Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (11 page)

The main reason I don’t own many things is that I hate packing up. I’ve had to do it too many times.

I’m forty-two years old and I’ve never been married. Came close a few times, but one of us always screwed it up or exploded over Lakehurst, New Jersey, or something. My series of exes is now long enough that the names have started to repeat like the books of the Old Testament: Ruth, then First and Second Sara, First and Second Kelly, and so on. Eventually you get to Goliath—that was just a phase—and then finally the Ephesians, who seemed nice at the party but didn’t even call the next day.

Some of it was youth. I knew
everything,
you should know, at least for a while anyway. Some of it was bad luck or the odd tragic calamity here and there. And some of it was living in Hollywood, where too many people upgrade relationships the way they do cell phones.

Still, I sleep OK. I’ve never cheated on anyone, my lies have usually been the kind that kept nice little surprises hidden, and I’ve never once said the words “I love you” without meaning them. I’m still friends with about half of my former One-True-Eternal-Soulmates™, and quite close to a few, if that means anything.

But I still can’t quite unpack all the boxes. This late in the game, sometimes I’m afraid I never will.

Jane—the latest book in my personal testament—was probably terrific and smart and funny and kind before she was even born. So maybe
this
time, I said to myself, carrying each heavy box and bag.

Maybe this time. Probably, even, if I had to write down my wager with an electronic pen. Let’s just hope nothing truly horrible happens to one of us.

But I just said too much. I keep getting ahead of the story.

There are now three large Hefty Cinch Saks sitting empty on the floor, covered in a large pile of notebooks and small slips of paper. I am tired, my throat is dry, and my clothes are covered in dust. Still, there is no record of my first attempt at the
Jeopardy!
test.

However, I have managed to locate my copy of
Speed Reading Made Easy.
So if I can just find a box of nails and some wood, I can make a wine rack as a present for Matt.

I’ve also stumbled across a large undated receipt from the J. H. Gilbert Company of Willoughby, Ohio. This piece of paper is particularly puzzling. I have no idea what this receipt is for. The letterhead offers some intriguing, even lurid, hints:

INDUSTRIAL GLOVES FOR EVERY NEED SAFETY EQUIPMENT, RUBBER CLOTHING, FOOTWEAR

For some reason, my eye keeps fixing on the words “rubber clothing.” And apparently I once spent almost a hundred dollars there.

I find myself curious.

You’re probably scanning through the same set of delicious possibilities that I am right now. But here’s the thing: I
really
don’t know, and it’s me that we’re talking about. I was on the road for a long time, and it’s gently surprising that I never woke up with inexplicable tattoos promising the secrets of my identity.

What the hell was I doing? How many people were involved? Did we scrub thoroughly afterward?

In the proposal that led to the book you’re now reading—facilitated by a fellow
Jeopardy!
contestant named Arthur Phillips, whom you’ll soon meet in the green room as an intense young fellow able to send heat rays through his forehead—this chapter wasn’t originally about
THINGS TO DO IN A CATSUIT.
It was outlined as a creativity and lateral-thinking exercise, fleshing out the fun memory techniques we’ll need so I can go all Jimmy Neutron in another thirty pages or so.

Looking at the outline, though, a whole separate chapter was supposed to delve into my own life history, so you’ll care more about what happens later. But we need a focus and examples for our memory exercise anyway, and so—if only because I’m extremely curious now about this receipt, and giggling childishly at the idea of seeing my whole life through the lens of the word
rubber
—let’s have a little fun here, open up a tin of madeleines, and play with everything all at once.

This way, we’ll not only encounter exotic maladies, third-world dictatorships, and lovers who flee to South America, but with any real luck, maybe we’ll even track down some embarrassing rubber knickers with frilly bits of lace on the side and a thank-you note from the Turkish navy.

I wonder if I’ve had a more interesting life than I realized.

Close the book, get out a piece of paper, and see how many free associations you can come up with which directly involve the word
rubber.
To keep this brief, let’s insist that the word itself has to be in a short phrase: “rubber this” or “this-that-and-the-other rubber.”

Don’t stop the first time you run out of ideas. Poke around. If you get stuck, change the sense you’re thinking with. If you’re thinking visually, start thinking with your nose, and then your ears. If you’re thinking with your sense of touch, start working with taste and sight.

Take your time. I’ll make my own list while you’re gone. That will be preferable to cleaning up the mess I just made.

Welcome back. Here’s the list I came up with.

Good enough. That’s twenty-one. Now let’s strip away the rubber bits, and gaze at the incredibly diverse stuff we’ve just conjured:

If someone had asked you yesterday how to connect “chicken” with “cement,” you’d probably have given them a blank stare. But it was already in your head.

This little game of Six Degrees of Your Own Skull shows that nothing exists in your head by itself. In fact, it’s hard to find anything that
isn’t
connected in a hop or two.

Just for style points, let’s look back at the list and pick the three most unrelated words we can find, and see how they also connect in completely non-rubber ways. A few jump right out:

“Cement” + “trees”: there are trees in cement planters near the coffee shop where I usually write.

“Trees” + “shoes”: you can find a shoe tree in any department store.

“Shoes” + “cement”: OK, that’s just an episode of
The Sopranos.

This is no coincidence; it’s a direct result of the structure of the human brain. Visualize it this way: imagine the word
rubber
floating around in the center of the room you’re in. Now mentally attach all the connected words, arranged so that they’re evenly spaced, floating around the center, flying like kites in all directions. Now try to picture all of these
other
words as the centers of their
own
little kite-spheres, all at the same time, with dozens of their own connections floating around them. And all of these, of course, are centers of their own connection-spheres.

The room gets full pretty damn fast, doesn’t it?

It’s impossible to imagine how dense all the connections really are. Your brain isn’t arranged like a book or even a hard drive, but like the Internet, with millions of interlinking entries and perhaps the same percentage of dirty pictures. You could probably spend a lifetime finding new connections and ideas, just by playing around with what you already have.

Happily, the more you goof around in there, the more connections you’ll have, and the faster they’ll work. If you’ve ever wondered how
Jeopardy!
players can find their way to some wildly obscure answers, this is a big part. I’ll give some examples from my own games a little later.

And so we reach another step on the Eightfold Path:

1. Obvious things may be worth noticing.

2. Remember the basics: the basics are what you remember.

3. Put your head where you can use it later.