A very memorable experience that I couldn't remember

Several years ago, I had a very extraordinary experience of the I-hope-nothing-like-that-ever-happens-to-me variety. I was giving a lady-friend a ride to pick her car up from a mechanic's garage located near the State Capitol. As I was approaching the corner of NW 23rd and Western Avenue from the North, a police car turned onto Western from 23rd with its lights on and stopped sideways in front of me, blocking my path. The officer stepped out of the car and while looking North, in my direction, he drew his weapon. I know it's cliche to say this, but time did in fact slow to a crawl.

The lady in my passenger seat looked behind us and said, "Oh my God, there are two men with guns in the back of the truck behind us!" Glancing in my rear view mirror I saw a black man in a dark hoodie jumping out of the back of the pickup directly behind me and he had a gun in his hand. He was facing my direction. The police officer with his gun out was 40 feet or so in front of me looking terrified. If this was going to turn into a shootout, then I and my passenger were directly in the line of fire.

I turned my head around and looked back and saw that the gunman was walking toward my jeep. In a voice that only massive amounts of adrenaline can produce I said to my passenger, "Where is the other gunman?!! I thought you said there were two?!!"

"He took off running North. Another cop was chasing him!"

The gunman behind me was several steps closer to my Jeep, which was providing him cover from the cop in front of me. I thought about punching it and driving my Jeep over the curb to get out of the way. If the gunman behind me saw that I was removing his cover, would he try and shoot me to stop me? What would I do if I was him? A guy in that situation must be insane. How can I possibly answer that question? I thought about the Jeep. The dashboard hangs on a thick iron plate. I knew that if the cop opened fire, that plate would probably protect me from his bullets. On the other hand, if the gunman behind me opened fire, that plate would ricochet anything that hit it right back at me and my passenger.

Maybe I should put it in reverse and try to run over the gunman behind me, I thought. That idea had merit. I would have the element of surprise working for me. The downside was that he would have almost certainly shot at me. I could be killed. Worse yet, my passenger could be killed because of my stupid heroics and I would have to live feeling responsible for someones death.

The gunman was almost to the back of my Jeep. "If I yell, get down on the floorboard fast." My passenger nodded okay.

The gunman walked around to the passenger side of my Jeep. The gun was pointed straight up at the sky. Surely he was going to try to hijack my Jeep. I put it in first gear. If he starts to point that gun at me, or tries to open the passenger door, I burn rubber.

The man in the hoodie looked in my window. He looked at my passenger, then he looked directly at me. The gun remained pointed skyward. For some reason, he decided not to hijack my car. Maybe he thought an Oklahoma man that drives a jeep is likely to be armed. Maybe he thought my passenger might go hysterical and refuse to get out of the car. Maybe he didn't know how to drive a stick shift. For whatever reason, he turned and ran into the parking lot to the West. I was so prepared to floor my car that I struggled momentarily with the compulsion to punch it and try to run him over from behind.

The gunman approached the driver of a white van that was leaving the parking lot. He pointed the gun at the driver then got into the van and they peeled off down 23rd street going East. The policeman jumped in his car then sped away after him.

Just that quickly, the danger was gone. The whole episode probably lasted less than two minutes. I sat there for a moment just feeling my heart beat. I looked at my passenger, "Did that really just happen?"

"Let's go, I have got to get my car." She said.

"I think we should stay here to give a statement to the police."

"I have to get my car. I have a very busy schedule today. Drop me off at the garage and you can come back and give a statement to the police."

I agreed.

About an 45 minutes later, I was back at the intersection of 23rd & Western and there were dozens of police cars there and several cops standing around. I told one of them that I was a witness and then I had to wait a long time and eventually I had to give a statement to a lady detective.

"Did you get a good look at the gunman?"

"Of course I did, the guy was looking straight at me from my passenger window."

"Do you think you could identify him if you saw him again?"

"Sure I could." Why wouldn't I be able to identify him?

"Describe him."

"He was black. He was wearing a hoodie."

She looked very pleased. "What color was the hoodie?"

"It was black." She didn't look quite as pleased. Could that be a wrong answer?

"What kind of gun did he have?"

"A pistol." A look of displeasure on her face again. What the hell? I know he was carrying a pistol.

"How tall was he?"

"I don't know, I think he was a big guy." Again, from her look, I felt like I was giving the wrong answers.

"Okay follow me downtown, I want you to look at a suspect."

At police headquarters I was told that the white van had a 70-year old woman driving it. The gunman had pushed her out of the van while in high speed pursuit. Miraculously, the woman had survived with only a broken leg.

Police chased the van into a neighborhood, where the guy ditched the van and took off on foot. They lost him for a while and so they systematically searched the neighborhood. They found the suspect, a black man, hiding in the bushes in front of a house. He was wearing a blue hoodie. They also found a sawed off shotgun in the bushes.

How could I not have known the guy was carrying a sawed off shotgun? I thought.

They took me to the window to a room where they were interrogating the suspect and had me look at his face.

"Is this the guy?"

The man in the room was definitely black and I would describe him as short. Nothing about his face looked even slightly familiar.

"I can't say that he was the guy."

"Well thanks. We'll let you know if we need anything else. Do you know the way out? Okay bye."

I left feeling that I was a complete failure as a citizen. Surely that was the guy. They didn't just happen to find an innocent man in the bushes with a sawed off shotgun. But my memory had completely failed me. Maybe my lady passenger would have better luck. But she went down to police headquarters the next morning and had the exact same experience. The suspect looked like a total stranger to her too.

I have a friend who is a forensic psychologist. He explained to me that it is common knowledge in law enforcement that eye witness testimony is usually terrible, especially when people are in a heightened emotional state, like when their life is being threatened. In those states, memory doesn't work like it normally does. My story is a perfect example. I have just given you a very detailed account of everything I was thinking at every moment of the encounter. I was hyper aware of where the people holding guns where standing, how they were threatening me, and I was playing out scenarios in my head and weighing various strategies to maximize my chances for survival. There was no room for thoughts about what clothes the gunman was wearing or what model gun he was packing or how tall he was or how he did his hair or anything of the sort. In short, I couldn't honestly remember any of that stuff.

My friend told me that to be a good eye witness in that type of situation takes training. Law enforcement professionals force themselves to ask those kind of questions and then write down their answers. And so, I offer this story as a cautionary tale. If you are ever witness to a crime, and just as soon as the danger has passed, review what you witnessed, and write down every detail you can remember. If you don't have access to pen and paper, call and leave the information in voicemail.

On the other side of the equation, if you are ever on a jury and the case hinges on eye witness testimony, be aware of how notoriously flawed such testimony is. Read the Innocence Project website, for example, and see how many innocent people have been convicted on bad eye witness testimony. And think about my interaction with the detective and how her reactions to my descriptions of events were leading me to fit my descriptions to her facts. And how my overwhelming desire to see justice done to a man that was threatening my life, a man that could throw a 70-year-old woman from a moving vehicle, made me feel like a total failure because I was not able to help the detective do her job.

Political Films

We live in a country where both sides in most political debates are usually wrong. It baffles me sometimes. It almost seems like the debates that are freely discussed in public are designed to give each side ammunition to discredit the other. Let's take the subject of political films and Michael Moore, for example. His movie "Fahrenheit 911", was designed to show audiences that George W. Bush is an incompetent president and that he demonstrated very weak leadership during the 911 tragedy. All of this was true. But Moore went on to paint a picture of our government, and particularly the Bush family, as being controlled by the rulers of Saudi Arabia. This distortion totally undermined the power of his film and gave conservatives an easy out to dismiss the whole shebang as boneheaded propaganda.

Now we have the Oscar-winning Al Gore, and his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." As I understand it, the main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland's 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100. The inconvenient truth is that there is not much scientific support for this doomsday scenario.

To be sure, global warming is frightening, but the only thing that can be said about it with accuracy is that we currently don't know how high the environmental price we are paying really is for our consumption of fossil fuels - let alone, specifically, how Greenland will be affected. We are driving down a road heading for a cliff in the fog, and we really have no idea how much farther we have to drive before we reach the cliff. That is scary, but it is a different message than "Stop the car right now, or we are all going to die!"

Gore's movie will ultimately give the morons who deny the reality of global warming weapons against more sober-minded politicians when they attempt to argue the subject with scientific facts. Inevitably there will be a temporary reversal in polar ice melting and those on the other side of the debate will declare victory. I suspect that in the long run, "An Inconvenient Truth" will do more harm than good.

If only the general public would pay money to watch the political documentaries produced by Frontline and Nova. Maybe if they hired Quentin Tarantino. I can see it now, Frontline and Quentin Tarantino present "The Naughty Nurses of Walter Reed Medical Center."

Return of the Blog

I took four months off from blogging. I didn't plan it that way. I just got out of the habit and the next thing I knew, four months had gone by.

So, I am going to try to get back in the habit.

So here is my synopsis of the last four months:

October: I mainly remember these two kids that came by my house on Halloween and scooped up over half the candy in this big bowl that I held out. They would have taken all of it if I hadn't said "Hey c'mon!" and yanked the bowl back. The parent of these two kids was right there and didn't say anything. The whole thing was frightening beyond belief. Demons really do come out and roam the earth on Halloween.

November: The Democratic Party totally waxed the Republican Party in the November elections. I could not have been happier. Gridlock is good. Also, I ate some turkey somewhere. I can't remember.

December: I celebrated 25 years of continuous sobriety in December. That was cool. I gave this 6-year-old nephew of mine a Spider Man Playstation 2 game for Christmas and he learned how to run the controls in this amazing hyper speed. It was freaky to watch. It was expecially remarkable since the kid can't read the instructions. I guess that kind of concentration comes from not having a lot of other crap bouncing around in your brain. Or maybe the opportunity of pretending you are Spider Man when you are six is more motivating than anything I can imagine at 43. December was also the month I really got to know Gerri, who is now my girlfriend. I think it is cool that when people ask "Who is that couple over there?" and they get told, "Oh that is Chris and Gerri," they won't know which one of us is Chris and which is Gerri.

January: This January will be forever remembered for the beginning of my relationship with Gerri, and for the Ice Storm of 2007. Schools were closed for an entire week because of icey roads. I have never seen that happen before. Meanwhile, I drive a Jeep Wrangler so I drove anywhere I pleased, anytime I pleased. At times I was the only one on the road. I felt like Charlton Heston in Omega Man. I love my Jeep.

A Puzzle for Myranda

My lady-friend Lynda has a 7-year-old daughter named Myranda Bahr. Myranda is very precocious and she loves attention. From what I gather, her mom was reading my blog recently and Myranda saw that I was talking about Pokemon, the passion of her older brother. Myranda asked nicely if I would write a blog entry about her. I have a hard time resisting her, so to make it interesting, I decided to give Myranda a puzzle for her to solve: I scrambled the letters of another phrase to come up with this phrase:

Barry and Ham

Myranda Bahr, if you can solve this puzzle, write your answer in a comment.

Ernest Becker Part 2

Here are a few more quotes from Denial of Death by Ernest Becker regarding what it means to be neurotic:

"We call a man “neurotic” when his lie begins to show damaging effects on him or on people around him. Otherwise, we call the refusal of reality “normal” because it doesn’t occasion any visible problems. It is really as simple as that. After all, if someone who lives alone wants to get out of bed a half-dozen times to see if the door is really locked, or washes and dries his hands exactly three times every time or uses a half-roll of toilet tissue each time he relieves himself—there is really no human problem involved. These people are earning their safety in the face of the reality of creatureliness in relatively innocuous and untroublesome ways."

"But the whole thing becomes more complex when we see how the lies about reality begin to miscarry. Then we have to apply the label “neurotic.”"

"Generally speaking we call neurotic any life style that begins to constrict too much, that prevents free forward momentum, new choices, and growth that a person may want and need."

"It is one thing to ritually wash one’s hands three times; it is another to wash them until the hands bleed and one is in the bathroom most of the day. Here we see in pure culture, as it were, what is at stake in all human repression: the fear of life and death. Safety in the face of the real terror of creature existence is becoming a real problem for the person. He feels vulnerable—which is the truth! But he reacts too totally, too inflexibly. He fears going out in the street, or up in elevators, or into transportation of any kind. At this extreme it is as though the person says to himself "If I do anything at all…I will die.""

"We can see that the symptom is an attempt to live, an attempt to unblock action and keep the world safe. The fear of life and death is encapsulated in the symptom. If you feel vulnerable it is because you feel bad and inferior, not big or strong enough to face up to the terrors of the universe. You work out your need for perfection (bigness, invulnerability) in the symptom—say, hand washing or the avoidance of sex in marriage. We might say that the symptom represents the locus of the performance of heroism. No wonder that one cannot give it up: that would release all by itself the flood of terror that one is trying to deny and overcome. When you put all of your eggs in one basket you must clutch that basket for dear life. It is though one were to take the whole world and fuse it into a single object or single fear."

"The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead. There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself."

"Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or “bad” one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this “badness” by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his “creative” work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means of his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life. In this way he satisfies nature, which asks that he live and act objectively as a vital animal plunging into the world; but he satisfies his own distinctive human nature because he plunges in on his own symbolic terms and not as a reflex of the world as given to mere physical sense experience. He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem."

"From this point of view the difference between the artist and the neurotic seems to boil down largely to a question of talent. If the neurotic feels vulnerable in the face of the world he takes in, he reacts by criticizing himself to excess. He can’t endure himself or the isolation that his individuality plunges him into. On the other hand, he still needs himself to be the hero, still needs to earn immortality on the basis of his unique qualities, which means he still must glorify himself in some ways. But he can glorify himself only in fantasy, as he cannot fashion a creative work that speaks on his behalf by virtue of its objective perfection. He is caught in a vicious circle because he experiences the unreality of fantasied self-glorification. There is really no conviction possible for man unless it comes from others or from outside himself in some way—at least not for long."

"In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed. And what we call “cultural routine” is a similar license: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agent’s office at the height of the tourist season, or the torture of working with a jack-hammer all day on a hot summer street. The answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are “right” for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum."

“Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person’s relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it. All the analysis in the world doesn’t allow the person to find out who he is and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and how he can make his life a triumph.”

Back to the subject of Penn Gillette and his criticism of A.A. and the twelve steps: When Bill Wilson and Bob Smith started Alcoholics Anonymous, they shared Becker's insights regarding the inability of psychology to address the fundamental problem of alcoholism (or for that matter any other neurosis). Psychologists of that era were deeply frustrated with alcoholics. They understood that self-awareness was ineffective but they lacked the basic insight of Becker that any effective solution must be have a spiritual component or it is doomed to fail. More about this in my next blog entry.

Ernest Becker Part 1

Last week I caught the tail end of an episode of the cable TV show Bullshit starring Penn & Teller. Penn & Teller are members of the Skeptical Society, an organization that investigates claims of the paranormal and exposes them as, well... bullshit. It is a tradition that goes back to the days of Harry Houdini, when it became very popular to visit "spirit mediums" and chat with your dead relatives. Houdini exposed many of these people as con artists, and in this respect, Penn Gillette is continuing in the Houdini tradition.

The show Bullshit includes subjects like Scientology and UFO abductions, and it can be very entertaining to watch. Last week's show was about A.A. and the Twelve Steps.

Now this subject is near and dear to my heart and to watch it be attacked as irrational and religion-based by Penn Gillette, someone that I generally respect, stirred up a powerful desire in me to respond. There are a lot of things I would say to Penn Gillette in defense of A.A. and the Twelve Steps if I could. For example, there is the free market argument: If another approach was better, then why wouldn't IT be in 97% of the drug and alcohol treatment centers, and why wouldn't people be court-ordered to their meetings instead?

However, I believe the best argument I could make to a rational scientific minded atheist like Penn Gillette would be to introduce him to Ernest Becker. Dr. Becker helped me to see the exquisite rationality behind A.A.'s twelve steps and to my knowledge he never wrote one word on the subject. According to Wikipedia:

"Dr. Ernest Becker (1925-March 6, 1974, Vancouver, British Columbia), a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer, came to the recognition that psychological inquiry inevitably comes to a dead end beyond which belief systems must be invoked to satisfy the human psyche. The reach of such a perspective consequently encompasses science and religion...

Because of his breadth of vision and avoidance of social science pigeonholes (given the independence of his thinking in the 1960s), Becker was an academic outcast in the last decade of his life. It was only with the award of the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his 1973 book, The Denial of Death (two months after his own death from cancer at the age of 49) that his enormous contributions began to be recognized."

I reread much of "The Denial of Death" over the weekend and I copied down a few quotes that I wish to include in my blog. First here are some choice quotes from Dr. Becker about the nature of the problem, i.e. why we are all crazy:

"...the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic."

"We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality with finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew."

"Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries gill marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—-the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with."

"I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right..."

"[As Pascal put it] “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” Necessarily because the existential dualism makes an impossible situation, an excruciating dilemma. Mad because, as we shall see, everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness—agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same."

"The individual has to protect himself against the world, and he can do this only as any other animal would; by narrowing down the world, shutting off experience, developing an obliviousness to both the terrors of the world and to his own anxieties. Otherwise he would be crippled for action..."

"...to function normally, man has to achieve from the beginning a serious constriction of the world and of himself. We can say that the essence of normality is the refusal of reality. What we call neurosis enters precisely at this point: Some people have more trouble with their lies than others. The world is too much with them, and the techniques that they have developed for holding it at bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself. This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality."

"But we can also see at once that there is no line between normal and neurotic, as we all lie and are all bound in some ways by the lies. Neurosis is, then, something we all share; it is universal..."

In my next blog entry I will provide some Becker quotes on what it means to be really neurotic, in other words: neurotic in the eyes of our neurotic society. Alcoholics and drug addicts certainly fall into this category. Then I will provide some Becker quotes about the solution to the problem, and my own thoughts about how the twelve steps of A.A. fit in this picture.

UFOs at the Zoo

Friday night was a very special night here in Oklahoma City. Our very own Flaming Lips played a magical concert at the Zoo Amphitheater. The Lips also took the opportunity to film their upcoming live DVD during that performance. I had a fantastic time as did everyone I knew that attended. In a prior article on this blog, I mentioned that I had met Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips and that we had several mutual friends. Well, in case you doubted me, here we are hanging out after the show.

More Future Disasters

The editors of Popular Science this month chose to commemorate the first anniversary of Katrina by listing the top 5 disasters that the U.S. can expect in the future. (I guess great minds think alike.) In my earlier article, I missed one completely and it is this:

Glacial melting in Greenland causes a freshwater cap in the North Atlantic. This stalls the circulation of warm water from the South and shifts the climate. All of civilization bordering the North Atlantic would be severely affected. The Eastern half of the U.S. and Canada along with all of Europe would experience a little ice age. Such a shift happened in the period 1550 to 1850. The worst part of this disaster is that if it only lasts 300 years like the last time we'll be lucky.

Also, I mentioned the possiblity of a big Tsunami hitting the U.S., but not mentioning La Palma was my bad. The following two paragraphs are straight from Wikipedia.

"La Palma is not only the steepest island in the world but has also been the most volcanically active of the Canary Isles in the past 500 years. The last few eruptions in the ridge were in 1470, 1585, 1646, 1677, 1712, 1949, and 1971. During the 1949 eruption, a two kilometer-long fracture opened and parts of the western half of the Cumbre Vieja ridge slipped several meters downwards towards the Atlantic Ocean. The fracture can quite easily be seen to this day. It is believed that this process was driven by the pressure caused by the rising magma heating and vaporizing water trapped within the structure of the island.

Scientists warn that in some future eruption within the next few thousand years the western half of the island, approximately 500km3 of land weighing an estimated 500 billion tons, will slide into the ocean -- a so called "lateral collapse". Should that happen, the resulting megatsunami would reach local heights of well over 300 meters and the speed of a jetliner, reaching the African coast in three hours, the coast of England in five, and the eastern seaboard of North America in eight. This could greatly damage if not completely destroy cities along the United States' east coast, such as New York, Boston, Washington, DC, Norfolk, Virginia, and Miami with 25 to 30m high waves."

Now how cool is that?

Finally, I also failed to adequately cover the potential devastation from a hurricane hitting the city of Miami directly. This oversite was natural given that I am a life-long OU football fan and I have an aversion to anything involving Miami Hurricanes.

A Tale of International Business

My girlfriend has a son that is totally into Pokémon. So, when I stumbled across an article about Pokémon at Wikipedia.com, I was curious enough to read it. The most interesting fact I learned about the Nintendo multi-billion dollar media franchise was that even though it is Japanese in origin, the name “Pokémon” is not Japanese, and Pokémon was not the original name under which the product was marketed in the United States. Originally, the name for the game was “Pocket Monsters.”

I think I know why Nintendo chose to change the name. It was to avoid the possible confusion that might result when overhearing this conversation in the back of a grade-school classroom:

“Dude, show Billy your Pocket Monster. I have been telling him how awesome it is ever since you showed it to me yesterday.”

“No way. If the teacher sees me playing with it, she’ll want to hold it until school gets out.”

Can you imagine the conversation about the name change decision in the Nintendo boardroom.

“Tajiri-san, we have to change the name of our Poketto Monsutā product in the English-speaking market. It will cost 30 million yen, and set our marketing plans back 18 months.”

“I don’t understand. Why must we do this?”

“Tajira-san, over 15% of our English-speaking focus group identified the English translation of Pocketto Monsutā as a possible slang term for a penis.”

"Surely, you are joking."

"No sir, I am very serious. The term is not commonly used in America. However, it is close enough to the commonly used penis metaphors: 'pocket rocket' and 'pocket weasel' that the interpretation cannot be avoided. The problem seems to be with the word pocket."

“I will never understand how these barbarians ended up running the planet.”