Irreducibility

 

I started my first day of class at the university at dawn. Wanting to insure that I got a good seat, I made it a point to get there early, before the big rush of students. So early, in fact, that the tables and chairs were not yet arranged, and most of the faculty was still unsure of their own curriculum. I was there to take a class from Forrest Hartman, a journalism teacher at Chico State with whom I played briefly in a band last summer, but who was being assigned in this dream to teach a comic book writing class. I was looking forward to gaining an understanding of the basic concepts of the medium.

I rolled into the great hall in my wheelchair and took in the atmosphere. It was a little overwhelming at first, as one could almost hear the wisdom of the ages echoing off of the cathedral-like walls, the ornate crevices of the gothic decor, sinister repositories of secrets, physically collecting every word spoken, history meticulously recorded in the dingy, tobacco colored patina of antiquity. In the oppressive early morning silence, where every footstep seemed a trespass, every cough or sniffle a violation, I was glad my conveyance was relatively quiet, its electric motor whirring demurely as it brought me to my class.

Within minutes, people began to trickle in, and the spell was broken. Soon the everyday clatter and prattle about this and that, where and when, who and how, and God knows what filled the hall in a cacophonous rush. Since I'd arrived early, I was on the leading edge of this wave of humanity, and I had my choice of seats at the table where Forrest's class was to be taught. Using my wheelchair as a bulldozer, I gently nudged the table away from to wall to give myself sufficient access and took the spot nearest to the where the instructor would soon be standing. 

A girl came in and sat beside me. She had straight blonde hair and a studious air of sensibility. Her utilitarian outfit, a white blouse with a simple pattern reminiscent of baby clothes or hospital attire, faded jeans and low top canvass sneakers, included a well-stocked backpack, which she laid on the table and began to unpack in an orderly manner. She'd make a good neighbor, I thought, as I re-positioned my seat one final time and waited for the teacher to arrive.

Forrest ambled in with the last of the students, a bit flustered, since he'd only received his teaching assignment that day. His only qualification for teaching this class was that he was a huge fan of Batman, a fact that he made known in his impromptu introduction. I raised my hand and asked him a question.

"Will we be going over the elements of artistic style that involve reducing the subject to its most basic recognizable essence?" I thought my question was well-informed and showed an apt appreciation of the medium.

"What you are talking about is irreduciblity," he said, and without thanking me for the segue, he put up a picture on an overhead projector.

The picture was of a rocky outcropping on the coast of Ireland, the kind upon which one sometimes finds a lighthouse or stone structure. Ocean waves were engulfing the outcropping with power and persistence in an unceasing assault, and yet the rock remained unmoved, unchanged for millennia. 

"That is the principal of irreducibility," he said, tapping the projector with his pen for emphasis. "The rock has been battered, but it cannot be broken down any further.

"It's a stalemate," he went on. "Will the ocean win? Theoretically, it's possible. But no, the rock isn't going anywhere. Even as it is seemingly being eroded, new mineral deposits are forming, reinforcing its structure and keeping it in perfect stasis. Irreducibility."

I was kind of seeing how this related to my question about getting to the essence of things artistically, but I still wanted to know about the actual techniques a cartoonist might employ to get the subject to this final irreducible state, so I asked him as much.

"For that," he said, "you will have to take copious notes," and he pointed to some tables piled high with notebooks from previous classes. 

I wheeled over to the table and began thumbing through some of the notebooks. I was looking for a blank one, since I'd forgotten to bring even a single scrap of paper to write on. All of the books were already filled out with notes and scribbles from last semester's lectures. I thought perhaps I'd get some free cheat notes, but they mostly contained equations, timetables, lunar cycles and things unrelated to this class. 

I was going to ask the girl next to me to borrow a pen and paper, but she was engrossed in the lecture, taking notes of her own, and I didn't want to bother her, so I did the only logical and sensible thing I could think of. I woke up.

My wheelchair adventure and Oprah's big event

 

It all began with some harmless junk mail that I'd received from Oprah's Angel Network. I'd almost thrown it out, but when I opened it, I discovered several checks inside. One was blank, which piqued my interest right away. Who sends out blank checks? Another was made out to some businessman, whose name eludes me, for the sum of $858. 

I began to feel a twinge of guilt for the thought I'd initially had about trying to make use of the blank check for my own purposes. I looked around at the other contents of the envelope, searching for some evidence that it was actually addressed to me but found none. Clearly, some error had been made at the post office.

 As I sat there in my electric wheelchair, going through the other letters which were addressed to me, Oprah rolled up in her own electric wheelchair and asked me if I was going to her event downtown. The details were all in the invitation I was holding, she told me. Sure enough, among the checks was a bulk mail flyer announcing an event in the soon to be newly renovated downtown Marysville.

We both zipped away down a bike path at top speed, with Oprah in the lead, headed off to the big event. My wheelchair was a bit wonky, however, and I had difficulty keeping it on the path, which was itself quite substandard as far as handicap accessibility. Some construction had re-routed the bike path over a drainage channel, and the terrain would have been challenging for a bicycle, much less a clunky electric wheelchair. 

Oprah's chair handled the loose gravel and small creek boulders just fine, but I kept spinning my tires and veering dangerously out of control. At one point, I had to get out and push my wheelchair back up a steep sandy embankment to avoid getting stuck in the slushy muck of the creek. I felt like I was cheating, since I was supposed to be testing this chair out for a friend who was actually handicapped. Between the erratic controls and the inability to propel itself over rough terrain, this wheelchair was not going to get a good review from me.

By the time I got myself unstuck, I could barely see Oprah disappearing over the hill on the other side of the creek. I was going to have to find another way to the event. Circling back through town, I went down alleys and through more construction sites, looking for the venue. 

As I made my way across a dirt lot, a giant foam boulder fell from the sky and bounced harmlessly in front of me a couple of times before rolling down into another creek. I was intrigued by this obvious Hollywood prop, so I abandoned my wheelchair for a bit and climbed down some rather large actual boulders and waded around in the creek looking for this foam outlier. Its camouflage had been too craftily designed, however, and I was unable to distinguish it from the natural terrain.

I gave up and returned to my wheelchair, which I'd parked next to a building and was currently being looked over by a couple of homeless guys. I quickly took possession of it, and as I was about to wheel away, one of them asked me to guess his religion. I looked him over from top to bottom. Treadworn shoes, pants and coat blackened around the edges with road grime and soot from hobo fires, greasy, unkempt hair and beard, he was the embodiment of Aqualung, Jethro Tull's archetypal vagabond.

I wanted to say Jehovah's Witness, but just then he rolled up his pant leg, exposing a network of needle tracks which he began to poke at with a wooden meat skewer. Maybe Rastafarian, I thought? I wasn't sure about their stand on IV drug use, though, so I kept my mouth shut. The other fellow kept encouraging me to guess, but I decided to leave, not wanting to miss Oprah's event.

The dream ended there, but from my vantage point in the spot by the building, I could just make out the Civic Center, the venue where the event was to be held. It was going to be big.