The Last Word On Nothing

Long ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I was charged with teaching a class of first-year students how to write “academically.” (Poor things.) One essay I chose for them from the beefy course reader was “The Loss of the Creature,” by the novelist Walker Percy. Briefly, Percy argues that we have lost our ability to see the essence of things. So many of our experiences come to us thoroughly pre-packaged that we gauge our pleasure by the degree to which the experience aligns with our expectations. “[T]he thing as it is,” he writes, “has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind.”

I was thinking of Percy and his discontents a few weeks ago while I drove on I-90 through eastern Washington with my wife, daughter, and mother-in-law. It was the start of my daughter’s winter break and we were off to Yellowstone National Park. I don’t go out of my way to visit national parks, but my daughter is in fourth grade and the National Park Service, taking a sort of “Give Me the Child and I Will Show You the Man” approach to wilderness appreciation, offers free admission for fourth graders. So to Yellowstone we were bound.

To make the trip an occasion we had rented a van that had more names than a member of the British royal family: a Mercedes Sprinter Storyteller Overlander BeastMODE 4×4. Its owners had shortened that to Serenity, which they stenciled on the side above some Chinese characters. Serenity was a stew of semiotic psychoses. Here we were, cosseted in an exemplar of wild, carefree, adventure-loving, planet-hugging #VanLife, all to the tune of fifteen miles per gallon. I spent a lot of the drive calculating the veritable forests we’d have to plant to offset the effects of this monstrosity. In the end I figured that, as middle-class Americans, if we truly wanted to lessen our impact on the planet, then the surest way to do that, sensu Camus, would be to kill ourselves. But it was the holidays, and we were leaving the Cascadia bioregion for the first time in two years, en route to one of the country’s most stunning national parks, and so I resolved to think happy thoughts.

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One of my fears, when I moved back home from DC to my minuscule hometown in a sparsely populated region of California, was that I’d lose what I consider an important modern survival skill: the ability to wait in line politely, or as the British put it, to queue. 

There were ample opportunities to queue in DC, including getting on or off on the subway, checking out at Trader Joe’s, or acquiring the latest novelty food item, like an (inspired) sushi burrito, or a (disappointing) cronut. I waited in grimy ballet flats that lacked arch support for endurance, or if I wanted to build up my tolerance for pain, in heels. Sometimes waiting made me cry, or want to. One sweltering afternoon I sat for three hours in rush-hour traffic in my 1999 Honda, sans air conditioner. I’m pretty sure I still have an imprint on my forehead from slamming it against the steering wheel in frustration. But waiting also made me more resourceful. (After that, I never drove in a DC heatwave without a thermos full of ice cubes.)

Queuing is a scientific discipline unto itself, I recently learned. The field was born in early 20th century Denmark from the need to configure early telephone switchboards to avoid long delays. Scientists have since applied mathematical models of queuing to 911 response time, the wait for an organ, and the number of times you hear “Please wait, your call is important to us” before a actual customer service representative picks up the phone. When a huge snowstorm knocks out power for thousands of people, it’s a mathematical model–rather than a system of “first-come, first served” –that typically decides whose power lines get fixed first. 

This post first ran in October 2019. Here’s hoping for the glorious return of school talent shows in 2021-22.

About a year ago, I attended a high school talent show. It was over two hours long. The multipurpose room smelled of old pizza and pubescent sweat. The folding metal chairs made me squirm uncomfortably in my seat, as did many of the acts.

Watching parents pull out their phones and prepare to post their kids’ performances online, I thanked God that Facebook didn’t exist when I dressed up as Baby Spice in 8th grade. (I didn’t want to be Baby Spice. I wanted to be Sporty Spice, or at least Posh Spice, and wearing Baby’s pigtails and knee socks felt like a betrayal of my values — of myself.)

So much has changed for teenagers since I was in high school: the rise of social media, the demise of the planet as we know it. At this high school, however, at least one rule of American adolescence appeared unchanged: to maintain social status, it was imperative not to be caught trying very hard.

Most of the kids who entered the talent show sought safety in groups, performing acts that required little skill or practice. One group bopped around to the relentless, infantile earworm “Baby Shark” (don’t click if you don’t want your life to be ruined.) The popular girls performed a Mean Girls-esque, unsettlingly come-hither dance. The goofball senior boys played “Eye of the Tiger” on kazoos.