Sometimes an entry runs away from its writer. The following is one of that kind: it began with an idea to talk about my . . . then the thing veered off in the direction of . . . and it ended up in a place that I never . . . (but I think it looks OK; so please love it or lump it)
What is an engineer?
That descriptor engineer is vague to me: it seems like it could mean anything from blah to blah. Let’s say you’re at a dinner party; and you gaze over to the far corner of the room and see me standing there; so you decide to strut forth and chat with me, because you’ve never before known me to take part in these functions, as they are intended to be super-secret meetings for engineers only, and there’s a chance that I might be an operative from the non-engineer world who infiltrated this event to collect intelligence, so you get the idea of asking me some tough questions, to see if you can “break me”; which is to say, you decide to take it upon yourself to coax me into a conversational trap where I’ll be forced to “show my hand”, in which case I’ll have no choice but to admit the truth that I am not an engineer but rather an agent of espionage, sent from heaven. So you draw nigh and offer me some smoked sturgeon and vodka, which I accept gracefully. Then you attack:
“What do you do for a living?”
Immediately I blush, because you’ve captured me—I’ve nowhere to turn; but I try one last desperate dodge:
“Why ask about my occupation when you do not even know my Christian name yet?” (Then I offer my hand to shake, as the English do.) “I’m Bryan Ray; pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Likewise,” you say. “So, Bryan, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m an engineer.”
“Oh really? Well then you attended the right dinner party, because we’re all engineers here. It’s our annual gathering. Every year, on the eighth day of March, we gather in this old abandoned palace in the desert, at midnight, to discuss the tricks of our trade. What type of engineering do you do, exactly?”
“I asked you first.”
“No you didn’t. But I’ll honor your misstep, because, as Officer Duke says to Sunshine in the 2013 film Wrong Cops…”
“Oh I LOVE that movie! We just watched it again last night, for the 41st time, in celebration of my birthday!”
“Ah, it was your birthday recently? Well, happy birthday.”
“Thanks!”
“And many happy returns.”
“Thanks; not TOO many though, I hope – for, let’s be real: This world is a prison. I don’t wanna end up like Methuselah.”
“Ah, isn’t Methuselah rumored to have lived longer than anyone, in the Hebrew Bible?”
“That’s right. The fifth chapter of Genesis. 969 years: Fuck that!—I’d rather end up like his father, Enoch: ‘And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years…’ A solar year is 365 days, as you know. (I’m just stalling for time, because I fear that we’re going to return to the question about the details of our engineering jobs, once we finish with this biblical-trivia detour.) ‘And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.’ What do you think happened there? ‘God took him’—does this mean that Enoch never died, and that he sits at the right hand of God, to this very day, so, when you ascend heaven’s staircase and look into the royal parlor, you see what appears to be TWO monotheistic divinities, who’re both glowing so bright that you’re nearly blinded, thus you can’t tell which one is the LORD and which one is merely his right-hand man?”
“No. You’re wrong. Only Jesus of Nazareth sits at God’s right hand. The apostle Paul says in his letter to the Romans (8:34): ‘It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.’ So that proves everything.”
“But he says ‘Christ’—that’s just a title; he doesn’t say Jesus; maybe Enoch is the Christ.”
“If you look at the context and the rest of the apostle’s letter, he makes it clear that when he says Christ, he means Jesus.”
“I know, I know—you’re right. I was just yanking your chain.”
“Good. Now, as I was saying, after you dodged my question about the type of engineering that you supposedly do, I’ll gladly share my own details first, for the same reason that Officer Duke, in the film Wrong Cops, explains that he included a complimentary amount of contraband in Officer Sunshine’s order—that is: Because I like you.”
“Ah, thanks; I appreciate it. This will give me time to consider the best way to devise and convey my own background information. So what type of engineering do you do?”
“I contrive the blueprints for those vast machines that manufacture gyroscopes. Turn the crank on the side, and the tray springs open and a bell rings; yet, instead of paper bills of cash extending from the register’s slots, all sorts of gyroscopes spiral out. They wobble all over the floor: some turn with, others against the clock. To be clear, my responsibilities have nothing to do with the actual, physical making of these playthings—I just draw up the plans for the engine that enables the process of production. Have you ever read that text ‘Der Kreisel’ by Franz Kafka?”
“Yes! That’s the one that starts out: ‘A certain philosopher used to hang about wherever children were at play. And whenever he saw a boy with a top, he would lie in wait. As soon as the top began to spin the philosopher went in pursuit and tried to catch it.’ ”
“Right. And ‘so long as he could catch the top while it was still spinning, he was happy, but only for a moment; then he threw it to the ground and walked away.’ —I just mention this as an example of the type of items that my machines gestate. I mean the tops, not the philosopher. Anyway, now it’s your turn to answer: What type of engineering do you do, exactly?”
“Well, do you know what a computer is?”
“Of course!”
“OK, so computers have these programs that they run, and some of the programs are simulators—you know what simulators are?
“Yeah! for instance, flight simulators are computer programs that mimic what it’s like to fly an airplane, so that pilots can learn how to use the controls in the cockpit without damaging any actual planes and killing themselves or others when they crash. For failure is an indispensable part of the learning process.”
“Yes; also there are simulators that have a slightly different function: like, instead of acting as a video game and allowing the user to learn how to handle a space pod dune buggy submarine, some simulators help you to visualize simple outcomes in reality, like the growth of bacteria: The computer says, ‘Feed me some info’; then you, the scientist, type in a bunch of data corresponding to this or that, and you press the ‘Enter’ button on the keypad, thus begging the motherboard to ‘Run the program’; after which, on the monitor, the simulator will visually animate for you how a petri dish of, say, infra-thin pasta will alter over the course of a three-day weekend, once you have misted it with a certain brand of hairspray—”
“Ah, that reminds me of the part of your blog post from yestermorn where you exclaim aloud: ‘That’s like a dress stain having a goal!’ So am I correct in assuming that you work on 3-D image modeling?”
“Yeah, I guess you could call it that. Like, if you find a stain on your dress, and you want to know exactly WHEN it was born, HOW it survived its abusive childhood, and WHY it remains so vibrant even after being soaked in club soda—that is to say: WHAT is its purpose and calling, in the eyes of God? I could engineer a simulation device that’d print out the answer to all these questions carnally, in the form of a tangible model. You just fill in your parameters: What’s the style of dress? ‘Red, backless.’ And: Are you dealing with matter or antimatter…?”
“Your machine can do antimatter?”
“Sure: it’ll cost you, but I can build it.”
“Wow! alright, go on…”
“Anyway, so you toggle all the switches corresponding to your query, and it spits out your solution. But it won’t just tell you who your spouse is having the affair with – it actually, physically sculpts the culprit. Real, clay-based flesh. Then it breathes its spirit into them, so that they become a living soul.”
“I admit, I’m astounded. Do you realize what you’ve done here? This solves the age-old problem of jealousy. Now, instead of battling in divorce court, one can enjoy the selfsame cheating experience as one’s hated lover.”
“And nobody gets hurt, because all are afforded a double existence: On one hand, a commonplace life at your day-job where you savor affairs with your co-workers; and, at the same time, an amazingly fulfilling stint as a professional life-coach.”
“In an all-girl universe—”
“Exactly. No males exist anywhere. All men have isolated themselves in murky caverns of their moony landscape, & it serves them right: that’s what they wanted: they’re in self-exile from society: they just sit in their cold caves, alone, and gnaw bones all day. For men did not want to connect with any other human who loves them: they lack the emotional capacity. Men have zero desire to interact with fellow members of their community. And they refuse to participate in committed, romantic relationships.”
“Tell me about it. In the years before you engineered your simulation device, every single one of my romantic relationships was with men who, emotionally speaking, could not connect deeply.”
“Yep—that’s the whole reason I chose to become an engineer. Until then, I found myself in relationship after relationship with men who leaned on alcohol and other substances to escape, who constantly said NO to physical and emotional intimacy, and who would not even entertain the idea of having a conversation about the future of our relationship.”
“Men never want to come together and connect in a positive way and get to know one another.”
“Men are basically inhuman. Even anti-human. The entire lot of them. All men lack feelings: that’s the truth. If a graph were employed to represent the emotional potential in males, it would show a long, flat line at the lowest level. However, now that I have engineered this simulation contraption, I am able to manifest the greatest of men into my life with ease.”
NOTE
My biological sister Susan recently informed me that she created a website (Susan dash Ray dot com) where she’s been intermittently blogging; so I visited the place & read thru all her posts, from oldest to newest; and the experience left me with the desire to copy some snippets and collage them into my next piece of sense – thus, much of the text and phrasing that occurs near the end of the entry above comes from Susan’s Feb-2018 post (“The Conversation that Changed My Life Forever”); the final clause is, in fact, replicated verbatim. I just thought you should know.
P.S.
Here’s the next couple parts of the mini-demo that I made while sitting solitary at my computer inside my cave & gnawing a bone. The effort is simple and sparse with just one rap per track, and I forced the same exact synthesized voice to chant the title with me at the end of each non-song (for more info see my initial utterance):
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