Reading, writing, resistance

So last Sunday, I thought of the last VCR we'd had -- the one I could program -- as the easier pages behind the red tabs, which I had mastered. Now I was moving to a new challenge, the yellow-tab material. Naturally, it would intimidate me at first, but I would figure it out, as I'd figured out how to write food reviews, essays and books, and managed to raise a child and now a teenager. Friends and books had always helped to throw on just enough light so I could at least see what I was tripping over, and I had tried and succeeded at whatever was right in front of me to do next -- publication, say, or colic, or my mother's illness. I've made a fool of myself a lot of times -- books have flopped, and I'm sure there is a label on Sam's medical file that says Extremely Tense Mother. But I've kept lurching forward. So with this and the owner's manual, I figured I should be able to program the VCR.

I found the owner's manual and sat down in front of the TV and VCR, with all my remote controls. What is it with all these fucking remote controls? I can't help but think of Father Guido Sarducci's plaintive cry years ago, "Where did all these white plastic patio chairs come from? And what do they want?" I finally figured out which ones I needed, and began.

I could take you step by step through the ensuing catastrophe of ineptitude and swearing, or refer you to the opening scenes of "2001," when the apes go bad and smash everything to bits with their bones.

Only I had, instead of bones, a bunch of remote controls.

Rage coursed through me, and I pounded the carpet with one of the remotes and imagined throwing the VCR down the hill, along with its accomplices, the TV and the cable box, and the computer, just on general principle. I got up and stomped around for a while. Then I sat down, closed my eyes, and tried to breathe. I coaxed the dog out from underneath the bed and took her for a walk, and then ate the last of the Halloween candy: the single-dose packets of Hershey bars. The pharmaceutically packaged Kit Kats.

I tried to remember why I had had any faith at all that I could do it: something about SRA and church. That morning our pastor had said people are so afraid and frustrated now, looking for God more than ever, and that God is trusting us to be those somebodies. But first of all, I don't think she was referring to my home entertainment center, and second of all -- if she was -- who could be my somebody for this? I tried to find a tech support number on the VCR's Web page. There wasn't one. There were only frequently asked questions, none of them dealing directly with rage or subhuman incompetence. I e-mailed them, begging for a phone number.

I remembered that when I was a child and stumped by a new set of colored tabs, I could get a little boost if I compared myself to the kids who were really, really slow: total SRA losers. It was SRA schadenfreude. There were always a few kids who couldn't even get through the few tabs in the course of the school year -- many of the poor kids often struggled, the children of the janitors and bus drivers, and of the rangers who lived on Angel Island, who were ferried over early every morning, who always had colds and wiped their noses on their sleeves. They'd be so out of alignment with the various codes -- dress codes, lunchbox codes, not to mention SRA -- in torn shoes, with boxes of Jell-O powder to eat for lunch -- and there'd I'd be with the other smart, privileged kids, hunched over my blue-tab pages with hooded eyes and tense shoulders, like Theodore Kaczynski.

But I couldn't think of a single person to feel better than when it came to technology, now that my mother is dead. Then I realized my boyfriend is even more inept than I -- I gave him a DVD player last year and it so frightened him that he left it in the box for two months until I threatened to leave him -- and this lifted my spirits. He still can't program it. I ate another Kit Kat and thought about leaving him. And I felt so sick of being afraid. I was scared my whole childhood, scared to leave for college, scared to drop out, scared to work, scared to quit, scared when I started every new book, scared at every publication, scared of getting out of bad relationships, scared of being stuck with whoever I was with, scared of having a child, scared to death I'd never have one. The only things that have helped were my friends, and my faith, but my best friends are seriously incompetent -- they make me look like Steve Jobs. It was a hopeless mess. But faith has taught me over the years that mess is compost, and this would have to do.

I do have a lot of faith in compost and decay, that it softens everything beneath us, and within us, and it breaks things down so they can be used again, and gives off all sorts of weird gases and life-giving elements, and these get into the cold, fortressed places within us. They trick their way past the bricks and fences and defenses, and they get in deeper than anything else can, besides music. The problem is that this feels terrible, because it exposes us -- the pain and reality and brutality and softness and strength and suffering and kindness that is the human condition: I know this is good, theoretically, but it feels so terrible when life gets in, even though life holds so much beauty. But then people help you, or you help them, and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved.

I stared at a quote on the wall: Nietzsche said, "Is not giving a need? Is not receiving mercy?" So I started being nice to myself. I put away most of the remote controls and lay down on the couch with a blanket. First I thought of compost piles I've had in other houses over the years, when I was younger. Then I thought of what passes for a compost pile now, all the junk stuffed under the work table in the garage, that needs to go to the dump or the Salvation Army. I squinted and saw myself shoving the old VCR in there last year. I went downstairs and pulled everything out, until I found it. I dusted it off, and went to my remote control collection. I still had the right one. I plugged the old VCR into the TV in the guest room, and sat down before it, as if it were a chessboard. I flexed my fingers, like a pianist, and began. It was easy, because there was no cable box. It was yellow-tab stuff.

I managed to program it within a few minutes. This morning the tech support people finally e-mailed me a phone number, and half an hour later, I had learned to program the new VCR. Now I can help other people. No more black and white for us: We need to meet each other wherever we are, whichever pages we're on, and help each other move forward from the early pages, red, yellow, orange, through the green and blue, through joy and terror and troubles and technology and family and kindness and politics, and keep on going through the purple, silver and gold.

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