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In The Strangest of Places
by David 'zzyzx' Steinberg - zzyzx@ihoz.com
"Hey my brother, think I've finally discovered
That some things just can't be understood
And so hard as we try, we can only rely on the fact that everything is for the good"
-Peter Himmelman, "G-d Don't Have to Teach You This Way"
There are people who believe that everything will work out for the best. Events that happen do so as part of a larger mosaic. Benjamin Hoff's The Tao of Pooh uses an example from Chapter VI of Winnie-The-Pooh ("In Which Eeyore Has a Birthday and Gets Two Presents") to illustrate this principle. As you may recall, in this story, Pooh Bear and Piglet get presents for Eeyore. Pooh gets him a jar of honey and Piglet gets him a balloon. However, while on their way over to Eeyore's house, a couple mishaps occur. Pooh got a tad on the hungry side and ate some of the honey. Well ok, he ate all of it. As for Piglet, he violated the old principle of "Never run with balloons," [1] tripped, fell, and broke the balloon. The net result of these unfortunate incidents is that Eeyore was given an empty pot and a broken balloon. It turned out however that the broken balloon fit quite nicely in the pot, and Eeyore spent the day happily putting the balloon in the pot and taking it out. Hoff uses this sequence of events as an example of unplanned accidents creating a result that was much better than it could be if things had worked out in the way expected. I see it as a chronically depressed donkey so starved for entertainment that he finds that endless amusment with a ripped piece of rubber.
I don't mean to say that believing that everything happens for a good reason is somehow an invalid point of view. Not only is this a reasonable idea, but once you believe in it, you'll start finding more and more examples of even the worst disaster could turn out to be a blessing. However, this also is true of the principle that everything is for the worse. If you believe in that you'll also be able to produce evidence for that. Regardless of the underlying truth of either of those, once believed, the brain will find ways of making the pattern fit. Being a mathematician, I have a hard time extending faith into any belief. For example, my reaction to being laid off last month was not, "Oh boy! Now I get a chance to reevaluate my life." Rather, the applicable phrase to describe my reaction would be "sheer terror".
Of course the terror diminished quickly when I got a new job the day before my old one ended - starting the end of this month. Instead of having to freak out, I now had the entire month of March to play. My first trip was to the unemployment office. I had never been to an unemployment office before. While there, I discovered a new metric to measure your life against. The crowd outside was reminscining with each other about the old days in the unemployment office, talking about how the system to used to work, and all I could think was, "You know your life isn't going according to plan when you can reminisce about how the unemployment office used to work." Dealing with the office was incredibly easy, well other than the fact that their network was down for a day. They were like "Oh you're a contractor for Microsoft and are on their 31 day layoff plan? Here's the number to call. Have a fun month, buh-bye."
Having dealt with that, I drove down to Centralia to visit my good friend Karen. I don't believe that Centralia got its name because it is halfway between Portland and Seattle, but it is a handy way of remembering where it is. I had never been there before; I just passed it a lot on I-5 while driving. Apparently I wasn't missing anything. Not only are all of the buildings rundown, not only does the town lie on a flood plain, not only is there nothing to do in town except work at the "Steam Plant" (I bet you didn't know that steam came from factories), and get really drunk afterwards - the town had an insane number of bars in it - but the plant was about to do massive layoffs. The aura of depression that lives over the town is so strong, that it wasn't until my second drive through that I noticed the downtown area. Centralia still had up all of its buildings from when it was an Old West town. This wasn't a Disneyland version of what the Old West was like, this was real, as was the 1950's era bowling alley we went to. While most of the alleys in Seattle blast loud music and have computerized automatic scorers, this place just gave us a sheet of paper to keep score. The mechanics of the alley were very loud - you could picture huge gears turning as the lane was cleared after each frame. This place wouldn't last five minutes in Seattle before having a Starbucks put in, but it fit quite nicely in Centralia. I even bowled my all time high score.
Feeling much better about the town, I drove homeward. For those of you who heard about the massive windstorm that struck the northwest, this was the night that it happened. If I had left about an hour later I would have hit some insanely bad driving - someone died on one of the roads I was on. As it was, I was reminded of the drive home after the Trax Phish show in '91. Going from Charlottesville to Baltimore involves taking US 29. As far as I could tell, the Civil War was fought over that road; every half mile or so there is another battlefield. That night though the focus was not on 19th century warfare but 20th century lightning. It was 3 AM, I was listening to the scary 8/27/72 "Dark Star" and watching lightning strike over DC- 100 miles away. About 5 miles outside of town, I hit the storm. I've never seen a rainstorm like that before, and never want to again. I had to slow down to about 10 mph because visibility was so bad. The Capitol Beltway had about a foot of water on it. There was a lot of lightning but no thunder. Just more and more lightning until - BOOM - thunder crashed right above my car. Somehow I managed to get around the beltway and up to I-95. As soon as I left the DC area, the rain stopped. The next day there were reports of people using their rowboats to make it through city streets. Whenever I drive through rain at night, especially if I'm listening to a "Dark Star" like I was coming back from Centralia, I flash back on that night. It makes the current driving conditions seem sane.
The next morning I saw the results of the storm. The Evergreen Point Floating Bridge was closed and would be for 3 days. That's the route that I take that I take to and from work. I turned on the radio and listened to traffic reports. Losing one of the two routes across Lake Washington lead to a complete and utter traffic disaster... one that I was not caught in. Hmmmm maybe being laid off *was* for the best. Maybe the trick is, even if you don't believe in an underlying plan, to pretend that you do. Start trying to make things fit in that way and they suddenly will. Despite my mockery of the layoff as learning experience idea, it turned out to be just that.
"They say with every good catastrophe
There's a lesson to be learned
A wisdom that gets earned" -Peter Himmelman, "Tremble"
[1] ...or is that scissors?
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