unscriptured

God asked me the other day about what’s been happening with Mountain Dew Somehow over the last few years it’s gone from being a drink to being a franchise. I remember when it made what I think was its first really big promotional push. I was a kid and the advertising for it was all over television. There was an animated caricature of a hillbilly shouting out “Yahoo, Mountain Dew.”

Mountain dew, the original Mountain Dew, not Mountain Dew Lotus Fusion, or Mountain Dew Tropical Depression or whatever other variant is out there this week, is basically just another citrus soda. It’s different than the lemon-limes (like 7Up and Sprite) and the grapefruits (like Squirt and Fresca) in that it doesn’t strive for that “crisp” citrus drink quality, instead joining its more common pop brethren by being sweet and heavily caffeinated. I think the caffeine was there mainly to differentiate it from Cactus Cooler.

But it also has that yellow color. And the “dew” in the name is awfully close to one of the slang terms for excrement. Combine those with the unsophisticated plumbing that young boys in the sixties believed to be extant in the backwaters of Appalachia that featured in the advertising blitz and it didn’t take much to imagine that they were all but saying “Hey, come try our urine soda!” To a prepubescent tyke like myself this was even better than a good fart joke, and I was instantly enticed. To this day I still occasionally imagine I’m indulging in a bit of cleaned up bodily waste when I pop open a can. Thankfully, the illusion never makes it past the first taste.

So I think that maybe this ties in to the mass profusion of different variations on Mountain Dew that now adorn our convenience store shelves. Somebody at Pepsi woke up one day and thought, “You know, if we can sell a brand of soft drink by invoking piss, what couldn’t we sell under that brand?” Of course, thinking about it this way really does make me wonder what kind of medical condition drove someone to come up with Mountain Dew Code Red.

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One of the tricks that gets used in art is called “forced Perspective.” God reminded me this week that a little forced perspective can be a good thing if you find yourself a little short of the non-forced kind.

Now that I’ve integrated my iPad into my life, I find myself with a perceived lack of downtime. I’m not putting in any extra hours at work (if you don’t count my hour-long commute), and I’m not, at the moment, getting any significant work done on my myriad artistic or entrepreneurial projects. But I’m also never (well hardly ever) just staring into space anymore.

Forced perspective is an optical illusion. There’s a number of different systems of perception that we use to determine size and distance. There’s binocular vision, the way we see 3D because the view seen by each of our eyes is slightly different. There’s also the arc of vision that something takes up, that is, how much of our field of vision it fills. It’s this latter clue that forced perspective plays with. By making something physically smaller the artisan makes it seem bigger. To be a little more precise, by making the part of something that is further away from us smaller than the part that is near, it makes it seem as if the thing is actually bigger because we know that for it to look that much smaller, for it to take up that much less of our field of vision, and still conform to our expectations of its geometry, that it must be a certain distance away.

A good example of this is in one of my favorite places in the world, Disneyland. On “Main Street, USA,” the stores along the street are all built with the second floors on a smaller scale than the first floors. This is done to make the buildings seem bigger and grander, it’s a subtle thing that adds immeasurably, though not immensely, to the ambiance. It allows them to make a barely two lane wide street feel much larger.

With the iPad, I find myself filling in all the cracks of the day. I’ve always got something I can do. I keep up on the news more than I ever have before. Thanks to social networking, I can keep up on the lives of my friends like I never have before. Thanks both to computer A.I.s and to network access, I get to play more games than I ever have before. Now to be fair, when I was younger I used to always carry a book with me and used it to fill in those small moments of downtime, but with the book I could see progress and I could measure (by space on my shelves) a certain kind of advancement over time. With the constant and massive deluge of things on the web, I only ever feel like I’m falling behind.

So God’s advised me to find a way to skip more of what interests me, so that I can do more of what interests me. In a way, I’ve got to both narrow what I’m willing to spend time on and go into it less deeply than I’d like to. It’s just like the technique of forced perspective which gives you less while seeming to give you more. The trick will be to do it without feeling guilty.

So last time I talked about going to a baseball game, and how it reminded me of going to church. This got God and I to talking about sports in general. Of course “sports” is up there in the list of most talked about subjects, so really it was rather more mainstream of a conversation than I’m used to having. As a subject though, it’s up there in the company of things like the weather and politics.

Now baseball stands out from other sports in that it’s been singled out as The Great American Pastime. I think I’ve got a good idea of why that is. It’s a game you don’t need to pay attention to, and Americans like things they don’t have to follow too closely. Things happen, in baseball, at a leisurely pace. It’s not like basketball, football, or hockey where the action is frenetic and sometimes hard to follow. This means you can chat with your friends while watching the game and not generally feel like you’ve missed much. You can go get something to eat, you can shop for souvenirs; you’ve got the time.

In other ways though, baseball is just the same as every other sport. It has its passionate fans, its devoted followers, its sinners and saints. And also, like every other professionally played sport, it has one big thing in common with religion: Everyone thinks that their team is the best, whether they win or lose, but which team is theirs is mostly just an accident of birth.

I feel like I went back to church yesterday.  I went into a large, publicly accessible building, engaged in arcane rituals, partook of, if not sacred, at least ritually specific food, and witnessed the public excoriation of the unfaithful.

Did I do this in a church?  A mosque?  A temple?  Of course not, I did it in a ball park.  I watched the San Francisco Giants take on the Chicago Cubs.

No one was called a sinner, but the unfaithful, the Cubs fans, were derided, shouted down, and then loudly booed when one of them caught a ball that had been hit into the stands.

There was music.  There was the sacred sing-along to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”  There was the playing of John Fogerty’s “Centerfield,” which is surely a baseball hymn or there is just no justice in the world.

And there were call outs and responses, though I don’t remember what they were.

Now I don’t know much about baseball statistics, so I don’t have any clue which team was favored to win, but I can tell you the outcome was far from Biblical.  In the Bible David defeats the Giant, but in this case the Cubs failed at the same task.  Maybe they should have used a sling.

So I’m working now in downtown San Francisco.  I’m not actually in the financial district but I share a BART station with those that are.  God asked me to look around at my fellow corporate drones and see what I could see.  I wasn’t sure what she wanted, but I went ahead and looked.

Now I didn’t grow up in the fifties but I did grow up watching reruns of fifties sitcoms and TV broadcasts of fifties movies.  Where today we have “knowledge workers” in the fifties they had “office workers.”. Both kinds of workers sit at desks all day.  Both kinds of workers get to and from work on trains and busses.  Both kinds of workers spend time filling in cells in spreadsheets.  And more often than they’d like, they end up taking those spreadsheets home for a little more tweaking.

Of course today the spreadsheets are files on computers and in the fifties they were actual large sheets of paper, with blank cells printed on them to be filled in by hand and bound into books.  So to take your work home with you in the fifties, you tossed real paper files into your briefcase, but now you bring home a laptop computer…  Then I noticed…  There were no briefcases.  They’ve gone the way of button-down shirts and black ties.  Lost to a sea of “business casual,” the briefcases have all been replaced by backpacks.

So there’s progress for you.  We never got the “paperless office” that they kept promising computers would make possible, but for the most part, they did get rid of the need to carry all that paper around with us.  Now if only we could get rid of homework entirely.

I’ve spent the last couple of days packing. Since starting this blog I’ve moved about as many times as in the rest of my life put together. The rational part of my mind says this is a natural outgrowth of having reached the point in my career where just any job won’t do. The less rational part of my mind says that when you start talking to God, you’re just naturally going to have to start moving around more; to believe you’re talking to God is crazy, and crazy just doesn’t tend to stability.

Craziness aside, I’m making an effort this time to sort of downsize. I’m getting a place that’s smaller than either of the houses I’ve owned, and fully expect to start getting rid of much stuff as part of the unpacking process. Partly this is in reaction to something that God pointed out to me. He told me that the so-called McMansions are the natural outgrowth of American Consumerism. The American Dream has always been to own our own homes, largely for the independence and stability that they represent, but in times past a modest house was enough.

So why does our culture of consumerism lead to larger and larger houses, beyond just the need to show a bigger “score” in the game of life? It’s pretty straightforward, once we’ve bought all the stuff they keep selling us, we need a place big enough to hold it all.

Like most of the people I know I saw Inception this week. It’s the latest bit of art that riffs of the age old idea that was perhaps best summed up by Edgar Allen Poe’s immortal line, “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”

So this got God and me talking about dreams and daydreams and memories. When you or I get nostalgic we spend some time thinking about the past. When God gets nostalgic, people start getting together to run Renaissance Fairs and Civil War reenactments. This tends to remind me that there’s not just a quantitative difference between God’s mind and ours but most definitely a qualitative one as well.

So you know how sometimes you get a song stuck in your head and it just keeps playing itself on a loop? Well God told me that’s kind of what’s been going on with the Middle East for the last couple of thousand years. They keep fighting because he can’t get their song out of his head.