| |
|
E=Mc˛, YOU JUST FEEL IT As a youngster growing up in New Jersey I was constantly surrounded by a warm ring of security. At the time I was growing up everyone was well aware that E=Mc˛. As Einstein worked at Princeton University nearby, his genius was apparent everywhere you went. Even on the doors to the bathrooms in the schools the girls' room had an 'E' printed on it, and the boys' room had a 'M'. By age 12 or so, we all knew they equalized each other. In my hometown it was like: "Hi Joe, Hi Ed, E=Mc˛, all's right in the world, God's in Heaven, and all children are happy." If ever a child would cry out for help, there was always someone there to grasp his hand and say: "Relax, E=Mc˛". Immediately the child would be pacified, having lost his footing for only a moment. In my own household it was evident that my mom was E and my dad the Mc. He'd get up at 5:30 in the morning, drive 2 hours to work, spend the whole day selling, renting, and promoting computers for the IBM Computer Company in White Plains, New York, then drive 2 hours home again. He never could of done this day in and day out for 35 years without E. My parents would kiss each other at sunrise before work and at sundown afterwards to equalize each other. My town was the perfect picture postcard town, just the type you'd want to make a T.V. series from, except you can't, cause they made this town from the T.V. series. You could just look at people's faces and rest assured that all was right in the world. Everyone had that 'certain type of grin' on their face, like - they knew - they knew the secret - it was inside of them - crystallized forever. Everyone was just 'pregnant and glowing with the truth' - veritable walking 'Arks of the Covenants' - constant beacons of security in this ever changing world we live in. . . Everything was going fine, just fine, until my 21st birthday rolled around. Then one day I was out for a walk, just walking long you know, and I get this thought: "Yeah - everyone knows that E=Mc˛, but what does = equal?" "What a stupid thought!" I said to myself. I decided that it'd be better to take a dog along with me than to smoke that stuff! Well, I put the thought out of my head, but then a week or so later I was sitting on the toilet, just minding my own business you know, and again the thought returns to me: "Yeah - any little punk knows that E=Mc˛, but what does = equal?" I thought it was plain ridiculous and decided to adopt an Arabic stance towards the issue in the future. Well, I put the thought out of my head, but then a week or so later I was laying in the bathtub, just minding my own business you know, when again the thought returns to me: "Yeah - any little 2 year old girl knows that E=Mc˛, but what does = equal?" Well, what do I do this time? Cold showers were out of the question. Maybe I should go back to high school to reform myself, or get a job teaching kids how great Einstein was? As I languished in the bathtub I imagined myself on a traveling promotional tour. . .with buttons. . .and slogans. . .But! What does = equal ! ! ! I jumped out of the bathtub, put on my clothes as fast as I could, ran down to the local drugstore soda fountain counter to see Joe and Ed, bursting through the swinging doors that were placed there just for this paragraph and panting heavily with loss of breath I gasp out: "Ed! Ed! Tell me again! How does it go? E=???" "Mc˛" he replied. "Oh Ed!" We embraced, hugged, slapped each other on the back, shook hands, consolidated our solidarity, and promised to meet again at the same time tomorrow. I paid for all the cokes and returned home. Whew! That was a close one. I almost forgot. Ed's a real regular guy he is. Maybe one day he'll need me...yeah...one day he'll come begging to me on his knees: "Mc. . .Mc???" and I'll pause a moment for effect, then calmly tell him: "= E". . .as he lies sobbing at my feet, I'll touch him gently on the shoulder and say: " Ed, don't worry about paying for the cokes, we didn't have any." Well. . .my bravado kept up until my friend returned to take his swinging doors back. He's writing the script for THE LAST WESTERN, where Top Gun says to The Kid: "Well - we've got all the bad guys - now we're looking for the good guys." It's lines like those that get me through tough times. "Let it be" - John Lennon "I can't, I've got a job to do." - John Wayne "Give peace a chance" - John Lennon "Then what happens?" - Interested Reader "Wait and see" - Innocent Bystander "Who's John Galt?" - Ayn Rand "I'm sitting on the dock of the bay" - Otis Redding "I left my heart in San Francisco" - [call in if you know the answer] "I'm waiting for dialing for dollars to call" - Martin Mull "The buck stops here!" - The President Then it swung back and hit me harder than ever - Even dolphins and Hollywood dogs know that E=Mc˛, I think even Mr. Ed mentioned it once - but what does = equal?!By now the cozy harmony of my life was thoroughly destroyed, I couldn't sleep at night anymore. I tossed and turned, twisted and squirmed, until one night HE appeared before me. He - Einstein - hovering over my bed, all impartial and just, just as much hair growing out of his right ear as his left, and he says to me: "E=Mc˛ - It's a fact! Pure reason - got it! Stop your foolish thoughts!" But I couldn't, and I tossed and turned, twisted and squirmed for many a more night until HE appeared before me. HE - God - hovering over my bed. [I'm not allowed to call this a nightmare because he was just 'All Love'] And he says to me: "E or M, you must choose, if you don't, you know what'll happen to you, you know how weird you'll end up." Calmly threatening the hell out of me that it was: E or M. This kept up for weeks, it felt something like sunbathing without a bathing suit, on another planet, with another son. . . . Maybe I was getting used to it , or maybe I was becoming purified, because gradually the Lord's face was turning into something more like W.C. Field's face. The carnival - vaudeville type. Bigger nose - funnier hat - more polka dots on the shirt. And the voice was sounding more like: "Pick one - you must - they're both very attractive - everybody makes a wise choice - and everybody's glad they did. . ." Until you walk away with a cigar, a cross-eyed koala bear, or a free coupon to try again. . . The point is, that underneath all of this, there was something in me telling me that I was being taken for a sucker, the greenhorn at the fair, the country bumpkin first time in the city. . .Like it was a big con - everyone had to love E and M and agree to be blind to =. I tried to get out of the jam by laughing it away, but found that something more like anger, or self-righteous indignation was my best - or only defense. Then I started to worry that people around town were beginning to suspect that something was askew in me. I tried my best to keep up appearances, but felt that at any moment my shell would crack, and I'd yell out at the top of my lungs in the middle of the town square on the finest Sunday morning God ever created: [or Saturday - depending on time zones] "Yeah-Yeah-Yeah! But what does = equal?" So - I packed my bags and left town, leaving behind me all the security that was driving me crazy. I went far out into the woods, high up a mountain, to think it over, for a long, long time. "Many moons passed, and then in the month of the She-Elk" [Screaming Eaglestein - current chief of the Jewish Indians] "Billions of months passed, and 28 days later" [Firesign Theater] "You're late" [my mother] The battle raged for many a season and when I awoke it was Spring. Then I remembered the other thing Einstein was famous for saying: "Time is relative". In a flash I 'knew' that time is relative to a fixed point and the fixed point must be = ! I jumped out of bed, made myself some coffee, and even before I'd finished my first cup I had the rest down on my notepad.Providing that '=' and 'impartial' are one and the same thing, and using a universal calculator, I thus calculated the equivalent of = to 66 decimals:   * For more information read the: I Ching. It's a book consisting of 64 'hexgrams'. Numbers: 64 and 1 correspond to 'Here'. It's about 750 pages long, and in Chinese, but worth the effort. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A feeling of wholeness prevailed.The coffee, [my second cup] tasted just as good and rich as the Columbian Coffee Commercials said it did when - 'Elexagente' [the coffee taster] is sitting at a small table in the town square at dusk, surrounded by hundreds of sacks of freshly harvested coffee beans and an entire village awaiting his judgment. Everyone's there; mothers with babes at their breasts, youngsters acting as grown up as possible, plantation workers with straw hats in their hands, revolutionary soldiers with machine guns standing at attention, foreign gentlemen in expensive suits with portable phones and airs, cackling hens, game cocks, wild turkeys, and tethered goats adding to the local color and filling in for the writer's lack of imagination, the crooked mayor posing for the press, the straight faced priest beyond the cares of the world - Elexagente lifts the small espresso sized cup to his lips, the sun gives a final glance off his accurately tilted sombrero and highlights the coffee that glistens on his exquisitely black 'Made In Mexico' moustache, and as one of his eyes has already been promised to his 'bride to be' and the other one 'serves no man' - the sun reaches the mid-way point on the horizon - marking the Autumn Equinox and last day of Summer, and by the precise laws that govern the solstices and equinoxes, and by time honored tradition, he must then pronounce his judgment - BUT! At exactly this minute - a furious young woman from the village pushes her way through the crowd and snatches the 'SURE' cordless microphone out of his hands! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- STORY 2 CONTINUED |
