Catching Fog

My sense of direction is practically non-existent. For instance, there is a family from our church that I’ve known for more than twenty years. Can I find my way to their house? No. About three years ago I had come close to learning how to get to their home—but then they moved to a much nicer house on the other side of town. So I’m back to having no idea how to get to their place.

My sense of direction is so poor that my wife does most of the driving: otherwise I’d leave one day never be seen again: “Oh yes, he went to get some milk at the grocery store. He’s been gone for six months. He’ll probably make it home before the end of the year. It’s his way, you know.”

Once I do learn how to get somewhere—for instance to said grocery store—I will take the same route from then on. In fact, if I happen to be elsewhere in town and have a need to go to the grocery, then I will drive home first. Then from house I can find my way. I’ve learned only one way to get there. The phrase “you can’t get there from here” is the story of my lost life. Lost is a lifestyle. In fact, most of the time I don’t quite know where I am.

When I go to a store for the first time, I carefully contemplate which aisle I to park in, because from then on, I will park only in that aisle. How come? So I can find my car when I leave the store. Otherwise I’d have to wait for the store to close and for everyone to leave until mine was the only car left in the lot. And that doesn’t work if the store is open 24 hours.
But despite the fact that I am mostly unaware of my geographic location, when it comes to finding objects, unearthing lost things—I’m a miracle worker. Just today, my wife asked me “where’s the Raid—we’ve got a bunch of ants on the back patio.”

“You were the one who used it last,” I pointed out. “Remember, you found ants on the front porch yesterday and had me get it for you?”

“Um…”

“So where did you put it after that?”

“Didn’t I give it to you?”

“No.” A pause. “We’ve got ants. I need it.”

So I began the hunt for the can of Raid. It took me less than a minute to locate it. First, I checked the location where I normally put it. It wasn’t there. Then I thought about where my wife was likely to stash a can of bug spray without thinking. I looked under the kitchen sink. There it was.

This is a standard pattern in our home.

My youngest daughter will regularly complain, “I can’t find my iPod.”

I’ll ask about where she was when she last had it.

“I don’t know!” And then she’s mad at me.

So, I’ll begin excavating the black hole she calls her room. Normally I’ll find the lost item within a minute. Usually it’s hiding under a plate on her desk, or beneath a pile of shirts and shorts on her floor.
My oldest daughter will wonder where a book might be located. I’ll snag it in no time. My wife will wonder where the serving tray that we use once a year at Christmas time might be. I’ll have it on the kitchen counter within two minutes. My wife can’t find her keys, or can’t locate her shoes? A brief survey of the premises and I’ll have them in no time.

This ability to find things extends to other aspects of my existence. Someone will wonder where the Bible says something. They’ll give me a look. I’ll flip through the pages on my iPad. Within thirty seconds I can recite chapter and verse.

I’ve had friends call me on the phone and ask me “do you know the address of Art’s Bakery” or some such place. I’ll type a query into Google and have it for them in less than ten seconds. Or they’ll wonder about a phrase in Shakespeare or Milton, or be frustrated because they can’t find anything about a particular obscure topic in sociology that they need for their research paper that’s due tomorrow. Within moments I’ll have what they need.

For whatever reason I seem to be able to find things online that other people can’t. My wife recently wanted to find a book she only vaguely remembered from her childhood—something about a time traveling teacher. Based on her fuzzy recollection I located the book in less than five minutes and ordered her a copy. This, after she’d spent more than a year, off and on, unsuccessfully hunting for it.

But I find myself puzzled.

Why it is that I can snag the most obscure information in a snap, unearth lost keys and iPods, but I can’t I find my children’s school, the grocery store, or even my car in a parking lot?

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Last month was the thirty-second anniversary of the video game Pac-Man. It got me to reminiscing and thinking about my relationship with video games over the last three decades, especially since my thirtieth wedding anniversary is coming up later this month.

The first video game I ever played was shortly after I graduated from college. I had just finished my first year in my master’s program at UCLA. My roommate and I had gone to a pizza place and discovered a game called Asteroids. We dropped quite a number of quarters on it and made a point to play it any time we went out to pizza after that. It wasn’t long before we found more games, of course. By 1981 I had purchased my first home computer, a precursor to the Commodore 64 called the Commodore VIC-20. It came with a whopping 3 kilobytes of memory, expandable to 8 kilobytes. Pre-loaded with the BASIC programming language I soon learned how to program the machine.

There were but a handful of programs that you could purchase for computers in the early days and most came as cartridges that you plugged into the back of it. Eventually I added a tape drive that used ordinary cassette tapes to save and read programs. It was incredibly slow. dedicated computer monitors were a rarity. To use the computer, I hooked it up to a television turned to channel three.

I soon discovered computer magazines that had programs in them that you could type into the computer. Probably for the first ten years or so, even after I upgraded to a Commodore 64, the bulk of my time on the computer was spent typing in programs from the magazine. It was maddening, since typos were easy to create and you’d spend hours then trying to figure out what you’d done wrong. Until every last letter was typed just right in the program, the program would refuse to run or would run part way through before crashing. The first program I typed in to my VIC-20 was a baseball game. The player was a small glowing ball that blooped slowly around the bases when I got a hit.

Eventually I was able to upgrade to a floppy disk for my Commodore, which made the loading and saving of programs much, much faster and easier than the old tape drive. And by then, premade programs for my computer were becoming much more common.

Meanwhile, of course, I still spent time playing video games in the restaurants we frequented. By late 1981 I was dating the young woman who would become my wife, and many a date was spent playing video games after we had eaten our dinner.

My wife became especially fond of the game Ms. Pac-Man, an unauthorized sequel to the original Pac-Man. The original Pac-Man had been created by Namco, a company in Japan. Ms. Pac-Man was a bootlegged hack originally called Crazy Otto. Created by programmers employed by the General Computer Corporation, they eventually showed it to Midway, the American distributor of the original Pac-Man. So Midway bought the rights to it and the game became a big hit—and Namco became very angry. Eventually, to prevent the inevitable lawsuit that Namco would have brought, the rights to Ms. Pac Man were then turned over to Namco, which made a lot of money from my wife’s quarters.

My wife spent long hours playing Ms. Pac-man. When my wife’s friend Kayleen and her brother Chris were returning to Africa with their missionary parents, they spent an entire evening, well into the wee hours of the morning, playing an entire roll of quarters on Ms. Pac-Man. Given how good my wife and her friends had gotten at the game, it was a wonder they ever came home.

When my wife and I got married, we spent our honeymoon in Lake Tahoe. Unsurprisingly, for the two weeks we were there, we spent several evenings playing video games. The game we particularly enjoyed in Lake Tahoe was called Tempest. Like Ms. Pac-Man, it had been released in 1981.

After I finished my graduate program at UCLA, I got a Commodore 64 to replace my VIC-20. With 64 kilobytes of memory and much better graphics and sound capabilities, it turned out to be a great machine for playing video games. One of our favorites was a side scrolling 3-D game that we had originally played in the arcade: Zaxxon. It had first appeared in 1982 and was then ported to the Commodore in 1985. My wife and I and our friends spent many weekends playing the game. It was one of the few games I ever completely mastered.

Later, as we moved beyond the Commodore 64, we particularly enjoyed the early first-person shooters such as Castle Wofenstein, Doom, and its many sequels and knockoffs. Because of its humor, Duke Nuke’m 3-D became one of our favorites. Later, we became absorbed by Myst and its sequels.

Oddly enough, for the last fifteen years or so–maybe longer–I’ve played hardly any video games at all, while my wife mostly only plays Farmville on Facebook. Where before I had endless hours for video games, for some reason I now barely have time to work and read. I’m not quite sure where all my time has gone or why I seem to have so much less of it now than I did when I was younger. Probably has something to do with my children. Thankfully, if I ever do find my lost time, I’ve got Ms. Pac-Man, Tempest and Duke Nuke’m waiting for me on my X-Box 360–which is set to become obsolete when the new Xbox One comes out at the end of the year. I suppose the old classics will once again be made available for the newest hardware; after all, I can also play them on my iPAD–even Myst and the sequel Riven are on it. Of course, my children think the graphics are lame on all those old games. If I ever played any of them, they’d probably shake their heads laugh at me.

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Someone I know copied an email she got this week and then sent it to me. It had dire warnings in it about a nefarious plot to cancel a certain beloved television show because of its religious content. Unfortunately, there is no such plot and the show in question is not in danger.

The email was an example of what the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand has called an “urban legend.” We’ve probably all read one or heard one, whether it was a badly mimeographed letter warning us that a well-known corporation was run by a devil-worshipper, or that deep fried rats have been found in buckets of fast-food chicken. And they are usually come from someone we trust, who insists that “my friend’s cousin knew the guy this happened to.”

Urban legends are, in essence, simply a form of gossip. The book of Proverbs in the Bible says that “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to a man’s inmost parts.” And so we find such juicy tidbits of information very satisfying. They feed our fears and our hopes. They sound so good that they must be true, like the story of the woman who decided after washing her poodle that she’d dry it off in the microwave. Her results were not what she hoped. Of course, such a thing never happened, but what pleasure we get in sharing the tale!

Brunvand has collected the more common urban legends into a series of books with titles like, Curses! Broiled Again, The Vanishing Hitchhiker, and The Choking Doberman. He carefully documents them, where they first arose, and demonstrates their falsity. Additionally, websites such as snopes.com list hundreds of examples of such urban legends, documenting them in ways similar to what Brunvand does. The stories, unsurprisingly, get rewritten over the years, with name changes and other alterations of details to fit changing cultural sensibilities.

Most urban legends are just funny, or perhaps give some sort of warning to inspire better behavior and so are harmless. But sometimes urban legends can be damaging. For instance, back during the 2000 election, many people were claiming that Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance, had the following quote on page 342: “Refusing to accept the earth as our sacred mother, these Christians have become a dangerous threat to the survival of humanity. They are the blight on the environment and to believe in Bible prophecy is unforgivable.” Of course in reality, Gore’s book nowhere contains such a quotation, nor would he, as a Christian, be reasonably expected to ever write such nonsense. But since most people never bothered to actually pick up his book and turn to the cited page, the lie circulated widely. Similar lies were told about George W. Bush and are now being told about Barack Obama.

Likewise, during a photo opportunity at a 1988 grocers’ convention, the first President George Bush was supposedly “amazed” at encountering supermarket scanners for the first time. This story was repeated numerous times by major news outlets to try to demonstrate how out of touch the now former president Bush was–and yet it wasn’t true at all! Later retractions by the newspapers which started the gossip never got the same traction as the original tidbit.

Some urban legends are dire warnings: don’t flash your lights at an approaching car. Gang members are known to shoot people who do that.

Um, no.

Urban legends often take on a life of their own, just like other forms of gossip. And even when confronted that a certain tale isn’t true, the gossiper will insist, “well, it’s consistent with what I know of him and while in this instance maybe it never happened, still, I know he does things just like that.” Regarding the health or safety warnings, the gossips will tell me, “well, it’s still good to know.” How? It’s not true. Why do I need to know it? Or they’ll say, “better safe than sorry.” Um, again, no. If it’s a lie, it’s not helpful at all and doesn’t make me safer.

Gossip hurts people. It’s never beneficial. Proverbs also warns us that, “a gossip separates close friends” and “without wood a fire goes out; without gossip a quarrel dies down.” Next time you hear a story that you just know has to be true, or you get an email from someone you trust, who swears that he got the story from someone who knows the person it happened to, be a bit skeptical. Perhaps take a look at some of Brunvand’s books in the library, or run a search on the web. It’s not hard. Spend the extra two minutes before you post something juicy. You don’t want to be spreading gossip, now do you?

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Last spring I went to visit my parents in Ohio. It had been a long time since I had seen them, though my mom calls me on the phone at least once a month. I had not flown in an airplane in more than twenty years before I flew last spring. And with all the issues that my youngest daughter has experienced over the past eighteen months, I’ve not had even an afternoon off for the longest time. Thus, it was a big surprise when, for my birthday, my wife and children gave me plane tickets to fly to Ohio to visit my parents for a week. It was my middle daughter’s idea: “You haven’t seen your mom and dad in more than five years. You need to see them!”

My initial reaction at the thought of being away from my wife and children for such a long time was stress. How would everyone get along without me? But my wife had scheduled my trip well: it would happen during spring break, so both she and the children would be home.

Any realistic worries I might have were non-existent. But I’ve never been all that fond of travel, though once I get to where I’m going, I usually have a good time. It’s just thinking about the trip that bothers me.

I had about two weeks to prepare mentally for being gone. I also had to get ready and packed for the trip: for instance, I had to acquire a case for my notebook computer and find a carryon bag for my clothing. The airline I’d be taking charged extra for checking luggage—and I didn’t want to pay for that.

My flight was scheduled to leave Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) at 5:45 AM on a Saturday morning. The original plan was simply to arise rather early that morning. But a week before I left for the trip, I’d done my mother-in-law’s taxes for her on her computer. I e-filed them and imagined I was all done. But thanks to a glitch in the program, the IRS kicked the return back. So I was going to have re-send them.

We decided I’d do that on our way to the airport, since my mother-in-law’s house was on the way there. We left my home in Lancaster, California at 11:00 PM for the two hour drive. It didn’t take me long to fix her tax return. In fact, the bulk of my time was simply spent waiting for her tax program to install updates. Soon enough, we were out of there and eating an early breakfast at a nearby diner.

The actual process of airline travel began with my arrival at the airport at 4 AM. Ticketing was easy: I already had an e-ticket on my cellphone, so there was no paper to worry about losing and no line to wait in. I just pulled out my phone and the airline happily scanned it.

However, though I escaped waiting to get a ticket, not all queuing was eliminated. There was still the matter of the security check by the Transportation Safety Administration. This was more time consuming and complicated than I had anticipated. For instance, I discovered that they expected me to undress and unpack all my luggage.

Perhaps a slight exaggeration. But all passengers were required to take off jackets, remove belts, empty their pockets and take off their shoes. Then we had to remove our medications, computers, and tiny containers of shampoo and deodorant from our luggage. We put everything into large plastic bins. While our belongings rode a conveyor belt through an x-ray machine, we passengers were taken through an imposing set of archways. Then, as if we were being arrested, we were told to assume the position: we spread our legs and put our hands up over our heads as our bodies were carefully scanned and examined.

The process is quiet and subdued. No one smiles, hardly anyone talks, but the TSA agents were polite enough. I had plenty of time to repack and get dressed before I had to get on the plane. I wandered down the aisle, stowed my luggage in an overhead bin, and found my seat. I was exhausted, but hopeful. My wife had told me, “You’ll be able to snooze on the plane.”

Not really.

I was in a middle seat, scrunched between a child and an overweight man, with no leg room.

After a four hour sleepless flight, I had to change planes in Detroit. In 50 minutes. It took me thirty just to run from the farthest gate in one terminal to the furthest gate in another, on the opposite side of the runway. Worn out and sweaty, I was the last person aboard: they slammed the doors and headed out within minutes of me plopping into my seat.

Thankfully the return flight did not begin so early in the morning. My layover in Detroit was much longer so I didn’t have to run. I didn’t have to do anyone’s taxes before I went to the airport.

And my parents were very happy to see me.

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