Logged -In Public: You're finally home. How was the flight? Welcome back. When's your butt going on the witness stand?
I think it would be smart to get over this jet lag first.
L-I P: For how long?
Probably as long as it takes me to get certain things off my gills, you might say.
L-I P: Another column of complaints about traveling. We know you had a horrible time.
Not really.
L-I P: But you wrote....
I loved every minute. It's the nature of the writing profession to appear negative and irritated about the general way things go. I'm quietly happy with many things...unlike many of my compatriots on tour who couldn't stop counting the ways Europeans are stupid.
L-I P: We know, the way they name their roads and never use numbers.
I can't believe you remembered something I wrote. And so long ago.
L-I P: For once we agreed with you.
Actually, I wasn't the one criticizing Europeans for....
L-I P: What's the matter this time?
Well, for one thing, to continue a thread from the previous column, many people were appalled by the toilets where you had only two peddles and you had to squat when....
L-I P: Oh, my God, we're never going to Europe.
They're not everywhere. A few of the public toilets. Personally, I would never use them.
L-I P: We should hope so.
But we sometimes forget that this is the way we should go to the toilet to defecate.
L-I P: (stunned silence)
I hate to tell you. Sitting down to go to the bathroom is a recent phenomenon and one not necessarily beneficial to western society's posterior.
L-I P: You expect us to squat? You do want to take us back to the Middle Ages!
I have no expectations of the kind. But it would be nice for Americans to withhold the impulse to improve the world.
L-I P: You're against making improvements! We should have expected this from someone who criticizes weather reports and everything else good about our world.
Look what's happened to soccer. The world's game isn't good enough for us, there's not enough scoring, so we look for ways to do that. Nor do we like tie games. There must always be a winner, so we create shootouts. Worse, the shoot-outs have been incorporated into the World Cup.
L-I P: What's wrong with a little innovation? Even Europeans were getting sick of the zero-zero ties.
We did the same with baseball with the designated hitter. Not enough runs were being scored....
L-I P: You're being too much of a purist. At least you have the National League to watch.
It's ridiculous to have two sets of rules. The World Series has been distorted by the situation. Now with interleague play....
L-I P: Make everyone use the designated hitter.
Or no one. My friend, Vespucci, calls this type of tampering with a status quo an "obsolete innovation."
L-I P: He was the one that didn't like the numbered streets, wasn't he?
Remember the expressways built around cities in the 1950s. Before they were off the drawing board, let alone when they were constructed, the highways were obsolete. They saw twice the traffic they were made for in the first year. Or the innovation, like the designated hitter, creates as many or more problems than it solves. In that case, the only answer is to eliminate the innovation.
L-I P: It doesn't happen that often.
I'm beginning to think it's the only way it happens. The atomic bomb, in particular; nuclear weapons, in general. The New Coke was the exceptional case, but it took many years for the mistake to be erased.
L-I P: The Bomb stopped World War II. Would you have wanted a million American soldiers to die on Japanese soil?
One problem solved, an everlasting curse we'll never be absolved from. Besides, American nuclear superiority didn't make us all that secure or superior.
L-I P: We'll find some way to deal with the nuclear problem, just like we found ways to work out the glitches in computer systems.
That's the problem in a nutshell: believing something better lies ahead. Or that we'll find a way to deal with the unwieldy innovation in the future, most likely with some other innovation. In the meantime, we must waste time and effort worrying about artificial insemination, surrogate mothering, cloning, sustaining the dying an extra week or month or two.
L-I P: What do you want? For scientists to close up shop?
I wouldn't be so pessimistic if I believed life were that easy to regulate and mend itself. The powers-that-be in Education believe in things like "block scheduling" or year-round schooling as ways to address the current deficiencies in American education.
L-I P: The year-round thing messes up vacations and summer jobs.
The programs aren't terrible or obsolete because they are potential inconveniences, but because they never had a chance to succeed. Likewise the morality we secrete to deal with cloning and babies conceived outside the womb or, for that matter, nuclear warfare.
L-I P: (log out)
The curse of modernity. To foster the illusion of human improvement.
[The Sardine waits for them to log-in. The quiet is restful and rehabilitating.]
I know you guys are Online. Probably to read some half-ass blogger or search for the latest news on some cholesterol reduction. Maybe if some of you return to this page, you can answer this question: why must we forge ahead creating opportunities to live longer in already overpopulated world, to live longer in parts of the world where people consume more per capita?
This is the essence of the obsolete. Creating more questions than there are answers for. Albeit very dangerous questions for someone in a newspaper to pose. I wouldn't think it beyond my confreres to take me to journalism court over this.
The Sardine's essays, articles, and stories have appeared around the Internet in the last few years at 3 A.M., Facets, Eclectica magazine, Fiction Funhouse, The Fiction Warehouse, 5_trope, and several film journals. Who and what he is probably will be revealed at various points through the articles appearing at this site. The first fifteen installments of his saga can be viewed at the old Unlikely Stories.