Happy insurance birthday to me.
I broke a years-long streak this week of spending election day at polling locations — either campaigning or working as an election inspector. On Tuesday, New Yorkers chose their party nominees (which is, in much of NYC, the only selection that matters ahead of the coming coronation in November) for Congress and for the State Senate in Albany, bringing to an end months of litigation over the new district boundaries and an unrelenting deluge of text messages, telephone calls, and mailers for those of us caught in the crossfire of the campaigns.
Under ordinary circumstances, I might have been one of the to first see a glimmer of results as they printed on thermal paper from the tabulators after the polls closed. This time, I heard nothing until Wednesday, and then only what someone else read to me of the Times headlines that loaded. The headlines are about the most information that a person could hope for 200 miles upstate in the Adirondacks, where what was once a total cellular dead zone now offers a limited connection to the outside world for those with premium cell carriers who hold their devices at just the perfect angle.
I am not complaining. Last Saturday, I set an auto-reply for my email, changed my Slack status to a pine tree (I have never really gone for palm trees — the traditional vacation favorite), recorded a new voicemail greeting, and settled in for six glorious days of reading in Adirondack chairs, canoeing, and various other forms of idling with my phone switched off in the bottom of my bag.
This week marks thirteen years since I got my first cell phone. It was a birthday gift and I remember the trip to the cell phone store in the strip mall north of town as a happy occasion. I enjoyed having a cell phone which, in hindsight, is because thirteen-year-olds rarely have very important responsibilities, and none of those responsibilities at the time were communicated by text message.
Thirteen years later, a cell phone is nothing but a link to a series of tasks and questions I am trying to avoid, and a delivery mechanism for all of the worst news from around the world. To a thirteen-year-old, a phone vibration heralded some exciting social experience. Today, it could be something nice, but it is more likely a notification of some terrible political news, exposure to infectious disease, an outflow of funds, or a dull task that needs attention.
I found during my week of freedom that I went to bed earlier, got a full eight hours of sleep (though some of this is no doubt also attributable to having little access to late-night jazz as an option on work nights), and was happier in general (perhaps owing in part to the accessibility of canoes, but still).
I fired up the device again on Thursday afternoon with the sense of opening Pandora’s box and, to a greater extent, the dopamine fireworks of a person looking at a colorful screen for the first time in the better part of a week. Despite my best intentions, it took my Twitter habit only a few hours to kick in again at full force.
It had been seven years since I last spent more than a few hours without a phone — also in late August in the Adirondacks during a sixteen-day college pre-orientation program. It was there that I celebrated my sixth anniversary of phone ownership and my nineteenth birthday by carrying a canoe over my head for a mile through the mud and then eating what was left of a potato bacon soup prepared over a camp stove for the occasion (most of the good soup was destroyed in a scramble to extinguish a fire set by the vegetarians in the preparation of their sad, inferior soup). Looking back, this was my first truly adult birthday — an otherwise normal day that might have been perfectly pleasant if the self-imposed obligation of birthday enjoyment had not cast such a pall over the occasion.
As a child, a birthday is a time of great festivity, when all the stops are pulled out and a great many colorful and sweet foods are made available. Gradually, this fades away and, by the time a person turns sixteen, birthdays mark regulatory milestones of when a person might drive a car, vote, or go to a bar at night. These milestones grow less exciting with time. Last year was my car-rental-without-extra-charges birthday, which was thrilling compared to this year when I celebrated my time-to-get-your-own-health-insurance-and-see-if-you-can-guess-how-sick-you-will-get-in-the-next-year birthday. I celebrated by picking up several boxes of COVID rapid tests and charging them against my new insurer, which then dutifully furnished a document detailing my federally mandated savings.
This exercise, more than being able to rent a car or purchase aerosol paint, feels like adulthood. The insurance birthday is the last of the administrative milestone birthdays until one starts considering such exciting touchstones as early bird dinner pricing and penalty-free 401(k) withdrawals.
Perhaps to distract myself from the strange reality of bureaucratic maturity, I arranged on my return to the city a trip with a few friends to Coney Island, a place that gives the impression of being entirely unconcerned with the passage of time. It is a birthday party alternative that involves a good deal less cleaning than having people in my home and has the additional benefit of testing who among my friends is devoted enough to spend a cumulative three hours of their Friday on the subway.
When my mother visits New York, she rhapsodizes about how Times Square is so wonderful because all of humanity is together in one place. It is, in fact, foul and wretched. Coney Island — which bills itself as the “Playground of the World” — is far closer to the ideal and has considerably more interesting — and more affordable — attractions on offer. Consider that, within five minutes of arriving at the boardwalk, we watched a man walking a pig on a leash until our attention was drawn away by another man walking down the boardwalk with a large snake over his shoulders. Either of these would have been an attention-seeking, cliché move in Times Square. At Coney Island, they fit right in with boardwalk karaoke and the annual hot dog eating contest as endearing bits of local flavor.
The true highlight of Coney Island is the rides (the beach is of little consequence because I do not believe in the ocean) and, while there have been new additions over the years, the stars of the show remain the Wonder Wheel (tagline: “They don’t build them like this anymore!”) and the Cyclone (municipal government appraisal: “Modern building codes [make] it irreplaceable.”). Both have the sure sign of amusement ride excellence, which is that they are controlled with a single, worn-down wooden stick. The stick, in turn, is usually pulled by someone with an air of total indifference.
The Wonder Wheel, which is like a normal Ferris wheel but with passenger compartments that swing back and forth wildly, has a sign advertising “Not a single accident in 95 years!” The Cyclone, a wooden roller coaster constructed in 1927, lacks such reassurance and instead advises, “LAST WARNING! DO NOT STAND UP!” on a large sign at the first curve. Indeed, two of what Wikipedia counts as “at least three” deaths on the Cyclone might have been avoided had the victims heeded the warning.
Even for those who remain seated, the sense of terror is far greater than one might expect from something constructed out of wood during the Coolidge administration. I alternate between screaming and what has been called “maniacal laughter.” In 1948, the Times reported that a mute West Virginia coal miner who had not spoken a word in five years found his voice on the ride: “At the second dip Mr. Franco shrieked, grabbed his cousin and continued to scream. Throughout the ride, his cries were unrestrained. When they landed, his first coherent words since 1943 were: ‘I feel sick.’” (Some reports indicate that he fainted upon realizing that he had spoken.) This was in stark contrast to my friend who I convinced to ride, who sat in absolute silence for the duration of the ride.
Mr. Franco’s cousin told the Times that “they had tried two or three airplane rides to scare him into talking. ‘It took Brooklyn to do it,’ he added.” Charles Lindbergh, who rode the Cyclone two years after flying the Spirit of St. Louis on the first ever solo transatlantic flight, testified: “A ride on the Cyclone is a greater thrill than flying an airplane at top speed.” I am pleased to report that, ninety-three years later, this remains absolutely unchanged.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace.
The first mention I saw of The Pale King was in the late David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules, where he alluded briefly to its discussion of bureaucracy. Wallace never finished The Pale King but arranged the manuscript as it was shortly before his death by suicide.
To convince anyone that an unfinished work of more than 500 pages concerning themes taxation, bureaucracy, boredom, and much more among Internal Revenue Service examiners in Peoria is one of the more gripping works of fiction I have read seems like an uphill battle, but here we are. Wallace was a genius.
“If you know the position a person takes on taxes,” he writes, “you can determine his whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of human life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity.”
“Up and Then Down: The Lives of Elevators” by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker.
It took two months of living in New York before I rode in an elevator. I am not against elevators — I am decidedly in favor of them — but living in a walk-up building, working from home, and having a social universe largely constructed of people in walk-up buildings, it simply did not happen, which is as improbable as it seems for a person living in Manhattan. This only occurred to me one evening as I finally stepped into an elevator and realized how strange and luxurious it felt.
Since that incident, details of life like rent stabilization, office space, and an expanding social circle mean that I now ride many elevators each day. Something as simple as doing laundry requires (over multiple trips to the laundry room) elevator trips totaling at least sixty floors. I spend time in office buildings with express elevators that cover thirty-five floors in as many seconds.
It was in such an express elevator a few weeks ago that I remembered an evening news story I once saw on television of a man who became trapped late one Friday night and spent days in his office elevator wondering if he would be discovered alive. After some light Googling, I found this article, which contains not only the sorry tale of Nicholas White’s weekend in the elevator, but also fascinating details on the vertical transportation industry (which is apparently the term that people in the vertical transportation industry prefer). Like everything else, elevators are a whole lot more complicated than they seem, every detail matters, and they are a much more interesting part of daily life once you know what to look for.