Ring the bell. Cue the salivating dog.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in 1849 in Russia, as the oldest son of a village priest. He grew up to study a bit of seminary but then jumped over to math and science, specifically physiology. He earned a 1904 Nobel Prize for his studies on digestion. However, he's best remembered for figuring out how to make a dog salivate on command.

I have unlocked the code to "Psychic Secretion."

Classical conditioning.
You ring the bell. You feed the dog. The dog salivates.
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Eventually, you ring the bell. You skip the food. The dog salivates anyway.
"Ooooh! Science is so neat," says the crowd of onlookers.
"Wheee! I can use that on students to keep order in my classroom," says a generation of teachers.
"Bollocks! That geezer just duped me into purposeless drooling," says the dog.

I'm currently feeling sympathetic toward the dog, having gotten the brutal Pavlovian smackdown this week myself.
You see, for about two years while I lived in St Louis I would look forward to weekends with good weather as a chance to hop on the southbound interstate and drive to Alabama. It was a 6+ hour trip, but at the end of the road I knew I'd get to spend two great days skydiving and hanging out with friends.

Women's State Record, Skydive Alabama July 2014

Apparently, that travel pattern was repeated often enough that it conditioned my poor unwitting brain. A few days ago, I was driving south through Seattle on I-5 under an unseasonably sunny blue sky when suddenly I felt absolutely giddy with excitement. This was completely involuntary joy. I could practically smell the blast off the turbines, hear friends' voices, and feel the rush of air -- if I were a dog there would've been uncontrollable drooling and tail wagging.  It took everything I could do to convince myself that I was just on a quick errand, not halfway across the country heading down to Cullman, AL.

Put a sun in the sky. Put my car on a southbound freeway. The Sarah salivates anyway.

Maybe the real question is how to cast this Pavlov moment.
Was I duped into feeling excitement, only to have my hopes dashed by the reality that my weekends are mainly spent with a pager instead of a parachute these days?
Or am I lucky to have such a big reservoir of vivid memories that can trigger happy thoughts at random times, even from far far away?

 

 

Illusion, Delusion, Imagination

Last weekend, I learned to scuba dive in paradise.
Scratch that.
Last weekend, I learned to scuba dive.  In the Puget Sound. In November. In 41F water, pouring rain, underwater visibility of less than 1 foot, ebbing tide, and a surface current pushing the water toward the demonic shredding propellers of the ferry boat line.
The dive site looked like this:

Which might make this a good time to review the definitions of three excellent words.
Illusion: "A thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or misinterpreted by the senses."
   Example: I perceive that this harbor full of murky water is cold and gray and fairly miserable, but maybe I'm just misinterpreting my sensory input!
Delusion: "An idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument; typically a symptom of mental disorder."
   Example: I believe that this harbor full of cold, gray, murky, miserable water is the single most delightful place to swim today!
Imagination: The willful action of forming new ideas, images, or interpretations of external objects that are not seen, felt, heard, or otherwise sensed in reality.
  Example: Cold harbor? What cold harbor?

If you picture it with a little more of a blue sky...

That still looks too chilly. Perhaps if you picture it with some sunshine...

And maybe some tropical ambience...

And, what the heck, might as well throw in a few charismatic fish and a nice cabana that serves fresh smoothies...

So if you picture the dive site like that -- I mean reeeeeally convince yourself of it -- last weekend, I learned to scuba dive in paradise.

For the record, all the imagination, illusions, and outright delusions in the world couldn't make that freaking water warm.

Wishes, Germs, and Gum

I've been in Seattle just a shade over 4 months now, but somehow hadn't heard of the famous Seattle Gum Wall until 3 days before its ultimate demise.

 

According to the story, back in 1991 someone standing in an alley waiting in line to see a movie got tired of their gum, reached their grubby fingers into their bacteria-loaded mouth, pulled out their germ-infused hunk of chewing gum, and mashed it onto the side of the nearest brick wall. Then for the next quarter century, all the lemmings ran off the side of the cliff, and all the pedestrians in that alleyway stuck their gum on that wall.

About 1 million salivary atrocities have been committed there.

Apparently, several weddings have been committed there as well.

So romantic.  So pre-chewed.
Their love will last forever, like a flavor-infused synthetic polymer.

Be that as it may, the gum is officially being stripped down off the wall this week. First, try processing the gag-reflex-triggering reaction to the fact that a wall covered with 2 decades of masticated gum exists, then the surprise that people think it's awesome, and finally the inevitable morbid compulsion to see the dang thing before it's washed off the face of the earth.

 

Today, in the name of experiencing this super gross footnote to history as it unfolds, I went on my own personal pilgrimage to the Gum Wall. Teardown is already underway. There in the alley, working their way downhill from north to south, were three guys with tools, buckets, shovels, ladders, and a spray hose, steadily chipping away at the gum.



A pressure washer and a dude in a Tyvek suit that
made him look like an Oompa Loompa,
waging a war against two decades of oral flora.
The scene smelled vaguely of Doublemint and defeat.

The man in the foreground is using a hammer and chisel,
so it's pretty much like Michaelangelo carving The David.

Every time the pressure washer turned on, the air filled with a fine saccharine mist flecked with JuicyFruit particles wildly flinging in every direction and landing on the brick pavers with the sound of wet rubber. Most pieces were tiny, but not all. This one the size of a baseball whacked against my leg as it fell from the sky like a multicolored meteorite:

Hubba Bubba's Magnum Opus.

Right around that moment while looking at the projectile aggregate of gum chunks close-up like that, it dawned on me: Every one of those nubs of gum belonged to a mouth once. (Obviously. Refer back to the aforementioned gag reflex.)  But what I mean to say is that every one of those wads of gum is tied to a person, a memory, a story.  Did the girl with the wad of grape gum enjoy the movie that night? Was the mouth that produced the pink gob from Seattle or just passing through? Did the dude who left the Big Red get a parking ticket for spending too long at Pike Place that day? Who chewed that blue stringy piece? Was the wedding pretty? Did the marriage last?

 

Somehow, it reminded me of a scene from Goonies when they find themselves at the bottom of the wishing well. Each anonymously wished-upon coin belonged to a person. Each blob of gum belonged to a life.

Stef: Wait! Stop! You can't do this!
...These are somebody else's wishes.
They're somebody else's dreams.
Mouth: Yeah, but you know what?
This one; this one right here. This was my dream, my wish.
And it didn't come true. So I'm taking it back. I'm taking them all back.

Did anyone ever come back for their gum?

Well, hello there!

The trouble with blogs and journals is the (probably entirely imagined) demand for temporal continuity. I'm pretty sure no one reads this thing but me, and yet there's an implied requirement to create a frequently-updated, linear documentary of some sort. The longer the time lapse between posts or entries, the harder it gets to resume. Not because I've gone mute or illiterate. Not because there's nothing to say. On the contrary, it's because of the mountain of thoughts that have passed by unwritten; the life that slid along full of events unrecorded and travels unexplained; the apology owed for letting them fly away without looking them in the eye first.

When was the last time I wrote? Not just wrote here, but wrote anything anywhere?

The last time I wrote was June 21, 2015: 
Coming to the end of a year at a job that I intensely loved and hated, I was down to my last weekend of living in St Louis. My belongings were distilled to only the stuff that would fit in my hatchback. Just the vitals: clothes, a few books, my piano keyboard, dishes (plates, saucers, spoons, forks; only 2 of each, like Noah's Ark), a chess set my dad carved, a pillow case my mom sewed.  My bed had sold inconveniently quickly on Craigslist, so I'd been sleeping on a camping pad on a cold bedroom floor for weeks, eye-level with the flecks of dust that settled on the bare hardwood. I felt battered by the Now, excited and scared by the What's Next, weirdly adrift in the transition, and somehow unrecognizable in my own skin. 
My chaotic, colorful, fantastic roommate had moved out in a cloud of shoes and scarves and cat dander and climbing gear. June 21st was a rainy Sunday morning, and I drove alone into a rough part of town to return the moving truck for her. The ride to bring me back from the U-Haul place fell through, so I was walking home in the rain north of Delmar Avenue. The walk took me along broken sidewalks, past churches with a glimpse of sparsely-attended services through the open doors, between a school with a misspelled word on its sign and the crumbling ruins of boarded-up houses.

Then I passed this one. It doesn't always fit, but it did that morning.

She was beautiful once.
Look past the surface and you can see it in the details.
Maybe life got hard. Maybe she disguised herself to fit in. But she was beautiful once.
We all were.

I think it's time to write again.