52 ~ Guest column!
I love the mind and writing of Matt Geiger, who seems to pretty much do it all at my near-hometown newspaper, The Mount Horeb Mail - including an invariably rich and heartfelt weekly column (“Geiger Counter”). Here’s a recent example to savor (which I am posting without prior permission - he’s a busy guy; I assume and hope this is legal. In any case, enjoy! - at least until a court order takes it down).
A life that is your own
Tue, 06/15/2021
By
MATT GEIGER
“[W]e must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.” -Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants
On Sunday, someone in a parade threw cheese at me. I caught it, ate it, and relished the thought that I live in a place where people in festive processions joyously toss dairy products to those in the crowd as they pass.
I had to consume the cheese immediately because the sun was shining and it would quickly have melted. It was hot. Summer is returning. The sun, which is responsible for all life on Earth, is once reminding us of its benevolent power. For just a little while, the weather in Wisconsin has stopped actively trying to kill us.
People will not stop complaining about it.
The average vacation in Costa Rica, where people from the Midwest go to enjoy bright sunshine and soaring temperatures, costs about $8,000. When that exact same weather comes to the Midwest, everyone here whines.
We are in the midst of the nicest stretch of weather I can remember. I have endured dozens of comments over the past week from people that go something like this:
Me: “Hi, how’s it going?! I haven’t seen you in 14 months!”
Person I am currently making fun of in a newspaper column: “I’m terrible! It’s hot and sunny! In June!! Waaa!”
I received a weather report that referred to sunny days with temps in the 80s, just as summer is getting ready to kick off, as “grueling,” which I guess is a scientific word learned in meteorology school. It can’t possibly be a sign of the apocalypse that even the weather reports these days are dripping with personal bias. Youth sporting events are being cancelled, to protect children from, I don’t know, pleasant weather, I guess?
This has probably been going on forever, or at least since humans invented central heating and cooling. I remember living in Florida (insert your own joke here; I’ve run dry at this point, and I went to college in Florida, so I’m not that smart to begin with) with someone who would shiver and turn the heat to 80 if the thermostat ever dipped below 75 in the winter. In the summer, she cranked the AC and kept the house at 60. I think the thing humans really can’t stand about the weather isn’t actually how hot or how cold it is, because being hot feels fine (our bodies are close to 100 degrees all the time, anyway) or whether it’s rainy or sunny. I think the thing people take umbrage at is the fact that they cannot control the weather, from minute to minute, which is an affront to the god-like powers they like to pretend they have.
Complaining about the weather says very little about the rain or the sun or the snow or the wind on any particular day. It speaks volumes about the type of person doing the complaining. Because anyone who complains about heat also complains about cold, anyone who complains about sun also complains about snow. Someone who whines about a chilly February is destined to lament the spring that comes with spring’s thaw, the bugs that come with summer, and the proliferation of pumpkin flavored things in the fall. The same person will be the loudest to weigh in on the tragic end of summer when fall arrives. “Can you believe summer is already over?! It’s my favorite season!”
In truth, if you can only have a good time when everything is perfect, you will hardly ever have a good time.
If you can’t find humor and meaning in the world unless the weather is 67 degrees with a 3 mile-per-hour southerly wind, and all legislative seats are filled with people you voted for, and your body is functioning perfectly in every way, you will get to spend roughly three seconds of your life having a good time. You will deserve them.
If you are a living person who pays any attention to the world these days, you have probably been collectively yelled at by large mobs of people over the past few years. Conservative, liberal, young, old, rich, poor; the little details change, but the thing they are yelling is always the same: “If every single one of our demands are not met immediately, no one can have any fun!” These demands sometimes include perfectly reasonable things, like wanting a 98 percent reduction in the number of superhero movies released each year, but also some items that seem nigh impossible. I regularly nod in agreement when I first hear what the latest aggrieved people want. “Oh, sure, that’s reasonable,” only to do a double take as the list drones on. “Wait, they also want custody of my daughter’s pet gecko on Tuesdays?”
All parents know that the trick to living a good life is not having everything you want. Nor is it being able to get everything you want. The trick to living a good life is simply being able to thrive in an imperfect world, because the world will remain imperfect. Summers will come with sunburns. Winters will bring frozen toes. Each spring, the dogs will track mud all the way through the house every time they return from the yard, and you will suddenly realize that the dogs return from the yard 5,789 times each hour.
But if you pay attention, you can find plenty of meaning and joy in our imperfect lives and this imperfect world. I know, because after listening to adults complain about the heat for a week, my daughter walked up to me this morning, clutching a bright orange, glittering stuffed cheetah and a bright orange striped fish. I asked her what she thought of the carnival we went to the night before. She did not complain about the heat, nor did she hesitate: “The sound of kids having fun is beautiful,” she said, her hair and skin emanating the very smell of summer.
Over the weekend, the little village where I live erupted with the sights and sounds of its annual summer festival, which hadn’t happened for two years thanks to the pandemic. Carnival rides groaned and whirred, kids tripped over the maze of power cables strewn about the fairgrounds, some of which are as thick around as my thigh and must be carrying enough power to run a Hadron Collider. There were prizes galore, from the massive Bort Sampson to the little Teenage Mutant Samurai Tortoise, Michaelardo (they might not have been officially licensed). Parents engaged in the ancient ritual of pleading desperately with the ride attendant to switch for the blaring horns on the little cars their children rode around a track in circles, jabbing eardrums while giving many adults a visual demonstration of what they are doing with their professional and emotional lives.
Music, most of it better than the honking, thrummed from the beer tent. Bingo, which is enjoyed where I come from exclusively by supercentenarians, was played and (enjoyed, I guess?) by people in their 20s and 30s. They use corn kernels as the pieces. I assume the board is made of cheese.
On the first night, the festival exploded. There is no other way to describe it. That’s from the “Sun Also Rises,” by the way; a book many people don’t read because the title references the sun and makes them too sweaty. Our seven-year-old daughter literally squealed and giggled with delight. I had driven her by the grounds the day before, to catch a glimpse of the games and rides and tents going up, so she would know what was coming but also understand that it is inherently temporary, and she had exclaimed: “Look how beautiful the colors are!!” She sounded like she was looking at a Gauguin. But that afternoon, the day before the festival, the giant metal strawberries that look exactly like apples, the little green dragon roller coaster, the fun house, the slide so tall that to a child it looks like it was built by ancient Babylonians in the land of Shinar, were all still deep in slumber. On Thursday night they rose and began their clacking, flashing, whirring dances. People, locked away from each other for so long, showed up in droves.
We spent several hours there, staying up well past our daughter’s usual bedtime.
One girl, her arm in a cast, was laughing as she rode a ride. My daughter pointed her out and said: “Look, dad: She has a broken arm but she’s still having a good time.”
It was not perfect. There was very little control of anything. The lines were long, the prices were not insignificant, the food pushed up the impending arrival date of hundreds of heart attacks by a few days. I saw couples skirmishing and kids wailing after attempting to endure rides that were beyond their vestibular abilities. One older gentleman had a medical emergency and had to be taken away by EMTs.
It was not perfect, by any means.
But here’s the thing: despite all those imperfections, the fun and games went on. The flaws did not dampen spirits. No, they gave the laughter urgency. They made people relish the sugary neon drinks and the vertigo as they stumbled off the rides. Because when people from all walks of life get together, face-to-face, it is clear that they are well equipped to live well in an imperfect world. We evolved while being hunted by cave lions, after all.
The highlight of my evening, and probably the lowlight of the evening for the little kids I beat so handily, was when I triumphed (by an impressive margin) at a midway game in which you must squirt water into a moving bullseye in order to push a nearby boat to the finish line in a race. All the children I beat took it well (their mom was actually the only one crying), but my daughter had asked me to win her a prize (the orange cheetah) and I will never see them again but have to live with my kid for another 11 years, at least. It was a no brainer. We came home with a lot of prizes that night. The cheetah. The stuffed orange fish, which I think was the main character from “Finding Nemo” as designed by someone who had not seen the film, but had it described to them by a drunk friend who viewed it a single time, 11 years ago. I believe the tag says it’s from the movie, “Locating Nermal.”
My daughter also asked me to win her a real, living fish, but before I could even try, a couple teenagers overheard her and they presented her with theirs. It was such a kind act by two complete strangers, giving us this little goldfish so it could die three days later in our home, instead of in theirs.
Luckily, we still have a bowl in which to keep it, the same bowl that temporarily housed a carnival fish the last time we got one. It’s basically a hospice bed, except it sits on our counter by the sink, and it has a little plastic house on the bottom that looks like a pineapple as designed by someone who had only heard about pineapples from Hunter S. Thompson.
It might not be a perfect life in there. I’m not sure what the optimal temperature is, or what the PH of the water should be. I know I bought a single container of fish food, and I will be surprised if I have to buy another one.
But I do hear legends from time to time, of carnival fish that live on for years, even decades. I hear tell of little fish that grow into legendary behemoths, lurking in the depths of increasingly large, increasingly expensive fish tanks for so long that the children who brought them home have grown up and left to start families of their own.
Many of those children, once they reach maturity, will spend much of their time complaining about the weather and waiting, so incredibly futilely, for the world to be perfect. “Once everything is just right, I will finally start living a good life,” they will think to themselves.
But from time to time, on a hot night at the beginning of summer, they will spend an evening sweating and standing in line, eating unhealthy food and smelling the sweat of those around them. If they pay attention, they might notice the laughter of children, which someone once told me is beautiful. If our lives really are equal to what we pay attention to, they would be wise, and lucky, to savor the moment.