This might have been the end were it not for one fatal yet obvious flaw. It takes him as long as two years to hit upon the uncomfortable realisation that his research contains a mistake. The SUSHI gene he thinks he has found just happens to occur in higher frequencies in Asian populations. So it wasn’t the gene that made people better at using chopsticks; it was that people who used chopsticks for cultural reasons tended to share this one gene a little more often. He has fallen headlong into the trap of assuming that a link between the use of chopsticks and the gene is causal, when in fact it isn’t. The spell is lifted and the magic is gone.
Like all good fairy tales, there was a moral to this story.
Although not everyone could see it.
My parents’ social life in Bosnia (and therefore their children’s) regularly featured a bunch of their friends getting together for a lot of food and drinking and singing and laughing. Nobody would ever call that endeavour “dinner” – the activity revolved around food, but could never be reduced to it. In Bosnian, the verb that describes such an activity is sjediti, which means to sit, as the whole operation consists of sitting around the table, eating, drinking and being together for the purposes of well-earned pleasure. If I want to invoke an image of my parents being unconditionally happy (not an easy task), I envision them with their friends at a table, roaring with laughter between bites of delicious fare and sips of slivovitz (damson or plum brandy) or grappa.
This would sometimes last for a whole weekend: sometimes we would go to Boračko jezero, a modest mountain-lake resort, to join my parents’ friends and their families for 1 May, the socialist Labour Day. The inextricable part of the fun and joy there was the presence of others, and the spirit of abandon reigned from morn to midnight and beyond. But the central, inescapable bonding ritual was spit-roasting a lamb that would then be shared by all. There, as everywhere we lived, food was meant to be shared, which is why it is never permissible to eat while someone else is watching and not eating. Food is other people. We hate eating alone, just as we hate being alone.
Last Sunday morning, during parental small talk at a kids’ birthday party in Brooklyn, one dad told me he had just “cobbled together” summer camps for his child, to which I replied that camps in the area are very “cobble-able.” Sensing a prime opportunity, his eyebrows rose. “Cobble Hill,” he said, referencing a nearby neighborhood.
Then we paused, heads shaking with a smidgen of shame. We knew what had just happened. Dad jokes had been committed.
What is it about procreating that turns men into miserable comics? In honor of Father’s Day, I’d like to float a theory while also making the case for the virtue of our much-mocked brand of humor.
But Recursion doesn't just ask you to consider the power, it wants you to see the consequences. All of them. It wants you to see the damage that travels in the wake of such choices. The bodies. The nightmares.
And then it asks again: Still, knowing what you know now ... would you?
It’s okay. I, too, have failed
at the expected, have sputtered
and choked like a rusty valve