Enlightenment and Nachos

I never really figured out what the purpose of money was or what it was for, but I knew my parent had spent so much time trying to make sure we had a roof over our heads, shuffling us back and forth to scouting events and little league sports, keep enough food in the house, cook a meal every night. Before I ever began to understand how it worked, it felt like it worked like clockwork. When I noticed the money changing hands, it stopped making sense to me very quickly.

This is why when I woke up on the day of the science fair at school with the most brilliant idea, I had to find a way to get to work. There was a bit of the ‘what do you mean today’s science fair?’ thing going on. But I was asking permission to disassemble garbage and slap something together, and they were getting hung up on semantics -like many things in my life at that point, it was on the ‘we’ll get to it’ list, so I was just letting the back of my brain work on it while persisting, but now I knew what I needed and where to find it.

One-inch thick remnant to plywood in a one-foot square

Number pad off a house phone (it’s smaller)

Cradle and receiver off an office phone

Single White High gloss porcelain tile

Printer and spool from calculator

A bunch of salvaged screws

A permanent marker

I was only asking if they had a Sharpie and if I could use the screwdriver; they were making a fuss about not being reminded enough about events in my life they showed no prior interest in up to this point. I understood they had to work so we could buy the food we ate. I had gotten to see them pay a bill or two before, so by this point, I thought money served some important purpose toward our survival and thus felt little more than pride as a child that my parents could make life this comfortable, even as shuttles exploded, oil tankers crashed, the world got angry at each other in this cyclical pattern of ‘tensions boiling over’ when they should have just kept turning the stove off.

I worked diligently and got it all put together and chocked down breakfast. I had to give the marker back before school, so I painstakingly drew my orca on the ride. Enough of it survived to the fair to pass for an orca without much explanation. I didn’t get to draw the rest of what I had in mind. I tried to pencil in the free-willy scene since I had the orca jumping, but I was nine, and I wasn’t very good at perspective.

I didn’t want to win; I can’t even recall if I placed. The point was the message…

“And what do we have here?” This was annoying since I was never allowed to write a sentence that started that way, but maybe that is because it looks as condescending to the eyes as it sounds to the ears.

“Is that a fish?” Guessing is fine, but adults never really felt like they were fully paying attention back then. (Kids these days might notice that hasn’t changed much. That’s because most kids always pay attention even when you think they aren’t.)

“Mammal. It’s an Orca, ma’am.” I always wondered if I would have learned to communicate differently if I never moved to Texas and how that might have changed the person I became, but I like myself too much to think I would not have been respectful wherever I grew up.

“Did your mom help you draw that?”  That one was becoming annoying; maybe if I answered the quiet one, they might contribute something more interesting to this conversation. No sense wasting my best work on the Ren & Stimpy comedy routine.

“I did it; she taught me how to years ago.” Smile, remember to smile. It’s meant to be a display, I didn’t want to take apart my Lynx, and the screen would have been nearly half the size. Using a tile was easier tha-“ I began to explain.

“You built this?” The tone was a tad offensive. “All by yourself?”  Said a grown man in astonishment at a handful of things hastily screwed into a piece of wood.

I looked to my right and saw the girl with the elaborately painted volcano, and I knew this guy was going to have a good day. I, on the other hand, was about to either get a lot of bonus points or ruin the whole mood and had decided to remember what my grandma had taught me about betting when teaching me to play poker for pennies – The trick to any gamble is a willingness to throw it away on a chance. If you can’t lose, leave.

“With both my hands and my foot for the printer. I couldn’t get the voltage right for everything to work without catching fire, so I rebuilt the prototype to show off my design.”  Deep breath before he cuts you off with another stupid realization. “I can use the number pad to communicate back questions, and the receiver is for listening to the answers directly. The printout was just to log the conversation.” If I get far enough, they will stop asking stupid questions.

“What’s it for?” Close enough. At least the silent one took enough time to let the coffee kick in before trying to engage her brain.

“Communicating with whales. It will interpret what their calls mean into speech and back,” I said proudly. I had practiced saying that part in the morning on the way to school in my head, knowing it was the only way to get to the point of the entire exercise.

“Oh, what would you say to the whales?” Of course, he was the setup guy. The universe has a funny way of delivering things you ask for -before you learn how to ask, that is.

“Keep an eye out for any drunk oil tanker captains,” I said, taking the receiver off and attempting to offer it to the quiet one with the good questions. She took it and I remembered that she looked at me hesitantly before putting it to her ear, noticeably relaxing when she realized there was no dial tone. I fought the urge to try clicking like a dolphin. “And they can tell us when they need our help or if bad weather is coming.” She handed back the receiver while looking at the guy that still smelled like Budweiser, if only faintly covered by some kind of cologne.

“That is a good idea.” That flattened, half-excited tone adults use when it’s only going on the fridge until you forget about it. I might have gone too far with the sassy remark. My dad thought it was hilarious.  He clearly heard the weight I put on the word drunken and stopped listening because he finally straightened up and took a more relaxed stance that kept our faces at a respectable distance apart- a nice compromise I thought. “How would the real one work.” So, he was paying attention. En Garde!

“Record whale songs and patterns, learn their language and ours. It will take a bit of time to get it running, but it could be useful for tons of other applications.” I admittedly stole that one from Abyss, but I don’t think he caught it.

“Not bad” was all I got back. Fair enough.

I never intended to win. I just wanted to let an adult know I was angry about the spill and that while it faded out of the news cycles, I would remember it for the rest of my life. I still only use Exxon stations in emergencies.

Smash cut to Orcas tipping rich people’s yachts, and I am dying with maniacal laughter. If you had asked me then how to prevent oil tankers from crashing, I would have said stop carrying oil over water; sinking the boss’s personal pleasure yacht seems like a far more eloquent solution that harms considerably fewer people—certainly not anyone who couldn’t afford the inconvenience. To hear scientist have to explain away their actions as playful teenage rebellion and not an open war on the assholes responsible for everyone’s problems is a tasty cherry I could not have picked in a million years. I know they are trying to defend them because some of those psychos would just try and convince the public that whale hunting would be really useful all of a sudden.

What is more terrifying is that some of the public would go along with it, like: ‘My lantern batteries do burn out faster than whale oil lamps did; that makes sense’ on YouTube, and I would have a whole other corner of the interweb to avoid.

Many years from now, some programs currently churning away at a ridiculous amount of data will come back with an answer that will freak adults out. Kids will somehow inherently understand it. I will be dying with laughter.

The creatures that communicate by sensing incredibly complex vibrations underwater could learn our speech far faster than we learn theirs. They don’t have anything else to do but eat and play. We are busy trying to kill each other for small pieces of green paper. Goes to show how intelligent one of those two species is…

We will discover that they were actively trying to help every time some shady shit was going down or being discussed out in the open water (conveniently) too close to a pod’s location…. ‘Flip!’

I can dream. The kind of society we would have to be to provide justice for our own (and currently only) planet is the one that already provides justice to its people. Sadly, we are a long way from there but are trying to point this vessel in the right direction.

I can still dream.