Introduction

The following observations are presented in no particular order, save for that in which they occurred to me. Which is to say that no one item is any more or less important than another, unless of course there is a specific safety issue being discussed, in which case I will make that plain, and expound as necessary. The only preemptive statements I will make by way of establishing credibility in the home repair field are to observe that I own a formidable collection of tools, both manual and powered, and yet I still possess all of my appendages, digits, and assorted extremities, which is more than I can say for my seventh-grade shop teacher.

Safety

Since I’ve brought it up already, a few quick words about safety are in order. In general, as with so many other risk mitigation strategies, it is antithetical to progress. Which is not to say that safety is unimportant or to be cavalierly dismissed, simply that the safer you choose to be, the slower and less productive you will also be. It is left to you to determine the degree of trade-off you are prepared to make in this regard. Think of it another way; driving with a seat belt is safer than without, but it takes time to put the belt on and take it off and your comfort is mildly compromised throughout. Again, your call on the tradeoff.

Safety in home repair work generally takes three forms, things that you wear, things that come attached to your tools, and the degree to which you pay attention to what in the hell you’re doing, this last item being most probably responsible for more accidents and misplaced digits than all other causes combined.  Situational awareness is as important to home repairmen as it is to jet fighter pilots. Junior high school shop teachers love nothing better than a good introductory safety briefing, possibly even more than drivers ed teachers love showing that grisly accident video. Shop teachers don’t typically have the benefit of visual aid (aside from any personal war wounds), so sharing their safety advice comes down to good old fashioned story telling, in this case not unlike the horror stories kids tell around campfires. My favorite is the one about the guy who, interrupted by a friend while he was ripping lumber, insouciantly turned around and hopped up on the table saw for a seat without first turning the saw off…ouch. Again, the general theme is that of awareness.

Then there are a whole host of guards and assorted plastic covers that come attached to your new power tools and which it is your sworn duty to immediately remove prior to powering up the new tool. Most of these guards are intended to prevent kick-back of stock, or to keep dust out of your eyes, or to keep your digits as far away from rapidly rotating blades to the degree possible. While I cannot officially advocate discarding these guards, I will state that it my personal preference to toss them all since they tend to compromise visibility, accuracy, and productivity. I figure I can more than compensate for the lost modicum of safety by paying that much more attention to what in the hell I’m doing.

Other safety-related wisdom that I’ve tended to ignore over the years includes the wearing of safety glasses (which I rationalize with the fact that I always wear normal glasses, which argument lasted me about three decades until a couple of years ago when a small piece of fast-moving aluminum ricocheted off my left cornea. I figure though that I’m good now for another thirty years, so I still rely only on my everyday glasses). It will also be recommended that you tuck in any loose clothing, which is probably good advice, since you wouldn’t want to get sucked into your table saw by the tail of your shirt. That would get real ugly real fast. This particular rule seldom applies to me though, since I live in Houston and am generally working in a garage whose mean temperature is about 110 degrees, meaning that I seldom wear more than a pair of shorts when I work.

The final piece of personal safety advice you may encounter has to do with hearing protection. Most power tools can be pretty noisy, so some sort of ear defenders are not a bad idea, though I only resort to these when doing something prodigiously noisy, like using a router. My hearing is already pretty bad from several years working in close proximity to the jet engines of military aircraft, so I really have nowhere to go but up on this score.

Bottom line on safety—don’t be an idiot. Pay attention to what you’re doing. But if you do manage to bleed, try to keep it off the lumber.

Inescapable Rules of the Shop

There are certain immutable rules that apply to every home repair project or piece of new construction, from the lowliest birdhouse or bit of caulking repair to the most advanced bathroom installation or electrical upgrade. It is best to familiarize yourself with these rules and ultimately to embrace them. Many have gone before you, donating at least their time and, in many cases, their body parts, in order to identify and codify these rules. Ignore them at your peril.

The Laws of Gravity and Associated Energy-Conservation Principles

Blame Isaac Newton, who as far as I know never did any carpentry work, but whose insights set the stage for the rules that govern much of construction these days. If you drop a tool or part, it will, of course, travel downward, caroming off your floor, or any other solid object it happens to encounter en route to your floor, so as to end up either invisible or underneath a piece of large furniture the movement of which will require at least an hour. There is a strong inverse correlation between the object’s size and the difficulty of securely holding onto it, and hence the probability of dropping it[1]. Worth noting as well is the important corollary that if you attempt to catch the falling object before it has come to rest, you will, ninety-nine times out of a hundred[2], simply exacerbate things by deflecting it into an even more obscure or hard-to-reach location. Best one can reasonably hope for is to watch the object fall and keep your eyes on it until it has come to rest, either in-sight or beneath something. Those who have fallen victim to this phenomenon more than once will know as well that if you happen to be in a seated position when you drop the object, you will, with time, develop an automatic reflex whereby the falling object will cause your thighs to instantly slam together in the (usually futile) hope that the falling object will fall onto your lap and remain there.

Therer exist numerous corollaries and extensions of the basic laws of falling objects in a garage or shop. It is well known, for example, that if you have in your possession several identical interchangeable objects, odds are good of you recovering the one you dropped, whereas if the dropped item is unique and irreplaceable, like for example, a specific sort of clip, etc. the one you drop will vanish forever.

Yet another important variation on this topic pertains to objects that fly in directions other than downwards, generally as a result of a strong pent-up force that is suddenly released for some unexpected reason. A classic example is the so-called Jesus clip, neologism for any small spring-steel ring used to prevent rods or other cylindrical objects from sliding out of a hole, i.e. in a similar fashion to the function served by a cotter pin. Inserting or removing a Jesus clip requires the application of tremendous force in a very controlled manner in a very tight space, the usual outcome of which is that the clip flies off the end of the tool at terrific velocity and the only hope you have of ever seeing it again is if it happens to actually lodge in some part of your body (hence the name). This outcome is quite likely even when using the proper tool for the job, and of course a complete certainty when attempting the difficult insertion or removal operation with something other than the correct tool. And because the correct Jesus clip tool is a challenging item to find[3], most home repairmen opt for attempting the removal or replacement operation with needle-nose pliers. This is, to cite an only-somewhat-related medical analogy, the equivalent of attempting a tonsillectomy with a chainsaw.

There is an entire branch of science that addresses dropped, falling and flying objects in the unique physical confines of a shop or garage, and at least one university offers a graduate program of study in this field.

Still More about Newton

When a tooth comes off a spinning table saw blade it will be traveling very rapidly, and it will be sharp, an unfortunate confluence of events and conditions. Given the great velocity at which such failed pieces typical move, the traditional laws of gravity break down over the relatively short dimensions of a typical garage or shop. For while any object will eventually succumb to gravity and make its way to the ground, that saw blade tooth will be traveling in excess of a couple hundred miles an hour and is far more likely to end up in your garage ceiling or wall (or your forehead). Combine this effect with more esoteric tools like dado blades, which not only spin rapidly but also wobble back and forth, and you can get some truly bizarre and unpredictable trajectories.

As a general rule, when metal things (or any things for that matter) fail/break under great pressure (like for example an over-stressed socket or too-highly-torqued pipe wrench) the resulting pieces will generally be sharp and fast-moving. Also, unlike the example of the single saw tooth flying off a table saw blade, in the case of failed wrenches, sockets, etc., there are frequently multiple parts flying in a variety of directions, which makes the whole process of avoiding them that much more challenging.

One more important corollary to the previous item—when that tool fails and breaks, the extreme pressure you’re exerting (which caused the failure) does not immediately abate upon structural failure of the tool, but instead causes your hand/arm to continue moving rapidly in the direction of the applied force (Newton again) until stopped by a solid (and inevitably sharp) surface or object. This almost always results in bloodshed and florid language[4].

Finally, everything discussed in this section gets worse the colder it is outside.

Why Subtraction is Easier than Addition

It is much easier to make a piece of wood (or any material, for that matter) shorter than longer. This is but a different way of expressing the well-known but oft-ignored “measure twice, cut once” aphorism. Similarly, it is easier to increase the diameter of a hole than it is to reduce it. It is remarkable the range of errors that result in wood being cut too short or a hole made too large. Most common among these are:

• Incorrectly converting from English to Metric and/or vice versa.
• For real precision work, not taking into account the width of the saw blade, i.e. cutting down the wrong side of the line you’ve drawn.
• My personal favorite, starting the tape measure at the one-inch mark instead of at its very beginning (a trick for gaining a bit of greater accuracy) but then forgetting to subtract the extra inch from your final measurement[5].

Sadly, it is only when the already-cut piece of wood is being set in place that the error is discovered.

It is worth observing here that both of the aforementioned corrective tasks can, in fact, be accomplished, (i.e. making the piece of wood longer or the hole smaller) but only with extraordinary effort and more than a little skill.

Splinters

Splinters go with woodworking like peanut butter with jelly, except that neither peanut butter nor jelly are particularly inclined to become lodged under your skin, whereas this is the whole raison detre of splinters. As a general rule, splinters come about as a side effect of sanding. Of course there are two kinds of sanding, power and manual. Power sanding doesn’t entail nearly the pain, energy or risk of hand sanding, and so deserves little discussion here aside from a few random thoughts that will come up when we get to the section about power tools in general.

Manual sanding, on the other hand, is an art form in its own right. For starters, it requires the application of significant force, combined with hand movements of a usually quite vigorous yet controlled nature, which any physicist can tell you is a dubious pairing indeed[6]. Throw into this already-fraught mix the fact that many manual sanding jobs take quite a long time and can be fairly boring (which combination often results in a diminution of focus on one’s work), and what you are left with is the extraordinarily high likelihood that you will thrust a large sliver of wood into some part of your hand before you have finished.

One of the first things you learn in basic woodworking is that sanding is to be done in a direction parallel with the grain of the wood[7]. As bad luck would have it, parallel to the grain is also the direction in which splinters orient themselves. The faster you slide the piece of sandpaper along the piece of wood, the deeper into your hand (or, if you’re really lucky, under your fingernail) the splinter will slide. Splinters are of course a necessary part of all woodworking, particularly when dealing with less finished pieces. The best ones manage to lodge themselves entirely beneath the skin, leaving nothing at all sticking out to grasp with tweezers, teeth, etc. This then requires self-performed minor surgery, usually using a utility knife whose sterility is suspect at best. Any such operation in which you manage to remove at least eighty percent of the splinter is generally considered successful.

Milton’s Law of Replacement

If you misplace a tool or part, the quickest (and frequently only) way to locate it is to get into your car and go purchase a replacement, in which case the misplaced item will reappear almost instantly upon carrying the new one into your garage. In 99% of such cases the replacement (and now unneeded) item is never returned to the store but simply hung on a pegboard against the chance of being required someday in the future. A useful corollary to this rule is that when an identical part is lost again at a later date, the previously-purchased replacement item (the one that wasn’t returned to the store) will also not be locatable, engendering yet another trip to the store. This cascading phenomenon is how guys end up owning seven 13mm sockets without knowing where any of them are.

Blood, Sweat and Tears

Blood and sweat play prominent roles in nearly all carpentry work, whereas tears only make an appearance with the occurrence of some truly tragic occurrence, such as, for example, incorrectly cutting that three-hundred-dollar piece of black walnut.

Since most garages tend not to be air-conditioned, sweat is a normal part of any work process lasting longer than thirty seconds. The only time it will play an important part in one’s work will be if it is copious enough to get into your eye at a critical moment, such as exactly when you are making a delicate cut or just pulling the trigger on your nail gun.

Blood is fortunately not as common in everyday home repair work, though I long ago adopted the probably overly-romantic view that any new-construction project worth doing is worth bleeding on at least once. More often than not, the first time you notice that some of your blood is suddenly outside of your body, it will be on the piece of wood you are trying to apply finish to, which is unfortunate since blood is itself an excellent staining agent. If you act quickly, you can generally wipe or sand away the stain before it seeps too deeply into the wood.

Most people’s normal first reaction to discovering the presence of blood (particularly given that quite frequently you will have no knowledge as to how your skin became perforated) is to check that all of your appendages are still attached, intact and functional. Having satisfied this examination, and having ultimately located the source of the leak, it will at this point become apparent that you have no idea where in the hell you put the box of Band-Aids. In fact most project-oriented garages have at least one permanent blood trail on the concrete floor clearly indicating the path that the leaking individual traversed while searching for the goddamned Band Aids.

Drill Bits

It is possible to do an entire book just on the subject of drill bits. The principal attributes common to all of them are that they are sharp and very brittle, which means they break a lot, particularly if misused like all good tools eventually are. A few things to keep in mind:

When a drill bit breaks, the break will always be below the surface of the material being drilled so that you cannot grab the broken-off part with your vice grips and pull it out. And since the hole is exactly where you wanted it and now has a permanent hardened-steel drill bit fragment in its center (which is by definition too hard to drill out with another drill bit), you’re fucked and must throw out the entire piece or significantly modify your design. This is of course mainly the case if the piece you’re working on does not allow access to the back, in which case you can sometimes remove the broken piece from that direction. The foregoing also applies to using threading taps, though even more so, since taps are extremely hard and brittle as crackers and break way more far often than drill bits.

Important side note about drill bits—Much of the energy created by the drilling of that new hole is absorbed by the bit in the form of heat. This heat takes some time to dissipate, particularly if the drilling session has been a long one, the stock is particularly hard, or the bit isn’t as sharp as it once was[8]. Attempting to remove the bit from the chuck before it has cooled off will inevitably result in you holding onto it for about two seconds, realizing that you’re cooking your fingertips, and then throwing the bit violently across the garage, at which point Newton’s laws as discussed above again come into play.

Final note about drills—None of the chuck keys you own will fit any of your drill chucks.

Painting

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Power Tools

Power tools come in two varieties, stationary and portable, the latter of which are further divided into corded and battery-powered. All three of these categories deserve their own discussion, as they each offer their own benefits and pose unique challenges. As a general matter though, things happen much faster with power tools, which is, after all, why you bought them. The wood gets cut faster, the hole drilled faster, etc, etc. Unfortunately, the bad things happen faster as well. No one, so far as I am aware, has ever cut off a finger using a hand saw. Doing so would take rather a long time and most reasonable people would know to stop sometime around reaching the bone. On the other hand, digits can go flying in a blink with any power saw, typically before you even know what has happened. Other things happen much faster with power tools as well, e.g. dust and shavings get created much faster and in far more copious quantities. And finally, mistakes happen much more quickly with power tools, not just the life-threatening kind, but the kind that screw up whatever it is you’re working on[9]. The following observations concerning power tools are ordered from least to most powerful (the tools, not necessarily the observations).

Battery-Powered Hand Tools

These have come a long way in the past ten years. Time was you couldn’t generate enough torque with a battery-powered drill to wind a wrist watch, whereas the principal issues these days are not torque or cutting power, but rather battery life and charging speed. And of course, as with all things involving construction, there are certain immutable laws that apply to this as well. Like, for example, the fact that when you most need your battery-operated tool, the battery is pretty much guaranteed to be dead[10]. The battery tools are also a good deal heavier than their corded counterparts, since you’re lugging around the power source with you. All this said, the moral of the story is that battery stuff is okay for around-the-house chores that don’t require much horsepower or duration. When you’re at a job site and there’s an outlet available, my advice – use it.

Corded Hand Tools

These come in all varieties and have been around pretty much forever, or at least as long as there’s been electricity, maybe a hundred years, give or take.

Stationary Power Tools

The absolute nirvana for any home repair type of guy is the purchase of a good quality stationary tool. Doesn’t matter—drill press, table saw, band saw, joiner, you name it. Nothing gets the male juices flowing quite like a brand spanking new power tool sitting smack in the middle of the garage where the car is supposed to be parked. Everything about the experience, from shopping and comparing scars with the guy at the tool shop, to the first time you fire that puppy up and marvel at the momentary dimming of the lights up and down your block. And of all the tools you can purchase, nothing quite touches the senses like a decent table saw. Yes sir, you combine a shiny new table saw, a good sharp ten-inch, sixty-four-tooth blade and a 2×4 just waiting to be ripped, and mister, you’ve got something there that’ll make a man glad to be alive! It’s all you can do to get a guy in this situation to put on safety glasses or ear protection. You simply don’t want to miss one sensory moment of the entire experience. So what if you go deaf or have to spend the rest of the weekend pulling splinters out of your eyes with tweezers.

But every one of these tools has a special flavor all its own, so each deserves a bit of detailed discussion.

Table Saw

So we’ve already crowned the table saw the king of the stationary power tools. But what do you need to know to be productive and avoid killing yourself while using it? Well, assuming you’ve taken my earlier advice and immediately removed all of the guards, you should be good to go. All you need, aside from the saw itself, is the fence that locks to the table for keeping an edge, and a few different kinds of ancillary pushing tools, all of which serve the laudable purpose of allowing you to complete cuts without getting your fingers anywhere near the blade. This is very important because of all the tools that exist in the world, the one on which bad things happen the most quickly and unexpectedly, the table saw again reigns supreme. A few randomly chosen examples of bad things that can happen when using a table saw:

• You can, of course, cut yourself in all sorts of creative ways, resulting in either minor or very major wounds, depending on your reaction time
• You can be impaled by a piece of wood kicked backward by the blade, since it is turning at high speed in the reverse direction from how you’re pushing the piece of wood. This typically happens when you hit some impediment you didn’t notice in the lumber, e.g. a nail, a knot, or just a damp spot in a piece of treated pine. Most table saw safety manuals will wisely instruct you to hold the work piece while standing to one side. That way, when it kicks back, instead of impaling you it will fly through your garage door or car windshield. Your call.
• You can be blinded or scarred for life by a small piece flying off the main work piece. This can include particles of removed wood, or, in rare instances of poor saw maintenance, one or more teeth from the saw blade itself. As described in the earlier section on Newton’s laws, objects departing a table saw blade tend to do so at great velocity, so much so that you cannot see them coming or take any reasonable steps to get out of harm’s way.
• You can also hurt yourself on a table saw when it isn’t even running, most frequently while changing the blade. Managing the delicate ballet of holding the blade shaft still while working two simultaneous open-end wrenches makes one glad that this isn’t required too terribly often, unless of course you’re one of those dado-blade people, in which case you will either get good at the operation or you will learn to use a router instead.

A few other tips on table saw use:

• It’s possible to put the blade on backwards, but it doesn’t cut nearly as well (think trying to cut your steak with the back of the steak knife).
• If you’re doing finish work (furniture, etc.) keep the side of the wood that you care about facing up. Since the blade is spinning toward you, any little bits that are going to flick off will come off the bottom side.
• Get one of those rolling-pin-on-an-adjustable-height-stand thingies. They are real handy when trying to cut a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood by yourself. Like it isn’t hard enough sighting the pencil mark when holding the other end of the plywood (from eight feet away), it’s really annoying when you get about two thirds of the way through the cut and the far end starts tilting down from the weight of the wood. That’s when the rolling-pin thing comes in handy[11]. Suddenly having to struggle to hold down the remaining third of the sheet of plywood has a way of making you forget momentarily about the blade, which is not good.
• As a general rule, when smoke starts coming out of the saw blade or there are burn marks on the wood after you’re done cutting, this is a subtle hint that maybe it’s time for a new blade. You will also get hints about the increasing dullness of your blade from the gradually increasing effort required to push that piece of lumber through, particularly when doing rip cuts. When the lights in the shop start going dim the harder you push, that’s another hint. Having the breaker blow and the saw quite in mid-cut is pretty annoying, especially if you’re trying to do something precise and accurate.

Chop/Miter Saw

The chop saw is an invaluable tool that is essentially a circular saw on a pivoting head. These typically can be rotated in a number of directions and are especially handy if you do a lot of molding work, hence the more common name Miter Saw. Unfortunate things can happen pretty quickly with one of these as well, particularly since the cuts are not of long duration like with a table saw. There is a tendency to get a little cavalier with the chop saw and pull down the handle very quickly, particularly when lopping 2×4’s in half, that sort of thing. Problem is that quick cuts like this have a habit of removing digits just as quckly if you’re holding something too close to the blade.

Drill Press

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Band Saw

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Router Table/Shaper

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Joiner

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Sander

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Nail Guns

No power tool discussion would be complete without addressing possibly the most fun tool of them all, the nail gun.

The Role of Obscene Language in the Shop

Appropriate methods of cursing….

Examples of Relatively Harmless Misuses of Tools

1. Hitting a nail with the side of the hammer head because you are working in a space too tight to allow a full swing of the traditional hammer head.
2. Easily the most frequent—using a common screwdriver or chisel to open a paint can. It will be news to many that there exists an actual tool for doing this banal job. Useful side note—this is the only tool you can legally obtain for free[12]. They will give you one at the Home Depot paint counter. In all likelihood the free-ness of this tool accounts for its infrequent use.

Examples of Incredibly Dangerous Misuses of Tools

1. My personal favorite – holding a Skilsaw upside down and using it as a table saw.
2. Cutting anything on a chop saw that is smaller than six inches in length while holding it with your fingers.
3. Holding a piece of wood (especially a small one) and lifting it upwards to drill a hole with a drill press (as opposed to mounting the piece of wood to the drill press platform and pulling the drill bit downward).
4. Similar to #3 but way MORE dangerous – holding a small piece of stock in your hand and drilling through it with a power hand drill[13].
5. Placing a piece of pipe over the end of your crescent or open-end wrench in order to gain more torque. This is an excellent way to fracture the wrench and cause numerous sharp, fast-moving fragments to ricochet around your shop.

Lessons I’ve Learned the Hard Way

1. The very first thing everyone should learn about their house is where the master water cut-off valve is located.
2. Never buy a tool belt that has the side pouches attached to the main belt with Velcro.
3. Stop pushing on the piece of wood you’re trying to ram through the table saw with a dull blade just before the circuit breaker blows in your garage (you can tell because the breaker blows about two seconds after the lights start to dim).
4. Don’t use a hammer to pound the lid back on a paint can while wearing any clothes you care about.
5. Don’t apply a fresh coat of polyurethane during mosquito season.
6. Wait a minute or two before trying to remove that drill bit that you just forced through something really hard (it’s hot). Ditto for router bits, saber saw blades, and anything else metal that cuts.
7. You cannot solder a copper pipe that has water in it—especially water under pressure.
8. Do not use a nail gun within three feet of any piece of glass.
9. If you have to replace/repair popcorn texturing on your ceiling, hire someone. Do not, under any circumstances, buy or attempt to use the can of ceiling popcorn texture material they sell at Home Depot. It will end in tears. This is the only substance, so far as I am aware, that is designed so that once it starts flowing (at an insane and uncontrollable velocity) it cannot be stopped until the can is empty.

10.  Never squirt the can of liquid foam into a sealed space. It will expand anyway and something will break or explode somewhere.

11.  Unless you’ve vacuumed and mopped your entire garage floor in the previous five seconds, do not turn on a fan in your garage to help dry that last coat of polyurethane.

12.  Pouring paint thinner on your hands to clean them is an excellent way to find small cuts.

13.  Do NOT fuck with that big spring thingie at the top of your garage door.

14.  A belt sander with No. 40 sandpaper removes stock really quickly, especially pine.

15.  A table saw blade can propel a three-foot 2 x 4 through an aluminum garage door.

16.  When a band saw blade breaks, numerous unpleasant things happen very quickly. Best strategy is drop to the floor and stay low for several seconds.

17.  If you manage to blow a circuit breaker by over-stressing a power tool, make sure the tool is turned off before you reset the circuit breaker. This is rather important since you will not be holding the tool when the power comes back on.

18.  Remember to remove the chuck key before starting the drill.

19.  If you accidentally drop caulking on any surface, trying to clean it off will only make it worse. Let the blob dry completely without touching it, then just pick it off.

20.  Pay the extra money to have someone install your garage door opener.

21.  Don’t cut something with a saber saw that you’re holding on your lap.

22.

Things That Make No Sense about Home Repair

1. A 2 x 4 measures 1 ¾ x 3 ¾ (ditto for 2 x 6, 2 x 8, etc.)
2. The shelf life of a can of PVC pipe glue is about one hour. Don’t buy more than you need right now.

Useful Tips and Tricks

1. When you plug your power tool into that extension cord, tie a half knot in the cords first. That way you won’t pull the tool plug out of the extension cord while you’re up on your ladder. This saves much cursing and many unnecessary trips up and down the ladder.
2. You can get away with using metric sockets on English nuts (and vice versa) so long as you don’t push too hard and don’t mind slightly rounded corners on the nut afterwards.

General Topics to be Addressed

1. Toilet unplugging
2. Retrieving ring from garbage disposal

[2] The one time in a hundred that you do somehow manage to catch the falling object, there will ironically then be some reason for dropping it again, either because it is hot or sharp, or because you will simply be so overcome with emotion at actually having caught it.

[3] And even if you do happen to own one, it will invariably not be the correct size for the clip you are working with.

[4] The role of colorful language in a shop environment is an important one and will be addressed later in its own section.

[5] I haven’t described this very well here, but anyone who’s done woodwork will know that the end of most tape measures is usually attached a bit loosely (typically with a cheap rivet) to the end of the steel tape, resulting in a tiny bit of slop which many purists find unacceptable. To compensate, I, like many, have adopted the habit of aligning the end of the piece of wood with the one-inch mark on the tape, which increases accuracy of measurement, but then requires that I remember to subtract one from my measurement. In this particular example, forgetting the subtraction results in a too-long piece rather than a

too-short one, but the point remains.

[6] I’m going to veer onto dodgy ground here and suggest that Heisenberg has a role in this. Anyone versed in science will know that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle teaches us that we can know either an object’s position or its velocity, but never both simultaneously. Applied to this situation, what it means is that the faster you sand the less likely you will know where the splinters are. I accept, by the way, that this is an entirely inappropriate use of the theorem, since it was intended only to address certain quantum mechanical phenomena and not carpentry. Still it makes for an intuitively pleasing explanation, so I will stick with it for now.

[7] Sanding off-axis (in a direction non-parallel to the grain) only results in the creation of new scratches to the wood’s surface, which, in turn, engenders the need for even more sanding.

[8] Helpful hint: If the tip of your drill bit is glowing red as you drill through the material, consider getting some new drill bits.

[9] See the earlier section on why subtraction is easier than addition.

[10] This rule seems to apply to my cell phone a lot too. I’ll be happy once they finally figure out how to send electricity through the air so that battery tools are just always magically charged up.

[11] Applies to ordinary-sized table saws. If you’re wealthy enough to buy one of those bug honkers with the eight-foot-square table, more power to you.

[12] Unless you regard a paint stirring stick as a tool, which I do not, seeing as how it is nothing but a piece of scrap wood.

[13] I have watched two people in my life backing drill bits out of their hands. It ain’t pretty.

Following is the complete unedited transcript of an extended interview conducted by Rolling Stone Feature Editor Marvin Foxtrap with Detroit Lions punter/place kicker Ryan Mitchell, following his team’s 45-6 loss to the Dallas Cowboys, during which game Mitchell missed 3 field goals, made 2, and punted an NFC single-game record 18 times, of which 3 were blocked, averaging 26 yards per punt.

MF: Ryan, I want to spend a bit of time talking about tonight’s game, but before we get into that I’d like to hear your overall take on the job. Place-kickers get a lot of criticism for having the lightest job on the field. What’re your thoughts on the job?

RM: You are absolutely right. Kickers take a lot of shit from their teammates. But hey, I wear the uniform, just like everybody else on this goddamned team, all right?! I give it up just as much as anybody else out there….well, all right, maybe not quite as much as some of the others, but I leave it all on the field, you know. And who’s the guy that’s the only thing between them and having to defend from their own friggin’ five-yard line?? Me! The punter…that’s right. Fuck…

Always whining about their pain and how it takes an hour to get out of bed every Monday morning. You think it’s fun having your ACL stretched so tight it’s like a fucking piano string? You think it’s fun having eleven guys trying to leap the hell on top of you while you’re in the middle of a hundred and eighty degree groin split and you can’t even see it coming? And couldn’t do jack shit about it even if you did see it coming?

Oh, I know what everybody thinks about kickers. Yeah, I know…don’t think I don’t know. I hear it from the team, from the coaches, sportscasters, freakin’ everybody right down to the last retard out there playing fantasy football. I’m not an idiot, all right. Yeah, that’s right—I’m one of the guys who got an actual goddamned diploma while I was in college, not some piece-of-shit kinesiology degree. Majoring in gym class for Christ’s sake….what a fucking joke. I didn’t have to subject myself to this shit, you know. I could have gotten a real job instead of listening to these guys laughing their steroid-hardened asses off in the locker room every fucking Sunday just because my uniform isn’t as shit-stained as theirs after the game.

I’ve taken a few licks too you know. Like just last week that fuck Winchester or Westchester or whatever the hell his name is plays left guard for the Redskins—Guy blindsides me two goddamned seconds after I’ve kicked the ball. I mean, honest to Christ, the ball’s already been caught, the guy’s run it back ten yards and been tackled. The play’s blown fucking dead and this guy’s still knocking me on my ass. Funny shit, all right. Ha fucking ha. Bent my damned index finger all to hell falling down, besides which he shat up my new uniform…big fucking grass stain all down the right thigh. You think that shit washes right out, do you? The son of a bitch hits me so late the refs are all the way back down the field where the ball is, so of course no one sees shit up at my end.

Oh, oh, and how many times has my almost completely unpadded ass had to actually tackle the fucker running the ball back—my own kick, thank you very much—because the ten of them are such spazzes that not one of ‘em can get their friggin’ hands on him??? Four times this season so far—four fuckin’ times. Do I look like a free safety to you? Do I? Shit, it’s like watching that part of a rodeo where the kids are chasing the damned calves around.

Oh, and as long as we’re getting stuff out on the table here, before anyone starts giving me shit about being just a dumb-ass kicker, remember there’s a reason they call it football, all right? Do you see anybody else out there actually kicking the goddamned ball? With his foot? Do you? I don’t think so…

And don’t even get me started on that dickweed Henderson and his holding. Jesus, it’s a miracle I managed to get two field goals tonight. No wonder the guy got demoted from QB to place-kick holder. He couldn’t hold his own ass with both hands. Dumb shit holds the ball like he has Parkinson’s or something. I’d do a better job just drop-kicking the fucking thing. Laces out, ball tilted back a little—is that asking too much? Jesus, my grandmother could do it. Damned candy-ass is afraid I’m going to kick him in the hand again. I tell you, you make one mistake and some bastards never let you forget it. And every time I say something about it, all I get is how shitty Paulsen’s long snaps are. Look, I don’t give a damn about all the lame excuses. I expect to take three steps and kick the goddamned ball, not listen to some overpaid prima donna whine about his fucking long-snapper.

I’m sorry—what was the question again??

MF: No worries. I think you covered it pretty well. Talk about your punting tonight. Eighteen punts in one game. That’s a lot of three-and-outs. Probably more field time than you’ve had all season.

RM: Well, it sure as hell felt like it. Ten punts just in the first half. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the practice and all, but c’mon—could we generate a little offense maybe? You see that score? You see our six fuck-all points? A hundred and twenty nine million dollars worth of payroll prancing around on that goddamned field and who scores the only points of the night? The league-fucking-minimum place kicker—that’s who! But do I get so much as a thank-you? Take a guess…

MF: It’s not often you hear NFL players willing to publicly criticize their fellow team members, or even their team as a whole. Do you think there could be repercussions from your comments here tonight?

RM: Yeah, well it’s not often I get knocked flat on my ass seven times in one game either. The only person who spent more time on the ground than me tonight was the QB, who by the way has gotten pretty used to that position this season, in case you hadn’t noticed. Besides, what’s gonna’ happen? You think the team is going to think any less of me if I bitch about how they did tonight? They don’t give a rat’s fuzzy ass about me to begin with. You think they’re going to stop blocking the punt rush and just let the defense through? Shit, that’d be a hell of a change, huh? What? Am I gonna’ get a wedgie in the locker room or something? This isn’t fucking high school, though you wouldn’t know it to see some of these pinheads play.

MF: You mentioned your compensation a minute ago. How is it that a place kicker in his ninth year in the league is still making league minimum?

RM: Two words—dipshit agent. I guess that’s three…I don’t know…whatever. First of all, let’s set the record straight about something. Agents aren’t exactly falling all over themselves to represent kickers, all right. I think my agent moonlights representing romance novel authors or something. Way I see it, it’s a goddamned miracle I even get a paycheck with the lame-ass crowds we draw. And don’t get me wrong here—I get that seven hundred large is a lot of money for a guy who spends maybe thirty seconds a game on the field and who hardly ever gets touched by the other team. I get that. I’m not an idiot, all right.

It doesn’t help that I happen to play for the shittiest team in the league—not the division, mind you—the whole honest-to-Christ NFL. Closest we’ve ever come to the playoffs was hosting the Super Bowl in our stadium four years ago. And it was all I could do to even get a handful of tickets to the fucking game! My own damned stadium. I mean how lame do you have to be for the league’s best running back ever to just say fuck it and walk away at the height of his career, twenty yards or whatever away from setting the all-time rushing record. From what I can tell, Barry’d rather be washing dishes at Bennigan’s than playing with this bunch of scrubs.

MF: Talk a little about the stress of the job. Seems to come down to that last-second kick a fair percentage of the time. How do you prepare for that moment after you’ve spent most of the game standing on the sideline?

RM: Yeah, ain’t it funny how that happens? I’m the guy nobody gives a fat rat’s ass about until there’s three seconds left and we’re down by two points and on the other guy’s forty yard line. Oh sure, Ryan, it’s only a fifty-five yarder and the wind’s blowing like a fucking typhoon left to right. Oh and by the way they’ve replaced their nose guard for this one play with some washed-up ex-NBA center who’s seven-foot-five. But hey, what the fuck, go on out there and knock yourself out. We’re all counting on you, buddy. Now suddenly I’m everybody’s buddy.

Yeah, it’s a little stressful, I guess. I mean it’s one thing to stand there on the sideline kicking the ball into that freakin’ little net over and over. It’s quite another to go out there with seventy thousand screaming fans, and five thousand of ‘em waving those goddamned plastic noisemaker things in the end zone behind the goal. I mean shit they may as well set off fireworks during the kick while they’re at it. Couldn’t make it any worse. Nothing much you can do to actually prepare, I guess. I mean I’m not into zen or meditation or any of that shit, if that’s what you’re asking. Hey maybe next game that’s what I’ll do. I’ll take off my helmet and tie one of those kung-fu bandannas around my head. Maybe I can hire some Mr. Miyagi guy to walk out there with me and we can light some incense or something right before the kick. That’d freak everybody out, right?  Or…or maybe I’ll do like that black guy from the Major League movie who walks up to the plate with a paper bag over his head. Fans’d go nuts for that shit, I’ll bet.

MF: Did you ever go in for the barefoot kicking thing?

RM: Not if I wanted my career to last more than half an hour. You ever walked on a football field in Detroit in December? I’m thinking not. Kicking that fucking ball is like kicking the side of a damned pickup truck. There’ve been days when I thought about wearing steel toes out there, except that I’d probably blow my knee out trying it.

MF: Speaking of which, you’ve managed to enjoy a relatively injury-free career.

RM: Yeah, no thanks to my teammates. Worst I ever had was a hyper-extended knee once. Green Bay game six years ago. I must have done something wrong when I was stretching out, because I’ll tell you, I kicked that ball a freakin’ mile. But, man, when that calf just kept on rotating up past the point where your knee is supposed to lock, well let me tell you, that is some kind of fun. Go back and watch it on slow-mo. Still hurts me just to watch it. And then, don’t you know it, just to add insult to injury, some douche from the Packers falls the fuck on top of me while I’m already laying their writhing around. I tell you, it’s a hell of a way to make a living. Kind of like what they say about airline pilots—hours of boredom interspersed with a few occasional seconds of sheer terror.

MF: What do you see happening after you’re done playing ball?

RM: Well, since I’ll be a retired pro athlete, I’m pretty sure the law requires that I either open a bad restaurant or buy a car dealership. I’m sure as hell not going out on the autograph circuit. I don’t want to be the pathetic washed-up kicker sitting there at some card table in a Holiday Inn signing footballs for fifty bucks a throw. Maybe I’ll get into broadcasting; that’s every jock’s wet dream, right? But how many actually pull it off? Problem is there are these little requirements that sort of go with the job, you know, like being able to talk in complete sentences, and also not looking like a guy who’s had his nose broken eight or ten times. So unless you’re Marino or some loud obnoxious ex-coach like Madden, that’s a pretty low-odds route. Hell, I don’t know. I’m not too worried about it right now. Shit, I’m only thirty-six. Frickin’ Blanda kept kicking ‘til he was in his fifties for Christ’s sake. That’s one good thing about this job, I guess. Maybe I stick around long enough I can break the record for punts in a career! Guess that’s one advantage to playing your whole career for a shitty team. Hell, these other kickers, the ones on teams that actually have offenses, they might only get to punt four or five times in a game. Me, I’m pretty much guaranteed to be in double digits every Sunday. Silver lining to every cloud, right?!

MF: So all in all you’re okay with how your career has gone?

RM: I suppose you could say that. In kinda’ the same way that OJ or Sanders were okay with their careers. Playing your entire career for a crappy team can be a really irritating thing. Not to say, by the way, that I’m comparing myself to those guys. I guess the only thing more frustrating than being just an okay player like me and playing your entire career with a shitty team would be to be a fantastic player and have to put up with that. I mean I get that I’m not exactly Yepremian or someone like that. I mean not only was he the best damned kicker maybe ever, but he also had the smarts to get his ass out of Detroit the second he got the opportunity.

MF: And would you take a trade if it were offered?

RM: Well it would have to be to a better team than where I’m at now, which would mean basically any other team in the league. So yeah, I suppose I would.

MF: Ryan, thanks for your time, and best of luck chasing that total career punts record. Only three hundred and twelve left to go to catch Feagles.

RM: Thanks Marvin. At the rate we’re going, I ought to have it pretty much locked up by about the middle of next season.

We who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction.

Denise Levertov

Let me begin by stating, for the record, that I was more than a little hacked off when I heard about David Foster Wallace hanging himself last year. Just to be clear, this initial reaction wasn’t a sad or mournful thing; I was genuinely pissed: at him, his doctors, his family, anyone who could plausibly be blamed for his abject failure to successfully handle a life replete with talent, fame and money, all things so many long for and so few actually have[1]. Wallace, however, spent much of his life in some state of depression, much of it heavily medicated, and he, not surprisingly, had a difficult time writing effectively unless under the influence of one or more anti-depressants he was being prescribed at any given moment[2]. To be fair, I don’t think Wallace can be accused of succumbing to some mere psychosomatic misunderstood-artist syndrome, or that his suicide attempt (there were several) was any sort of stereotypical cry for help or attention or whatever. The guy was genuinely sick for much of his life, and apparently wasn’t getting any better despite having pursued several different avenues of palliative endeavor[3]. All that said, the world has still lost a tremendous talent, arguably the finest essayist of the twentieth century. Once I got over the annoyance, I was, and continue to be, genuinely saddened by his death.

Find any photo of Wallace, watch video of his readings and interviews, and you can see it in his eyes, clear as day[4]. It’s like there’s this other person struggling to get out. Not to get all psychoanalytical or anything, but if you can buy the idea that creativity is simply the manifestation of a big pile of ideas inside a person that are trying anything they can to get out, then it’s not much of a leap to imagine as well that, like any closed system, the greater the pressure, the more likely it is that at least some of what’s inside (the creativity) is going to eventually work its way out. The more pressure, the greater the flow of ideas[5]. But there I go, committing one of the cardinal sins of expository analysis, anthropomorphizing a general physical law[6] like thermodynamics[7]. It’s not as though the guy was a teapot. Still, when you close up something tightly that’s under a lot of pressure, and you don’t let any of that pressure out, it’s pretty certain that eventually it will explode[8]. Perhaps writing was simply Wallace’s way of trying to vent some of that stress.

Much has been written, most notably in psychological texts, concerning purported links between extreme creativity and a propensity for mental illness in general, depression in particular, and self-destruction in extremis. It is not the purpose of this essay to get all Emile Durkheim on anyone or to try to explain suicide and what drives people to it. I am supremely unqualified to expound on or in any way contribute to a deeper understanding of the technical nuances of biochemical phenomena in the human brain, and I will not attempt to do so. The goal of this analysis is simply to explore a few of the better-known cases in which enormously creative and accomplished individuals have ultimately succumbed to whatever profound force it is that makes someone end their own life. Perhaps some similarities among the various cases will reveal themselves, in addition of course to the creativity thread that ties the whole thing together.

I write quite a lot—essays, fiction, poetry. I also take an occasional stab at music, not writing anything, just learning to play the occasional song. I do these things because I deeply enjoy doing them, not because anyone is paying me to, or even particularly asking me to. There is a certain degree of luxury and freedom attending that state of affairs, because it means that whenever I feel like stopping, I can just stop. It also means I’m not facing publisher’s deadlines, critical reviews or big readings, none of the things that might cause a reasonable person some modicum of stress. Many’s the time I’ve wondered how I would respond if I were faced with an actual writing deadline. I don’t know, but my gut tells me it wouldn’t go well. That said, I’m not aware of anyone who ever killed themselves over a deadline. I expect it goes far deeper than that.

I believe as well that the main driver of creativity-driven suicide stems from stress, which is possibly the most self-evident statement anyone has ever written. But here’s the thing—writing is an inherently solitary undertaking, at least for most people. You sit by yourself for hours and hours[9], and if you’re lucky when you get up there are some more or less coherent words on the page that weren’t there when you first sat down. I think that because writers function so well by themselves, when stress—self-imposed or otherwise—does actually rear its head, for whatever reason, their first reaction is not to go and discuss it with someone else, but rather to internalize it. Doesn’t mean they’re incapable of holding a conversation with others, only that it’s not their first reaction.

Wallace made many excellent points during his 1997 Charlie Rose interview. One particularly poignant comment addressed the fundamental dichotomy whereby, on the one hand, the writer is this nerdy recluse who likes to hole up in an office or library, doing his/her own thing for endless periods of time, and on the other hand is this insecure closet attention junkie who is constantly putting work out into the public domain in the desperate hope that there will accrue some measure of acclaim and recognition. And these are two alarmingly different ways to be, psychologically speaking, so much so that attempting to strike a balance between the two might plausibly lead to its own stress-induced outcome. He went on to observe, in response to a question about his potential interest in writing a screenplay, that part of the attraction of writing fiction is that it is one hundred percent one’s own, and that, unlike screenplays or dramas, the success or failure of fiction is entirely within the control of the author[10], an aspect of writing that he found not only unique, but altogether compelling. What he didn’t say, though it was certainly implicit in his remarks, is that because the work is entirely one’s own, so too is the stress associated with getting it done and then responding to the ensuing public reaction[11].

Having spent many years of my life in the corporate world, I can vouch for the profound levels of stress that such a life can engender. There is the stress of project deadlines, the stress of public speaking, and of course the stress that attends spending each day surrounded by incompetent, sycophantic co-workers and egomaniacal and capricious superiors. The common thread in all of this is that these forms of stress all eminate largely from external sources. There are many ways in which corporate individuals deal with such stress, some more effective than others. On the positive side, some practice effective time management techniques, establish candid peer-to-peer relationships with co-workers[12], or take the occasional vacation to unwind. On the rather less positive side, some indulge in verbal abuse of fellow employees, alcoholism, self loathing, and, with luck, an early-onset heart attack—again, all in response to forces essentially outside the individual’s control.

Writers, on the other hand, indeed artists in general, live with much the same sort of stress, but in many cases manage to inflict it on themselves. And because they’re doing it to themselves, and because they, by and large, do not have co-workers that can be abused, many tend, instead, to engage in all sorts of self-destructive behaviors, the milder varieties of which include smoking[13], drug abuse, eating bad food, keeping odd hours, and acting generally sociopathic on those occasions when they do encounter other humans. And in the most extreme cases, the result can be self-destruction. I suspect, watching this tenuous thread of logic unwind, that the reason so many artistic types are regarded as such dicks is that they are simply doing their best to manage stress and anxiety, with the next best alternative being to put a pistol in their mouth.

Particularly notable assholes among the literary ranks include Robert Frost[14] and Ernest Hemingway, neither of whom could apparently handle being around other people for more than a minute or two before unleashing a torrent of invective, and doing so, one imagines, with a good deal more skill than the average misanthrope, given their penchant for language. The historical record suggests that Frost, who died at the ripe if curmudgeonly age of eighty-eight, did rather a more effective job of venting and stress relief than did Hemingway, who died at sixty-one, his final act the forcible removal of his head with a Boss twelve-gauge shotgun.

The sorts of stress artists impose on themselves take many forms, some more serious than others. I will argue, with little to corroborate the view aside from my gut, that the most profound, and ultimately destructive, form of self-induced stress stems from a lack of satisfaction with the quality of one’s own work. One of the reasons most highly regarded artists get that way is because of the exacting standards to which they hold themselves. For writers this takes the form of endless editing and rewriting[15] before at some point grudgingly declaring a piece complete[16]. Some, as it happens, are better than others at recognizing the tenuous boundary between being demanding of oneself and being neurotic. It doesn’t help matters any when one is particularly susceptible to certain inevitable externalities of the artistic life, i.e. sales success, and the critiques and opinions of others.

Which is as appropriate a point as any to introduce into the discussion the issue of professional peaking. Most people who live in the normal (i.e. non-artistic) world have career arcs that tend to see their earnings and professional reputation rise in a more or less linear fashion from the day they graduate[17] until the day they retire, or perhaps a few years before, depending on one’s degree[18] of comfort with a bit of late-career coasting. There are, however, numerous examples of writers whose most highly regarded work happens very early in their careers, and who then spend the rest of their lives struggling to live up to a reputation established by this early success[19]. Much has been made of the stress attending the “sophomore” efforts of writers whose initial publication achieves some unexpected measure of recognition, particularly if the writer wins a major literary award or is, as a consequence of that first favorable reception, subsequently identified as being filled with promise, the newest, most vibrant voice of his/her generation, etc. Writing history is replete with examples of authors whose second novels were regarded as disappointments given how their first ones had done. There can be few things in life more fraught with stress than having to sit back down at the writing table the day after giving your Booker or Pulitzer acceptance speech.

John Kennedy Toole’s case is particularly poignant[20]. He wrote A Confederacy of Dunces while teaching at Dominican College in New Orleans. His subsequent efforts to get the novel into print were fruitless, and, despondent, Toole killed himself at the age of thirty one. His mother, Thelma Toole, possessed of a good deal more vigor and tenacity than her son, subsequently managed to get the book published by Louisiana State University Press, and Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for what is, almost certainly, the funniest novel ever written in the English language. One can only conclude, given the facts of the case[21], that Toole was a singularly fragile[22] individual to begin with and ill equipped to deal with anything that smacked of failure[23].

In some regards though, Toole’s case appears a good deal more straightforward than the other well known literary suicides, in that it seems causally centered around the fate of a single work and the inability to get it published. Conversely, once one has a look at the cases of Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf , and Anne Sexton, all authors with significant bodies of work completed prior to their deaths[24], things become a good deal murkier, motivationally speaking.

Sexton, for starters, seems to have been pretty much doomed from the outset. She battled depression her entire life, and, oddly, her long-time therapist Martin Orne recommended she take up writing poetry for therapeutic purposes. Later in life, Orne was replaced with a second therapist with whom Sexton subsequently had an affair, which arrangement is thought to have contributed materially to her eventual suicide.[25] The key difference between Sexton’s case and most others is that rather than being driven to self-destruction by her art, it seems her psychological wheels were already well on the way to falling off the track from a young age.[26] One might even have thought that Sexton’s particular brand of self-absorbed, confessional poetry would have served a palliative purpose, a venting or release of various internal pressures if you will. Still, her issues must have been serious and systemic, for the writing[27] was formidable and she achieved recognition in what seems, compared to most famous authors, a relatively easy fashion.[28] Her final volume, The Awful Rowing Toward God, had just been completed around the time of her death, its title offering perhaps a hint as to her mental state for anyone curious enough to have given it a look.

One has to give Virginia Woolf bonus points for creative interpretation of the whole suicide-as-art genre. It’s one thing simply to leap off a bridge in despair. Depending on the height of the overpass, you are either dead or unconscious upon striking the water. But to take the time to weight one’s self down and then walk slowly and methodically into a river. That requires a certain special level of commitment, given how easy it is at any given moment to chicken out and change your mind. Even the redoubtable Quentin Compson, Faulkner’s anti-hero from The Sound and the Fury, couldn’t manage the gumption to walk straight into the Charles once he got fed up with Harvard. And the whole river as giver of life[29] metaphor thing to boot—good luck competing with that with your shotgun.

You can get a pretty good sense for Virginia Woolf’s mental state (or what it was destined to become) by taking one quick look at the photo of her mother, Julia Stephen, taken by Julia Margaret Cameron. If you’ve seen the original Carrie movie[30] and recall Piper Laurie’s role, you’ll get the idea. Virginia grew up in a household of social and academic achievement and must surely have experienced great pressure to measure up from a young age. Her mother died when the girl was only thirteen, leading to the first of what would become several nervous breakdowns. She was purportedly sexually abused by a pair of half-brothers from a young age, and suffered another breakdown, including some brief institutionalization upon the death of her father. In an odd congruence of familial fate, she seems to have been drawn to a life of literature by precisely those forces and circumstances that created and reinforced her continuing mental instability. Her life was in fact filled with overlapping contradictions. She was labeled an anti-Semite despite being happily married to a Jew. Her fiction was accused of lacking depth and breadth for its focus on the elite of Britain, yet her literary influence resonates to this day for its innovation and virtuosity.

Ernest Hemingway’s earliest published short story, The Indian Camp[31], is held up as a quintessential example of Hemingway’s enduring fascination with self-destruction, in this case as witnessed by his alter-ego, the young Nick Adams, who accompanies his father to assist with a difficult child birth, only to witness as well the simultaneous suicide of the child’s father as the infant is being delivered. If one took the liberty of associating the delivery of the baby[32] with the creation of a difficult literary work, then the suicide of the work’s (baby or book) creator would seem to suggest a thing or two about the arc of Hemingway’s subsequent life. It is easy as well to envision Hemingway’s generally grim state of mind by the simple consideration of a quote from his later work Death in the Afternoon, to wit “If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”

It is insightful, if ultimately misleading, to have a momentary look at the history of self-destruction in the Hemingway family. While suicide was clearly on the author’s mind as far back as the early twenties, the suicide of his father in the late twenties could only reinforce a burgeoning fascination with the theme. Throw into the mix the suicide of his first wife’s father and Hemingway’s prescient comment at the time (“I’ll probably go the same way”). It appears as well that there was at least one physiological cause behind Hemingway’s suicidal tendencies, a genetic disease he shared with his father[33], and which may, as well, have contributed to the suicides of his sister Ursula, brother Leicester, and perhaps even granddaughter Margaux much later. Factor into this already inauspicious genealogy Hemingway’s lifelong alcoholism and the considerable physical pain in which he spent the latter years of his life[34], and it becomes nigh impossible to posit any compelling chain of cause and effect for his death.

All of which brings us at last to Hunter Thompson, the all-time undisputed king of making a statement with one’s suicide, not to mention the post-suicide festivities. Apparently Thompson had decided at some earlier point in his life that fifty was about as old as he considered himself entitled to live, and when he woke up one day to find himself at sixty-seven, it all felt rather unfair or superfluous or something, and that was that. He was ever the considerate type though. Like Hemingway, he shot himself in the head[35], but he had the common courtesy to first phone his wife and then shoot himself while she was on the line[36]. This selfless act doubtless speaks to some fundamental aspect of his personality, but damned if I can figure out which one. One of the strongest themes of Thompson’s life was a profound problem with authority and it’s not much of a stretch to imagine the suicide as being his own special way of offering a final “fuck you” to the world—fans, critics, everyone. Compared to the other cases examined in this treatise, I find it difficult to feel bad about Thompson. Ending things the way he did just feels right for him. On top of which, he arranged, before his death, to have his ashes fired from a cannon set atop a 153-foot tower. Along with his ashes, they set off colorful fireworks as well, and did so to the music of Bob Dylan, et al. I’m envisioning all of this as a sort-of “can you top this?” kind of moment for a guy who spent a good deal of his life trying to top what others had done. Like I said, hard to feel sorry for the guy[37].

To be fair, I hadn’t given a great deal of thought to this whole writer/suicide thing prior to learning of Wallace’s death. I think, for that matter, that one would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that authors are systemically more prone to self destruction than practitioners in any other career field[38]. The fascination, the intuitive link, to the extent that it exists, would seem to stem from the largely solitary nature of the writing profession juxtaposed with the logical, if ultimately mistaken, linkages one is tempted to draw between solitariness, loneliness, and a desire, in especially extreme cases, to do oneself in. Throw into this already-incendiary mix the extremely high rate of external opinion and criticism[39] that attends the writing life, and one would seem to have a recipe for a positive flurry of self destruction. The real news in all of this may then be the fact that so many willingly undertake this lifestyle and seem generally to have a pretty positive go of it. And to the extent that the occasional writer does end his/her life prematurely, it looks as though the writing, and/or criticism one receives in response to it, can, at worst, be indicted as a catalyst that sets into motion a reaction whose inevitability was established at the time of the author’s birth or very early in life. One intriguing final observation—given that nearly all suicides, regardless of vocation, feel compelled, despite their overpowering despondency, to leave a written statement as their very last act on earth, one has cause to wonder if the very act of writing might not be, in the end, an act of salvation, either in this life or the next.

[2] Phenelzine among others. Wallace writes with far-too-well-informed clarity about depression and associated pharmaceuticals in his magnum opus Infinite Jest, e.g. pp. 68-78.

[3] He even attempted electro-convulsive therapy near the end of his life.

[4] The Charlie Rose interview of March 27, 1997 reveals all sorts of nervous ticks and general agitation suggesting a mind not exactly at peace with itself.

[5] Not sure if this whole causal/metaphorical thread, i.e. creativity equals pressure and vice versa, is in any way related to another pervasive idea concerning artists in general and writers in particular, to wit that you can’t be a successful artist/writer unless you grew up abused, impoverished, or otherwise miserable. Perhaps a follow-up essay…

[6] One of the more popular examples of this phenomenon is misuse of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal, which emerged from quantum mechanical theories developed in the mid-twenties and which is frequently (and incorrectly) invoked whenever someone is uncertain about pretty much anything. The theory only applies if you are a subatomic particle that also happens to behave in a wavelike manner, and how many of us can say that about ourselves?

[7] In the foregoing example, Boyle’s Law, first published in 1662, inversely relating the pressure and volume of a gas at fixed temperature. Boyle, so far as I am aware, while doubtless a clever individual in his own right, made no mention in his research or subsequent conclusions concerning the forces that might drive a creative person to self-destruction.

[8] Or at least spring a leak someplace.

[9] Unless, that is, you’re like me and have the attention span of a parakeet, in which case you write for five minutes, get up and do something else, then come back and write for five more minutes, etc, etc.

[10] Issues of subsequent criticism, marketing and publicity notwithstanding.

[11] It is at this point I would theorize that this stress, whether self- or externally-imposed, accounts for a sizable percentage of writer’s block, about which so much has been written, and which I have had the pleasure (one supposes) of seldom having felt, most likely because of never having had to write to an actual deadline.

[12] The most extreme example of which are the Myers-Briggs personality tests, ostensibly designed to help you better understand your own personality type and thus interact more effectively with others. ISTJ, for anyone who’s wondering…

[13] I’ve always been struck by the enormous percentage of authors who feel the need to have their book jacket photos taken with a cigarette in their hand.

[14] Whose view of the world is piquantly summed up by his observation that “it goes on.” He is occasionally credited (incorrectly) with the slightly more trenchant “life sucks and you die,” an aphorism in fact attributable to that most ebullient of philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer.

[15] Particularly stressful for some is the need to deal with editors, whose efforts frequently include the omitting of substantial portions of a draft piece of writing from the final product. It is easy to become attached to one’s writing, and being obliged to jettison some of it is not an easy thing. Case in point: Jeffrey Eugenides, author of the Pulitzer-winning novel Middlesex, which comprises a hefty 529 pages, had in his original draft over 1500.

[16] Aside from several works of some artistic merit, Leonardo da Vinci is noted as well for observing that “art is never finished, only abandoned.”

[17] From whatever it is that they graduate from.

[18] Or one’s employer’s degree

[19] Notable examples include Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead,” (written at age 25), and John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” (also written in his early 20’s).

[20] Perhaps even ironic, given the hilarity and general joie de vivre of his novel juxtaposed against the apparent desperation of his life. The hands-down gold medal winner though for ironic artistic suicide would have to be Felix Powell, the World-War-One-era British Staff Sergeant, who while no literary titan, did, during the heat of battle, manage to etch his name lightly on history’s guest book by penning the music to “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile” right before shooting himself through the heart with his own rifle.

[21] Details of which are contained in the seminal biography of his life Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole by Rene Pol Nevils and Deborah George Handy, LSU Press, 2001.

[22] The doted-upon only son of a domineering mother—hard to imagine. There is also spurious and largely unfounded speculation concerning Toole’s comfort level with his sexuality, but we won’t go there.

[23] Rather the exact opposite of Ignatius Riley, in yet another ironic twist to the whole grim affair.

[24] National Book Award winner and terribly talented writer Jerzy Kosinski (Being There, etc.), another prominent inductee in the writer/suicide pantheon, is conspicuously omitted from this list. He was a seriously ill individual and in a great deal of pain near the end of his life. The facts suggest no mental instability, but rather the simple desire to end his physical torment with some measure of dignity and self-determination.

[25]Garage, exhaust. Take that, Billy!

[26] Greased, as it were, by what appears to have been a pattern of parental violence, which abuse Sexton then dutifully passed on to her own two daughters.

[27] Eight poetry collections, a bit of drama, and four children’s books—go figure.

[28] Within twelve years of first putting pen to paper she had won a Pulitzer and been made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Not exactly the path of suffering and sacrifice that seems to characterize so many authors and aspirants.

[29] Or in this case, taker…

[30] 1976, Brian De Palma director, based on Stephen King’s first novel.

[31] Included in the American edition of In Our Time, Hemingway’s first collection of stories, published in 1925 by Boni & Liveright

[32] By cesarean section, as it happens, which would seem to solidify the veracity of the posited metaphor.

[33] Hemochromatosis, in which the inability to metabolize iron causes mental and physical deterioration.

[34] He was quite accident prone and lived a fairly high-risk lifestyle to boot. He endured numerous concussions later in life, and at one point had the dubious distinction of being seriously injured in two different plane crashes on successive days.

[35] In a nice piece of artistic circularity, Thompson visited Ketchum, Idaho in 1964 to spend a bit of time investigating the story behind Hemingway’s suicide. Being the immersive, gonzo sort of journalist that he was…well, let’s just say that when all was said and done he took Hemingway’s technique a bit more literally than was called for.

[36] He had also invited his son and daughter-in-law over for the big weekend, lest they feel left out of an important family event.

[37] While unable to figure out how to work his story into the preceding narrative, I feel compelled to at least acknowledge the case of the poet Hart Crane, who killed himself by leaping from a tour boat somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. Crane appears to have tried to live his life in the schismatic and ultimately futile mode of being both gay and straight, the ultimate denouement of which was to be savagely beaten on the tour boat for coming on to one of the male crew members while simultaneously having an affair with Peggy Cowley, the ex-wife of a good friend. On top of all this drama, Crane considered his entire artistic life’s work a failure (which assessment apparently many contemporaries agreed with), meaning that anyone who knew the guy could have pretty much seen his end coming from a mile away.

[38] There is, for example, a great deal of hue and cry currently going on within the dental community in response to the prevailing view that dentists are inordinately prone to self-destruction. Not sure what this is all about, but the industry is taking it seriously enough to publish articles of rebuttal in recent issues of the Journal of the American Dental Association.

[39] A good deal of it negative, either in the form of rejection letters or unfavorable critiques of the pieces that do get published.

When a complete stranger voluntarily spends enormous amounts of time and energy working to convince you to spend money on something you neither need nor want, that’s marketing. It is the very essence of capitalism, as vital to the free flow of wealth (from you to them) as the invention of cash[1] itself. And no matter how you feel about marketing—supportive, jaded, or ambivalent—it is absolutely critical that you understand how it works, because whether you acknowledge it or not, it is taking place all around you, every minute of every day. In fact, it is being done to you, whether you want it to be or not. And the people who are doing it to you aren’t only the professionals, though there are certainly plenty of those. It is also being done to you by your friends, your family, your colleagues at the office, everyone you know. There isn’t one damned thing you can do about it except to understand how it works and be as vigilant as possible. And while you’re at it, with a fair degree of self-awareness and a bit of creativity, you can also have yourself a bit of fun.

First, though, a word about terminology and semantics. Many perfectly serviceable business texts and academicians go to great pains to distinguish marketing from sales. I will not draw, nor even acknowledge, that particular distinction in this discussion, except to say that sales is the purely mechanical front-end of marketing. The salesman is simply the individual who presents to you all the marketing-derived reasons for why you should want to acquire something that you don’t currently have. Put bluntly, sales is nothing but the process by which money gets transferred from your pocket into someone else’s, none of which would be remotely possible without all those forces that are created and stirred up by marketing, many of which we will explore forthwith.

So, what exactly is marketing? It is, plainly put, the science of making you want something. It is as vital to commerce as oxygen is to life, because if you don’t want something, then as a practical matter there is no force compelling you to purchase it[2]. And it is important to distinguish want in this context from need. There are very few things we as humans truly need aside from air, food, water, and shelter. Need is about survival. But once we start distinguishing one sort of food from another, or declaring one person’s shelter superior to another, then we are squarely in the realm of marketing. Go all the way back to day one and you will discover that God himself started the whole marketing thing there in the garden, employing one of the most effective techniques of all time, i.e. making the first man and woman want something by telling them they couldn’t have it[3]. There was no surer way of getting Adam and Eve to eat from that tree than telling them it was off-limits. If he hadn’t said a word about the tree, they never would have known the difference and history would be very different today[4]. Steve Jobs knows his history[5], and he knows that the surest way to generate hysterical demand for the newest iPhone is to spread the word that you can’t get one.

To frame things a bit more scientifically, marketing is all about creating or enlarging what I will call your perception gap, i.e. the gap between how you feel now about a particular product/service and how you will (presumably) feel when you’ve acquired the product/service in question. There may be no gap at all initially; you may be perfectly content with your current cell phone, car, or hamburger. But then along comes a newer, better model and suddenly the gap begins to appear, widening a bit more each time you see the new item and then have to look back at your increasing pathetic and inadequate one. Or there may be an existing perception gap you’ve been nursing or trying to ignore for some time. You may know perfectly well that your infant’s stroller is kind of lame. You feel it on every play date. Then along comes that ad for the newest model (“Doesn’t YOUR child deserve the very best?”), and the gap begins widening, quickly[6]. It takes a strong will indeed to ignore the gap between what you have and what you could have[7]. It is the exploitation of this gap that gets marketers up in the morning.

So how can the marketing professional widen the gap and make you feel that unavoidable urge to replace something perfectly functional[8] with a new version that does more or less the same thing? Case in point—even as I write this, I am glancing periodically at the cell phone next to me, an item that has served me reasonably well for three years and which continues to work fine. These days though I am bombarded with marketing messages about new G4 networks, high-resolution cameras, multi-party video-teleconferencing, and downloadable apps. The unstated message is clearly that I am a world-class loser if I do not possess these features on my phone, and an even bigger loser if I’m not willing to freely admit how very badly I want these features. The gap has begun to grow already, and I can scarcely walk past an Apple store these days without feeling that less-than-subtle tug.

While we’re exploring this notion of a perception gap, it’s worth noting that there exists a slightly different, more nuanced sort of gap as well, which I will call the applicability gap. It’s that awkward, borderline-embarrassing feeling you get when a new product is released and you have no idea what it even does, despite which you nonetheless feel compelled to own one anyway[9]. In these cases, it doesn’t matter in the least that no one else knows what the new widget does either. You cannot be sure of that, and so you’re left to fret over the possibility that you may be the only cretin around who doesn’t instantly grasp the myriad and obvious wonderful uses for the new item. The poster child for this phenomenon is the new Apple iPad. No one, so far as I can tell, including many industry experts, can authoritatively state what this $500 device is for. Yet despite this inconvenient fact, more than three million iPads have already been sold. And the beauty of the applicability gap, if you’re a marketer, is that it’s rather like a slow-motion nuclear reaction. The more people who purchase the object whose purpose no one comprehends, the more inexorable is the force on the rest of us to do the same.

So a critical part of the marketer’s job is to create a feeling of inadequacy or discontent in your mind about some aspect of your current life. This part of the job turns out to be startlingly easy, because all that’s necessary is to make you aware of the very existence of a newer better alternative, or one that you will assume is better by virtue of its being newer than yours. The hard part is in the hands of the engineers and product developers who are tasked with actually conceiving and creating the newer better product. Once it exists and it works, the marketing challenge boils down to communicating its existence to the masses. As an engineer, the challenge is not only to make the new item functionally better in one or more demonstrable ways, but, more importantly, to make it look newer[10]. That way, each time the owner of the previous model sees someone with the new one, it matters not at all that they haven’t even touched the new one, or that they are in no way even familiar with its improved capabilities. Merely the fact that there exists a new one creates an overpowering sense of desire to own it, without the slightest regard for the continuing flawless functionality of their current model. This effect works perfectly well with strangers, but it is especially powerful among the peer/friend group of the affected individual. There is no sicker feeling than sitting down over drinks with one’s friends and watching as one of them whips out the latest model widget while you’re still using the previous one. Many people will stand in lines overnight or spend far in excess of retail price to avoid experiencing this feeling of hopeless inadequacy.

Indeed, if the marketer is doing his job proficiently, he will be skilled at making you feel however he wants you to feel. As we’ve discussed, the most common manifestation of this skill will be to make you feel inadequate or, in some less tangible way, unfulfilled. Alternatively, it can be just as successful to make the unwitting individual feel simply overwhelmed and confused. Consumer confusion takes many forms, the most common and powerful of which are technological terminology/features[11] and sheer volume of alternatives. Confusion can be a particularly effective technique, particularly insofar as it gets consumers to make purchasing decisions that are ill-informed and, ultimately, of benefit to the marketer.

When I stand before the shampoo aisle at my local grocery, it is hard not to be intimidated by the magnitude of choices[12], particularly as many of the options distinguish themselves on the basis of some arcane knowledge that it is assumed I possess, which lack of knowledge engenders on my part, yet again, a feeling of inadequacy (sometimes even anxiety) that is the stock in trade of the profession. In this case it is expected that I will know, first of all, whether I have dry, normal or oily hair, whether it has split ends, is straight or curly, frizzy or tame, etc. I am also expected to intelligently evaluate the relative palliative capabilities of a variety of organic and synthetic substances ranging from aloe, cocoa, honey and butter to dimethicone, sodium citrate, and polyquaternium. I am expected as well to know the optimal pH for my hair and to have an actual preference regarding how I want my hair to smell[13]. Finally, to seal the matter, I face the decision of whether to purchase separate shampoo and conditioner or opt for the combined product, the latter of which I am made to feel bad about by marketers, since the two-in-one product shows less commitment to the quality of my hair care and is invariably less expensive than buying shampoo and conditioner separately. The primary force at work throughout this ordeal is that of confusion, the working assumption being that absent the graduate degree in chemistry required to actually understand most of these choices, the typical consumer will opt for the time-honored approach of assuming that the most expensive product must be the best one and will act accordingly. Shampoo is a particularly troubling product to think about in these regards, as the vast majority of what we purchase ultimately ends up being washed down the shower drain[14].

Not only do marketers work from an assumption of scientific ignorance on the part of the consuming public, but an equal level of mathematical ignorance as well. There are very few consumer products to which I would say I am truly dedicated, but one of them is unquestionably Diet Coke. Each time I go shopping for soda in my local grocery store, I am struck by the pricing decisions that confront me. I tend to buy twelve-ounce cans, which come in either twelve- or twenty-four packs. Simple enough you say, the larger pack ought to cost twice what the smaller one does. If only. Two interesting things happen with stark regularity in the pricing of soda. The first is a tacit collusion thing[15], whereby on any given day either Coke or Pepsi will be on sale, but absolutely never both on the same day. One wonders if they signed an agreement for odd and even days, or exactly how this phenomenon came to be. The technique though that I find absolutely intriguing is the one in which the twenty-four pack of twelve-ounce cans costs something other than double the cost of the twelve pack, an occurrence that is almost always the case. One might reasonably think that in order to function in modern society, one would need to possess the mathematical acumen to determine whether a twelve pack at three dollars or a twenty-four pack at five dollars is the better buy. Yet, in the selfless interest of social research, I have stood before this aisle for minutes, watching as consumers fret over which purchase to make. Of course this phenomenon is happening all over the grocery store, but it’s at least reasonable that one might find momentarily challenging the comparison of a seven-point-five-ounce bottle of spaghetti sauce for a dollar twenty-nine versus the sixteen-point-two-ounce bottle for two seventy-five. When one package is precisely double another, the mental struggle is a bit tougher to accept in one’s fellow consumers.

In fact, there are something like six[16] different sorts of containers one can purchase the same soda product in, and comparing unit prices one to another can be as mentally challenging as keeping track of one’s stock portfolio. In a rare bid to reduce consumer confusion, many grocery stores have taken to printing a per-ounce price on their shelf labels, which takes most of the sport out of the thing and is doubtless frowned upon by the brand marketers.

Before we leave the subject of soda, it is worth venting a bit about one of the more underhanded marketing ploys attempted from time to time in the effort to introduce to the public new products. I am about to wade into the dangerous area of marketing trickery, which topic could easily merit an entire essay of its own[17]. I will limit this discussion to a single example and leave it to readers to reflect upon similar painful experiences of their own. When Coca Cola rolled out its new Vanilla Diet Coke[18] some years back, I, along with countless others, fell victim to a form of trickery that relies on brand loyalty, particularly as it translates to packaging. Because I am a loyal Diet Coke customer and hence used to the coloring and design of the regular Diet Coke twelve- and twenty-four packs of twelve-ounce cans[19], and because they are always in the same spot on the grocery store shelf, I will pick them up with relative thoughtlessness and deposit them into my cart. Through the simple expedient of designing the new Vanilla Diet Coke packaging to look exactly like the already-popular Diet Coke packaging (the only difference being the word “Vanilla” in single-point font in the lower corner of the package), and by rearranging the shelf layout a bit, they were able to trick many consumers into accidentally buying the new Vanilla Diet Coke, not realizing the mistake until they get home and actually open one. The subterfuge in this particular example was so complete that even the cans looked the same, with the identity of the imposter not fully revealed until one actually opened a can and took that first awful unexpected sip.

There is an underlying assumption implicit in all of these examples, i.e. that the consumer is an idiot. What’s even more disturbing, based on the time-honored success of some of these techniques, is that the assumption may, while cynical, in many cases be accurate. If people weren’t perpetually purchasing products marketed in the most inane ways, then one might reasonably expect the inanity to cease. A particularly stunning example that has been perpetuated for decades by car dealers across the country goes something like this:

“If we can’t beat the other guy’s deal, we will give you a new car!!”

In order to give any sort of credence to a nonsensical statement of this sort, one has to believe that the dealership would prefer to give away an entire automobile rather than lower their price by a couple of hundred dollars.

And in an especially ironic twist on the whole affair, a well-known men’s clothing chain has, for many years, had as its tag line:

“A well informed consumer is our best customer.”

…an assertion so demonstrably untrue as to be laughable.

There is an especially nefarious aspect of marketing that merits serious discussion, and that is the shameless exploitation of young children. This comes in two flavors. The first is self-imposed by adults, specifically parents. It involves the endless assortment of things one can purchase for kids two and under, i.e. the age below which children haven’t yet developed their own marketing muscles, as it were. Included in this area are a wide range of clothing, strollers, toys, diaper bags, etc., which every responsible parent is expected to purchase and which are endlessly compared to the analogous purchases of other parents. And woe be upon the parent who arrives at a play date pushing a stroller that doesn’t feature the latest microprocessor-controlled child restraint technology, independent carbon fiber front and rear suspension, myriad storage areas, and self opening/closing structure. The all-too-clear message behind such an ill-equipped arrival; I am scrimping on my child’s upbringing. You might as well take out a full-page ad in your local newspaper admitting that you are enrolling your child in public school.

The far more evil marketing ensues once the child reaches the age of media comprehension, the age at which they become both susceptible to marketing messages and at which they begin to understand the mutually beneficial concepts of peer pressure and parental manipulation[20]. This is the age at which the child begins interacting and communicating regularly with other children of similar age, and at which children begin actively comparing what they have and do with what other children have and do. Once again, the marketer’s work is simplicity itself. All that is required is to state in a firm declarative tone of voice that everyone has a particular new item or that everyone is attending a certain event, and the marketing happens pretty much automatically, i.e. the children take up the mantle and happily do it themselves.

I once had a neighbor who several times each year would spend an entire day driving to every McDonald’s within a twenty-five-mile radius in search of a specific Happy Meal toy that his child absolutely had to have in order to complete a set or whatever, in order to restore some semblance of domestic tranquility. This same parent routinely spent hundreds of dollars buying children’s concert tickets so that his daughter wouldn’t have to go to school and explain why she was the only one who hadn’t attended the latest event in their town. Parents willingly subject themselves to these travails for two distinct but related reasons. First, it will shut the kids up (which is, after all, the principal goal of every parent’s existence). Second, it will negate the need for them (the parents) to have to explain to their parental counterparts why their kid wasn’t at the event or wasn’t in possession of the particular new item that every other kid has. There is no marketing more powerful than that which peers do to each other every day.

In the foregoing example, it is important to keep in mind that there is, in addition to the direct benefits of the product—real or imagined—intrinsic benefit as well in having spent more than others for an identical item, particularly if it is an incredibly scarce item, possession of which conveys some special status on the owner. Not only does having overpaid signal a strong willingness to participate in the one-upmanship game that modern society demands, but over-spending also discreetly conveys socially valuable information about one’s ability to over-pay, i.e. income level.

It is worth digressing at this point to discuss briefly a couple of germane microeconomic concepts. Everyone who made it past junior high school is familiar with the basic notions of supply and demand, the most basic tenet of which is that demand rises for a product or service as the price falls and vice versa. This simple and intuitive maxim does not, however, take into account the notion of status, the explicit acknowledgement of which gives rise to an economic oddity known as the Veblen Good[21], i.e. an item for which demand rises the more expensive it becomes. Typical items inhabiting this recondite corner of the microeconomic world include exotic automobiles, rare wines, and high-end artworks, all of which convey value less from their direct utility and more from the status they impart, which utility hence rises with scarcity and increasing price. While it is difficult to construct an argument for an equivalent status being conveyed by a baby stroller or pair of designer shoes, there exist nonetheless a similar set of forces compelling otherwise rational adults to at least keep up with if not outdo their peers for these items.

At risk of ranging even further afield from our original line of discussion, it is illustrative to expand on the Veblen Good construct and its relevance to marketing by introducing to the discussion a couple of concepts borrowed from social psychology: cognitive dissonance, and its close cousin, adaptive preference formation. There are actually two varieties of cognitive dissonance that apply to the discipline of marketing. The first is the better known, illustrated by the Aesop fable in which a fox, unable to reach a bunch of grapes hanging from a tree branch, concludes that since he can’t reach them, they must in fact not be desirable and thus he doesn’t really want them anyway[22]. This is a risk every marketer assumes in deciding how available to make their new item. For while scarcity tends to make things more desirable, futile levels of scarcity can engender the sort of cognitive dissonance demonstrated in the fox example, in which consumers rationalize away their desire for a product, or reduce their willingness to pay a premium[23].

There is, as well, another version of cognitive dissonance in which a consumer, having been cajoled into overpaying for an item, either due to scarcity or gouging, rationalizes having been taken advantage of by increasing their post-purchase regard for the item to match the exorbitant price paid. As in the prior example, the consumer adapts his/her preference level so as to minimize the discomfort that would otherwise attend the realization of having overpaid, or having purchased something that is in fact not worth the money, or both. No one wants to feel like an idiot, and consumers will go to great psychological lengths to minimize such feelings. It goes without saying that the mutual goals of the marketer are to create enormous desire for an item while also making the consumer feel good about the purchase despite having been demonstrably manipulated into its purchase by peers and marketers working in close if unwitting cooperation.

All of the foregoing is predicated on the marketer’s skill in addressing a customer’s expressed need for a new or better product or service. But the single greatest marketing challenge of all is the creation of need where none has previously existed, and of course developing the new products to then fill that need. Most of the foregoing has focused on the replacement of existing widgets, purportedly better ways of doing things that we already, at least tacitly, admit to needing or wanting to do. It takes true genius to convince people that there exists some new activity we all desperately need to be doing that we’ve never done before, or some new thing we should be carrying around that we’ve never carried around before[24]. Or, most astonishing of all, and a tribute to marketing curricula in business schools the world over, convincing people to suddenly start paying for things that have, for prior millennia, been available for free. Which brings us to water.

There can be no greater marketing triumph than the creation and marketing of bottled water, sales of which are forecast in 2012 to exceed $94.2 billion[25], a 41% increase from 2007[26]. Never mind that something like 70% of all bottled water comes directly and unapologetically, without being changed in any way, from municipal systems (i.e. tap water), or that bottled water is almost certainly less healthy than tap water by virtue of residing for months in plastic bottles, potentially absorbing all manner of petrochemicals that leach from the plastic, or that while the safety and quality of municipal water is closely regulated, there are no analogous regulations at all for bottled water. All these realities notwithstanding, people the world over have, in less than a decade, like so many sheep, voluntarily begun handing over as much as two dollars a bottle for something that is available for free in unlimited quantities[27]. There is no plausible explanation for such a fantastic turn of events save for marketing. By tying notions of your personal image and self-worth to the brand on the bottle of water you carry around, marketers have succeeded in convincing people not only that they cannot do without the bottled product, but that there is actually something wrong with drinking the free variety.

But rest assured, the marketing profession is not sitting back on its collective laurels celebrating this brilliant success. Rather, they are hard at work on the next logical extension of the idea, i.e. figuring out how to get you to pay for breathing. Yes, the very last of the purely free necessities of life will, someday soon, be collected, put into containers of some sort, and charged for, with as many brands as exist today for water[28]. And, like water, since the free variety cannot be made to go away, they will instead have to work hard to convince you that the air circulating all around you is, in all sorts of ways, inferior, and that, further, allowing your family to breathe free air is tantamount to buying a used car or kicking one’s dog. It has begun already on a small scale in the form of oxygen bars, which while a novelty item at present, offer a small taste of what can and will be achieved in the coming years.

The practical implications of all this are many. We inhabit a world filled with clever marketers who are keener than ever to transfer money from your pocket to theirs, and who are willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen as expeditiously as possible. And, truth be told, while many of the products and services being marketed with such fervor are so much snake oil, many others are in fact perfectly functional and, indeed, capable of improving your life, even if only marginally so. It’s easy to become jaded in this sort of world and assume that anyone who tries to convince you to buy anything is a lying money grubber. The trick though comes in knowing how to separate the wheat from the chaff, being able to see through the hyperbole and discern what we truly need, and to then distinguish these needs from the wants that assault us every day and from every direction.

[2] Notable exceptions to the otherwise obvious idea include college text books and things that come packaged with other things you actually want (which used to apply to music albums until iPods came along, web browser software until Microsoft got sued over it, and which still includes cable television packages).

[3] Actually God was presented with quite a marketing challenge even before that business with the forbidden tree. The creation of woman was no slam dunk in the early going. History records Adam’s initial reaction, upon first seeing Eve, as something along the lines of “What’s that thing good for?” Of course, once God explained the many features and benefits of the new arrival, Adam caught on quickly, the first-ever victim of a sales pitch. Only later would he also become the first customer to suffer from buyer’s remorse.

[4] I will endeavor to steer clear of excessive Biblical references in this treatise, though it is challenging since the Bible is positively rife with examples of both good and bad marketing.

[5] Far be it from me to equate Steve Jobs with God, though he has been known to do a bit of that himself.

[6] How quickly depends on the sort of friends you have.

[7] It takes true cluelessness to not even perceive the gap, i.e. to actually be truly happy with what you have even in the presence of constant reminders of how outdated and inadequate your stuff is.

[8] Note that the assumption throughout this discussion is that marketing is about the replacement of more or less functional/existing items rather than the replacement of things that are demonstrably worn out, broken down, or otherwise non-functional. Of course marketing plays a role there too, except that it isn’t nearly as challenging to get someone to replace something broken as it is to convince someone to replace a product that works perfectly fine as it is.

[9] Some products survive this difficult phase; many do not. Notable failures include the Apple Newton and every tablet computer released in the past ten years prior to the iPad (of which there have been dozens).

[10] Not to put too fine a point on it, the actual challenge is to make the previous item look old.

[11] Pity the luddite whose flat-screen television doesn’t have 1080p, 240 Hz refresh rate, and a full-array local dimming LED back light.

[12] In the case of my local store, 417 choices – I counted.

[13] Lately I find myself partial to the fruity varieties, particularly anything in the melon family.

[14] The foregoing discussion applies with equal effectiveness to toothpaste, toilet paper, cake mix, or any of the 50,000+ other products available in the typical suburban big-box grocery store.

[15] Patently illegal and beyond the scope of this essay.

[16] Cans—8, 12, and 18 ounces. Bottles—20 ounce (in six-packs) and 1 or 2 liters.

[17] Favorite techniques include changing simultaneously the size and price of an item in the manufacturer’s favor, offering rebates that require you retain and mail in a voucher of some sort (the explicit assumption being that many will lose the voucher and thus not receive the rebate—an effect known in the industry as breakage), and blaming partially filled containers of product on “settling.” If you’ve ever accidentally opened a piece of junk mail deceptively designed to look like a check, you will be familiar with the technique.

[18] One of no less than twenty-five varieties of Coke extant, including Regular Coke, Coke Classic, Coke Zero, Cherry Coke, Blak, Cherry Vanilla, Coke with Lemon, Coke with Lime, Coke with Raspberry…and, of course, Diet and/or Caffeine-Free varieties of each of these.

[19] Silver box with red lettering in Coke’s own trademarked cursive font, thank you very much.

[20] Somewhere between two and three years of age, depending on your child’s precocity.

[21] Not to be confused with a Giffen Good, an item for which demand also rises with increasing price, but for arcane non-status, non-marketing reasons that are beyond the scope of this analysis.

[22] The origin of the notion of sour grapes.

[23] Each holiday season reveals one particularly graphic example of this phenomenon once it is determined what that season’s “hot” toy will be, i.e. the toy that every kid will want and no parent will be able to find without quitting their day job and searching for it full-time. Examples from past years have included Cabbage-Patch dolls, Tickle-Me Elmo’s, and various and sundry video games. Manufacturers play this game of balancing availability against desirability at at their peril though, because once Christmas has come and gone, the impetus for these purchases vanishes almost instantly.

[24] Can anyone remember what life was like before cell phones? texting? ATMs? Microwave ovens?

[25] With a “b”

[26] Bottled Water: Global Industry Guide, Datamonitor, 2009.

[27] At least in the developed world.

[28] Probably more actually, since there are plenty of other things you can drink besides water, whereas your only breathing option is air.

This chapter is where we will begin to get to know know Rodrigo better, important as he is our main character in this story once things get rolling in earnest. He will have his fourteenth birthday in this chapter and will be given by his father the falcon that will accompany him through the rest of the story including his time on Columbus’s crew. Indeed the falcon will play a pivotal part in certain historical events such as the first sighting of land, etc. Rodrigo of course is credited in history with having actually been the first to sight land in the New World, though Columbus would later rook him out of the promised money (Isabella had promised a reward–a significant pension–for whoever first spotted land).  The addition of the peregrine falcon Ain Fir allows us to elaborate on some of the heretofore sketchy historical details, as well as dabble in a bit of magical realism, something I’ve never tried before, but which I think could add nicely to this story,  so long as it isn’t overdone.

Cast of Characters

1. Columbus, Christopher – Explorer who traveled to the New World four times in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

1. Ferdinand II of Aragon (the Catholic) – King of Aragon and Castile, from 1479 to 1516.

1. Fir, Ain – Rodrigo’s pet peregrine falcon.

1. Isabella 1 (the Catholic) – Queen of Castile and Leon from 1474 to 1504.

1. Morillo, Miguel de – Dominican friar and one of two original inquisitors of Castile, appointed in 1480, well prior to Torq’s appointment as IG.

1. Torquemada, Tomas de –Inquisitor General of Spain (from 1483 to his death in 1498), Spanish Dominican friar. On Oct. 17, 1483, Thomas de Torquemada, then sixty-three years of age and prior of a monastery at Segovia, his native city, was appointed inquisitor-general.

1. Torres, Luis de – One of 5 conversos on Columbus’ expedition, the one who first set foot in the new world. He served as Columbus’s translator, as he knew both Hebrew and Arabic.

1. Triana, Catalina de – Lope’s wife, Rodrigo’s aunt.

1. Triana, Ines de – Daughter of Lope and Maria, cousin of Rodrigo.

1. Triana, Lope de – Rodrigo’s uncle, brother of his father Pedro de Triana.

1. Triana, Marina de – Rodrigo’s mother.

1. Triana, Vicente de – Rodrigo’s father.

1. Triana, Rodrigo de – One of 5 conversos on Columbus’ expedition, the one who first sighted land in the new world. He will have a pet falcon through whose eyes he can see in addition to his own.

Note: Bold names are genuine historical characters

Details

De Triana, Rodrigo

(Born 1469 in Seville, Spain) was a Marrano sailor and the first European since the Vikings known to have seen America. Born as Juan Rodrigo Bermejo, Triana was the son of hidalgo and potter Vicente Bermejo and Sereni Betancour. His father may have been murdered during the Spanish Inquisition because of his Jewish heritage.

On October 12, 1492, while on Christopher Columbus’s ship La Pinta, he sighted land of the Americas.

After spotting America at approximately two o’clock in the morning, he is reported to have shouted “¡Tierra! ¡Tierra!” (land! land!) Columbus claims in his journal that he saw “light” at 10 p.m. the previous day, “but it was so indistinct that he did not dare to affirm it was land”

Triana went without reward and credit for this find. According to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, he moved to Africa and converted to Islam following his unrewarded discovery.

The addition of the fictional falcon adds an interesting flair to his sighting of land, because we can create a situation in which the falcon actually spots it first because he‘s up in the air. The boy can see what he sees and so has a natural advantage!

De Torres, Luis

(died 1493), perhaps born as יוסף בן הלוי העברי, Yosef Ben Ha Levy Haivri , (”Joseph the Son of Levy the Hebrew”) was Christopher Columbus’s interpreter on his first voyage and the first person of Jewish origin to settle in the New World.

While still a Jew, de Torres served as an interpreter to the governor of Murcia due to his knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Portuguese. In order to avoid the expulsion edict against the Jews of Spain, de Torres converted to Catholicism shortly before the departure of Columbus’s expedition. Columbus hoped that the interpreter’s skills would be useful in Asia because they would enable him to communicate with local Jewish traders, and he may also have believed that he would find descendants of the Ten Los Tribes of Israel.

After arriving at Cuba, which he supposed to be the Asian coast, Columbus sent de Torres and the sailor Rodrigo de Jerez for an expedition inland on November 2, 1492. Their task was to explore the country, to contact its ruler and to gather information about the Asian emperor described by Marco Polo as the “Great Khan”. The two men were received with great honors in an Indian village, from where they returned four days later. They did report on the native custom of drying leaves, inserting them in cane pipes, burning them, and inhaling the smoke: the first European encounter with tobacco.

When Columbus set off for Spain on January 4, 1493, Luis de Torres was among the 39 men who stayed behind at the settlement of La Navidad founded on the island of Hispaniola. Coming back by the end of that year, Columbus learnt that the whole garrison had been wiped out by internal strife and by an Indian attack, which had occurred in retaliation to the Spaniards’ abducting native women. The Indians remembered that one of the settlers had spoken “offensively and disparagingly” about the Catholic faith, trying to dissuade anybody from adopting it. According to Gould, this man may well have been de Torres, who had probably not converted voluntarily.

On September 22, 1508, de Torres’s widow Catalina Sánchez, living then in Moguer (Andalusia), received a grant from the Spanish treasury in recompense for the services of her deceased husband.

The Luis de Torres Synagogue in Freeport, Bahamas is named after Luis de Torres, and there is a great amount of traditions on his life. The most wide-spread one, which can be found in the Encyclopedia Judaica and similar reference books, affirms that he became in his latter days a wealthy and honored landowner in the West Indies. This version goes back to Meyer Kayserling’s book Christopher Columbus and the participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries (1894). In fact, Kayserling confused de Torres with another Spanish explorer who in 1514 was granted an estate and Indian slaves in Cuba.

The story of de Torres addressing an Indian crowd, who sometimes smoked tobacco through their noses, in Hebrew after Columbus’s first landfall on San Salvador is a product of novelists’ imagination. De Torres is also believed to have discovered the turkey and named it after the Hebrew tukki (parrot) of the Bible. Still another legend has him return to Spain and smoke tobacco there, which led to his being accused for witchcraft by the Inquisition.

Without mentioning de Torres’s Jewish origins, some Islamic websites have claimed the participation of “an Arabic-speaking Spaniard” in Columbus’s Atlantic crossing as a proof for the antiquity of Arab American history. The legendary San Salvador speech is said here to have taken place in Arabic. These conjectures have been given credentials in an article by Phyllis McIntosh in the U. S. State Department’s publication Washington File (August 23, 2004): “It is likely that Christopher Columbus, who discovered America in 1492, charted his way across the Atlantic Ocean with the help of an Arab navigator.”

• Burman, Edward. The Inquisition: The Hammer of Heresy. Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 2004.

• Cohen, J. M. (Editor, Translator). Christopher Columbus: The Four Voyages. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1969. (in work)

• Dyson, John. Columbus: For Gold, God, and Glory. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

• Edwards, John. Inquisition. Stroud, Gloucestershire, Tempus Publishing, 1999. (done)

• Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. Columbus and the Conquest of the Impossible. London, England: Phoenix Press, 1974. (done)

• Grant, George. The Last Crusader: The Untold Story of Christopher Columbus. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1992. (done)

• Granzotto, Gianni. Christopher Columbus: The Dream and the Obsession. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1985.

• Green, Toby. Inquisition: The Reign of Fear. London, UK: Macmillan, 2007.

• Homza, Lu Ann. The Spanish Inquisition: 1478-1614: An Anthology of Sources. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006.

• Irving, Washington. The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus – Author’s Revised Edition. Philadelphia, PA: David McKay, Publisher, 1892.

• Kedourie, Elie. Spain and the Jews: The Sephardi Experience: 1492 and After, London, UK: Thames and Hudson, 1992.

• Koning, Hans. Columbus: His Enterprise – Exploding the Myth. New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976. (done)

• Marino, Ruggero. Christopher Columbus, the Last Templar. Rochester, Vermont, Destiny Books, 2005.

• Morison, Samuel Eliot. Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown & Company, 1942.

• Morison, Samuel Eliot. Christopher Columbus: Mariner. New York, New York: Meridian, 1983.

• Reston Jr., James. Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition and the Defeat of the Moors. New York, New York: Random House, 2005. (done)

• Riviere, Peter. Christopher Columbus. Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1998. (done)

• Rosenfeld, Daniel. The Fall of the Spanish Inquisition. Aventura, Florida: Rosenfeld Book Publishing, 2001.

• Sale, Kirkpatrick. Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise. New York, New York: I. B. Tauris & Company, 2006.

• Sale, Kirkpatrick. The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy. New York, New York, Alfred Knopf, 1990.

• Taviani, Paolo Emilio. Columbus: The Great Adventure: His Life, His Times, and His Voyages. New York, New York, Orion Books, 1991.

Alhambra Decree. Document expelling all Jews from Spain, issued on 31 March 1492, taking effect 3 months later.

Auto da fe’. Grand trial of faith. Ceremony in which conversos were tried and sentenced for their heresy.

Bachiller. Term of address signifying a man with a basic university education.

Capellar. Moorish clothing.

Converso. Jew or Muslim who converted to Catholicism under pain of death or persecution.

Convivencia. Centuries of shared Christian, Jewish and Muslim life on the Iberian peninsula

Corozas. Conical hat worn by Convictees at trial.

Crypto-Jew. Those who secretly continue to practice Judaism despite being converted Christians, or conversos.

Ducat. Unit of currency

Fuego revolto. Garment worn by penitents who had been convicted by the inquisition, but who had then converted to Christianity. These individuals were typically shown the “mercy” of being garroted rather than burnt alive.

Garrotte. Method of capital punishment of Spanish origin in which an iron collar is tightened around a condemned person’s neck until death occurs by strangulation or by injury to the spinal column at the base of the brain.

Maravedi. Currency/coin in common use in medieval Spain.

Marrano. Sephardic Jew (resident in the Iberian peninsula) forced to adopt Christianity under threat of expulsion but who continued to practice Judaism secretly, thus preserving the Jewish identity.

Morisca. Descendent of a converted/converso Muslim

Potro. Hard wooden table onto which torture victims were frequently tied.

Reconcile. Process by which conversos, having confessed their heresies, are returned to full church membership subject to having paid various penances.

Relajados. Convictees turned by the inquisition over to secular authorities for execution.

Relax. Euphemistic (and not a little ironic) term used to describe the burning alive of someone convicted by the inquisition. In all cases, those convicted were turned over to the secular authorities for carrying out of the sentences of execution.

Sanbenito. Vest-like garment required to be worn by conversos, generally with red crosses on the front and back.