writing challenge

An Attack of the Cleans

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It is said that Albert Einstein once asked, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what are we to think of an empty desk?” While not famous for his quips (although E=mc2 is the soul of wit in its brevity), Einstein’s joke came from his one man show, “The Theories of My Relatives.”

His mother was always complaining about his messy desktop and resented that opening the desk drawers was verbotten.

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The human mind is an organizer, the greatest one in existence, the one that all of our tools and machines are built for in an attempt to replicate its principles and imagined actions. Nature does not organize. Every organizing structure we come up with is an imposition on nature and is thus radically random: no method of organizing is more “correct” than any other.

Alphabetical order? Which alphabet? Which word should be used to alphabetize? “The?”

Chronological? Write your next book from the outside in.

Size? I partly organize my bookshelf by the size of books (see above), the heavier ones on the bottom or on the floor (thus, not even on the bookshelf) because the shelf needs reinforcing.

Or one could organize an argument by number of words used in each section, largest first. Juries would return verdicts of “confused.”

(My girlfriend’s cat has one organizing principle and the work of perfecting her world with it occupies much of her day, for many of her few waking hours: This thing on the space that I want to occupy until I move it off this space, when I will move somewhere else, must go. And she sweeps the offending pen or paper or book off the desk.)

The human mind finds and makes connections between things and ideas, or the representations of ideas: words, papers, books. In an ideal sense, all ideas are equal. The work of organizing, re-cluttering, and finding new connections is a creative act. Dear Albert Einstein’s mom: A cluttered work space is the same as an organized work space, it’s just that only one of them meets your random aesthetic standards of ideal desk appearance.

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I have lived with hyper-organized spaces that I created for myself: Books separated by subject and then alphabetized (left to right, by author last name) within those. Multiple titles by the same author arranged chronologically by publication date.

(A famous writer’s wife once tried to start a fight with me over how our bookstore organized its books: Alphabetically, but in two different ways, neither of which suited her particular preference for her husband’s name to be prominent everywhere at all times for reasons of income. The majority of the store was alphabetical by author within its various sections, but the privileged section of new hardcovers, nearest the door, well, the books on those shelves were alphabetical by title. Thus, his newest title was on a lower shelf because it did not begin with A, and his paperbacks, with his last name starting with S, were not always at eye height. After she and I stared at each other for a moment, the famous writer paid for his purchases and placed his arm around his wife’s shoulder and they started out the door. But at the door he turned, looked at me over his wife’s head and said, “You’ll have to excuse my wife. She’s rather eccentric.”)

Virtual file folders inside virtual file folders in my computer. A clean computer desktop, with just the “C:” icon and the trash bin and maybe the couple of virtual folders that contained whatever I was working on at that moment.

(I had an officemate who photographed his desktop and made that image his computer screen desktop image, so when you were talking with him at his desk you were looking at a real-life version of Pink Floyd’s “Ummagumma” album cover. Desktop > desktop > desktop. He would regularly update the photo to reflect current changes on his 3D “real” desktop like the content of his IN/OUT box or his children’s school pictures.)

ummagumma

I haven’t listened to Ummagumma in quite a while.

In the past, I have organized my kitchen to discover how inefficient that could make me. I alphabetized the spices. I have arranged the clothes in my closet by color. My baseball card collections (many complete sets) were always divided into American and then National leagues, and then broken into teams, my favorites first, favorite players on each team towards the front.

Perhaps you have noticed that, in the past, I was kind of a rigid idiot.

Finally it occurred to me that the best, most efficient, kitchen organizing principle was “frequency of use near the areas of frequent use.” And that principle, which is a barely controlled entropy, is what guides most of my organization now.

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Roland Barthes: “My body is free of its (self image) only when it establishes its work space. This space is the same everywhere, patiently adapted to the pleasure of painting, writing, sorting.”

Where am I me? When am I me? When I am not engaged in the illusion of self that I studiously maintain; the image of myself that I carry around in my brain is not me, as it is a fiction. When I am not my image, I am myself. Often, I find myself in the field around me, the space that gives evidence that I occupy it, my work space. My desk. I am found in the outline of things that I use, the adumbration of my stuff: papers, books, pens, glasses. Words. Inside is a space perfectly fitted to me, or to my image of myself. And then, by thinking that thought, it is gone again.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 14 asks, “What’s messier right now—your bedroom or your computer’s desktop (or your favorite device’s home screen)? Tell us how and why it got to that state.”

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No Time. Too Loose. Or, Time’s Mulligan

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Nothing is perfect, except for the perfect things. It does not take a precise 24 hours and zero minutes and zero seconds for the earth to complete one spin on its axis; it takes slightly longer, but not so much longer that you could even call it a “tick.”

The earth’s rotation is only a tiny fraction of a millisecond slower than what we otherwise call a day, but these partial seconds add up. Twenty-five times since 1972, the international bureau of standards that handles time issues has added a “leap second” to all of our lives. The last year with a leap second was 2012, so if that year felt longer for you, there is a reason: It was. By one second. Clocks everywhere could have read “11:59:60” at midnight the night of the leap second, but they did not because no one makes clocks that do that.

If it was not for those leap seconds—and, every four years, leap days—our clocks and calendars would slide and slip all over the place compared to what they are measuring; if not for leap days, eventually New Englanders would be confronted with a frigid July and the dog days of December, and vice versa for the Southern Hemisphere.

What our clocks and calendars are measuring is perfect: a year is X number of seconds, days, months, but not the same every year. The earth’s orbit is regular and perfect, but not 365 days every year. It is almost 365 days, and a day is almost exactly 24 hours in length, and we live with the compromise we call clocks and calendars. The ancients came as close to exactly right simply from observation as they could—to within seconds.

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No one is perfect, except we are each of us perfect, perfectly ourselves.

The clock makers and the calendar printers, heck even the bureau of standards that decides how to measure things, regularly make adjustments to the ways we mark the passage of time. Everything, even time, needs a semi-regular do-over, a mulligan.

(The mulligan is a very specific rule in golf—a rule that does not exist in a place called reality—which states that “sometimes rules do not apply,” so do-overs do exist in the universe. Of course, my friends and I found ways to bend even this non-rule. In informal golf, friendly noncompetitive golf between or among noncompetitors, if one hits an egregious drive [if? when, in my case], a drive that everyone agrees there may be no recovery from, everyone might also agree to grant that player a do-over. That is a mulligan. He or she does not get another one for the remainder of the day, even if the mulligan, the replacement shot, was worse or if an even worse drive came off their club later on. My friends and I came up with the “retro mulligan,” in which a player kept his or her mulligan in the bag if the do-over was a worse shot. That was our contribution to the world of golf and the world of do-overs, and it was super-secret, I think. Maybe I will take a mulligan in tomorrow’s column. The “retro mulligan” was the only mulligan that a player truly had only one of, and using it erased it and the mulligan.)

As an idea, the mulligan is forgiveness from the universe, a creative admission that there is a better version of what you just did still available in you. There is a better version of you. The retro mulligan concedes that sometimes we grab a do-over prematurely in life. There is a saner version of a better version of you.

I have a perfectionist streak that I am striving to lose, because I can not be the best version of myself by placing perfect in my path. Perfectionism leads to procrastination, then paralysis. All those leap seconds and leap days, I needed every last one of them to get to where I am today. And I expect I will need every leap second and leap day yet to come, because I am keeping the retro mulligan in my golf bag of life. Every second counts, yet there is no time to lose.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 13 asks, “Good news—another hour has just been added to every 24-hour day (don’t ask us how. We have powers). How do you use those extra sixty minutes?”

Lies, Damn Lies, and Ad Sales

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The newspaper’s weekly circulation was a closely guarded exaggeration. The circulation manager knew the number, the editorial department knew it, the advertising manager knew it. The newspaper’s circulation was about 2000 copies per week. Now you know, too.

The pliability of the words “circulation,” “copies,” “newspaper,” and “week” was tested regularly. This is because if the advertisers had been told the 2000-per-week number, they might have asked the newspaper to pay them for the honor of placing their ads; thus, they were given a number 10 times larger. More often than not, they were told that over 20,000 pairs of eyes “saw” any given issue of the newspaper. Actually, in an effort at a specificity that would grant legitimacy, they were given a figure of “21,000 readers.”

The word we used was not “subscribers,” it was “readers,” and I may have been the reason for this taint of honesty: even though I was the assistant editor, I was given many tasks over my time there in order to learn the newspaper business, and one week I placed ad calls. I knew that 21,000 was an exaggeration akin to harvests in Soviet provinces distant from Moscow and could not bring myself to repeat it. We did not have 21,000 subscribers: We ordered fewer than 5000 copies from the printer each week. But “readers”? I saw people manhandling copies on line at the supermarket only to return them to the newsstand. They counted, right?

We started to claim 21,000 readers. Each of the four or five communities we covered had populations under 1000, so the only way one could legitimately claim 21,000 anything was by including pets and livestock.

Sometimes, the word was “readership.” We had a “total readership” of 21,000.

Many of our ads were from the local car dealers, so my pang of an honest twinge was not met with an equal bout of honesty from them. They tended to pay late.

Our ad manager was remarkably creative with the set of facts that he made up from the facts that we had. It was a case of a “known known” being treated with the delicate hands of a diamond-cutter. If one fact yields 20 different perspectives, many facets, well, then it is no longer one fact: It is 20 facts. And facts are knowledge, and knowledge is power, so the more facts one knows, the smarter one is.

And math always grants the deployer of facts a sheen of certitude, or in my case when making the phone calls, the nervous luster of flop sweat.

We started the magical addition with the 2000 paid subscriptions, quite a few of which were free, but whatever, these were 2000 real subscriptions and Shhhhh. Each house has an average of three members, so we can assume there are more readers right there. Quite a few of our subscriptions went to doctors’ offices, and who knows how many people thumb through an average issue in those, amIright? These two estimates, home and office, brought us to five digit figure land.

Further, we distributed about three thousand copies to X number of stores and sold quite a few each week through those outlets (in Reality Land, that number varied wildly from week to week). The population in the several counties that these stores were in was Y. Surveying the gas station and grocery store owners at which we sold our newspaper, our ad manager learned their estimates of the average number of customers they deal with each week. Their estimates. Their own exaggerations, um, estimates.

Our ad manager hated when we only came up with enough news to produce a one-section paper. The irrefutable logic was that a multi-section newspaper gets split up, doubling or even tripling the potential readership for that issue.

When I look at my page views and metrics on the website here, I sometimes think about my 21,000-circulation newspaper that covered life in a profoundly rural part of the world. Then I remember one fact, one single fact, that has never been broken up into 20 different facets or perspectives by anyone: I loved that job.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 10 asks, “Time to confess: tell us about a time when you used a word whose meaning you didn’t actually know (or were very wrong about, in retrospect).”