Thursday, February 26, 2009
Pachyderm
* Why do you even do those things, anyway?
* It’s fun.
* Really? Looks hella boring.
* No, it’s good. It relaxes me. And it’s so satisfying to work them out. You start with all these mysteries; it looks like they couldn’t possibly have have told you enough to mean anything or get anywhere. The numbers just swim around like fish, each one in its own little bowl, perfectly disconnected. But if you approach it methodically, row by row and column by column, the truth begins to emerge. Maybe you get one number for sure, or can narrow it down to a couple of options. It’s still wide open and mostly empty but you’ve got that first little toehold toward a solution. Then you pull back and look at the big picture again - is there someplace you can really be analytical? You think about how verticals and horizontals impact each other, or specific arrays with low-hanging fruit. Can you fill in just one more square, and does that give you the leverage to get a few more? Sometimes I can stare at the grid for a couple of days, totally stuck, losing confidence, reworking everything over and over in my mind to make sure that I haven’t made any mistakes, and then like a bolt from the blue a connection will click in my brain and I’ll suddenly see a place where something cannot be, which means it must go somewhere else, which suddenly resolves a whole slew of mysteries. Then all the cryptic little notes I’d left for myself in the corners of all those boxes start paying off, answers tumbling into place one after another, each new realization resolving another old question somewhere else… it’s logic and vision and deduction all coming together in different ways, intersecting and aligning. For a long while, the farther I get, the harder it becomes to pick up the remaining pieces. But my mind gets sharper and I eventually see structure through the chaos - but I have to think my way through to it. It’s never a matter of what I already knew or being in on a joke - externals don’t come into it. It’s me and the numbers and the matrix. And once every row, column and array is neatly and uniquely filled, I wind up holding a piece of the universe in my hands that I’ve fixed, and I can stop and take solace that in this broken twisted world, I’ve done something pure and clean and perfectly ordered. It’s a good feeling, a deep, gratifying feeling. That’s why I do these.
* Yeah?
* Yeah.
* I dunno, man, whatever. I just don’t get it. But hey, um, do you know a nine-letter word for “trunk toter?”
Visual entertainment: cellphone shot of the art light installation under the Fremont Street Transbay Terminal overpass. It’s a miserable gritty stretch of shut-in streetscape, but they’ve installed rainbow lights that change color and shine happily on the underside of the overpass. If you wish to return today’s blog post, keep the photo as my free gift to you. All rights reserved; licensing by written agreement only; Rule Against Perpetuities will be enforced to the fullest extent of the law. Other than that, enjoy.
