Wandering Consciousness

"His brain is squirming like a toad."

I’m sitting on a deep old beat-up leather sofa that was donated by some church in the U.S. probably about ten years ago. I wonder how it got some of the nasty scuff marks and other scars, and then think of the time I took kids on a Junior High retreat to snowy Wisconsin and they were tobogganing down the stairs until they slammed into a wall and broke the paneling. Then I wonder how the old leather has survived this long.

The Mexican band-aid that is holding the cut on the tip of my thumb together is doing the trick, but the adhesive that they use is too sticky and hard to remove, so I’m guessing about whether dishwasher detergent or laundry soap will be the best thing to try when I take it off. I could go to a hardware store to find some WD-40, which is great for this kind of thing, but I don’t know if they carry it in Mexico, even though I’ve always been able to find just about everything here if I looked hard enough. We tend to think the U.S. has all the best stuff, but I’ve been impressed with the stores here. Wandering into a Soriana is like going into the best Krogers ever, but with fresh tortillas.

The cereal box that I opened for dinner has one of those little cutout tabs on top that are supposed to allow you to re-close the box, but they hardly ever work. The slot it is designed to fit in rips, or the glue that they use to seal the package is so strong that the whole top of the box is pulled off in order to get it open. I don’t even want to mention the bag inside the box, which I can never open smoothly. I end up with Frosted Flakes everywhere, or just a tiny hole that allows about three flakes at a time to get out. It doesn’t make sense to me. It can’t be that difficult an engineering problem — we don’t need origami, just a package that opens and closes easily. It frustrates me the same way that some websites do: the ones that have you enter your information on page one, and then enter the exact same stuff on page two. Why? It’s a computer program. It can remember things. Some programmer was just too lazy to write three more lines of code to go back to the database and find the right storage location.

My brother was hit from behind while waiting for a truck to pull out from a driveway. After the accident, his car looked like the whole back end had been smashed with a giant hammer. Luckily no one was badly injured. He said he glanced in the rear view mirror just in time to see the horrified look on the driver who piled into him as she looked up from her phone, probably going 40 mph.

I used to think these things were not related. People are lazy, people do dumb things, people try to get away with doing as little as possible. But now I have a theory that all these little errors and omissions are adding up to a very big mess. The coder who forgets to access the loop that causes AI to keep some information private. The government worker who figures another percentage or two in tax cuts won’t really make that much difference. The judge who doesn’t take the time to read the history that might turn her legal decision. These things tend to compound. The stone begins to roll downhill.

And pretty soon no one can figure out how we got into this terrible spot.

(By the way, the physical characteristics of adhesives are not my real passion. But there’s probably a whole career there for some chemist who wants to pay attention.)