It’s hard to imagine how that would work. 

 

A couple years ago, during a different assignment, I found myself at one such retirement home shooting some photos of a pianist who had come to entertain the residents. The songs he played, naturally, were selected from the era in which that generation came of age; the set was heavy on Sinatra and Martin and some of the public domain ditties from the great American songbook, tunes that the house bands on late-night shows can play without cracking open the company wallet. It was fun. The piano guy was a good player, the residents were clearly enjoying themselves, and even as I was contorting myself to get various angles, my toes kept tappin’ to the rhythm. If I had stayed any longer I’d have played a few rounds of canasta in a pair of pink slippers.

 

That kind of music, naturally laid back and mellow, is a nice fit for the age group. More difficult to imagine is Piano Man ripping into a frenzied acoustic version of Slayer’s “Angel of Death.” I picture a cluster of elders leaning on their canes in a geriatric mosh pit, with Dolores from 309 hip-checking her friend Beverly into the snack table during the blistering solos. Then, when Slayer morphs into “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter” by Iron Maiden, all the World War II veterans who fought in Iwo Jima can stage-dive off the beverage cart and crowd surf while dousing themselves in beer.

 

Seems like a farfetched scenario. But when “old people” like me reach that age, there’ll at least be a handful of us still taking bands like Anthrax and Black Sabbath for a spin. This should make for some interesting musical requests during these special events; maybe future musicians who play the retirement home circuit will be dragging around Flying V guitars instead of settling gingerly behind the keys of a stately Steinway. They’d better be prepared. Not all of us are hip to Shania Twain.

 

Granted, metal’s a fringe genre. It mainly appeals to people who have unruly body hair and wear lots of leather. I’m sure that others in my age group who’ll be enjoying their twilight years will be perfectly content to whistle the day away to the soothing strains of Michael Buble or Adele, and that’s fine – I’m a man, I can take it. But no amount of aging will ever convince me that Megadeth’s “Holy Wars” isn’t the greatest things since the invention of Fluffernutter. 

 

Mmm. Fluffernutter.

 

Maybe the young girl is right; maybe metal’s made the leap from empowering youth music to rusted artifact of a time gone by. Gives a guy some outside perspective on his life, at least. What’s comforting is that the accumulated years have given me some perspective of my own; and I know there’ll come a time, one day, when someone says to the girl’s grown-up counterpart, “You know, I don’t really like Shania Twain. It’s old people music.”

 

Won’t that be the day. And I. Can’t. Wait.