LEARNING HOW THINGS WORK? FIRST LEARN WORDS

Learning how to do anything takes a special effort when you already know everything.

Then you find out what you’ve learned is wrong and your time and energy feels wasted?

After that it’s pointing fingers, assigning blame.

Or, there’s another way to justify the time and energy to learn how things work.

Call it a universal fix.

Cormac McCarthy said:

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

I took twenty dollars into a casino with the plan on losing it all on a dollar slot and leaving.

But I kept winning.

Eventually I had a little over $600 showing on the screen and my plans changed.

I would keep pulling the handle until the free money is tapped out.

It took a while but I eventually succeeded.

But did I? Or was I learning how things worked?

If I had cashed out at $200 I would have packed it in.

But I didn’t have the cold hard cash in my hand. Instead, it was just colored lights on a screen.

If I had cashed out at any point before losing it all I believe I would run out of there.

How it’s supposed to work: Cash out and start over with another twenty dollar bill. Lose it and leave.

If I had gambled that way I would have been $580 to the good and still lost twenty dollars like I planned.

Call me injudicious, imprudent, fatuous.

Get Your Shit Together

We are either starting out, or starting over.

That’s the hill I’ll die on.

Starting out?

Think of your last road trip.

In the beginning you were starting out with a plan, a schedule, a destination, and interesting stops along the way.

In life you start out with a plan, an education, a skill, an attitude, and the ability to bring it all into focus on the work you do.

Learning how to start out well takes the best you’ve got.

Bruce Springsteen says his concert plan is to overwhelm the audience in the first five minutes and he’ll have them in his hands the rest of the night.

Have you seen the Bruce show?

The best example of starting over I’ve seen is Tina Turner.

‘Europe has been very supportive of me,’ Turner, who passed away from an unknown illness at her sprawling manse in an obscure Zurich suburb Wednesday, told the station in 1997 of what influenced her decision to live across the pond full time.

Grinning ear to ear, the singer, then 60, joked: ‘I’m as big as Madonna in Europe.’

She added: ‘I’m as big – in some places – as The Rolling Stones.’

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She came through Portland in 1985 and played Roseland.

I didn’t go because I didn’t want to see another sad nostalgia act milk an audience out here in the Oregon sticks.

But I was wrong, oh so wrong. It wasn’t nostalgia that night, it was more like lighting the fuse on the second stage of the Tina Turner Rocket to the top.

She showed the audience how to start over with a bang so powerful that it echoed for decades.

When you make a decision to start out, or start over, know what it means.

Make it your commencement, your conception, your prolegomenon.

Why Learning How Things Work Matters

The wife and I were talking about the parents we’d met in the time before we knew each other.

She met the family of two boy friends with mixed results.

I met the parents of everyone I ever dated because I was such a catch.

Did I ask to meet them?

Moms, dads, stepmoms, stepdads, divorced dads, divorced moms.

In other words, I’m an expert at meeting parents. And breaking up afterwards. Because I’m such a catch.

One girl had a very active family life with big gatherings every week or so.

After the third or fourth one I’d had enough.

I go the lay of the land early. The men were meek, the women dynamic.

It was nice to be included, just not all the time.

I was explaining this to my girl at one gathering when her Grannie came over and stood close to better listen.

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Grannie: You seem ill at ease.

Me:

GF: David was just saying how much he enjoyed our family.

Me:

Grannie: That’s wonderful to know. Enjoy yourself.

GF: You could try to be civil. These a nice people.

Me: Why does your Grandma bully your Grandpa all the time and shit-talk him?

GF: He had an affair when she was in the hospital.

Me: An affair? Like sex? What are they, ninety?

GF: It happened back in the 50’s.

Me: And everyone knows this?

GF: Of course. It’s a family, David.

Me: It seems a weird thing to bully an old man.

GF: Does it?

The top item on my To-Do list, #1 with a bullet?

Break up before the next family gathering.

They were a nice family, just not one I fit in with very well.

The Grannie was a shit talker to Grandpa, the Mom was divorced and shit talked everything to everyone.

But their’s was a different kind of shit talk than mine.

Instead of dragging up everything that ever went wrong in life and blaming someone with an avalanche of cursing and accusations, and then getting over it like loving people, that family did it politely.

Well mannered shit talk is the worst because it’s so close to normal conversation it seems superfluous, inessential, if not unwarranted.

Or maybe, just maybe, I’ve got thin skinned hypersensitivity to family archives, annals, and antecedents.

While you’re learning how things work, like families, learn what words mean.

Learn the elucidation, the explication, the connotation.

Do that and you’re set for the long haul, pilgrim.

Then it’s time to light one up and pour a tall glass.