Knobs

Me at my station. Note how state-of-the-art it looks now that I've replaced all the knobs with rotary encoders.

Last year, after a prodigal decade, I got back into ham radio. Digging out my old gear and catching up with the new had a Rip Van Winkle quality; like all things tech, radio evolves at astounding speed.

There were also the inevitable jargon shifts. It's a universal human phenomenon – constantly adjusting our codes to confirm insiders and bar outsiders. Tech fields, with their giddy rate of material change, are especially given to it.

So it was that I spent weeks working out what a "rotary encoder" was. Something to do with Arduinos? (This after looking up "Arduino", which clarified but little. Now, having read some more and watched a few YouTube videos, I own one. And someday I hope to get it to do something.)

But "rotary encoders" appear on Arduino-less equipment, too. I soldiered on through the blizzard of rotary encoder references, till at last I cornered this majestic creature for close and thorough inspection. And lo I was enlightened.

It's a knob. You know: the round plastic thing you twist to turn up the volume, or change the frequency.

Apparently, in my absence, the rest of you figured out what a knob is, so we had to upgrade that terminology before you began to suspect we aren't as great as our game.

And that's why, starting tomorrow, I'm refitting all my doors with rotary encoders. Because I insist on cutting edge. I won't actually have to do anything; just call all my doorknobs "rotary encoders" from here on in. And I'll be miles ahead of you other dweebs.

Which meditation puts me in mind of a broader trend in my life these days. To wit, all of my religious and political opinions have dwindled and melded into one single iron principle:

Show me results or sod right the hell off.

As I age, I've quite lost patience with shell games. I'm not the least bit interested in thrice-busted cons (capitalism, Marxism, any scheme to sum up all human aspiration in a single sentence) and pseudo-science (economics foremost, along with a great steaming chunk of the other social sciences, yea though that's my academic preparation).

Nor do I retain any faith in religious eschatology. Try to sell me some Nigerian scam whereby I tolerate or cause suffering in this world in exchange for a pay-off in the next, and you'll see my veil of courtesy slip. Same with attempts to shame me into collusion. "You think too much of yourself. You can't possibly grasp the genius of God/guru/gospel."

Listen, O Knowing One: show me results or piss off. Validate your success. I want unspun stats, discrepant data, objective evaluation, adult-level honesty, sensitivity, and complexity. I don't care whether or not your approach is consistent with my religion, culture, or assumptions. If you've fixed something, I'll muck in.

If not, I won't let you finish your sentence.

This is the sword of Zen, as I've lived it. In my experience, "don't know mind" is both the essence and the action of this practice. When I fail at that, I fail at other things as well. When I succeed, I tend to reap results.

It's difficult not to get bogged in the quagmire of "knowing 'don't-know mind'". Humans are wired to "find" things, and then to conclude that others' troubles come from not having found them. (Or even from wickedly obscuring them.)

So not-knowing is a constant chore. Putting down the stuff I know, which I pick up every day, is a goal I'll ultimately never attain. But reaching gets results, so I keep doing it.

In the end, I guess the best advice I can give to myself or others is, respectfully:

Don't be a rotary encoder.


(Graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and the Newark Sunday Call.)