April 3: Didn't Quite Fit Properly, Cease to Exist, Persistence of Memory

A little more about the power of improbability . . . 

The improbability-proof control cabin of the Heart of Gold looked like a perfectly conventional spaceship except that it was perfectly clean because it was so new.  Some of the control seats hadn't had the plastic wrapping taken off yet.  The cabin was mostly white, oblong, and about the size of a smallish restaurant.  In fact it wasn't perfectly oblong:  the two long walls were raked round in a slight parallel curve, and all the angles and corners of the cabin were contoured in excitingly chunky shapes.  The truth of the matter is that it would have been a great deal simpler and more practical to build the cabin as an ordinary three-dimensional oblong room, but then the designers would have got miserable.  As it was the cabin looked excitingly purposeful, with large video screens ranged over the control and guidance system panels on the concave wall, and long banks of computers set into the convex wall.  In one corner a robot sat humped, its gleaming brushed steel head hanging loosely between its gleaming brushed steel knees.  It too was fairly new, but though it was beautifully constructed and polished it somehow looked as if the various parts of its more or less humanoid body didn't quite fit properly.  In fact they fitted perfectly well, but something in its bearing suggested that they might have fitted better.

Perhaps you noticed in the above paragraph that everything is just a little bit off.  The room.  Walls.  Computers.  Robot.  It's as though Salvador Dali created the Millennium Falcon or Enterprise.  Science fiction with a side of surrealism.

My days this week have seemed slightly surreal.  Tomorrow will be my last day to work for the surgery center my sister built.  Ever.  I'm not really working at the surgery center anymore.  I'm working at the idea of the surgery center.  A little over a month ago, the physical surgery center ceased to exist.  It was packed up, emptied out, and mothballed.  Right now, I'm working with the surgery center staff at a temporary location, doing surgery center stuff.  (It's difficult to follow, I know.)  Thus, the essence of the surgery center sort of still exists, in the staff and work and patients.

However, after tomorrow, that essence will cease to exist for me.  I will register patients for the last time.  Assemble charts for the last time.  Answer phones for the last time.  For about nine hours, I will still be able to call myself a surgery center employee.  Then all that will vanish forever.  No returning.  No looking back.

Truth be told, this last month of work has felt like a long goodbye.  Like I've been sitting on an airplane for over 30 days, waiting for my flight to take off.  Nothing has really felt quite . . . right.  Behind my desk where I register patients now, a clock is mounted on the wall.  The battery in the clock has been slowly dying, so it is forever slow or fast, the second hand tick, tick, ticking in the same spot for hours.  It's my own little version of The Persistence of Memory, the clock melting on the wall behind me.

Tomorrow, at about 2:30 p.m., that clock will stop ticking as I pack up my things and leave for the last time.  When I turn off the lights and close the door, everything will remain frozen in that final moment.  The desk I'm using right now used to be my sister's, the one that sat in her office for over 25 years.  I sort of have this vision of me turning around as I leave the office tomorrow afternoon and seeing her sitting at the desk, like she always did, smiling and saying, "I'll see you tomorrow, Mart."

That is what I will be losing.  The last living part of my sister.  She will pass into memory and be gone.  Forever.  Only my friend, Missy, who still works with me at the surgery center, gets that.  She was one of my sister's best friends.  Is one of my best friends.  She knows that my sister is going to die for me again tomorrow.  One last time.

Saint Marty is a little haunted tonight.

April 2: Couldn't Stand a Smart-Ass, Stupid Decisions, Common Sense

More about the Infinite Improbability Drive . . .

The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.

It was discovered by a lucky chance, and then developed into a governable form of propulsion by the Galactic Government's research team on Damogran.

This, briefly, is the story of its discovery.

The principle generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood--and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.  

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sorts of parties.

Another thing they couldn't stand was the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralyzing distances between the farthest stars, and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.

Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way:

If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability.  So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea . . . and turn it on!

He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long-sought-after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air.

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smart-ass.

I am frequently guilty of being a smart-ass.  I don't get stupidity and stupid decisions.  They flummox me.  When I recognize particularly wrong-headed ideas, I tend to point them out.  I use logic and common sense to try to rectify these kinds of mistakes.  Because of my inability to keep my mouth shut, I sometimes come off as a smart-ass.

That has happened frequently to me over the last couple months dealing with the shutdown of the surgery center where I have worked for the last 20 or so years.  I understand healthcare economics.  I semi-understand corporate economics.  Healthcare in the United States, for better or worse, is governed by money.  It is what drives the entire system.  Oh, and, if it doesn't cost too much, some lives may be saved, as well.

That being said, I spent today training a person to do a job that I've been doing for the last two decades.  I like this trainee.  She's smart and has been working in healthcare for a very long time.  However, my job is now being shifted off to this person and four different departments.  That's right.  Instead of simply paying me to continue to do the job for another few months, the administration would rather pay, at the minimum, five people to do the work.  That makes no sense to me.

Today, I pointed this fact out to several people in smart-assy ways and non-smart-assy ways.  I cannot change this decision (regardless of how improbable it seems to me).  I just have to roll with it and be thankful that I have a job.  I am grateful for that.  (Perhaps there is some logic operating here that I'm not aware of.  That's possible, I guess.)  However, as I said above, stupid decisions get under my skin.

But I am living in a time of stupid decisions.  The country I live in is being run by a majorly stupid decision with orange skin and hair.  President Stupid Decision is being enabled to make more stupid and cruel decisions by a Congress full of more elected stupid decisions.  It's a complete era governed not by common sense, but by common nonsense.  At the moment, my job situation, I guess, is a reflection of this, as well.

That is my wisdom tonight, not that anybody cares to listen to it.  It seems my wisdom is not highly valued at the moment.  So be it.

Tonight, right now, Saint Marty is going to make a good decision--it involves Chicken in a Biscuit crackers and cheese.

April 2: My Daughter, Billy Collins, "Man in Space"

I have loved the poem below since before my daughter was born.  Now that she is 18 and about to enter the "real" world, I hope she is like the women in science fiction movies, armored against stupid boys and men who are simply looking for mommy replacements.

This afternoon, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine who knows my daughter.  At the end of the e-mail, he wrote, "Have I mentioned that your daughter is an amazing kid?  She really is."

At least Saint Marty did one thing right in his life.

Man in Space

by:  Billy Collins

All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making his point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver

and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,

why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breasts protected by hard metal disks.

April 1: Imrobability Drive, Woe Is Me, Fake It

Arthur and Ford have just learned that they are on the Starship Heart of Gold, which was stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox several chapters ago . . .

The voice continued.

"Please do not be alarmed," it said, "by anything you see or hear around you.  You are bound to feel some initial ill effects as you have been rescued from certain death at an improbability level of two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand to one against--possibly much higher.  We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway.  Thank you.  Two to the power of twenty thousand to one against and falling."

The voice cut out.

Ford and Arthur were in a small luminous pink cubicle.

Ford was wildly excited.

"Arthur!" he said, "this is fantastic!  We've been picked up by a ship powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive!  This is incredible!  I heard rumors about it before!  They were all officially denied, but they must have done it!  They've built the Improbability Drive!  Arthur, this is . . . Arthur?  What's happening?"

Arthur had jammed himself against the door to the cubicle, trying to hold it closed, but it was ill fitting.  Tiny furry little hands were squeezing themselves through the cracks, their fingers were ink-stained; tiny voices chattered insanely.

Arthur looked up.

"Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out."

Improbability Drive.  That seems like the engine that's been powering my life for the last couple months.  Of course, for Arthur and Ford, improbability saved their lives.  Plus, Adams alludes to the infinite monkey theorem, which posits that a monkey hitting random keys on a keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost certainly create any given text--the Bible, War and Peace, or Hamlet.

Of course, improbability doesn't always have positive results.  It can create awful circumstances, as well.  Disasters.  Car accidents.  Trumpian elections.  Job loss.  Life loss.  You name it.  Now, I'm not going to be doing a lot of hand-wringing in this post.  Nor will I be throwing myself on a fainting couch, exclaiming, "Woe is me!"  I'm not even going to talk about the headache that has plagued me all day long.  Nope.

What I want to talk about for a few moments is the improbability of friends.  I know a lot of people whom I consider really good friends.  Yesterday afternoon, I spent some time with a friend who performs healing sessions.  She taught me techniques to relax, to redirect the energies in my body.  When I left her, I was more centered than I have felt in a long time.  Last night, the members of my book club came over, and we ate and laughed and discussed books and played a game.  This, too, was really healing.

Good friends are remarkable gifts.  Last week, when I was feeling particularly low, one of my really good friends simply started texting me out of the blue with crazy, funny observations and jokes.  For about an hour, we traded literary bon mots back and forth.  My friend had no idea that I was one step away from joining Holden in the rye field at the time.  He just reached out and reminded me that I was loved.

I am in the middle of my long teaching night.  In about a half hour, I will be heading downstairs for my evening class.  Not feeling particularly inspired or inspiring.  Thank God a good portion of the class will be taken up with watching and discussing a Michael Moore documentary.  Right before I sat down to type this post, I got a comment on a Facebook post from another friend.  It simply said, "I hope you feel better soon."

It's these kinds of things, arriving at the most improbable moments in my life, that keep me sane and calm.  They remind me that all is not lost.  (In fact, my friend who did the healing session planted that little seed with me as I was leaving her house.  That kind of blew me away, because, all weekend long, I'd been nursing this nagging thought:  "I am a complete failure."  And then this friend gave me a spiritual injection of hope.)

I am really tired tonight.  Tomorrow at the medical office, I have to train somebody to replace me.  This person has no idea about all the things I do, and in two days' time, I'm supposed to show her everything.  I'm not feeling particularly . . . helpful at the moment.  In fact, I would describe my attitude as bordering on hostile.

Yet, I will help this replacement as best I can.  I will appear positive and supportive.  This is something I learned from another good friend who's a therapist.  When facing difficult circumstances, this friend suggested that you "fake it 'til you make it."  In other words, pretend to be positive and helpful until you either become positive and helpful, or the work day ends.  I will be faking a lot tomorrow, per my friend's advice.

Saint Marty is going to be faking it in the classroom tonight, too.