Oh Tesla, Where Art Thou?

Charged by large beasts, punks in drublic, and the cursed box in the basement

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: charging and getting charged.

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Ingredient List

🎵 : It’s been out for a few years, but the double EP/split album of Khruangbin and Leon Bridges has been on repeat for me this week (Texas Sun and Texas Moon). It feels like warm nights that turn cool by morning. Particularly the song Mariella, which is a song that makes you remember a feeling from somewhere long ago.

🎧 : My other favorite thing this week was Post Malone on This Past Weekend with Theo Von. Just two dudes having a good time. Could’ve listened to four more hours of this.

The most important thing that happened to me this week was discovering a barely functional HVAC unit at a condo complex in our neighborhood. I was at the playground with my kids, finishing the final pages of the book I recommended a couple weeks ago (The Upstairs Delicatessen by Dwight Garner), when I heard a horrible noise behind me. A grating, irritating noise of machinery. But then I noticed that that noise had a pattern, and a beat, and suddenly I was hooked. It was an incredible freak occurrence of music in real world devices and I had to record it. So I did, and then sent it to David, one of my best friends (and founding subscriber to Suppertime) who just happens to be an incredible musician and touring bassist for Andrew Belle. I figured he would like it. Which he did, and just for fun, he laid down a track over the beat. And now I can’t stop listening to that. It’s amazing. So here it is, I hope you enjoy it.

And now, onto dinner service.

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Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Free Range Bison

The summer after my freshman year in college, a high school friend and I decided to embark on the great American road trip. Fueled by way too much Kerouac and Ginsberg, we plotted out our journey, loaded up his car, threw a road atlas in the front seat, and headed west. 

The first day was spent eating up the boredom of the turnpike running from Harrisburg through Ohio, the patron saint of road trip robbery. 

The midwest is A+ for people and A+ for driving through a whole state and feeling like you’ve driven nowhere, but the dynamic finally changed once we hit the Black Hills and Badlands of South Dakota. A better name for a place could not be given, and the topography lives up to the hype. Growing up in the foothills of the Appalachians, greenery was all around me; out here, aside from the grassy prairies, it was shades of wind-swept desolation. I had never seen anything like it in real life, but it was beautiful all the same. The striations of sediment in the walls, the prairie dogs popping up like periscopes, and of course– the bison. Home on their own range.

The Badlands is home to one of the largest bison herds on federal lands (nearly 1,000 bison), and they kind of just do their thing. Roaming and grazing and staying large and in charge. An annual bison roundup helps control the population and, over the years, thousands of bison are donated to American Indian tribes.

You’ve probably seen a bison in a zoo, or on a safari, or maybe even in one of our national parks. They are not small animals. A full-grown male bison can weigh upwards of 2,000 pounds, which is like putting 14 of me on a unicycle and wheeling me around South Dakota. They can also run up to 35 miles per hours, which I would soon find out first-hand.

We had reserved a camping spot in the Badlands National Park, essentially in a flat and grassy area about a hundred yards long with camp sites on the perimeter. As evening approached, we rolled into the campsite and began setting up for the night. 

As we were setting up our tent, a handful of bison were grazing around the perimeter, minding their own business, just the same as us. One of them walked into the middle of the campground, probably about 30 yards away from our camp. I was looking at, obviously in awe of such a large creature, but not engaging it in any way.

And then it charged. Straight at me.

There isn’t much you can do when a bison is charging straight at you, but for whatever reason, the only thought I had was to just stand my ground. This is not the correct thing to do, by the way. Unlike bears, acting large and scary will not deter a bison charge. Standing your ground is an invitation for a head-on collision with a pickup truck. They just do not care. Your only option is to try and get behind a large object, which is kind of difficult when they’re running 35 mph straight at you in the middle of a damn prairie. 

It all happened so fast, of course. Within seconds it was ten feet away from me, still charging heading on. I can still hear the pounding of its hoofs. And then, at the very last moment, it inexplicably changed course and dodged off to the right. There was an audible gasp from other people in the camping area, and from myself. Nature, in its rawest form, charged me head-on, and spared me.

A couple weeks later when I got home from the trip, my grandma told me she felt the urge to pray for me that day, that God would keep me safe on my trip. She’s one of those people who I think God actually listens to. Whether he spared my life in that moment or a fly flew into a bison’s eye and forced it to turn at the last second, I guess I’ll never know. 

But I took on nature in a game of chicken, and I won. Cock-a-doodle-do.

And for that, I am grateful.

Course 2

Appetizer: Banquet Beer

In my late twenties, my friends and I often made our way up to New York City to hang out in Brooklyn with other friends we had there. Sometimes we were there to play a show, other times we just drank on the rooftop of their apartment building, which was so far away from the downstairs that we resorted to bringing beer up in cooking pots so we didn’t have to make unnecessary trips back down to the keg. Most times the night ended with us in a Crown Fried Chicken at 4 a.m. or a Dunkin’ Donuts at 6 a.m., whichever came first. 

We were obnoxious of course, like the Brothers Grimm version of the Cinderella story. If we didn’t continuously drink from 5 p.m. until 5 a.m. in New York City, then we’d turn back into pumpkins. Being young and broke and knowing we’d probably spend an ungodly amount of money on cigarettes at some point in the evening, this meant that the bodega was our best friend, since it provided us with a bounty of Coors Banquet beer for a whole dollar. As you can imagine, we thought the world revolved around us, which is why we thought it was perfectly fine to brown-bag master cylinders of Coors Banquet on the subway. 

Surely, people would understand how we needed to be drinking at all times. Which, most Brooklyn hipsters probably did. Just not the boys in blue.

As we went through the turnstiles (which apparently everyone just jumps these days) to get onto the L train, we saw two cops from way down the platform, and quickly dropped our goods in the trash can, probably right after we drained as much as possible into our throats. We went on our way, thinking we’d be totally fine. They were so far away and we got rid of the goods. As we walked farther, so did the cops, except they just happened to be coming right towards us. When we finally met, it was like a scene out of The Warriors, one gang dressed in skinny jeans and American Apparel hoodies, the other cosplaying as The Good Guys in NYPD uniforms. One of us had a carabiner keychain with a bottle opener, the other had guns and batons. They told us all to stop and get against the wall, which we did, and then they made us sit cross-legged on the ground with our hands behind our backs. 

This seemed like an overreaction. Combined, the four of us barely weighed 500 lbs., and from our daily dose of Vitamin C-for-cigarettes, we couldn’t run from here to the end of the platform. We also technically didn’t have anything on us, which I told the cop. He didn’t have any “evidence” that we were drinking in public, a paper-thin defense which sometimes works in movies but never works in real life.

“Are you gonna make me go over and dig through that trash can?” 

I knew what that meant, and I knew I didn’t want to spend the night in the drunk tank at the local precinct. We handed over our licenses as he radioed them in, and twenty minutes later (why does it always take so long to look up outstanding warrants?), we had our open container charge on paper and a $25 citation to go with it.

Now, fifteen years later, you can smoke crack on the top steps of the Times Square subway station and the cops walk right on by.

I guess we were just ahead of our time.

Course 3

The Main: Long Island T

In my basement resides a shoe box full of useless accessories. You have this same shoe box somewhere in your house. Maybe it’s a plastic storage container, maybe it’s an old grocery bag. Maybe it sits in the corner of a room or maybe it sits on a shelf in your garage. 

It is the tomb of the unknown chargers.

Wires coiled up together, assorted gauges of copper encased in plastic, keeping each other warm through one long winter after another. Sometimes a cord is added to the nest, but never is one actually used again. They are species of cords from all corners of the technological spectrum. Dell Inspiron laptop chargers, a Compaq Armada converter, audio and video cables that came with your first DVD player, a power brick for a Mini DVR video camera that no longer works but still sits in your upstairs closet. Two lovers separated by stairs and neglect. If you’re lucky, both the Nokia 5110 and its charger are both inside of that box, which gives you a reassurance that even after you die and your possessions are pawned for pennies, even after the world resets, even when cell antennas sink into the sands of time, that the game of snake will live on. 

The only person who can save you from this mess is yourself. That box could go into the dumpster tomorrow if you just picked it up and put it in a trash can. And yet you never will, because somewhere inside of that ball of electrical yarn is your soul. All the memories and yesterdays and somedays of life are tied to those chargers and the possibility that one day, they might turn on an old laptop with photos from college or connect a VCR to a TV or bring back a voicemail from 2006. The reality is that they will end up in a landfill, someday, but not by you. You will die and your kids will take this box and say “really?” and nothing will be recovered and all will be lost and the world will go on. 

It doesn’t have to be that way. One man could save us all.

O Tesla, where art thou?

By now, the greatness of Nikola Tesla, the most consequential inventor to ever live, is widely known. The brains behind Thomas Edison’s greatest creations, Tesla’s legacy is more recognizable today than when he lived. Part of that, of course, is a result of the flagship electric car company of the same name, owned by the modern day Edison himself, Elon Musk.

Tesla’s iconic inventions included the radio, AC power and induction motors, remote controlled boats, hydro-electric power, and the most amazing of them all– wireless electricity.

I won’t go into all of the specifics of wireless electricity and how it works (this video actually explains a lot in a little bit of time), but the fact is– it does exist and did exist almost 125 years ago. In his own laboratory on Long Island, Tesla could fire up a standard light bulb– the kind that hipster coffee shops and barn wedding venues buy in bulk– without any wires whatsoever. Expanding this technology became his life mission, but due to the limitations of known science at the time and funding woes (as well as unscrupulous competition), the dream of large-scale wireless electricity and technology never came to fruition. Eventually his patents ran out and one of the greatest minds of modern history shuffled from hotel to hotel in New York City, racking up unpaid bills and getting kicked out before he died alone at the age of 86.

It’s frustrating to read back on the history of Tesla, because he was so close to figuring it all out. His dreams and theories and predictions of the future were all largely correct. Part of his vision for wireless electricity was the ability to send photos and telegrams wirelessly, something we do every few minutes today from our handheld computers.

We’ve made small advances towards wireless electricity– we can now charge our phones from a pad and electric cars will probably have the same capabilities within a few years. But we’re largely stuck in 1899, with the same wireless technology that existed when the majority of the public still rode horses. Horsepower was still literally horse power. 

Obviously there are certain limitations and physics that have prevented his vision from moving forward on a grander scale. Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder if he were alive today, would he figure it out? Would he have the government funding and the Tony Stark-style lab to go along with it? Or would a tech billionaire come a long and hire him to map out the invention, then make a few trillion off his name?

More importantly, would I finally be able to release myself and my devices from the low battery doom loop in which we both perpetually exist?

No more USB woes, ever in search of plugging it in the right way on the first try. Old laptops turned on again, all of my college-era writings and musings exposed to sunlight, the yellowed pages of Windows XP Word document brought into the Substack era of now. Me, reading those documents, wishing I would’ve let sleeping dogs lie, and sometimes die. 

On the inauguration day of Tesla 2.0, a mass funeral will be held for all our cord collections. After decades spent in the dungeons of our homes, the cables in their cardboard coffins will finally be laid to rest. We’ll gather around a grand bonfire, surrendering the bundles of snakes to the flames as bolts of current run through our bodies, one to another, exciting us in ways we’ve never felt before. Untethered by the new dawn of the age of cordless electricity, we’ll move onto solving the grandest problems of the human race.

First up: the kitchen junk drawer.

Course 4

Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week

Man, I am in the peak weeks of marathon training for the Berlin Marathon, which is only three weeks away. This is the time when I hate running the most and also love it the best, because I can feel all the work paying off, but I have no desire to keep running long distances five times a week. This past week I cranked out 42 miles in the past four days, culminating with a 19-mile long run with the Charles Street 12-Mile race in the middle. I really wanted to test out my marathon pace to see if I had it, and I’m happy to report that I felt strong at a 7:40 pace for 14 miles, so I think were in PR territory for Berlin if all goes well. I also ran into Stavros Halkias (aka Stavvy aka Dundalk Ronnie aka the real Ravens mascot) on my run in Patterson Park this Thursday, as he was doing walk laps around the park, so that was kind of cool. 

Plus, two Orioles games this weekend, one win and one loss, but at least I got to experience the T. Rowe Price suite life thanks to my buddy Kuch. And I got to ride my bike to and from Camden Yards; a quiet, post-sunset ride back along the harbor with a crescent moon reflecting off the water can’t be beat.

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.

I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to this past week’s episode here.

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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