Numbers racket

As a younger man, the transition into a new year seemed somehow significant, a major event of sorts. Friends and I would gather around a TV to watch the ball drop in Times Square; and then, as with any big-deal moment, we’d consummate the celebration by cracking open bottles with swashbuckling pirates etched into the glass, tip back our heads, and awaken hours later in a tangled mess of limbs and confusion: Did I really dance the tango with the neighbor’s dog? Where are my pants? 

 

I’d say you can’t buy memories like that, but calling them “memories” would be misleading. It implies remembering things.

 

Fun at the time, but years later, I’m glad to have left that era behind. Partly, of course, this is due to age; you can’t do that kind of thing forever, at least not without the feeling that your head is filled with burly construction workers, feverishly jackhammering blocks of concrete. Increasingly, though, I find the whole New Year’s phenomenon curiously arbitrary. 

 

I mean, we kind of made the whole thing up.

 

The Gregorian calendar, which most of use, has sort of become the de facto international standard, but it’s basically an invention of the Roman Catholic Church, whose timekeeping ability is only surpassed by its predilection for really pointy hats. Back in the day (1582, to be exact), the robe-enveloped men who ran things were pissed off about Easter, the date of which kept floating around like Keith Richards’ lazy eye after a coke binge. They wanted the holiday, which is tied to the spring equinox, to come about a little more predictably. So they reformed the old Julian calendar. Which itself was a reform of the Roman calendar. Which was based on Greek lunar calendars, which were based on some guy in a toga pointing at the sky and yelling, “Hey look, the moon!” This is all according to Wikipedia, which, as we all know, has never been wrong about anything.

 

As for January being the start of a new year, well, we owe that one to Roman dictator and Shakespearean murder victim Julius Caesar. When he wasn’t busy revolutionizing the salad, he was inventing the Julian calendar, whose months were named after Roman gods. January’s namesake, Janus, was the god of doors and gates, and had two faces, one looking backward and one looking forward, a physical trait envied by algebra teachers the world over. So January, thought Caesar, was a natural fit to kick off the new year, which was typically marked by riotous celebrations and wine-fueled orgies. Nice to know some things never change.

 

All this is to say that our demarcations of time are random, the historical equivalent of a blindfolded child trying to pin the tail on the donkey. That Wednesday marks the start of 2014 – that we even recognize it as 2014 at all – is the result of happenstance. While human beings were building civilizations and devising ways to more precisely define time, the earth was oblivious, spinning on its axis and Tilt-A-Whirling its way around the sun with perfect indifference. We’re still the only species that cares that it’s 4:07 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 27. To the planet, and everything else that lives on it, time is a rhythm, not a number or a name. The sun rises; it sets. Seasons change. For most living things, that’s enough.

 

Not so for we people, with our watches and clocks and Garfield calendars. Humans like to compartmentalize. That’s what timekeeping basically boils down to: dividing our lives and our history into digestible chunks, so we can ascribe to them significance, meaning. As midnight approaches on Tuesday, we’ll be the only ones taking note; while owls and anteaters plod on with their lives sans ceremony, we’ll be wearing goofy plastic 2014 glasses and sipping champagne to the tune of some awful boy band draped in feather boas. We’re weirdos, you and me. Okay, mostly me.

 

I guess when you deconstruct it to that degree, it’s easy to condemn New Year’s celebrations as being superfluous. They mark the passage from one arbitrary number to another, while absolutely nothing of note actually changes, except of course for varying levels of drunkenness. But subdividing an abstract does have one advantage: It allows a person to cut off ties with one era and look to the next with optimism and – is it too corny to say? – hope. I’ve never put a whole lot of stock in New Year’s resolutions; if it’s June and I need to drop five pounds, I’m dropping them in July, not waiting six months. But sometimes people need that dividing line, a looming threshold on which they can fixate, so they may galvanize their will. It’s like a boxer psyching himself up for the big fight, except when all is said and done, most of us won’t be bleeding from the ears and sport a face that looks like a chewed Trident.

 

In other words, it’s sometimes helpful to erase the slate, even if we have to invent the slate in the first place.

 

I still don’t know if I’ll ever truly get it, this fixation on a number, but that’s the way I’ve got it worked out in my head, and it’s fragile. So as 2013 slides into its grave and celebrants toast its successor, I’ll stifle my confusion and go with the flow. It’s all you can really do during this strange period between celebration and living.

 

As the minutes tick away on Tuesday, my only thought will be: Do I still have a 10-year-old bottle of Cuervo stashed in some forgotten cupboard? It’s gotta be around here someplace.

 

Wire the long face?

In mere days – days! – I’ll be sitting on a carpeted living room floor, surrounded by a dizzying kaleidoscope of torn wrapping paper and flung bows, one of which will invariably be stuck atop the head of a confused housecat. Buried beneath this festive camouflage will lie boxes filled with Christmas gifts, and although Santa usually plays his cards close to the chest, at least one of these gifts is bound to be an electronic device of some kind – something that plugs into a wall and probably makes a whirring sound.

Being a man (sort of), I’m genetically programmed to like these things; buried in the male DNA are instructions to drool over shiny things that power to life by flicking, turning, or pressing something. That’s why guys tend to drool over stuff like electric drills and televisions, much the way a puma will drool in sight of a picked-over deer carcass. These analogies may get more disgusting as we go along.

Even though I love loving this crap, these flashy gizmos with their lights and loud noises, what accompanies them is pure evil: The necessary, yet troublesome, scourge of wires. Tangly, knotted, mind-of-their-own electrical wires. They’re the most insidious plague to befall humankind since the mullet.

I keep a junk drawer in the kitchen, right? Just about everyone has one of these; you never know when something around the house will break, and you’ll need to scrounge parts from the old portable cassette player you used in 1986. When I first crammed said drawer with heaps of misfit detritus, I tried to be organized about it. I placed the items in carefully – cell phone charger, can opener, an ancient Game Boy from another life – and coiled the corresponding wires into tight curlicues so pristine they could have passed as modern conceptual art. Like those confusing exhibits you see in which someone places a Burger King wrapper next to a dirty diaper, and claims it’s an exploration of the human soul vis a vis the digestive system.

Such attention with which these items were stored. Such care. Such delicate placement. And what happens when I open the drawer to retrieve a set of AA batteries? It looks like the contents were shelled with heavy artillery. Like the rubber bands flew a tiny plane over my electronic Hiroshima and dropped a big fat A-bomb.

 It’s not just that the wires fall slack with time. Logic would dictate that, even if the coils were to gradually loosen, they would still maintain some semblance of their basic shape, and stay segregated. But no. They’re tangled, twisted, knotted like shoelaces, wrapped up in a bizarre lover’s embrace that can only be undone with time and patience and a crack team of NASA engineers. It takes no effort at all to store these items, but the delicacy of a seasoned heart surgeon to restore them to order.

Only after long, stressful minutes of untangling am I able to recover enough sanity to ask the obvious question: How does this happen?

At first, it seems physically impossible – a mathematical enigma that would blow Stephen Hawkins’ glasses straight off his face. When asked about it, most people invoke theories that conjure the work of mythical creatures, like elves or gnomes. Any rational person would discredit the existence of these fictional beings, hallucinations of Tolkien and Suess and the self-proclaimed Lizard King who lives in the Dumpster near my house. But when you’re dealing with an issue so stupefyingly mysterious, you suspend your disbelief.

It’s easy to see how the scene would unfold: Elf Team Six, comprised of tiny men the size of peach pits, assembles on your kitchen table, having snuck in through the pet door. Buford, the elf with the hairlip and the uncontrollable flaulence, fires his grappling hook toward the uppermost drawer closest to your sink; one end hooks around the brass handle, and other is fastened to the centerpiece that holds the wax candles scented like cougar butts. The elves shimmy their way across this makeshift tightrope, nudge the drawer open, and pounce headfirst into this wire-rich eden. Then they tangle everything, light up cigars, raid your fridge and eat all your cheese.

Bastards! Infidels! Stupid jerks!

But wait. Turns out there’s a scientific, elfless explanation.

See, scientists are nerds, and some of these nerds have developed something they call knot theory. This is real. The math is complex, but according to Cracked – a website dedicated to explaining weird crap – the gist is this: Most of these wires are round in circumference. This means they lack aerodymanics and friction control. Since there are many more configurations in which wires can be tangled than untangled, the laws of physics dictate that a tangled arrangement is much more likely, statistically. So whenever there’s movement – jostling, rumbling, opening and closing – the wires move, unfettered by friction, and seek out one of these more probable tangled arranegements. This is called action-reaction motion physics. That’s why, when a college student tosses her headphones into a backpack and walks across campus to basket weaving class, she pulls them out to find the wires twisted into the kind of knots that could tie a sail to a clipper ship.

Physics! It’s a gas.

With the proliferation of wireless devices, this stands to become less of an issue. But as long as gadgets need to be charged, we won’t purge the world of wires completely – meaning junk drawers like mine will continue to be havens for disarray, confusion, and anarchy.

So when I rip the wrapping paper from my long-awaited Christmas loot, I just might squeal with delight if one of those gifts happens to be tube socks.

Ye Old Internet Shoppe

There’s this love-hate relationship I have with the Internet. On the one hand, it’s drained people’s attention spans like pus from a cyst (sorry, that was gross), and I’m pretty sure I just spent the last 20 minutes in a trance, looking at someone’s random collection of silly and embarrassing wedding photos. On the other hand, I no longer have to leave the house to do my Christmas shopping, which pleases me as both a consumer and a reclusive hermit.

 

Grudgingly, I do have to acknowledge that, yes, there are a handful of benefits to the in-person shopping experience that you miss out on by going the eBay route. No mall excursion would be complete without the honeyed background noise of Johnny Mathis singing about his ring-ting-tingling; that’s always a nice touch, although after a while it just sounds like he’s crooning about a rash. And mall Santas are always fun, unless you’re one of them, in which case there’s a pretty good chance you’ll finish your shift looking like you’ve gone a few rounds with Clubber Lang from “Rocky III.” 

 

I jest, of course; the sights and sounds of the season are among the more compelling reasons to get up off the couch and into the thick of things. (That and walking off Aunt Ethyl’s Thanksgiving pie.) But every year I find it more and more difficult to suck up my courage and walk through those automatic sliding doors. Maybe it’s a function of getting older, but fighting crowds and jostling elbows to get a prime deal on a toaster is less rewarding than it used to be. At their worst, holiday crowds feel like a giant mosh pit at a heavy metal concert, only they’re more violent, and no one seems to be having any fun.

 

Sites like Amazon and NewEgg have become especially attractive now that the holiday shopping season has nearly overshadowed Christmas itself, devouring it with the flesh-hungry fervor of a rabid wildebeast. Black Friday has now given way to Thankless Thursday; rather than settling in with family for an afternoon of gorging on goopy turkey innards, the way Thanksgiving should be, many people now spend that kickoff to the season camped outside big-box stores like they’re waiting to score prime seats for a Springsteen show. Retailers have brazenly ignored the languid vibe of that hoiday in favor of keeping their doors open, presumably because people would rather trounce their neighbors for ten bucks off a TV set, and all in a kind of mad rush that rivals Spain’s annual running of the bulls. In fact, being chased through narrow streets by a bull is less likely to result in injury, since bulls tend not to place much value in the entertainment potential of a discounted Iron Man Blu-Ray.

 

Contrast that with one of my recent online shopping splurges. Here’s the scene: Me in a tattered hoodie bespecked with ketchup stains, butt sinking into a couch cushion, feet up on a makeshift ottoman. Laptop on a table in front of me; steaming cup of herbal tea within arm’s reach. Music playing through the TV, volume low. Mellow lighting. Not a soul in sight. Solitary, peaceful, quiet.

 

Ahhh.

 

That’s what holiday shopping should be like. No garish displays featuring cartoon Santas using Gillette’s latest shaving technology; no long lines at the register, where the cashier has the hollowed-out expression of someone who’s trapped inside a North Korean prison camp. Just me, my debit card, and the strangely disquieting sound of Ted Nugent shredding on a hard rock version of “Deck the Halls.” I didn’t even have to wear pants. (Turns out I did, but it’s nice just to have the option.)

 

It’s hard for me to acknowledge the superiority of the online experience given my antipathy toward technology run amok. Not to sound like an old fuddy duddy, but between wi-fi enabled refrigerators, smartphones that cook waffles and clean your underwear, and Facebook profiles for peoples’ pets, enough is enough. Gadgets and whiz-bang machines are supposedly designed to bring people closer together, but it’s now easier to make eye contact with someone over a Skype connection than it is in person. There are benefits to this – living in a digital world lowers the possibility of randomly running into Pauley Shore – but increasingly, society is a fractured mirror, and the blunt instrument of its damage is inscribed with the Apple insignia. 

 

Only something drastic, like holiday fever, could drive me to seek shelter in a cyber store. I won’t do all my shopping online; once I’ve covered the major purchases, I’ll hit up local shops and mom-and-pop outfits for the odds and ends. Those are usually the best places to find the more unique items, like candles that smell like beaver poop, or wood sculptures of Maine black bears riding tricycles. And unlike the big-box stores, these little nooks in the wall still know the value of an understated Christmas motif: A few tasteful lights, a mellow instrumental holiday album on the stereo, and a manageable traffic flow that avoids human logjams. If that was still the soul of Christmas giving, I’d gladly exchange the hoodie for a reindeer sweater and hit the bricks, seeking those gifts that warm hearts and make eyes sparkle. Maybe someday the tide will turn that way once again.

 

Until then?

 

On eBay, on NewEgg, on Etsy and Bulktix! On Bookswim, on GameFly, on EToys and Netflix! From the guts of my laptop plugged into the wall, I’ve got my free shipping ... so to hell with the mall!

 

TGIT

Thursday’s an awkward day to have a holiday. In some professions, a Thursday holiday translates into a blissful four-day weekend, and if I worked in one of those professions, I’d probably be ranting about something else, like candy cigarettes, or Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor. Another time, perhaps. Another time.

 

The way things are now, last Friday was a regular workday, and workdays that follow straight on the heels of a festive national event never feel quite right. If a holiday is punctuation, then celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday is like an exclamation point right in the middle of a sentence. It’s a headliner playing before the opening band. It’s weird.

 

Not that I’m complaining about a day off, mind you. Every year, it’s a mind-bending ritual, spending a random weekday in front of a football game, cramming my face with can-shaped cranberry goop, and passing out face-first in a dinner plate caked with congealed gravy. It’s not an experience one typically has in the middle of the week, or, you know, ever. In fact, if it weren’t for Thanksgiving, I might never have discovered the perverse joy of chasing banana bread with gooey pie and a still-dripping turkey heart. Stop me when this starts getting gross.

 

It’s a glutton’s delight, but its placement is curious. Why Thursday? Thanksgiving is a secular holiday – not like Christmas, which is consistently held on the same date each year, one determined by men who probably knew Latin and wore robes that vaguely resembled Snuggies. The placement of Thanksgiving is completely arbitrary, so even if it was settled during an era when the typical two-day weekend had yet to exist, the very nature of its genesis suggests that it could be changed with relatively little effort. Thursday is ingrained as a tradition, granted. But frankly, a lazy three-day stretch of meaningless sports and too-tight belt straps is a tradition I’d be all too ready to embrace, as long as we could still dress our school kids like pilgrims and cartoon turkeys. One of the great joys of a holiday is making children look silly.

 

I’m a curious dude, so I did a little searching, trying to find out why it’s on Thursday in the first place. The answer is less satisfying than I had hoped. Some holidays have clear and simple origins: The signing of the Declaration of Independence gave rise to Independence Day; Easter got started because Christians believe Jesus was all like, “Screw you, death,” and rose from the grave, probably with a pretty mean hangover. These are explainable traditions.

 

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that got refined over the years, and the further back in time you look, the fuzzier its origin becomes. It’s like trying to read a road sign when it’s a mere speck of dust on the horizon. In 1941, Congress formalized the holiday, which was based on the Thanksgiving-on-Thursday event that had been observed since 1863, which was started by Lincoln, which was based on a national day of thanks established by the first Continental Congress, which killed the cat that ate the rat that lived in the house that Jack built.

 

In other words, no one truly knows how in blazes we ended up with it. (We’re told tales of Native Americans and pilgrims getting along famously during a harsh winter, but c’mon. It smacks of mythology.) I’d take that history with a grain of salt, though, ‘cause I got it from the website of a horse rescue in Massachusetts.

 

If you were around in the days of horse-drawn carriages and unruly hyena beards, then I guess a Thursday Thanksgiving wouldn’t have been that big a deal. The standard Monday through Friday, nine-to-five workweek had yet to be spawned by the industrial revolution, and life moved at a pace that was stately and slow; there was no such thing as hopping in the Volvo and hightailing it from Portland to Providence, arriving at cousin Lemmy’s bungalow in time for the opening kickoff. With the average person’s social radius set at about a mile and a half, you simply put down your spade and pickax, dressed in your best overalls, and cooked a sumptuous bird for your nine brothers and sisters, most of whom probably lived in the auxiliary barn with a bunch of flatulent cows.

 

Arrangements are a bit more complex these days; life moves at a speedier clip. So speedy, in fact, that it’s often difficult to take a moment and do what the holiday suggests we do in the first place: Take stock of the things for which we feel thankful. That’s hard to do with just the single day off, and doubly so if you’ve got to squeeze in a 500-mile round trip, punctuated by a gargantuan meal that could drag a tweaking meth addict into a peaceful slumber. 

 

Thanksgiving’ll probably be on a Thursday until the end of time, which I guess is fine – it’s nice to have some warm holiday time with family no matter what day of the week it is. But that won’t stop me from dreaming of a Friday holiday, and a three-day weekend dominated by excess and intentionally bad food choices.

 

‘Cause then we’d really have something to be thankful for.

 

Excuse me while I kiss this guy

In my entire life, I’ve never met anyone who actually knew what the heck Aretha Franklin was singing about in the chorus of her song “Respect.”

 

Which is actually kind of impressive, when you consider the fact that “Respect” is one of those tunes everyone kinda knows, at least in passing. Over the decades, it’s become one of those ditties – like Elvis’ “Jailhouse Rock,” or the ever-painful “Gilligan’s Island” theme – that’s absorbed into the minds of first-world youths by some kind of mysterious osmosis, spreading with the alarming speed of a mutant virus. Babies born while the song is playing display a jaw-dropping acceleration of their linguistic skills, as they turn to their doctors or midwives and say, “Aw, change it already, I’m sick of this one.”

 

Most everyone, including fictional genius babies, know the words up to a certain point. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T / Find out what it means to me / R-E-S-P-E-C-T …” and then everyone just kinda shrugs their shoulders and mumbles something about greasy peas. For years I thought Franklin was singing, “Take down TCP,” but I never had any idea what a TCP was, or why it needed taking down. I just assumed she was singing about acid. Have you really listened to music from that era? They were all singing about acid.

 

It’s a famously confusing line, but the fact is that misheard lyrics are all over the place. Singers, especially in rock music, will oftentimes slur their words in order to squeeze a little extra juice out of the melody. Usually that’s all well and good, and in some cases preferable, since rock lyrics frequently range from embarrassing to oh-my-goodness-who-ties-your-shoes.

 

But when a song gets stuck in your head, and you’ve been singing it to yourself all morning, it’s helpful to know what the words are; otherwise your mind just keeps repeating the part it knows, like a skipping record, and before long you start to wonder what the straight jacket will feel like pulled taught across your chest. Catchy songs are the main culprits here, because not only are they designed to lodge deep inside one’s brain like an itchy splinter, but the vocalists of these bubble-gum tunes never seem to want to enunciate anything. Modern-day singers in particular sound as though some producer in the recording studio just woke them up out of a dreamy slumber. “All right, Gaga, snap out of it! You’ve gotta sing the second verse! That’s the one where you croon about having sex with the entire Venezuelan lacrosse team. Go!”

 

Thanks to the Internet, unknown lyrics are a less frustrating phenomenon. A few keystrokes, and you can finally figure out what Bono is babbling about in the chorus of U2’s “Mysterious Ways.” (Spoiler alert: It’s “She moves in mysterious ways,” not “Shamu the mysterious whale.”)

 

All too often, though, we’ll get the lyrics wrong without ever realizing it – at least until we’re called out in embarrassing fashion by someone with a better ear for slurriness. Case in point: My mother was a fan of country singer Kenny Rogers when I was a child, and she’d play his greatest hits collection on the old lumbering stereo unit in the living room while she did light housework. The song “Ruby” caught my ear one afternoon. Looking at the lyrics online just now, I see that the tune, rather oddly, is about a man pleading for Ruby to stay with him despite his having been paralyzed from the waste down in the Vietnam War. (Always a fun, jaunty subject for a country song.) As my six-year-old self was listening to it, I heard Kenny-boy mumble one final, barely audible line before the music faded into silence. The real line goes, “Oh Ruby / God sakes, turn around.”

 

Singing it out loud one afternoon, I belted what I thought the line was: “Oh Ruby / I’ve got six children.”

 

Like that would help his case any.

 

In all the times I had hummed that tune to myself, it never once occurred to me that I might be getting it wrong. On this occasion, though, my mother fell to the floor, laughing so hard I thought she might rupture important internal organs, and I thought, “Hmm, maybe it’s time to read the ol’ lyric sheet.”

 

To spare myself any further embarrassment, I finally looked up the long-misunderstood lyric to the Aretha Franklin song, which places me alongside roughly three other people who know what the hell she’s singing. Turns out I was only one letter off; the line reads, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T / Take down TCB.” The acronym “TCB,” says the all-powerful Internet, was once a popular abbreviation of the phrase “taking care of business.” Like a pre-email, pre-Facebook version of OMG, only incrementally less lame.

 

So that’s one mystery solved. Still unresolved is why TCB needs taking down, where it would be taken down from, or how one would go about taking it down in the first place. It’s a lyric that may not make any actual sense, but I think we can forgive Ms. Franklin this one time. We’ll just chalk it up to all that acid.

 

Manscape portraits

Ever had somebody share with you a piece of information that they should have kept to themselves? Of course you have. We all have. The phrase “too much information” was invented because of folks who don’t realize that sometimes you have to play your cards close to the chest. 

 

So when a former co-worker of mine started talking about his “manscaping,” I was suitably horrified.

 

“Manscaping” is one of those words that’s crept into the common vernacular the past few years, and it means what you might guess: The shaving, trimming, and overall care and maintenance of a man’s body hair. Explaining it may be superfluous on my part, because the word, and the concept, have spread faster than swine flu, and caused roughly as many instances of retching – mostly among men, like myself, who’d rather not think in detail about other dudes’ body hair. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, naturally; if the thought of a freshly shorn man-chest gets you through the cold winter, then more power to you, and I wish you a Christmas stocking filled to the brim with Edge Pro Gel. But it’s not my thing.

 

Writing about it, though, and sharing my misery: That is my thing.

 

As revolted as I was by the details of his grooming habits, in truth I really liked the guy. Not to sound too much like a 19th Century English chimney sweep, but he was a swell chap. And while it was mostly amusing that his mouth had no filter, it would sometimes result in unwanted revelations – so one fine day, when the thought of hairy pectoral muscles had never even begun to cross my mind, the guy let slip that, in accordance with his girlfriend’s wishes, he made it his habit to remove all of his body hair. Like a professional wrestler, or a mole rat. Like a shiny golden seal.

 

Gross.

 

Not everyone feels the way I do, obviously, or his girlfriend wouldn’t have made the request in the first place. (Ten to one odds she had a Slip ’N Slide growing up.) But when it comes to things like that, extremes on both ends of the spectrum tend to freak me out. Take abnormally hairy actor Robin Williams, for example, who for decades has slowly been morphing into a hyperactive, wisecracking werewolf. The man could be wearing a full three-piece suit with an ascot and a pair of dishwashing gloves, and it’d still look as though his clothes were covering a layer of the hay they use to make scarecrows. If human overpopulation ever threatens species indigenous to the Brazilian rainforest, biologists can establish a reserve on Williams’ forearms, the skin of which hasn’t seen the light of day since the golden age of radio.

 

The difference, though, is that Robin Williams is a product of nature. Hairless Man makes a conscious effort to become Hairless Man. He clips and snips and trims and shaves, and it’s anyone’s guess as to how long it takes him. I’d have asked, but then he would have told me.

 

I mean, we all groom. Unless we live in a dystopian future overrun by robots, we pretty much have to; society expects it of us. Depending on how far you want to stretch the definition of manscaping, all dudes do it to a certain degree – myself more than others, in fact. Long ago, nature decided that my head would never be adorned with the type of curly Richard Simmons ‘fro that blots out the light of a full moon and harbors warblers and double-crested cormorants. When it reached the point that my hair looked like patches of straw glued to a dinosaur egg, I started shaving it, and once you go down that road, you can’t stop. So I blaze through razor blades in an effort to keep my head in full baby-butt mode, gleefully avoiding shampoo, which for me has gone the way of blankies and Winnie the Pooh pajamas.

 

Every guy’s routine is different. Maybe you grease your mustache and curl the ends in a style reminiscent of alcoholic Civil War generals. Maybe you tweeze your eyebrows because otherwise they’d stay wet a full eight hours after a routine shower. That’s all fine. It’s borderline necessary. Otherwise we’d look like garbage-picking coyotes.

 

Removing hair below the neck, though – that starts getting silly after a while. It’s really only justifiable in extreme cases, like when your upper arms and shoulders start looking like Cosby sweaters. In those rare situations, fine, manscaping is acceptable, as long as you never tell another human being, ever. 

 

Chests, meanwhile, should never be shaved except in the cases of Olympic swimmers and grime-encrusted mountain yetis. If neither hydrodynamics nor hygiene play a role, then there’s no reason left for this bizarre activity. At least none that wouldn’t be cause for uncomfortable squirming in the sauna.

 

I feel like this manscaping thing is a recent development. There’s nothing in the history books about Winston Churchill shaving his chest, or Louis XIV trimming his knuckle hair, or whatever men are doing nowadays. That’s because guys used to roll with whatever nature gave them. 

 

Someone needs to tell Hairless Man that it’s perfectly acceptable to keep it old school. It just won’t be me. I don’t want give the impression of being okay with those conversations, ‘cause honestly, who knows what he’d try to tell me next.

 

Hot or not

Kate Chase would have a tough time of things nowadays. 

 

Of course she’s been dead for over 100 years, so she’s got nothing to worry about. Kate was the daughter of Salmon Chase, who, despite his name, was not a fish. Ol’ Sal was a U.S. Senator from Ohio, Treasury Secretary under Lincoln, and the sixth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, which is an impressive resumé for a dude that no one seemed to like very much. Historians grudgingly acknowledge that he did some good things, but he was kind of a schmuck, and I guess I would be too if I had a name like Salmon.

 

Kate, though – Kate had it all. She was the belle of the ball, and I mean that quite literally, since she grew up in the era of both belles and balls. As her father climbed through the ranks, Kate held the town of Washington transfixed, throwing elaborate parties for the political elite, and impressing her fawning guests with her two strongest attributes: Her uncanny intelligence, and her looks.

 

See, Kate Chase was kinda hot.

 

For the 1860’s.

 

Okay, now why did I just qualify that statement? I mean it as no disrespect to Ms. Chase, although if I was going to disrespect someone, it might as well be a person who died before the age of electric light bulbs. (What’s she gonna do, haunt me?) But I noticed something recently as I was reading about the Chase family, and looking at pictures of the uber-popular Kate: As attractive as she was – and she was undoubtedly a very pretty woman – she’d have a hard time getting a magazine cover in this age of obsession over superficial beauty. That’s partly because the field is more crowded nowadays, but there’s something else at play here.

 

I’m going to posit an audacious, and possibly frivolous, theory: On average, each generation gets more attractive than the last.

 

A potentially dangerous assertion, I know, but bear with me on this one.

 

First of all, I’m talking strictly about averages; this isn’t an across-the-board rule. So if you’re older than I am (I’ve been 25 for about seven years now), fear not: You’re probably gorgeous. And I mean that in the most pandering way possible.

 

Secondly, there may – may – be a quasi-scientific basis behind this claim. It’s tough to pin something like looks down to an objective science, because physical attractiveness is largely a matter of subjective opinion. There’s some consensus at the extremes; Brad Pitt, for example, is generally considered a good-looking man, while “Boardwalk Empire” star Steve Buscemi looks like a mutant bug that got his thumb caught in a car door. In between those extremes is a massive gray area, where most of us reside, in which a person’s beauty is purely subjective, dictated by personal tastes. On most days, I’ve got a pretty low opinion of my own looks – bird-beaked, bald and gangly, I look like an awkward Muppet – but you may disagree with me, and if you do, call me up. I’m available for dinner on short notice.

Where my pseudo-scientific theory comes into play is in the realm of natural selection. Evolution is something I spend a great deal of time thinking about, and not just because I have no cable. It’s fascinating stuff. And what it tells us is that species tend to mate based on the fitness of genes; in human terms, this means that “fit” people have an easier time finding partners with whom to dance the horizontal tango. Less-than-stunning people spawn plenty of offspring themselves, as evidenced by “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” but top-tier lookers have their pick of the human litter, if I may be permitted a touch of crassness. Dating is how our species evolves. If Jon Hamm and Scarlett Johansson ever had a child, its beauty would destroy retinas. People would have to look at it through those contraptions they use to watch solar eclipses.

 

When this phenomenon persists for thousands of years, standards of beauty naturally change. Consider George Washington. President Numero Uno was, according to biographer Ron Chernow, quite the ladies man. There are no known instances of him ever cheating on his wife, but he was quite fond of dancing with young women at parties and society shindigs – and they returned that fondness, even before he became a Revolutionary War hero. Washington, in the late 1700s, was considered quite the handsome chap.

 

Now take out a dollar bill and look at him closely.

 

Not a swamp creature, by any means. He’s got cool, penetrating eyes and a strong jawline (turn-ons include walks on the beach and killing British people). But would he turn heads at a party? Maybe with that powdered hair, and the Farrah Fawcett-style wingtips he’s got goin’ on there. But stand him next to George Clooney and I doubt he’d get much attention, at least without firing a musket.

 

I’ve used the word “science” a couple of times now to describe this phenomenon, but it should be noted that I’m using the term loosely; real science is subject to the rigors of testing and experiment, whereas this particular theory has been mined from the recesses of a bodily orifice that’s better left unnamed. Still, I remain convinced. And this is great news, because if it’s true that successive generations get incrementally better-looking, then by the time I’m elderly, all the young folks will be downright ravishing, and I can be one of those creepy old men that make people uncomfortable. It’s nice to have something to look forward to.

 

I just feel bad for Kate Chase – a woman that lovely, and most of the men in her life looked like Steve Buscemi.

 

Three cheers for beer

Say what you want about beer – it kills brain cells, causes hangovers, destroys lives – but there are few industries that allow you to put a drawing of Santa Claus’ bare butt on the label.

Lest you think this a flight of fancy, be assured that I’m talking about a real label on a real beer, appropriately named Santa’s Butt Winter Porter. It’s an English concoction from the Ridgeway microbrewery in Oxfordshire, which is now on my official list of Top Ten Places to Visit Before I’m Committed to an Insane Asylum. (Also on the list: Paris, and that amusement park where they filmed part of “Zombieland.”)

From what I see in the beer aisles of various supermarkets and convenience stores, those butt-loving Brits are hardly the only brewmasters who name and label their beers with tongues firmly in cheek. In fact, they’re not the only ones to use the word “butt.” The Big Horn brewery, with locations smattered throughout the northwest, showed impressive boldness when they invented Buttface Amber Ale, the only beer I’ve come across that incorporates an actual insult I used when I was 9. Aside from ticking my inner adolescent, who still inwardly titters when he hears words like “booger” (and “titter”), this Buttface product has also allowed me to say “butt” six times in three paragraphs, which I believe is a personal record. Make that seven: butt.

Perhaps surprisingly, I am not currently drinking these products. Actually, I hardly drink at all, outside of holidays and Wednesdays. But when I do, it’s usually some microbrew with bench-pressing minotaurs or toga-clad Greek gods on the bottles, which are often saddled with ridiculous monikers, like Polygamy Porter or Spleen Cleaver. Both real, by the way.

The silly imagery and testosterone-drenched titles of these crazy creations are only possible because, contained within their glass or tin confines, is a liquid that makes one’s brain feel like a hall of mirrors in a mid-level amusement park. You just don’t see that kind of wacky (or immature) freedom in other industries. You don’t buy Spleen Cleaver running shoes, or book a seat on Buttface Airlines.

Earlier this year, while on vacation, a friend of mine decided that the best way for me to experience local culture in her little North Carolina town was to try as many ales, porters, and lagers as I could find. I’m pretty sure she wanted me dead. There are more craft brews in the western mountains than there are people to drink them, and while I didn’t find any that had the word “butt” in the title, there were plenty that somehow managed to incorporate ninjas, or 17th Century French kings. At one brewpub in particular, my “friend” ordered me what’s called a “flight,” which is basically a sampler of a half-dozen beers from the restaurant’s barrels. It’s the kind of thing you drink when you’re tired of remembering your own phone number, or you feel like obliterating cherished childhood memories. With a veritable cornucopia of different beers to taste, the goofy names were assaulting me almost as violently as the crippling alcohol buzz – names like Sir Ryan the Pounder, Freak Double IPA, and Uncle Rick’s Pilsner. I have no idea who Uncle Rick is. All I know is that Uncle Rick knocked me flat on my butt.

That’s 10 “butt” references. I think I win some kind of prize or something.

Some of these beers, for all their silliness, are pretty tasty, which is actually a little surprising. The label for Polygamy Porter, for instance, features a small army of fleshy, naked fun-seekers with arms conveniently placed over controversial body parts, illustrated in the style of an oil painting from one of the lustier Renaissance masters. Usually you have to pay gobs of money for a hotel’s pay-per-view service to gain access to that kind of content, and so the jiggle-riffic motif doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the quality of the product. But lo and behold, the beer smacks of hops and spices and goodness – the kind of drink that pulls off that rare double-trick of satisfying taste buds whilst growing the hair on one’s chest. Heck, since the waxed and buffed lovers on the box seem to lack hair anywhere south of their necks, maybe they should start drinking Polygamy Porter.

The nice thing about these beers – aside from the nude women and the butts with faces drawn on them – is that they’re oftentimes a better alternative to the stodgy, boringly-named beers that dominate at keg parties and in Super Bowl ads. Budweiser, for instance, tastes like the distilled armpit sweat from an unwashed rugby player. And just what the hell is a Budweiser, anyway? A German outhouse? Please. Pour me a Sir Ryan the Pounder any day of the week. 

These tiny little microbrews may limit their own marketing potential with these strange and incongruous titles, but sometimes quality is found at the fringes. Do a little hunting, and you’ll find that perfect beer waiting for you, and chances are good it’s saddled with some kind of oil painting of sword-wielding gladiators kicking the butts of two-headed lions. 

And that, my friends, is one dozen butts. Does that constitute some kind of world record? 

Quick, someone call Guinness.

No, the other Guinness.