The World According To Chuck

The weblog of Chuck Sigars

So.  Schrödinger had this cat.

Erwin Schrödinger was a theoretical physicist, and this was a theoretical cat.  For the record.

It was a thought experiment, an activity physicists in the early 20^th century engaged in a lot.  They would imagine hypothetical situations under perfect conditions, extrapolate and theorize and pretend to their heart’s content, and then they’d all get together and discuss these experiments with great passion.  You know the type.

Take a box, said Schrödinger.  Construct a diabolical mechanism, a Rube Goldberg device triggered by a small piece of radioactive material.  Given the nature of such things, eventually an atom of this material would decay.  Might take an hour, might take longer, might take less time, nobody knows.  But when it decayed – in this imaginary, ideal situation – it would lead to the release of cyanide gas.

Now put a cat in the box, close the lid, and think.

I’m thinking the cat didn’t consider the situation all that ideal.

But here’s the question Schrödinger posed: What’s the state of the cat, over time, with the lid remaining closed and no way to know what’s going on with that pesky decayed-or-not atom?

For those of us not theoretical physicists, it’s simple.  We think of two things.

(1)    Dude.  What did that cat ever do to you?  And

(2)    The cat is either alive or dead.

Again.  No actual cats were harmed. Sheesh.  Cat people.  Chill.

Schrödinger was just taking the new quantum mechanics that everybody was yakking about to its illogical conclusion, which would be that, in fact, the state of the cat couldn’t be known without observation, and was, in fact again, a statistic, a wave form of probability.  According to a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, the cat was sorted of smeared all over the inside of the box, neither alive or dead.  Messy though.

Enough of quantum theory, which I will never truly grasp, although I try.  And enough of theoretical physicists, for that matter.

Except to note that some of them, including Schrödinger and particularly Einstein, were bothered by all this talk of mathematical possibilities and uncertainty and discontinuity, etc.  This is reality, Greg.  They wanted a connection between the quantum atomic world and the classical physics of Newton, where an apple fell to the ground and didn’t just hang in mid-air in a state of probability.  This sort of thinking drove Einstein right up the wall.

And we can imagine he would have gone ballistic, in his Einstein way, had he lived just a few years longer to see the “many worlds” concept begin to take off, the idea that uncountable little choices spin off into multiple universes and timelines; in one the cat is dead, in the other the cat is alive, and so on.

Once again: There was no cat.

This is what’s really on my mind.  Not quantum physics, although that’s fun to think about sometimes.  But other lives?  I’ve been there.

This weekend I head for Texas to spend a few days with my girl, overdue and anticipated.  I held her in my arms a few seconds after she took her first breath, and I imagined her life to be.

And if you had told me the future that actually happened?  Absolutely.  I would have grinned and nodded.  It makes sense.  She has surprised me in so many ways, but I could have seen it way back when, definitely.

Tomorrow my son turns 22, though.  And here we go.

You hold a newborn and you see the paths; you can’t help it, I think.  They dance from general to specific, from an unknown future to particular chromosomal arrangements.  I saw a boy and then a man, back then, fuzzy but there.  I imagined all sorts of things.

I was wrong, of course.

I have two sons, then.  One had the joyous sitcom life I imagined in the delivery room, the Little League and the first car and the prom dates and (forgive me) the winning catch.  Or the winning essay, or the solo, or the lead role.

And then there’s the son I have observed, who has faced challenges that would send me under the covers, and done it with mostly grace and humor.

If he sees the other life, he doesn’t dwell on it.  This is the Newtonian reality, with gravity and momentum, with medication and forms, with special classes and uncertain options.

I’ve known a lot of people in my life.  I still think he’s the bravest person I’ve ever met.  Walk in his footsteps and wonder.

I have grieved for that other boy, just a little, just a couple of times, on purpose and with a specific point.  I didn’t want to change the past, fix the future, argue with God about the unfairness.  It happens.  People have it worse.  I love my son just the way he is.  I wish it had been easier for him, but then.  Wishes.

And after I mourned this alternative reality, I learned something important.

What didn’t happen can’t hurt us.  What might have been has no power over us, not unless we let it, and I won’t.  Don’t.  Can’t.

It’s not just John.  I have a lifetime of other options, if I want to play that game.  So do you.  Take it from me, then: Regret can cripple you.

Hope, on the other hand, is pretty cool.  I’m a big believer in hope.

This is where I’m heading now.  Hopeville.  Hopeland.  The Hope Community.

And also Austin, as I say.  Looking forward to that.  And to John’s 22^nd birthday, when I get to once again recite the details from amniotic fluid to apgar scores, and he can roll his eyes.  This is the life we get, this is the day we get, it’s what I can observe and what becomes real as soon as interact with it.  The rest is just theory, and a little of that can last a long time.

There is no cat.  Just so you know.

Lately my mind has wandered to chromosomes, mine in particular, and why they’re broken.

It may not (of course it’s not) be biological, just cultural or even random individuality, but I know something about men and toys.  And we live in Disneyland, we do.

Even a new, 50-buck microwave gives me little spasms of joy.  If it runs on electricity and has something you push, swipe, plug or push, I’m liking it a lot.  And if I can program it, well.

So I can’t really explain it, other than I’ve just outgrown myself.  There are a couple of new computers in this house, and I’m really weary.

I bought my first computer in 1990, preparing to go into business for myself and diving into overhead in a big way, for the time.  That first one – ordered from a small Seattle company, and taking a week to assemble before I got my shaky hands on it – cost me approximately a month’s salary.  Add in that fancy dot matrix printer and we were talking real money.  I had one foot dangling over a cliff and the other on top of a 1400-baud modem that was pretty much worthless.

You know the story, if you did this and remember.  A 286 processor.  40 MB of hard drive, way more than I could fill up with word processing.  A floppy disk drive (5-1/2-inch, of course) and MS-DOS.  “Back to the Future III” was in theaters, George H. W. Bush was in the White House, and I was computing, gingerly.

I’ve lost track of computers, now.  That first one went to the kids after I upgraded (one with CD-ROM and Windows!).  Then I upgraded the kids’, who were also upgrading themselves.  Then a motherboard went bad, then a new and fancy one, then a hasty one, then a laptop for JK when she went to seminary, then a laptop for Beth when she went to college…they blur.  Lots and lots of computers.

And now I think: Remember when that used to be fun?  Maybe it was an emergency, or maybe it was just time, and almost always it hurt my checking account, but a new computer?  That was fun with a capital everything, and the thrill lasted for weeks.

On Labor Day I had another motherboard melt-down, my 5-year laptop starting to creak and overheat.  It was a bad day for it, and being savvy by now and informed I walked into Best Buy and walked out five minutes later.  I literally bought the second computer I looked at.  Fine, whatever, I’ll take it, price is right. What a pain.

And it was.  Ugh.  Transferring my files from the cloud and external drives, reinstalling familiar programs, setting up VPN, decrapifying the preloaded junk…a waste of a day.

Last week, loading up her car in the university parking lot, dark and cold, my wife left her laptop bag all by its lonesome.  Someone picked it up and turned it in to Security, but something happened.  Something less than being run over but more than nothing.  The screen was shot, and screens are important.

It worked fine with an external monitor, but trying hauling one of those around.  It was also an ancient machine, and by now a new computer is essentially an unexpected but minor car repair bill: Nobody likes it, but the electricity stays on.  Not a huge deal.

Getting her back to work, creating exams and grading papers?  That took me a while, and with other things to do and the clock ticking, the stress built and nobody was happy, and here we are.  New computers.  No joy.  Mostly irritation.

This is a specific kind of anhedonia, I think, the inability to experience pleasure.  It’s a fine computer.  Much nicer than her old one, and much lighter too.  Better processor, more RAM, good graphics, shoot me now.  I’m just not that into it.

What I want, actually, is a door.  A new garage door.  Some new interior doors.  That would be sweet.  That’s what is on my mind.  Some solid, functional, old-fashioned doors.  And maybe some flooring.

It was bound to happen.  Our electronic attention deficit disorder was bound to crop up, even in this world of new and improved.  Or else my tastes have changed, like everything else.  I got a food processor from my daughter this Christmas, a pretty simple tool that makes chopping quicker and easier, and it gives me pleasure every time I use it.  It doesn’t even stream movies or play mp3s, but it gives me way more pleasure than a new laptop, and so now I wonder.

Also?  Really want those doors.

It’s currently 31 degrees at my house, while in Austin, according to my sources, it’s 68.  This is what I’m talking about.  I may have picked a good time for a trip, although let’s see what next week brings.  If it’s 45 degrees and rainy there next Friday, I won’t be disappointed, although I can’t rule out thinking that somehow I deserve it.  I really should have been a better person, etc.

I’ve been practicing my Texan.  I’m fixin’ to get on a plane, and so on.  Verbs are important in Texas, as are hats.  This is very complicated but I’ve done it before.

Texans are also masters of the double negative, proudly and unashamed.  This was introduced into the Lone Star lexicon by Sam Houston hisself, who famously said, “We don’t need no damn help.”  It stuck.  It’s also useful in Best Buy.

I have a long and well-documented history in Texas, including bloodlines.  There are plenty of my people in Texas, not all of them in Starbuck’s.  A lot are buried in the Fort Worth area, my grandfather used to tell me.  My mother spent part of her childhood on a farm in West Texas.  The bloodlines are there, popping up occasionally, nudging me toward fried food and pick-up trucks, although I resist.

And of course I snagged a Texan 29 years ago, spun my web and charmed her with my clumsy dancing and near-sightedness.  She’s a fixer, a Texas trait, and I was imminently fixable.

It made sense that my daughter would head there for college, given her waiting support system and a nice sense of adventure, but I remember having concerns.  She was a Northwest native, reared on sushi and aloofness.  Her first word was “macchiato” and she grew up thinking that football teams always lost.  She was used to seeing mountains, and fresh vegetables on her plate.  She was accustomed to the practice of Seattle triage: We assess a situation, give first aid and other help, but we don’t want to get involved.  Here’s how you get to Pike and Fourth, no problem, buh-bye now, got a book to read and a bike to ride.  We’re not social animals.

But she survived and flourished, snagged her own Texan, and in a week I get to visit, my first trip there since the two of us drove through on our way to Santa Fe, a long day we’d both probably rather forget.  Now I get to see her new town and her new house, her front porch and her cat.  I’m fixin’ to go to Texas in a week, and I can’t wait.  The only question is whether I bring my hat or not, but I’ll figure that out myself.  I don’t need no damn help, as they say, thanks anyway.

I own my habits.  By now I should.

They are influenced by no one and not much.  Some days I sleep a little later, but that’s about it.  I take full responsibility for what I do or don’t, and on most days I can write my own ticket, assuming it doesn’t cost much.

So it’s up to me, and even the weather is usually irrelevant, given where I live.  But our snow of last week cramped my style.  It started on Saturday, showed up occasionally for the next three days, arrived as expected on Wednesday again and then surprised everybody by partying big time on Thursday.  It snowed for 12 hours that day, as far as I could tell, pleasant snow, nice to watch, not threatening but cumulative.  I eyeballed 10 inches on the ground and particularly on my trash can.  A fair amount of snow.

And enough to keep me off the roads, except for a few hikes to Safeway, half a mile one way depending on how you go.

But really?  That’s about as far as I go anyway.  When I go out to walk, I loop and zigzag, pick up a hill here and there, turn a quarter-mile crow fly into a two-mile hike, then turn around and come back.  It’s better than a treadmill but that’s mostly psychological, not geographical.

And if you documented my travels, if you drew a circle or had an app do it for you, with me in the middle and oh-the-places-I’ll-go dotted out, it would be a small circle.  If Best Buy closes, it will be smaller.  I don’t get out much.

Thirty miles at the most, in fact.  That would be church in Renton; downtown Seattle is not nearly that far.

I’ve come to believe that there’s little wrong in my life that can’t be righted or at least helped by getting out more.  This is empirical data, and based not just on how I feel after but what’s going on before.  I start to dread leaving the house and then I know: You’re messed up, buddy, been inside too long.  Time for a trip.

JK and I drove down to Eugene a year ago, 300 miles, in weather that was comically rainy, like a Northwest cartoon; yeah, it was raining.  The entire time.  A good trip, though.

Other than that, you have to reach back to preoperative days, spring 2010, when I was in Arizona for the better part of a week.  Feels like a different life, now.

A week before the snow, I booked a trip to Austin.  It was a spontaneous thing, although talked about a lot, and a good deal from Alaska Airlines, but really?  You either shake the chains or the chains shake you.

I’ve worked at home for 23 years now, a stunning number to me.  I’ve written about it before, trying to document the sameness and explain what it’s like, how the wardrobe becomes limited and the socialization more so, how tiny interactions become major events, how socks wear out like crazy because you never wear shoes.  How the Internet becomes your friend.  How the walls become mobile, always moving in, until there comes a time when you can calculate the square footage of Hell.

Could be just me.

So I’m looking forward to the end of same old, same old.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Texas but not so much in the south, a quick trip in 2004, drove through Austin, didn’t see much.  And Austin is an island, they say.  We shall see.

Here’s to expanding my radius, then.  Shaking off some dust.  Get a little inspired.  See what WiFi on planes is all about.  Spend a little time with my girl, tour the town, eat some good food and be on the watch for Matthew McConaughey, who apparently can be spotted from time to time.  I’ll wave for you.