I Think I've Been Had
I just can't stay mad at the universe.
Oh, the universe makes it easy for me to get mad at it every once in a while. There is no shortage of opportunities for me to drop to my knees and curse it, like Chuck Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. I mean, when the universe plays its old "indifference card" in the face of death and destruction, tragedy and trial, hypocrisy and hate, and many other alliterations I can't think of right now, I get off my metaphorical horse, leaving my metaphorical hot girlfriend behind with a quizzical look on her face, fall to the metaphorical ground at the edge of the metaphorical ocean, and pound my metaphorical fists into the metaphorical sand and surf while screaming, "You maniac!! You let it happen!! Damn you, universe!! Goddamn you to hell!!" - metaphorically speaking of course.
But I just can't stay mad at the universe.
And the reason I can't is because it's got such a great sense of humor.
Allow me to illustrate.
I attended a conference in Los Angeles over the weekend, the nature of which is not important to the story, but suffice to say that despite the fact that I attended, there were a great many of the world's top intellectuals in the crowd, along with some circus clowns, a 1952 Cadillac El Dorado, Fyvush Finkle, a herd of llamas, and some non-toxic slime (unscented of course). It was a pretty eclectic group to say the least.
Anyway, while in Los Angeles, my companions and I experienced several instances of what we came to call "synchronicity". You know, those moments where everything just seems to fall into place without any effort or forethought?
For example, Saturday morning, we were running a little late for the conference, and we were not quite sure how to get to the auditorium at Caltech where the conference was being held. As we were rushing to the car, we bumped into a woman who happened to need a ride to the conference. So after we made sure she had gas money, we offered to let her ride with us. Well, the woman also just happened to know the exact route to Caltech, and even had hints about where to park. Her navigation skills and stalker-like knowledge of the faculty parking lot allowed us to get to the auditorium and find our seats just as the first speaker was stepping up to the podium. Perfect timing.
If feels great to have all the tumblers fall into place like that, especially when you are expecting them to grind together and bring things to a screeching halt. And the amazing thing is, there were several other similar instances throughout the weekend where it seemed we just happened to find a bit of luck exactly when we needed it.
We sent a member of our group ahead to get a table at a popular Chinese restaurant, and at the exact moment the rest of us were walking in the front door, the maitre d' was announcing that our table was ready. Several times, the elevator doors opened to an empty car just as we were approaching, and all weekend our drinks arrived in a timely manner, perfectly mixed. In fact, it got to where our cute little expression to describe the occurrences was, "The planets are properly aligned, god is in his heaven, and all is right with the world". (I said it was a cute little expression, not necessarily a funny one.)
Anyway, little did I know that those moments of synchronicity were not moments of synchronicity at all, but instead, all part of an elaborate setup to one mother honey of a practical joke.
The older I get, the more I realize that the universe is a master at the setup when it comes to practical jokes. It knows how to build to the dénouement like no other all-encompassing construct. In fact, the universe was flawless this past weekend - even to the end - allowing me yet another moment of synchronicity as I was leaving LA.
At the airport, I said good-bye to a friend with whom I'd attended the conference, navigated the security cattle call, and arrived at my gate at the precise moment the gate agent called my row of seats to board the airplane.
As I pulled a book and some head phones from my back pack and stowed the back pack in the overhead bin, I whispered a triumphant, "The planets are properly aligned, god is in his heaven, and all is right with the world", and settled into my seat with a smile.
And then came the big payoff - the punch line.
After buckling up, I suddenly noticed that static was issuing from the in-flight intercom. The flight attendant was feverishly fiddling with the button in what I suppose was an attempt to fix the thing - I'm sure she needed the intercom to herd us all into place, to do the safety announcements, and to feel important - but she soon gave up to help the passengers stow their carry-on items.
Why is it that on every flight there are those people that for some reason are afraid of the baggage carousels and wind up loading their entire collection of bags in the overhead bins by playing an odd form of the game Tetris? One man had a full-size steamer trunk, another had a refrigerator box full of car parts or iron ore or something, and I swear an old lady had her late husband with her, casket and all. So I got to watch their logistical acrobatics while the static hissed at me from the cabin speakers.
The noise was quite noticeable and more than a little annoying, but I sat listening for a few minutes, trying to see if perhaps I could hear any of the lost tin can and string transmissions from my youth among the buzzing, cracking, and popping. Okay, so I'm not very electronically inclined. Besides, my imagination tends to kick in when I'm bored, and it doesn't know about disbursement of sound waves, radio transmitters and receivers, or the space-time continuum for that matter. For all it knows, those long ago messages to my buddies in the tree-house fort across the fence could have escaped into the atmosphere where they drifted upon, I don't know, gamma rays, or those ever-mysterious electromagnetic waves, or maybe even something with the word "quantum" in it, just waiting to be received by a faulty aircraft intercom. Hey, it could happen.
Well, when I failed to hear the lost transmissions of young boys playing army, I concentrated more deeply on the static in hopes that perhaps I could divine voices from beyond the grave mingled within. I had read an article about a woman who got messages from the "other side" through her toaster, and I thought that listening in on a bunch of ghosts would be really cool. I'm sure they live fascinating lives and no doubt have extremely powerful messages to impart to us.
Apparently, however, souls trapped in limbo prefer simple kitchen appliances to an actual communication device for talking to the living, because despite my effort to receive messages from the dearly departed, the only voices from beyond that I heard were voices from beyond the first class section, as the captain soon came down the aisle informing everyone that there was a problem with the public address system.
"Folks, we're sorry for the inconvenience," he says. "But we're having a little trouble with the PA."
By the way, I think the captain's name was "Captain Obvious".
Captain Obvious, however, was indeed quite helpful at first, answering every stupid question the passengers could ask. It turns out, the in-flight PA system is an item that is included on the pre-flight checklist, and according to FAA regulations, that checklist must have every single item checked off, or the plane doesn't leave the ground. Fortunately, Captain Obvious told us that he had already informed Maintenance of the problem, and that correcting it would only delay our departure for about 15 minutes. All the maintenance guys had to do, after all, was replace the amplifier with a new one.
So the maintenance guys replaced the amplifier.
Well that gave us new hope that we would soon be on our way. Unfortunately, as you might expect, the PA system still emitted only static, but now it was REALLY LOUD STATIC!!
I actually saw a man's ears begin to bleed. A small child burst into a million pieces, like a champagne glass. And a flight attendant killed a man with a bag of peanuts after he stuck his head between her thighs to muffle the sound. The entire cabin was thrown into chaos.
Upon this little setback, the maintenance guys and the flight crew assembled in the galley, and I can't be sure, but it looked as though they played a game of Rock/Paper/Scissors to see who would inform the passengers that the delay would be a bit longer than expected.
Captain Obvious - who always throws paper, he's so obvious - soon came down the aisle again, saying things like, "Boy, that's loud static." He also told us that the delay would be another thirty minutes while the maintenance guys scratched their heads and shrugged their shoulders to see if that would fix the problem.
He didn't actually say that about the maintenance guys, but that's what they did, and I can only assume standard operating procedure requires they have a contingency plan in place. I just expected it would be a little more . . . I don't know . . . practical, I guess.
If it can be said that airline passengers have enormous carry-on items and ask stupid questions, then it can also be said that maintenance guys apparently have extremely ineffectual contingency plans.
In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that when the head scratching and shoulder shrugging didn't work, they tried pounding on the PA box, like an old television set, because at one point I swore I heard Ed Sullivan introducing Topo Gigo amid the static. The public address system may not have been working, but it was now apparently picking up broadcasts from 1960's television shows. Or perhaps in my boredom, my imagination was just trying its damnedest once more to entertain me.
By this point, we had been sitting on the plane at the gate for about an hour and a half, so no one was very pleased when Captain Obvious came back around again. This time, however, he was accompanied by a man wearing a blazer that was the same color as the airplane with the airline's logo on the breast pocket, a walkie-talkie in one hand, and more credentials and badges around his neck than Mr. T has gold chains.
"This man works for the airline," says Captain Obvious. "His name is Airline McBigWig, and he has an announcement to make." Good old Captain Obvious. Nothing gets by him.
Well, Airline McBigWig seemed like a nice enough fellow, but the passengers were growing restless. So bristling with a new and robust set of stupid questions, they let out many groans and grumbles and mumbly things I couldn't understand, when he informed us that we needed to exit the aircraft so the maintenance guys could troubleshoot the issue more thoroughly. I can only assume he meant that the head scratching and shoulder shrugging would now be even more animated, or that perhaps they needed to add some chin rubbing and brow furrowing to the regimen. But then I'm no maintenance guy, and I'm only guessing at their various contingency plans.
So we mumbled and grumbled some more, and grudgingly got off the plane.
The good news was, the airline had arranged a free meal for us at a deli in the terminal. Unfortunately, the deli was about to close for the night and only had sparse leftovers to serve.
Let me tell you, there's nothing like being tired and bored and anxious and frustrated, and then having someone try to pacify you with leftover airport food. Mmmmm Mmmm!
Now as visions of heat lamp-dried sandwiches and watered down sodas danced in my head, I had a major revelation. Like being hit by a ton of bricks, or something else really heavy that hurts a lot, I realized that the planets were surely not properly aligned, if they were even in the solar system at all anymore. God was not in his heaven, but had gone out for a pack of smokes never to return. And all was definitely not right with the world - especially my world.
Oh, the universe makes it easy for me to get mad at it every once in a while. There is no shortage of opportunities for me to drop to my knees and curse it, like Chuck Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. I mean, when the universe plays its old "indifference card" in the face of death and destruction, tragedy and trial, hypocrisy and hate, and many other alliterations I can't think of right now, I get off my metaphorical horse, leaving my metaphorical hot girlfriend behind with a quizzical look on her face, fall to the metaphorical ground at the edge of the metaphorical ocean, and pound my metaphorical fists into the metaphorical sand and surf while screaming, "You maniac!! You let it happen!! Damn you, universe!! Goddamn you to hell!!" - metaphorically speaking of course.
But I just can't stay mad at the universe.
And the reason I can't is because it's got such a great sense of humor.
Allow me to illustrate.
I attended a conference in Los Angeles over the weekend, the nature of which is not important to the story, but suffice to say that despite the fact that I attended, there were a great many of the world's top intellectuals in the crowd, along with some circus clowns, a 1952 Cadillac El Dorado, Fyvush Finkle, a herd of llamas, and some non-toxic slime (unscented of course). It was a pretty eclectic group to say the least.
Anyway, while in Los Angeles, my companions and I experienced several instances of what we came to call "synchronicity". You know, those moments where everything just seems to fall into place without any effort or forethought?
For example, Saturday morning, we were running a little late for the conference, and we were not quite sure how to get to the auditorium at Caltech where the conference was being held. As we were rushing to the car, we bumped into a woman who happened to need a ride to the conference. So after we made sure she had gas money, we offered to let her ride with us. Well, the woman also just happened to know the exact route to Caltech, and even had hints about where to park. Her navigation skills and stalker-like knowledge of the faculty parking lot allowed us to get to the auditorium and find our seats just as the first speaker was stepping up to the podium. Perfect timing.
If feels great to have all the tumblers fall into place like that, especially when you are expecting them to grind together and bring things to a screeching halt. And the amazing thing is, there were several other similar instances throughout the weekend where it seemed we just happened to find a bit of luck exactly when we needed it.
We sent a member of our group ahead to get a table at a popular Chinese restaurant, and at the exact moment the rest of us were walking in the front door, the maitre d' was announcing that our table was ready. Several times, the elevator doors opened to an empty car just as we were approaching, and all weekend our drinks arrived in a timely manner, perfectly mixed. In fact, it got to where our cute little expression to describe the occurrences was, "The planets are properly aligned, god is in his heaven, and all is right with the world". (I said it was a cute little expression, not necessarily a funny one.)
Anyway, little did I know that those moments of synchronicity were not moments of synchronicity at all, but instead, all part of an elaborate setup to one mother honey of a practical joke.
The older I get, the more I realize that the universe is a master at the setup when it comes to practical jokes. It knows how to build to the dénouement like no other all-encompassing construct. In fact, the universe was flawless this past weekend - even to the end - allowing me yet another moment of synchronicity as I was leaving LA.
At the airport, I said good-bye to a friend with whom I'd attended the conference, navigated the security cattle call, and arrived at my gate at the precise moment the gate agent called my row of seats to board the airplane.
As I pulled a book and some head phones from my back pack and stowed the back pack in the overhead bin, I whispered a triumphant, "The planets are properly aligned, god is in his heaven, and all is right with the world", and settled into my seat with a smile.
And then came the big payoff - the punch line.
After buckling up, I suddenly noticed that static was issuing from the in-flight intercom. The flight attendant was feverishly fiddling with the button in what I suppose was an attempt to fix the thing - I'm sure she needed the intercom to herd us all into place, to do the safety announcements, and to feel important - but she soon gave up to help the passengers stow their carry-on items.
Why is it that on every flight there are those people that for some reason are afraid of the baggage carousels and wind up loading their entire collection of bags in the overhead bins by playing an odd form of the game Tetris? One man had a full-size steamer trunk, another had a refrigerator box full of car parts or iron ore or something, and I swear an old lady had her late husband with her, casket and all. So I got to watch their logistical acrobatics while the static hissed at me from the cabin speakers.
The noise was quite noticeable and more than a little annoying, but I sat listening for a few minutes, trying to see if perhaps I could hear any of the lost tin can and string transmissions from my youth among the buzzing, cracking, and popping. Okay, so I'm not very electronically inclined. Besides, my imagination tends to kick in when I'm bored, and it doesn't know about disbursement of sound waves, radio transmitters and receivers, or the space-time continuum for that matter. For all it knows, those long ago messages to my buddies in the tree-house fort across the fence could have escaped into the atmosphere where they drifted upon, I don't know, gamma rays, or those ever-mysterious electromagnetic waves, or maybe even something with the word "quantum" in it, just waiting to be received by a faulty aircraft intercom. Hey, it could happen.
Well, when I failed to hear the lost transmissions of young boys playing army, I concentrated more deeply on the static in hopes that perhaps I could divine voices from beyond the grave mingled within. I had read an article about a woman who got messages from the "other side" through her toaster, and I thought that listening in on a bunch of ghosts would be really cool. I'm sure they live fascinating lives and no doubt have extremely powerful messages to impart to us.
Apparently, however, souls trapped in limbo prefer simple kitchen appliances to an actual communication device for talking to the living, because despite my effort to receive messages from the dearly departed, the only voices from beyond that I heard were voices from beyond the first class section, as the captain soon came down the aisle informing everyone that there was a problem with the public address system.
"Folks, we're sorry for the inconvenience," he says. "But we're having a little trouble with the PA."
By the way, I think the captain's name was "Captain Obvious".
Captain Obvious, however, was indeed quite helpful at first, answering every stupid question the passengers could ask. It turns out, the in-flight PA system is an item that is included on the pre-flight checklist, and according to FAA regulations, that checklist must have every single item checked off, or the plane doesn't leave the ground. Fortunately, Captain Obvious told us that he had already informed Maintenance of the problem, and that correcting it would only delay our departure for about 15 minutes. All the maintenance guys had to do, after all, was replace the amplifier with a new one.
So the maintenance guys replaced the amplifier.
Well that gave us new hope that we would soon be on our way. Unfortunately, as you might expect, the PA system still emitted only static, but now it was REALLY LOUD STATIC!!
I actually saw a man's ears begin to bleed. A small child burst into a million pieces, like a champagne glass. And a flight attendant killed a man with a bag of peanuts after he stuck his head between her thighs to muffle the sound. The entire cabin was thrown into chaos.
Upon this little setback, the maintenance guys and the flight crew assembled in the galley, and I can't be sure, but it looked as though they played a game of Rock/Paper/Scissors to see who would inform the passengers that the delay would be a bit longer than expected.
Captain Obvious - who always throws paper, he's so obvious - soon came down the aisle again, saying things like, "Boy, that's loud static." He also told us that the delay would be another thirty minutes while the maintenance guys scratched their heads and shrugged their shoulders to see if that would fix the problem.
He didn't actually say that about the maintenance guys, but that's what they did, and I can only assume standard operating procedure requires they have a contingency plan in place. I just expected it would be a little more . . . I don't know . . . practical, I guess.
If it can be said that airline passengers have enormous carry-on items and ask stupid questions, then it can also be said that maintenance guys apparently have extremely ineffectual contingency plans.
In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that when the head scratching and shoulder shrugging didn't work, they tried pounding on the PA box, like an old television set, because at one point I swore I heard Ed Sullivan introducing Topo Gigo amid the static. The public address system may not have been working, but it was now apparently picking up broadcasts from 1960's television shows. Or perhaps in my boredom, my imagination was just trying its damnedest once more to entertain me.
By this point, we had been sitting on the plane at the gate for about an hour and a half, so no one was very pleased when Captain Obvious came back around again. This time, however, he was accompanied by a man wearing a blazer that was the same color as the airplane with the airline's logo on the breast pocket, a walkie-talkie in one hand, and more credentials and badges around his neck than Mr. T has gold chains.
"This man works for the airline," says Captain Obvious. "His name is Airline McBigWig, and he has an announcement to make." Good old Captain Obvious. Nothing gets by him.
Well, Airline McBigWig seemed like a nice enough fellow, but the passengers were growing restless. So bristling with a new and robust set of stupid questions, they let out many groans and grumbles and mumbly things I couldn't understand, when he informed us that we needed to exit the aircraft so the maintenance guys could troubleshoot the issue more thoroughly. I can only assume he meant that the head scratching and shoulder shrugging would now be even more animated, or that perhaps they needed to add some chin rubbing and brow furrowing to the regimen. But then I'm no maintenance guy, and I'm only guessing at their various contingency plans.
So we mumbled and grumbled some more, and grudgingly got off the plane.
The good news was, the airline had arranged a free meal for us at a deli in the terminal. Unfortunately, the deli was about to close for the night and only had sparse leftovers to serve.
Let me tell you, there's nothing like being tired and bored and anxious and frustrated, and then having someone try to pacify you with leftover airport food. Mmmmm Mmmm!
Now as visions of heat lamp-dried sandwiches and watered down sodas danced in my head, I had a major revelation. Like being hit by a ton of bricks, or something else really heavy that hurts a lot, I realized that the planets were surely not properly aligned, if they were even in the solar system at all anymore. God was not in his heaven, but had gone out for a pack of smokes never to return. And all was definitely not right with the world - especially my world.
Well, this revelation left me officially cheerless, and I chose not to partake in the free meal, which by the way, consisted of lightly salted kettle chips, Uncle Eddie's Vegan Cookies, and either Yaki tea or Los Angeles county tap water. Amazingly, the two look and taste pretty much the same. Instead, I wandered through the terminal cursing and thinking up my own stupid questions, and eventually made my way back to the gate to check the progress of the head scratching and shoulder shrugging.
While there, I once more encountered Airline McBigWig who informed me that no one was sure how long it would take for the head scratching and shoulder shrugging to fix the public address system, so they had secured another aircraft for us . . . At another gate . . . In another terminal!!
Captain Obvious then emerged from the jet way, and told us, "You should collect your personal items and take them to the new gate with you." Obvious yes, but very thorough.
At any rate, it was now almost a quarter to midnight Los Angeles time. My flight was originally scheduled to depart at 6:20pm. So it was amazing, yet not really surprising, how quickly we all boarded the new aircraft, played Overhead Bin Tetris, and got settled.
Once in the air, the flight was fairly smooth, but we didn't touch down in Houston until almost 5am. By the time I left baggage claim (hey I ain't afraid of no carousel) and drove home it was after 5 o'clock in the morning. I had just enough time to lay my head on my pillow, breathe comfortably twice, reach over and turn off my alarm, get up again, get dressed, and come to work.
And it wasn't until just a few minutes ago that I realized the joke. It wasn't until I was sitting here, with a chance to reflect, that I realized I had been duped, that the synchronicity was all just an elaborate setup on the part of the universe, meant to lure me into complacent confidence, and to cause me to stop paying attention in my normal, cynical way.
I'm sitting here at my computer with toothpicks in my eyes (not holding the eyelids open, but jammed point first into my corneas, because the tremendous pain is the only thing keeping me awake), and I think of the universe and its impish ways. In my mind, I run through the monumental planning tasks it undertook. I marvel at the logistics of setting everything up in LA to work out so wonderfully for me for three days, only to have it flip completely in the opposite direction and fall apart so magnificently. I ponder these things, and I have to smile.
I want to grab the universe in a head-lock, and say, "Why you. You got me, you little rascal," and then give it some noogies.
I want to do that, but I'm too damn tired.
posted by Sam Ogden at
9:54 AM
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