I say there is a
monster in my basement – can
you prove its not there?

Completely and entirely ripped off from Carl Sagan’s essay, “The Dragon In My Garage” in Sagan’s book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

I changed garage to basement because I was thinking of the basement in the house where I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I changed dragon to monster because of the monster that lived in that basement.

The basement in this house was huge.

No other way to describe it.

It had five rooms.

It had a professional billiard parlor pool table in one room and a full size regulation shuffle board court in the linoleum floor of another room.

Do not ask me how I knew it was a regulation size shuffle board court as I have no idea what the regulations for shuffle board are but this was the full floor length deal.

We played more floor hockey in that room than shuffle board but I remember seeing those shuffle board poles and pucks among the clutter of the basement for most of my life in that house.

There was also a back stairs that went up and out to garage.

The door did not close super tight and there was a small space at one of the door.

This small space created the monster that lived in the basement.

With the lights off that basement was dark.

And I mean DARK.

Dark and scary just by the dark alone.

The space under the door let in just a dot of light.

You had to be down there in the dark for a bit and let your eyes adjust and suddenly the dot would appear.

It was the eye of the monster.

Or the eye of the ghost.

Or the scary eye.

We called it a lot of names.

Every once in a while I or one of my brothers or sisters would say, “let’s go see the ghost.”

For some reason, though we knew all about the mechanics of the setup AND we knew what would happen, a bunch of us would go down to the basement.

Someone would stand by the lights and the rest of us would huddle in the big room.

Then the lights would go off and that person would make their way over to the huddle.

Sometimes that person had a flashlight which was really cool.

We had a bad habit of taking my Dad’s flashlights and leaving them where we happened to be when we were done using them.

We also usually left the flashlights on.

But I digress.

Then it would all go dark.

Dark and silent.

Slowly and slowly and slowly our eyes would adjust to the dark.

Someone would catch sight of the dot and yell, “there it is!”

We would all scream.

We would grab at each other.

As I said, this was a linoleum floor and we were mostly always in stocking feet and we would slip and slide and fall and scream some more.

As an aside it was on this slippery floor on Thanksgiving Day in 1969 that I was running from my brother Timmy and slipped and fell as he dove on me and I hit the floor screaming with my mouth wide open.

The force of the impact was taken by my front tooth which snapped in half and I have had a gold front tooth ever since.

I must add I didn’t know a gold front tooth was a fashion statement until I moved to the south.

Anyway, we would slip and slide and fall and make our back to the lights switch and stairs and safety.

Our hearts would be pounding.

I am not sure of my brothers and sisters, but I was really scared.

I knew nothing was there in the dark that wasn’t there in the light.

I knew what was in the basement.

But in the back of my mind I was saying to myself maybe this time …

I do know that it was difficult if not downright impossible to be in that basement by myself even with the lights on.

I could be down there by myself and hear an odd basement noise.

The hair on my neck would stand up.

I would turn and in way not be able to stop myself and look up those back stairs and if I could make out that dot, and even if I couldn’t, I would get out of the basement and back upstairs as fast as I could.

I understood the use of the phrase, “he bolted from the room,” quite well.

Sometimes I would even claim that I knew there really WAS a monster in the basement.

My brothers and sisters were used to me making all sorts of ‘claims.’

But these were the same kids who told me that we had a big can of dehydrated water in the garage.

I would demand to see it and they just said its out there in the garage.

Just put some in a bucket and add water and you’ll have a bucket of water.

I would still demand to see the stuff.

Things like that, when I didn’t get it, drove me nuts.

So I was never entirely convinced there WASN’T a monster in the basement.

It was hard to prove to me there wasn’t.

Better safe than sorry I guess.

We would stand there for a second or two.

Then someone would say, “lets do it again.”

Here is Dr. Carl Sagan’s Essay:

The Dragon In My Garage

“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage”

Suppose (I’m following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself.

There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence.

What an opportunity!

“Show me,” you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint
cans, an old tricycle — but no dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.

“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible
dragon.”

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.

“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”

Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”

You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

“Good idea, but she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.” And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.

Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you’ve really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I’ve seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don’t outright reject the notion that there’s a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you’re prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it’s unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative — merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of “not proved.”

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons — to say nothing about invisible ones — you must now acknowledge that there’s something here, and that in a preliminary way it’s consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it’s not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages — but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we’re disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I’d rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren’t myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they’re never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon’s fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such “evidence” — no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it — is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

of facetiousness
disguising as earnestness
control freakery

‘We cry at weddings and tell jokes at funerals,” says Garrison Keillor.

Reading the article, “the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life” by Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian I was struck by his use of words in an early sentence.

Mr. Burkeman wrote about his writing, “Typically for me, back then, this was a case of facetiousness disguising earnestness.”

I was fairly sure I knew what he meant.

But I fed facetiousness into the google to make sure.

The online Merriam-Webster states that “Facetious is an adjective (“not serious,” “waggish”), while facetiousness is a noun (“the state or quality of being facetious”).”

The M-W also says , “It is not inherently insulting to say that someone is being facetious (although it may imply dubious or ill-timed attempts at wit or humor). The word comes from the Latin facetia, meaning “jest.”

As the writers write, this gave me pause.

If I had ever had any cornerstone advice for anyone it was, “when in doubt, go for the laugh.”

I have always tried to see, seek, find or force humor out of any situation.

I thought I was being clever.

Clever AND helpful to often release tension is a tense situation.

Then I read Mere Christianity by CS Lewis.

It was then that I realized that I wasn’t always being clever so much as I was being flip.

As Mr. Lewis wrote on the different levels of humor AS A DESTRUCTIVE force, “Flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny.

Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it.

If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter.

It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it.”

Talk about the literary brick through the front window.

When I first read that I had to put the book away for a time.

As I thought about it, I remember times when I had been referred to as ‘flip’.

I stopped giving my cornerstone piece of advice.

Interesting that all this came back in the sentence, “a case of facetiousness disguising earnestness.”

I realize that it applies better to this post if the sentence was “this was a case of facetiousness disguising as earnestness” so I added it for my Haiku.

That all being said, I found myself reading and agreeing with most of what Mr. Burkeman wrote in the article.

In bullet points, Mr. Burkeman wrote that:

There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating.

When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness.

The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower.

The advice you don’t want to hear is usually the advice you need.

The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it.

The solution to imposter syndrome is to see that you are one.

Selflessness is overrated.

Know when to move on.

I am not sure any of this is new.

Often all I need to re-read what I feel expressed by someone else to remind or reaffirm myself that I know what I need to do.

Ending this by again by paraphrasing Mr. Keillor, “It is nothing special. We all know what needs to be done.”

And if asked for cornerstone advice, I also quote the Lake-Woebegone Man, “Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids — all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.”

pie for my breakfast
guilty feasting continues
happy left overs

The classic American short story, The Devil and Daniel Webster by by Stephen Vincent Benét is another tale based on the Faust and selling your soul to the Devil.

The twist in this version is that the poor feller hires Daniel Webster as his lawyer to get him out of the bargain.

Mr. Webster was a speaker who; “They say he could call on the harps of the blessed when he chose”.

The court and jury was stacked against Mr. Webster and the Devil himself or “Mr. Scratch” stood for himself.

And as Mr. Benét writes, “we know who’s the King of Lawyers, as the Good Book tells us.

When it came for a closing argument, Mr. Webster stood up, frustrated by all efforts, ready to let the court and the jury and devil really have it.

And he realizes that is the game they want him to play.

He steps back from the brink and instead of a bell wringing oration, he talks quietly.

Mr. Webster “began with the simple things that everybody’s known and felt—the freshness of a fine morning when you’re young, and the taste of food when you’re hungry, and the new day that’s every day when you’re a child. He took them up and he turned them in his hands. They were good things for any man.”

In the end, the jury stares down the devil and finds for the defendent.

Winning the case and the freedom of his client, Mr. Webster says, ” . . . it’s dry work talking all night. I hope there’s pie for breakfast.”

I read that story as a kid.

For some reason the concept of pie for breakfast stuck in my brain.

When I can get it, it is my favorite breakfast food.

Partly because of the story but partly because it IS good for breakfast.

Growing up in a huge family of 11 kids, left over pie was as rare as any leftover.

At some point I started substituting ice cream sandwiches for pie.

Somewhere along the line I made the point out loud to my family that my favorite breakfast was an ice cream sandwich.

This story got told around my family a lot and was repeated often.

More often than I knew.

One Christmas season years later several of my little nieces and nephews stayed overnight at my apartment.

As they were dropped off, one little guy says to me, “Uncle Mike, do we REALLY get to have ice cream sandwiches for breakfast?”

But to tell the truth it has really always been pie.

Thanksgiving may have been the one time of the year I could count on left over pie.

Such a feast yesterday and a fridge full of great food today and I have to feel a little bit guilty.

BUT be that as it may be …

It is a rare treat to have pie for breakfast.

And it even rarer treat to be able to PLAN on pie for breakfast.

I had pie for breakfast this morning.

I thought of the Devil and Daniel Webster.

I thought about Mr. Benét coming up with that line.

The pie was wonderful.