On bravery and Uncle Max

Not everyone attending Stanford comes from a background of wealth and privilege, obviously, but few people arrive there after circumstances like my spouse’s.

Violent trauma; abandonment; food insecurity. For college, she’d turned down Harvard despite their generous offer of significant financial aid: she didn’t have any money to pay for college. Instead, she went to a school that offered a full ride plus a stipend.

Even that wasn’t enough: her father took out credit cards in her name and used them to pay his bills. After collection notices began to arrive at her dormitory mail room, she … well, first she slumped to the floor and cried. Wouldn’t you? But then she used the money from her job at the college bookstore to pay them off.

After college, she won a Fulbright. The Fulbright award comes with a stipend: many young people use this money to travel, to see something of the world while they’re overseas. My spouse used the stipend to pay her bills from dental surgery.

By the time she and I met, she’d made her way to Stanford; her mother, father, and younger sibling were all unhoused.

Her father was in Albany. Luckily, a friend took him in, a man named Paul who had a little pension from working at the post office. Paul’s house was small, the foundation was sinking, and everything rattled with the passing trains, but there were four walls and heat. I’ve never not had four walls and heat. I like to think that I have a good imagination, but I can’t fathom being unhoused in Albany.

The post office pension was something, but Paul decided that he ought to grow marijuana. That would nicely supplement his income. He also decided, despite living on a street where two-thirds of the houses were vacant and boarded up, that he ought to tell his neighbors about this plan to grow marijuana in the attic. Then they’d know to buy from him.

The first time people broke in to steal the marijuana, my spouse’s father got pistol whipped in the face. For weeks afterward, his face ached. After the second time, he found his bedraggled tomato plants abandoned in the middle of the street. This I can imagine: somebody waiting in the car, engine idling, ready to drive away, looking up to say “You idiots, that’s not marijuana!”

Paul decided to get a guard dog. He found somebody with a pitbull too unruly to handle – the dog had been kicked out of two houses already, for howling, breaking things, biting people. This dog would go berserk around bright lights, and was even worse when he heard the sound of motorcycles. Two years old, but he walked and ran with a limp; the dog must’ve broken a leg when he was a puppy.

Having a guard dog helped. When some guys were working their way down the street, stripping copper pipes out of all the vacant houses, the dog started barking and got the guys arrested. My spouse’s father didn’t get pistol-whipped again.

He talked to my spouse on the phone. “Paul got a dog,” he said.

My spouse knew how much her father loved animals. “Is this really your dog?” she asked.

“No,” her father said, “it’s Paul’s dog.” But also, my spouse could hear a gentle panting; the dog’s head was in her father’s lap.

The next year, toward the end of November, Paul was having sex and died. Very suddenly. Which must have been traumatizing for Paul’s lady friend?

After Paul passed, the dog was very clearly my spouse’s father’s dog.

Unfortunately, the mortgage was in Paul’s name. As were the utilities. Paul’s post office pension had been paying the bills. Which meant that my spouse’s father and the dog were squatting in the vacant house without electricity or heat. December tends to be cold in Albany.

So my spouse and I borrowed a car – we’d spent a few years walking and biking everywhere – and drove out to get her father and the dog. We moved them in with us, thinking that they’d be with us briefly, then found out that you can’t keep a pitbull in Section 8 housing. So then we spent a few months searching for a second apartment that we could afford.

My spouse’s father didn’t have any money. He’d lost his last job – parking cars in a garage – when he had a stroke during working hours. His boss assumed that he’d been drinking and so he was thrown in jail instead of taken to the hospital. He had unmanaged diabetes and cardiovascular troubles and the stroke made things worse, but it took several years before he was approved for disability.

But the dog kept him alive. Got him outside a few times a day – the dog would pull like a little tugboat to get my spouse’s father up the stairs again to their apartment – and would rouse him when my spouse’s father briefly stopped breathing in his sleep. (Which happened often, and always sounded deeply unsettling during the time that he lived with my spouse and me.) The dog seemed to like trying to help. Although, honestly, the dog was pretty traumatized too: he’d howl when he was left alone, and the gunshot sounds of the 4^th of July would make him thrash and snap his jaws.

The dog got his full name a few years later, when my spouse showed up at her father’s apartment to tell him she was pregnant.

“Max,” her father said, turning toward the dog with tears brimming in his eyes, “you’re gonna be an uncle. Uncle Max.”

“Nuh uh,” my spouse said, “we are not calling the dog Uncle Max.”

My spouse’s father died when our child was one. The dog came to live with us: his fifth family, then. We called him Uncle Max.

The name helped. He was a sixty-pound, scary-looking pitbull. But there’s something disarming about a dog called “uncle.”

The first week he lived with us, I thought he’d bitten off my child’s fingers. I was fixing lunch and had lost track of what my child was doing. I didn’t realize that she might be in the room with the scary dog.

Suddenly, I heard my child wail. I rushed toward the sound, and my child came staggering toward me, clutching her arm against her belly as though her hand might be bleeding or even missing, but when she finally let me see, there was the slightest little dimple on the soft skin of the back of her hand. She tried to explain what had happened to me in that vaguely incomprehensible way that an 18-month-old explains things:

“I, I …” she said, or perhaps “Eye, eye …” and then, “…put finger Max-y eye.”

So she’d been putting her fingers into the dog’s eyeball and then wailed, chagrined, when he had rather gently told her “No.”

Uncle Max loved running. I rather loathed going running with him, but we went together three times each week. He was fast, despite his limp, and he liked to start at a sprint, bolting from the house with me stumbling along behind him, struggling to hang on to his leash. Then, after about three miles he’d tire and plod along the rest of the way home.

He especially loved bounding through the local university campus, drawing smiles from students as his tongue flopped rakishly through the air: he was as gorgeous and charismatic as an underwear model. When people were watching, he liked to hop up and prance along little stone walls next to the sidewalk. He’d wag his tail and flirt whenever people asked to pet him.

But Uncle Max had memories. He held a lifelong vendetta. He’d seen an ambulance take my spouse’s father away, and then my spouse’s father never came back: just a long lock of faded russet hair that my spouse brought for Uncle Max to sniff.

I was walking Uncle Max one day when an ambulance came by us, forty miles per hour and flashing lights on a quiet street. Uncle Max lunged, trying to bite the ambulance, and nearly pulled me off my feet.

To be perfectly honest, my eyes filled up with tears when I typed this. Uncle Max seemed mostly happy. But that was one goal he never achieved: he never got his revenge, never killed an ambulance.

That’s one type of heroism. Easy to spot. Cinematic. A dog hurling himself into danger to slay the mechanical beast that took his person.

Uncle Max also had the other kind. The quiet heroism. Generally I don’t like David Foster Wallace’s writing, but I love this passage about heroism from The Pale King:

“By which,” [our accounting instructor] said, “I mean true heroism, not heroism as you might know it from films or the tales of childhood. You are now nearly at childhood’s end; you are ready for the truth’s weight, to bear it. The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all – all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience. An audience.”

He made a gesture I can’t describe: “Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth – actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.”

He paused again and smiled in a way that was not one bit self-mocking. “True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care – with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk.”

This is a sad passage: the author wants to convey the heroism of quietly getting your work done; his own ability to do so had faltered. David Foster Wallace could no longer bear to sit at his desk.

But Uncle Max had children to look after. I think that Uncle Max was in a lot of pain for his last few years. He lived until he was almost fourteen, but by the time he was eight, he stopped being able to run – he still wanted to run, but if we let him, he’d spend the next few days licking his aching, arthritic joints – and as the years went on, he needed to take progressively shorter and shorter walks. Near the end of his life, he was so stiff in the mornings that watching him walk was like a stop-motion film of a taxidermied dead animal.

But each day, after his medication kicked in, he was so happy to see his kids, to play with them or simply sit and be their pillow. He hurt, a lot, but he probably would have kept on going if we’d asked him.

At times, of course, he was infuriating. He felt aggrieved one evening when we rushed off to a dinner party without taking him; he protested by nosing his way into our baking supplies, dragging a package of chocolate chips off a shelf, and devouring them. His heart was racing and his breath was shallow as I drove him to the all-night vet; it took a while to clean all his chocolate-scented vomit.

He’d shriek with a high-pitched, plangent whine whenever he felt like he wasn’t near enough to help; other people in town can walk their dogs to playgrounds and leave them tied just outside the fence, but Uncle Max had lost so many families that he couldn’t believe we’d survive without him. His shrieks sounded like he was in agony; spiritually, perhaps he was.

And he was very loud. Our whole neighborhood knew when he was demanding to go outside or in. Once when we happened to be out of the house for a while on the 4^th of July, we returned home to find the kid next door shaking her head ruefully and saying, “I think there’s something wrong with your dog.” He never could handle fireworks.

But he loved his children.

Uncle Max did well. I believe he lived his life with heroism.

I’m proud of that dog.

And I’m proud of my spouse. She took care of her father until the end and then some. For seven years after her father died, my spouse made sure that his dog was safe & warm, well-fed & loved.

Most paths that start like theirs do not lead to here.

On trauma and the marshmallow test.

We were walking our dogs past our neighbor Katie’s house when she stepped onto her front porch. Katie is a philosophy professor specializing in the works of David Hume. She is also a phenomenal baker of holiday treats (her collection of cookie cutters is prodigious) and a generous guardian to several cats.

“Your flowers look beautiful!” we called out from about twenty-five feet away.

“I hope they don’t die right away,” she said. Then she shook her head and laughed. “God, what a year. They do look beautiful. And that’s the first thing I thought?”

We’re feeling traumatized. Nearly all of us.

The marshmallow test: a researcher leaves a young child in a room with a marshmallow. “You can eat it now, but I’ll be back in ten minutes, and if the marshmallow is still there, you’ll get to have two.”

The marshmallow test has been written about extensively. The children who waited used a variety of strategies to distract themselves from temptation, like closing their eyes or singing to themselves.

Some children impulsively ate the marshmallow. Here’s a treat, nom nom nom! But the children who waited, the researchers reported, grew up to be more successful.

A variety of claims were made, like that the willpower needed to delay gratification allowed children to prioritize their futures, to keep struggling and striving even when things were hard, to turn down drugs and alcohol.

Here’s another interpretation: children who have been through trauma might be making a perfectly logical decision if they eat the marshmallow right away. Because lots of kids have been taught, by past experience, that despite a recently met grown-up’s promise, waiting might cause them to get zero marshmallows, not two.

If a child has learned that any situation might suddenly turn dangerous, they might not feel safe closing their eyes to ignore the marshmallow. If a child has learned that the money and food often run out by the end of the month, they might rightfully eat treats when there’s still a chance.

The pandemic has made me more impulsive. Like my neighbor Katie, I worry that the beautiful flowers might die –almost to the point of forgetting to enjoy them while they last.

Like a child, I worry that the marshmallow might be gone.

I am – or at least, I have been for almost my entire life – a patient, resilient person. My graduate degree took six years. I merrily undertook a writing project that lasted another six. I’m raising children, which feels both hectic and achingly slow.

But right now, I can feel it in myself. Signing up for a vaccine and having the appointment be two and a half weeks away! felt interminable. Every delay aches. The future feels like a distant blur.

Especially amid all the outbreaks of violence – mass shootings in the national news, seemingly unrelated spates of murders in our local paper, all of them likely rooted in impulsiveness, isolation, & stress – delaying any source of joy feels agonizing. As though we might not make it another whole week, or month, or year.

Today, at least, I set aside time in the morning for self-care. I dropped the kids off at school. I went for a fast run, five kilometers just under eighteen minutes. I stretched.

Most importantly, I took the time to meditate.

Meditation is the marshmallow test writ small.

Set a timer for twenty minutes. Sit down. Close your eyes. Choose some small phrase, meaningful or not – “sat nam,” “love more,” “I am calm” – and intone it silently in your mind, half as you breathe in, half as you breathe out. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Your mind might wander – if you notice, try to resume your small phrase. Silently repeated sound can anchor you, give yourself space to wash away some mental turmoil.

And, if you are like me, you’ll want to open your eyes and be done with it. This is taking forever! See if you can stay. Keep your eyes closed. Repeat your phrase, and breathe.

If you can last the entire time – well, no researcher will bring you a second marshmallow. But you’ll still receive a gift. A bit of inner peace that wasn’t there before.

I could not have passed the marshmallow test yesterday.

I meditated.

I could probably pass today.

header image by Kate Ter Haar on flickr

On ‘Among Us’ and honesty.

How is the mobile game Among Us like Robert Greene’s The Art of Seduction?

I appreciate the premise of both. They’ll help you learn to get what you want.

But I doubt I’ll play again.

When people write to Pages to Prisoners, they request all kinds of books. Fantasy, thrillers, sci-fi, horror, romance. How to draw, how to start your own business, how to build a home. How to speak Spanish, or French, or Italian. The history of ancient Egypt. UFO books about aliens building the pyramids.

Most people write and tell us a few topics that they’re interested in, then we comb through our collection of donated books and put together a package that the person will (hopefully!) be happy to receive.

Are you interested in self-help and philosophy? Here’s a package with Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist! Are you interested in games and comics? Here’s a package with a Dungeons & Dragons manual and some freaky zombie books!

We try to give people what they want. Nobody should have their entire life defined by their single lowest moment.

When people write to us requesting a specific book, usually it’s the dictionary. Seriously, that’s our top request. Despite their miserable circumstances, a lot of people caught up in our criminal justice system are making a sincere effort to improve themselves. To read more, learn more, and be better.

If I had to guess what our second-most requested book is, though, I’d say Robert Greene’s The Art of Seduction.

Which seems less helpful than a dictionary if your goal is to become a better person.

I attempted to borrow The Art of Seduction from our local library. We only had an audio version, though, so I can’t quote from it directly. I listened to the first third, I believe.

And Greene made a remark that I appreciated: because so many of us feel unfulfilled in life – our work might be dull, our achievements might fall short of our ambitions – we would enjoy being seduced. After all, we spend buckets of money on booze, movies, and games. We like beautiful illusions.

Perhaps a seducer isn’t the person whom they’re pretending to be – so what? Greene suggests that we’d still enjoy an evening in which we take on a role in that person’s play – we can pretend to be loved by someone dazzling, someone who at least postures as rich, friendly, a scintillating conversationalist.

In my classes at the jail, I’ve met a fair few men who seem to have studied The Art of Seduction and other such pickup guides. Although their conversations are incredibly engaging at first, they quickly become repetitive – they have a few timeworn routines that they trot out again and again, the same slew each week. If you met this person at a party, he’d seem fascinating! Meet him at three parties in a row, you’d be hearing all the same skits.

As long as we anticipate this dissipation, maybe it’s okay. When we drink, we know that sobriety is going to catch up with us in the morning – sobriety, and a headache. We let a film transport us even though we know that the house lights are coming on two hours later.

If I were talking to someone who was playacting as a brilliant conversationalist, and we were both having fun, I don’t think I’d mind that their stories were invented. When guys in jail spin tales about their lives, I always take them at their word – even though I know that much of what people say in there is bullshit.

Sometimes we have to bifurcate our minds to get the most from life. Immerse ourselves fully in a role and enjoy it for what it is. Nobody playing Dungeons & Dragons believes that she’s really a level nine elf wizard, but she can still enjoy the thrill of saving the party with her powerful spells.

The major flaw with The Art of Seduction, from my perspective, is that it discusses the people being seduced as objects. The guide uses the language of battle and conquest, as though pleasure is something that the seducer takes from the seduced.

If, instead, the guide simply wrote about how best to entice others into joining you for mutually-pleasurable roleplay – in which pleasure is shared as you both pretend to be, and thereby become, scintillating lovers – well, then I’d salute Greene for doing his part to make the world a better place. Couldn’t we all use more love, pleasure, and excitement in our lives?

There are lots of ways to dance the dance. To play games. I simply prefer the honest ones – in which everyone is privy to, and pleased by, the illusions.

My brother recently gathered a group of ten of us to play the mobile game Among Us.

Among Us is a social deduction game, like Werewolf, Mafia, or Secret Hitler. Each player is assigned a hidden role at the beginning of the round – are you townsfolk or the werewolf? Are you a liberal or a fascist?

In Among Us, you’re an interstellar scientist or an alien.

The two teams have opposed goals. The scientists are trying to complete a set of mundane tasks – dumping the garbage, stabilizing the engines – so that they can return home. The aliens are trying to kill the scientists.

The graphics are charmingly reminiscent of early Nintendo games. And the pace of the game is excellent – at times your character wanders a map, trying to do chores, at other times play is interrupted by a meeting in which everyone tries to solve the mystery of who could’ve killed their teammate. Catch someone without an alibi and you can vote to fling them out the airlock, saving your crew from further tragedy.

Unless you were wrong and you accidentally ejected one of your helpful friends. Then the aliens are that much closer to victory.

I’m quite earnest.

Yes, I love the shared illusion of games, and I can appreciate that Among Us asks two players from each group of ten to playact as evil aliens. Those players are required to be deceptive, but it’s within the safe confines of a game that everyone in the group has chosen to play. There’s deceit, and there’s total consent.

But also, I’m terrible at this sort of game.

We played for several hours – a dozen, maybe two dozen rounds? I was given the role of the evil alien only once. And I attacked my second victim while standing right out in the open. Taylor walked past, saw me, and promptly called a meeting.

“Oh my God,” she said, “I just walked in and Frank totally killed him right in front of me.”

In retrospect, it’s clear what I should have said next. The scientists’ mundane tasks fill up the entire phone screen – I could’ve claimed to be working on one, that I’d been interrupted by this meeting halfway through it and hadn’t seen what happened, but then accurately described the place where I’d been standing. Yes, this would have seemed suspicious – I’d admit to standing right where the body was found – but the other players might think that Taylor had come into the room, killed someone without me noticing, and then tried to frame me.

We played with a team of two evil aliens, so this would’ve been quite helpful to say – even if the other players voted to eject me from the ship, they’d remain suspicious of Taylor and might eject her later, bolstering the chances of my alien ally.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t recall what the nearby chore was supposed to be. I learned that, if you haven’t played Among Us very often but are given the role of the alien, you should slay your victims near chores that you know well. So that you can convincingly describe what you were doing if someone stumbles across your misdeed.

Instead, I laughed and voted myself off the ship.

Among Us was fun, but the game has its flaws.

Each round is ten or twenty minutes, but a few people are eliminated right away. If you were playing, you’d definitely want a book nearby or a TV show to watch, just to have something to do during the times when your character gets eliminated first. Except that the players are still expected to complete their vaguely unpleasant chores – clicking a set of buttons at just the right times, or dragging illustrated leaves across the telephone screen to clean an air filter – even after they’re killed and can no longer participate in the discussions or votes.

I’d definitely prefer if a deceased player’s chores were automatically completed at steady rate.

For about a decade, Jonathan Blow, creator of the fantastic puzzle game Braid, has been an outspoken critic of unethical game design. In a 2007 lecture, Blow described his qualms about World of Warcraft – players are forced to complete mundane, unpleasant tasks in order to progress in the game. To balance this unpleasantness, the game keeps players engaged with tiny pulses of dopamine – even though it’s not particularly fun to slay each tiny goblin, the game rewards you with a jingle of dropped gold or a gambler’s rush of wondering whether this unidentified treasure will be a good one.

By forcing players to sink time into mundane tasks, World of Warcraft makes their lives worse. “The meaning of life in World of Warcraft is you’re some schmo that doesn’t have anything better to do than sit around pressing a button.”

The chores in Among Us need to be sufficiently challenging that they introduce a cognitive burden for most players, but there are ways to do that without making them tedious. Simple logic puzzles would accomplish the design requirements of Among Us and help players get more out of each game.

The more dire problem, from my perspective, are the ways that repeat play with the same group shifts your optimal playstyle.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game in which two players choose either to cooperate or defect. Then they’re sent to jail for various lengths of time depending on both players’ choices.

The Prisoners’ Dilemma is a very different sort of “game” from Among Us – I assume nobody would want to download an app for it. Your team wins! You only go to jail for two years each!

If both players cooperate, the pair will be imprisoned for the least total time. But also, no matter what the other player chooses, you can reduce your own time in jail by defecting.

And so the “game theory optimal” play is to defect. When both players do, they both wind up spending more time in jail than if they’d both cooperated.

In Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett discusses ways in which human evolution – which bestowed upon us emotions, a tendency to blush or bluster while lying, and a willingness to endure personal suffering in order to punish non-cooperators – may have solved the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

When evolution gets around to creating agents that can learn, and reflect, and consider rationally what to do next, it confronts these agents with a new version of the commitment problem: how to commit to something and convince others you have done so.

Wearing a cap that says “I’m a cooperator” is not going to take you far in a world of other rational agents on the lookout for ploys.

According to Robert Frank, over evolutionary time we “learned” how to harness our emotions to keep us from being too rational, and – just as important – earning us a reputation for not being too rational.

It is our unwanted excess of myopic rationality, Frank claims, that makes us so vulnerable to temptations and threats, vulnerable to “offers we can’t refuse.” Part of being a good citizen is making oneself into a being that can be relied upon to be relatively impervious to such offers.

Emotions can solve the Prisoners’ Dilemma – cooperating because you’d feel bad about hurting the other person – and so can repeated play.

When you’re faced with the Prisoners’ Dilemma once, the “rational” choice is to betray your partner. But if you’re playing with the same person many times, or with groups of people who know your reputation, the optimal strategy is to be kind. To cooperate unless you have ample evidence that a particular partner will not.

The Prisoners’ Dilemma is a game where playing more makes you a better person.

By way of contrast, Among Us teaches you to behave worse the more you play.

This is a feature common to all social deception games. If you were playing Secret Hitler once – and only once – and were assigned to play as a liberal politician, your optimal strategy would be to be scrupulously earnest and honest. The players assigned to roleplay as fascists must lie to succeed, but the liberal team doesn’t need to.

However, if you plan to play Secret Hitler several times with the same group of friends, your optimal strategy includes a fair bit of caginess and trickery even when you’re playing the role of a liberal. Otherwise, the contrast between your behaviors would make the game impossible to win during the rounds when you’re assigned to roleplay as a fascist.

Similarly, Among Us rewards deception even when you’re assigned the role of a scientist. Otherwise, you won’t be able to win during the rounds when you’re assigned to play as an evil alien.

Although the optimal strategy for the team of scientists might seem to be extreme forthrightness, repeated play cultivates a basal level of dishonesty.

In The Biggest Bluff, Maria Konnikova describes her journey from poker novice to professional – the book jacket lauds her $300,000 in winnings.

She frames this journey as a quest to understand the whims of chance – how can an appreciation for randomness buoy her spirits during the hard times of life?

And the biggest bluff of all?

That skill can ever be enough.

That’s the hope that allows us to move forward in those moments when luck is most stacked against us, the useful delusion that lets us push on rather than give up.

We don’t know, we can’t ever know, if we’ll manage or not. But we must convince ourselves that we can. That, in the end, our skill will be enough to carry the day. Because it has to be.

It’s a beautiful message. We let ourselves believe that we’re in control, because if we lost that belief, we might give up.

And yet. Almost unmentioned in the text of The Biggest Bluff are the mechanics of where money comes from in poker. Poker doesn’t produce wealth – instead, a large number of people pay to enter a game, and a small number of people receive the money at the end.

Because Konnikova was fortunate enough to be instructed by experienced players, and wealthy enough to invest a lot of time and money on learning, she was eventually able to deceive and bully other people well enough that she could take their money.

Poker is consensual. Everyone entering a game knows that the other players are attempting to take their money. Some people must play with full understanding that they’ll lose – maybe they think the entry fee is a fair price for the enjoyment of the game. But most people, I’d assume, are hoping to win. And – because poker doesn’t produce anything, instead redistributing wealth from the many to the few – most don’t.

Playing many games of poker would teach you skills that can be used to get ahead in the world. An appreciation for chance. An ability to negotiate. An ability to tamp down or hide your emotional responses to adversity or triumph. An ability to manipulate those around you.

Some of that sounds good, some doesn’t. On the whole, I don’t think I want the traits that poker would help me develop.

Similarly, The Art of Seduction promised to teach valuable skills. I, too, like cuddles! My spouse bought me a cute little “polyamorous” pin to wear on my jacket label. But I wouldn’t want to follow any advice recommending that we deceive potential romantic interests, or treat them as objects.

And I don’t want the traits that Among Us would help me develop, either.

Deception is a valuable skill. More often, we’d get what we want. But at what cost?

When I played Among Us, I had fun. I was often laughing during the meetings when we discussed whether we should eject someone from our ship. Sometimes we did, and we felt so sure that we’d eliminated an alien because that person had seemed suspicious the whole game, but then we’d lose and realize that we’d doomed a fellow scientist.

Whoops!

Again, I’d laugh.

But the ability to enjoy Among Us comes from a wellspring of privilege.

My spouse can’t play social deduction games. She grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother – in order to stay safe as a child, she learned to lie. For many years, my spouse then lied compulsively. Pervasive lying came close to wrecking her life.

She resolved that she wouldn’t lie anymore. Recognizing that it would be an easy habit for herself to slip back into, she won’t lie even in a game.

Our children know that there’s no Santa Claus. That’s okay – I think that the Santa story is a starter conspiracy theory, and, even if Santa were real, our family would probably be against elf servitude.

Our children know that there’s no Tooth Fairy. My spouse and I dress up fabulously and dance through their bedroom when we replace their teeth with quarters – I wear a glittery skirt, angel wings, and a light-up tiara, all rescued at various times from neighborhood trash.

Another of my close friends joined us to play a single game of Among Us. She hated it. She, too, had a traumatic childhood. For someone who grew up around adults with mercurial swings of violence and rage, it feels awful to be lied to by your friends. Even within the consensual confines of a game.

After each game of Among Us, I wanted to play again. Despite the nuisance chores, despite my near-total inability to lie, despite knowing that I might be eliminated from the game within the first minute, I wanted to play again.

And yet, having written this essay, I doubt I ever will.

On attentiveness and names.

When a scientist first discovers a function for a gene, that scientist gets to name it. Sometimes these names seem reasonable enough: I worked with a hematologist who did a study to identify proteins involved in apoptosis, which means roughly “programmed cell death” or “cellular suicide,” and so each gene wound up named “Requiem 3”, “Requiem 4,” etc.

Fruit fly geneticists tend to give their discoveries more creative names than other scientists. There’s the gene “cheap date” – if a fruit fly is missing that gene, it will – ha ha – be unable to process ethanol and so quickly passes out. Another genetic mutation produced male flies that would court either males or females, and so this was known for over a decade as “fruity,” until another scientist decided that universal courtship could be less offensively described by the term “fruitless,” because clearly any mating-like activity that does not lead to progeny is a waste of time.

Yup, some gene names were bad. One person’s idea of a joke might seem to somebody else like a mean-spirited reference to the wider world’s power dynamics.

Other gene names were bad not out of malice, but because humor at the expense of a fruit fly doesn’t make as many people laugh when a human child is dying.

A gene that produces a somewhat spiky-shaped protein was named after Sonic Hedgehog. It seemed funny at the time! See? The protein is spiky, the video game character has spiky hair, and … get it? You get it, right?

Okay, so this Sonic Hedgehog protein doesn’t look all that much like Sonic the Hedgehog. But spend enough time staring at something like protein crystal structures and you’ll experience pareidolia, like seeing animal shapes in irregularly dappled plaster ceilings, or anthropomorphic gods amongst the twinklings of the stars.

Well, the Sonic Hedgehog protein establishes a concentration gradient that allows cells to recognize their spatial position in a developing body. If a human fetus comes to term despite having a mutation in the Sonic Hedgehog gene (genetic abnormalities will often result in a miscarriage, but not always), the resulting child will have severe brain defects.

And then a doctor has to explain, “Your baby is suffering because of a Sonic Hedgehog mutation.”

And so, in 2006, geneticists capitulated to medical doctors. No more fanciful names for genes that might lie at the root of human health problems … which, because humans and fruit flies are actually pretty similar, means most genes. Patients would now be told about a mutation in the SHH gene instead of Sonic Hedgehog, or a mutation in the LFNG gene instead of Lunatic Fringe.

Words have power, after all.

Some people are more attentive to their environments than others. During evolutionary time, this trait was obviously good for humanity. If your tribe is traveling through a hostile environment, it helps to have somebody around who is paying attention to the world. A friend who’s primed to notice encroaching threats like a hungry lion about to leap out and attack. Maybe we should take a different path. Which, yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

Other people are particularly inattentive to their surroundings, so it’s easy for them to ignore the world and focus instead on one single problem. During evolutionary time, this trait was surely good for humanity, too. It’s helpful to have somebody on the lookout for threats that might eat you, obviously. But it’s also helpful to have somebody who might discover a way of using dried grass to weave baskets. A way of cooking mud into pottery that could carry or store water.

Neurodiversity is a virtue in and of itself. Over the millennia, the world has offered our species many challenges. Populations that were sufficiently diverse that some members were good at each of a variety of tasks were most likely to flourish. A cooperative species like termites or Homo sapiens benefits from specialization among its members.

Left to our their own devices, people would naturally fall asleep and wake up at different times. Some brains are primed to work best in the early morning; others work best late at night. And that’s good. It reduces the amount of time that a tribe would be susceptible to attack, everyone asleep.

But in the modern world, we occasionally forget to feel grateful for the diversity that allowed our species to thrive. The high school students whose brains are primed for late-night thinking drag themselves through morning classes like zombies. They’ll be midway through first period before the sun rises. Their teachers glance derisively at their slumped and scruffy forms and call them lazy.

Eventually, humans invented language. Much later, we invented writing. Much, much later, we invented the printing press, and then written words became so widely accessible that most humans could benefit from learning how to read.

Of course, reading is easier for people who are inattentive to their environment.

If I had been born earlier in human evolution, I totally would have been lion bait. When I’m reading a book, or am deep in thought, the rest of the world melts away. When I’m typing at home, K or the kids sometimes shout my name several times before I even realize that I’m being spoken to.

People like me, or this kid at a library, totally would’ve been lion bait.

Luckily for me, I wasn’t born way back then. Instead I was born into a world where inattentive people – the people best able to block out the world and instead focus on their own thoughts – are the most likely to find academic success. People like me become medical doctors. Then we get to name the world’s various conditions and maladies.

And so, when it came time to categorize the sort of person who is especially attentive to the world, people like me (who obviously thought that our way of being is the best way to be) referred to those others as having an attention deficit disorder.

Identifying those people’s awareness of their environs might sound like a virtue; instead, we castigated those people’s difficulty at ignoring the world.

I’ve never read the Percy Jackson books, but I’m glad that they exist, if only for passages like this (from The Lightning Thief):

“And the ADHD – you’re impulsive, can’t sit still in the classroom. That’s your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they’d keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that’s because you see too much, Percy, not too little.”

Childhood trauma can cause symptoms that medical doctors term “attention deficit disorder.” Which makes sense – if you’ve gone through an experience where your environs were threatening, you should learn to be more aware of your environment. It should become more difficult to ignore a world that has proven itself to be dangerous.

Even for somebody with my type of brain, it’s going to be easier to sit outside and read a book when there’s a squirrel nearby than if there’s a prowling grizzly fifteen meters away.

Some children have to learn early on that daddy’s sometimes a grizzly. And if it can happen to him, why not other grown-ups, too? Best to stay on high alert around the teacher. She’s trying to get you absorbed in these number tables … but what if that’s a trap?

Certain drugs can narrow a person’s perception of the world. They act like blinders, chemicals like nicotine, ritalin, and amphetamines, both un-methylated (sold under the trade name Adderall) and methylated (a CH3 group attached to the amine moiety of Adderall will slow its degradation by CYP2D6 enzymes in the liver, increasing the duration of its effects).

Note to non-chemists: the methylated analogue of Adderall goes by several names, including “ice,” “shard,” and “crystal meth.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it — this compound played a key role in the television show Breaking Bad. And it’s very similar to the stuff prescribed to eight year olds. Feel free to glance at the chemical structures, below.

In poetry class last week, a man who has cycled in and out of jail several times during the few years I’ve taught there – who I’d said “hello” to on the outside just a few weeks earlier when he rode his bicycle past the high school runners and me – plonked himself down in the squeaky plastic hair next to mine.

I groaned.

“I know, I know,” he said. “But I might be out on Monday.”

“What happened?”

“Failed a urine screen. But I was doing good. Out for six months, and they were screening me like all the time, I only failed three of them.”

“With … ?”

“Meth,” he said, nodding. “But I wasn’t hitting it bad, this time. I know I look like I lost some weight, dropped from 230 down to 205, but that’s just cause it was hard getting enough to eat. Wasn’t like last time. I don’t know if you remember, like, just how gaunt my whole face looked when they brought me in. But, man, it’s just … as soon as I step outside this place, my anxiety shoots through the roof … “

This is apparently a common phenomenon. When we incarcerate people, we carve away so much of their experience of the world. Inside the jail, there is a set routine. Somebody is often barking orders, telling people exactly what to do. There aren’t even many colors to be distracted by, just the white-painted concrete walls, the faded orange of inmate scrubs, the dull tan CO shirts and dark brown pants.

The world in there is bleak, which means there are very few choices to make. Will you sit and try to listen to the TV? (The screen is visible from three or four of the twelve cells, but not from the others.) Try, against all odds, to read a book? Or add your shouting voice to the din, trying to have a conversation (there’s no weather, so instead the fall-back topic is speculating what’s going to be served for dinner)?

After spending time locked up, a person’s ability to navigate the wider world atrophies, the same as your leg would if you spent months with it bundled up in a cast.

And these are people whom we should be helping to learn how to navigate the world better.

“ … so I vape a lot, outside. I step out of this place, that’s the first thing I do, suck down a cigarette. And, every now and then … “

He feels physically pained, being so attentive to his surroundings. And so he doses himself with chemicals that let him ignore the world as well as I can.

And, yes. He grew up with an abusive stepfather. This led to his acting squirrelly in school. And so, at ten years old, medical doctors began dosing him with powerful stimulants.

Meanwhile, our man dutifully internalized the thought that he had a personal failing. The doctors referred to his hyper-vigilance as an attention deficit disorder.

Words have power.

We can’t know now, after all the hurt we’ve piled on him, but think: where might our man be if he’d learned to think of his attentiveness as a virtue?

On wasted ingenuity.

You should read Demetrius Cunningham’s essay about learning to play the piano in prison. He describes taping together flaps of cardboard trash and training his fingers by pressing the places where a piano’s keys would be. It’s a beautiful piece of writing.

And it hurts to consider what Cunningham might accomplish if he had access to more resources.

He’s not alone in striving to apply his intellect within a situation where most of his effort is – from the perspective of our modern world – simply wasted. It’s incredible that he devised a system for learning to play piano with only cardboard at his disposal. But we live in a world with such cheap plastics and electronics that perfectly functional keyboards can be purchased for three dollars or less at most pawn shops and thrift stores.

But Cunningham, in prison, is not allowed a three-dollar children’s toy. He studies with cardboard.

Which is not to say that our world should be without punishment. Those who murder need time away from society. People should be kept safe from harm. But I find it inconceivable that the best way to help someone who has murdered become a kinder, gentler, wiser human would be to lock him inside a world of violence, mistrust, and cement.

K’s mother, too, was murdered recently. In her case, the man who murdered her had previously been held in New York prisons for some nine years on nonviolent drug charges. The time he served in prison surely affected him. Based on what little I know about life inside, that time probably affected him adversely.

So I’d argue that the state of New York’s efforts at “correction” contributed to K’s mother’s murder. Would that man have killed her had we not shunted him into prison for nine years? And, what of the childhood that led to his drug convictions in the first place? Did we devote the resources necessary to ensure that he felt safe and loved as a child? Did he have the opportunity to build a life around respected, well-compensated work?

Did Cunningham?

In my poetry classes, only one participant (that I know of) has served time for murder – in his case, 20 years thus far of a 50-year sentence. He is an excellent writer, and very well-read, but, until our class, every time he wrote a poem or story he would crumple the pages and throw them away.

Why keep them? The world had made very clear that no one cared what he might have to say.

Inventions are made over and over again inside: using only those spare materials allotted inside prison, how might men mimic some of the conveniences of the modern world? In Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water, a clear-eyed description of the 1971 Attica prison riot and its aftermath, she describes the jury-rigged water heaters many inmates built for their cells.

Or there’s her passage on the amenities:

The men needed money at Attica because the state offered them only a few items gratis. These included a thin gray coat, two gray work shirts, three pairs of gray pants, one pair of shoes, three pairs of underwear, six pairs of socks, and one comb. Then, every month, prisoners would receive one bar of soap and one roll of toilet paper, which meant that men were forced to limit themselves “to one sheet per day.” The state’s food budget allotment was also meager. At a mere 63 cents per prisoner per day, it was insufficient to meet the minimum dietary standards as determined by federal guidelines. The reality was that many men at Attica went to bed hungry. For this reason jobs in the kitchen or the mess hall, while more arduous than others given their seven-day-a-week schedule, were some of the most coveted. At least on those jobs a man could eat leftovers.

To get anything beyond the supplies given them – warmer clothes, more food, toiletries like toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, razors, and extra toilet paper – prisoners needed money. Being able to buy deodorant was no luxury since these men were allowed only one shower a week and were given only two quarts of water a day. With this water prisoners were expected to wash their socks and underwear, shave, brush their teeth, and clean the cell to a correction officer’s exacting standards.

Prisoners had to be clever to endure such conditions. Likewise, it takes more cleverness to survive childhood poverty than is needed for a privileged middle class existence of soccer leagues at birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese and A’s stamped on the state achievement tests.

But our world doesn’t celebrate the former type of cleverness. We prize instead earned wealth and good grades. And yet, think: what if all that ingenuity weren’t wasted? What if more of our nation’s childhood survivalists and prisonyard Edisons had been given a fair opportunity?

I love capitalism and the chance for people to profit from their discoveries. But capitalism crumbles without opportunity. Especially now, with automation at the forefront of technology, a system rewarding past capital ownership will waste more and more human ingenuity. The class of those born into opportunity will keep shrinking.

Of course, those privileged few – armed with their intentional misunderstandings of economics and technology – will argue otherwise. That’s how we got here in the first place.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: childhood trauma

On bravery and Uncle Max

On trauma and the marshmallow test.

On attentiveness and names.

On wasted ingenuity.