Winging it
Mar. 7th, 2009 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOne summer in 1990 me and a couple of college buddies stopped in Aberdeen, Washington, and rented an efficiency apartment for a week. We ate peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, cooked ramen on a single plug-in coil and a battered metal pot, and drove hither and thither up and down the coast. My friend Mark was scoping the place out for details for a novel he was writing. This was before I took up writing seriously; I was mostly there for the lark of travel.
I passed by that complex on the way up to Quinalt. It's all boarded up now, but the one thing I most clearly remember from that time was the disconnect I felt between what I knew and what I was doing. I didn't know crap about renting a room for a week, or what the laws were where I was, or whatever. I'm pretty sure neither Mark or Gene had any clue either. (My most memorable quote from that trip came from Gene, when we got lost one night: "You're right, I'm sorry. This was a clusterfuck.") We assumed that a working car and enough cash would get us the hell out of there if we needed it to. One night in Kansas, I bought us an extra four hours of sleep past check-out by slipping an extra five bucks to the motel owner. Mark, the Ayn Rand-reading libertarian, thought I was crazy, that wasn't an option on the hotel's prices, while I, the liberal do-gooder at the time, knew damn well that I could pay the motel owner for any legal service he was willing to sell, including the allowance to sleep late.
It was Mark's car; I remember stealing his keys one morning and taking the thing to get its oil changed. We'd driven all the way from Orlando to Seattle and into Aberdeen before I'd checked the maintenence log and realized his last oil change was 15,000 miles ago, before we'd left Florida. The oil came out slower than sour crude and we found a small tomato inside the air filter. The technician was amazed. On the drive home, the water pump started to malfunction and the car couldn't go above 55 without overheating or below 20 without the onboard computer screaming at us. He was an idiot. Gene was an idiot. I was an idiot. That's what being in your early 20's is like: you don't know shit about shit. If you've been lucky to have enough money most of your life, you know less than that. You're winging it.
Life has remarkable fault tolerance for guiding young people in their 20s through that prolonged crisis of ignorance and into something less melodramatic and more productive. People helped us, gave us slack they'd never give someone in his 40s, someone who you expect by now should know what the hell he's doing. They did that because they could remember being young once, and they remembered being an idiot.
I ought to write a story about how cultures with far fewer children and far more multi-century vibrant adults will have far less slack for the individuals among them who don't know what they're doing. Who don't have the wisdom of experience. Who have a lot of passion and only the shallowest of channels gouged by life out of their souls with which to direct it.
I passed by that complex on the way up to Quinalt. It's all boarded up now, but the one thing I most clearly remember from that time was the disconnect I felt between what I knew and what I was doing. I didn't know crap about renting a room for a week, or what the laws were where I was, or whatever. I'm pretty sure neither Mark or Gene had any clue either. (My most memorable quote from that trip came from Gene, when we got lost one night: "You're right, I'm sorry. This was a clusterfuck.") We assumed that a working car and enough cash would get us the hell out of there if we needed it to. One night in Kansas, I bought us an extra four hours of sleep past check-out by slipping an extra five bucks to the motel owner. Mark, the Ayn Rand-reading libertarian, thought I was crazy, that wasn't an option on the hotel's prices, while I, the liberal do-gooder at the time, knew damn well that I could pay the motel owner for any legal service he was willing to sell, including the allowance to sleep late.
It was Mark's car; I remember stealing his keys one morning and taking the thing to get its oil changed. We'd driven all the way from Orlando to Seattle and into Aberdeen before I'd checked the maintenence log and realized his last oil change was 15,000 miles ago, before we'd left Florida. The oil came out slower than sour crude and we found a small tomato inside the air filter. The technician was amazed. On the drive home, the water pump started to malfunction and the car couldn't go above 55 without overheating or below 20 without the onboard computer screaming at us. He was an idiot. Gene was an idiot. I was an idiot. That's what being in your early 20's is like: you don't know shit about shit. If you've been lucky to have enough money most of your life, you know less than that. You're winging it.
Life has remarkable fault tolerance for guiding young people in their 20s through that prolonged crisis of ignorance and into something less melodramatic and more productive. People helped us, gave us slack they'd never give someone in his 40s, someone who you expect by now should know what the hell he's doing. They did that because they could remember being young once, and they remembered being an idiot.
I ought to write a story about how cultures with far fewer children and far more multi-century vibrant adults will have far less slack for the individuals among them who don't know what they're doing. Who don't have the wisdom of experience. Who have a lot of passion and only the shallowest of channels gouged by life out of their souls with which to direct it.
