Ask A Genius 982: The Reality of the Shroud of Turin
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/28
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, well, I grew up in a town with a cemetery right in the middle.
Rick Rosner: You grew up in a town with a cemetery. I didn’t grow up with a cemetery in the center of town, but I lived about a block and a half from a huge one. One of my best friends in high school lived two blocks from another cemetery in town. I used to walk our dog Mitzi, the poodle, in the cemetery. I even had sex in the cemetery with a college girlfriend; we walked the dog there, and we did it on the grass. So yeah, the cemetery was very close. I don’t remember any specific tombstones or how much time I spent reading them. We walked through it, among the tombstones. The back of it was next to my walking trail. So I wouldn’t enter through the gates. When walking the dog, I’d come in through the back way, past the tool shed and the uncarved tombstones, then onto the grass and among the stones. If I took a longer walk, it was weird because, a block away, across the street, was the National Bureau of Standards, which Eisenhower started in the mid to late fifties as a big science push. This lab installation, the size of Disneyland, was directly across the street. I walked our dog there almost every day. It was strange because, on one hand, you had science, and on the other, you had death. It’s also weird how little I thought about these places, even though they were right next door. One time, when I was about 10, my grandpa took me to a lecture just across the street by Edward Teller, one of the fathers of the hydrogen bomb. I didn’t pay much attention. Why was I so oblivious to these things?
Jacobsen: Did you ever think about death when you were in the cemetery with the dog or alone?
Rosner: No, I didn’t.
Jacobsen: That’s crazy.
Rosner: It is.
Jacobsen: I used to think about death all the time going through it.
Rosner: I knew I didn’t want to die, but as a kid, I didn’t think much past the year 2000, when I would be 40. I didn’t think of my life beyond that. I mean, maybe I thought that science would save me eventually because I’ve always been very anti-dying. Now that the people I care for, like my parents, are gone, I’m very anti- them dying. In high school and junior high, I’d spend a lot of time wondering what I could do to get a girlfriend. After school, I’d watch TV, but I hated what was on, like The Brady Bunch or Star Trek. I’d try to watch for 20 minutes, then give up and take a nap until dinner. When I woke up, I was really sensitive to noises, and my family consisted of noisy eaters, which was torture if we had soup.
After dinner, we’d watch TV, and then I’d maybe do some homework while watching TV. My mom would be on the couch. I’d be on the floor working on something. I’d stay up until midnight. Then I’d jerk off and fall asleep. My jerking off was very lazy because now when I jerk off, I jerk off into a sock, which is a clean way to do it. It goes right in the sock, the sock goes in the laundry. Back then, as I was coming, I’d be on my back jerking off, and I’d either roll right or roll left. I’d just shoot my jizz into the sheets. I didn’t have a peepee pad or a rubber sheet under the sheets, so it would shoot right into the mattress. After a while, my mattress looked like the Shroud of Turin. But this was my life: worry about getting a girlfriend, be happy I was good at math (though it didn’t seem to help me in any way), jerk off, repeat. It didn’t help with mental clarity that my whole family was probably depressed, and we didn’t do a lot of talking or healing. Everybody would retire to their respective bedrooms and be quiet for the rest of the evening after dinner. I wish I had all that time back to learn more and to start working on myself.
I was surprisingly unproductive in creative thought for someone with an IQ like mine. I had my moments. A math teacher introduced us to linear programming, which is a rudimentary form of math for decision-making by graphing. You make a graph of something like cost versus quality or cost versus quantity. The graphs I made were two-dimensional, describing the parameters of the space where variables exist. For example, mattresses versus wholesale cost: the more you buy, the lower the unit price, but there are limits on how many you can sell in a year. Once I learned this, I plotted gradients to maximize profit. In 9th grade, I wrote a short story as about five linear programming problems. It was about a guy wanting to get a girlfriend and his life’s issues, expressed mathematically. I don’t remember all the details, but it showed some imagination. However, it wasn’t until I was 17, in my senior year, that things really started to change. I was having a difficult time—couldn’t do well in school, couldn’t apply to college. I was so pissed off about not getting a girlfriend, even though I was student body president, that I let everything fall apart.
But one thing I did do was start plotting a novel you’re familiar with, about a kid with two families because his parents got divorced and each started a new family. In his senior year, he decides to fake transcripts and move in with his other family to live a second senior year the way he really wants to. After a couple of months of plotting, I decided, “Forget it, I’m really going to do it.” That was, in a sad way, my creative awakening. There was one more semi-creative thing I did: I built a three-dimensional plastic grid that caught BBs. It was a 3D statistical distribution curve generator, and it immediately became clear that the pattern would be a bell curve in three dimensions. I spent a couple of hundred hours building it, and when I calculated, that’s what it made. When you dumped a bunch of BBs into it, it created a bell curve out of BBs. Nobody at my school was remotely interested or impressed. It was just this wasted effort.
My technique for building it was sophisticated—I got the plexiglass and used the band saw in shop class to make the grid by slicing fluorescent light grids until they were an eighth of an inch thick. I showed great technical skill for nothing, and I was pissed off that I built something that worked great, but for what? For nothing. My awakening happened during my senior year when I started to lift weights. I began with thousands of push-ups a day and then moved on to weights. I was reasonably buff to no avail. My hair looked pretty good. I got contacts for a while, but they made my eyes hurt because they gave me glass ones instead of plastic ones. Eventually, I said “forget it” and went without glasses, trying to negotiate the blur and figure out who people were within the blur. I didn’t look terrible. I looked good, but it didn’t work.
So, my point here is that you walked through the town cemetery and thought about death. I walked through my life being fairly oblivious until my senior year when I was so pissed about not having a girlfriend that I scuttled everything. It all began because I was trying to be a high achiever and get into Harvard before I messed up my senior year. Among my high-achievement activities, I took a class in speed reading. Speed reading used to be a class you could take in high school, or in my case, it was a night school class for high school credit. Not that it mattered much; it gave you three credits or something, but a college is like, “What’s this? Speed reading?” Anyway, I took the class, and one of the books I read was called Type A Behavior and Your Heart. In the mid to late seventies, there was a growing awareness of the link between personality type and heart attacks. I took the test in the book, and I had every characteristic of a Type A personality except one: “Do you regret things that have happened in your life and wish you could redo them?” At seventeen, I hadn’t had much to regret, but from the moment I read that question, I started regretting my life. The book Going Back to High School, which started as a potential novel, began as a way to have a redo. So there you go. I was oblivious to the cemetery I was walking through and oblivious to everything until I didn’t get laid in senior year.
The end.
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Rick Rosner, American Television Writer, http://www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
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