Dog Hotel and Stolen Time
By John Taylor; 2009 Feb 04, 15 Sultan, 165 BE
I drove the family to the cinema in Welland last night in a light snow. It had just frozen over after a melting period, so the roads were treacherous. On the way we hit some black ice. What happened was that I got stuck behind this clown who was plodding along at forty clicks; probably one of these nervous Nellies who listen to weather reports. Then we came up to a large accident, at least five cars, that had just happened. One car was way off the road, piled into a snow bank by a farmer's fence. Some guy was helping a girl out of the car. She looked pretty shaken, but unhurt. Other cars were distributed pell-mell, all over the place, on and off the road.
The slow car ahead stopped and got out to help. They opened their doors and looked back at me, like rabbits looking into my headlights. I slammed on my brakes to stop but kept on going at the same speed. We did not even slow down. I knew I was going to plough right into them. The image of these helpless Good Samaritans about to die is burned into my memory.
Finally, thanks to our new 400 dollar snow tires and that low speed they had forced me into, I gained some control, though I did not dare come to a full stop or try to turn around. This was glare ice. Going at about 10 clicks I weaved among the stranded cars and continued on. As a non-cell phone user, there was not much I could do. Then I remembered that an oncoming car had warned us by flashing its lights just before we ran into the death zone, so I flashed my high beams at oncoming traffic. Then I realized it would be more friendly to turn them off and on again, and did that for a while. We went very slow until we hit the county line between Haldimand and Niagara. Niagara must have voted for the party in power, because their road was suddenly sanded, salted and bare. A huge difference. Who says democracy does not work? It is a lifesaver, if you know how to be bribed.
For the rest of the evening I felt myself in a strange, surreal, limnal state. It was not entirely unpleasant, after the sweat stopped dripping and my hands stopped shaking. No doubt I was suffering a mild case of what they now call post traumatic shock syndrome. The senseless babble of the kids, playing their strange "laughing game," seemed more senseless than usual. I put on the audio CD biography of Einstein that I have been listening to lately. Einstein's life seemed different too.
Then we arrived just in time at the cinema, having missed only the ads and the trailers. I did not want to choose anything at all, so I went with their choice, Dog Hotel. It was only a few minutes old when I realized that I did not want to be there. How do you escape dogs in a film that is all about dogs, dogs, dogs. What a soppy, sentimental dog lover's orgy that film is. It even has two homeless orphans, a brother and sister, constantly in danger of being separated. I just could not sympathize with it, although I was involuntarily in tears most of the time. Empathize, not sympathize I guess. I have been playing a tank battle game on the kid's WII game system far too much lately, so I amused myself by taking pot shots with thumb and forefinger whenever another dog came on screen. After the film I shared my anti-boredom strategy of mentally shooting the dogs with my daughter Silvie. Her response was less than sympathetic.
"You have gone over the line! Way over the line," she shouted, supplementing her words with fist and flying kicks, in the manner of her heroine, Leela, in Futurama. She has the idea that I am less than an animal lover. Entirely false, I assure you. I have a great deal of empathy, as my tears attested. I took the attack stoically, and on the way home left her and her mother and brother to their babble and got absorbed in the life story of Albert Einstein.
I awoke this morning with a striking thought. It was not what you might expect, the vision of mowing down Good Samaritans with my car, or being beaten up by my daughter, rather it was about Einstein. I had a deep realization of how immoral he was, and how by extension he has implicated us all. Einstein wrote his four main papers that revolutionized physics, his so-called "miracle year," on stolen time. He had learned how to complete his allotted work of passing or failing patent applications in only two or three hours, and the rest of the day he worked on relativity, quanta, and all that. If he had been an honest worker, he would have gone to his superiors and reported that he was being assigned too little work. In the words of Dilbert, using paid hours to work on personal projects is like stealing from the company. He stole from the patent office, and every time we use a microchip, which is based on his stolen work, we are using stolen property.
I am especially guilty of using hot goods. Before I got a computer, I wrote with a pen because my migraine-degraded concentration made using typewriters an exercise in futility. So, if I were completely honest I would throw out my computers and go back to pen and paper. Today I hang my head in shame as I hunch over the keyboard. I am stealing, or at least fencing stolen goods from the Swiss patent office.
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