True Stories From My Life. Part 4: The Mystery of Electricity

My town is in the midst of an "arctic vortex" of unusually-cold winter weather. This afternoon, I drove my 2003 Saturn Ion 1 about half a mile from my home to the Salvation Army, to see a social worker about a pair of glasses. The Major was behind the desk, and he told me that the social worker wasn't in today. I said I was surprised they were open at all today, because of the weather. He said they were open today, with a skeleton crew, precisely because of the weather: in case someone needed to get indoors somewhere and warm up.

From the Salvation Army I drove to Kroger's, about 2 miles. After I had Kroger'd, my car wouldn't start. I went back inside Kroger's, searched my wallet, and found an AARP card. (My Mom had gotten me an AARP membership, and told me that roadside assistance was the most important part of the membership.) To my surprise, the card said that my membership was still active, until May 2019. After about half an hour on the phone, I found out that my membership had been cancelled.

I went back out to the Kroger's parking lot, and this time my Saturn started. I was not as surprised as I had been when a similar thing had happened in earlier years: drove my car to a parking lot, shopped, car wouldn't start, waited about a half hour, then it started.

Since this wasn't the first time, I wasn't completely surprised. But I still don't understand what happened. Perhaps my not understanding it just shows that I know laughably little about electricity. Maybe engineers who are reading this are shouting at the screen: "It's the condensation, you idiot!" Or something else if it's something other than condensation.

I've been trying to learn about electricity, because the world is converting from petrochemicals to electricity. I can't claim to have made much progress. I open books such as this one:

-- and am immediately baffled. it maik munkee brane hert. And there are other textbooks in physics and math whose equations make my brain hurt much more than the ones in this book. I stopped studying math in the mid-1970's at age 15, as soon as I was allowed to stop, and now I'm hopelessly behind. (Also: I still don't actually like math. That's why I stopped studying it: because I hated it.) I have heard that Einstein used tensor analysis to come up with the theory of relativity. I've heard that. I don't know whether it's true, or partly true, or a misleading statement, or what.

I do know that my 2003 Saturn Ion 1, if it doesn't start on a cold day, may start a while later the same day. I know this is so, but I do not know why this is so. There's an entire world of STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math -- which is mysterious to me. And yet I know that I know much more about such things than do many poets and artists. And I know that many scientists, engineers and mathematicians are just as woefully ignorant of history and philosophy and the arts.

And so for today, grateful to be back home and grateful that the heat is on, I shall be as one crying in the wilderness for geniuses of various kinds to become less ignorant about one another.

I hope you're not too cold out there, reading this.

True Stories From My Life. Part 3: The Past Few Days

(100% true.)

I began the day intending to look through my two volumes of Isidore of Seville's etymologariam, hoping I might get some sort of idea for a blog post about Isidore and other ancient compilers of knowledge into more or less the form of what we call encyclopedias.

Then I saw something which I had forgotten: that the first page of the praefatio editoris in vol I of my copy of Isidore's compilation was badly printed, so that the words were fainter than they should have been. It's just the first page, as far as I can tell, but it really threw me off.

I wonder how much my new glasses will help me with things like this faintly-printed page. On Wednesday I got a new eyeglass prescription, I spent most of Thursday in the hospital, on Friday I dropped off my prescription with a program that gave me a free pair of new glass years ago, and, I hope, will do it again, because I'm living on Federal disability benefits, and a new pair of glasses would be a big expense for me.

On Friday, and twice today, Sunday, I got calls from strangers who had been alerted about my hospital stay and called to see how I was and if I needed anything. Calls like that, and the free eyeglasses, are just two examples of the fine community in which I live, and its unusual commitment to giving help to people who actually need it.

The weather here has been very, very cold since before last Thursday, and I think that might be a big part of what happened to me Thursday: I just freaked out because I didn't have the psychological wherewithal to deal with the extreme weather, and with my anxiety about difficulties to which the weather could lead.

Tomorrow's weather is forecast to be much warmer, then there will be several extremely-cold days, then it will get much warmer again. I went to Kroger's today, and I was intending to shovel my walk after that, but I looked at it and decided it's fine. There isn't that much snow on it.

True Stories From My Life. Part 2: Me And Allen Ginsberg

(100% TRUE.)

It was a very cold day November, 1994, in New York City. I was walking north on Fifth Av in midtown. The broad sidewalks were crowded with people as usual on a weekday, and wisps of snow blew around on the concrete. I had the impression that it was one of those days when it was too cold for snow to fall heavily.

As I crossed an intersection I saw a young man on the other side, facing toward me, facing south, standing still and so standing out from all the people who'd begun to move when we got the green light. He was probably in his 20's, had fair thinning hair which was cut short, was just a little bit on the pudgy side. He stood out for other reasons too: He was wearing a winter jacket, but it wasn't zipped up. There was no hood on his jacket, and he wasn't wearing a hat, or gloves. Or shoes or socks. His toes hung over the edge of the curb. His arms hung at his sides with his palms turned forward. His eyes were rolled up into his head. But what really made him stand apart from the crowd was that his fly was open and he was peeing into the street in a thick stream. The real "New York" aspect of the situation was, with all the big crowds around, no one was paying any attention to him.

A block or two further, between 47th and 48th on the east side of 5th, I came to Brentano's bookstore, a great bookstore. That 5th Av location has since closed. As I entered the store Allen Ginsberg came rushing out, so hastily that we very nearly crashed into one another, his face came within inches of my face. I didn't have time to turn around and say "I'm sorry" before he was gone. At the time I had the impression that either he was late for an appointment and rushing to get there, or repulsed by something or someone in the store and rushing to get away before he lost his temper or something. This was long before I had been diagnosed as autistic. Since that diagnosis a third explanation for me and Allen Ginsberg so nearly colliding has occurred to me. Because I am autistic, my perceptions of events often differ radically from those of others, and because I know that now, I wonder whether possibly Ginsberg had not been rushing along at all, but rather that I had been lumbering along like a big half-blind moose (I'm rather large), abstracted, in my head and not watching where I was going, and so that perhaps the near-collision was entirely my fault. I am not good in crowded situations and that is putting it mildly. I've taken to making extra conscious efforts to get out of other people's way in crowded places.

A forth possibility has also occurred to me: perhaps Ginsberg was in a terrible rush, but not because he was late to be somewhere else nor very anxious not to be there anymore, but because he knew the young barefoot urinating gentleman, and had just been alerted as to his current behavior, and was rushing to the young man's aid and hoping he got there before the guy got into trouble. This forth possibility jibes more with my image of Ginsberg as consistently compassionate and concerned for the welfare of people in trouble. I have no idea whether or not this image is accurate because I never met Ginsburg apart from that near-collision.

Once I was inside the store, I asked an employee, "Was that Allen Ginsberg?" The employee said yes, he had just given a reading. I was disappointed that I had missed that. I asked if I could fill out a job application. Brentano's never hired me -- within a few days I was working at another bookstore on the west side of 5th Av a few blocks farther north -- and a few years later they went out of business. A complete coincidence? You tell me.

True Stories From My Life. Part 1: Me And Joey Ramone

(100% TRUE.)

It was 1996, and I was working in a bookstore in the East Village. (This was a little bit before the East Village became "cool" -- in my opinion anyway. But what do I know?) On our lunch break, a co-worker asked if I'd like to go to a sushi restaurant with him. I had never had sushi before and was intrigued. (Turned out, I like sushi a lot. In my opinion now, cooked fish is pretty much ruined fish.) We were pretty close to where CBGB was (it closed a while ago), around where Joey Ramone Place is now, when I saw Joey Ramone and another guy get out of a van across the street. I said to my coworker, "Hey, look, it's Joey Ramone!" I waved at Joey and yelled in my booming baritone, "Hey, Joe-EEEEEE!" My coworker cringed and whispered something about being cool. Joey waved back and yelled in his booming baritone, "Hey, how you doin', man!" Maybe my coworker cringed because he thought I was about to run across the street and bother Joey for an autograph or something, but I'd just wanted to say Hello. I was done. My coworker and I kept walking down our side of the street toward the sushi restaurant, and Joey and the other guy went on about their business.