The Revelation

I never truly learned to read. At least, I don’t recall the process of learning. I remember sitting on the floor with my father as he read to me when I was 4 or 5. I often drifted off if the narrative became too far-fetched, such as a bear acting too much like a human.

One evening, as my father read, I inadvertently blocked his view of the book after slipping off his lap. He paused and asked, "Can you read this?" Confused, I thought I was reading simply by being there with him. He remarked, "Your lips were moving. Were you just mimicking me?" I felt a vague impulse to conceal something.

“Here,” he said, handing me the closed book. I looked at him uncertainly. “Go ahead, read,” he insisted.

Taking the book, I located our last stopping point and began:

The children were frightened. It was dark and cold. They walked and walked. The forest made sounds. ‘What is that?’ his sister cried out, grabbing his arm. ‘Aren’t you scared?’

‘A little bit,’ the boy admitted.

“What’s that long word?” my father asked.

“This one?” I replied, pointing. “Frightened?”

“I thought you knew how to read,” he countered. “How can that be frightened? There’s no ‘g’ sound and two ‘e’s’ I can’t hear at all.”

“Dad,” I responded reasonably, “it’s frightened, trust me. It fits perfectly. You often read words to me with extra green letters. That’s just how they are. Can we continue with the story? I hope it’s not some animal huffing and puffing.”

“Extra green letters?” my father echoed, his tone unfamiliar to me.

“What color do you think they are?” I asked.

Ratio Issues

“He thinks too much,” my mother remarked when my father returned one evening when I was 7. Then she turned to me: “Stop thinking all the time!”

“I tried to stop,” I explained. “I can’t. The words just come.”

“In living color,” she teased, suppressing a smile. “Tell your father about dinner.”

“I was trying to help Mom cook faster. I turned the oven up to 485 degrees. The ratio was right. I added 50% and planned to cut the time by 50%. It should have worked.”

“Why didn’t it work?” my father inquired.

“Some things need to cook slowly. And don’t start on ratios,” she warned me. “He thinks ratios will solve everything.” I was already calculating at the kitchen table.

“Wait a minute,” my father realized. “What number increased by 50% gave you 485 degrees?”

“It wasn’t 485 exactly,” I clarified. “325 increased by 50% is 487 and 1/2. I adjusted it a bit.” I could visualize the colors of 1–6–2 point 5 — adding them to 3-2-5 yields 4-8-7 point 5. Not the best combo, but acceptable.

“Show me the calculations,” my father demanded.

“I did it in my head,” I replied. I was supposed to show my work, and he was about to remind me. “The red pen was missing,” I offered.

“Fine,” my mother relented. “I won’t touch his precious pens!”

“You can use the pens, Mom. Just return them.” After a moment, I added, “Sorry about the roast. I’ll figure out a way to fix it. Maybe we can replace the moisture.”

The Age of Reason

I believed the Age of Reason allowed me to explore every fleeting thought and made me right about everything.

For Catholics, when a child turns 7, their understanding of right and wrong is deemed mature enough to grasp concepts like free will and God’s expectations. However, it didn’t imply that an 8-year-old, no matter how clever, could create their own grammar and punctuation rules.

“We can’t allow children to invent their own rules,” the young teacher told my mother. “And we haven’t taught the semi-colon yet, yet he uses it as if he invented it.”

“I didn’t make anything up,” I insisted, holding back the thought that the semi-colon appeared in an irresistible deep purple.

“But your answers deviate from our curriculum,” the teacher replied. “We do not spell behavior with a u. You’re not even British.”

“Both spellings are acceptable,” I informed her.

“By whom? If they’re both acceptable, you can spell it as we studied it.”

“The word looks incorrect without a red letter,” I slipped out.

“This isn’t a coloring book,” the teacher snapped, pointing at my worksheets. She usually was gentle and understanding, but I had exhausted her patience. She attempted to compromise: “I marked behaviour as incorrect, but instead of deducting four points, I’ll only take away two. You know the correct spelling, and you had a reason.”

“I wouldn’t mention reason,” my mother cautioned. “That could be problematic.”

The following year, our school served as a pilot site for a new aptitude test. “This could be significant for your future,” my father told me. “High schools will consider it, and you could gain an advantage now. But you’ll need to answer the questions in the conventional manner. No variations, no colored pens.”

“Do I even have to write like Harris’s or Davis’s?” I asked, disgusted. “Perhaps I could write belongs to Davis to bypass the whole issue.”

“See? You already know what they want. It will be a valuable exercise.”

“For what purpose?” I demanded.

The test comprised 75 questions, which I completed in less than an hour. I reviewed my work and had to change “37” to “thirty-seven.” Most of what we wrote was letters. We needed some variation. Numbers were bright and colorful, yet they had their rules. The questions with “none of the above” posed the greatest challenge. There was always a reason to reject an answer, but I understood they wanted me to select a “good enough” option. It didn’t help that the phrase “none of the above” took on the color of its letter choice — yellow for “d” or dark green for “e.” It practically begged me to choose it, but I followed my father’s advice and attempted to think like them.

I handed in the exam without a word to my teacher and went to the office to ask the secretary to call my mother for a ride. I felt nauseous and dizzy. That evening, I registered a temperature of 102 degrees. When my father came home, he entered my room, touched my forehead, and glanced at the thermometer.

“Your test score was higher than that,” he informed me. “You also did the extra credit and received 110 points. Congratulations.”

Out in the Real World

The unique perception of colors and hidden associations with words and numbers could have portrayed me as an arrogant intellectual or an eccentric nerd. However, during my teenage years, I was mostly viewed as an unmanageable rebel, angry and defiant, often harshly reprimanded. The initial intrigue surrounding my learning styles, from both myself and others, took a backseat to the reaction to my increasingly oppositional conduct.

As I ventured into the workforce, I initiated changes from any position I held; my lack of a title was irrelevant. I would streamline processes and leap from Step 1 to Step 10 without addressing Steps 3, 6, and 8 — those steps had been obscured, while the essential ones radiated with their natural colors: burgundy for Step 2, green for Step 5, pink for Step 8. People were initially amazed at how quickly tasks were completed, but inevitably someone in Step 3 would seek something, fail to find it, and incite paranoia regarding its absence. No amount of logic or data could penetrate these layers of fear; this would escalate to mid-level management, who defaulted to a worst-case scenario mentality, resulting in the rollback of my innovations.

My first full-time job was at a factory producing parts for RVs when I was 18. I spent half my time on the assembly line and the other half working under Bob Gordon, the elderly Shipping and Receiving Manager, who was plagued by a bad leg and internal issues. He soon went on medical leave.

After a week of disarray in the department due to a lack of leadership, I approached the crew chief, a 30-year-old hustler named Danny Ramos, who I had recruited as a Spanish tutor, and suggested I take charge in Bob’s absence. He pitched the idea to upper management, and the next day he informed me they were willing to give it a try.

“Speaking some Spanish was beneficial. They won’t offer more than $2.25 an hour,” Danny said, disappointed. “I pushed for $2.50, but they insisted you must prove yourself. And you won’t have a title.”

I had been making $1.85 an hour. “That’s a 22% raise,” I replied, astonished. I hadn’t even considered that; I was more excited about the charts, tables, and time studies I could create to explore efficiencies. I could already visualize the colors and symmetrical ratios, a synaesthete’s ultimate dream.

“Is that good?” Danny asked.

“Definitely,” I affirmed.

“I’m still your supervisor,” he cautioned.

“El jefe,” I acknowledged.

Señor Compasión

It was just me and a crew of three: Servando Medina and his younger cousin Carlos, both from Michoacan, and a friend from high school, Garry Stalk, a 6'2" eccentric hippie, strong as an ox, who would burst into bizarre laughter every so often for no apparent reason. Servando managed the factory betting pool: World Cup soccer, American basketball, baseball, boxing matches at weights below 130 lbs, mostly pitting Latinos against Filipinos, a fierce rivalry.

With Garry absent on Sugar Mountain, Servando taking strolls every 20 minutes to finalize some bet, and me engrossed in time studies and color-coded space utilization charts, the bulk of the physical work fell on Carlos, a well-meaning kid who attempted to follow my instructions but would sneak off to ask Servando what I meant by cuatro filas de cinco cajas or una orden mixta, which Servando would figure out. Meanwhile, two middle-aged men from Argentina would visit me at the end of each day to correct my faltering Spanish. I fared slightly better with Carlos, but Servando wanted nothing to do with the pretentious Argentine Spanish, frequently clashing with Martín, the older man, over language and soccer.

One evening at a local bar frequented by South Americans, where I was served without questions about my age, we continued our discussion about cultural differences. Antonio — the other Argentine, charming and the strong, silent type — asked me why I cared about the less fortunate. A few beers in, I fabricated an answer: Porque tengo compasión, unsure if compasión was even a word. After a moment of stunned silence, Antonio and Martín erupted into hysterical laughter, soon the whole bar joined in. I left that night with a new nickname, Señor Compasión, the “ñ” glowing alongside the semi-colon in glorious purple.

The temporary position as the Shipping and Receiving leader extended as Bob Gordon took longer to recuperate from surgery. Within a month, I had transformed nearly everything and was pushing other departments to respect my new protocols. A tradition of tearing apart incoming orders in our area and leaving the debris around persisted. The rationale was that we had access to the roll-up door and the trash bins. I aimed to run a tight operation but found myself in continual disputes with some of the old-timers. In retaliation, someone reported my practice of fork-lifting strapped orders out to the pick-up area instead of leaving them inside to the Vice President, a nervous fellow named Fred, who appeared wary of me. He observed as I fork-lifted a strapped order back into the warehouse at closing time.

“That’s a waste of time,” Fred informed me. “Don’t put orders outside. You’ll just have to bring them back in if the pick-up is delayed.”

I attempted to clarify that less than 10% of orders weren’t picked up and that we worked far more efficiently in the warehouse if we weren’t dodging large pallets of boxes while moving about. Fred dismissed my reasoning, insisting that I keep the prepared pallets inside. Two days of that proved unmanageable, slowing us down considerably, and Carlos tripped over a poorly positioned pallet and injured his hip, prompting me to request a meeting with the President to make my case.

My First Meeting

I arrived at 10:00 AM for the meeting, carrying folders filled with my various charts and tables to support my argument.

Fred had gathered a sizable team, maybe 6 or 7 mid-level leaders from different departments, already seated around the conference table, chatting and ignoring my entrance. I took a seat, waiting for their conversation to conclude, enduring an awkward minute until Jerry, the President, arrived. He was a friendly guy, intelligent but distant from the factory floor, allowing Fred to run the place as he saw fit. Danny Ramos was there, appearing somewhat anxious, and Bob Gordon, the Shipping and Receiving Manager, who could now get out of bed, sat next to Fred, who wore a sly grin.

“Well, Fred,” Jerry said, settling in. “What’s happening?”

“He called the meeting,” Fred indicated, pointing at me. “Let him start.”

I began with the efficiency and safety of clearing the workspace, but Bob Gordon countered that orders had never obstructed work during his tenure. I distributed my charts and time studies. No one seemed interested, except Jerry, who perused them while Fred guided the group’s critical remarks about every change I had attempted to implement. The New Projects Engineer defended the practice of tearing apart orders and leaving trash by the roll-up door as essential for efficiency.

“It has always been our job,” Bob Gordon offered.

“If he weren’t pushing those orders out into the parking lot,” the Engineer rationalized, “the trash wouldn’t be an issue.”

“If you examined the charts,” I insisted, “you’d see how much more was being accomplished.”

“These are good,” Jerry remarked. “We should take time to study these. Perhaps we can create some storage space that can remain empty for all the trash. It will be contained; wouldn’t that work for everyone?”

“Bob?” Fred asked before I could respond.

“I don’t see that it’s necessary,” Bob replied, beginning to fade. He appeared pale, and his eyes seemed cloudy and unfocused.

“I see areas in this space chart — ” Jerry pointed out.

“He spends work time on those,” the Business Manager interjected. “I see him measuring the floor and writing at the shipping desk with a calculator all the time.”

“That’s going to stop,” Fred assured everyone. “Bob will be back in a month, and he should find things as he left them. No one authorized any changes.”

“I guess we’re finished then,” Danny Ramos suggested, eager to leave.

“Sure,” Fred agreed. “Danny, keep an eye on things over there. Get them back to how they were.”

Ultimately, Fred supervised the rollback to the previous state. He assigned extra workers to organize the inventory according to Bob Gordon’s vague preferences and used me to translate his directives to the Spanish-speaking workers.

Outside Jerry’s awareness, Fred showed no interest in the CEO’s practical solution of creating a tear-down area to contain the desastre. The torn-apart incoming shipments seemed to be deliberately scattered about, pallets, ripped boxes, and long strips of plastic strapping blocking pathways and obscuring packaged orders. When pick-ups were delayed due to the chaos, Fred would bark at me to locate them, once exclaiming loudly, “What am I paying you 40 cents an hour for?” I had no answer, but one came from an unexpected source: Garry Stalk, who broke off from one of his laughs to stand beside Fred.

“This isn’t working,” he told Fred directly. “It’s a mess. And he was doing the work of three people,” he added, pointing at me.

Fred appeared uncomfortable, shot me a piercing glance, then turned to Danny Ramos, who seemed to materialize out of nowhere. “We need to make some changes,” Fred mumbled and wandered off.

Act of God

This situation persisted for a few weeks; when Fred wasn’t around, no one touched the trash, and pallets that had been partially dismantled would have nails and shards protruding. A worker had to go to the hospital for a tetanus shot after stepping on a nail that penetrated his shoe and broke the skin of his sole; the man was undocumented, and Workers Comp refused to cover him. The Business Manager devised a creative solution to pay for the ER visit, but Fred remained oblivious.

Carlos attempted to clean up when he could, but maneuvering the fork-lift around obstacles took time; Fred observed him as the entire department halted, unable to proceed until the large fork-lift was clear. I scrutinized Fred as he watched Carlos, our best driver, waste triple the time I would have taken to transport the orders out and back, the few times it was even necessary. Data indicated that only 5% of orders required bringing back in. Fred exhibited no awareness that the decisions he made disrupted or harmed workflow.

Since I had been instructed to set aside the procedures manual and statistics, I carried a small pad in my back pocket and recorded stats in shorthand. Even with two extra workers, productivity was dismal. More trucks began to arrive, necessitating waiting as eight assembly line workers were pulled to assemble a pallet. We started incurring wait time charges on trucking invoices, amounting to as much as $100 per hour.

One October morning, we arrived to find the factory roof had caved in overnight, and a fire had ignited. Due to the abundance of wood from the pallets, considerable damage occurred. After the fire was extinguished, a steady rain began to fall, causing the inventory to deteriorate by the hour. Fred had been on site since 2 AM, attempting to cover the inventory with tarps, but his efforts were in vain. Hardly coherent, Fred laid everyone off on the spot, shouting to the assembled group on Olympic Boulevard: “Factory is closed. Go home indefinitely,” but most of us stood there, staring at the smoldering ruins.

A few days later, Jerry summoned me for a debriefing and to discuss unemployment benefits. Only a small storage hut at the back of the property was accessible, where all the administrators were gathered, two men to each small folding table, boxes and old equipment jammed into corners. He took a few phone calls while I was with him, trying to persuade the insurance company that an Act of God caused the roof to cave, not a structural flaw. “Acts of God pay much better,” he explained, “although they’re doubtful it was a meteor.” He held my charts and tables as we spoke and reviewed them after we finished discussing unemployment. He didn’t mention a reopening date or the future of the company.

“These are quite good,” he told me, “and I have no doubt you were more productive with all you did. But can I offer some advice?”

“Sure,” I replied.

“It doesn’t benefit much,” he suggested, “to live in blazing color in a black and white world. People get overwhelmed. You might consider slowing down a bit and progressing in smaller steps.” He tapped the folder on his knee, assessing whether I comprehended his message. “I’m going to keep these,” he said, “since you produced them on my time. Plus, our payout on the fire will be higher because we have instruction manuals and data. They believe they’ll pay out less on the back end if everyone is trained and we have everything organized.”

“Those are pretty rough,” I said. “Not sure they’ll be useful. And they were never implemented.”

“They’ll be worth almost $2,000 in premium reductions,” Jerry stated. “On top of the payout benefits, which I think I can secure an additional $4 or 5K based on these. You took the initiative; I know you worked on these at home after you were told not to use work time. I want to thank you for that. You put a lot into your work here. I genuinely appreciate it.”

I almost offered to polish the documents into a final product, making them substantial and enduring. They could compensate me for the work while the factory underwent repairs. I envisioned the cover page, a table of contents, section headings — along with the elegant charts, graphs, and tables, and a new visual I called “Directionals,” utilizing arrows, symbols, and shading to define various strands of company work in a flow like a river, with up to six strands, illustrating trends, directions, and intersections or separations with other strands... but that was too much vivid color for an operation that might never resume. Jerry had what he needed. We said our goodbyes, shook hands, and my time as Interim Factory Shipping and Receiving Department Head concluded. I was just nineteen.

I took a trip to Oregon to see the Grateful Dead in Eugene, and upon my return, the Unemployment Office denied my claim for the two weeks I was away. “You went to Eugene to look for work as a dishwasher?” the clerk asked, squinting at the form I had filled out.

“Am I not entitled to explore new locations?” I retorted. “They need dishwashers everywhere.”

“I’m not approving this,” she declared decisively. “Next time, consult an employment counselor before you leave, and we’ll see if it gets the green light.”

I appealed and ultimately won the case six weeks later, partly because the woman had resigned, leaving no one to contest my statements.

That’s how things sometimes unfold; hard work and innovation can lead an entire organization to descend upon you, yet someone’s absence could result in winning a dubious case for a few hundred dollars.

I enrolled in evening community college classes and began working on a book titled The Synaesthete’s Guide to Survival in a Grayscale World. Even fellow synaesthetes struggled with my spelling of the word, the ae reflecting the British spelling. “It’s from the original Latin,” I would explain, but no one cared about the beautiful pink-grey of the ae, a unique and aesthetically pleasing combination. It was an official letter in some Scandinavian languages, which failed to impress anyone.

During that year, I observed a national shift in aesthetics from a vibrant, colorful medley of psychedelic swirls and East Indian intricacies to a more subdued, primary-color presentation. I first noticed the change in TV commercials, which started adopting asymmetrical angles and techniques leaning more towards irony than the bright hues and rich contrasts that characterized how I perceived the world. Clothing trends turned monochromatic as The Gap established new standards with its khaki and button-down style.

At 20 years old, I felt obsolete. Lacking direction and out of ideas — a rarity for me — I decided to join the Air Force. Of the available positions, I chose Aerospace Radar Operator.

Something about the ae in “aerospace” held an irresistible charm. I rationalized that life choices had been made for worse reasons, and I proceeded to basic training.