Category Archives: The Everyman Chronicles

L.A.’s Hottest Wheels

I’m not much of a grocery store shopper, maybe because I’ve cooked a total of 10 meals in my life. Maybe.

But I’ve discovered something that’s shot to the top of my shopping list whenever I go to Ralph’s, Food 4 Less or any other grocery store in the San Fernando Valley: a shopping cart.

They used to be easy to find in the Valley. A couple of them used to live at the end of my block. I once commandeered a cart to bring home motorcycle gear walking from the shop.

But a pandemic, recession and rising homeless population have made shopping carts harder to find than an honest plumber.

Two weeks ago, I found an abandoned cart in an empty parking space of my Ralph’s (the outdoor corral and entire store were empty). Last week, I found a cart but left my wallet in the car. When I tried to walk the cart to my car, the front wheels locked when I passed the security sensor. Yesterday required a five-minute search-and-shop scour.

I asked the store manager what happened.

“It’s the homeless,” she sighed. ”They’re even asking for them when people are packing their cars.”

She said the store had begun alerting customers to not feel rushed into unpacking. ”That cart is theirs as long as there’s something in it.”

But once the cart is empty, she said, clerks have to rush to fetch them.

Even with the store mandate, ”We can’t keep up,” she confided, unaware that the customer was an old newspaperman. So, being one, I researched the problem when I got home. Jesus.

According to the Food Marketing Institute, 2 million grocery carts are stolen every year, costing individual stores $8,000-$10,000 annually. Supermarketnews.com estimates a cart is stolen every 90 seconds. And those studies were pre-pandemic, in the age of human contact and heavy metals.

Now, a lifted cart is serious larceny. I Googled the cost of roll cages, and they routinely run from $200 to $500 – without an anti-theft system.


The solution is obvious and impossible: a return to the days when a clerk would help you load the car. Those went the way of the full-service gas station, and corporate Darwinism all but guarantees their permanent extinction.

And L.A. is its own nation-state: If it is happening here, it is likely headed to the other 49 – if it’s not already there.

Covid has proved a seismic shaking of the tree. All assumptions of everyday life are on the table, from the jobs we’re willing to work to the people we’re willing to talk to. I guess shopping carts shouldn’t be a surprise casualty.

Still, I had big plans for my 11th meal.

Open Your Mouth and Say Beep

I had my first robot doctor’s visit.

Well, I’m the one who visited. But a robot did the doctoring. In fact, the entire visit was without human contact, a first for me. And the experience was seamless — save for near-contact with a human being, who nearly fucked the whole thing up.

The occasion was a CAT scan my sentient doctor needed. But medical imaging is as expensive as a Marvel motion picture, just with an hour-long wait. And no popcorn.

The exorbitant cost forces myriad patients to reserve a spot in line for what amounts to an IMAX X-ray machine. On the day I visited, there a dozen patients, some on crutches, some in slings, some with a belly full of baby.

The night before, I looked over the electronic pre-exam instructions for a non-contrast CAT-scan: Bring insurance, a mask and a stomach emptied of a four-hour fast, including water.

As instructed, I showed up an hour early with the proper criteria. After finishing the paperwork — slid beneath a ceiling-high Covid shield that encapsulated the reception area of the waiting room — I took a seat with 45 minutes to spare.

About 10 minutes later, a woman came out from behind the section area. She wore a mask and gloves as she delicately walked a plastic cup brimming with…something.

“Hi Mr. Bowles,” she said in a friendly tone. ”You need to drink this. It’s contrast for the scan.”

I leaned back in my chair. ”I think mine is a non-contrast scan.

She stiffened and turned. ”I’ll take another look at your file,” and disappeared behind the desk.

I would not hear from her again, to neither confirm or deny whether I was supposed to drink…something.

An hour later, a…tech? nurse? told me to lay down on a gurney hooked to a large digital display that sat over a five-foot(?) ring that flashed lights and featured a giant, spinning lens.

“Put your hands over your head and listen for the instructions,” he said, politely. When I did, I heard the click of the iron door behind him.

It took a minute, but then a calm male voice. ”Hold your breath for three seconds,” he said. I couldn’t help but notice that the ”doctor” had a male voice, unlike Alexa, Siri, GoogleHome, Amazon and just about any A.I. you’d like to do secretarial tasks.

So I took a breath. A large hold-breath emoticon lit up over the ring, and the bed slid into the ring, which spun like an auto-focus camera looking for the target. The bed slid back, and a breathe emoticon lit up.

So I breathed. The process, twice more. The metal door clicked.

“Okay, we’re done,” he said, again politely. ”The requesting physician should have results in two to three days. Thank you.”

I dressed and walked out. I had registered at a new medical center, undergone a procedure and been discharged without human interaction. Thankfully, because the human interaction was the only near-glitch in the day.

I’ve heard much sturm and drang lately over the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the dark specter it casts the fate of humanity. But I think that fear is misplaced.

Look at the real source of human suffering, through just the headlines of today. It’s not natural disaster, famine or disease, and it won’t come attached to Artificial Intelligence like email malware.

Math adds up; that’s why there’s an equal sign. To err is human; that’s why there’s us. We’re in the way.

The real existential threat facing us is Human Intelligence.

There must be an app for that.

Evidentialism 2.0: Am = I See Squared

I’m tired of the puzzled looks I get when I suggest that science is a faith. Screw that. Let’s go beyond puzzlement. Let’s go for confusion, offense and maybe even anger.

Math is a faith. What’s more, it’s a faith that likely kicks the ass of your faith. It certainly makes Moses look like P.T. Barnum.

So let’s go at it.

I realized, after a talk with my mom, that getting people to accept science as faith was a non-starter for Western believers because they claim science as part of god’s domain. Witness my cousin, who puts the ”ist” in Baptist. After the recent successful surgery of a friend, she exclaimed “Thank God the science worked!” How do you respond logically to that?

The answer, I suspect, is that you don’t. But that shouldn’t hamper the effort to craft a better belief system, one specifically suited for the 21st century. Hence: Math as faith.

To be clear, this not a walk back — or double down — of the supposition that science also is faith. It is. But as a byproduct of math. Science is the corporeal form of math, which sits as the spinal cord of Evidentialism, the new faith with a track record!

Consider: since the discovery of quantum mechanics, virtually every physical movement in the observable universe can be codified, tested and predicted. Evolution is a mathematical equation. Save for black holes and consciousness, we have reduced our reality to ones and zeroes.

Speaking of which, those two numbers hold the infinite. Albert Einstein doubted the possibility of black holes, even though his equations screamed their existence. As the Large Hadron Collider demonstrated, once you have the equation, the math does the work.

The miracle of that work is hardly diminished by its simplicity. If anything, that simplicity becomes more profound. Ponder, please, the faith-level questions math poses:

* Eternity We know any number can be doubled or halved. Thus, math proves — but does not explain — infinity, in both directions, unaltered by time. We know it exists, but mortal creatures cannot ever see it. That’s some holy spirit shit, homes.

* Nature The universe’s spirals, from sunflower heads to hurricanes to galaxies, follow the Fibonacci sequence, or 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, and so on. Each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers. It suggests — but does not explain — some intent. Math is the one faith that abides laws without need for a lawmaker.

* The human capacity Our second invention (after booze) was the wheel, and we know, through pi, that the heart of its measure can never be fully known. Kind of like a god’s will.

*Beauty The Golden Ratio, a mathematical symmetry of 1 to 1.618, mysteriously accompanies innumerable examples of human beauty, from the Pyramids of Giza to the face of Mona Lisa.

*Music Virtually all Western music is composed of 12 notes. Those notes were discovered and scaled by the mathematician Pythagoras. Legend says that one day, he heard blacksmiths hammering on metal rods of varying length and wondered why they emitted unque clangs.

And on and on. The track record of math/science is clear: It’s the only faith that answers prayers. Did you know quantum mechanics has never been proven wrong? If it were, it wouldn’t get to be a quantum theory. Membership is that exclusive.

Plus, it’s harder to hijack math than science. Are believers going to shout ”Thank God the math added up!”?

Probably. But we’re faith-building here, folks. Remember the cause: Science, with math as its backbone, has more than doubled our lifespan since its arrival 400 years ago — or less than 15 seconds ago on the homo-sapien stopwatch.

Plus, it gives me a new bumper sticker:

Evidentialism: The numbers don’t lie.

Bring it, Moses.