The Crazy Years

by Spider Robinson

  After increasingly urgent e-mails went unanswered, I went to eBay. In mere hours, I was able to obtain Confidential Member Information on Mypaltoo—who in reality is a nice woman in Ohio named Gail. I phoned, and she was shocked and sympathetic: she hasn’t visited eBay in over two years. Someone hacked into eBay’s password records and pirated her identity…and God knows how many others.

  You’d think that—receiving input from a member inactive for two years, from a different state, using a different e-mail and IP address on a different computer containing none of the “cookie” files eBay insists on placing on computers as a condition of membership—eBay might smell a rat. You’d be wrong. If they’ve taken any steps to detect identity theft, I can’t imagine what they might be. What would trip their alarms?

  In fairness, I myself missed a clear sign—one—that something was rotten in the state of Bookmark. If I’d happened to open all eight of Mypaltoo’s feedback comments at once, I might have noticed none bore a date less than two years old. And if I’d started with the presumption that eBay’s security is a joke and every member’s identity is open to question, this might—or might not—have made me suspicious.

  In only a day, I managed to notify eBay of the fraud—despite the procedures it provides for that purpose, which make voicemail look like fun. Finally eBay said a) it would launch an internal investigation, the results of which would not be shared with me, b) reporting the matter to the authorities was my problem and c) I could ask for a token partial refund of $175 maximum—much less than I lost—but my claim must be filed no less than thirty and no more than sixty days after the fraudulent sale. And might be unsuccessful.

  Guess what law enforcement authority has jurisdiction in this? The two-man RCMP detachment out here on my remote island (pop. 3,000). I swear to God. Corporal Greg Louis, an outstanding officer but no Internet maven, took my complaint and has been diligent in updating me on progress…but we both know there won’t be any.

  On my own initiative, I posted feedback about Mypaltoo. For days I received urgent e-mails from members confused because I said she was bogus, and eBay still listed her as legit. I was able to save them thousands. Apparently it took eBay almost a week to deregister Mypaltoo.

  When the statutory thirty days had passed, I’d already bought—without eBay—a new Powerbook. That two and a half minute homepage then loaded in six seconds. So I only spent twelve hours of the four days afterwards trying to file my Fraud “Protection” Claim.

  The Fraud Protection Program is a dribble-glass joke, visual voicemail, designed to send you in circles forever no matter how fast your computer is. To apply you must use the proper Fraud Protection Claim Form. It took me three determined attempts to secure one. The first two requests—hours apiece—produced auto-response e-mails telling me I needed the form I’d just requested, and directing me to a place I’d already been where it didn’t exist. It may be coincidental that I mentioned my position as newspaper columnist on my third, successful attempt.

  Then I submitted my claim…and since I faxed it, was promised a decision in only three weeks. Two days later eBay e-mailed me: my claim might—isn’t that cute? might—be denied unless I supply the original auction page. EBay knows that’s impossible: it took that page down after the auction—thirty days ago. I faxed them that news.

  Then I left home for two days. I returned to find the last straw, a two-day-old e-mail from eBay: it would cancel my claim within seventy-two hours unless I reconfirmed that it hadn’t been resolved! Barely making the deadline, I assured them “Aleksandra” had not spontaneously repented and made restitution.

  EBay uses utterly ineffective security measures to protect its customers—and a brilliantly effective system for covering its own ass after the inevitable thefts occur, making even their inadequate token refund exquisitely difficult to obtain. EBay not only enables crooks, it competes with them in sleaziness after the fact. As if I’d go through all this crap to take eBay for their miserable $175.

  If by some miracle my claim is granted I’ll only have spent nine hundred bucks for an amusing e-mail—and wasted enough writing time to have earned five times that much money. If I were an investor thinking of putting money into online commerce, I’d be too stupid to have any money. Cyberspace is chockfull of crooks—InfoHighwaymen—and the cyberauthorities clearly either can’t or won’t stop them.

  Compared to What?

  FIRST PRINTED JULY 2002

  These days a cop with any decency at all looks like a hero

  The millionaire knows billionaires who think that he’s a zero

  The shoes a lord rejected are a godsend to the churl

  And an immie in the shower looketh mighty like a pearl

  So remember on those days when in your bed you shoulda stood

  That somewhere there is someone who makes even you look good

  It’s only your perspective that has got you in a muddle

  You ain’t too small a frog: you just been in too big a puddle…

  —FROM “PERSPECTIVE,” BY JACOB STONEBENDER

  IT USED TO BE, you could be weird if you needed to. I suspect we’re all going to miss that, by and by.

  I was a weird kid. I read books. Without pictures. I laughed at things nobody else did. At eleven I was six foot one and weighed 125 pounds. I got beat up a lot. I didn’t like it, but couldn’t help noticing how much they enjoyed doing it. One day a short stranger picked a quarrel, insisted on a fight and halfway into my usual beating I had a sudden cosmic epiphany: it came to me that I could take this chump. At last I was going to experience the fun part of the transaction! So I settled in, went to work and beat the stew out of him, just as I’d fantasized doing for so long—

  I hated it. It was less fun than being beat up. Much less: it added embarrassment. Here was this poor bleeding sobbing fool, shamed by his own bad judgment, and I had done it. Being punched had never been my fault: this was. Cracked knuckles turned out to hurt more, and longer, than black eyes or fat lips.

  So okay, now I knew I was not and would never be normal. I was weird. That was something useful to know. A place to stand, an identity to grope toward. I’m a weirdo…what is it they do, exactly? Fine, give me some of that. Science fiction novels? Love ’em. Long hair, beards, guitars, peace, theogens, poetry? Bring it—the weirder the better.

  Forty years later, I find I’ve had a perfect marriage for more years than my own parents were lucky enough to get; our daughter is a peach; I live in the only civilized nation in this hemisphere, in a part so beautiful tourists pay to come here and gape at us; most of my thirty books are still in print; and my rolodex includes private numbers for Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, John Varley, Mikhail Gorbachev, Amos Garrett, Jef Raskin, Janis Ian, Stephen Gaskin, Paul Krassner and Henry Kissinger. (I fantasize a conference call.) Weirdness has worked out well for me. Please note: I am not recommending it, it’s not for everyone; I’m merely asserting that it was a viable choice. It taught me that when I’m alone, I am in good company. Even before it started paying off, it was always a refuge, a way to go, an accepted category for those who fit no other. An option.

  But I grew up in a smaller world. Just try and be weird today!

  How would you go about it? In a world with a Karla Homolka fanclub on Usenet, what would you have to do to qualify as weird? Fly a tall building into an airplane? Worship a god who commands his children to heal the heathen? Respect all those who love truly, however they express it? Buy stock in a company because you share its beliefs, support its long-term goals and wish its employees well? Decline to bid for the Olympics? Resign high office with dignity?

  You want to be weird today, you got two big problems. First: there are six billion of us. Since all people are at least a little flaky, that many of us overwhelms the very concept of weirdness. Say you’re so kinky, you’re a one-in-a-million freak. Well, that means there are three dozen of you in Canada alone! And three hundred more just below the border. Enough of you to hold annual meet
ings at Harbourfront—apply for a grant—lobby for tax breaks. Just think how many counterparts you have in China and India.

  The second problem, and the death knell for weirdness, is the Internet. In what some experts believe may have been the single greatest irony of the last irony-packed millennium, this was invented by—of all possible people in human history—the US Department of Defense, as a hedge against nuclear attack. One of the many unplanned side effects (Ted Sturgeon used to say there are no side effects, only effects, some of which you wish not to think about just now) has been the destruction of weirdness as a refuge.

  Once I was a teenager crazy about science fiction novels…with no clue that some of the greatest sf fans of all time, and two of my favorite authors, lived mere miles from me. Unless they were unusually diligent, there was no easy way for even the mildly weird to find each other back then. New York’s a lonely town when you’re the only surfer boy around.

  Today, it doesn’t matter if you’re a left-handed transexual skydiving albino dwarf with a hammer toe, more than two HIV-positive parents and a taste for goats in leather chaps: a few minutes with Google, and you’ll find enough likeminded souls to start your own branch of the Anglican church.

  Well, that’s good, isn’t it? If this goes on, in a few more years, everybody will be Out, and the bigots will be too busy masturbating each other over at www.bigot.com to organize any pogroms. Surely to God that has to be good, not to mention ten thousand years overdue, right?

  But what are the strange kids—the underbodied, overminded different ones—going to do without weirdness to fall back on? When nothing is weird, what will teach them that they are not at all like anyone else, that nobody is, that we’re all aliens, and that that’s just fine? Something, I hope. Science fiction novels, perhaps.

  Don’t Go Toward the Light…

  FIRST PRINTED DECEMBER 1999

  WHEN I WAS A KID we had dark rooms.

  Only when we chose to—I’m not that old! But what I mean is, if you simply shut off the light, you had darkness. Real darkness: if the room had curtains or lacked windows there wasn’t even starlight. Whole rooms of total utter blackness, space enough for any number of fantasies or fears, canvas for infinite imaginings. Minefields of adventure, in which all you risked was a bruised shin.

  I think it began to change in the 70s, with those little glowing digital clocks. Before I noticed it happening, suddenly every single room in my home seemed to contain something with a clock, or a pilot light, or a standby light, or a status light, or a power-on light, or a glowing reset switch. Invariably in Christmas colors, for some reason: red or green. (Why? Traffic light resonance? Then why are so many of the lights indicating “go” status red?) Even photographers seldom truly have darkrooms anymore.

  Do we really need that much constant reassurance that everything’s okay?

  Sometimes I miss dark rooms. Even the smallest morsel of light takes most of the unknown out of a room. A totally dark room might be the airlock of a starship…or a time machine…or the throne room of the Galactic Empire after the Emperor has gone to bed—

  —but one tiny orange “ready” light, and it’s only your living room…and you’re once again confined to a world that has no starships, time machines or galactic empires.

  And if you close your eyes, sooner or later you fall asleep. And miss all that dreaming…

  Off the Road

  FIRST PRINTED OCTOBER 1997

  MY DAUGHTER TERRI graduated from college, and—to my delight—chose to revive the splendid old European tradition of wanderjahr. She simply hopped into her car and headed off across the continent for an indeterminate time, with the loosest of plans and no deadlines. She’d been a student all her conscious life and was determined to see what it was like to be “a live human, free on the earth,” for a change.

  My wife and I did more or less the same thing in our own early twenties, before we met. So we helped her prepare, fed her superfluous advice, then hugged her and waved goodbye. And ever since, I’ve been thinking about Terri’s journey and contrasting it with the ones Jeanne and I each took at about the same age.

  For a start, we hitchhiked. If that word is unfamiliar to younger readers, I mean we stood beside a road heading the way we wanted to go, held up a thumb and got into any vehicle that stopped for us. Everyone we knew traveled that way, and nearly all of us got away with it. We seldom carried—or needed—weapons more authoritative than a jackknife. With rare exceptions, the greatest hazard we faced was a boring conversationalist or a horny drunk.

  To be sure, females (and males, too) sometimes had to fend off unwelcome propositions—they weren’t a felony, back then. But it was quite rare to meet someone who wouldn’t take a firm no for an answer. In especially rough regions, the American Deep South for instance, hitching in pairs was almost always adequate protection for women.

  Serial killers? I can recall only one back then—a strangler in Boston.

  What we did often have (on long-haul hitches, at least) were long searching meaning-of-life-type conversations with people whose minds worked so differently from our own or anyone we knew that they might as well have been a different species, sometimes. I think this was an education at least as crucial as the kind we’d gotten in school.

  One of the important things I’d never previously suspected, for instance, was just how much kindness is out there in the world. Again and again, total strangers stopped for us, went miles out of their way for us, bought us meals or coffee, offered us crash-space or part-time work, showed us sights we’d have missed, got us medical help…without asking anything in return but our company and the warm pleasure of having helped another monkey.

  And I think my journeys gained something because I was autonomous, with no possessions save what I could carry. It was liberating. And broadening: somebody else chose what station to play on the car radio, and as you moved across the continent, the music changed.

  All unthinkable now, of course. Terri traveled surrounded by over a ton of metal, kept it locked at all times and carried a cell-phone in case she needed 911 in a hurry. She had few conversations with anyone but waitresses and gas-jockeys—except on that cell-phone, with people she already knew, at umpty dollars a minute. Everywhere she went, she heard the same music: the CDs she brought with her. Every minute she wasn’t actually in the car and moving, she had to worry that someone would try to steal it. Perhaps there is still just as much kindness in the world as I found…but Terri dares not take the risk of finding out.

  She has no choice. Even if she were not—intelligently—too afraid to hitch-hike, most of the drivers out there these days are—intelligently—too afraid to pick up hitchers. The world has changed.

  My generation truly believed, back in the sixties, that we were going to save the world…or at the very least, hand it over to our kids in better shape than we got it from our parents. Thirty years later, it seems we have done a rather shoddy job.

  Don’t trust my memories. Have you seen Cape Fear—the original, mid-sixties version? There’s a scene where the mother arrives to pick her daughter up after school, but the kid doesn’t come out. So Mom goes inside to look for her…leaving her car not only unattended and unlocked, but with the door wide open! In Miami! It’s still there when she gets back. No moviegoer saw anything odd about this at the time. The world has changed…and not always in the way we hopeful invincible flower-children thought it would.

  I take what comfort I can in small improvements. The car Terri drove is much safer, for example, and vastly more mechanically reliable. (Are you old enough to remember how crummy cars used to be before the Japanese came along?) It was cheaper to run and much less polluting. The cellphone is a nifty gadget. She heard those CDs—in a moving car!—with better fidelity than anyone but a serious audiophile had ever heard in my day. And there are other, more subtle improvements in the world, too. When the Honda dealership in Madison, Wisconsin, charged her over three hundred bucks to not repair her power steering
, she simply repudiated the Visa charge. Each time she stopped for a few days with a friend or relative, she could use their computer to get her mail and research the next stage of her journey. And so on. But these are all meager consolations for what has been lost.

  And perhaps it will be even more disconcerting for Terri when her kids reach their twenties. Her cohort is right on the cresting spine of The Great Digital Divide; those who come after will see everything differently. They may not even make many actual meat-journeys. Why go to all that expense and risk when it’s so easy to visit anywhere on earth for mere pennies? Of course, anywhere on earth will look remarkably like a computer screen…

  But who knows? Perhaps, in time, a small, cynical, practical generation will be able to reverse some of the grosser mistakes of a large, naive, idealist generation. Humans solve problems, sometimes faster than we can create new ones. Perhaps by the time Terri’s children are old enough to develop itchy feet, the Wheel will have turned again…and they’ll be able to ride their thumbs once more, just the way Grandpa and Grandma did in the Olden Days.

  Got to Admit It’s Gotten Better

  FIRST PRINTED DECEMBER 1999

  When I become was, and now is back when,

  Will someone have moments like this;

  Moments of unspoken bliss?

  And will there be heroes and saints

  …or just a dark new age of complaints?

  —MOSE ALLISON, “WAS”

  I’M SUPPOSED TO BE JEREMIAH, HERE.

  Not the inarticulate oenophile bullfrog who was a good friend of the late Hoyt Axton. I’m speaking of the cranky curmudgeon they named the jeremiad after. I’ve spent years writing columns where the basic mandate was to be my readers’ surly seer and pessimist prophet, casting a jaundiced eye on the future and muttering of impending dooms.