(Dunno why I wrote this. It ain't even edited. Dunno why. I might call it “The Paraduck of Zeno" or I might put in the virtual trash. Dunno why…)
There once was a kid. He was alone. His father worked all day. His mother worked all day, leaving for work early. His father dropped him off at school, since his job started later but ended later too. What the boy learned or did not learn in school—and what he had for lunch—is not part of our story here, so please don't ask. After the school day was over, the kid then went to band practice (or was it some academic club or maybe sports, his parents couldn't tell me) until 4:30 pm. His mother then picked him up between 4:31 and 4:53 pm, depending on the traffic. (Now that may seem like a big range of times, but the traffic was very unpredictable.) When he got picked up, he knew his mother would be tired—plus he was almost a teenager—so when his mother perfunctorily said how was your day, etc. he'd answer okay, yes, okay, yeah. His father came back an hour later. They ate dinner, prepared by his mother two times a week, his father one times a week, and the rest of the time take-out or delivered from some place or another. Then he did whatever; it's not really overly interesting.
One day, around 5:17 and 32 seconds in the evening, a young man selling encyclopedias knocked on the door. (This was when young men sometimes knocked on doors selling encyclopedias.) His mother answered the door, was nice to the encyclopedia salesman but trying to hurry the pleasantries and say thank you and good evening and same to you, when the kid said, "I want to know about encyclopedias." The young encyclopedia salesman, knowing how these things worked, invited himself in, in his own clever way and started talking with the kid about the encyclopedia. They talked a great deal. The boy may have listened and said enough to keep the encyclopedia salesman talking because he was bored, but it's more likely that he had an interest in what was in the encyclopedia. At least that's what his mother thought, and being a good mother, she wrote a check to the salesmen for the encyclopedia (remember, encyclopedias that were books were big, bigger than one book, so that was 16 books, or maybe 18, who knows now?) Well, of course, the salesman only didn't have 23.7 sets of encyclopedia books with him, even in his VW bug; and 23.7 sets is what he sold in a day on average. So he made an arrangement to come back in two weeks, by which time the encyclopedia company would ship him the books.
In the meantime—and I said I wouldn't mention what he did during his school day earlier (and you can scroll up if you want), but I will now—in the meantime, the boy learned something very interesting in math class, which was made more interesting by the fact that he usually didn't learn anything interesting in math class. (He wasn't a bad student. He was a good student, but a little spotty because he tended to daydream. But since his older brother was a good student and didn't tend to daydream and had been to the same school and had the same math teacher before going off to some college somewhere that is not important here, the math teacher generally went easy on the boy and always gave him partial credit on tests, even if it was pretty borderline.) Well—where were we?—oh, yes, well one day his math teacher told him about this things called the Paradox of Zero, no, Zebo, no, maybe it was Zeno, which seemed pretty boring until the math teacher illustrated it. He started at one end of the classroom, then he walked to halfway to the other side of the classroom, then we walked halfway again, and kept doing that. It took him until the end of the class (50 minutes!) to get within one inch of the other side, and he still hadn't gotten there. Granted, he was talking the whole time—and most of the students were falling asleep—but not our kid. Maybe he thought the name Zero or Zebo or Zeno sounded funny enough for him to keep his attention on what the math teacher was saying, if just to figure out whether it was Zero or Zebo or Zeno. Or maybe he got interested because the math teacher looked pretty ridiculous crossing the room like a dork. Or maybe the boy was just interesting.
Anyway, he kind of got it. If you keep dividing the distance you go by one-half then you'll never get to there other side, because you can keep divine by one-half forever. Well, he hadn't experienced marijuana yet (note to the authorities: neither he nor anyone affiliated with him in anyway, concretely or abstractly or whatever, has ever, ever smoke... I mean, done—I dunno how it's done—mooryjuna (is that how you say it?). But this Ze-something stuff had an effect like what they say that the merry stuff has on people.
So he thought and thought, and couldn't get to the other side of the classroom! How do you get to the other side of the classroom?
Well, the next day, the encyclopedia salesman knocked at the door at around 5:13 and 54 seconds and told the kid (he ran to the door before his mother) that he had the encyclopedias and that it'd take 3.4 trips (based on his prior experience) from his car to bring them all there. But the kid was excited, so he helped out, and it only took two trips.
And when the books were inside the house the house, the salesman spent some time talking to the boy and left him his telephone number in case he had any questions. (This was in the earlier days of the internet when only the super-nerdy had e-mail, and the boy and the salesman were not that nerdy; oh, also it obviously wasn't a cell phone number, so the kid couldn't just reach him like that and would no doubt have to leave a message—yes, answering machines existed even then—and then wait for a call back.)
Anyway, the boy, as you might imagine was still interested in that Paradox of Zeno thing (by this time, he knew whose paradox it was). But the encyclopedia just said the same thing he already knew. It didn't tell him how he could get to the other side of the classroom. He tried and tried to understand how, but couldn't. The encyclopedia was of no help. (Obviously, he had already asked the math teacher about it, who was of no help, since they knew math but couldn't really explain anything in English without numbers on a board.) So we was still stuck. He couldn't get to the other side of the classroom.
So—you guessed it!—he decided to call the encyclopedia salesman. No answer. The boy left a message. The encyclopedia salesman got back to him a bit late (the boy luckily was waiting and answered the phone before his parents woke up). The young salesman said sorry for the late return call, but he had been out speaking or streaking or tweeting or something like that, he said, but the boy didn't care. So the salesman asked him what was up? The boy immediately explained to him the Paradox of Zeno and asked him how to get to the other side of the classroom.
The salesman inhaled deeply—strangely deeply, thought the boy—and answered, "Little dude, it's something you gotta just see; you know, just be there; well, I mean, you're there like sometime, like, I mean, so close you're there, know what I mean?"
The boy answered, "No." The salesman realized he wasn't being very clear because he was foggy, collected his thoughts and answered more intelligibly:
"Okay, bro, let me explain it to you. Well, let's say you read half the encyclopedia, then another half, then another half; you'd get to the end, right?"
"Yeah," the boy answered, being pretty clever.
"Well, it's no different for anything else."
"I don't get it. That still won't help me get the other side of the classroom."
"Dude, sure, it will. Think about this. Instead of looking at the encyclopedia as paragraphs of stuff, what about sentences? If you take sentences half-by-half but read at the same speed, will it take you longer?"
"No!"
"Yeah, exactly, it won't take you longer. What if you read at the same speed, but thought about words...no, man, letters...would it take you longer, even though you have more halves?"
"No!"
"Well, that's it, little dude. You get there no matter what, the bits don't matter at the end, 'cause you're there, see?"
"Not really."
"Okay, you can break it down, smaller and smaller, but you're going the same speed, and you get there because at the end you're there... or close enough. I mean if you wanna break it down to dot matrix dots, then you can..."
"Hmmm. I guess. But what if I break it down into even smaller things."
"Little bro, then you're just loony. See: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. That means that at some point you're so close to there that you are there!"
At that point, the boy got it. And he didn't even have any morrybuna or whatever it's called. He got it. He thanked the young encyclopedia salesman, and the young salesman replied, "No probs, dude, you da man, man, and if you want anymore 'pedias or other stuff just gimme another call."
The boy understood and slept deeply and soundly and blissfully that night.
The next morning, he awoke very early. Both his parents were still there and both up. They said, "Hi, hon'," which the boy hated since it sounded fake like some lame TV show family greeting, but that didn't dampen his mood. He didn't want to tell them why he was in a great mood, though. They were surprised but they still hadn't had their second cups of coffee yet, so they didn't press it.
Before his mom left for work, she asked the boy, "Have you done your homework?" The father rejoined—feeling a bit, well—he said in a deep voice, "Well, have you, son?"
The boy said, "Sure, I kept getting halfway there but then I said the duck quacks, and I was done."
"Huh?" said the mother.
"What's that, son?" asked the father in a deep voice.
"It's the Paradox of Zeno and how the duck solved it by just saying, 'I may not be a duck, but I look, quack and feel like one, so, shit, I am one, and if you gotta problem, it's the maryjanana.' "
The boy got grounded for saying "shit," but his parents thought, "What the hell is the Paraduck of Zero and the problem with Mary Joanna?"
The parents eventually understood too.
The boy eventually married a woman named Mary Jane and sometimes goes outside, even today, and laughs at the stars and says to himself in a whisper—standing close to him you might hear—"I may never actually reach you up there, but I quack, so I already have!"
— Gabriel Fenteany, February 9, 2016
