Notes from Maine - 2023/11/12
Yesterday, I took the dogs out back to look for Frisbees. By the way, they’re not Frisbees. That term is still trademarked by Wham-O. When a trademarked term suffers “generocide,” it moves from being the proprietary domain of one organization into widespread use. A company has to fight to prevent broad use of their term, or they lose it. Anyway, we were actually looking for “flying discs.”
Albert (German Shepherd) is really good at finding a disc that’s lost in the woods, but only if he hasn’t given up. If a disc gets stuck in a tree and falls down a few days later, he will have already given up and he doesn’t even seem to recognize that it’s something he should be looking for. Finn (English Mastiff) just likes to come along for the walk—he has never cared about flying discs.
As we walked around, I primed my brain for the five discs that are lost. There was a yellow, pink, purple, and orange, and then a bright red ring. I have a general sense of where they should be. We found zero discs.
It made me wonder if I should have been searching or just taking it all in.
This morning, I was looking for a coffee mug. I had the idea that there was a tall tan coffee mug on top of the refrigerator. I couldn’t find it. Later, after I discovered the tall tan mug in a cupboard, I went back to the top of the fridge and took a general inventory. Since my kitchen is still torn apart, the refrigerator is in the laundry room and I keep a couple of dishes on top of it.
When I wasn’t specifically looking for a “tall, tan coffee mug,” I found that there was a tall blue one up there, right in plain sight. When I had the wrong color in mind, I couldn’t even see it.
So I guess I should have been conducting a general inventory of everything out back without specifically looking for the five flying discs that we were trying to find. I found a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that said, “Our findings show that observers implicitly recruit their knowledge of objects’ physical properties to guide how they attend to and engage with visual scenes.”
But, as I experienced with the coffee mug, it seems that if I have the wrong mental image, I will never find an object that actually matches what I’m searching for. I thought about that as I walked through the leaves and branches. These flying discs are brightly-colored, but so are the leaves on the ground. You can’t just open your eyes and let them dart around to all the yellow, red, or orange objects. You’ll just find a billion stupid leaves.
I decided to just look for round things. That didn’t work either. I thought maybe I would pick up part of the curve of one of the Frisbees. I didn’t see a thing. These discs have been out there a while, so they’ve probably gotten stained from leaves and dirt. The curves of the rims are probably perfectly camouflaged by now.
There’s only one logical conclusion: some supernatural force back in the woods subsists on generic flying discs. Maybe if I go out and buy an actual “Frisbee™️,” the disc-eating monsters will be banished.
