Overclocked: Our Future (I Hope)

I’ve never been much of a drug user—apart from the odd, unexpected joint, I rarely take anything stronger than Scotch and iburprofren—but a recent New Yorker article, combined with my travel schedule, reminded me of a drug that I wish existed. First, though, the New Yorker piece, which was about the scientist David Eagleman, who studies how the brain perceives time. For example:

The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. It can track seconds, minutes, days, and weeks, set off alarms in the morning, at bedtime, on birthdays and anniversaries. Timing is so essential to our survival that it may be the most finely tuned of our senses. In lab tests, people can distinguish between sounds as little as five milliseconds apart, and our involuntary timing is even quicker. If you’re hiking through a jungle and a tiger growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points. The difference can be as little as nine-millionths of a second.

Yet “brain time,” as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective. “Try this exercise,” he suggests in a recent essay. “Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.” There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did the missing moments go?

Pretty cool, eh? Well, reading this made me remember my drug wish: Why isn’t there a drug that would either speed up or slow down our experience of time? In computer-geek terms, why can’t we overclock or underclock our CPUs? You’d think Big Pharma, or its subsidiary, the CIA, would by now have developed drugs that would let us experience two hours as one, or 15 minutes as 60. You’d either be able to skip the dull bits or concentrate on their worthy moments with greater focus (though they’d seem to be going by in slow-motion). You could even have drugs so precisely calibrated that you could speed up your brain by, say 2 or 3 percent, so that you’d seem and act just a bit sharper than everyone around you. (Note to the ghost of Philip K. Dick: This is great material—it’s all yours if you want it.)

For me, a constant traveler, the uses would be practical: The 13 hours I spent in transit the other day could have felt like 6.5, or 2. And the 10 minutes I sat on the beach in full sunlight with no sunscreen could have been made to feel like hours.

And, as they say, think of the children! Forget Benadryl on intercontinental flights—or really, whenever—just slip them a ChronoFlex™ and enjoy peace and quiet for a change.

Obviously, I have no understanding of how brain chemistry works, but this would seem like as worthy a project as the one behind Provigil. Any scientists out there want to say if this is even remotely possible? Until then, I guess I’ll stick Angry Birds.

The Boy has a Birthday

Today is the boy’s third birthday. This is a very big deal to him. I can tell because the leading edge of all his learning is centered around his birthday. The first month he learned to say was May. The first numbers he learned were two and, increasingly, three. Some of his best and clearest sentences have to do with telling others that it will be his birthday soon, and that he would like a unicorn for his birthday.

We are going to have a regular-sized party for him on the weekend. He doesn’t have friends of his own, really, so we’re just inviting our friends, especially those with children. We had in the past killed and roasted a goat on his birthday—an overly grand gesture, perhaps–but that seems past our budget and beyond our ability to prepare. I only just arrived on a redeye from California today at 4:50am, and there’s not enough days between here and then to arrange for a big grill or to make contact with our Muslim goat hookups in Trenton.

But it will still, I’m guessing, be a good day. I was looking at some video we shot of his second birthday last week, and what really stands out is how, even before he could talk, you could read a kind full pride on his face, probably for no other reason than the fact that he was the center of attention.

Maybe that is the magic of birthdays. Young children are such natural egotists, but they live in a world that often ignores them or at least misunderstands them. It must be a mighty disconnect, feeling like they are the center of their world and yet observing constantly that that world only sporadically pays them the right attention.  The satisfaction of the birthday is the satisfaction of wholeness: their view of themselves finally aligns with the way they are treated. They are adored and feted and fed cupcakes and no one is cross with them and it’s sort of fantastic.

But that’s the weekend. For today, his real birthday, I am taking the day off work. I couldn’t sleep on the redeye, so I will be a bit bleary. But we don’t have a thing to do, besides play and eat some crazy goat-milk caramel lollipops I picked up in the Mission District in SF yesterday.

I could tell you more about my son, but suffice it to say that I’ve missed him while I’ve been away this week, that he is a good kid, and that he deserves all the attention he’ll get. At least for today.

I Had a Dream

As surely annoying as it is to hear about someone else’s dreams, especially on a website ostensibly about parenting, but this dream, which along with a mosquito kept me from a proper night’s sleep the other day on the island of Samos, is odd enough that I’m going to force you to read about it:

So, I’m hanging out with Seth Rogen at the Saturday Night Live after-party, when Andy Samberg comes by and tells me how much he liked the sketch that Seth and I developed that night. At which point Seth turns to me, quite seriously, and asks if I want to help him with something. Conde Nast, he says, has recently canceled his favorite publication, College Football Magazine, and he’s angry. Furious. He wants to do something about it, and he wants me to help.

“You want me to help you take down the world’s biggest magazine publisher?” I ask.

He smiles.

The thing is, we’re not really equipped to take down Conde Nast. It’s not like we can just go get high-level jobs and destroy it from within. Instead, we get low-level jobs, the most basic we can find, at the main distribution warehouse, and proceed to become royal screwups, in the hope that preventing subscribers from receiving their copies of Vanity Fair. We knock over pallets, put the wrong labels on the wrong envelopes, and generally cause a ruckus.

Needless to say, this doesn’t really do anything, and then I wake up.

Then, when I go to hang out with Seth Rogen again–yes, this is some Inception-style meta-dreaming!–I tell him about the dream, and he’s skeptical.

“I told you I wanted to take down Conde Nast?”

“That’s what you told me.”

“Huh.” He sounds weirded-out, confused, almost as if he has no idea who I actually am.

And that’s when I wake up for real. A mosquito is buzzing in my ear, my neck hurts, I’m sweating, and I don’t really like this island. One more week, and I’ll be in Ithaca, and then I get to go home.

Our Fair City: The Big Jerk

Since this has proven, in large measure, to be Nathan Bike Week at DadWagon (see here and here), I felt compelled by guilt and puerile competitiveness to chime in.

I haven’t been to Amsterdam in many years, and I was too fogged in (make of that what you will) to ride a bike. But I do ride one here in sunny, friendly, progressive Portland New York City. I make no claims to originality in this regard. In fact, this 2006 article from the New Yorker seems to have me pegged pretty good:

[The] hundred and twenty thousand New Yorkers who ride bicycles every day, comprise three distinct types—commuters (book editors, say, wearing cargo pants), exercisers (lawyers in spandex), and messengers (streetwise minorities without health care)—whose agendas overlap only loosely.

I fall–loosely these days–into category number one. I like to bike: I bike to work, to see my friends, and for pleasure. I own spandex bicycle pants but I’ve only worn them once, during last year’s New York Century Bike Tour. I’m not a fan of such garb. I have a body type that makes a virtue of certain things being left to the imagination; besides, even with the padding–and the humiliation–I couldn’t feel my daddy-making parts for three days (Tomoko referred to this stretch as “My Great Malaise”).

I’m not a bike zealot, whatever that’s supposed to mean, although I think bicycle lanes are a good idea in a city with as high traffic density as New York’s. I don’t think cars should be outlawed or anything like that. I agree that transportation safety is an important social value, and that bikers, particularly with more people falling into that category, should adapt to the existing rules of the road. That said, I don’t much enjoy following the same traffic laws as cars while on my bicycle. I will admit, to the five people who read this site, that I run red lights (although I do look). I have on occasion gone the wrong way down the street. I don’t ride on the sidewalk, an ethical virtue, given the current anti-biking climate in New York, I expect to ensure my entrance into heaven, or at the very least Rao’s, whichever is easier.

Like most New Yorkers, I also walk a great deal. And also like ALL ambulatory New Yorkers, I jaywalk, cross against the lights, and generally follow the only law governing pedestrians here: that of the jungle. Walking in New York, particularly for natives like me, is an instinctive art form: you bob, you weave, you find your rhythm, and whenever possible you make for daylight. Traffic lights and street signs are for suckers and people from Kansas and most definitely for the other guy. Because I am a modern man, I also text, talk on the phone, eat, complete chapters of my book, and buy real estate while walking. If you’re a New Yorker you probably haven’t noticed me, either because you’re doing the same thing, or you’re a geriatric and blind and being pushed in a wheelchair while sucking oxygen from a tank. Get out of my way.

I also own a car, which means I have high blood pressure and anger management problems, directed occasionally against bikers, to be sure–in their fucking skinny jeans–but more so against other drivers and the lawless, artful pedestrians. This is largely because there actually aren’t that many bikers to be mad at. Even if they are apparently, if recent reports can be believed, assaulting traditional values, mating with sheep, and stealing babies in the night. I will also point out, apropos of nothing, that I can parallel park in a windstorm, I shop at Fairway, I am a cliche, and I can’t afford any of the things that I own and need. Look me up in the dictionary under boring or in the encyclopedia under “the disappearing middle class.”

How did I get here? Was it Nathan? Was it the first day in a week dry enough to get on my bike? Was it the view of the tugs on the East River as I crested the Manhattan Bridge? Was it my father asking me when I was going to get a job? Was it because I’m taking the training wheels off my son’s bike and he’s scared? Or was it this RIDICULOUS AND HORRIFYING new “safety campaign” from the City’s Department of Transportation, called “Don’t Be a Jerk,” aimed specifically at a tiny transportation minority–bikers:

DOT’s “Don’t Be A Jerk” bike safety campaign humorously highlights the essential dos and don’ts of safe, responsible biking. According to DOT’s 2010 Sustainable Streets Index, commuter cycling increased 262% in New York City from 2000 to 2010. With more bikes on the road, smart cycling is even more crucial to making New York City’s streets safer for everyone using them.

The simple message of “Don’t Be A Jerk”: Always follow traffic laws by yielding to pedestrians, riding with traffic, and riding on the street not the sidewalk (unless you’re 12 or younger). “Don’t Be a Jerk” is part of DOT’s larger Bike Smart initiative, which includes the Bike Smart Pledge and the LOOK campaign, designed to educate cyclists and other road users about sharing the streets and roadways safely.

There’s video and even television commercials to go along with the campaign (I saw one last night). Life in New York is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and if you aren’t willing to literally shoot your neighbor down in the street for access to public education, parking, healthcare, a job, and a rent controlled apartment inherited from an old lady who just died, short. And yet we find time to harass people on bikes.

Here’s one of the spots, featuring Mario Batali, who NEVER SAYS NO: