Things That Terribly Disappoint Joe: Sudoku

The year was 2006. The world was gripped by Sudoku Mania (not to be confused with the Rubiks Cube Ague of 1983). I, being of this world and highly attuned to all its whims and fads, was soon spending every spare waking moment filling empty squares with numbers, such that each number from 1-9 would appear nine times, but once and only once in every row, column, and 3x3 grid.

Man, was I hooked. I started on the easy ones, developed a few strategies, and methodically planned to move up the Sudoku difficulty ladder from easy, to medium, to hard, and finally (Lord willing) fiendish! Each level found me getting stymied, as my early strategies were found to be inadequate to handle the tougher puzzles. But each time, a new strategy appeared before me, beckoning like a great big beckoning thing, showing me the way forward. Thrilled beyond hope, I crept along steadily, amazed in the ability of the human mind to construct ever more refined logical tools to solve problems, until, one day, I finally discovered something that would change my life forever....

You can't solve every Sudoku with plain old logic. There are some puzzles (millions, in fact), where you have to guess - there's no other choice. You pick a square that has two possible numbers, pick one, and try to solve the rest of the squares, hoping that your 50/50 chance works out. If you reach a dead end, you backtrack to that same square, erasing everything you've done along the way, go with the other number, and voilá - a completed puzzle.

I think that's stupid. The whole point of Sudoku is that it's a universal logic game. It's not like the hybrid logic/verbal game of a crossword puzzle. You don't have to know any historical or pop figures; you don't have to know twelve synonyms for "paltry"; you don't have to be clever enough to figure out any themes or cutesy clues (Clue: "Head start?" Answer: "Doodoo"; ha ha ha); you don't need to know anything at all beyond the numbers 1-9 - it's pure logic. Wow! what an incredible challenge, thought I. The greatest human advancement since staging the moon landing at Universal Studios in 1969.

Well, that's baloney. It's not pure logic. If you're guaranteed to reach a point where logic stops working, then it's not pure logic. That's pure frustration. And a waste of my valuable time the entire way. If I'd known that guessing was eventually going to be not only a strategy for the weak, but a requirement for success, I would've found something more worthwhile to do - like twiddling my thumbs, or listening to Kenny G (best jazz artist ever imho).

By the way, I understand that, strictly speaking, guessing (or trial and error, or Ariadne's thread, or whatever you call it) is still logic. When you're walking around a labyrinth, keeping track of where you've been and so forth is actually a very logical way to proceed. In fact, it's the most logical way to proceed. But if you're not in a labyrinth, guessing is stupid.

Point is, Sudoku betrayed my trust. It's not what it purports to be. And I think it's sad that Will Shortz has jumped on the bandwagon by putting his name on so many Sudoku books - for all the dumb puns and obscure 1920s actresses that find their way into the New York Times crossword puzzles, at least you know what you're in for. Suduko, though, the siren of puzzle games, sang her song of mental stimulation, lured me too close to the shores of false logic and dashed my brain ship on the rocks of stupidness. Very messy.

Things I Hate: Dreams

First off, I don't mean "dreams" as in "life aspirations." The word "dream" really should not be used for that. The nonsensical struggles that occupy through my head when I'm asleep have absolutely nothing to do with my deepest wishes for myself and the world. When I contemplate what would make life a heaven on earth, it seldom involves me going back to high school without pants on. 

So in my continual mission to make the English language clearer, I hereby ban the use of the word "dream" to mean anything but the moronic narratives that your dumb brain spins when you're trying to get some rest. (I actually have a whole list of English words that have several contradictory meanings, thus making communication more cumbersome, forcing you to write a long boring introductory paragraph just to clarify your terms -- but that's fodder for another post.)

Cuz my dreams, especially lately, have been nothing but annoying. Nothing good ever seems to happen in them anymore. I'm always relieved to wake up and discover that I'm happily married, no longer in high school, and fully clothed. I would much prefer if my dreams just acted as a VCR on an endless loop, replaying the day's events.  As boring as that would be, it would be much more pleasant than dredging up conflicts that I resolved long ago (or never actually needed to resolve, as in the nudity-in-public scenario).

Before you put in on your Freud glasses and skullcap and say "Well, maybe those conflicts aren't truly resolved!," I should probably lay out the basic themes of all of my dreams lately:

1. I have to spend another year in high school. I've already gone through college and grad school and everything, but for some reason the law is that after all that you have to spend one more year in the soul-impaling world of floor-to-ceiling lockers and cruel social hierarchies based on people's relative ability to pretend they're not miserable. Usually my dream brain manages to squeeze in the old theme of having a class that you're terribly late to but can't find the room, or a class that you forgot to attend all year and now you have a test ... yadda yadda.

I think you'll agree that, while these problems once may have weighed on my mind, they are no longer terribly relevant. And I don't really think they're a metaphor for current insecurities (what, that I'm worried that I'm going to forget to go to work for several months? Or that I suddenly can't find the building?) I think this is just a case of some insecurities being so pervasive during my high school years that they etched themselves in my brain and won't go away. 

I general I should mention that I'm not really a fan of trying to interpret dreams. I don't think they're some sort of outlet for deeply repressed feelings -- I think they're just a  attempt at piecing together a jumble of brain activity that my bored brain is chucking at me. 

See, the brain is a ravenous information hog. That's why you spend all your waking hours running around like a madman stuffing information into it: Every day, you read and watch TV and talk to people and travel and pierce things and hit balls with objects and generally pile on the experiences until you collapse. Your brain is like a shark strapped to your head, who has to keep consuming information or it's going to bite you with a vicious bout of boredom. 

But when you're asleep, your eyes are closed, your ears aren't picking up anything, and your information-starved brain panics. It starts just randomly firing whatever is already in there -- memories, fears, pleasures, what you had for lunch, whatever. Then the executive functions take all these random firings and try desperately to piece it together into a narrative. Doesn't need to make sense, as long as it feeds the shark.

Of course, that doesn't exactly explain why the same themes keep coming up -- it should be more random than that. Maybe it's firing off the parts of the brain that have been well-established but aren't getting exercised during the day. Whatever. Anyway, let's get back to the main themes:

2. I have to move my collection of Star Wars figures from one place to another and I keep losing parts of them. This is an odd one, but very pervasive in my dreams. See, my childhood was little besides Star Wars figures. I think there were some sisters involved somewhere, and some taller people we called "parents." Mostly, it was about Star Wars Figures.

Star Wars figures are cruel little things, though, in that each comes with a tiny little weapon, often dark-colored and no more than an inch in length, that is just begging to get lost in the carpet and then vacuumed up. Because I worshipped these little blobs of plastic, the thought of losing a weapon was a little like the Pope misplacing his shards of the True Cross. Imagine if the Pope was in his room playing with his Jesusania when his mom calls him to dinner. Afterwards he gets back into his room and "Wait, what happened to Jesus' true toenail clipping?" Then a frenzied search ensues. 

That's what my dreams are like.  Last night I had to fly (I can also fly in my dreams) from one area to another while holding my Speeder Bikes, and I dropped one of the tiny little removable handlebars in the snow. Then I wheeled around and furiously scoured each inch of ground. 

So Freud, interpret that one, beeatch. Am I holding on to my childhood or afraid of losing my memories or things that are important to me or some shit? Fuck that, I think it's just that the fear of losing these shitty little pieces of plastic was so ingrained in my head as a kid that now it comes out every night for an encore.

3. I'm trying to find a girlfriend. You know, each of these terrors covers the dominant insecurity of a different era of my life. Before meeting my lovely wife, I spent about 18 years doing little besides trying and miserably failing to establish a functional and comfortable romantic relationship with a woman. I dated a few women briefly, had a whole host of all-consuming and painful infatuations, but never experienced a single moment of genuine requited love. That kind of thing leaves scars. And being the ever-helpful fuckface that it is, my unconscious mind is happy to reopen those wounds when I'm trying to sleep. 

Of course, it's always wonderful to wake up and realize that that stage of my life is dead and buried, and that I love my wife dearly and would likely be a wreck without her. But did I really need to relive those years all night to do that? I feel grateful for my wife every day -- I really don't need help with that, dreams, thanks though! 

4. I'm naked and am completely incapable of putting on pants. I try to put on pants and for some reason can't. Actually, I'm usually not entirely naked, but am wearing tighty-whiteys. And I'm running around town, doing all sorts of stuff. And sometimes I forget about my situation, but then suddenly think, "Oh crap, I have no pants!" It's a pain in the ass.

So maybe that means I'm afraid that people will discover the true me and etc. Probably true. I dunno. I'm tired now. But I'm not going to go to sleep, because I might perchance to dream, and dreams suck! (Worst ending for a post ever. Oh well.)

Things I'm Not Terrifically Find Of: Dogs

This is, of course, an issue as old as the sun. The dog people vs. cat people rivalry is as storied as any in the history of this country, combining the bitterness the Hatfields vs. the McCoys with the intellectual repartee of Tastes Great vs. Less Filling. Few realize that the famous Douglas vs. Lincoln debates actually only mentioned slavery in passing -- it was mostly about how Lincoln's dog had been pooping all over Douglas' lawn and scaring Douglas' beloved tabby Mr. Demo-cat.

I hope I can contribute a bit more fodder to this grand national debate with the following theses. To wit:

1. Dogs smell. Cats are wonderful at keeping themselves clean. Dogs -- not so much. Their owners have to knock themselves out to bathe dogs, or they get that nasty wet-dog funk on everything within a fifty-mile radius. Cats come straight from the factory with a self-cleaning mechanism, and are so fastidious that they do it with their tongues. Can you imagine how dirty you'd have to feel before you'd be willing to clean yourself with your tongue? Cats will do it daily, no problem, usually by daintily spreading their legs and delicately licking their own anuses. That's commitment.

2. Dogs jump all over guests. Dog owners, please understand that this is not cute. It's really, really annoying. Please don't say "Oh, he likes you!" Well, then I hate him. This is not how beings of any species should introduce themselves. Unless you're Scarlett Johansson, you should never, ever react to seeing me for the first time by jumping on top of me and licking my face. It's just perhaps a bit forward.

3. A related problem with dogs is that they're unbelievable jerks. How many times have you been walking along the street, humming a song and dancing along, la di da, la di doo, and then suddenly "ARF! ARF! ARF! ARF!" And it turns out to be a dog behind a fence who's unbelievably angry because you dared walk along the sidewalk in the general vicinity of its owner's piece-of-crap house. I always try to stop and calmly explain, "Look, the whole purpose of a sidewalk is to serve as a place upon which people can walk past houses. I am fully within my right as a pedestrian. And besides, honestly, do you really think I was going to come and burglarize this house? If I were to burglarize any house on this block, I'd probably take the mangy, slobber-infested rag doll in your doghouse before trying to swipe your master's collection of dirty pans and porn movies."

And what do I get for my trouble? Same crap: "ARF! ARF! ARF!" Their owners aren't happy with this either, and usually scream at them from inside the house to shut up. Then, realizing my efforts at reasoning with the dog are for naught, I try humoring them: "Oh, my. Yes, you are very frightening. You're what, three pounds? If you were let loose, you could probably make mincemeat of my shoelaces. I'd better go burglarize a different house instead. Your owner should thank his lucky stars and give you lots of belly rubs for the way you single-handedly keep the world safe for justice and the American way by making a lot of irritating noise."

And the response? "ARF! ARF! ARF!" At what point does the dog start to think that he might not be as intimidating as he thinks he is? So, dogs are smarter than cats, eh? Well, then the SATs should be a test of who can yell the loudest at passing strangers.

4. Dogs are obsequious kiss-asses. I suppose this conflicts with the whole "Dogs are assholes" bit that I just finished writing. I'll need to amend that: Dogs have two modes: Assholish or kiss-assy. Either way, it involves asses, that round, dumb, and disgusting-in-the-center part of the body.

To strangers, dogs are assholes -- to owners, oh my God, they would literally lick their owners' assholes clean without even being asked to. They certainly spend enough time licking their owners' faces (and then their own assholes, and then back to the owners' faces -- see Thesis #1 about dogs being dirty and smelly). I think dogs would lick anything. (And yes, I've heard that dogs' mouths are as clean as an OCD germophobe, but I think this is yet another lie perpetrated by the dog-centric powers that be. Nothing that smells as bad as dog breath does could ever come from a place of cleanliness.)

Come to think of it, I think I'd rather have a dog hate me and bark at me than have it love me. At times, my friends' dogs will fall in love with me immediately and refuse to leave me alone. It's supposed to be touching, but I find it really very sad. I'm always like "Look, I'm a raging egomaniac and I even I don't think I'm THAT great." It's as if dogs have some sort of deep, all-consuming insecurity that causes them to either lash out violently or smother you with love. It's like every dog has borderline personality disorder.

The lack of self-esteem displayed by dogs really bothers me on some deep level. Cats are often affectionate, but they do it in a cooler way -- they come up and rub against you. If they don't get a response, they say, "Oh, actually, you were just in my way there. I was actually in the process of chasing an imaginary goblin." And then they run after the goblin. They go for attention in a subtle manner, and if spurned, they escape with their dignity intact.

Dogs have no dignity. They run up to you, panting, wagging their tails, getting in your face like you're a Jonas brother and they're a thirteen-year-old girl. You try to gently push them away, and then they come right back. They not only don't take rejection with dignity -- they don't take rejection at all. It doesn't compute in their feeble little minds.

I suppose this is good for some people. People often extol the loyalty of dogs, saying that they love you unconditionally and are your only true friends and yadda yadda. OK, then I guess prostitutes are the most romantic people in the world because they'll have sex with anyone. Meaning that dogs are such whores for attention that they'll love anyone, regardless of what an unlikeable prick he or she might be. So if you're incapable of gaining love from beings that have higher standards than "you must have a pulse," then yeah, I suppose a dog would be your only true friend.

Cats like their owners, but never in the overbearing way that dogs do. Cats seem more like regular animals that way. All kinds of animals can develop affection for other kinds of animals. They can hang out with them, enjoy snuggling with them, share food, etc. They never get as single-mindedly devoted as dogs do to humans. It's just not natural. No animal should willingly be so slavish to another. It's as if dogs were sad, twisted freaks created in a lab somewhere when an evil scientist accidentally spilled too much co-dependence serum into the batch.

5. Dogs poop too much. Well, that's not true. But they do have very finicky ways of pooping -- they must go outside. So the owner has to get up after a hard day, escort the dog to a exterior toilet, watch it crap, and then use a baggie to pick up their leavings. I wouldn't do this for my wife or non-existent kids, and I damn sure ain't doing it for an animal. Meanwhile, cats, who are supposedly SO finicky and prissy, have no problem with just pooping in a box full of sand. And they do it very reliably. You don't even have to train them or anything. As with their self-cleaning mechanism, the organized pooping they come with is a wonderful feature that seems to bespeak a product fully formed as a Practically Perfect Pet right out of the box. If dogs are PCs, in that they're the standard-issue pet product, then cats are Macs, better designed and more user-friendly.

So in conclusion, I believe I have proven, with great tact and impeccable reasoning, that cats are better than dogs in every conceivable way, and that all dogs should be rounded up and shot immediately. Thank you.

Things I Feel Ambivalent About: Jazz

When people ask me,"Do you like jazz?" I never know what to say, exactly. It's a tough question.

For maybe the first half of the 20th century, jazz was crazy stuff. I'm talking about times when conventional popular music involved white guys with slicked back hair and pinched voices crooning through megaphones about someone named "Marybelle." Then jazz came out of left field. Jazz was music played in whorehouses by drug addicts.  It had actual rhythms in it. Sometimes jazz musicians played notes that were not in the sheet music. Sometimes there was no sheet music! Dangerous, dangerous stuff.  

Even when it hit the mainstream it was still pretty great. Duke Ellington, Count Basie -- all good. Miles Davis and John Coltrane -- a lot of awesome stuff by those two. And then in the 1950s rock came along and, well, jazz didn't react well, I feel. You ended up with Charlie Parker, who is supposed to be a genius. He never did much for me personally, and didn't for most people. Except, of course, for the People Who Know Best, who trip over each other to get in line to kiss his ass.

Basically, jazz got arty at that point, and that's usually where you lose most people. "Arty," by my definition, is when only the people that "get" it are the people who spend way too much time immersed in the art form in question. These people value novelty over accessibility. These are the fanboys, critics, participants -- they eat and drink the art form, so they naturally get jaded with the same old stuff and start looking for something new. The arty stuff has the originality they need. And it makes sense to them because perhaps they do have greater levels of understanding for the art form, through intense study.

But does that make the arty stuff "better" than something more understandable by the layman but perhaps less original and complex? Typically the answer would be yes, because the fanboys, critics and participants say so. They feel it and feel it deep. The rest of us don't feel it, though. So how is better? I don't think it is, really. It's like saying "Star Trek" is the world's greatest cultural achievement because the Trekkies love it so much. 

This phenomenon reminds me of a a great pro wrestling documentary called "Beyond the Mat." Stay with me here. One of the wrestlers featured in the movie was Jake the Snake, and boy he was a sad case. He was long past his salad days in the '80s, and was reduced to going to tiny backwoods underground wrestling arenas. I bet he was the inspiration for the recent movie "The Wrestler."

The saddest part of Jake the Snake, though, was his sex life. In his heyday, he'd have sex several times a day, literally. As he got older, though, he somehow lost the ability to have normal sex, and had to resort to weirder and weirder forms of sexual stimulation. He had built up some sort of tolerance for regular sex and had to get more and more exotic just to get the same feeling.  It's basically the same thing that happens to a drug addict who builds up a tolerance and then needs higher and higher doses to get the same high.

That's how I think of the "fanboy, critic and participant" type. They're addicted to their art form. Eventually the simple stuff can't quite do it for them and they need increasingly complex and strange forms of the same thing to get the highs they need. Then they justify it by assuming they have some sort of "elevated" understanding, and that only stupid philistines would ever enjoy pop music when they could listen to Charlie Parker's endless, pointless noodling. 

Maybe that's a little unfair. There is some degree to which everyone gets more sophisticated taste in things as they get older and wiser. But I do there is some point at which a person has gone too far down that road, and they end up becoming critics in local free weeklies and trashing anything popular while heaping praise on anything weird and incomprehensible. 

And maybe Charlie Parker really is as good as people say. And maybe if I spent half my time studying music, my tastes would be honed to the point where Charlie Parker would seem like a God on Earth. But frankly, there are so many hours in the day. I can't spend all my time learning to appreciate jazz. I'm busy learning about history, politics, language, film, literature -- there's a lot out there and not really that much lifetime to process it all. I don't want to put all my eggs in the jazz basket. 

Meanwhile, there's lots of great art that actually is understandable to the layman. I "get" Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" album as much as the fanboy does (at least I think so), and I didn't have to work hard to do so. Shakespeare is like this too, I think -- it takes a little bit of work to understand the language, granted, but his stuff is mostly just about sex and death and lame jokes. Everyone gets that stuff. 

Every genre of every art form has a few people like this. You don't have to be an art major to enjoy Monet and Picasso. You might, however, have to be an art major to really enjoy Jackson Pollock. Pollock might go too far, in my view. I suppose for every artist I suppose it's debatable which side of the line he or she falls on.

But my objection is to how it becomes "fact" that Monet, Picasso and Pollock are all enshrined as similarly Great Important Artists, just because the art addicts say so. I think that you're less great if you're less accessible to the layman. It's all well and good say deep things, but you ought to say them in a language that most people can understand, or you're really only talking to a few people. And there's a certain elitism in that. 

What was I originally talking about? Oh yeah, jazz. So I feel that jazz was once great, but nowadays is pretty much of two crappy, disparate types -- the inaccessible and the overly accessible. The inaccessible is Great Important Art that we're supposed to enjoy but don't, which I've already explored ad nauseam. The overly accessible is the stuff all the cool people know to dislike, because it really is boring: Kenny G, David Sanborn, etc.

In the latter category you get the encapsulation of jazz in the modern day, to my mind: a coffeeshop with some old, pudgy, conservatively dressed white guys tootling away. You picture that they're all married, work as dentists or something, and every Saturday night they live out their childhood dreams of being musicians. Their music stinks, sure, but they're kinda cute. And they're having fun, so let 'em.

But this new category begs the question: Why isn't it great art? It's accessible, right? More people bought Kenny G records than have or will ever buy John Coltrane albums. Doesn't that make him a great artist, by your definition, smart guy?

That is a tough one. I do get the feeling that Kenny G fans don't really feel his music deep in their souls. I think they put it on as background music at cocktail parties and forget it's there. I think that art has to arouse some level of deep passion among people to really be considered great. 

So maybe I'm not a total democrat when it comes to artistic tastes. The masses don't get to decide on their own what's great, because then each boy band who sells a zillion records one year and then collapses the next would get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I think the stuff we consider truly great should appeal to both the cognoscenti and the masses.  Charlie Parker doesn't get to be great, and neither does Kenny G. Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" album does, and Louie Armstrong does. A few others. It's a small club.

So anyway, I guess the answer to the original question is pretty simple. I like some jazz, but not a lot of it. Come to think of it, that's true of just about everything. Eighty percent of everything is crap. It's the other 20% that makes life worth living.