Month: January 2017

Liechtenstein!

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It finally happened; I’ve had a visitor from Liechtenstein!

Actually, a lot of folks landed here after the interweb dumped them out of the tubes from Eastern Europe. Funny story actually.

Turns out, some douchenozzle hijacked a photo of my son from my blog. You know, the gross one — the one immediately following his birth, where most of his small intestine is in a toothpaste tube attached to his belly button (he had gastroschisis, but don’t worry — he’s fine now). Said douchenozzle then used said picture to fuel one of those garbage social media posts. You know the ones. Look at this suffering baby. Like = 1 prayer, Comment = 10 prayers. Essentially, a ploy for attention and clicks using my son to bait the faithful.

Which is shameful, but I guess not shocking. The internet is a place for all sorts of deplorables to get together, after all. Funny thing, though? That picture is lifted from my “Why I Am an Atheist” post. Which goes to show you — not that it’s shocking or anything — just how hard this particular deplorable worked when he stole my picture. (Spoiler alert: not hard at all. Searching that picture brings you straight here.)

But wait!

The hits, it seems, are coming from this site — which is in German, thanks Google Translate — which appears to be something of an aggregator for skepticism and debunking fake news. Two of my favorite things! And somebody at that site saw the post, researched it, found out it was a load of hot garbage, and pointed out the proper home of the picture. Along the way, they cheekily pointed out that the picture, property of an avowed godless heathen, was being used to garner prayers. Ha!

So a handful of Eastern European atheists — a gaggle of Germans, a smattering of Austrians, and my one Liechsteinian (that’s so much fun to say!) are landing here. That kind of makes me smile.

Although I have to wonder how well the stories about toddler poop hold up when they get translated into German.

Revising Reality

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I’ve seen some pieces flying around the internet lately about “The Mandela Effect.” In short, this refers to the sensation that you’re living in some kind of parallel universe where reality has rearranged itself and changed, leaving only your memories of a past that no longer exists; or, to quote Wikipedia: “…a situation where a number of people claim to share memories of events which differ from the available evidence of those events.” (I like my definition better.)

Maybe you’ve seen the memes. The Berenstain Bears was actally The BerenstEin Bears, but it changed somehow, somewhere, somewhen. Sinbad starred in Shazaam, a movie that clearly doesn’t exist.

This is all pretty harmless, a few troubling webpages aside. Sure, there are some people out there who actually believe that visiting aliens, or shadow corps, or time-travelling emissaries from the future have mucked about with timelines and memories to make us forget about Sinbad’s breakout role, but they reside where they belong: on the fringes, where they can comfortably be laughed at, ridiculed, and finally, ignored.

But then I turn on CNN this morning — we’ve got a snow day* here in the suburbs of Atlanta — and I see that yet again, the man who will be our next president has lashed out with his favorite weapon, the mighty Tweet Scepter, against his perceived injustices. This time, against Meryl Streep, who pretty thoroughly lambasted him in her lifetime achievement award acceptance at last night’s Golden Globes. (One could make the argument that such an event isn’t the forum for such a criticism, but one would clearly never have seen any award shows.) The kernel at the center of her argument against him? This little gem:

“It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back.”

It’s a trope in comedy, satire, and such: you’re allowed to punch up, but not down. Trump punches every which way. And in this instance, he swung his tiny  oratorial fists in the direction of this reporter. It upset a lot of people, not least of which is Meryl Streep, who brought it boiling back to the surface during her speech.

So now he’s on Twitter calling her overrated and a Hillary shill — whatever, that’s par for the course — but then he’s also claiming he wasn’t mocking the reporter.

Hmm.

And then, there on CNN, is his mouthpiece speaking for him and insisting that he never mocked the reporter.

Here’s the problem: they can’t revise reality.

It happened. It was caught on film. In other words, it’s a fact. It’s a part of reality. We’ve all seen the clip, but here it is just to be sure:

That happened.

Trump and his people are trying to convince us that it didn’t happen or that it didn’t mean what it obviously meant. They’re trying to convince us that the way they remember the event trumps (sorry) the objectively obvious reality that exists. But here’s the simpler truth: we all recognize that spastic arm-motion that all the middle-schoolers used to make fun of the “retarded” kids. The orange one executed it perfectly, at age 70, to make fun of somebody he didn’t care for.

So, big kerfuffle over this reporter thing again, but it’s only a microcosm of the bigger problem. Fake news has run amok. Hillary Clinton probably ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor; I read it on the internet. Aliens totally live on Mars; you can see their faces in our low-def cameras. 9/11 was an inside job; buildings don’t fall down like that.

This is the Mandela effect on a frightening scale. People — otherwise intelligent, fair-minded people — are convincing themselves on the daily that reality is not what it obviously is. They want to pretend that their own memory, their own perception of a thing, is correct when the objective, concrete evidence of the thing contradicts it.

And it’s bloody crazy.

The human memory? Yeah, it’s a squishy, sloppy mass of grey matter stitched together with duct tape and galvanized staples. Our memories are notoriously awful — this is demonstrably true. We screw things up all the time when we rely on our memory (which is why eyewitness testimony is basically the most unreliable evidence on the courtroom totem pole). You can even be tricked into “remembering” details of an encounter that you never even had. And yet, people — enormous swathes of registered voters — are trusting their memories, “trusting their gut”, and imposing an alternate reality on the actual one.

Thing is, though? “Mandela Effect” thinking? It’s really conspiracy theory with a less shamed-into-the-closet coat of paint. For reality to change requires a network of very capable entities working in concert, notwithstanding some damage to the fabric of space-time. But those things don’t actually happen.

Reality is what it is. It is up to us to accept that reality for what it is, rather than hammering it into a shape we’d rather it be.

I get it. Accepting reality is hard. (It’s why religion has had such a good run.) But what’s the alternative? We knowingly let people get away with lies? We allow ourselves to believe things, or forget things, because they make us feel better?

Let me drift away from the political to wrap this up (thank goodness).

For a long time (almost a decade, if not most of my life!), I sheltered in the belief that I could be a writer; that the only thing holding me back was a lack of inspiration, a lack of time. But that’s not an accurate representation of reality. What was holding me back was a lack of commitment and a lack of work ethic.

Owning up to that sucked. I had to accept that I had been a lazy jerk about my writing. It was a lot easier to pretend that I was capable, but I was just waiting to get motivated or inspired to do something about it. Out there, I’m lazy and unmotivated and maybe not even able to do this thing. In here, I can do it whenever I feel like it — I just don’t feel like it today.

But if I hadn’t owned up to reality? I wouldn’t have written even one percent — maybe even not one percent of one percent — of what I’ve written in the past three years. I would have sheltered in my alternate reality; the one where I was unproductive on my own terms. Where I believe whatever bullsharknado is on offer — especially the bullsharknado that bubbles up from my own gut.

And maybe some people would rather live that way, I dunno.

Me, I’ll take the jagged edges and freezing winds of the real world over the fluffy clouds and artificial heat-lamps of the fantasy world any day.

*Atlanta snow days do not actually feature snow.

 

Don’t Talk About the Weather

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We went into yesterday girding our loins for a snowstorm that was supposed to be amongst the nastiest on record here in Atlanta. Many school systems — mine included, whee! — dismissed early, with visions of the five-day clusterfargo commonly known as “Snowpocalypse” dancing in their heads.

This is what it looked like three years ago in Atlanta. Images are property of Fox 5 News Atlanta.

This is the part where Northerners smile and chuckle to themselves a little bit, because virtually the entire metro area of Atlanta — the city and its suburbs — was literally brought to its knees and locked down by about two inches of snow. We’re notoriously underequipped to handle winter weather down here. It’s just a thing we don’t bother to deal with; being prepared for a blizzard in Atlanta makes about as much sense as keeping an elephant gun on hand in case Bigfoot wanders through my backyard.

Still, snow is a thing we secretly get excited about in the South, though: kids and grown-ups alike. Sure, it shatters our infrastructure, but holy carp, we can make snowballs and listen to that foomp sound when we walk around and, most importantly, catch a day off from work and school.

Helena had been knocking on the door for several days. We had been warned to plan for being “snowed in” at least three days. We had been warned to clear the roads by four PM, to clear out before the ice starts to accumulate. Weather reports, even when the precipitation had barely started by four PM, called for anywhere from one to five inches of snow (though any guy will tell you, it ain’t about the measurement; it’s about what you can do with it).

Seven PM, still no snow.

Eight PM, still no snow.

Nine PM, still no snow.

It got to be 10 PM, which is bedtime even for the adults in our house, and we still hadn’t seen a flake. We checked the local news — reporters in their bulky winter coats dutifully stood outside in the drab rain, anticlimactically holding aloft sticks sheathed in ice to show us just how dangerous the roads could be, despite the total lack of any actual winter weather happening at all.

We went to sleep, dreaming that maybe the blizzard would strike while we slumbered, that the day would break and we’d have to reach for our coats and boots and hats to brave our front yard. But when we woke, it became clear that we’d been misled. (Sidenote: I learned recently that it’s actually pretty common to misread “misled” as mize-eld, the past participle of the non-existent verb “misle,” which of course means to trick or deceive. Especially if your only experience with the word is in print. This actually makes perfect sense, since English in general makes none.) The yard is, at most, highlighted with frosty tips like the spiky protrusions on the Backstreet Boys’ bed heads. The road looks like somebody spilled a particularly large salt-shaker across it. But there is no snow in Atlanta, and we’re all very sad.

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It’s like when your parents told you they got you a new car for Christmas, except it came in a match box.

The roads are still icy, though, so we all have the excuse we wanted to hunker down for the weekend and binge-watch Westworld. Except we already did that over the Christmas holiday. (So good!)

Despite all that build-up, our winter coats and mittens and hats will remain in the closet to gather dust, and we Atlantans will have to content ourselves with dreams of the white stuff.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Why I Love Being Bald

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You’ve been told that being bald is a big ol’ bummer.

Your hair goes, and with it, your looks, your confidence, your masculinity, even your identity. Just look at commercials for Rogaine throughout the years. Before: I was afraid to talk to anybody. I always felt like people were staring at me. I couldn’t even go out in public. After: My confidence is back. I’m dating a supermodel. I can even go in the pool! (Because if there’s one aspect of your life that really determines your quality of life, it’s whether or not you can go in the pool without feeling icky.)

It strikes a lot of us guys. Some more than others. Some of us get a wicked thrashing with the bald stick, leaving our heads resembling fleshy bowling balls, while others just get a perfunctory tapping, leaving our hairlines resembling the coastlines of Mediterranean countries. Some get smacked early in life and have to spend their entire adulthood follicularly challenged, some can stave off the beating until their twilight years.

But like all things in genetics, there is no escaping it if it comes for you. And, like a squirrel getting swept down the river, you can either fight the current or relax and see where it takes you.

Me, I leaned into the current and took my hair off at age thirty; I recognized that the troops were slowly losing ground, and after a few years going back and forth with growing it back and pretending things were going to be okay, I’ve been buzzing it weekly.

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And I love it. Here’s why:

There is no such thing as a bad hair day. For the pessimist, that’s because they’re all bad hair days, and maybe I’ll grant that. But I have suffered from cowlicks and ratty-looking bedhead for my entire life. It is glorious to have that weight lifted off my soul.

It’s distinctive. Maybe not the way it used to be — the bald thing has caught on, even for white guys, in the last decade (thanks Bruce Willis and Jason Statham) — but it’s not a common look. Much more common are the guys suffering from hairline creep and pretending they’re not, with combovers or short haircuts. Forget that. Go big or go home.

Hats in the winter. I used to hate wearing hats, no matter how cold it got outside. Why? You already know: hat hair. Problem solved!

Cool in the summer. If you live in the South like I do, you’ll do anything to survive the pressure cooker waiting outside your door. Having no hair and letting your scalp breathe is so refreshing.

The feel. There’s nothing like feeling the wind across your dome. Or your kids or your wife giving it a rub. Or rubbing it yourself. No shame in that. Just don’t go crazy with it in public, you sicko.

All of which is nice, don’t get me wrong. But it all pales next to the real reason that being bald — bald-by-choice, as my fellow head-shavers call it — is the best style choice I’ve ever made. (Temper that with the fact that I still wear Star Wars t-shirts and walk around in my universally hideous Vibram shoes.)

The real reason I love shaving my head? Taking a razor and cutting short the desperate strugglers who might otherwise have hung on at least well into my late thirties?

The give-a-fargo factor. (Which is zero.)

It’s well documented that we only have so many fargoes to give in any given day. Anything you expend effort on — mental, physical, emotional — that carries a cost. Some things are small — deciding whether to make a smoothie for breakfast, or whether to snag a sweet, sweet Chick-Fil-A biscuit — while others carry a bit more weight — whether you buckle down and get some work done or turn in your productivity card and consign yourself to an afternoon watching cat videos on YouTube and reading articles that get you good and angry about politics. Either way, big or small, the fargoes pile up and take their toll — and once you use up your daily limit, well, you end up pretty much worthless.

The best thing about shaving your head is that it costs just a couple of fargoes a week, tops.

When I had hair, it cost me a lot of fargoes. It took time to clean it in the shower. It took time to style it. It took time (and money!) to go to the barber every couple of weeks to get it cut. It stressed me out when I’d get to work and see that it was sticking up or not sitting right, or if I had to try to re-style it after putting on a hat. Are these huge expenditures? No — but like grains of sand in your crotch after a day at the beach, they add up fast and are impossible to ignore.

So I shave my head. It takes about ten minutes once a week (I’m not particularly arsed about keeping it super-short, as you can see in the above photo), and I don’t have to spend an ounce of mental or physical energy on it outside of that. No shampoo (and, by extension, I’ll never get shampoo in my eyes again!). No combs, brushes, blow-dryers. No hat anxiety. No styling. Just streamlined simplicity. Plus the benefits listed above. And a net increase in my daily fargoes, to spend on whatever I want.

Probably videos of people falling off hoverboards.

If you’re like me — losing the fight with genetics and the will to fight it — get off the fence and reach for the razor. You won’t be sorry.

And if you are, well, you know … it grows back.

(Some of it.)