These, it has been said, are uncertain times.

Imagine that you are on a train. As long as you are on this train, you will be fed money at an almost alarming rate. You will be reassured. You will have people tell you how wonderful you are.

And eventually, at an indeterminate time, this train will careen off the tracks and plunge into a deep ravine.

But the train doesn’t stop at any stations. Or at least isn’t planning any stops until the ravine-dive. So to disembark prior, you’re going to have to jump. Which is infinitely safer than plunging heels-over-head into a ravine, mind you. But perhaps adds that extra special little disincentive (along with the money and the reassurance and the praise) to leaving the train behind.

The obvious question of the day is:  When do you jump?

It should probably herein be noted that one can’t really jump when one sees a ravine on the horizon. Maybe the train is always skirting a ravine for its entire run. (Presumably one would jump in the opposite direction when deciding to flee the train.) And no one can imagine being coordinated enough to jump one way as the train is plunging ravine-ward. So let’s just leave that hedge out altogether.

We’re also going to caveat that you can take it with you… you’re being paid in a form that you won’t at any point weigh yourself down and make a leap less feasible. At least not physically.

So when do you jump?

There are those, including my childhood self, that would advise jumping ASAP. Immediately. Posthaste and without delay. As long as that train rolls on with a chance of taking you into the ravine with it, there is nothing worth letting that happen. Prevention of worst-case scenarios is a principle I’ve lived by a lot, and maybe it’s the obvious solution to this one.

And there are probably many of you still looking for a way to hedge this one. Surely you can get some clues or indications that the ravine is coming, right? I mean, the whole train can’t go into the ravine at once, right? Unless maybe there’s an earthquake. (Indeed yes, unless there’s an earthquake.) Surely you can hang out in the caboose and minimize your chances of a negative outcome?

I mean, maybe. But maybe I have to push this metaphor to the extreme and say there’s a thick mesh netting around the train that takes a decent amount of time to cut a jumping-sized hole out of. So one has to prepare to jump – it’ll take much longer than a few seconds. Yes, let’s go ahead and commit to that. This mesh also has the dual impact of making it very hard to see where the train is going at any given time. And adding yet another small disincentive to jumping at all.

But you have to jump. The ravine is not survivable. Or if it is, it’ll be so crippling that no amount of money/reassurance/praise will be worth the cost. If nothing else, you’ve learned that lesson before.

While I wrote this scenario primarily with one (maybe two) setting(s) in mind, I think it’s widely applicable. All over the country, people are making calculations that look a lot like trying to figure out when to jump from the train. Or perhaps they just should be… it’s more likely that most folks are actually trying to discern how long they can cling to the train, regardless of how many ravines it attempts to navigate. For many, jumping looks like the most dangerous option. As though a million phantom cacti appeared to them in every direction, everywhere but onboard the train and on the tracks themselves. Making jumping so viscerally painful that even worse consequences could be swallowed wholesale.

But the cacti are small and spread out, if indeed they exist at all. The train probably slows to a good 25 or 30 miles an hour sometimes, though it probably has to go at a constant speed for the analogy to work. Then again, one could always just hold out, hoping for a slower train. Hoping that maybe it would stop sometime and the jump would be palatable.

Don’t get your hopes up, kids.

Clock’s tickin’. Train’s a-whistlin’. Ravine’s a-waitin’.

It is still too early to be too late.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Every summer, a teeming horde of young Irish men and women descend on San Francisco for a taste of life in the big American city. Youthful, exuberant, and almost sweet enough to convince one that there really is such a thing as innocence in the twenty-first century, they come to San Francisco for what seems like just three months’ worth of America for perhaps a whole lifetime. Frankly, that’s probably more than enough.

I don’t know if there’s an actual overt summer program based at some Eire university or a collection of them, but it seems more of an organic tradition than anything overt. They come seeking summer jobs and summer sublets, immersing themselves in a culture that must seem supercharged and hyper compared to the green homeland hills. Do they come to every city? Does San Francisco share a special place in the heart of the young Irish fancy? Until I move, I may never know.

My special insight into this small temporal demographic of the City comes from two sources. For one, the Irish, like all Europeans, are more accustomed to riding trains than the average American. So they fill the subways when the rest of us might otherwise leave them empty. But I might never have truly noticed the trend had Emily not worked so long and devastatingly hard for PIRG, finding many of the young Irish in the employ of their summer canvass by summer’s end. They come, no doubt seeking just enough work to earn their room and board and revelry in the midst of one California season. They left, those at PIRG, thinking that only in America can we muck up idealism and civic engagement with obsequious panhandling and worker abuse. No doubt, it’s a lesson worth learning from our sordid country.

I was nestled amongst three such Irish on the train home today: two lasses and a lad full of the high optimism of early summer interviews. They were tired and already feeling the pinch of the interview process, but one among them had been triumphantly offered a job at a clothes shop that afternoon, recounting an amusing anecdote of picking up a shirt to demonstrate her sales technique and finding it rather small. “Can you believe,” she went on to explain, “they have a clothes shop only for children?”

“I would love to work in a clothes shop,” her fellow female responded wistfully.

I’m likely painting a far more starry-eyed visage of these young Eireanns than they deserve, but if so, it’s because I want to believe. My picture of Ireland is idealized enough as it is without idealistic fresh-faced inhabitants coming to San Francisco with their folkloric accents and ginger freckles. No doubt I would’ve jumped at the chance one summer to take off for three months in Dublin with a handful of friends. And maybe I would’ve never returned.

It might also be worth noting that Irish is my selective heritage. I say selective because truly “European mutt” is the only description that can fit my bill, though Irish is tied with English and German at the top of the list. Somehow Ireland’s history feels better to me than England’s or Germany’s, though, and I’ve taken a special liking to that particular quarter. I say it here perhaps only to disclaim my interest in these visitors, or perhaps disclaim anything that might be misinterpreted. These are “my people” and I can say what I want to, like so many religious and ethnic groups will speak of their own.

Of course, truly, I have no people except those friends I select and the parents who raised me. Any ethnic kinship with any real group feels shameful at worst, irrelevant at best. And America? What is America except a place to disappoint the hopeful aspirations of a downtrodden but rising race of Irish?

And yet they keep coming. If you have to come, it might as well be San Francisco. Weather just like home, only less interesting. The isolation of a peninsula to replace an island. A sense of quiet perseverance against a surrounding world that might not understand.

Malarkey? Blarney?

You mc the call.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

The events in Tokyo yesterday got me thinking.

So Dear Whoever You May Be Who Wants to Be Next, please accept this open letter:

There is a better way.

So, this would be a pretty major life-changing event, right? Whether you’re looking at a suicide or want to go through the legal proceedings and calmly explain to the police why you killed so many people, it’s going to change everything. You’ll never experience anything like freedom again, at least in this lifetime. So it’s worth taking some time to really slow down and consider whether you’ve done everything you want to do first.

Maybe this urge would be satisfied just as much by an extended vacation. Or a permanent one. You could always disappear and start a completely new life on the other side of the state/country/world.

But I’m guessing if you’ve gotten this far and are seriously considering killing lots of people at once, you’ve already ruled out such alternatives as trivial. Maybe you don’t have the financial means to completely makeover your identity and leave everything else behind. Maybe you couldn’t face trying to contemplate the mundanities of life again, to take everything that seems so meaningless seriously again. Maybe life has become so meaningless that you don’t want to find a way to make it meaningful again.

There’s still a better way.

Here’s the important thing, or one of them: You aren’t crazy. Life really is this mundane and silly and seemingly meaningless. I know you know this already. But sometimes it might help just to know that other people realize that life is so ridiculous. Most of society’s systems and institutions are set up around meaningless trivialities. Most people spend their entire lives pushing the cogs that make one of a million wheels turn in sync, for no real purpose except turning the wheels. People are living for the sake of living, marking time for the purpose of watching it pass them by.

You aren’t crazy. It’s really as stupid as it seems.

But there are other ways to wake them up. You don’t have to kill them.

Indeed, isn’t that what you really want? An awakening of some kind. Wouldn’t it be better to get everyone to see how ridiculous and stupid their lives and expenditures of time are? You don’t really think killing a small swath of them is going to do that, do you? Or even a big swath, fine. How does that help? Doesn’t that just entrench them in clinging more dearly to what they already value too much? Doesn’t it just glorify the martyred lives of those who are meaningless, or torment you, or don’t even see you? How does martyring them achieve your ends? No one’s going to remember any message you had and you’ll only serve to amplify the heartfelt beliefs of whatever trivial people you want to off.

Instead, why not somehow simulate the killing of them, in a way that might even get you killed if you really want that, but as a martyr instead? Intrigued?

I don’t know a lot about guns, but I bet there’s some realistic-looking paintball guns you could go get. You might have to paint the tips black, but kids have been doing that for years.. So you could, could go out and run through your whole gameplan you’ve devised with a paintball gun.

How would this impact people?

Don’t assume you’d not be taken seriously as much as you might when first considering this. If you walk into a crowd at your high school, or in public, or at the mall and start paintball-gunning people down, it’s going to be taken seriously. People will get the same kind of crazy-scared. You will still feel that rush of power and dominance and control that you so crave in the rest of your life, that you feel you deserve. Nobody in public (or school) is expecting someone to walk in and start shooting anything. It will take a long time for them to figure out people aren’t dying, if they do at all.

And yet, you will also create an incredible kind of revelation in the people who are themselves hit. Anyone hit in that kind of panicked environment that you have already contemplated creating is going to pretty much assume they’re dead. Paintballs hurt enough that the pain will not dissuade them from this thought. Especially since most people have no earthly idea what it feels like to be shot. They will assume they’re in a shooting environment and react accordingly.

And yet, at some point - minutes or hours later - they will realize that this was not, in fact, their day to die. That no matter what horror they feel they’ve been through, what trauma you’ve made them endure, they have been given the opportunity to live. Frankly, in some ways, given that opportunity by you, who could’ve just as easily chosen to take their lives this day. Yeah, you get plenty of power in this alternate scenario.

Now how do people tend to react in this circumstance? Well, near-death experiences are probably pound-for-pound the absolute best way to get people to take a second look at their lives. To contemplate what they’re doing or not doing, to make the changes that will fundamentally alter their course and add some meaning to their existence. And yes, killing some of them would give others that near-death impact with even more verve, but it would all be clouded by the fact that they were mourning their friends, elevating the dead to sainthood in the face of such tragic randomness. You would be an agent of cementing their belief that everything is hopeless and meaningless and abysmal. While they take your tormentors or random meaningless people and revere them for all-time.

And maybe you really want everyone to believe that life is random and meaningless and trivial after all. Maybe that’s your take-home message. But let me ask you this, even if you believe that: Wouldn’t you do almost anything right now to convince yourself that this is not the case? If you could wave a magic wand and convince yourself that life is indeed meaningful, has purpose, matters in any small regard, wouldn’t you wave at will?

Be the magic wand. You can wave it at everyone else. And maybe, in so doing, even take a crack at yourself.

I mean, sure, I would imagine that paintballing a mall full of bystanders is somehow criminal. There may be some assault charges or some confinement in a mental health facility. And maybe you’d rather die than face these consequences, in which case you can always find a way to take care of that if you really must. I’m not advocating suicide, but that alone is a way better alternative to taking people with you.

It’s your legacy I’m concerned with as much as anything - how are people going to perceive you after you’re gone? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but nobody really thinks much of these guys after they’ve offed themselves. I know, I know, you don’t care what people think. But don’t you want to be understood? I know you’ve given up on any hope of that. But don’t you think if you passed up the opportunity to slaughter people and instead paintballed them all… don’t you think that would at least give you a shot (pun intended) at being understood?

I mean really - did anyone make an effort to understand the last few guys who did this? Maybe you did. I’ll grant that you probably tried to understand, maybe even understood. Maybe in some perverse way, you see this as a legacy to be carried on from spiteful outcast generation to generation. But other than your lone understanding, has anything been achieved by this or accomplished? Is any progress being made? Are you changing anyone’s mind or life?

No, no, and again no.

But you don’t even have to paintball. You could achieve a similar, maybe even larger, impact without even lifting more than a pen.

Yes, this is going to be corny. Pen is mightier nonsense. Bear with me… I think you’ll like it. Time is one thing you’ve got right now.

Think of all the people you’d be trying to gun down (or stab, I suppose). Each one of them - those who have wronged you, those who you’ve grown to hate. Get their addresses. Write them a letter.

It doesn’t have to be signed (but it can be). It doesn’t have to make sense (but it could). You could tell them your whole plan, in bloodcurdling detail, sparing no horror as you describe what you could do to them. It could be short and to the point, like a ransom note of old - newspaper cutout letters telling of their doom. You could even do what no shooting has ever done, what no mass-shooting has ever had time to even attempt: explain to them exactly the message you are trying to convey with the action you are contemplating.

Now wouldn’t that be profound and original? (I won’t tell that you got some help on the idea.) You could explain to these horrible people just how desperately seriously they need to take you, or their actions, or their life. How horribly wrong they’ve been for so long. Indeed, the receipt of such a letter might be so unsettling that it gets them to rethink every decision they make, to truly begin to live each day as if it were their last. I bet they’ll be a bit nicer to people too. A little more likely to not do whatever it was that made them so awful in the first place.

Maybe you’re only interested in the illusion of power, in the seeming bluster of the power to choose to kill. But half of power is the power of restraint - in the choices we don’t make. And when coupled with an actual power - a transformative one, wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t that make you more than wanton force of a painfully unfair random universe, but an agent of what could be possible if people took their heads out of their collective rear-ends? Isn’t that all you really want in the end? Wouldn’t that make life worth living?

Maybe?

You’ve got time to think about it. Those people aren’t going anywhere. There are probably five more alternatives that I haven’t even really thought about. Something really creative to scare people into submission or change or being better people.

Guns? Knives? There’s nothing new there, nothing to accomplish. Nowhere to really make your name. People have only been murdering like that for thousands of years, day in and day out. You might as well join the military.

And don’t kid yourself into thinking that you’ll set some sort of record. The records are impossibly high at this point, and even if you set it, some other guy will break it in a couple years. Someone less thoughtful, original, understandable than you.

There’s still time to be understood. There’s still time to find some sort of meaning, some sort of reason. It may not be enough to make you want to persist in this awful life. But consider - just consider - the alternatives to forcing someone else out of that decision for themselves. You’d still have all the control… in the end, the choice of them living or not would be in your hands.

It’s worth a shot.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.