thermodynamics of ideas

As it happened, the breakfast joint across the street from the Atlantis Building was the first drop-off location for DC Heralds.  Benny and Elliot each had one of those two-wheeled grocery carts that could fold flat for storage and had stacked them high with newspaper bundles from the DC Herald office.  Elliot felt rather foolish, having used just such a cart on his paper route growing up, but Benny didn’t seem to think anything of it.  They parked their carts against the front of the restaurant and Benny dropped a bundle of newspapers just inside the door.  He snipped the string holding them together with a fingernail clippers he’d pulled from his pocket.  Then, hands parted in explanation, he looked Elliot square in the face and said, “See?  That’s all there is to it.  Drop ‘em off and you’re done.  You’ve already learned a lot about the newspaper business.  Come on – let’s get a bite to eat while we’re here and I’ll draw you up a list of stops.”

They took a booth at the front of the restaurant where they could keep an eye on their carts through the windows. The newspapers were free for the taking, but the carts could be targets of homeless people. A waitress took their orders and brought them coffee.  As they waited for their meal, Benny composed a list of drop-off locations and map on a couple of napkins.  Most of the distribution points for the newspapers were businesses near subway stops.  Benny inferred that Elliot could try his hand at selling some advertising to the businesses he encountered in his travels.

“It would save me a lot of time – time that I might otherwise be able to help you get started on your travelogue.”

Elliot muttered, “I’m not much of a salesman,” trying to be tactful and polite at the same time.

“We’re all salesmen of one kind or another.  Persuasion is just selling an idea to someone else.”  Sensing Elliot’s discomfort, Benny added quickly, “But if selling’s not your thing, no big deal.  There’s always plenty to do.”

Benny began to explain the inner workings of the DC Herald as he stirred his coffee, “The latest issue will be finished once we get them all delivered.  Then I’ll have about two seconds to relax before the month-long countdown begins getting out next month’s issue.  Half the work is getting together the raw mass of original material; photographs, articles, book and music reviews, and, of course, advertisements.  I need to sell enough ads to fill up a little over half the space in the paper to break even.”

“How many advertisements did you sell last issue?” asked Elliot.

Benny said, “I’d say around forty percent, forty-five percent, somewhere in there.”

“But I thought you said you needed ads to fill up half the space in order to break even.  How can you afford to go to print if you’re losing money?”

Benny waved his fork for emphasis and said, “Finance can be something of a paradox. There are externalities at work.  You have to juggle and balance one thing with another, this against that. But the financing is the least of my problems.  The real trick is to not get bogged down with details that might distract from the task at hand – which, in this case, is delivering newspapers.”

“I would have thought that finance is a pretty big detail.”

“It’s a little counter-intuitive.  On one hand, I’m trying to get from one place to another, from the beginning to the end of my publishing cycle.  But the shortest distance between two points isn’t always a straight line.  The best route between two points is different on a two dimensional road map than it is on a three dimensional globe.  Business management sometimes involves many different levels, a multitude of dimensions to consider.”

Benny noticed Elliot’s confused expression, so he tried a slightly different track.  “See, the creative process is like hacking through a wilderness.  Explorers like Lewis and Clark had a rough idea where they wanted to go – the Pacific Ocean – but not a clear idea of how to get there.  Instead of an ax or machete, I’ve got my pen, scissors, and eraser, and I dive in hacking away at the pile on my desk.  I’m like a sculptor digging into a block of clay trying to carve something majestic out of it.  Hack, hack, hack, and an image begins to appear.  A little more hacking, a little more refinement, and the figure begins to take shape.  Smooth a little here, carve some detail there, and the work begins to take on a life of its own.  It becomes bigger and grander than a pile of mud and a pair of hands armed with tools.  An image already exists inside the clay before a sculptor even knows about it.  Regardless whether the image is invented or discovered, he has to peel away all the stuff in between our world and whatever barriers stand in the way of the image trying to climb out.”

Their breakfast plates came and Elliot seemed relieved to have something to do with his hands.  He said, “Ah!  Not a moment too soon.”

Benny continued, “Maybe it’s a little more complicated than drawing a line on a map between two points.  But any creative process is an art as well as science.  And that goes for publishing a newspaper.  The next issue exists out there somewhere in the future, the same way the statue exists undiscovered in the clay.  I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like yet, but I know it’s there.  It’s as much the knowledge – the certainty – that the next Herald issue exists as it is the methods and techniques that brings it into existence.  See, you don’t know that your travelogue exists the way I know the next issue of the Herald does.  You don’t have enough self-confidence or faith to experience that certainty, that knowledge.  It’s powerful stuff. Is this making any sense ?”

“S-u-r-e, I suppose so,” said Elliot, debating whether or not to dilute the rather bitter coffee with sugar or not.

Benny said, “Edison once said that all you needed to be an inventor was a little imagination and a pile of junk.  He could have been describing the newspaper business.  I start with a big pile of junk in my office, stuff that’s been brought to me by people who are willing to go out and write the review or article, or shoot the pictures, or sell the advertising.”

Elliot asked, “But if you’re losing money, how can you afford to pay them?  You do pay them, don’t you?”

Benny hesitated and said slowly, “Uh, like I said – it’s complicated.  That’s where the juggling comes in.  A lot of aspiring writers are just happy to see their names in print.  I can usually line up an intern or two from the university who possess enough wherewithal to pull the best stuff out of the pile and set it aside for me to look at.  They’re usually living on some kind of allowance from their parents back home and are willing to work for very little or no money at all, just for the glory and prestige of working on a big city newspaper. Time is my most important resource because it’s so limited.  That’s why I need interns.”

Or an out-of-town visitor, Elliot suspected.

Benny went on, “They just start laying out pages, taping pieces of articles and photos onto paper, and fitting the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle.  It’s not perfect; it doesn’t have to be.  It’s a process, a self-organizing principle at work, to a degree.”  Benny snapped his fingers as something else popped into his head.  “Oh, say!  One more thing!  I’m looking for a box of articles I need for next month’s paper. When you get back to the house, could you bring it up from the basement?  I think I left it right at the bottom of the stairs.  It’s a big cardboard box with D-C-H written in magic marker on the side.  Come to think of it, you might want to look through it yourself.  I think there’s some stuff in there that might work for your travelogue.”

“Don’t you have all that in a computer file somewhere?”  asked Elliot.

Benny returned a glance of quizzical sarcasm.  He said, “You belong to an age that can’t imagine life before computers.  I’ve got a computer in the office – an intern left it behind – but I don’t use it that much.  It might surprise you to know that most of recorded history is on paper, not electronic bits and bytes.  So far anyway.  I suppose that will change eventually.  But the point is the box.  It’s down in the basement somewhere.  If it’s not under the stairs, look toward the back of the house.  And if it’s not there, look toward the front of the house.  I’m sure you can find it.  I have complete confidence in you.”

After a few bites of breakfast, Benny asked, “Listen, do you play chess?”

“Sure, I’ve played a little.”  Elliot was glad to be off the subject of selling.

“First chance we get, we’ll sit down for a nice game of chess.  Then we can talk about your book.  I’d be glad to help however I can.”

“Uh, sure.  Sounds good,” Elliot said, sheltering a secret uneasiness at the thought of any sort of competition whatsoever, even a game.  He pointed to Benny’s scrawled map and asked “Listen, how do I get back to your house when I’m done?”

“Ah!”  Benny said as he made an addition to his drawn map and labeled it Home.  “Just be sure to get off at the National Zoo station.”

Elliot recalled waking to the strange sounds he’d heard in bed that he might have guessed were lions if he hadn’t dismissed the idea as absurd.  Looking again at the map, he said, “I’m still a little disoriented.  I know your address is on Garfield Street.  But what was the name of the road we walked down this morning to get to the subway?”

“Oops!”  Benny suddenly smacked his forehead as he remembered something.  “Where’s my brain?  I guess I was distracted and should have mentioned it earlier.  But you might get towed if you park on the wrong side of Connecticut Avenue during rush hour.  Where’s your car?”

“It’s a rental.  Or at least, it was.  I had an accident on the way here and had to leave the car out in Virginia.”

Benny sat back in the bench astounded.  “You’re kidding!  What happened?”

“It was a mess.  I must have been tied up for six hours.”

“Bad?”

“Someone was killed.  It was pretty upsetting.”

“So how did you get into town?”

“The police were pretty helpful.  They connected me with someone who took me as far as the suburbs.  I had to take a cab the rest of the way.”

Benny shook his head and grimaced with empathy.  “This is why I always advise not to have a car, especially in the city.  It’s just this kind of thing that most people assume will never happen to them.  But it happens to tens of thousands of people every year!  If you don’t have a car, you’ll never have an automobile accident.

Elliot asked, “What about your newspaper deliveries?  Wouldn’t it be a lot easier with a vehicle?”

“That’s just it.  I’ve got a vehicle.  We’ve all got a vehicle.  It’s called mass transit .  But somebody else is paying for it!  Using the taxpayer-subsidized subway system makes much more sense than suffering the expense and aggravation of your own car.”

Elliot wondered aloud, “Isn’t it rather costly to ride the subway all over town?”

“Use your Farecard.”

“But don’t you have to pay to…”

“Let me worry about that.  I have my ways.  Externalities, remember?”

“What about the deliveries?  They let you on the subway with a grocery cart?”

“These two-wheeled ones, yeah.”  He took a bite of eggs, and continued before he’d finished chewing.  “A car is nothing but grief.  They’re expensive to own, hard to park, and incredibly dangerous to drive.  Deathtraps!  No, you don’t want a car in the big city.  There’s a theme for your travelogue.”  Benny noticed something out the window as he washed down the last of his egg with a sip of coffee.  “And then there’s that,” he said, gesturing toward the street.

Elliot turned to see a uniformed official on the sidewalk writing parking tickets.  Almost every windshield in the line of sight had a red and white piece of paper fluttering in the breeze beneath its wiper blade.

“They’re like vultures,” said Benny in disgust.  “In the old days, the king would send out tax collectors to extort money and terrorize the countryside.  Today they use parking enforcers who will bolt your car down with a big metal lock they call a Boot if you catch them in a bad mood.  It’s the one city function that works like it’s supposed to.”

By the time they’d finished eating, Elliot had pieced together Benny’s business process.  As it happened, the office supplies, rent, and practically all the expenses of production for the DC Herald were financed by trading goods and services for advertisements in the newspaper.  The few cash receipts barely covered of cost of things that couldn’t be bartered or traded for subway farecards.

“Hmm,” Benny was frowning at the bill.  “How much do you usually tip – fifteen or twenty percent?”

“If I like the service, I usually leave twenty or so.”

“I see.  What about the tax?  Do you count the tax when you’re figuring the tip?”
Exercising diplomacy, Elliot said, “Here, let me get that.  I’ll put it on my expense account.”

“Yeah?  Thanks,” said Benny.  He led them back onto the sidewalk to recover their newspaper carts and pointed Elliot toward the nearby subway station.
Then just as they parted company, Benny called back, “Hey, one more thing!  Keep your eyes peeled for boxes while you’re out.  We’re going to need lots of boxes.”

There was that ‘We’ again, Elliot noted, not sure exactly how he had ended up on the push end of a two-wheeled grocery cart with a list of newspaper drops, a nearly unintelligible hand-drawn napkin map, a couple of subway fare cards that he suspected might be stolen or otherwise unauthorized, as well as an inkling of more distractions to come – all of which had absolutely nothing to do with writing a travelogue to Washington, DC, the Nation’s Capital.

Next: Apparent Sanity