Only the sixth day of my mortality count-down, and already I'm in danger of losing track of which day I'm in, and I've already skipped an entire day's opportunity to weigh forth on the benefits and drawbacks of... coming in for a landing, shall we say? I can barely wait for the struggle, come next August, of ticking off the days, backwards, to figure out which mile marker I've reached...
I've never been very good at counting, actually. I have a hard time staying focused. It seems such a boring thing to do. My mind continually wants to run off in the direction of a color or smell or random memory, and by the time I've reined in my naughty train of thought, I've forgotten whether I'm at 47 or 79.
This isn't usually too much of a problem, as problems go, in daily life. Twice in my life, however (at least as far as I can currently recall), this foible or shortcoming did have a material impact, at least on my mood at the time. With 'mood', in my case, equaling 'my entire life, from beginning to end, focusing mostly on my failures'. Which is a lot of weight to put on such a small, round word of Germanic derivation.
When I was in the Air Force, and stationed for a year at the Keflavik Naval Air Base in Iceland, I was supposedly a computer operator, as career fields were then defined. At that point, however, computers were giant lumbering laboratories for miscalculation, more prone to stopping for no apparent reason, than for providing much useful information. What I really worked with was punched card equipment, and my nemesis, counting-wise, was the card sorter.
Once a month, we computer operators had to produce an inventory of everything of any description that the Air Force contingent had, anywhere at all on the Keflavik Naval Air Station. This meant sorting boxes filled with punched cards -- slim lengths of oaktag-like paper slips, each filled with bits of information, in the form of rows of little rectangular holes. The card sorter used a series of small brushes, to 'read' the arrangement of these holes, and then send each individual card sliding into a corresponding slot along the machine's four or five-foot length. Once all the cards had been sorted about a million times, the final arrangement was fed through yet another machine that wasn't really a computer either, so we could print out a paper report, to reassure the bored officers in some office, somewhere across the base's bleak expanse of windblown volcanic rubble, that there were enough cans of beans and rolls of toilet paper for all of us for the rest of the month. (It doesn't matter whether you understand this or not, as long as you find it really boring. Think about it)
And I was to stand at this machine, patiently loading stacks of these punched cards into a feeder, setting the column indicator to read the next appropriate column (one letter, one number at a time, please), and then starting the cards on their whirring sort. Numbers on the cards required only one trip through the reader; letters, composed as they were of two punches, required two. Then the smaller, sorted stacks were gathered, in order, from their little landing slots, and then straightened up, so they could be put back neatly into the feeder, for the next pass, with those reader brushes set to the next column.
Or, as was too often the case, maybe not.
I may have done this particular job correctly once, in the year I was there -- but I also think I'm deluding myself. Much more often, a younger enlisted colleague would be called on to repair the sorting damage I'd accumulate, which repairing usual took this other airman a remarkably short period of time. The pitying glances I invariably got, from this person of inferior rank, would have withered acres of aspens. As far as the punched cards were concerned, I was much better at turning them over, and drawing weird pictures in black grease pencil on their blank backs.
Flashing forward to New York City, in the mid 1980's, and the 39th floor windowsills of the Exxon Building, overlooking the intersection of 6th Avenue and 51st St. I am now the titular supervisor of a team of data-entry clerks, hired to sit at typing terminals from 5 pm until 1 am, keying in expense information for executive spending accounts and other outlays racked up by the employees of Morgan Stanley, 'the whitest of the white shoe investment firms', (which designation-- as none of the managing directors ever sported albino footwear -- made no sense to me at all. But then, I didn't really know what investment banking was either. I just knew that, in one purchase, of an antique demi-lune side table to be used the upper echelon dining room, the company spent more than my annual salary. And those tables aren't even whole, when you think about it), while on the aforementioned windowsills, are being arranged, in what I hope is numerical order, all the taxi vouchers for all the cab rides racked up by all the employees eligible for such a perk, for whatever month preceded the one back into which we imagine that we are now peering. Little wrinkled clumps of thin paper, to be smoothed out and stacked up -- taxi company by taxi company, of course -- and sorted by the red number in the upper right hand corner. A job which was just engaging enough to keep me focused on it, while reminding me that I had been assigned it simply because I was the only employee in the department who had had the gall to go to, and to graduate from, college.
It was one of the most tedious and difficult jobs I ever had to do, while at that job. The notion that the taxi voucher information could be input in any random order, with the computer (we did have remotely recognizable equipment for that, by this time) doing the sorting internally, seemed inaccessible to my manager, who of all my colleagues was the most threatened by the Penn State diploma I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able locate at the time anyway.
On the other hand, what I mostly did, during the dreary hours when the keyboards were clattering, was to stalk around the Morgan Stanley offices, strewn about on different floors of the building, and make art on the various copy machines to which I could easily gain access. I have boxes of these prints upstairs in my attic, and a folder of what I think are remarkable prints done on a now defunct Xerox 360 -- sumptuous smears of lush inks that would make Gerhard Richter a little envious, I suspect.
But I still had to count those damned vouchers. Or, at least, put them into numerical order, which wasn't that much different, really.
Sometimes, though, I have to admit that I do actually count, voluntarily, and on purpose. Or, perhaps more correctly, on purposelessness.
I first happened on counting as a possibly helpful activity, while in graduate school, in Rochester NY, in the early 1990's. I had a considerable round-trip commute to school every day, and the radio in our old maroon Ford LTD didn't work (in solidarity with the heater and the air conditioner and one of the windows), so my own thoughts were my regular driving companions. And one day, for no reason I can remember, I actually listened to what I was thinking about -- I realized that I was in an imaginary courtroom, energetically arguing a case before a judge and jury. The substance of the argument seemed to hinge on some minor imagined driving mistake I'd made, or some other recent wrong I'd committed, but the mental focus and energy expenditure was considerable -- what a lot of concentration I was exerting, on defending myself, to myself, for something that hadn't actually happened!
And then I sort of... came to, I guess. I realized that, for the most part, this was how, probably for years, I had been spending most of my thinking time -- when I wasn't actually doing something that required my full-ish attention. I was in a court room, the judge often none other than the woman I refer to as my horrid grandmother, her pale bitter face hovering above the blackest of judicial robes, behind a high podium...
What a stupid thing to do, I realized. Why on earth, I asked myself, was I spending so much of my time, in these imaginary struggles? Why didn't I... think about something else instead? What could be easier -- to say nothing of more pleasant and perhaps even productive?
But I found, much to my puzzlement, that without these habitual and chronic courtroom fantasies, I really had no idea what I should think about. I did try singing to myself -- bleak old Scottish folk songs about infanticide and adultery and other frivolities -- but that would only work for, at best, half of one portion of my daily journey. So, for lack of anything else to do, I started to count.
At first, I tried to keep a running tally of how far I'd counted, on the trek between my house and one of the school's more remote parking lots and then back again, but as I've already mentioned, my concentration wasn't as reliable as one might like, and eventually I decided that simply counting to 100, over and over again, had just enough focused carelessness to appealed to me. Plus, it used a lot less mental energy than trying to argue my way out of a life sentence because I'd taken a right on red when I wasn't supposed to.
And now this pointless, almost meditative counting has became a habit in its own right. Currently, when I'm on the treadmill at the gym, I count to my favorite target sum of 100, over and over, timing the count at one number per two strides, with the machine set to 4.2 mph., on a 3.5 incline, whatever that means. I suspect though, that I'm actually skipping from, oh, say 49, straight to 80, because I'm not really thinking about the counting at all, but am somehow wandering through a more unruly, wordless part of my brain, exploring an alternate world filled with images borrowed from the treadmill's TV screen, that I mute, and tune to the Discovery Channel. So that, as I make my journey to nowhere but sweatiness, and rack up meaningless numerical sequences, I'm also ruminating on the likelihood that these two particular naked urban-dwelling white folks from America running across a deadly venomous fer-de-lance, right on their path in the Nicaraguan rain forest, as they search desperately for potable water. All the while being trailed by a TV camera crew toting its own weight in bottled H2O. Is it any wonder I might forget whether I've reached 52 or 78, when the cameras are once again lingering on blond Adam's remarkably picturesque, naked posterior?
(I also try using meditation technique which encourages me to imagine that I have no head. But Adam's butt can be such a distraction, even to the headless exerciser)
(Even to the headless exerciser who is, on the one hand, counting meaninglessly and carelessly, and on the other, demarcating sections of the remaining portion of his predicted mortality)
[A Dread Suspicion: As I was driving to the gym today, and in between counting meaninglessly, I had a chilling thought -- in figuring out how many days make up a 70 year life span, did I remember to include the two quarter-days that get tacked onto every year, just because of the earth's wobbly axis or something like that? Actually, now that I think about it, I did factor in these extra partial days, though I may have short-changed myself on this negligible hourly overage...
I'll check the math later. I've already swallowed my meds, and taken off my socks. Tomorrow, as has been remarked upon, is another day...]
© 2014 Walter Zimmerman
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