What Does It Take to Learn a Lesson?

Sports Illustrated, May 13, 2013, page 53. 

Drinking and Driving and Dying.

Go and Find it and Read it.

I read it this morning while working my circulation clerk job at the library. If I had not been front and center in a public customer service location, I would have had tears streaming down my cheeks by the time I was finished reading the article. As it was, my eyes were overly watery, and I had to swallow multiple times before answering questions from patrons while I was reading.

Thomas Lake, the author of the SI piece, has created a work of written art.  He takes the reader on a journey through time, beginning on the day a certain NFL player was born and concluding on the day that same player died a scant 25 years later. Almost like reading a dairy, each dated entry through the years of 1987 to 2012 provides a snapshot of events in the American cultural photo album entitled Drunk Driving. The first snapshot, on October 20, 1987, is not the first page of the album. No, this snapshot occurs well into the album, three quarters of the way through a year that will add 23,632 pictures tagged as “Died in Alcohol-Related Car Crashes”. It occurs seven years into the snapshots that are tagged “MADD”.  It occurs in a city whose MLB team is playing Game 3 of the World Series in a home stadium name for beer.

Bit by bit, Thomas Lake pulls out selected pages of the album, selected pictures of the cultural landscape of DUI America: deaths and MADD efforts to curb them. This being Sports Illustrated, many of those selected images feature professional athletes, both as DUI victims and offenders. And the thread that connects them all together so cohesively is the evolving story of the baby growing into adulthood named Jerry Jerome Brown, Jr. and the choices he makes that find him a 25-yr-old Dallas Cowboys player, dead and drunk, in a vehicle driven by his legally intoxicated surviving teammate, crashed less than a mile from the headquarters of MADD, leaving his unborn daughter to make her own choices.

Does not compute

I often feel that I’m operating on auto-pilot. The captain has left the bridge, the junior officers have decided to loaf instead of work, and all systems are left to automatic operating parameters… my eyes and ears send data to my brain which my brain shunts directly into long-term memory, delaying only long enough to assess what’s come in and re-issue whatever command my legs, arms, hands, need to do next.  My legs continue to walk, or sit, or whatever they’re supposed to be doing, my arms and hands continue to type, fold, hold the steering wheel, turn pages, as the next round of continuous loop input goes into my eyes and ears. Over and over. Systems on automatic, quietly minding themselves. I even hear the soft little beeps and whistles of 1960’s starship bridge special effects, as the helmsman fights to stay awake by counting the stars visible on the view screen and the communications officer yawns.

 

Seen from the outside, this would be called “glazed over”.

 

My mind is mud, or at least sludge, and my responses to outside stimuli are sluggish. It takes awhile, after all, for something to break through that continuous feedback loop, for the auto-pilot system to quietly beep an alert that it’s got something requiring actual input from something sentient. Like my brain is supposed to be.

 

And once the external stimulus has actually gotten the quiet beeping alert, the supposedly-sentient bridge crew has to actually notice, check it, and know how to respond.

 

This is where the junior officers come into play- so often, those poor greenhorns just don’t know how to respond. They just sit there staring at the console, wondering who’s going to end up having to call the senior officer to ask directions.

 

Glazed over - empty eyes, frozen mind, waiting for those junior officers in my brain to get on with draw straws and get an answer on what to do next. React, already. Respond, for heaven’s sake.

 

“Oh, hello ma’am. I’m so sorry I didn’t see you come up to the desk! Can I help you?”

 

That taken care of, things settle down again, and I realize that I don’t think those juniors ever actually called for back-up. I think the science officer just took some educated stabs in the dark while the rest of the schmucks silently held their collective breath.  Yeah, I can hear the echoes of the giant sigh of relief when the guesses turned out to work okay and no one had to bother the captain.

 

Or that pointy-eared science guy.

 

Cue the 1960’s starship bridge soundtrack.

 

 

Infinite Gaze

 

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