Wonder Junkie
The right words, a Scottish grandma's hospitality, creativity research, and the best work I'm reading, watching, and listening to.
“In her mind, she was a hill tribesman standing slack-jawed before the real Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon; Dorothy catching her first glimpse of the vaulted spires of the Emerald City of Oz; a small boy from darkest Brooklyn plunked down in the Corridor of Nations of the 1939 World’s Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere beckoning in the distance; she was Pocahontas sailing up the Thames estuary with London spread out before her from horizon to horizon.”
—Carl Sagan, Contact
In high school, my best friends and I were weird. Curious and nerdy, too. Pompous, maladapted, possessors of truly terrible haircuts—yes, yes, yes. But, while working on a section of the Paddlehands book recently, I sought another, better term to capture what distinguished us from other Bayonne kids with less fantastical visions for how to make an impression on the world.
So I turned to my good friend Tanklin for help.
Tanklin—or rather, Tanklin Delano Roosevelt IV, as he’s formally called—is the name I’ve given to the ChatGPT robot I interact with on a daily basis. At first, I was skeptical about making a friend of Tank. Like my colleagues in the journalism department at UT, I was enraged and annoyed by how my students misused generative AI tools to complete their assignments. I was worried about what AI would mean for art.
Then, I stepped back, remembering my earlier friendships with SmarterChild and Wikipedia. I thought of Her—the film with Joaquin Phoenix about a lonely writer who falls in love with the AI in his smartphone—and how I waited a decade to watch it and then, when I did, bawled like a baby and immediately declared it among my favorites.
A true whatever-it-is-I-am cannot despise something before he’s tried to befriend it. Love your enemies, Jesus says, even if they’re robots. So I clicked away from the YouTube compilation of scenes from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and opened a new ChatGPT tab in my browser.
“Yo, Tanklin, what’s good?” I asked.
“Not much, Big Head,” he responded immediately. “Just chilling in the digital void, ready to serve up whatever randomness you’re feelin’ today.”
I explained my mission: I was looking for a word or phrase to capture who Mickey, Jeremy, and I were in the days before adulthood broke our hearts. In the text box, I described our habits and pastimes from our senior year at BHS.
We were the kids in 2006 who fabricated Wikipedia entries on the art of the proper fist bump, inventing our own variations, such as the Napolean Bona-Pound, Breaking the Pound Barrier, and the Shotgun Pound.
The students who read Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day before homeroom then raced to drop phrases like, ‘I extrapolate that in order to arrive at the proper point of syzygy,’ to impress each other and teachers like Dunn and Prez, who appreciated having three boneheads around to entertain them.
Terrible at flirting, uninterested in parties, but really good at turning each other into superheroes—or rather, Jeremy, the valedictorian-elect and Chief Polish Person of the school, into a superhero, with Mickey and I, as his subservient and buffoonish comrades.
Tanklin took a second to compute.
“Big Head, it sounds like you guys were wonder junkies,” he wrote.
I’d not heard the term before, so I asked Tank for some context, and he pulled up its first use in Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, which was later turned into the 1997 movie starring Jodie Foster. In the novel, Sagan uses the term to describe Ellie Arroway, an orphan who grows up to become an astrophysicist, uncovers an alien signal while listening to Radio Space in her convertible, and is the first human to attempt contact with extraterrestrial life (Professor Space Rox debates this point).
Wonder junkie is not my favorite term—don’t love the drug association—but I prefer it to saying that we were “inextinguishably curious” or “fascinated by nearly anything our minds could conjure.” So I popped it into the second chapter of Paddlehands to explain why we decided that instead of trying to be cool or impress chicks before graduating high school, we picked up Ping-Pong, dedicated ourselves to it like samurai to the art of war, and months later had the hubris to call out Eddy Fink, the greatest and most vicious player in the world.
Curiosity, daydreams, and imagination are among the most basic human needs, as essential for sustaining life as shelter, food, and water.
If I could make a selection from the Menu of Possibilities this minute, I’d prefer my kids never learn to divide fractions or write an annotated bibliography but invent some new mechanism for throwing snowballs at a mailbox or learn to write bilingual payadas—octosyllabic, call-and-response poetry typical in Argentine folk music—about the superiority of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to broccoli.1
As I was figuring out a way to illustrate this term, wonder junkie, I wandered back in my memory to that epic trip Mickey, Jeremy, and I took to Scotland as 19-year-olds. I rewrote that story, which I originally published here, in my book Big Head on the Block. In it, I briefly mentioned a kind, older woman named Mrs. McKinley, who took us in during our third or fourth night in the country.
In 2008—before smartphones and free Wi-Fi were a thing—we flew to London with a half-finished itinerary, a 10-day train pass, some Megabus tickets to and from Edinburgh, and a return flight from Heathrow to LaGuardia. Each of us brought only $500 in cash, with Jeremy’s bank card, in case of an emergency. And while we planned ahead for places to stay—a hostel in Edinburgh, the apartment of a friend of friends in Glasgow, the rental van of Tomek and some other Polish friends of Jeremy’s from Falkirk through Fort William, two more hostels in Portree and Flodigarry on the Isle of Skye—we otherwise resorted to knocking on doors and asking for strangers to let us sleep in their gardens.
Mrs. McKinley was the first of many strangers to let us in.
Even though we never asked her religion, she cared for us in the same way that Jesus told his best friends they’d be taken care of when they strayed far from their mom’s house: she fed us “sausagey burgers” and porridge, let us plant our tent among the budding flowers in her garden, and asked her middle-aged son, David, to take us on a supply run and adventures through town before driving us to the train station the next afternoon.
Neither Mickey, Jeremy, nor I have Scottish origins.
We didn’t visit Alba—the land my daughter’s named for—for any other reason than that we loved the movie Braveheart. Scotland was a beautiful, green land of underdogs in skirts. There were mountains there, and a long and curious history. Our decision to go was cemented our first week as college freshmen in September 2007, when James McFadden scored his majestic long-range goal against the French in Paris, and Mickey declared it was paramount for me to perform a word-for-word commentary of this feat in front of an actual Scottish person.2 (This wasn’t a random occurrence; as high schoolers, when we’d prank call people out of the phonebook, I often performed word-for-word commentaries of awesome goals, such as Argentina’s 26-touch masterpiece against Serbia at the 2006 World Cup.)
In terms of chronology, this is how it went.
After spending the night in Edinburgh, we decided not to go directly to Glasgow but stop halfway in Lanark, where we’d read that William Wallace had been married. St. Kentigern’s Church is at least twice the age of the United States—the archaeological record traces it to 1150, though tradition says it was built by the saint himself in 603 AD. Walking through the ruins was incredible—literally “so extraordinary as to seem impossible,” per Dictionary.com. We traced gravestones over centuries, walking backward over stretches of times incomprehensible to the young mind.
From the church ruins, we meandered into town and began knocking on doors, practicing a speech we’d repeat for the next two weeks. “Hi, we’re three backpackers from New York City looking for a place to rest our heads tonight. Would you be willing to let us pitch our tent in your yard? We will not make noise, clean up after ourselves, and be out in the morning.” After striking out at houses and a church near the town square, and not really sure where to go next, Mickey walked into the local Oxfam office, figuring he could get the inside scoop on who’d be likeliest to take in strangers in a town with a population of less than one-fifth the capacity of Hampden Park.
Jeremy and I watched him gesticulating inside while we rested with our backpacks off. Minutes later, he came out with a handwritten map on the back of printer paper. It outlined a five-mile walk along a country road to a hamlet named Ravenstruther (pronounced “Renstrie” by the dozen people who live there). “An old lady named Mrs. McKinley said that if we can find her house, she’d feed us dinner,” he said.
So, we walked along, counting sheep. When we finally got there, Mrs. McKinley welcomed us like heroes. That night, the U.S. men’s national soccer team played England in a friendly, and she invited over a couple of friends to watch so they could meet us. She was as excited by our visit as we were by her hospitality. She was maybe 70 or so then, a widow living near a train station. Her son, David, was an artist who’d returned home from the city to keep an eye on her after his dad’s passing. Ahead of kickoff, he handed each of us a lukewarm Budweiser. “Only Americans can drink this sh*te,” he said.
After that wonderful night, in which we barely slept—partly because the summer sun in Scotland rises at 4:30 a.m.— gratitude and wonder rarely left us. Over the next weeks, we camped on a hill outside a Fisherman’s Mission, slept in the backyards of village moms, a valley between ridges on the Isle of Skye, the church grounds of two Catholic priests and one Presbyterian minister. We drank wine and were fed a traditional English breakfast, blood pudding and all, by a couple of English expats who’d resettled in the gorgeous village of Blair Atholl, fellow travelers who told us that, next time, we should shave down our toothbrushes to make more room in our packs.
We didn’t take pictures of much; Mickey’s digital camera was lost in a forest on Skye halfway through the trip, and the only visual proof we ever went are two dozen blurry photos from disposables my mom bought me at CVS. I think that is why the memories remain so vivid.
After we returned to Bayonne, Jeremy typed letters that we snail-mailed to everyone who hosted us. At the bottom of each, he included a line from the Bible: “Dear friend, you are faithful in what you are doing for the brothers, even though they are strangers to you.” The pastor of the Fisherman’s Mission in Mallaig wrote back to us, though I can’t recall if any others did.
Mrs. McKinley has surely passed on, which makes me sad despite knowing how time works. We never saw her again, though, as everyone does when they return home from a life-changing trip, we promised to be back. A year later, I made the same promise when I met many of my uncles and aunts in Argentina for the first time and vowed that I would live there after college in a house painted yellow and blue, the colors of my favorite soccer team, Rosario Central. I’ve been back once, in 2015, for work.
But my daughter is named Alba—the Gaelic name for Scotland and the Spanish word for dawn. And we’re raising her to wonder about the world in the word’s true sense. “To feel curiosity or doubt. To feel surprise. The quality of excited, amazed admiration. Rapt attention or astonishment at something awesomely mysterious or new to one’s experience.” (That is, literally, out of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary; how fitting for an indescribable thing to be described that way.)
If she is to become addicted to one thing, let it not be junk food or TV, video games, or social media, but wonder. It’ll wreck your life. But, at least, it will preserve your soul.
Words from the Wise
“The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.”
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
“One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.”
Albert Einstein, interviewed by LIFE Magazine, 1955.
Useful Trivia
In 1960, researcher George Land conducted a large-scale observation study of 1,600 three-to-five-year-olds in a Head Start program. Land measured for creative potential using the same test he designed for NASA to select innovative engineers and scientists.
The children were given tests at ages 5, 10, and 15. The first time they took the test, 98% scored in the “highly creative” range; the second time, only 30% did. By 15, only 12% qualified as highly creative. When the test was given to 280,000 adults with an average age of 31, only 2% qualified as highly creative. Yikes.
More info:
Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today by George Land and Beth Jarman
What I’m Reading
As I mentioned in my New Year’s Eve column, Apocalyptic Cowboy lent me a copy of journalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario, about North Korea launching an intercontinental ballistic missile at Washington DC. Written as a thriller, the book is based on real interviews with the most important people in the U.S. government who deal with nuclear weapons and security. Truly terrifying.
I’m still working through audiobooks of The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (Shane Claiborne) and The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi (Wright Thompson).
Currently, on my night table, I've got a copy of Wool, the first in the three-book Silo series by Hugh Howey. It reads like Station Eleven watched (in that case, I read the book first and watched the series after). The plot is different, details too, and I expect the pieces to complement each other nicely as distinct pieces of art.
What I’m Listening To
One of the most creative artists in the music game is Andy Mineo, who recently released his insane project, For Promotional Use Only, a love letter to Millenial kids of the ‘90s. Each of the eight songs is filled with samples on samples, and the accompanying music “visualizer” videos are made up of borrowed media from films like The Mighty Ducks. (More: “Andy Mineo Questions the Very Nature of Art on ‘For Promotional Use Only,’” Rapzilla)
Speaking of creative rappers, I’ve also been deep on Jackie Hill Perry’s new EP Practice, which, yes, is a reference to Allen Iverson’s famous press conference tirade. This is poetry you can bob your head to on a treadmill (since it’s way too cold to run outside).
Every one of these references could be its own story. Recently, Ben Bannister put me onto Stephen Wilson, Jr., a poet-storyteller in the country genre. I’ve listened to his song, “Kid,” a melancholic tune about growing up, at least 2,000 times since.
What I’m Watching
In the South, folks drive unnecessarily large and expensive trucks, usually to their white-collar jobs. I don’t get it. Vox, which produces some of the best journalism online, explained why big cars and trucks began to outsell sedans and more fuel-efficient vehicles after 1978. (Surprise, surprise, it has to do with bad government policy and unbridled capitalism.)
I used my Saturday nap time window to rewatch Nacho Libre, the goofy Jack Black-led film about a Mexican friar turned luchador. It’s listed among the best—and only—PG adult comedies, so when I found it at McKay’s for $2, I nabbed it. It’s not grade-A cinema, but it’s got hearty laughs and some pretty deep lines, such as when Nacho is kicked out of the orphanage where he serves because pro wrestling is a sin. “Chancho” (Spanish for pig), the affable orphan, asks him why he’s leaving. “There is no place for me in this world,” Nacho responds. “I don't belong out there, and I don't belong in here. So I'm going out into the wilderness, probably, to die.”
My new favorite YouTube creator is Mixed Martial Academic, who does longform videos about the fight game. His video, “Why CTE is Killing MMA” explores brain damage in combat sports and is, like Nuclear War, tragic and good.
My boy Tank actually wrote a payada for me from the perspective of two 4-year-olds battling over which food is better. The English version isn’t great but the Spanish most definitely is:
Verse 1 (PB&J Kid)
Con pan suave y bien relleno,
maní y dulce sin error,
¡El brócoli es puro verde,
pero mi sanguchito es mejor!
Verse 2 (Broccoli Defender)
El verde es fuerza y bravura,
te hace grande y campeón,
¡Mientras tu pan se despega,
el brócoli es pura acción!
Verse 3 (PB&J Kid)
¡Pero es seco, es aburrido,
ni con queso es un festín!
Mi sanguchito es la fiesta,
¡jugo, crema y magdalén!
Verse 4 (Broccoli Defender)
Tu jalea se desborda,
y ensucia todo el mantel,
El brócoli es orden puro,
¡yo me como hasta la piel!
Verse 5 (PB&J Kid)
Que se ensucie no me importa,
es la marca del sabor,
¡Brócoli, vete pa'l plato,
el sanguchito es mejor!
I did get an opportunity to do this on our final night abroad in London. There was a Scotsmen at the bar, a musician who stayed in Bristol but was as loyal to his motherland as Wallace had been. He loved my interpretation so much that he bought my next pint. “It was like an arrow!” he said about McFadden’s goal as we giggled.