What Is...

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent

My senior year of college was spent in a kind of limbo that will be familiar to many of you. It was a time of legal adulthood and emotional infancy, all of us just a few months shy of entering the respectable professional world, and able to meet our own needs, but only just so, the way animals can. To the outside observer I imagine that year in the life of my friends and me might resemble one of those situations you hear about where an elephant terrorizes a town—eating horrifying quantities and types of food, bothering the women, drinking beer by the barrel.

During that time I was fortunate enough to have a friend named Torie. Torie, despite being a year younger, was far more mature than my friends and me by just about every conceivable metric. She grocery shopped and cleaned; my friends and I made daily trips to Wendy’s and lounged in squalor. So out of the goodness of her heart she began taking in my roommate and me—who had known her since her first month on campus—once a week for what we referred to affectionately as “family dinner.”

I delighted in those dinners, not just because Torie was fun to spend time with, but because it was a nice mental break from our own self-imposed filth, because we were explicitly not allowed to help cook, and because it was nice to know I would get at least one meal with some nutritional value each week. There was one more hallowed piece of those dinners, though, one that to my memory we never failed to incorporate.

Jeopardy.

Many people share a similar affinity for the show because of its proximity to dinner time, I’m sure; not only was its slot convenient, but it was something that could easily be done together, hitting the sweet spot of educational/fun/not a whole lot of work.

I have always loved the acquisition of trivia, filing pointless things away for later recall. This is less because of some Judge Holden-esque attitude toward the world (“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent”) and more because I am good at it without having to try, and games like Jeopardy and bar trivia have created an avenue for people like me to apply this otherwise-useless skill. (For my birthday one year my mom got me a book called The Know-It-All, about a man’s quest to read every page of The Encyclopedia Brittanica, both to see what mundane things he could learn and to prove that he could do it. I vividly remember thinking Damn, I won’t do that…but I do get it.)

My immediate and extended families have a lot of people with this specific skill set. My older brother, for instance, was required by his college dorm-mates to sit behind the TV whenever they watched Jeopardy so that he had to hear the whole question at the same speed as everyone else before answering. At our college family dinners, Torie made me play with my eyes closed, for the same reason. There are surely countless others with their own variation on this, and that makes me love Jeopardy, too—that people care enough about it to add their own rules and tweaks and conditions, so it might forever stay fun and competitive and interesting. Everyone seems to have their own way of hanging onto the magic.

It’s also a good way to spice up your marriage when you’re stuck in different states for months on end.

Alex Trebek died over the weekend at the age of 80 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He held the rare position of being universally beloved while still seeming human, even as he steadfastly refused to break character while hosting. Anyone else who for decades had the job of “stating obscure facts aloud in a way that seems like everyone should know them” would have seemed like an asshole. Trebek could range from kind to disappointed to incredulous at the wrong answers—sorry, questions—he heard, but I doubt you’ve ever heard anyone say Alex Trebek…what a prick. He was the perfect foil to every flavor of contestant, allowing each of them to try to make themselves interesting without being fawning or syrupy about it.

Without Alex Trebek some of the show’s essential magic will disappear. There is no replacing him, even as the show goes on, as shows are wont to do. But I hope the bonds and traditions that Jeopardy created, in my family and yours, continue on. I know I’ll still be playing—I’ll even close my eyes for you, if you want.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll catch you next week.

-Chuck

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