Time After Time
[That last go-round was rather heavily laden with self-promotion. I'll steer past that for the present.]
Burr Brubaker is our protagonist (or victim) this time around. He's tallish.1 Also, he works in a bank.
I realize that this immediately suggests that he's a clerk, or a teller, or an account manager of some kind, dealing with deposits and withdrawals and the sort of careful record keeping that checking and saving and certificates of deposit (CDs) and IRAs and loans and payment plans and so on and so forth2 entail. But no.
Burr works in a sperm bank, which, obviously enough, requires deposits, and I guess “withdrawals”, but, unlike the financial type, involves cryogenics along with other details that we really don't want to go into here. [We're aiming for a general audience.]
How well we recall the two young women whose DNA tests revealed that they shared … oh, sorry. I almost … so, nevermind.
When Burr was driving home the other day he heard a story on the radio that really piqued his interest. That doctor who pretended to be artificially inseminating women with semen from anonymous donors, but was actually using his own? [Talk about “time after time.”] That one? He was convicted. [The upside being that he has lots and lots of kids who might well visit him in prison. Or who might be imprisoned with him. As in the case of the mattress people, who would know?3]
Oh, by-the-by, Burr is in management, not “administration,” so he's in no position to do the same if he wanted to. Which he does not. He's one of our “good eggs.” This suggests, by the way, General Rule #3. “As we go through life, time after time we are likely to enjoy more reliable results when we deal with good eggs.” 4
But the radio report did get Burr to thinking, which is as good a reason to listen to NPR® as one can imagine. (Or only?)
Here's the thing: “Thoughts just emerge, you don't think them before you think them.”5
This sounds simple enough but it is a rabbit-hole of the first order. It takes us right down the bunny tunnel to matters of free will and the urgent matter of “who's in charge here?” Do we decide or are the decisions already made? [In wider stretches of the imagination, are we a computer simulation ginned up by an adolescent mattress-person on the planet Serta® (or Sealy®?)orbiting Alpha Centauri?]
Take any decision you make and try to work backward to see the cocoon (or cave) it flew out of and you very quickly realize that your entire life has pretty clearly been a series of Russian nesting dolls going all the way back. This because of that, that because of the other, the other contingent on what seemed like a good idea at the moment. Oh boy. “That which seemed like a good idea.”6Road to hell and all. Even the fact of your “being” isn't something you chose. You popped out of Mom, and that entails another whole series of Russian doll incidents ranging back to either: 1) the first chimpanzee who could … but, no, that opens up another product line of furry figurines7; or 2) Eve and that portentous apple.
If everything depends on “initial conditions” and then simply flows, where does “free will” come in?
So we can well imagine Burr having what NPR® refers to as a “driveway moment”—those attentive and perhaps introspective, or in other cases “outro-spective,” times you leave the car running—contributing unnecessary carbon to the climate crisis—in order to hear the end of a story.
Everything emanates from pre-existing conditions. We like to think we could choose differently but obviously that other choice rolls down the chute from the same gumball machine as the one we “decided” against. We enjoy jokes like the one that poses the conundrum: “Should I walk to work or take lunch?”8 But in sober moments we know the decision was made long ago. It's no wonder so many people believe in original sin, but it's hilarious to notice that those same people mostly think it can be undone. Nope. That horse left the barn a long time ago.
So. After Burr turns off the engine he sits quietly for a bit, thinking about everything in the last five paragraphs and asks himself the obvious question. “Then my choices don't matter?”
Ah, Burr, Burr. All the men and women may merely be players, but we still have to perform our parts. The show goes on. The show goes on. It all matters.
***
NOTE PER FOOTNOTES: Substack starts off with new numbering each time I post a story. But Footnotes in the original book are continuous and often refer back to previous super important stuff, So original Footnote #s are included below in [#]s.
1 [98] To you writers out there, take note! Readers like to know something about your characters!
2 [99 My grandfather used this phrase a lot. A whole lot.
3 [100] See page 13 (in the print edition) and so on and so forth. (Ding! 100 footnotes!)
4 [101] You can quote me on this. Also true of in vitro fertilization.
5 [102] Quoting Sam Harris® as heard on a Lex Fridman® podcast.
6 [103] The source of all travail. And where did that idea come from?
7 [104] Per Oliver Sacks®, in The New Yorker®, April 27, 2015, “(Apes and monkeys, like children, though clearly intelligent and capable of forethought and planning are relatively lacking in frontal lobes, and tend to do the first thing that occurs to them, rather than pausing to reflect. Such impulsivity can be striking in patients with frontal-lobe damage.)” Yeah, well, Mr. Sacks, This sounds so deep, but, when those of us without “frontal-lobe damage” pause to “reflect” we still do the thing that occurs to us. First or whatever.
8 [105] Oh that one cracks me up!