Topical Guide 171
Mark Dorset
Innocence, Loss of; Lying, Dissembling, Acting; Improvisation
I began giving outstanding service, or the illusion of outstanding service, every payday and on any other day when an opportunity presented itself. …
On one occasion, inspired beyond anything I’d done before, I tore the front page of one copy and put it at the front of the stack in my canvas bag. At each customer’s door, I would pull the torn copy from the bag and say, “Oops, can’t give you this one,” then add, with a wink, “I’ll have to give that one to somebody else.” They loved it. Of course, when I got to my last customer, Mrs. Blynman, I had no other copy for her. To Mrs. Blynman I said, “I can’t give you this. It’s torn. I’m going to ride my bike downtown to the Reporter printing plant and get you a fresh copy.”
Mrs. Blynman didn’t say anything. I started down the walk. Suddenly I turned and ran back to her door.
“Oh,” I said. “Before I go, could you call my mother and tell her I might not get home for dinner, Mrs. Blynman?” I asked.
Mrs. Blynman said she would. Again I started down the walk. Again I turned suddenly and ran back to her door.
“And ask her to save me a piece of her birthday cake, would you please?” I said. Mrs. Blynman swallowed hard, insisted on taking the torn copy of the Reporter, and pressed a dollar bill into my hand.Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home”
Money, Attitudes Toward
On occasion, when my mother was ironing, I would get my capital out and press it. It was on one of these occasions, while I was ironing my money, that the thought ran through my mind that I had enough to buy a model plane kit with a real gas engine.
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home”
He [John Cheever] wanted to be beyond money, but money buys paper and typewriters and lawns and people to mow them, and it pays school tuition and doctors’ fees. He used to joke that he had taught us that small bills come out of the cold-water tap and large bills out of the hot-water tap. In other words, we didn’t know the value of a dollar or a hundred dollars, and he was proud of that. For him, money was almost completely subjective; the value of the dollar fluctuated wildly depending on his state of mind. He was rich sometimes and he was poor sometimes, and both of these conditions were as dependent on his mood as they were on his net worth (which also fluctuated pretty wildly).
Thinking
How strange it is that one’s mind works independently of one’s efforts to direct it, that the solution to a knotty problem eludes one through hours of concentrated effort and then appears unbidden but certainly welcome while one is running to the dock with the last of the trash cans, hoping that the trash boat will wait.
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home”
As it turns out, networks are also subject to background noise very similar to the thermal noise in physical systems. Even “at rest,” networks can be buffeted from between stable states, bouncing about the E surface like a grain of sand dancing in water. Thus, we can consider “thinking” as a form of Brownian motion in a network buffeted by internal random noise. This phenomenon is not limited to brains, strangely enough. Technically, any living network, including a single cell, should be capable of something resembling thought. The speed and complexity of that thought may not approach that achieved by the human brain, but it’s thought nonetheless.
Frank T. Vertosick, Jr., The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing
[more to come on Tuesday, January 11, 2022]
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