The relaxed tension of the baseball fields and loping passage of time with the early summer rains heralded the end of the 1995/'96 school year as a young man soldiered on. Only by an heroic measure of action could anyone maintain discipline n' order, but administrative anarchy could not hold the tide of restlessness that was bursting at the seams. Maybe there would be "one more game", if the dice rolled multiple 11's for a last hour rally and the clouds parted and the out field dried out, but it was pretty much understood that "this was it". We were ragtag confederates, a sandlot baseball-grade team from a small, liberal arts alternative school who might as well have made up the cast of the Iliad, but far more hopelessly teenaged and taken to epic throes of macho posturing which ended up like bugs splattered on an SUV windshield out in the exurbs as "Old Glory", flapping on top of a flag pole, had no comment.

In a world of Gatorade and sugar-free raspberry "Fig Newtons" and the black hired help down at the local "Papa John's" pizza cookery taking 50 minutes to get your order completed as they clacked their acrylic nails on the counter and grimaced with a half-turn, laughing with the joke of not wanting to be here. Stranger still was a funky grandma holding a slice of sandwich bread up to her cheek to judge whether it was warm enough and a character who ordered a Pepperoni pizza without Pepperoni and then ranted over the phone like Mr. T when they delivered him a pizza with missing circulets of cheese. One felt like an anthropologist, but this screwiness was "the coin of the realm" along with Kung Fu movies that had the sounds of bones being broken and Looney Tunes' "Michigan J. Frog" appropriated into "a Mack Daddy" on the cut-rate "WB network" on local channel 11 that was to commonsense to what "Def Comedy Jam" is to Bob Dole.

But evidently, it fit into someone's niche marketing plan as they blasted their offensiveness across the region and lent to the impression that our world was nothing more than one rotten cosmic egg with the wafting stink lines as chaos and woe saturated our land. Life was hairy-- and complicated-- and it seemed so much easier not to get involved. I kind of snickered at the idea that you couldn't wrap your arms around someone's back and say, "carry me" because even the black grandma with the bread would sock you in the mouth.

You had some sorry Looney-tune like "Wavy Gravy" sloshing around on his back, having an LSD trip on a stage and telling the old black bluesman, stopped mid-song what he felt like, and the character shaking his head at "the foolish white boy" and making him sound ridiculous like only a hardened black man can with a glint of evil. Or there was the modern version of "Wavy Gravy", some kind of buffoon running around outside a grunge concert in the streets of Seattle with a garbage bag over his head in ripped jeans. It is said that "the man who doesn't fight doesn't fuck" and neither I nor "Wavy Gravy" were getting anywhere fast. . . . .

But once you're in a rut, sometimes it's difficult "to find the courage to leave". You find your dignity and pride bargained away a little bit at a time because "it seems easier and safer", but pretty soon you're left with very little as you thrash around in the net compulsively seeking stimulation. When there is only a broad outline of "what you want", and a vague, ill-defined plan to getting there, you're oftentimes led down the fool's path of uncertainty and desperation. One can be told about "the opportunity costs", or what they're missing by staying with this boondoggle course of action, but if no one has any better ideas and you've already sunk enough investment in this beast then you might as well go down with the sinking ship. If there was only less ambiguity in the world, then you could find the courage to be strong.

One also has it beat across their bottom with a strap that "there is no such thing as a free lunch". And it's pretty sad that a 14 or 15 year-old has to have it "knocked home", that he has to be "de-gifted" of the time, some years back, when he went up to his grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary at a golf course in New York and had the run of the place as the barista poured him glass after glass of 7-Up until it became the running joke among everybody, the bubbly water of life flowing through his veins like high-fructose corn syrup. . . . . and no, corn wasn't "a vegetable" in this case so it wasn't healthy. The nature of life IS competition, or at least "holding your own" in the jostling ball club. As the satirist P.J. O'Rourke largely pointed out-- a man ought to "give a shake" to a little bit of government and a little bit of luck to attribute his success but would be a coward and a fool to rely on either absolutely in this life.

And it all pathetically came down to ego. . . . . such as a Saturday spent on a futile effort at "community service". Here we were, like the Peace Corps filled with young people at the local college. The boys and girls loaded up in cars and headed down to some trashed ghetto lot to pick up garbage, and just why we should have had any business in this random section of the crumbling north side, no one knew for certain.

There we were, stooped over like Chinese peasants in the blowing wind, and I could not help but feel ridiculous-- like that once again, one had been "put over on whitey" as the idealistic toiled liked automatrons against the futility of human debauchery, those who just "took". An Indian guru standing up on the United Nations lectern with Nelson Mandela would speak about the infinity of mankind, but all I saw and heard were passing '70s junk cars, the R&B bass turned up so loud you could hear them coming from two blocks away, complete ungrateful blunt-smoking cynicism, as we kept at it like stick-legged coolies in a rice paddy bent over like stalks in the wind with our impotent Zen-like sayings.

Next, we were made to plant trees for no discernable purpose-- the majority of us standing around without direction as the vigorous leaped into the breach. The Indian girl in a sash who lured us into this debacle with a mention at our high school's Tuesday's announcement stood looking on, her arms crossed, lost deep inside of herself, and I wondered why most humanitarians lacked the capacity to lead with clear purpose. There seemed to be no central planning, no method to our madness. . . . . it just seemed like we picked up and went to random spots to volunteer our sweating, aching bodies to drudgery while the smarter held back and merely observed.

And that's about all we did. . . . . except retire to "The Crown Candy Kitchen", a business which an owner had attempted to revitalize back in the late '70s before Reagan cut incentive funds to get folks moving back into the cities. Left holding the sack. . . . . and it seemed so much safer to be cynical, keep to one's self, and stay the hell out of the shaky spots. There was that old '60s maxim: "Are you part of the problem, or are you part of the solution?". Perhaps another saying is in order: "If a leftist is let down by the people he believed in, and no one cares enough to follow his example, hadn't he made the wrong choice?".

To have been an enchanted prince riding in on a flying stallion in some kind of glorious, mythic past. . . . . but that was not the way of the world. It was that day, back in 1996, that I felt like a dangling participle and that I would forever be one.

But the future was shaping up in strange directions. . . . . and I found myself astounded at the limits yet outer reaches of electrochemical brain process merged with my desktop computer. How computers could summon up information with near-instant recall, and "teach each other" lessons without the gross inefficiency of human brain-ware that had to be run over and over again like disintegrating magnetic tape before the data was lost forever. How this world was full of random information, in the form of useless junk, and how order "canceled the noise" and was a form of assembly "that fit a purpose". If there was "a cycle of communication" that sent/received like a fax machine to God that was an emergent property once a telephone line of human consciousness could cast itself into the dark night sky and ponder questions like these. And how out of simple rules, super-complex patterns can emerge in a fractal self-replication whose very imperfection is its perfection. . . . . and not forgetting how evolution works on all levels, like a circus tent lifted off the ground with its poles in coordination to truly put on "The Greatest Show on Earth".

We make it real, you know. . . . .