Someone Should Be Studying These Things

I bet that it would make a good book to collect the bizarre stuff that people think about, and to just have someone clean up the grammar and structure a little bit. I should think that it would be rather nice to wake up on a Sunday, say, around 2pm (as is my custom on Sunday mornings, Saturday mornings, and other mornings when the Giants do not play an afternoon game) and to eat a turkey sandwich, lazily thumbing in and out of some guy's pointless thoughts. It must be at least half-interesting to some of you: after all, you're reading this. And it would obviously be better if you had that turkey sandwich.

Spying on Whales
I begin with the premise that for all the advances that we have made in our study of the myriad species on our strange planet, sometimes our technology is too powerful to be useful. On several occasions, I have seen marine biologists on television, zipping their UltraWhite Smile boats through the Pacific. They drop down their scanners and dials, their cone-shaped sonar dishes and their cooing sonic mechanisms, and they start pulsating coded messages to all the whales in proximity. They're talking, and hoping to hear back. I'm not sure what sort of research is being done by these trials. I do not consider myself an expert on whale conversation, but I thought that we knew pretty much all we really needed to about whale habits. They swim up and down the coast depending on the weather, they eat krill, and they have heroic battles with giant squid the size of space shuttles. Case closed, I figured, but damned if you can't find some guy with a patchy beard and a whole bunch of pockets who wants to sail for a living. Onwards with the funding, then, to invent all these fancy gadgets that let us chirp to whales.

The weird part is, they answer back, these lumbering giants with their bathtub faucet heads. A couple flirtatious, mechanical blips, and these whales quip back with as much undersea gossip as the scientists can haul in and--get this--interpret. Because, you may ask, what good is doing the work if you cannot figure out what the things are saying? I have no idea how this sort of translation is done. I suspect, and now with even more evidence, that we have found an aquatic Rosetta Stone, and those swarthy marine biologists are just keeping it a secret. I have suspected this for years, in fact, and I suppose that it is the exact reason that Porter Ricks was able to understand Flipper; how else, after all, are we to believe this was possible? And good, I say. Otherwise, both Coral Key Park and Marine Preserve and mid-1960s television programming would have been all the worse for it.

How strange it is that we spy on whales? It is probably no weirder than the fact that I am into a third paragraph of writing about it. But there are two particular things in this whole matter that stick out to me. First, I cannot think of any other animal, with the obvious exception of other human beings, that spy on one another, across species or within a species. So, it seems to be that we are the only animals that have a system for recording and interpreting the conversations that other animals have with each other and with our own computers. When you think about it, it is probably a good thing that other animals really do not concern themselves with these sort of trivialities. Only the species that has NASCAR commemorative KFC buckets could invest in whale translation as a profession. Second, I am not sure that I can say, with confidence, that I could never imagine myself in the topsiders of that sailor. There are only a few things left that are a total mystery to us, but have the prospect of being comforting anyway. I can imagine being that lonely scientists, floating askance on a choppy emerald ocean, dropping six-hundred foot of steel cable into the deep, and waiting. Maybe you get a booming sigh back, and you have company somewhere under the unimaginable blueness. Talking to whales may be the intersect of a Venn diagram which addresses things that are magical and things that are scientific.

Real Trust
Actually, when you look at how we generally act towards one another, we probably should not trust airline pilots half as much as we do. Here are the facts. I have probably taken 100 plane flights in my life, and likely more than that, the majority of those having come in the past four years. Each time, my routine is the same: I guard against boredom and people with the cunning use of an iPod, I bring with me several books which I never read, I buy a tremendous wealth of candy for the flight, and I board a several-ton flying bus to be guided in a parabola across the planet by a man I will never meet. This man now has the ability to kill me. But I get on the plane, I clickwheel over to Wilco or Belle and Sebastian or Sufjan Stevens, and I rack out with my face pressed against the plexiglass, nary a thought for the 'morrow. There is no other time in life when we are required to trust so much, given so little. Why do we do it, and without paying this relationship any attention? I think it has to be basically the same mindset which governs our collective respect for Zorro.

What I mean to say is, it seems that we can reasonably infer that if someone is wearing a mask, he's either a hero or a madman. The allure of what is not seen--and therefore, what could potentially be--is enough to inspire confidence in a masked avenger, and is likewise sufficient to bolster our terror of a sheathed lunatic. I think the mask somehow convinces us that our initial opinion is right. And if in cinema, then why not in person? We get a great deal of what we imagine life to be like from the print we read or the films we see, so this bit of transposition is not too big of a stretch. Every girl I have ever dated seems to want, from me, some version of John Cusackitude: so this mask idea might as well have some merit. Someone has entrusted a man with the responsibility to fly a jumbo-sized tuna can through the troposphere--he even gets little uniform accessories, if he's good enough--and if he is mostly an unknown to his passengers, that may actually be calming. The pilot even has the benefit of that speaker system, by which he can, through his trademark drone and slogans, reassure everyone in the cabin that he knows what he's doing and that everyone can go ahead and relax. If I knew that Spiderman was really that spazzy little chemistry student from Empire State University, there's no way I would let him dive off a roof to try to catch me (and by me, I mean whatever chick is playing MJ). But because I don't know who he is, I just trust the mask. I listen to his voice. And I go about my day.