I've kept the old email signature line at the end. By the way, I was homeless when I wrote this. It was sent from an internet café.
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1996 16:13:59 -0800 (PST)
From: Wes Browning
Subject: Friday Prose Bush thing
This is an exercise in "form following content" that I am planning to expand upon. I spent about seven years in the eighties obsessed with a step in Heisenberg's arguments leading to his Uncertainty Principle. I believed then (and still do) that he missed an opportunity to spotlight a good deal more uncertainty in the nature of reality than what he picked out, but I was in no position to be heard by physicists on the subject, as they demand, and rightly so, the Practical Details. So I sought them in the form of equations that would clarify my point. My search took me a little far afield, and this writing is about that sort of thing (getting far afield that is, on your way to you don't know what).
Sometimes sidewalk cracks make me laugh. It's not the "step on a crack" thing. If I think of that I'm not amused. Sidewalk cracks mostly make me laugh when they remind me of Einstein.
Last night, for instance, I was walking up 2nd Ave Ext by the Union Gospel Mission and had to step over one that was just right. It set me thinking of one morning when I was 6 and got up to the smell of bacon and eggs cooking, and the sound of the radio in the kitchen. That was actually every morning in our house. My parents had bacon and eggs, I had cereal, just about every morning, and the radio in the kitchen was always on. But the sidewalk cracks by the Union Gospel reminded me of this one particular morning when my parents were paying more attention to the radio than usual.Remembering the radio reminds me that I had a Radio Flyer. I always wondered what it had to do with radios, being a little red wagon, but there it was in plain writing on the side, over the zig-zags. Come to think of it the radio might have had zig-zags on it too. It's all about lightning of course I know but real lightning doesn't look like that. It looks more like the sidewalk cracks by the Union Gospel Mission.
So anyway my parents were really leaning into the radio. And the changing voices on the radio kept talking about the same thing over and over again. Somebody named Einstein had just died. At first I didn't think anything of it. The people on the radio were always talking about somebody or other who had just died. But this time they wouldn't give it up. So I had to ask who was this guy? My father said he was a great scientist. So I said what's a scientist and my father started to get angry cause I was asking stupid questions again but my mother said he's only a boy he doesn't know and my father said alright he's somebody that knows things. I said I know things, am I a scientist?
I was a little scared at this point, wondering now what killed this Einstein guy. Now my father was really mad but my mother laughed and he turned red and said a scientist's job is to learn new things that other people don't know yet. And I said it's a job? They get paid for it? And he said yes now shut up so I can hear the radio. So I shut up and listened for a while longer and then I took my red wagon outside, and pulled it up and down the sidewalk in front of the house, thinking about things.
I used to do that a lot. I wouldn't actually play with the red wagon, I just used it as a prop so if someone asked me what I was doing I could say I'm playing with my red wagon instead of saying that I'm thinking because if I said that they always asked me what I was thinking about and then I'd tell them and they'd get mad and say they didn't want to hear all that. Which would make me mad cause I'd think why'd they ask?
Anyway this particular day that I was reminded of by the cracks in the sidewalk by the Union Gospel Mission, I started thinking about how when I'd wanted to be a cowboy or a fireman I hadn't known about this scientist option. It was definitely sounding good. After all I was always wanting to know new things wasn't I? Then I got sad as I realized that all my questions had been stupid ones that someone always already knew the answers to. I started walking with my head down feeling stupid when I noticed how the cracks in the sidewalk didn't go straight.Now I wasn't THAT stupid, really, that I hadn't noticed that before. Cracks in sidewalks never go straight, period. These by the way were the really elaborate kind that zig-zag like lightning really does all over the place with lots of branchings and branchings of branchings, ending just anywhere. Like the ones I've been talking about by the Union Gospel that made me think of Einstein. The cracks in the sidewalk in front of our house were that impressive. So anyway what I meant when I said I noticed that the cracks didn't go straight was that there were questions in that for a scientist. If they don't go straight why do the go the way they do? Could you, seeing a crack start, figure out which way it was going to go? Could you look at a supposed drawing of a sidewalk crack and tell whether it could be a drawing of a real sidewalk crack?
For some reason I was sure even without asking that these were questions no one had yet answered in all of history. Nevertheless, full of the confidence of youth, I imagined that, if I devoted a lifetime of study to these questions, I could eventually elucidate the geometric evolution of sidewalk cracks to an amazed and astounded world, and that then when I finally died everyone would talk about what a great scientist I had been, and my parents would then listen intently to every word the announcers would say about me on the radio.
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(c) Dr. Wes Browning
Have some gestalt on me!
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