Editors’ note: The opinions and ideas expressed in The Accidental Gentrifist are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook and belief of anyone else in the Ist network.

Author’s Note: This column is more than three times longer than the word limit I generally hold myself to. So be warned: The following—like C-Span, crossword puzzles, and commercials for the guy who may not look like a lawyer—was designed for an audience with a fair amount of free time. Bite-sized morsels shall return next week.

Part 1.

The new homes going up at Mueller seem to be coming along nicely. $300k to live in a claptrap clone-home three feet from your next door neighbor. Apparently, nobody has taken full measure of the psychological toll of having to look at McHoods every day, much less actually live in one. Mucher lesser planting one in the heart of a reasonably organically-developed city. I thought we’d be trying to cut down on the tragically high incidence of shooting sprees in this country, but Hey. I just work here. And only part-time.

Not that this is my first rodeo, in terms of 'revitalization', As was alluded to in a previous nail-biting episode of The Accidental Gentrifist, I did most of my growing up on an island in Northern California. This island was, geographically speaking, about one-third Navy base. Alameda Naval Air Station, to be precise. Once home to all four of this nation’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, when there were only four, until some smartypants in the Pentagon figured that might not be such a good setup, what with the Soviets having a bunch of strategic ICBMs and all. While the base, to my knowledge, has not been converted to nouveau-row, it has served as the set for the chase scene in Matrix: Reloaded, as well as the studio for Myth Busters, and is the distilling site of Hangar One vodka, hence the name.

Growing up on that island gave me a lot, including the experience of monthly air raid drills, even when such rituals we considered passé in less strategic corners of the country. It also showed me what it was like to live next door to an enormous piece of real estate suddenly put up for grabs at ridiculously low prices.

In terms of the new businesses in the wake of a Navy base closure, ‘revitalization’ is a hard nut to sell. More like 'damage control'. In Alameda, the closure meant the exodus of literally tens of thousands of civilian jobs, not to mention the millions of dollars enlisted Navy personnel poured into the city's economy trying to impress local high school girls. And speaking of young scholars, it was also believed that said exodus would result in the partial closure of the nearest public high school. Unless of course something amazing happened.

Enter: Arthur Andersen.

Part 2.

The Alameda Naval Base closed down a little bit before the Robert Mueller Airport, in early1997. But let’s go even further back in time. Five more years, to be exact. To the summer between my 6th and 7th grades. With a single phone call, my school counselor suspended two and a half uninterrupted months of basketball and water balloon fights. She told my parents that I’d been selected to participate in a very special seminar in the Oakland Hills, one of only ten kids in the whole district, actually. Well, technically, I hadn’t been selected so much as invited. I thought this changed things, but my mom assured me I was going.

We convened at the Claremont Hotel, a posh and historic landmark about a mile from UC Berkeley. Our congress consisted of a little more than two dozen students, teachers, and administrators. Arthur Andersen’s consulting arm had convened us to help them brainstorm a more perfect school. Each of our files had been perused, and for whatever reason, we were all deemed in some way exceptional, and likely to give exceptionally creative responses to any given problem. Our guides on this expedition of exceptionality were Greg and Amy, ostensibly two of Arthur Andersen’s more promising young consultants. Polo-shirted Greg’s energy seemed incongruous with the little pudge hanging over his belted khakis. Amy was a bit younger, cheerleader-average with corn-colored hair and a thin little body of only passing interest, even to a young man nearing the apex of puberty. However, their pride was palpable as they told us we were an elite group.

Their mission over the next three days, they explained, was to pick our minds and guide us into helping them design a fundamentally improved school. Specifically, an institution that would simultaneously eschew the dead weight of scholastic dogma while pushing forward into previously unexplored territory of inventive and worthwhile scholarship. It was to be a wholly new kind of learning environment. After all, if the multi-billion dollar magic of Arthur Andersen could redesign a business to attain previously unimagined success, why couldn’t the same effect be achieved with a school?

For this task, they wanted to impress upon us an ultimate principle of creativity. We weren’t to limit ourselves in any way. To stress this, they named the seminar Beyond the Box, and, in order to give us a touchstone to this central metaphor, Greg and Amy carried an easel with a giant pad of paper to the midpoint of our chairs, which at their behest had been hastily arranged into a rough semi-circle.

While they made arrangements, I looked around the room. I recognized a handful of ‘favorite’ teachers, usually younger faculty genuinely admired by kids, parents, and other teachers alike. And my ‘peers’ were all what one would call ‘shining stars’. It seemed like they all played the violin, regularly won talent shows and science fairs, had their angst-ridden poetry published by actual magazines, filled younger roles with professional theatre troupes, and spent their weekends developing their masonry skills laying new wheelchair ramps for local convalescent homes. Simply put, I had no idea why I was there, or how I came to be selected.

In fact, the only person whose presence mystified me more than my own was Mr. Carver, a rather infamous old administrator. Carver was black, maybe six-foot-three or more if he wasn’t so stooped over, and so skinny he had to cling to light poles when the wind picked up. His hair was done up like a Jheri curl, just not as greasy, with a long goatee of the same approximate texture. Mr. Carver was dark, the gleaming color of baking chocolate, and about three times as bitter. He wore thick, bottle-bottom bifocals, and lectured us in a southern accent peppered with East Oakland jive—“You ken juss’ cawl me Mistuh Kahvuh.” To us he was ancient, his true age pegged anywhere from sixty to forty-five. His primary responsibility seemed to be discipline, both the enforcement of policy and the punishment following infraction. But he took the most interest in our basketball teams. Rumor had it he played in the ABA, the NBA’s ‘outlaw’ rival from 1967-1976, popularizing the slam-dunk and the three-pointer. The ABA ended when it merged with the NBA, but Mr. Carver’s pro basketball career died even earlier, the result of quadruple bypass surgery.

Now that Greg and Amy had dragged forth the easel with the giant pad of paper, they proceeded to illustrate our seminar’s central theme. Greg approached the easel, uncapped a black felt-tip marker and drew nine dots like so:

“What I want you to do is, I’d like you to figure out how to connect all nine of these dots using only four straight lines.”

Fifteen years on, most of us now know of this “puzzle”. But back in those halcyon days before the widespread transmission of ‘Outside the Box’ and other corporate newspeak, few of us, especially youths and those ensconced in the liberal insulation of California’s state-sponsored education, could dream of such savvy.

So we replicated the dots in our own notebooks. We doodled, we scratched, we started over. We worked together, in pairs, sometimes in isolation. No one seemed to get it, as Greg and Amy looked on smugly. And it was a little funny. After all, everyone in the room already had some shred of justification for believing themselves a shade or two brighter than the average bear, and were now scratching their heads and crumpling scratch paper in frustration. Erasers were worn thin. There were jokes, nervous titters. Then, questions: Can the lines intersect? Yes. Do they have to be straight, exactly? Yes. Is it actually possible? A quick chuckle, and a Yes. To Greg and Amy’s apparent satisfaction, none of us could figure it out.

After fifteen minutes or so, they put an end to our suffering. Greg approached the easel and explained the basic concept. “See, sometimes, to solve a tricky problem, you have to think outside the box. Everyone in this room confined their minds to the box these nine dots apparently make. But in reality, there are no lines to make a box. The 'box' was a conceit, a product of your minds. Once you adjust your mindset to ignore perceived limitations, your capacity for creative solutions becomes infinite.”

Greg drew:

There was this collective “Oooooohhhhhh….”

Smiling, Greg continued. “This will be our central metaphor for the seminar: ‘Beyond the Box’.” He recapped his marker. “Because that’s what we’d like you all to do. Think outside the box." Here Greg took in a deep breath. "We want you to open your minds to new possibilities. Let us be bold. Let us adventure. Let us—”

“Now jus’ ho don a minit, young man…”

Greg froze, mouth open, still smiling. Heads turned to find the source of the interruption. Of course, I already knew the voice. It was Mr. Carver.

“Yes?” Greg asked politely.

Mr. Carver stood, and with some effort, straightened his broken old body. “I don’t need no fo’ lines to conneck those dots. I ken do it with one.”

“Really,” Greg said, still smiling. He glanced at Amy and the pair shared a brief moment of absurd witness. “Okay,” Greg said, “Show us.” Greg extended the marker to Mr. Carver, offering it like a length of rope.

The consultants beamed, full on the afterglow of their psycho-geometric parlor trick’s transmission. Mr. Carver laboriously made his way to the easel, where Greg drew a fresh set of nine dots. As Carver tried to hustle his old, pointy ass forward, several pairs of eyes needled me, as if he was just wasting everyone’s precious time, and I was somehow guilty by association. I shrugged. I suspected that most people there shared my basic assumption: that Mr. Carver had somehow misunderstood the simple instructions. That he didn’t catch that the lines were supposed to be straight, or something to that effect, and that he was about to embarrass himself by drawing some monkey-fuck curvy-ass line all over the neatly plotted dots, probably to an effect that would disgrace the entire district, with the only conceivable positive outcome being that he'd be forced to accept early retirement, and a happy if not senile twilight.

But he did not.

“Well, you start at the first dot, and you go right, straight off the page…”

Eyebrows were raised. Undaunted, Carver went on:

“Than you go all the way ’round infinity,” (pronounced ‘iyn-fiyn-nuh-tee’, but not spelled phonetically here in order to preserve the clarity of Mr. Carver’s vision) he said, making his ink go right off the paper. “Then you come ’round again, through the middle dots and back off the page again…”

“And aftuh that, you come around infinity one more time, and you make one more pass fo’ the lass’ three dots.”

Mr. Carver turned and faced us. “There. All nine dots, jus’ one line. And it doesn’t turn a corner o’ cross isself o’ make no angles o’ nuthin’.”

Greg and Amy were speechless. Stunned, maybe. Seemingly, the old fart had trumped their math, and with three lines to spare. This was off their radar. Beyond their box, if you will. The consultants regarded each other with a sense of urgency, if not in a slight panic, searching each others’ faces for absolution. Seconds ticked by as a roomful of eyes awaited their rejoinder. We in the group exchanged glances, began whispering. My thumbs began to twitch inexplicably. The whispers grew to murmuring, the murmuring to open, anarchistic dialogue.

Finally, Amy surged with epiphany. She blurted: “You can’t just go around infinity. I mean, that’s what infinity is, right? It’s… everything. You can’t just circumnavigate it. Like Magellan, or something.”

There was a collective sigh of relief from most of the group as Amy delivered us from doubt and logical jeopardy. Order, it seemed, had been restored, and none too early. Mr. Carver paused as if about to speak. Then he chuckled and pushed his glasses up his nose, his shoulders slumping as his body resumed its rounded hunch, bouncing with the laughter of his own playful, self-deprecating rhythm, making his way back to his seat as if he had simply been trying to pull a fast one on us. As if he knew full well how ludicrous it was to propose nine dots could be touched by only one line.

“Wait a sec,” a voice said. It belonged to this young Japanese girl, a girl my age, a new student to my school, in fact. Her name tag said ‘KIRA’. “Why does the line have to go around infinity? Why can’t it just go around the earth? You know,” she quipped sardonically, "...like Magellan?”

There was a smattering of laughter and an audible "Touché!" Those who didn’t buy into Amy’s definition of infinity rode a fresh wave of insurgency. Mr. Carver rubbed his goateed chin thoughtfully. Amy herself faltered at the repulsion of her hypothesis. Nervous, she looked to Greg.

“Well,” Greg stammered, “I—I don’t think a line is straight, technically, if it spirals around a curved body, like, heh, a planet.” He chuckled for effect, trying to spark rational consensus.

“Sure it is,” a thirty-ish geometry teacher called out. She stood up, pulling long blond hairs out of her eyes. “The distinction you’re making is purely semantic. In reality, ‘straight’ is pragmatically relative to the planet we live on.”

There was a fresh swell of murmurs.

“Okay, Okay,” Amy said over the din, “I think we’re getting a little off-track here. As far as the box problem, let’s just say you can connect all the dots with fewer than four lines. That’s okay. But you have to at least stay in the room, okay? No space travel, no circumnavigation, got it?” Her smile was sweetly stuck on, peeled over her exceptionally white teeth. It was obvious she now hated us, thirty minutes into a three-day seminar.

I heard someone say, “Isn’t this room just another box?” Before anyone could reply, a portly, mustachioed man stood up. I couldn’t read his nametag. He said, “Hang on a minute. Mr. Carver here’s onto something. Maybe you can’t go around infinity, but if you tear the paper off the easel, and roll it into a slightly skewed cylinder, his idea still works. Nine dots, one line. And,” he chuckled at Amy, “You don’t even have to leave the room.”

We all started rolling up our scratch paper to see if it’d work. It did, of course.

Amy, now a little red-faced, urgently spat something into Greg’s ear. They turned and faced us, obviously deciding not to sweat this one out. Greg smiled broadly and raised his hand, his signal to us that he would very much like our attention. “Okay, okay. Sure, you could do that. You could roll the paper. You could get into a 'space ship'. But that’s not what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to show you that when faced with the dot problem, your mind automatically limited itself by presupposing the nine dots comprised a box. Which is why you couldn’t see how four lines could work. We’re trying to get you to get creative here, to really open your minds. To transcend limitation. And on that note—” Greg decisively tore away Mr. Carver’s one-line illustration from the easel and without pause began writing empty bullets for the next topic. “Okay. Now let’s talk about educational priorities, and streamlining education bureaucracy....”

The group half-heartedly sunk itself into the new topic, most of us clearly disappointed not to have resolved the 'spiraling straight line / infinity' issue. There was a brief moment when we all thought the whole seminar would be that invigorating. But no. Greg and Amy picked up steam after they suppressed a mutiny to their logic, and there were no more interruptions.

Later, I sat next to Kira and whispered, “You know, Magellan didn’t actually circumnavigate the Earth. He died in the Philippines. His ship went on without him.”

“God,” she sighed. “Duh. You think I didn’t know that?” Then she rolled her eyes into the back of her head, by way of demonstrating how much of a moron I clearly was.

Part 3.

For well over a decade, I had forgotten most of what I just recorded here. Then, last year, it all came rushing back, in a dream no less. I awoke and leapt from bed, disturbing the unconscious lump of plasma next to me, exclaiming, “Mr. Carver was right!”

I grabbed a piece of scratch paper and wrote:

If Zeno’s Paradox demonstrates that space is infinitely divisible, then all measurements are therefore relative. A meter cannot be ‘just’ a meter if it cannot be reduced to a smallest possible component. Thus, the construction ‘1m’ is as ridiculous as ‘1m + ∞’. And if space is infinite, then it must be infinite in all directions, both infinitely divisible and infinitely multiple, relative to the point of the viewer. And if all space if infinite, then so too is the earth, from pole to pole, crust to crust. One’s place on that scale cannot be absolutely determined, as it exists solely relative to one’s perception. Therefore, one can ‘go around infinity’, relative to one’s position in the universe.

Now, a year later and in the sad and sober light of day, my notes don’t seem to make a terrible amount of sense. Perhaps more promising is the image I sketched to help demonstrate what I was after:

Fifteen minutes after I sprung from bed that night, the brutal irony of Mr. Carver’s dismissal stung me in strange ways. It was like I was suddenly twelve years old again. Arthur Andersen had gathered us to ‘brainstorm’, to conceive without constraint, enthusiastically pumping us for ideas. But an unlikely voice offered a truly exceptional solution to a bewitchingly mundane problem, and what happened? He got shafted. Arthur Andersen proved themselves to be an elite class entrepreneurs sworn to innovation… unless. Revolution, if only.

It was, in a way, my first episode of disillusionment. Repeated on a weekly basis when I witness such events as a blank canvas / former airport turned into… well, go see for yourself. It’s already beginning to resemble the same shit cropping up everywhere else. Or rather, the same fungus cropping up on different shit nationwide.

Despite their implosion following the Enron scandal, Arthur Andersen did come though on their design for an innovative school, and built the Community Learning Center in Alameda. In an old high school building vacated by the base closure, no less. And apparently, their students regularly outperform 90% of all high school students in the state.

As for Mr. Carver, I don’t know if he’s passed on or still alive. I hope for the latter, as he seemed well-suited to a long and pleasantly curious old age. But if he’s not, perhaps what’s left of Arthur Andersen could foot the bill to have his ashes jettisoned from the next space launch. So that in death, if not life, Mr. Carver can prove that a simple man may indeed circumnavigate everything.