DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The baby’s passport arrived in the mail. Page 1 shows the worst photo ever taken of him. He’s a cute kid, but the local post office’s cruddy Polaroid equipment yielded a truly mediocre picture, which the passport agency apparently squashed, posterized, and color-shifted, resulting in a monochromatic, carnation-pink, vaguely alien lump.

The idea that an infant photo will be of any use in identifying a toddler is already laughable. But this is ridiculous — it already doesn’t look like him. And this passport is supposed to be good for five years.

Page 2 of the passport shows a signature form, which warns, “NOT VALID UNTIL SIGNED.” No explanation is provided for teaching a 4-month-old to write his name.

I was tempted to ignore it, but then I pictured some officious TSA or INS brain-donor at the airport refusing to allow us to either leave or re-enter the country. That, I don’t need. So I called the passport office.

“We just got a passport for our 4-month-old,” I said, “and I have a really dumb question for you — “

“I know exactly what you’re going to ask,” interjected the agent. “You want to know how he’s supposed to sign his name, right? I get that question all the time.”

She told me the secret procedure, which curiously doesn’t match the one given on the State Department’s website. So we may end up getting hassled at the border after all.

David Lazarus reads between the lines of the recent Unocal acquisition and sees the Hubbert Peak. In a piece called ChevronTexaco’s CEO banking on peak oil situation, he reasons:

Because Unocal’s stock has soared 75 percent over the past year, the thinking goes, ChevronTexaco could find itself with a white elephant on its hands if currently sky-high oil prices end up coming back to earth.

Well, I’m prepared to say this much: [ChevronTexaco CEO David] O’Reilly isn’t stupid. He knows more than most people about world oil markets.

So if [he] is prepared to gamble more than 16 billion bucks on oil prices staying at stratospheric levels, I’m ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.

And reading between the lines, that means only one thing.

Peak oil.

Local gas prices topped $2.75/gallon recently. Is there any reason to believe they’ll go down?

I predict a run on crappy old Mercedes and BMW diesels, as greasecar conversions become mainstream. As ridiculous as it sounds that your neighbors will begin collecting discarded fry oil from the local fish ‘n’ chips for home filtering, it sounds even more ridiculous that the entire population of the country will happily pay $10 per gallon for gas.

A month ago I wrote about the Auto Alliance’s ad campaign claiming that new cars are “virtually emission free,” and the Union of Concerned Scientists’ sarcastic response (depicting a stoned-looking baby smoking a cigarette).

The UCS sent a followup email to report on the success of their campaign:

• 24,000 people requested that the FTC investigate the Auto Alliance’s claims. The FTC responded: “The communications we have received are already more than ample to allow us to begin evaluating the substance of the complaints.”
• 1100 people donated a total of $40,000 to finance the UCS’ response advertisement, calling out the Auto Alliance for deliberately misleading the public. The UCS has placed its ad in print and online media and will be distributing full-color reproductions to the entire Congress and Senate.

The UCS reports,

[T]he Auto Alliance has remained publicly resolute on this issue… commenting in an auto trade press article that “they will not stop using [the ads].” But we have heard from a number of different sources that individual automakers are reconsidering this ad campaign, and have, to this date, stopped running the ads in the Washington, DC media they had been saturating before.

In other words, thanks to your actions and generous contributions, the Auto Alliance is now well aware that their misrepresentations will not go unchallenged. We will continue to push auto companies to play a constructive role in cleaning up vehicle emissions, but when they attempt an end run around the facts, we will expose their deceptive practices to decision makers and consumers.

I hate to even mention this, because there’s a chance it will tip one more person over the edge into a maelstrom of change. I’m sure I don’t even see the whole scope of the change yet, but I’m awed by the tiny piece of the iceberg that has penetrated the surface of my consciousness.

It started with this introduction to GTD. Don’t read it. Seriously. Because a casual read could turn into a couple hours’ worth of poring over documentation, the purchase of a book and a pile of new software applications, and a couple weekends’ time reorganizing your entire existence.

I’m not writing this from the perspective of someone who has mastered a new skill and is eager to gloat, nor from the perspective of a new convert eager to proselytize, but rather from the perspective of someone who has glimpsed the possibility of something incredibly useful and life-affirming and is taking baby steps in its direction while fearfully clinging to the blackboard of old, bad habits with the untrimmed fingernails of obstinance.

And yet, I’ve purged my desktop. This was “step 0.” The aspect of GTD that fit into my brain like a crowbar into a rusty padlock appeared in one of the many personal testimonies and interpretations of GTD that I’ve read over the past two weeks: have a single inbox. Don’t let your whole life — your desk, your calendar, your office, your car, your house — represent a collection of not-done tasks. This was my first Zen slap. I looked at my desk: piles of stuff. My office: piles of stuff. My house: piles of stuff. In fact, at that very minute, I remembered having left a bank deposit on the floor of the passenger seat of the car.

Purging my desktop was a small milestone, hopefully representative of bigger achievements to come. This weekend, I’ll purge my desk. Then my office. Then the project-overflow space in the den. In widening concentric circles, I’ll regain control.

I’ll admit that this is a scary process. Getting organized is a fractal project: no matter how much detail you see, there’s always another entire universe of complexity at the next zoom level. Put another way, my clutter is recursive. And the last thing I need is yet another task for the to-do list.

But I’m going to do it anyway.

My 4-month-old son has been responsible, directly or indirectly, for two massive, head-jerking, whiplash-inducing double takes. Before old age takes over and my brain finishes ossifying, I’ll commit the stories to the global digital archive, which unlike my memory has a decent chance of lasting more than 15 minutes.

Last Fall, my forward-thinking (and still-pregnant) wife retrieved an infant doll from the toy bin at her office, with the idea that we could practice diapering without the added stress of a wailing baby, flailing limbs, or fresh warm feces. I wasn’t particularly motivated to play papa with the doll, so I ignored it, and like anything that sits in one place in the house awaiting attention for a couple days, it became invisible. I forgot about it.

Then one day, in a rush to shower and dress for some event or other, I dashed into the bedroom. Out of the corner of one eye, I spied what appeared to be a newborn baby laying naked on its back on my side of the bed, arms reaching up as if to say, “Just because I was born a couple weeks early doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like a diaper right about now.”

It’s totally unreasonable to believe that (a) my wife would give birth without my knowing or (b) even if she had, that she’d leave the baby unattended and naked in the bedroom, on my side of the bed no less. Just tell that to my visual cortex. Or my heart, which stopped.

The second neck-wrencher happened just a couple weeks ago. It, too, regards diapers, but then what about newborn babies does not? Raphael was in the middle of a diaper change when I noticed, glancing sideways from one eye, what appeared to be a clump of gray pubic hair on his testicles. The juxtaposition of old-man-pubic-hair with hairless-newborn-infant was too much to process rationally. Had my head spun any faster I might have knocked the house off its foundation.

The hair turned out to be a piece of fuzz from the lamb’s wool playmat, which I’ve now taken to shaving daily as preventive maintenance for my cervical spine.