Test Driving Our Instinct for Connections

One of the cool things about being a writer is, aside from the occasional drink-‘til-ya-drop tequila binge, you generally go to sleep smarter than when you woke up. You’re constantly finding and filing away facts, like an information squirrel worried about winter. For example, I know that Birmingham, England has a larger canal system than Venice, Italy, there are actually five different versions of David’s painting, Bonaparte Crossing the Alps and China is scheduled to take over the world sometime in 2028. This kinda stuff doesn’t come up all that often in casual conversation, but it definitely keeps most conversations casual. After all, when you’re the Wyatt Earp of useless information, you don’t get a lot of people calling you out on it. That’s the other reason why writing is such a lonely profession. People tend to think you’re a pompous ass. But I digress. The cool part of having tons of off-the-top-of-your-head trivia at your disposal is that you get a leg up on analysis that most people don’t have. You can see the connections between ideas before other folks even get their Google warmed up. Let me show you how it works.

Remember when you were a kid and, face up to the sky, you actually spent some time looking at the clouds? You didn’t see nimbus or cumulus (unless you were terminally nerdy) you saw sheep and surfers and an old guy with a pipe. This is because our minds are hardwired into detecting images (especially faces) long before our conscious brains have accumulated enough information to make a judgement call. Essentially, we see things before we actually see them by instantly reducing any image to it basic components. This phenomenon comes from a time before time when humans were not even close to the top of the food chain. As a species, we needed to recognize the things that were going to eat us — with enough time left over to run like hell for the trees. In evolutionary terms, our ancestors who were good at this became our ancestors; everybody else ended up digested on the savannah floor.

Move the calendar forward half a million years, we still see faces in inanimate objects, but the only time we actually use this instinctual skill is to generate religious revivals from tortillas or buy into paranormal swindles. After all, it’s been a lot of years since our species was threatened by hairy beasts. However, in the 21^st century, the predator of choice is information. In order to thrive, if not survive, we need to recognize essential information out of the info-flood we’re soaking up every minute of every day. Since no one has the waking hours to analyze every piece of data that arrives, hat in hand, to our conscious mind, we do this by connecting new information to the knowledge we already have. A very simple example is when we see a truck drive up and park in front of our house, we immediately determine what kind of a truck it is (fire, garbage, FedEx) and take appropriate action. If we don’t recognize it, we file it and get on. Thus, the more information we have, the greater our ability to test drive the new stuff when it arrives.

As a writer, I get to test drive tons more information that most people — it comes with the territory. And the thing that’s really cool is, like cloud watching, it’s a never ending process. One shape morphs into another and another and another. Think of it this way: what started off as an Internet search for “pareidolia” (you need to Google this, BTW) ended up, somewhere after midnight, at a YouTube video on how to fold t-shirts. Now, how cool is that?

Comic Relief By Remote Control

A certain acceptance comes with age. As you get older, you realize that the world is not going to change that radically between now and the time The Grim Reaper takes your pulse. Walmart is going to remain the mighty retail monolith it’s always been. McDonald’s will sell more burgers than Africa has cows — despite the interesting fact that no one you know has ever eaten there. And Microsoft, Google and Apple are going to continue to rule the world in an unholy triumvirate worthy of Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus. However, just because you’ve accepted the inevitable doesn’t mean certain things don’t continue to drive you nuts. Our world is loaded with stuff that simply doesn’t make any sense beyond material for a stand-up comedy routine. For example, go to any store in the country and you’ll find the two-fisted gigantic bottle of Coke™ sells for 99 cents, the smaller (smaller!) bottle costs $1.50 and the bottle of water (that beverage you can get free out of any garden hose.) is $1.89. Just let that sink in for a moment. It makes you wonder what Dasani actually means — you just got robbed?

However, the single most ridiculous thing in our world that sends me loopy every time I think about it is the remote control. This is the point and click device that revolutionized our society. It changed us from a vigorous, dynamic people into lazy swine with the attention span of a hummingbird without its Ritalin. It does everything but deliver the potato chips and chew them for us. I swear, if you knew the correct sequence and pointed it at NASA, you could launch the Mars Rover. I (the original techno-moron) have recorded Games of Thrones in my living room while lounging through Spaghetti alla Vongolese and a bottle of Amalfi Red (I had to fight to get that combination) on a rooftop in Rome. It is the most important item, aside from the coffee pot, in any household. So why, by all that’s holy, is every single one of those little bastards different?

We live in a homogenized world. If, while you were sleeping, you were magically transported to a shopping mall in darkest Bavaria, when you opened your eyes, aside from The Gotterdammerung music playing in The Food Court, you would have no idea where you were. You could be anywhere from Indonesia to Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The utter sameness of most of our planet is worthy of Groundhog Day. Yet, when your Blu-Ray player finally hits the wall of planned obsolescence and you have to buy a new one, you’re about to enter the undiscovered country. You’re reduced to re-inventing the 21^st century wheel because the brains of the operation, the remote, has changed its shape, its size, its colour and rearranged all of its buttons. The first time you use it, you think you’ve paused Breaking Bad: the Teenage Years to go for the Orville Redenbacher’s and suddenly you’re recording a 24 hour marathon of Everybody Loves Friends, in HD, on a channel you haven’t even paid for – yet. So, you start pushing buttons like a Rhesus monkey finding the food pellet in a primate behavioural study. Six clicks later, you’ve selected the adult classic, Boob Chaser III, which Channel 531 casually informs you, has been “shared” with your Facebook friends. “Thank you for choosing Pay Per View!”

And it’s no use trying to beat the system with one of those Universal control-everything-but-the-toaster jobbers. That’s just madness. First of all, you need an advanced understanding of the Da Vinci Code just to turn one of those babies on, and, more importantly, nothing less than a degree in binary engineering from M.I.T. is going to make them work. By the end of the first hour, you’ve screwed up the set-up so badly the instructions are now in Hebrew and the one channel available for your viewing pleasure is The Weather Network from McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Finally — $19.95 plus tax, poorer — you give up and go back to fighting with the original villain that came in the box.

I know that, in fifteen minutes any twelve-year-old can reconfigure my system so she can run it off the microwave, for God’s sake. It’s not that technology is all that smart; it’s just that it’s smarter than me. However, I don’t understand why, when all technology is basically the same, every piece of equipment is so utterly different from the last one that you need to channel Thomas Edison to figure it out. I can’t be the only guy on this planet old enough to remember Ronald Reagan. What’s wrong with one size fits all?

We have cars that can parallel park themselves, murderous drones that search and destroy across the wilds of Pakistan from a Wii™ system in Wiesbaden; we’re on the verge of creating electronic nanobots that literally eat disease. Yet, when I want to watch an old episode of Arrested Development on Netflix, I still need six (different) little boxes to do it. If this isn’t Comedy Central, I don’t know what is!

The Top Ten Best Sidekicks Ever

Last Tuesday, as part of a bad-mouthing of Disney’s The Lone Ranger, I touched on our society’s inability to understand the role of the “sidekick.” For those of you who didn’t read it, what I said, in part, was

“The relationship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto is impossible for contemporary audiences to comprehend. Sidekick just doesn’t translate into Oprahspeak. In our relentless adherence to equality, anything less than a bromance between the two men is unacceptable. We refuse to believe that Tonto has any dignity, being the lower man on the scrotum pole, even though it’s clear he does.”

My point is that “sidekick’ is a complicated idea. It takes as its starting point the concept of Master and Man, an abstract which our society refuses to acknowledge. The very words trigger deep prejudices within us, and we invariably rebel against the connotation of inequality, no matter how beneficial it might be. Thus, with no frame of reference, it is impossible to explain the relationship between Tonto and the Lone Ranger (or any other fictional duo) to a 21^st century audience. The problem is, however, since the sidekick format is alien to, us we tend to adjust the stories to fit our current perceptions, by either changing the relationship or explaining it away. Unfortunately, this detracts from the original tale, written to rely on the sidekick as an integral part of narrative. In a nutshell, Sherlock Holmes would not exist without Watson, and when we renovate Watson to accommodate our current sensibilities, we inadvertently damage the character of Holmes.

So, rather than trying to explain the concept of the sidekick, here is a list of some of the best Sidekicks in Fiction. They can explain their existence far better than I can. And rather than provoke a future argument, they are in no particular order.