Before you read this rant, please, remember this password, okay? 45K-L41. Those are totally random numbers. Remember them.

So, I watched a Taxi rerun this weekend. As I'm 18 and we're in a new century, it's obviously a rerun. I am strangely drawn to art/culture of the working class east coast during the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties. Billy Joel songs, from 52nd Street or The Stranger. Mob movies that deal with the period, such as the incomparably uncomfortable Goodfellas. Rocky and Saturday Night Fever each make me cringe—the lighting on each is so tacky and dark, the outrageous Italian accents so gaudy and the decisions the characters make are often desperate. I love the movie Network—the relevance of which on the current culture will make an excellent future rant. It's like The Grapes of Wrath: people fighting to get by, but not above fighting each other if need be. And the Steinbeck connection to the era was entrenched with Springsteen. The River, Born to Run, heck, each song of his: a man facing circumstances that make him bend but not break. The entire Nebraska album deals with this issue, of dilemmas, of trust. I am fascinated by the killing, the massive murder rate during this time period, right before I was alive (I was born in 1983.) Somehow, this era holds extra allure in that it created the circumstances of the world to which I came into existence.

Well, back to Taxi. Louie (Danny DeVito) starts stealing some small things from the company and blames a younger black employee through an elaborate scheme. Then Louie, after classic, Three's Company-ish sitcom twists, tries to apologize but his boss doesn't believe that he was guilty. Nevertheless, the innocent man's job is restored as a caveat to Louie's perceived valor in the name of his employee. At the end of the episode, Louie is smoking cigars, talking to the character played by Judd something (with an H. I think) talking about how crime pays. "What's the price I pay?" Louie taunts as he climbs a ladder to hide his wine and cigars. "That's the price you pay," Judd shouted back. The price was that Louie's own dishonesty made him distrust others so much that he had to hide everything.

I work at a store I often cashier, and scan people's cards. I have to sign on to the register with my own supersecret code. I use the internet and for AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo messenger, New York Times online, a network at school... Our lives are mundane strings of passwords, series of situations in which we must prove that we are indeed who we are. If that is in fact clear anymore.

I probably have 30 passwords. I'd bet if you summed up all the crap I belong to, my license number and social security number, tax numbers and the like. We are a passworded society, and I for one can't remember what all the different ones were. This is similar to lying, the reason why liars—except the good ones, who become lawyers, or the perfect ones, who make the laws that help create more lawyers—get caught: life for liars becomes so duplicitous (or multiplicitous?) that keeping the compartments of life separate becomes the end all be all of life. What lie did he hear? What did I tell her?

There is an alternative to lying: the truth. But this to has drawbacks. "How are you?" the greeter asks at TGI Friday's. "Well, nobody loves me, we life in a state of existential meaningless, I think you are a phony, and these hemorrhoid are KILLING me. Now give me my *&^^**( table!" We must, as it seems, keep compartments of our life separate; we must answer questions reciprocating the depth with which asked.

* * * * *

Now, to my point. I started out with one password for everything, and many of my services that allow me to choose a password are the same...but part of me wonders. If there is just one of me—3, 5,9 letters that contain "me", or at least all that I am "digitally"—if someone steals one of my passwords, they own me. However, if I have to remember 10 pin numbers, 9 passwords, and a partridge in a pear tree...well, "they" will have won, in a small way. Those thieves, that wont to dare to take my money (none of which is online) but more pressingly my secrets (those e-mails which noone else should read) have created in us duplicitous and vulnerable people. We now have several identities to shield ourselves, but never before have we been more vulnerable.

"I'm sorry sir, you're not listed on our database, and neither is your card." Those words are the nadir of modern man; so mundane is this fallen state of subjugated humanity that we have words and numbers and marks of the beast to PROVE we are who we are.

And woe to those who lose the combination to that place at the top of the ladder where short, fat Louie hid the only fruits of his crooked day.

I should tell you how that episode turned out.

Judd-Hirsch?-walked up to the ladder as short DeVito was momentarily inside his booze's hiding place, mocking Jud for being honest. And Jud, quietly smiling, moved the ladder and left the Taxi building. The more you hide, the more you can be marooned. Yet at the same time, the more you can be marooned, the more the inclination and even the very survival instinct to protect one's self, behind a barrage of symbolic letters and numbers, passwords that define the compartmentalization between ourselves and the outside world and within ourselves. We are secret people, afraid of being invalidated. We are scrambling around, ala a Springsteen character, doing what we have to do to get by in a world where our inherent human sovereignty is constantly in question.

But now, social Darwinism has given way to a battle for our own validation... It’s an identity crisis of the most literal sense: Personal Identification Number. How do you define yourself? Is it by the combination to the safe at the top of the ladder? That has become the key, the final means to self-actualization.

Quick. Don't scroll up or look up. Write, as best as you can remember, some or all of the password I gave you at the top...Got any of it?

Well if you were close, you are in firm control of your compartments, and engaged in a constant battle of self-definition. You are who they say, and you've admitted it.

Now, those who forgot the password completely? It is admirable, to be a bastion of the old world. But what's in a name is changing. A name is no longer what you wish to be called; it's what others choose to have you known by. And the password is the combination to the locks that keep us separated from ourselves and our peers.

That we need passwords is, to me, somewhat frustrating. But, yes, we are a dishonest people, a world full of Louie's puffing on stolen stogies of some sort or another. You see, the issue of why we need passwords is the infinitely saddening one. We can't have just one password, just one name, just one number, just one idea by which to be defined.

I'd been having trouble accessing my emotions until today. That's when I stared at the piece of paper that my doctor gave me: 45K-L41. 45K-L41. 45K-L41. 45K-L41...

We preprogrammed my brain at an earlier session, but today the computer turned everything on in side of me, and fixed the barcodes on the paper. "Yes," the doctor told me as I stared at the paper like a mantra. "you mustn't forget the new password for your soul."

"Four five kay, el four one....four five...." I mumbled.

* * * * *

Every time you create a password you lose a part of yourself. The mundane activities of the digital world constantly threaten to whittle you or I away to a password, a bar code, a signature. Then again, that beats getting robbed blind by the rest of the Louies in the world.

Here's hoping that you get someone kind to spot your ladder.

About the Author: Peter Gillette is a freshman Trumpet Performance major at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. His hometown is Antioch, IL--where the suburbs meet the cornfields and the Wisconsin stateline. Interested in jazz music, Peter also enjoys writing, and works for his campus paper, The Lawrentian. He also collects Frank Sinatra recordings--32 CDs so far.