22 May 2006

Up and Down

The Boys are pretty amazing. I remember when they were small, and even before they were around at all. Now they are tall lean creatures with their own lives and opinions.

They were flipping up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. in the upper unit at Big Pink.  I almost said “dialing,” which is absurd, since there are no dials anymore, and no pleasing little detents on a mechanical wheel to change channels. There is just infra-red transmission from the remote to the channel box that parses out the spectrum contained in the co-axial cable that comes through the wall.

The insurgents have apparently adapted television remotes to detonate their roadside bombs in Iraq, among other innocent household devices. Cell phones, garage openers and old-fashioned doorbells are also in the mix.

Saddam left tons of artillery shells behind in hundreds of ammunition dumps. Much of the explosive material was spirited away in the interregnum after the conclusion of major ground combat, and that is what forms the bulk of the improvised bombs that are killing people in Iraq.

In order to see if we can detect the things from a distance, I had secured an inert 155mm shell from a private source. It had been in my trunk for almost a week, long enough to forget about the sleek black monster. It was almost two feet long, and around eighty pounds in sheer dead weight. I finally was able to transfer it to someone else's trunk for the trip to the Laboratory.

I wondered what might have happened if I got nailed in a security inspection going to work. “It's OK, Officer, I'm a scientist?”

The news from the war has its up and downs. Some things seem to be improving. Others are not.

The Boys were sitting in my two comfortable chairs, ostensibly watching game seven of the Pistons-Cavaliers semi-finals. It was a nail-biter of a series, with a particularly scrappy Cleveland team threatening to put Detroit in the dustbin of NBA history. But on the way to watching the Cavaliers crumble under determined swarming defense, we were also at the NCAA men's lacrosse semis with Virginia crushing Georgetown, at the Henrico County PGA tournament, where the lesser pros were having a hard time getting up and down. On channel 20 it was the Nationals versus the Orioles in a rare inter-league game at RFK.

I could not sort it out, nor did I try. There must have been some adaptation to the human brain in this latest generation. They have an ability to follow many more things than I can. Perhaps it is the influence of computer games, though the Boys never seemed addicted to the things. Maybe it is just that the world they live in is more fragmented than the one in which I grew up.

It can't be a mutation. At least, I don't think it is. The New York Times is saying that the latest analysis of the human genome suggests that there may have been a confluence between primate species at some juncture after the initial founding of the line of chimps and man. I don't know if it is the ascent or descent of man. Up and down are entirely relative concepts.

This revelation is going to set off an unpleasant discussion between the scientists and the anti-evolution crowd. The Scopes Monkey Trial may have a sequel in this century. I am reasonably confident that my hands are clean in the matter, and at least in this collision between faith and science I have decided to be agnostic.

Is coffee bad for you this week? And what about those eggs?

I was scrambled enough for a Sunday. I had been at the Quarterly since before seven, searching the databases of material I had cleverly scattered across three separate computers and a one megabyte flash drive.

It all looked the same, except in some translations the files had emptied, and there was no data contained within them.

This was not as bad as losing the nuclear strike plans in a sea of black floppy discs. Trust me on that. But I was growing frustrated. I had been doing a little editing right along as the material arrived over the last three months. I was confident that I was on top of the process, right up until crunch time, when I have to package the latest edition and take it off to the lay-out people.

This is crunch time. I got a call from the ex, saying that someone was leaving for Italy and wanted to drop an article off; there was material coming from the War Zone, and I did not want to distract anyone over a matter that is considerably short of the threshold of life and death.

The Boys settled on the basketball game long enough to get a sense of what was happening, and in the end, Detroit seemed to be pulling away. Then we were back at the lacrosse game, in which Virginia had pulled far enough ahead that a kid the Boys had played with in high school was on the field for some trash minutes at the end.

The boys watched their old comrade run around the field for a few minutes, and then rose to move onto their next appointment. I walked them down to their vehicles, knees popping as they flexed on the steps.

"Hey, Old man, those things sound like they crunch."

"That's what they ought to call me," I said. "Captain Crunch."

I walked them past the pool, where the water glitters, and then watched them roar away from Big Pink into the late afternoon sunlight.

I sighed, and stopped by the office next to the pool to poke at the manuscript to see if it had got any better, or more complete, since I went away.

Scrolling through the material, I could not discern a change, for better or worse. Not even up or down.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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