The Day I Chose Camping Over Cable

All right, I think it's time to call some bullshit here.

According to Harold Camping, a 90-year-old Christian radio broadcaster, the rapture was supposed to have occurred on October 21, 2011. Mr. Camping, who has a BS in Civil engineering to go along with his "BS" in prophecy, was wrong. I was actually worried when I got up that morning. I had a repair appointment scheduled with my cable service to fix my Internet connection. The company gave me a two-hour window for their arrival. Are they kidding?! I've had repair and delivery people miss four-hour windows. I know hell's a comin' before those guys show up on time, so I'm thinking, "The Rapture's coming and I'm not ready. I'm fucked." So for two hours I'm in my backyard looking toward the heavens, waiting for a bright light to split the sky open accompanied by a blast of trumpets and a choir of angels. But then Eric-the-cable-guy showed up with half an hour to spare, fixed my high-speed Internet connection, and saved my life. Thanks, Eric.

Clearly my choice of being prepared for Christ’s arrival 

over the cable guy’s arrival was as wrong

as it was awkward.

Mr. Camping, aside from being as old as he was wrong - which is very - seems to be having trouble in his role as an End-of-Days Prophet. His October 21, 2011, prediction came on the heels of his previously errant prediction of May, 21, 2011, which itself came after his wrong September 6, 1994, prediction, which followed his off the mark September 21, 1988, call. Talk about crying wolf. He's essentially running around yelling fire-and-brimstone in our crowded Earthly theater. His poor judgment of the Lord's Judgment is doing nothing more than add to the confusion and turmoil that already exists in my life. Thus, on October 21, I didn't know whether to run like a Sodomite or sit tight and risk getting the ultimate bitch slap from the Big Right Hand.

Editorial Note: For clarification, Sodomite, being capitalized in the previous paragraph, refers to a resident of Sodom during the time of their destructive Judgment. When it's not capitalized, it refers to a person who engages in that specific sexual practice you perverts thought I was referring to.

You see, I don't know everything. For the things I don't know, I rely on the guidance of so-called experts. For example, I'm not a geologist or an economist. But if someone who claims to be able to interpret ground fault stress or see a downward financial trend warns the world of an impending earthquake or recommends stuffing money in mason jars, I'm going to brace myself a little. In the same way, not being a religious person, I look to those educated in all things biblical in order to be prepared for ethereal events, such as a possible tribulation. That said, I took a look back to analyze where my focus should have been under the circumstances I faced on October 21 with the hope that the next time Mr. Camping or some other Prophet calls "All aboard!" I won't get caught with my pants down again.

God's service: To clear my conscience every week, I'd have to sit in a booth in a church and divulge my sins to a messenger of God before asking for forgiveness.
Cable service: To clear my conscience every week, I'd stay home and Ctrl+Shift+H, Delete.
Advantage: Cable. Why leave the house with a dirty soul?

God's service: The Bible.
Cable service: The eBible.
Advantage: Cable, but only if I download the Direct Verse Jump option. Otherwise, it's a push.

God's service: A couple of hours once a week in a place of worship getting preached to.
Cable service: The Trinity Broadcasting Network, having His word brought to me every minute of every day.
Advantage: God. Nobody needs to get preached to 24/7, especially in HD.

God's service: Praying for enlightenment.
Cable service: Search engines.
Advantage: Cable. It's easier on the knees.

God's service: The Tribulation can take seven years with no knowledge of when it will begin.
Cable service: A service window can be two to four hours on a specific date.
Advantage: God. Two to four hours can fuck up my whole day. At least I can plan around seven years. 

God's service: The Holy Trinity.
Cable service: Comcast Triple Play. 
Advantage: Cable. Father, Son and Holy Spirit doesn't beat father, son and a Center Ice package.

God's service: Historically, payments to the church, or tithes, are roughly 10% of a person's earned income.
Cable service: Payments to a cable provider are tiered based on levels of service and premium channels.
Advantage: God. Tithes are tax deductible, so that's one way to write off the church without feeling guilty.

The results were close, but it confirms that I should have gone with cable over God. That's not to say I'd have cast Him aside completely had I known beforehand. After all, I would have needed someone to talk to while I waited for that service window to close.

A World Without Jobs

There is no doubt anyone who is everyone, to some extent, will be impacted by the loss of jobs.

I mean Jobs.

As in Steve Jobs.

Before getting labeled as uncaring or cold hearted or jealously poor, let me say I have sympathy for Mr. Jobs’ family and those closest to him for their loss. He is an American business icon – or iCon – who contributed greatly to transforming the way we distract ourselves in how we live, work and drive. Steve Jobs’ contributions to society as a whole are on par with some of the most noted visionaries the modern world has ever known. It would be insensitive of me to mock his death.

But not necessarily insensitive of me to mock some of those who mourn him.

An Apple worshiper genuflects before

entering the iTemple in Los Gatos, CA.

I’m not talking about his peers or Apple’s employees, who certainly have the right to celebrate or castigate him. Or Apple’s stockholders, many of whom likely suffered a portfolian, oh-shit stroke as they flashed back to 1985. I’m talking about the average person who felt compelled to turn their local Apple Store into a memorial by dropping a bouquet or lighting a candle in his honor before going inside to spend $400 on a 64-gig phone that’s probably going to be upgraded and outdated by the time they figure out how to use it. I’m talking about people who will mark his passing by making an emotional pilgrimage to Cupertino, CA, to view the center of the universe as they know it, the core of the Apple, as it were.

Did You Know: Cupertino owes its earliest mention in recorded history to the expedition led by the Spanish explorer, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, who was on his way to San Francisco to establish a presidio but took a wrong turn after his cell signal dropped and his navigation app failed.

I caught news of a guy who took time off from work to take his 3- or 4-year-old on a drive-by of the corporate complex like it was a national monument. There were reports of groups of people, iPhones in hand with arms raised high, holding candlelight app vigils. A mourner expressed regret that Jobs had not lived to see even closer links between humans and their devices. Hell, there are people who have closer links to their phones than they do to their kids. There are people who suffer separation anxiety having to shut down their iGadgets on airplanes. Folks have the ability to pleasure themselves in public with something in the palm of their hand that won't require them to register as a sex offender. How much closer to your device do you want to be?

I found it amazing seeing people update their Facebook statuses to tell everyone how they are “connected” to Steve Jobs like it’s a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. Really? You went to the same schools he did? Lived in the same city? Jesus, does your family know how close you were? “Hey, kids, Steve Jobs and I drove down this same street once. He was three cars ahead of me, but we stopped at this same intersection waiting for this same light to change.” The kids either a) don’t care because they don’t know who Steve Jobs is, or b) aren't listening because they have earbuds implanted into their heads with one of many of shut-out-the-parent apps running. I have one big degree of separation from Steve Jobs. It’s called my bank account. 

Hardcore fanboys can join the current movement to create a Steve Jobs Day. There's a website that encourages you to look like him. Put on that black turtleneck (sales of $175 black turtlenecks have doubled since his death), and for full legacy-perpetuating effect, throw on your blue jeans and slip on your tennis shoes. Then update your picture on Facebook or change your Twitter profile photo with you as Steve. Don't forget to leave a comment about how he has affected your life, or how you want your kid to grow up to be just like him. Yeah, well, you can have your kid look like Steve Jobs, but to actually be like Steve Jobs? No, what you actually want is for your kid to be rich and famous like Steve, because the odds are when your kid tells you they're dropping out of college like Steve, he or she will have a better chance pushing a broom at a place like Apple than running one.

While his death is sad, I can't bring myself to shed a tear over it. Music didn't stop when John Lennon died, lights have lasted much longer than Edison, and if there wasn't an Alexander Graham Bell there wouldn't be a need today for no-call lists. And all of them, like Steve Jobs, piggybacked on the accomplishments of others...and others will ride into the future on his. I don’t think of Jobs as the company as much as he was the face of the company. Sure, he was a founder, but there comes a point when success allows you to place certain burdens on the shoulders of others. Disney eventually cut back on drawing the art when he was able to hire artists to color his dreams for him. Likewise, I don’t think Mr. Jobs spent a whole lot of time soldering circuits.

Others may wish to remember him over their iPhones, iMacs and iPods, or set up impromptu, sidewalk sticky note mosaics. If I'm to celebrate Mr. Jobs, it will be for how he exemplified for me the "iDeal" of a true American Dream...making millions sitting around thinking shit up and having others do the work.

Dam Shame

The San Francisco Bay Area gets 85% of its drinking water from Hetch Hetchy reservoir. The reservoir, which is fed by the Tuolomne River and surrounding watershed, is 8 miles long and holds up to 117 billion gallons of water. The reservoir was created when the O’Shaughnessy Dam was completed in 1938. Beginning with the purity of its origins in the snow-capped wilderness peaks of the Sierra and accumulating throughout a 459 square mile protected watershed, it is one of the nation's premier drinking water systems, serving approximately 2.4 million people.

I didn’t know any of this until my recent vacation visit to this grand water retention project located in the northwest corner of Yosemite National Park. A couple of other things I didn’t know: the rising waters behind the dam displaced as many as 8 Indian tribes, who either moved to other land “reserved” for them or, as one would expect, to higher ground. I also found out that Chuckchansi is the name of an actual Indian tribe, not a craps table mascot named “Chuck Chancey."

Note of American Indian Irony: While touring the Yosemite Museum, I came upon a Native American woman dressed in traditional post-occupational attire sitting at a display as a cultural interpreter. She was on the phone, and I overheard her ask about...making a reservation. 

If I wrote interpretive signs for the National Park Service.

My trip to Hetch Hetchy was made out of curiosity, and I admit I did learn a few things. Along with the preceding tourbook tidbits, there were several interpretive signs that celebrated the dam as an engineering marvel for its time, with one noting the efforts of the dam's visionary, Mr. Mike O’Shaughnessy, he himself a chief, albeit of the engineering variety. There was also one interpretive sign specific to the Indians, but I found that to be a weak effort to downplay their eviction. Sort of like, “…but we didn’t kick them all the way out.”

I had read quite a bit about how this valley would have rivaled Yosemite Valley, and indeed the literature, guides and whatnot all extolled the grandeur that was still above the waterline. Even the park ranger at the entry kiosk built up our arrival and our expectations. After a week of hiking around Yosemite proper, my wife and I were now excited to check out the “other” Yosemite for comparison. They sold it pretty well, but I was not impressed. Hetch Hetchy turned out to be more of a location than a destination. Unless you're prepared to pack into the back country, there's not much "there" there. Only a five-mile hike on a trail set back from a body of water you can't swim in or boat on. Or throw rocks into. Or camp next to. Because it's special water. It's water for a city that's surrounded on three sides by...water.

I love the outdoors, but I'm not a tree hugger or a card-carrying member of a radical environmental group. San Francisco isn't the first city to reach out with a pipeline to sustain their existence, so I won't criticize them for tapping into a natural resource for their own benefit. What happened 70, 80 years ago is what it is. Siding with the argument that the dam should be torn down to allow the land to reclaim itself is moot. I won't be able to enjoy the new landscape in my lifetime, nor will my children. But I can enjoy other places, like Yosemite. And San Francisco. I'll have a different feeling when being served water in that city, though. I'll have a sense of the water's history. A sense of what one culture lost for another culture's gain. I've been to the dam, to the reservoir...I've stood in the famous alpine meadows of the Sierra high country and watched the Tuolomne River begin its meandering trek to the faucets of the City by the Bay.

I have gained a new appreciation for the water, for I have been to its source.

“The most important factor in water quality is

its source.” – S.F. Public Utilities Commission