Growing up, I was always reasonably good at math until we started getting into really advanced stuff and then they started to lose me. By the time I got to college, I was cast completely adrift. It is probably for the best that I dropped out. I guess Barbie was right. Math is hard! However, I was always really drawn to the idea of the asymptote. According to Wikipedia, “an asymptote of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as they tend to infinity.” In essence, it is a line that draws closer and closer to zero but never actually reaches it.
For me, so much of life is an asymptote. I can always get close to whatever it is that I want, sometimes insanely close, but then never actually reach it. It is maddening enough to face life as a restless character out of a Tennessee Williams play, so much bigger on the inside than can safely be housed in your own body that you forever feel the need to claw your way out of your own skin. Sometimes it feels like the very fabric of reality can’t hold me and if I could only punch hard enough, I could get out of it, making the kind of improbable escape from my own being that no less than Houdini was always looking for.
But so much remains out of my grasp, and even tonight, the very word asymptote itself. I couldn’t remember it. What a relief that I was walking up Tenth Avenue instead of listening to the countdown music in Final Jeopardy. I had been having dinner with Matt Kugelman at 44 and X, a tony gay place with outdoor seating spitting distance from the green and white glow of a Hess gas station. Originally I had envisioned the night as our long promised reunion. Matt and I have barely seen each other in the last few months and finally it felt like we would have a chance to have a real talk.
But between when I made plans with him and tonight, my friend Ryan James came in from out of town for a few days and the next thing I knew, the three of us were out on the sidewalk under a familiar florescent green and white glow. It turned out that Kugie also had an intern at work that came by and then it all turned into a nice foursome which worked out well, especially when the intern came to my rescue. For a math minor in college, it took him a moment, but when I pressed him as the person in the group most recently in a geometry class, he came through for me with asymptote by the time we turned onto 48th street on our way to Vlada.
Matt the intern was a sweet tender morsel, a creamy dessert in a button-down shirt. He has a noble desire to be an old school investigative journalist. I teased him that I hoped he had a time machine. And then I lamented the current state of news and how overwhelmed we are by punditry over facts. As I always say, you know you are old when you start talking about things that don’t exist anymore. Journalism is now in the same category as Studio One in West Hollywood, logging into a bulletin board service, and picking up a video at Blockbuster. I even cited a study I read about recently that insisted that the more information we are bombarded with the less we absorb. The brain instead creates shortcuts and just keeps what already fits our pre-formed world view and throws everything else away. It is why hundreds of channels of TV and the infinite span of the internet, like that asymptote, just gets closer and closer to zero the more it expands.
I forget in moments like this that someone like Matt the intern is not a near contemporary. I know rationally that he is still a college student but I suppose in my head I imagine that is just a few years behind me. I am seeing someone who is just catching up to me but he sees someone who went to high school with his dad. There are so many ways in which my life hurls perilously toward zero, and I suppose this is just another one of those.
When I was a teenager, I saw Peggy Sue Got Married and didn’t really see what the fuss was. As a high school student, the desire or ability to go back to high school held neither appeal nor necessity. But seeing it again in my thirties, it tore me apart. There is a scene later in the movie when Peggy Sue goes to visit her grandparents and her grandmother tells her that things that happened to her decades before are more real to her now than ever. It is that wonderful illusion of the curve of time that as we approach infinite and beyond, our own experiences are all there at once in high definition and expanding constantly in quality and richness. With such abundance around us, no wonder we can never get to zero. I guess sometimes sliding down the asymptote of a curve isn’t such a bad thing.
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