1984: Definitely the time that George Orwell’s, 1984 came into my life was to be inspired by societal restrictions and media influence with or without this book. However, 1984 taught me some well-needed criticisms of and warnings for our society. I came across 1984 in the cheap bin of a bookstore. Didn’t think much of it at the time, besides “what a great find. so cheap.” This being the age of my discovery, having just turned 21 years old (it was a heavy time of digesting several beatnik authors), I had developed the sociological lens through which I see. I was curious to read this famous tale for myself. My High-school friend Jason and I were on a road trip in and around the Northeast visiting places with exact direction unknown except for Thanksgiving in Boston with a friend. I’m sure that it took me months or even weeks to begin reading, or for that matter to finish the book. But, I can remember where I finished it. I was on a train from Liverpool to London on voyage to visit another friend. I was wearing this light grey, wooly material turtleneck sweater that I had collected during the first half of this journey at a town-center street market in Wigan, England, jeans and my ol’ Doc Marten boots. I had grown in maturity enough to wear my glasses at all times; I wore circle-rimmed frames under my long boppy-top, side-shaved hair cut of the generation. In my train car table seat I was smoking hand-rolled drum tobacco in between passages (anticipating a little hash once I arrived to my destination) watching the blue cigarette smoke rising along with my thoughts as the countryside swept by outside the window. When I arrived, we created the World Party of our futures, walked for hours and watched Trainspotting in the theaters of London. We smoked and talked all night. It was a great time to be alive and in love with my people. I had finished the book on that rail trip. I remember sitting in shock. I’m not sure if any part of the book disturbed me so much as the ending. Just visualizing that (no spoilers) gave me shivers… and still does. If all else equal in the world of literature, this book scared the dickens out of me in fear of what an overpowering troop of leadership could do. Hence, I have always kept a critical objectivity of what our leaders claim to do for our safety or benefit, and loved dystopian films or stories since. The book is colored with a bit of positivity. Many years later in remembrance, I bought a glass sphere paperweight with glass flower encapsulated within as a gift for my wife while we were still dating. Just to say something like, “hey babe, if things go bad out there, at least we have now.” That was during the earlier years of the patriot act and the post-war America that we now live in. Oh boy, here we go…
A Book that Changed My Life “The People’s Almanac,” published in 1975 lived on the shelf right above my father's failed attempt at a fish tank. It functioned as a bookend. What had once been a lively little eco-system of fish and algae was now dry. An odd collection of dehydrated sea horses, silver dollars, and a shellacked puffer fish dangled on fishing line in the waterless tank. I have no recollection of pulling down the book for the first time. But in the late 80’s, when I was probably 12, I regularly turned to this book of weird facts when I was bored. “The People’s Almanac” logically begins with psychic predictions, the real story of Snoopy, the history of the Mafia and then takes a sharp turn to spend 300 odd pages detailing the significance of each year in America history from the founding to present day, 1975. I was taken in by the 50 pages of lists: “15 Renowned Redheads,” “The 9 Breeds of Dog that Bite the Most,” “20 Celebrities Who Have Been Psychoanalyzed…” the lists were filled with random curiosities that matched my limited attention span. In 1989 I lived just outside of Richmond, Virginia at 13701 Winterberry Ridge. My childhood home was the third house built in a planned community on a manmade lake. Suburban Bliss with 6,000 other families. Each mailbox was the same. We didn’t have sidewalks but we had bike trails with golf cart lanes. The local McDonald’s was blue and brown because the community found the red and yellow color scheme too garish. This was a place that took Hands Across America very seriously. At 12 I donned a permed mullet and had grown restlessness with leafy col de sacs. I was a scheduled only child with parents a decade older than most moms and dads back then. I was terrible at all the sporty offerings at the neighborhood country club and refused to try anymore. I was still forced to dance in white gloves at Cotillion most Saturday nights. But that would soon come to an end when I shared with my mother the NWA lyrics a dance partner whispered in my ear. Honestly, I was more interested in talking to my friends’ mothers about the bike trail flasher than doing anything else. Reading the almanac I learned about Utopias and my favorite sub-heading “Failed Utopias.” I was pretty sure this suburb was a failed utopia, it just hadn’t fallen yet. That summer, I found some happiness at sleepaway camp. I decorated my footlocker with puffy paint, outlining the states I had visited. My bunkmate used a whole years’ subscription of Hit Parader and Circus magazines to create an epic collage of hair metal bands. (I hope she still has it was very well done.) I learned a lot about CC Deville, from the band Poison, that summer. But Camp started off a nightmare. Every activity involved upper body strength that I still don’t have. I wrote home nasty postcards, detailing bug bites and a tooth I had chipped trying to get back in a boat. But over time I found my calling at camp, grooming horses and mucking stalls. I could sing selections from the musical Chess without interruption. Back at home, my love of animals led me again to the almanac. Unfortunately, this book is VERY lacking in its coverage of horses. There in no mention of their beautiful manes or best practices for picking hooves. In the “Animal Oddities” section there is a brief mention of a stable in 1880’s Germany that trained horses to do math but nothing more beyond that. I did find passages about respecting animals in the “Famous Vegetarians” section of the almanac. This Chapter was followed by an illustrated section on animal testing. I had never seen images like that before. Those pictures paired with a Sassy magazine interview with River Phoenix transformed me into a vegetarian. Twenty-Seven years later, I’m still a vegetarian. That fall I started sixth grade with a new style fresh from my first EVER trip to New York City. I had bought a cool leather hat with a metal chain that I had no idea was a leather daddy cap. I wore makeup to school for the first time too. Blue or green mascara from the Avon catalog was coordinated with casual nm=-blazers; I always rolled up the sleeves. In my very first yearbook photo, I look like I’m ready to anchor the evening news. But I was just a weird kid looking for some sort of identity, equally influenced by Starlight Express and The Heidi Chronicles. Back then I was a mess of contradictions, the same is true today. “The People’s Almanac,” helped me make sense of suburbia. Where my friends found solace in novels by Judy Bloom, being an only child, I couldn’t find a novel with a family like mine. So I looked to an almanac that was just as weird as me.
Honeybee Democracy By: Thomas D. Seeley Since boyhood I have been fascinated by honeybee behavior. As an adult, my experience in thermal packaging and engineering led me circuitously to Thomas Seeley’s book. How was it, I thought, that regardless of the weather conditions outside a honeybee hive, the core of the colony inside remains constant at 95°F? Whether its 120° above zero or 20° below zero, the internal hive temperature will not vary by more than +/- one-half degree. Hive architecture certainly plays a major role but to what extent? Honeybee evolution over millions of years has resulted in an organism with absolute mastery of their environment. Their seasonal life-cycle is incredibly complex. A colony consisting of tens of thousands of individual bees works with remarkable cooperation, precision and expediency, to democratically make all decisions - as a collective - with the express purpose of benefitting the hive – and only the hive. They are a superorganism with a “hive mind,” an army of workers that stake their very existence on each other - a process that includes collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, and consensus building. Every aspect of a colony’s existence is dependent on this - from house building to foraging; from attending their queen, to nurturing developing brood; from managing inventories of honey stores and pollen, to looking for a new home (swarming). All these things are regulated by precise thermal regulation within the hive generated by the bees themselves. I found these facts so compelling that I invested in tending honeybees and running my own experiments to observe and validate Dr. Seeley’s findings first-hand. Honeybee Democracy ignited my understanding of honeybee biology and social structure and taught me that what works for honeybees can also work for people in that any decision makiing group works best when it consists of individuals with shared interest and mutual respect, where a leader’s influence is minimized, debate relied upon, and where diverse solutions should be sought, and where majority should be counted on for dependable resolution.