Art Imitating Life

See for yourself:

A favorite pastime of mine is to contemplate the thing I am using in the current moment in time and to consider its history and its future. This may sound profound (pretentious), and maybe it is (it isn’t), but that’s not the hook for me.

What entertains me about this consideration is the ability to postulate absolute statements. For (a crude) example, as I lie here in bed writing this, I can see hair on my belly. I don’t know how long those specific hairs have been there—perhaps three months. I know they will fall out within another three months to be replaced with indistinguishable other hairs. Knowing this, I can say with almost 100% certainty that not one of the hairs that I can see on my belly right now is ever going to be the cause of my death. I am also 100% certain that they will never ever make it as far as Africa and that they will not ever be used as an intended ingredient in a dinner (or breakfast, for that matter. Lunch—we’ll see).

The other major source of amusement in this exercise is then testing these postulated absolute statements and trying to construct a scenario in which they are proven false. An example, using the first example from above, is:

As a belly hair is shed, as happens every day, it drifts into my cat’s water bowl; she laps the hair up, causing it to tickle her throat. As she is momentarily confused, she jerks backwards, directly obstructing my walking path into the kitchen, tripping me, and causing me to flail somewhat clumsily onto some sharp knives, which Emily has inadvertently placed point-up in the dishwasher, which she has (uncharacteristically) left open. One impales my eye! Instant death. Thanks a lot, belly hair.

It works for other things, too.

Number of knowings where I live. There is a finite number of times coitus will be achieved in the apartment I’m living in—by me, by all previous tenants going back to the 1920s, and over the entire span of this building’s existence as a habitable domicile. (Counterexamples: is penetration without ultimate satisfaction considered coitus? Does oral pleasure count in this tally? What if the oral pleasure did not achieve ultimate satisfaction? What if it did, but was a prelude to bigger things?)

Places where I will ride my bike. I will never ride my bike underwater. (Counterexample: oh god! What horrible scenario must I have gotten myself into so that I am riding a bike underwater? Surely some sort of gangster has forced me to flee from him and this, in a state of panic, seems the best, most logical course of escape.)

You get the picture. This works on literally anything you can think of. (Counterexample: some badass temporally-independent thing whose fundamental characteristics change in order to prove jackass amateur philosophers wrong.)

*Please do not read this as bragging. This is a complaint, at best.
**Probably facts, as far as anyone knows.

For as much fun as summer can be with all its semi-nude women, patio beers, and “summer hours” (also known as skipping out early on Fridays), its lameness cannot be overstated. You see, I have a fall birthday, and that means after Christmas I go an entire ten months without presents.

Don’t get me wrong, having a fall birthday as had its advantages: I was among the first of my friends to turn 16, 18, and 21, and that carried with it extreme gloating rights. But, like time itself, gloating rights are fleeting; presents last forever.

This lack of gift giving in my direction isn’t really a problem in the first months of the new year, as at that time I am sufficiently satiated, for a while anyway, from the appetizer of my October birthday and the feast of Christmas. But now that the summer months have arrived I remember fondly the days of anticipation and hint dropping, and I miss them like one misses a discarded half-hotdog that was too much to eat at the time but would taste so good right about now.

The great expanse of presentlessness might be dealt with by simply getting things for myself without tribute to my birth as the stimulus. But I can’t be expected to buy a season of The Simpsons on DVD or an iTunes gift card on my own; if I did, what would other people get me? I must think of others before myself.

I have tried putting it out of mind, hibernating the desire for presents by distracting myself with the fleshy, naked things of summer. However, one tormenting factor stands in the way of this and all other possible solutions: my sister’s birthday. It falls on June 28^th, three days off from being on the exact opposite side of the year from Christmas. It just sits there, smack dab in the middle of summer, taunting me with its even distribution of presents for her.

But no! Not only does she get presents, I have to give her one! Imagine being a starving homeless man, cursed by destiny to sit in front of Burger King begging for whatever pittance the passing fat business executives will throw at you. Now, imagine being forced to go into the Burger King to order a delicious meal with the money you have scrounged together after many hours of begging in the hot sun. But this is not a meal for you. This is a meal for the fat executives, which you are then expected to hand to them personally with a smile on your face as they unwrap and enjoy their bounty right in front of you.

Yes, an October birthday is a wonderful yet cruel, cruel fate.

Since September of last year, Emily and I have participated in a handicapped bowling league. The premise is that everything is super laid back. You come, bowl three games with some friends, drink a pitcher or three of beer, and have something to look forward to every week. We play for modest cash prizes at the end of the 14 weeks, but otherwise there is nothing at stake, aside from (very unimpressive) bragging rights. It’s not even a sanctioned league!

My point is this: it’s supposed to be fun.

But there are some who seem to take no joy from this weekly recreation. There are a few people we bowl against who are paying $13 a week (plus $2 for shoes, if the don’t bring their own) to do nothing but scowl. They bowl a strike, and it’s a straight face: no jump, no arms raised in victory, no fist pump. They feel no joy.

DUDES! It’s bowling. You’re paying money to enjoy yourself. Smile one goddamn time. You’re bowling!

I grew up listening to Bob Seger. I know most of his songs, and have known them since before I knew who Bob Seger was. Because of that, I didn’t actually pay close attention to the lyrics of many of his songs until recently.

Have you heard the song Main Street? If not, here you go. Pay attention to the lyrics. (Video is unrelated.)

In case you don’t have speakers/don’t have time/don’t care, I’ll dissect these lyrics for you.

I remember standing on the corner at midnight
Trying to get my courage up
There was this long lovely dancer in a little club downtown
I loved to watch her do her stuff
Through the long lonely nights she filled my sleep
Her body softly swaying to that smoky beat
Down on Main Street

Translation: I love spending a lot of time at the strip club. I even have a favorite stripper! I have dreams about her. I really think I am in love with this stripper.

In the pool halls, the hustlers and the losers
I used to watch ‘em through the glass
Well I’d stand outside at closing time
Just to watch her walk on past
Unlike all the other ladies, she looked so young and sweet
As she made her way alone down that empty street
Down on Main Street

Translation: Sometimes I go to places other than the strip club, but I don’t really go inside. Mostly I just walk by them on the way to the strip club. When the strip club closes, instead of going home I hang around so I can stare at my favorite stripper. Even though she is a stripper, and even though I have never spoken to her and know nothing about her, I know she is different from all other strippers. I think she loves me. Oh! Here she comes.

And sometimes even now, when I’m feeling lonely and beat
I drift back in time and I find my feet
Down on Main Street
Down on Main Street

Translation: I am still obsessed with that stripper. I wish I could still stalk her.

Let me be clear: I have no problem with strippers. I think, as Emily has said, it might actually give more power to women than we say. But strippers are just doing a job: they are showing you their naked bodies for money. It’s just that songs about stalking strippers and their authors and those who sing them are creepy.

I’ve loved social media for years now, based solely on its own merits. The democratization of information (big words for big ideas) has been a critical factor for journalism, politics, and humanitarian efforts for anywhere between two and six years (I start counting at Howard Dean). It takes the dissemination of information partly out of the hands of the Big Guys (Media, Government) and gives it to everybody.*

But yeah, ok, so you see a picture of a plane in a river or you save people from earthquake rubble. Big deal. The biggest achievement of social media has yet to come: letting us know about the aliens. This is genuinely what I am the most excited for social media to bring to us.

See, every sci-fi geek since H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine (decent book; wouldn’t base a genre on it) has been waiting for the aliens to come, and every sci-fi geek since 1948 has known that when they do (or when the did), the government will (did) cover it up. Until now.

If aliens crash near, hover around, or otherwise come in contact with humans, it will be all over the social web. It will be like a virus (but the good kind; not the kind normally associated with alien invasions), first starting as a tweet along the lines of “Um. Aliens?” And then someone will retweet that, and then ten more people will retweet it, and so on. Then maybe it will trend. Then someone will post something to TwitPic, and that will trend. It will spread across Facebook, and only every fifteenth item in your news feed will be not about the aliens. Then CNN will pick it up and show five or six different cell phone videos. Then variants on this will dominate nine of the top ten trending topics (I’m certain something about Beyoncé will still be seven or eight), and it will be otherwise independently verified half a billion times over (that number is likely not an exaggeration, either).

Five days later, the government will reluctantly say something.

Ten years ago, this would not have been possible.

*99 times out of 100 this is a terrible, terrible thing.

Leif has brought up a mechanical concern with Twitter style that has so far gone unresolved by anyone in any sort of position of power. I call that a power vacuum, and I’m here to step in.

Leif wrings his hands:

My head almost went all Scanners while typing the “a @gowalla.” Strunk and White, where are you when I need you the most? Is it “a @” or “an @”?

The correct way to do this is to keep the “@” silent, and I’ll tell you why.

Let’s take Erica Mayer’s tweet

My buddy @jonberrydesign is at the #Olympics working in graphic design! You should follow him, he’s a swell dude <3

Do you pronounce this, “My buddy at-jonberrydesign is at the hash-Olympics”*? I don’t. When I sign up for Twitter, I pick user names that don’t involve “at” being said at the start. My Twitter handle is Punsultant. I am not the at-Punsultant; nor am I running the at-MNBeardOff.

The “@” indicates that the string of letters immediately following it is a user name. Similar symbols include the apostrophe, which indicates possession or acts as a replacement for letters within a word; the period, which indicates the end of a sentence; and the quotation mark, which indicates speech from someone other than the narrator. These symbols are called punctuation and are not pronounced.**

My point is this: “@” is punctuation that Twitter has invented. Find me a reputable style guide that says punctuation should be pronounced and I will start saying “at-username.” Until then, the “at” should remain silent.

*I would like to compete in the hash Olympics.

**Sometimes quotation marks are pronounced when reading aloud. I don’t care.

Do you ever notice how winter before New Year’s looks different from winter after New Year’s? True, the Christmas decorations are taken down sometime in January, but that’s not exactly it. I could never really place it until a few days ago, when I saw a man in a stylish coat and scarf.

After the first of the year, we stop giving a shit about how we dress, because it’s just too damn cold.

Before the first of the year, people are still excited about wearing their nice pea coat, a stylish scarf, and some sort of jaunty hat. But once January gets at full tilt, and all the way until March, it’s like a race to see who can wear the most layers. This results in lumpy, waddling, sad-looking Minnesotans.

I don’t think the fact that spring is just out of reach helps things much, either.

Today it’s supposed to be 42 degrees in Minneapolis. It’s January 16.

“Awesome!” you might think. Nope, not awesome. This sucks. This is so damn stupid. I hate the January Thaw.

See, in Minnesota, our winters are brutal and last from November to April. That’s pretty close to half the year. When you put spring and fall in there, that doesn’t leave much room for 85 and sunny. So when it gets close to springtime, when things start melting a bit, I get really excited. Winter is exhausting, and by the middle of January I’m ready for it to be over.

Enter the January Thaw.

Every year around this time, the temperature spikes by 30 degrees, things start melting, and my springtime reflexes activate. The woooooshhhhhhhh of cars driving through puddles, the sparkling of water droplets from snow melting, the thinning of snow in places. All of these are indicators of spring. But actually, spring is fifteen weeks away. Fifteen weeks! That’s 105 days. That’s nearly a third of a year.

So, give me 25 below, please. No more of this 40 and sunny. I need 25 below zero right now, so every bit of hope in me is securely frozen in place, not ready to move for… ugh… 105 days.

I realize that it’s half way through the month of January by now, but I would be remiss if I did not finish out my MaBeGroMo updates.

For the month of December, I did not trim my beard. It started like this, moved in this direction, and this was the final product:

Look at how manly that is! It’s so manly that Hercules crapped right in his pants and had to put on a dress so all residual crapping due to the extreme manliness of this photo would just fall to the floor–because it was inevitable for months.