Category: 20 Minutes

Driving Alone

Gone broke in my car and got nothin’ to listen to. I’m bored with two hours down and twenty to go on a plain old worn down road with a bump in the middle and no yellow line. The dust blows if I roll down the window, and my back sweats a sweaty hole in my seat if I roll it up. Doesn’t even seem like AC’s been invented yet with this old beater I’m rollin’ around in. It’s breathin’ too damn hard to worry about something so sophisticated as conditioning of the air.

I squint ahead to see what I can see, and what I see is mostly a light grey line splitting two green fields and a stray black and white dairy cow mooing on the left. No big red barn ’cause that’d be asking too much of this dust bowl landscape I, for some reason, chose to cross in the July heat. That’s a July heat with an emphasis on the July, like you hear people say in movies about southerners. I’ve never met a true southerner with a true accent, so I guess I’m just speculating my memory on a motion picture. But that’s the best I got, and if you were here you’d get that I gotta speculate on anything I can to keep on the pencil line-road.

Big Decisions

Most of the last eight years of my life have been trying to figure out what I want to do with it. Getting an education was always a driving force in my decision making. At the end of high school the persistent question was where to go to college. For half of college the big question was what to major in. And after deciding that, where to work when I graduated. Working after graduating was interesting, however it wasn’t settling because it reminded me I had a lot more to learn, and kept me eager to go to grad school. So, during the two years I was working I was also focusing on where to go to law school. Now that I’m in law school, I’ll be looking for a job soon – a continuation of the two-year cycle. And I’m sure it will continue well into my life.

The clip below is from an essay titled “The Power of the Marginal” by Paul Graham. It’s interesting with regard to how to select a major. I think the general principles of the excerpt can be extracted and applied beyond the university setting.

One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there’s almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It’s this end that gives rise to phrases like “those who can’t do, teach.”

Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you’re probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who’s good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn’t. You often hear people say that you shouldn’t major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: don’t learn things from teachers who are bad at them.

Back Porch

The back deck was fun. We were sitting under the pines standing tall above the roof of the house. I liked to look up and try to see the sky. The table was gooey in places and I had to watch what I touched. Sticky fingers – like someone rubbed marshmallows all over.”Chris, say grace so we can get started,” mom said.

For a little bit I looked around to make sure that everyone had their hands together and heads down. “God is good, God is great. Let us thank Him for our food. By His hands we must be fed. Thank you, dear Lord for our daily bread.”

And when I finished, we all said, “Amen.”

I looked up fast – before everyone else, as if to check that we were all still there. Mom and dad were by the grill. My little sister sat still, dwarfed by the ugly yellow deck chair.

“Grandpa, how’s the baseball on TV?” I asked. He was sitting at the end of the table with his wooden cane hooked on his chair. I looked his way and my dark head of hair followed.

He muttered for a moment then said, “Who’s so tall they couldn’t see?”

“No. How’s the baseball on TV?” “Oh,” he said, still not answering. He was playing. But I guess he didn’t watch the baseball either. It was static in the background during his nap. My mind moved on. The grill smelled good, but I really just wanted to make s’mores.

Laundromat Man

He slouched on the wooden bench outside of the 24 hour laundromat two blocks from his house. A yellow light hanging by half of its cord dripped shadows on the highlights of the night that lagged reality. The undefined darkness was an insidious vacuum that siphoned the terrors from his forgotten dreams and brought them alive just beyond the edge of illumination. He scratched his beard, black and hooked like velcro, with uncut fingernails as he crossed his right foot over his left knee. The laundromat coughed hot air with each wash cycle, the machines spinning together in an eerie harmony that nulled the rest of night’s noise.

If there were people in this night, they would see a pair of eyes peaking from a black tuft of hair and they would think that it’s been too long since this guy on a bench last spoke to someone. Only a matter of days, but that’s a long time to not share a thought or comment on someone or something. Void – dark – lost were only the beginnings of his untold story. The true horror that haunted him still as he sat alone in front of the laundromat waiting for a month’s worth of laundry to finish.

Velcro

He slouched on the wooden bench outside of the 24 hour laundromat two blocks from his house. A yellow light hanging by half of its cord dripped shadows on the highlights of the night that lagged reality. The undefined darkness was an insidious vacuum that siphoned the terrors from his forgotten dreams and brought them […]

Update 2009: It cut off.

Two People at a Singles Dance

There’s a red schoolhouse along Route 9 between Concord and Portsmouth. During the day four dark windows overlook an empty gravel parking lot with a yellow sign that reads, “Singles Dance Friday Night 8pm.” The dance has taken place for at least a hundred years, the townies say. Generations have depended on this place to […]

Update 2009: It cut off.