T is for Traveling

I like to travel. I really, really like to travel. You know, it's not even a matter of preference. It's almost a compulsion. If I stay in one place for too long I just go crazy. I have to go. Sometimes when I leave I just straight up move. Other times I go on trips. And for me going on a trip has less a sense of "getting away for a bit" and more the urgency of desperately running from whatever it is I happen to be doing.

I did some serious running this last summer. I spent about forty days on the road making stops of one to five nights in Chicago, New York, Boston, Columbus, Chicago again, Fort Collins, CO, Tucson, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, back to Chicago and then a short camping trip to Lake Geneva, WI. It was really, really great. And as I intended, I was thoroughly worn out and ready to settle back into the basement for a few months by the time I got home.

Of course, being me, I made my journey much more difficult than it had to be based on the logics of financial responsibility and life planning expedience. Now, what that means was that I was riding Greyhound the whole way while taking three online college classes. I'm kind of an idiot.

First of all, Greyhound. Jesus. What a mess. I will say that Greyhound is by far the cheapest way to travel long distances around the country, and it will usually manage to get you to your destination with some reliability. I will also say that these facts really piss me off. Because Greyhound sucks. It's seriously just awful. I know what you're thinking: it can't be that bad, Nate. Well, you're wrong, DAD.

Riding Greyhound is the true test of character. And as someone who spent the better part of this summer transferring between dozens of packed buses, traversing over seven thousand miles, spending hours upon hours on layover in disgusting terminals in wee hours of the morning, I can tell you that most of Greyhound's clientele fail this test.

Now, of course, not all of the bus people are that bad. But most of them aren't that great. And I don't know how Greyhound pulls off the logistics of this, but they manage to put at least one loud, obnoxious, disgusting, ignorant person who has way too much to say over the phone on every single bus they have in service. It's impressive really. They must have recruiting offices wherever camouflage cargo pants and mismatched bra/halter top ensembles are sold. And these people must have stock in the company because they're all under the impression that they are the sole proprietor and occupent of any bus they happen to be on. Any other passengers are assumed to be there for their entertainment or if not, mistakenly allowed on the bus to take one of the eight seats that these VIP riders have claimed for themselves. As I go through life, I'm trying to become tolerant of others, and more than that, empathic and accepting. But those people bring me right up to the brink of unadulterated hatred.

The worst cases were on the first and last legs of my trip. On the way from Chicago to New York, there was a guy sitting near me who was just really, really bad. He was the perfect douche bag. Even as I seethed at the effrontery of his existence, I sort of had to admire how impeccably terrible he was. He was mildly overweight, but had enough of a muscular build that you know on sight that he likes to threaten people with physical violence. He had a horrendous hillbilly accent that he didn't use to speak so much as holler. And he didn't shut up for the first five or six hours of the trip. He was always either on the phone talking to his significant other (telling sexist non-jokes) or turned around in his seat hollering at the two black people behind him (saying racist things). And he was constantly bouncing around, fidgeting, kneeling on his seat to hang over the back of it as everyone around him (children included) sat perfectly calmly. He just didn't have the knack for it I guess. He was wearing one of those little cross necklaces, too. And he wasn't just wearing it either. He would continually put it in his mouth and suck on it and twiddle it between is teeth. And that significant other I mentioned. I found out that she's his wife. That guy...is married to a woman. Isn't life great?

After that incident, I learned to sit at the front of the bus. I should have known this already. Remember back in school when you rode the bus? All the cool kids sat in the back. Of course you remember. Well, in the adult world the back of the bus is largely occupied by people who never developed past wanting to be one of the cool kids in sixth grade.

On my way back from Seattle (two days straight, mind you), I had the misfortune of getting on an already full bus, and had to take a seat toward the back. We were making our way across Montana, and I had the pleasure of being surrounded by some natives. These people were...interesting. I learned that aside from interesting people, methamphetamine is also native to Montana, and I learned this through observing the interesting people around me. At one point we were leaving a station, and a kid sitting near me ran up to the driver to tell her that he had forgotten his phone inside. We had already pulled out into the road, but she stopped in the median and let him run back for it. After waiting for a few minutes when we were already behind schedule, the driver made the correct decision that she couldn't delay the rest of her passengers any longer and left without the kid. And then hell broke loose around me. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" "THAT'S BULLSHIT!" "THAT'S FUCKED UP." These people were losing their already drug-addled minds. There was a good five minutes of uninhibited shouting and calls for mutiny until I was finally able to get a few choruses of "Hey. Hey! Chill out" in, and calmly explain that the driver had a job to do, and the kid would get to catch the next bus. And while the shouting stopped, this righteous clan in bus riding solidarity did not forgive the bus driver or forgive her supposed transgression for the rest of the trip. (Fortunately, there was a transfer a few long hours later and most of these people went separate ways to smoke separate crystals of meth.)

So that's Greyhound. Or at least a few prime cuts of my experience. I'm not saying I won't ride with them again. I'm sure I will; they're stupid cheap (because they don't see the need for things like any kind of coherent or standardized passenger/conductor procedures), I'm usually not in any real hurry, and I like doing things the hard/stupid way. But if you're not looking for a brush with genuine mental instability, long sleepless nights punctuated by crying infants or writing material, just fly. Or drive. Or take the train. Spend the money.

In case you're wondering, this trip wasn't just rolling nightmare of the worst form of travel. I did, in fact, go places to see people and do things. Because I was on a shoestring budget of my dad's money, I was staying with friends wherever I went. But really, even if I had the money for hotels, crashing on couches is really the way to do it. For one thing, you invariably get to spend more time with the people you're there to visit, and this is key if you're making a short stop. For another, people are awesome when they have guests. And it makes sense. When you're playing the host it's a perfect excuse to have more fun than you know you should. It'd be the same with almost everyone I stayed with. "Work? Ah, nah, I called off. Let's go up in the mountains/out to the bars/down to the Daily Show taping! Yeah! I bet you're hungry. Let's go out to this great restaurant, my treat. And then we can go back to my place and I'll cook some more food while you drink some booze." It's seriously the best. This may sound selfish of me, but I'm giving some real consideration to seeing how long I could go just hopping from friend's couch to friend's couch, living off the spontaneous excess that is having a houseguest. To those of you reading this who will inevitably end up being my gracious hosts: I'll gladly repay the favor with interest just as soon as I have my own place again.

There is one thing about staying with friends that's kind of problematic. Whenever people have guests we always say the words "Make yourself at home." To most people, these words essentially mean nothing. But I can be a little bit of a literalist, so when I hear such a greeting I interpret it as "Hey! Feel free to poop and masturbate!" And then everyone's all indignant when I act on the invitation. What gives?

Trees, mountains and water. I don't know if it's my Midwest, corn and soy upbringing, but trees, mountains and water just float my goat.

I'm almost done with school. That means I'm just about ready to blow this joint. I'll be on the left coast before long. Thinking about a stint out east to help clean up some hurricane turds. (Ir)regardless(ly), I'll be on the road and on your couch again soon. In the words of Sam Elliot, see you on down the dusty trail.

F is for Freewriting

I feel like you all want me to write something really funny. That feeling is based on all the fan mail I haven't been getting. But it's there. I feel it. You want the funny.

Well, too bad! I don't even know you. Who do you think you are - demanding jokes and witticism of me? Don't tell me you're my dad, Dad. I get it: you read stuff, including the stuff I write. REAL COOL, DAD. Wish I could read everything ever. Oh, ho ho, read a book about that. Well, I didn't, DAD. Wanna know why? I was on facebook looking at pictures of people - people I don't even like. At all. No, I don't know why. 

Oh, ho ho. Wish my beard would connect to my mustache. REAL COOL. Psh. Dad.

NEWT. GINGRICH. Is that guy for real? Seriously. Newt Gingrich...just what? Remember that scene in the movie "National Security" when Steve Zahn's character asks Martin Lawrence's character if he even believes what he's saying, and Martin Lawrence is all like "I usually don't even know I'm saying until I hear myself saying it" or something like that? NO. Of course you don't remember that. Why do I remember that? I DON'T KNOW. But that's essentially Newt Gingrich.

You know when you're surrounded by people who you know don't like you, and you know they know you're just lying about everything you say? You know that feeling? No. Of course you don't. But Newt Gingrich does. You thought I was done talking about him because I started a new paragraph didn't you? Didn't you?! Well, he's so awful his awfulness merits two whole paragraphs. He's awful. Really, just a really awful person.

Ever notice how it's good to have some awe, but you don't want to be full of awe? Funny, right? Wrong. Not very funny. But that pops into my head almost every time I hear or say those words out loud.

Speaking of awesome, I'm almost done with school. Finally. School is so dumb. We're going to have to fix all that education garbage after we siphon some of the oceans off onto the moon. See, I do have my priorities straight. That was a climate change reference. Anyone wanna go in on an iceberg with me? Get while the getting's good. Antartica's calving bergs like crazy. Yeah, get used to water-dealing slang.

Right but I'm done with school in a month and...I don't know, I think I might just streak across the country. I think that would be the appropriate response to never having to go to school again. Just run in my birthday suit until I get to a coast and then kick over the first sand castle I see shouting "FREEDOM!" But I'll probably just go back to school and get another degree - because I'm an idiot.

I don't know. What do you think I should do, huh? Who do you think you are, my dad? What? You want me to finally write a book because I've been talking about doing that for years? Maybe I will. Shut up. DAD.

V is for Veterans

Facebook informs me that it's Veterans Day. Well, okay. I don't really go for holidays like this one. More and more, the holidays we mark on our calendars seem shallow and meaningless and patronizing. Mother's Day, Father's Day? Yes, have a few cards, a couple gifts from children who otherwise avoid you. Labor Day? Well, if you're a laborer you'll probably still have to work for less pay than you're worth to your employer, but...cheers.

These holidays are times once a year when we are reminded to say things we usually neglect to say. My problem isn't really with saying things; it's with how thoroughly our actions on the other 364 days of the year belie the things we say. Veterans Day to me is no different, except perhaps maybe a little worse.

Some of my best friends are veterans of foreign wars. I've never thanked them for serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. That's not because I don't care about them or appreciate them, but because I'm not grateful to them for participating in the occupation of foreign countries or the wholesale assassination campaign in an allied country on behalf of the empire. I don't thank them because I'm not grateful.

I do listen to them about their experiences. I know I can't fully understand what they've been through, but I do listen and try to be as aware as I can of just what they signed up to do and then did. I do read the accounts of those still serving and veterans whom I haven't met and probably never will meet. I do try to learn about the wars we're fighting, the reasons we fight them, and the regions we've stuck our nose far enough into that getting bitten is more likely than not. And I try to do those things year-round.

And that's really not enough. Even if everyone in the country really tried to listen and learn what serving men and women do and the reasons why they have to do the things they do, it wouldn't be enough. Having a day once a year to say "Thanks" is pathetic. Listening is a step in the right direction. But our actions are still speaking for us.

If you want to live in a way that shows your appreciation for our women and men in uniform, consider the following: Have you ever voted for someone who's demonstrated a will to exert the force of our military in ways that are clearly not about self-defense? In your heart who do you have more space for: people of different faiths and ethnicities or Americans who are prejudiced against them? As a citizen of the world, do you use more than your fair share of its resources? As a citizen of the world, do you see it as a place where the strong my protect and lift up the weak? Or do do you see it as a place where the dumb luck of being born American entitles you to endless luxury, paid for or stolen at rifle-point?

I know I haven't always come out on the right side of those questions. We're all going to have to start finding out how to answer those questions honestly and correctly if we want to keep our women and men of service out of harm's way.

But we live in a volatile, over-crowded, conflict-ridden world. Things are going to happen that at this point are out of our control. We're going to have a lot of hard decisions to make. Among them is whether we meet our future as a conscious people ready to engage with the world, or with our eyes closed as we send in some troops.

If we don't have that level of consciousness of our place in the world, then our "thank you's" and our parades and our waving flags serve only to mock our cowardice. Honoring courage and leadership won't cut it. We must display courage and leadership alongside our friends, family and strangers in the military. We must do this.

C is for Community College, Part 2

This is the text I practiced for the persuasive speech assignment I did in my speech class on Thursday. I gave the speech from memory, but this was pretty much what I said. 

Show of hands - how many of you were in high school last year? [About half] Two years ago? [The rest except for the Moms In Community College Brigade]

Okay. 

None of you should be here. You shouldn’t be in college. 

Now, you all have some ambiguous, good-sounding excuses for being here. But the reason you’re here is that lots of people told you to go to college for a long time. But you shouldn’t be here. Not yet anyway.  

Because this is one of the biggest investments you will ever make of your time, effort, energy and money. And at your age you really don’t know what you’re investing in.  

Well, you’re investing in yourselves, of course. But you’re more likely than not to find out  in a year or two or five or ten that you want and need different things than you think you want now. There’s data on this. According to the US Deptartment of Education, about half of you won’t even complete a degree. Of that half, most of you will change majors at least once, and then when you’re my age you’ll just have to stick with whatever you’re doing. 

What comes after that? Well, hopefully a job. Any job. Even a job you don’t really want. Because your loans are coming due. That's where a lot of my friends are right now. So if you don’t want to be stuck between a job you hate and a mountain of student loans, stop what you’re doing. 

I beseech you: Leave. Run. Go learn about yourself and the world. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Try things you’ve never done. Get an apartment with four strangers and live off ramen noodles because you have a crappy minimum wage job. Quit that job as soon as you find a marginally better one. Read books and magazines about everything. Try as many different things as you can. But never stop learning, growing and trying new things. Then you might just become obsessed with something. If that obsession absolutely demands a college education of you, then go, by all means. And you will get so much more out of it.  You’ll eat everything up because you’re obsessed with this thing that you need to do. Right now, college is just another chore that someone told you to do. If you find out where you belong in the world, and it happens to be a college classroom, it could be the best investment you ever make.

The assignment was specifically to give a speech that would be controversial. I figured that telling almost all of my classmates that they shouldn't be in college would meet that criterion. But after my speech there was about five or ten minutes allotted for Q&A. No one really tried to refute anything I'd said. People seemed to appreciate what I had to say, and were interested in how I came to think such things. I was a bit disappointed that my classmates didn't lead a walkout of the entire school followed by a pilgrimage en masse to the west coast. But I think I made something of an impression on them. I at least gave them something to (gasp!) think about.

And let me be clear: College isn't bad. If that's what you got out of my transcript, you weren't paying attention. A traditional, four year education is a really great thing for a lot of people. I just don't think it makes any sense to waste all of the resources that we do as a society by sending fresh high school graduates into that kind of situation.

Most of the three of you who will read this are old enough to reflect on this personally. When you were eighteen did you really want to be in school? You may remember being excited for college. But was that about composition classes and biology labs? Or could it have been about getting away from home, drinking alcohol in all the dumbest and most creative ways imaginable, and finally, finally having some good old fashioned unprotected sex after said alcohol consumption? Even if you got adequate grades, were you really learning things that were informing a coherent worldview? Or were you jumping through hoops and going through motions as required by syllabi?

Do you think, maybe, you could have done something else with your time while you purged the shenanigans from your system? Do you think it's possible that if you had done so, you might have been a better student for your freshman and sophomore years of college? Do you think you'd regret having spent a couple years, being young, debt-free, responsible for nothing - maybe traveling, maybe volunteering, maybe doing whatever?

Really try to answer those question honestly for yourself. Don't be surprised if you were just as stupid and obnoxious and immature as everyone else always has been at that point of their lives.* Take me for example. I was really, really smart for an eighteen-year-old kid when I first went to college. I was also more thoughtful, more engaged and more mature than most of my classmates. And all of those points apply to me. I was a stupid, obnoxious kid. That's what eighteen-year-olds are. I didn't belong in college.

This isn't a new or revolutionary idea. There are plenty of places where high school graduates (or their equivalents) are expected to go away for a year or two before starting in at a university (or its equivalent). And so far none of these places have fallen into the ocean or seen plagues of bees overtaking their metropolitan areas. I think we could safely give it a shot.

One last point to consider. People of my generation are likely to remain in the workforce into later and later years of our lives than our parents and grandparents have to or had to. If this comes to pass it will be largely the fault of our parents and grandparents. So I think it's apropos to put off taking on roles of responsibility for a couple years as a kind of "fuck you."

More on this front later. A book? Would you guys read a book if I wrote it? What if a third of the pages were graphics and charts and pictures? Ah? Ah?

*D, I know what you're thinking, and shut up; I remember stories from your freshman year.

C is for Community College

I'm sitting in my math class as I type this. We're doing a chapter on interest and stocks and bonds and mortgages and a number of other (figuratively and literally) captivating financial mechanisms. I'm struggling to stay awake. And this is stuff I'm interested in. I guess I'd rather be arguing about the ethics of these devices than practicing putting hypothetical numbers in rather simple equations.

But I'm glad I'm here. I'm taking a few gen-eds that I never took as an underclassman. And it's really enlightening to be doing so now, as a cynical twenty-something who's grown very critical of the prevailing system of "education." There is the benefit of actually being a better student and learning more of the material, but I'm learning so much about this big crazy mess after which we're all supposed to be able to cross-multiply and support a thesis.

Let's just stick with this class. My teacher is some kind of central-European. I think. I arrived a few minutes late on the first day of class, so I missed whatever bio she gave. I don't know. I do know that she has a very thick accent and speaks monotonously to boot. She's also not the most detail oriented when it comes to digits, negative signs, parentheses, etc. I don't think I have to explain how all this can be problematic.

Now don't get me wrong. She's not that bad. But she's really, really not that great. I often pipe up to re-explain concepts when I can tell my classmates are really lost. Part of me wants to be resentful toward someone about this situation. But I don't blame my teacher. She's trying to explain abstract concepts to an unresponsive audience in her second (or third or fourth, I don't know) language. I've tried to relate to some of my classmates how difficult that must be when they get a bit too mean about her. My teacher's doing what she can. So I don't blame her.

I don't even blame the school, really. They've got to have a math program, and that has not been the strong suit of Amurcan talkin' Amurcans for a while now.

But something is wrong with this picture. The economics of it is just insane. There are roughly twenty-five of us in the class. Most of us are commuting here. Many, like myself, from over fifteen miles away. We drive here - one person per car, of course - to sit and listen to a subpar, semi-intelligible lecture given by someone who had to cross an ocean to get here. And there are maybe a couple of other students in the class who will retain anything useful from this class.

And we know how to teach these classes efficiently. Find a great math teacher. Have him or her record a semester's worth of lectures. Put them on the school website. Students from anywhere can watch from home at their own pace. Play on repeat as necessary. Still don't get it? Live chat with a jaded, twenty-something career student who lives in front of his computer and wants nothing more than to be distracted from whatever horrible thing he's reading about the world. Go to your local testing center. Have some college credit. Scale up. Save trillions of dollars.

Anyway, I'm in different class. That's all for now.

S is for Settling

Somehow I became the friend who people come to with their relationship issues. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I've "had a girlfriend" for all of about two months since I got into middle school. But for whatever reason, I regularly find myself advising people on the chaos that is romance.

Recently I was talking to a woman with whom I wanted to have...a conversation. So we just talked instead. We discussed a number of uplifting topics including her self-image anxieties and fear of death. It was really great.

At one point she was elucidating on the troubles of finding a suitable mate. Again, I don't know why I'm the person who gets to share in these crises, but even when I could theoretically be the suitable mate, I'm confided in about the difficulty in procuring one. Sigh.

Anyway, she was telling me about a woman she works with who's in her early thirties and is still single. The woman I was chatting with was afraid she would end up like her coworker in another six or seven years. I told her not to worry about it.

And with good reason. Well, at first I was just basing that response on the devil-may-care persona I like to project. Who cares? At second, I have anecdotal evidence to back this sentiment up. My parents were in their thirties when they met. They got married after three months, and they're still together and growing on each other. Sure, it's a mixed bag. They had me, for one thing, but I think it worked out fairly well on the whole.

But this woman wasn't convinced. Which meant I had to argue with her about it. And I actually hit on a few things that I'd never quite realized for myself. She was protesting "Well, I'd have to settle at that point." That's when it crystallized for me: being in an exclusive relationship is settling. I mean it's actually called "settling down." They don't even call it "settling up." If you're monogamous, you've settled.

Let me get into that. I just want to look at this statistically here. There are seven billion people in the world. If you're heterosexual, that means about half of them are the right gender for your romantic interest. Let's say that twenty percent fall within the age range that would be compatible for you. That's 700,000,000 potential mates in the world. Assume you could accurately rank them all, 1-700,000,000. The odds of ending up with your number one are abysmal. Scientists would call it near perfect certainty that if you choose to be with someone, there is someone out there who is better, and you've precluded yourself from being with them.

Now, that's not to say that settling is wrong. It isn't. I would hate to live in a world where people didn't settle. An economist would endorse settling as rational behavior because it allows us to maximize utility. The benefit of being with your number 8,930,003 far outweighs the cost of holding out for your number one.

But if settling is good, why shouldn't this woman I was talking to want to settle right now? That was her predicament, right? Well, this gets away from economics and statistics a bit. She was worried about what she would look like at that point and the quality of the potential mates left at that point.

First of all, I would argue that the quality of what will be left when she's in her thirties isn't likely to be any worse than what's available to her now. If anything it will probably be better. The truth is that people generally aren't that great. Some are better than others. The better ones often improve with time, the worse often get worse. A guy who's her age now probably hasn't manifested which direction they're going, and she probably isn't in the best frame of mind to predict it. In other words, if she got married this year, six years could go by and she could find out that the guy is a total asshole. If she's single six years from now, the men her age will have either matured into either assholes or non-assholes, and she will be in a much better position to perceive that. I'm not making this up. Our teens and twenties make up the time in our lives when we're still shaping the person we're going to be. We're much more stuck being those people after that point.

Secondly, what she is concerned about - really - is physical attraction. She's worried that she won't be "hot enough" at thirty-one and all of the "hot guys" will be taken. Well, there's some truth to that. She won't look the same as she does now, and many of the more attractive men will have married earlier. But considering that she will have been maintaining the body of a single woman rather than being married, bearing children and all that, it's likely that she'll be hotter than she would've been had she married young. And that should prove plenty hot enough for the single men of that age group who are actually looking to finally settle. And the same will be true of them. The ones capable of doing so will have kept themselves in single and mingling condition.

Lastly, people at that age are much more likely to have their lives a little more figured out for themselves. And I think that's a good thing. I'm friends with plenty of young married couples, and I love them, and I think most of them have really great relationships. If I'm honest about it, I'll admit that a part of me desperately envies them. But another part, the so far prevailing part, doesn't want that. I want to figure me out. I want to travel and try things and meet people and do crazy things and fall out of touch with some people and find others and be miserable and get it all out of my system and never have anyone to stick around for even if I wanted to, so that when I finally find someone worth settling for I'll be able to do so as a complete person, without the what-ifs to resent her for when I'm in my fifties. When the person I am solidifies in the next decade or so, and I'm done experimenting, I want a relationship to be something new and fresh. I want to be able to tell that woman the ten years worth of stories from my twenties because she wasn't there. And if we should enter into the great American tradition of divorce, I want to know that I'll be okay on my own because I was on my own when I became myself.

That woman I was talking to has a boyfriend now. Obviously. I have bad gas, a long beard, and I'm getting restless again. I might steal my dad's boat. Who knows how to sail?

Short Story: Medicinal Obedience

In the months after the Reckoning, there was much turmoil and chaos and confusion as the survivors tried to figure out how they would go on living along side one another. After the great project of human civilization had proven subject to the theory of gravity and crashed violently into rubble, some kind of order had to be established. Previous titles like doctor, senator, manager and convicted felon meant nothing in this new era. So it was that every citizen of every former state became a social philosopher tasked with theorizing how to make a society.

Meetings and conferences big and small, orderly and casual were held in all quarters at all hours. If two people were seen speaking to one another, it could be assumed that they were having a meeting. Three or more generally constituted a conference. If a person was heard talking about anything but the creation of a civilization, they were thought to be psychologically disturbed.

Many societies of as many shapes and sizes sprang out of these meetings and conferences. There were the communists who seized the moment with optimism, opportunism and an ironically religious zeal. In their levity, reveling in the glory of western capitalism's fall, many of these communist communities forgot to feed themselves, and quickly petered out. Some of the communes overcame their exuberance. They put down their guitars and banjos and stopped having unprotected sex with multiple partners long enough to put some scraps in the communal stew. Among other societies, equal numbers of rumors flourished that the communists had been largely eliminated by mass suicides, had quickly reverted into private property-based economies, or that they had predictably become authoritarian dictatorships.

Some societies started capitalist and others started authoritarian. The democratic capitalists found their chief commodity to be collective amnesia, but there wasn't much of an export market. Some of the capitalist societies returned to the gold standard, asserting that money should be attached to something of real value. Very few pointed out that if gold was anything it wasn't particularly valuable. Much of the economic activity took shape in night raids of caches of gold. Inflation reached 53% (every day), and hundreds died of starvation.

The dictatorships seemed to fare better, at least at first. These were almost entirely formed around individuals who truly believed they were very, very cool. Enough people believed these very, very cool people about how totally cool they were to establish communities around them, communities of people who also wanted to be cool. Not surprisingly, these societies very much resembled the seating arrangements of high school cafeterias. There were the jocks and their Captain, the geeks with factions loyal to various Kings, Wizards and Starfleet Commanders, the punks who tended to gravitate to whoever had the loudest voice and hairstyle, and of course, the nerds who ended up telling the jocks what to do after they had exhausted their resources beating up the geeks. Many of these societies fell apart as their figureheads grew tired of the admiration of their subjects, wanting only the admiration of their parents.

Some new societies were more experimental. There were communities of anarchists, bound together by their collective disdain for one another's opinions. There were the monarch-for-a-day societies, rife with decrees governing snoring and the inclusion of peas in casseroles and personal hygiene. Some societies were offshoots of others, often simply serving as their antitheses. There was an unsubstantiated rumor that a society had come together around the idea that everyone should jog more. Travelers claimed to have seen these people, hundreds of them, just running at an easy pace, all of them strangely happy about this, but few believed such people could exist.

It had been almost a year since the Reckoning when perhaps the most inventive society was formed. It was founded by a married man and woman who had been scientists the year before. They claimed to have created a pill which would compel anyone who took it to abide by the laws of their community. Many people joined them, recognizing that so much of the problems of civilization were due to people breaking laws.

The people arranged themselves as a democracy, and voted on some basic laws of conduct. But in their deliberations it was suggested that there ought to be a code that the citizenry lived by beyond the prohibitions of certain acts like theft and murder. Many agreed, and it was put forward that the code should read as follows: "All citizens will do good unto our society and respect their neighbors. All who harm others or disrespect them will be banished." This was widely hailed as a remarkable distillation of what everyone wanted from their new society. They all wanted to be treated well; they all wanted respect. The code was put to a vote and it passed unanimously. The code was written in stone at their make-shift town square, and a celebration was held. After the celebration, the founders brought out the pills that would ensure the prosperity and unity of their law abiding society. The citizens held out the pills in their hands, and then excitedly swallowed them in unison. After a moment, someone read aloud the code they add all ratified. Having ingested their medicine and recognized the code, every last citizen walked away from the society, unsure where they would go, but satisfied knowing that they were obeying its law.