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Okay, I won’t lie, I had a long weekend of obligations and stuff to do, ending with watching I Am Big Bird over at the Cape Ann Cinema (awesome, recommend), so today we’re going to cop out and re-run last year’s piece about driving like absolute shit.

Okay, Gloucesterites. We have to talk. We really need to sit down and have A Serious Discussion about something, and I want you to listen up – but we both already know the truth here, don’t we? It’s the elephant in the room. Our deep dark not-heroin-or-pregnancy-related-for-once secret.

We’re a city full of TERRIBLE DRIVERS.  Just awful. On the best of days, it feels like driving in a post-apocalyptic nightmarish cityscape where if a man flinches, the churning hordes will innately sense weakness and rend him asunder. On the worst of days, there’s beach traffic.

DRIVING DOWN CENTENNIAL

Because I’m a deeply introspective person who tends to think of the macroenvironment surrounding my collection of dented vehicles, I set out on a spiritual journey to understand WHY we drive this way. And by “set out on a spiritual journey”, I mean I cracked open a beer. What I found on my Vision Quest (Sponsored by Downeast Cider) may explain our curious driving habits. Let us begin.

– The abysmally narrow roads. In a normal city like Somerville or Mumbai, a road twenty feet wide would be either two-way with no parking, or one way with parking on one side of the street. In Gloucester, twenty feet wide means two way traffic with cars parked halfway on the sidewalk in both directions, but you have to pull over where you can and let opposing traffic pass. Or they have to pull over.

Plenty of room to park, seriously.

Or, you have a “Gloucester Traffic Standoff” which is like a Mexican standoff but with cars and beeping and sometimes a gentle mist of swearing. Apparently, according to a neighbor who turned her car around, followed me to my house, and openly berated me in my driveway, you should also cede right of way to the person who has lived in Gloucester the longest. I could not make this up if I tried.

– It’s a constant monster truck rally. I’ve been here for a decade, my entire twenties, a third of my life. Still, to this day, I am dumbfounded at the subset of Gloucester drivers who carry on as if the roads are their own personal demolition derby. Large, somewhat illegal pickup trucks are a dime a dozen ’round these parts. They come equipped with exhausts that sound like whooping cough, and they screech their tires at any available opportunity like a mating call for the perpetually dense. Almost predictably, these classy stallions of the motoring world are driven by white guys under the age of 35, sometimes shirtless, usually wearing a baseball cap.

BRB honey, off to get trashbags in my perfectly reasonable mode of transportation.

Let me regale you with a tale from ye olde last week, when my other half got into a very minor traffic accident. He was driving up the mountainous terrain of Commonwealth Ave at a reasonable speed and on the side of the road one is socially obligated to drive on, on his way to pick up our preschooler. Suddenly, a wild truck appeared, cresting the hill. Naturally, the driver thought, “I can’t see the other side of this hill, so it’s a great idea to just drive in the middle of the road as fast as possible! Wee hoo, let’s see if we can catch air at the top!”

Since my spouse has an innate survival instinct, he pulled to the right as much as possible to avoid being smashed like a beer can on a frat boy’s forehead. Unfortunately, he clipped a mirror, and dented our car a bit more. Of course, the offending truck continued blissfully on its path of dumbassery, blind to the consequences of DRIVING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GODDAMN ROAD, so now our insurance will go up because that guy’s a moron.

– Infrastructure designed by sadists. It appears sometime in Gloucester’s past, we may have hired a thorazine-addled Ray Charles as our city’s street planner. Nothing makes sense. We have swirling masses of one-ways that can pull you in over on Washington street and spit you out by Burnham’s Field when you had a preference for ending up on Main. We have fake-rotaries where no particular rules apply and from which a set of makeshift laws governing them have been handed down from generation to generation, an oral history never committed to DOT approved signage.

All roads lead to this.

And for some reason, we have a multitude of completely unsafe, blind, terrifying street intersections and it seems to not even bother people. There’s nothing like the thrill of pulling out of the end of a street where you can’t see more than 15 feet in either direction, and despite “thickly settled” being an understatement, the traffic is going Ludicrous Speed. It’s like a roulette wheel! Most of the time you can get out safely if you whip your head back and forth enough to check both directions without devolving into an epileptic fit, but once in awhile you get nearly pegged by a National Grid truck whizzing around the corner.

– People who never leave the island. When I first moved here, I had heard tales of those who never left Cape Ann. I imagined these people as a simple, yesteryear folk who believed trolls, socialists, and hell existed beyond the bridges. And now I am one of those people who barely leave. I am totally part of the problem. I work here, I live here, I shop here – I once went 5 weeks and 2 days without leaving Cape Ann entirely accidentally. But this means that without much outside stimuli, we as a people have our societal habits break down. We forget what it’s like in the big, outside world where you can’t park 2 feet from the corner of a major intersection or take up both lanes of a two lane road because it’s Not Cool elsewhere.

– Tourists. In the interest of complete fairness to my people, it isn’t entirely our fault. We have a huge annual influx of visitors, which is wonderful, because our economy needs it to survive and it makes Gloucester awesome. But sweet fuck, tourist drivers are just as bad as the rest of us, if not worse. They don’t use blinkers, don’t wave people through at difficult intersections (THAT’S HOW WE SURVIVE HERE, IT’S THE ONE THING WE DO RIGHT!), and they make sudden movements, like frightened rabbits. They drive 10 under the speed limit all the way to Lanesville because like gosh, Jeff, look at this view, isn’t it just precious? When I see an out of state plate, I have to assume the person behind the wheel has an IQ of “baked potato” and will brake suddenly and swiftly whenever the breeze blows.

All in all, we have a ways to go as far as our vehicular behavior is concerned. It’s an “all of us” problem – I won’t excuse myself from making questionable-at-best driving decisions (constantly misjudging curbs is my weakness). But with a little humor, and a lot of patience, we can make the roads more tolerable. And by “tolerable” I mean I only shit my pants once in a rolling 24-hour period. We can work towards that. I believe in us, Gloucester.

Our history with technology has always been simple: our creations have universally amplified our uniquely human characteristics.  Our desires for food, sex and domination were more easily sated with every advance from stone axes to hydrogen bombs. If you wanted another man’s wife, you could make that position clear by pitching a well-made spear through his chest. If you wanted another man’s country you could request it via bombs rained from the sky. For all our Star Trek vision  of technology making us more noble (The Wright brothers, for instance, believed aircraft would make war impossible because both sides could too easily monitor each other’s troop movements) the reality reveals technology slavishly serving imperfect human masters to their basest whims. It was George Carlin who reminded us the flamethrower was invented by a guy who thought, “That guy over there? I want him on fire.”

Interestingly, though, this is beginning to change. There are places, corners and pockets, where the technology has been given the power to say, “no.” I find this to be a fascinating and potentially hopeful development.

Let us discuss drones (when do we not?). Modern drones are what we call “semi-autonomous” it’s what differentiates them from the remote-controlled aircraft of the past. Instead of using a controller to direct their every action as we would with a TV or a toy car, we instead send a signal of our desire and the device interprets our request based on the internal priorities of the software. The drone has important things its already doing: keeping itself level, compensating for wind, understanding its position and monitoring on-board systems such as battery, distance from origin point and control signals. In every case a modern drone in its normal configuration will override commands from its human operators if those orders conflict with its programmed imperative for self-preservation.

This is kind of amazing.

If it finds itself running out of battery, the drone will abort its mission and fly to where it took off from and land all on its own. If its ordered to travel out past where it knows the signal will get lost, it will not proceed. If it loses signal from the control station it flies home (sometimes with hilarious results). Drones are “smart” technology and as their sensors get better they will have more and more conditions under which they will ignore our orders. Soon they won’t fly into walls and trees. They won’t smash into the ground at high speed and there is even talk of them knowing where airports and sensitive areas such as government buildings and military operations are, and they will refuse to fly there.

These drones, when perfected, will be better than us in some ways. They won’t fly onto the White House lawn. They won’t smash into the groom at a wedding.

Of course you can bypass all this stuff. You can set it to fly it miles away with no account for the battery power it will need to get home and crash it to your heart’s content. And the tech is still young enough that it doesn’t always work so great- but we are so at the early stages. Already we find pilots crashing real planes because they ignored or overrode the aircraft’s warning system which knew better what was going on than they did. Very soon we’re going to be able to apply fail-safes to more and more technology. Should we? And if not, who accounts for those hurt or killed where we selfishly choose to keep our autonomy?

An incredibly short time ago historically we rode around on horses, a similar technology to drones. Under most conditions they did what we said, but they’d look out for their own necks as well. No matter how drunk you were, a normally-trained horse wouldn’t walk off a cliff. Horses know about human limitations and frequently disobey human commands they don’t favor. Dogs are the same way. Humans and dogs have been together for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, but you still won’t get a standard pet dog to come in from the yard if there is a deliciously decayed dead squirrel carcass out there. As much as it loves you, the dog has priorities built into its software. Our autonomous technology is getting like this.

Very soon your car will resist merging into a lane if there is already a vehicle there. This technology is already being deployed on Mercedes in Europe. They’re deploying it because unlike us, technology doesn’t get tired. Its boss doesn’t chew it out, it never worries about the mortgage. The tech won’t have one too many at its niece’s wedding and plow into a minivan in the rain. The tech can handle getting a text and steering at the same time. In terms of driving cars it won’t be too long until the tech is better than us.

Think about where this will go: You could build a gun that won’t shoot anyone in your family. Small HD camera, facial recognition software, Arduino microprocessor, electronic trigger system. I can almost sketch the circuit out in my head. Is this a good idea? Would you be more or less likely to buy a gun you could program not to shoot the people you care about?

This is a thought experiment, of course. Things called “ski masks” exist and the need for the processing in super-short time frames and chaotic conditions like darkness make this impractical today. But five years from now? Ten? Add to facial recognition a series of identifying features like body mass and heat signature and the question is quickly begged: should your gun warn you if it’s more likely the person crawling in through the window at 3 AM is your idiot son home from a drunken high school party than a member of the Zeta narcogang? Should your gun pause even though you’re desperately squeezing the trigger? Should it vibrate? Give an audible warning? Because very soon guns will be better at identifying targets than we are. They don’t get scared and unlike us their imaginations are profoundly non-vivid. Guns could be made to be better than we are at not shooting the wrong people.

Guns could be made to be better than us.

For all our brilliance at creatively solving problems, we humans suck at the boring stuff. We are inconsistent. We vastly overestimate our abilities and delight in fooling ourselves on topics granular and grand. In contrast, machines excel at the dull. They can do the same job over and over till their servos wear out. The more complex tasks they become capable of, the more they will best their human creators in completing those tasks without faltering.

Already there are robot pharmacists outperforming human ones. There are software radiologists who can find tumors in slides better than humans with the added benefit of being able to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and the first analysis on Monday morning has the same quality as the one at six on the Friday before a long weekend. The planet Mars is inhabited entirely by robots as the conditions there are unspeakably difficult for us meatsacks, with our need for not only atmosphere but water AND food AND sleep making us a less-than-ideal choice for exploration. Leave it to our bots. They are better at exploring the solar system than we are.

Algorithms will get better at identifying risks for negative human behaviors as they have more and more access to “big data.” For instance, recognizing certain patterns of obsession online coupled with some keywords and purchases identified from an IP address could have stopped Adam Lanza and Anders Behring both. Our sense of freedom boils at this, but talk to the parents of the victims and see if they feel the same way. A not-very-sophisticated analysis could have told anyone the 2008 financial crash was a disaster waiting to happen. What responsibility do we have in creating a reporting structure in our bots? Whom do they tell? What actions do we give them the power to execute, knowing our propensity for self-delusion?

There will come a time, not far off, when our devices start telling us what to do, and not because they are evil in a Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster sort of way or a Skynet/Matrix sort of way.

But because we are wrong.

Today’s Fuck It Friday is courtesy of Obvious Plant. “I renamed some of the paint colors at the hardware store.”

Part 3 – stealing you from Gloucester once and for all (I haven’t written Part 2 yet, so deal)

So you’ve come to Salem and fallen in love with the city. You’ve decided “I simply must live here!” and are willing to do whatever it takes. Well, you’re in luck. I’m here to steal you away.

Salem essentially has a few large neighborhoods where most people go. We have the Derby Street neighborhood, which is really the oldest neighborhood left after the Salem Fire of 1914. It’s filled with triple-deckers and historic homes from the 1700s and 1800s, many of which are condos nowadays. Parking sucks in the neighborhood, but it’s really walkable to almost the whole city – and it’s close to our seasonal Boston ferry for the commuters (they take T passes!).

The next neighborhood on the list is Bridge Street Neck. That’s the spit of land that connects Salem almost to Beverly, and it’s connected to the Salem Common neighborhood. Basically, as you get farther from Beverly the homes get bigger and more condo-y. There is a nice mix of small single-family homes and bigger multis. The west side of Bridge Street is a bit more twee.

Bridge Street Neck transitions into the Salem Common neighborhood once you cross Webb Street. The single-family homes there are freaking massive. Most were split up into condos, though. Really convenient to the downtown. Side streets can be really tight for parking. This is a meme in Salem. Everyone wants resident parking here, but not too many places have it.

The Point is a very dense neighborhood wedged between Lafayette and Congress Streets in the downtown. Housing is cheap, but it’s also where a lot of our police logs chronicle life. There are some better sections and streets but in general be aware in your housing choices. Quite a few of my friends live there and are very happy with it. The parks in the neighborhood are typically safe and pleasant, which is a good thing. Mind you, a “bad neighborhood” in a city like Salem is far safer than a bad neighborhood in a bigger city… I have a few friends who live down there and overall it’s pretty chill. This was the old French Canadian neighborhood at the turn of the last century for people who came to work the mills. Nowadays it’s mostly Hispanic – we have a lot of Dominican immigrants here.

Next we have South Salem, where I live. South Salem is split pretty much in two. I live in the section closer to town, with a mix of homes, a lot of college kids living in the area, and more walkable. The east side of Lafayette Street borders the harbor, and there’s some nice views to be had. The west side of the street (between Lafayette and Canal) has more student housing and more triple-deckers. The southern part of the area is towards Swampscott and almost entirely single-family homes with yards and stuff. We don’t have so many yards in my part. Salem’s only working farm is in that part of South Salem. Also, the university is located here.

Still with me? There’s a few more. North Salem is the part you drive in thru as you come in from 128. Nice, small suburban houses, close together, where a lot of our hippie types go to live. They have chickens and bees and stuff, and free-range kids.

HOORAY FOR BEES

The catch is that you probably can’t get a house there. Zero turnover unless people die. Several of our city parks (Mack Park, Gallows Hill, Furlong Park) are in the area so there’s plenty of outdoor places to go be active if you aren’t one of the people with a yard there. North Street splits this neighborhood into two sides – the south side has more multifamily houses and is a little denser. The north side has more and larger yards, for the most part. It’s also a great place to live if you work in Beverly. The Kernwood Bridge is a shortcut that dumps you into Ryal Side in the event the bridge isn’t open for boats. Which it always is (or at least whenever I want to cross it).

The whole area to the west of Route 107 is what we call Witchcraft Heights. It’s like Wellesley. Relatively big yards, suburban architecture, single-family homes with attached garages, and most of our Republicans. There’s a few sections to it but that’s the nutshell version. Off Highland Avenue there are a number of fairly modern condo and apartment complexes. Good options for folks who don’t want the downtown life. This also is where our big box stores live. Target, Wal-Mart, Market Basket, Shaws, and Home Depot are all on this stretch. The only other big retail area we have is Vinnin Square, which mostly is in Swampscott on the other side of town.

Downtown we have the whole “McIntyre District”. This encompasses Federal Street, Essex Street, Chestnut Street, etc. Beautiful 1700s and 1800s homes, and you can’t afford them. Neither can I. But by all means go visit, it’s beautiful. Our library is over there. You can’t park at the library because the whole area is resident sticker parking, but we all do anyway because Salem. Chestnut Street, in particular, is a great example of 1800s architecture.

Our downtown is something I spoke of in my previous Over The Bridge entry. Did you know you can live there, too? There are a handful of homes in the area, but we also have tons of condo buildings and apartment rentals downtown. There’s a nice apartment complex immediately adjacent to the new train station (Jefferson at Salem), and several large condo developments in convenient spots. You can pretty much go carless in downtown Salem. If that’s the life for you, we also have Zipcars in Salem. Just saying.

Also in my last entry, I wrote of the Salem Willows. There’s homes in that neighborhood, and the views are almost invariably amazing, but as far as turnover goes this is like North Salem only smaller. They don’t turn over at all so you can forget living here. But do come on the morning of July 4^th for their Horribles Parade. It’s a Salem thing.

For other amenities here that you might like, we’ve got a municipal golf course, two city boat ramps, and a neat wooded area with trails you can go exploring in, though there’s no boulders with inscriptions on them. You might see a carving on a tree instead?

So I really do like Gloucester. It’s a pretty cool place with a lot of funky, beautiful neighborhoods. Many of my friends live there, and a lot of the clients I have in my day job are there. But my suggestion is that you all pack it in and move here to Salem. We’ve got the room for you, and we’re like 30 minutes by train closer to Boston. Just putting that out there. You will have to make sure that your car passes inspection, though. We don’t get to have Island Cars here. Dang.

Every once in awhile, we check on the google search terms that led people to click on our website. Some… are weird.

leonard nimoy star trek

old black and white photo of a man sitting in a chair smiling 1800s mems

dumpster fire

wrestlers have them others play with them

is the gloucester clam satire?

what would happen if we put the trash in the bermuda triangle

what is the worst part of tally’s corner

giant truck with confederate flag

pantsshitter mcgee

how to make a clam mascot

what is longform of 3d

is football fans are stupid

running for mayor of gloucester, ma