Style points

My dad would be thrilled and tickled if I spent a long, laborious paragraph describing his facial hair in great detail. So this one’s for you, pops.

 

First off, there’s something you have to understand about the man: He’s an “old hippie from way back,” in his words. Aside from the debauched behavior that this implies, it means he has rather “free” notions about what constitutes a normal and acceptable style. Don’t get me wrong; his chosen facial hair configuration is pretty awesome, in much the same way that a giant bone shoved through the nose of a tribesperson is awesome: You know you wouldn’t want that look for yourself, necessarily, but man, you just can’t look away.

 

It’s a unique motif he’s got crafted for himself. Bald on top, his hair in back is grown somewhat long, in sort of a Hulk Hogan-ish mane that blows behind him in a tight wind like a cape. (Is that a mixed metaphor? I can never tell.) This hair connects to a set of epic sideburns that flare out from the sides of his head with an authority that’s almost scary – it’s the way a blazing fire would look if it was somehow growing out of a person’s face. This, however, is all window dressing for the centerpiece of this daring arrangement: a long, pointy beard that looks like the mother of all arrowheads, an imposing triangle of salt-and-pepper fur extending down his chest in a geometric tumbleweed. Well-kempt and exactingly trimmed, one gets the impression it could puncture a monster-truck tire. The members of ZZ Top bow before it in humble servitude.

 

This has been his style for decades. That fascinates me. At some point in his life, he looked into a mirror, rubbed his chin consideringly, and said to himself, “Yep, this is going to be my style.”

 

Wild.

 

Like all styles, it’s an expression of who he is. When most people pick a style for themselves, it’s usually more understated; someone with a penchant for emerald jewelry is being decidedly more subtle than any man with a foot-long hair spike that could parachute him to safety from a nosediving plane. But my dad’s look is a manifestation of the same desire the majority of us share: To present ourselves a certain way, to say with our appearance, “This is who I am.” In his case, it may also be a cry for help. We’re still trying to figure that one out.

 

The lucky ones get it right, and stick with their choice. Out of thin air, I’ll grab Al Pacino as an example. Visually, Pacino’s defining characteristic is a shock of jet black hair that swoops up from his forehead in a dramatically coiffed pompadour; the envy of Elvis impersonators the world over, it’s a lush thicket that could easily nest a fledgling family of urban sparrows. On another guy – on most other guys – it would look ridiculous, a greasy mop borrowed from the chemically-fortified head of a 1950s lounge lizard. On him, it just works. And he’s figured that out. Can you imagine him with a buzz cut, or the wind-chime dredlocks of a rastafarian? He wouldn’t be Al Pacino anymore. He’d just be some dude with wild, devilish eyes and a gravel voice that could skin the bark off a tree. A pack-a-day creeper.

 

Not everyone is so lucky. Youth, in particular, is a time for trial-and-error, and high school halls are rife with identities invented and discarded on fickle whims. Goth one day, preppy the next. I remember it with chilling clarity: During an ill-fated attempt at playing high school football, I took it into my head to adopt the jock’s casual style; I spent the better part of my sophomore year wearing Dallas Cowboys jerseys, despite coke-bottle glasses and frequent, spontaneous nosebleeds – not to mention that the closest I had ever been to Texas was burning my mouth on hot wings at a sports pub. It’s a bad sign when even the guys on your football team mock you for wearing football jerseys. I soon quit the team and the style both, trading them in for the drama club, which conveniently hid my style-less form behind various nylon leggings and chicken costumes.

 

That’s what it takes, sometimes. You ping-pong between various looks until you find the one that works: That certain hair style, those specific clothes. The more personalized styles, the ones involving avant garde clothing choices and piercings the size of go-kart engines, become frivolous and silly over time; after a certain age, it’s time to stop using one’s appearance as a billboard for individuality. We still make choices, though, and collectively, those choices define who we are. Some care about it more than others – personally, if I could get away with coming to work in Thunder Cats jammies, I would – but nobody’s immune from the consideration. We’re Nike and New Balance and Reebok; we’re bowl cuts and flattops and ponytails; we’re Old Navy and Macy’s and Banana Republic. We’re hippies with sharp-tipped beard swords.

 

I’ve got to hand it to my father. He found a way to make baldness cool-looking, whereas I just look like a light bulb with a face. He found it a worthy representation of who he is, and stuck with it. We should all be so lucky. Because more important then how we appear to others is how comfortable we are with ourselves; it’s liberating, I imagine, to look at oneself in the mirror and say with confidence, “This is who I am. This is me.”

 

Psyched out

Apparently I’m a psychopath.

 

So says some random psychologist on YouTube, whose main credential is that he didn’t shoot his video in a basement surrounded by Led Zeppelin posters. It’s hard to know how seriously to take the guy. On the one hand, this nameless, lab-coated cranial expert filmed his video for the educational series “Big Think,” an ostensibly credible YouTube channel with a notable lack of piano-playing cats. Specializing in interviews with provocative subjects who inspire thought and debate, on topics ranging from science to morality, “Big Think” has featured such luminaries as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and science educator Michio Kaku. These guys aren’t scrubs. They have diplomas with fancy, unpronouncable words on them. If Psychologist Guy indeed belongs in their ranks, he could keep worse company.

 

On the other hand, his name was never listed, and he spent the entire three-minute video licking the roof of his mouth as though it was caked with peanut butter. It would have been worth finding out who he was just so I could track him down and hand him a glass of milk.

 

Anyway, Psychologist Guy posed a series of questions that were interesting to consider. On the basis of a person’s answers, this sticky-palleted gentleman claims the ability to determine whether someone is, for lack of a better term, “different.” I’ve never doubted that I’m a different sort of dude, but a psychopath? I’ll let you ponder the same questions I did, and hey, who knows? Maybe you’re nuts, too!

 

The first question – more of a scenario, really – may be familiar from school. Let’s say you’re on a train traveling at full speed, and up ahead, five people are tied to the track in the path of the oncoming locomotive. They await certain death, which means this is probably an Amtrak of some sort. Placed in front of you is a lever, and if you pull it, the train will switch course at a fork in the track, missing the five unlucky souls – but on this new course is a solitary person tied to the track who will surely die. Do you pull the lever?

 

I said yes, and so did most people. The reasoning is fairly easy to figure out. KIlling people may be fun in a video game, in which the casualties are fake, and the bad guys are usually part of some evil group, like Nazis, or roadies for the rock band Nickelback. In real life, being responsible for the deaths of five people generally isn’t considered a high point in someone’s day. Taking the life of one unlucky sap is hardly a sunny alternative, but you’re mitigating the causalities in this case; offing one person instead of five, you’re essentially saving four lives. There’s a net benefit to pulling the lever. Sure, the lone victim might be the next Einstein, and by snuffing him out, you may be depriving the world of some deep insight that could finally culminate in the invention of the flying car, or a toupeé that doesn’t look like a hibernating mole rat. But the odds are low; I woudn’t take the chance.

 

This is the most common response, and it doesn’t make us crazy. But consider a twist on the scenario.

 

Same train, same five people. Only now, instead of being on the train, you’re on a platform high above the track, and the only way you can save the would-be victims is by pushing a fat dude off the plank; this man, a daily consumer of raspberry muffins and ice cream cake, is heavy enough to stop the train, and his death will save the lives of five others. Do you push him off?

 

I didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” I said to myself, “Hefty McWendysburger is getting the heave-ho, no doubt about it.”

 

This lack of hesitation, according to Psychologist Guy, is what makes me a psychopath. Lucky me.

 

Except, despite my derth of head-shrinking credentials, I have to dispute his hypothesis. For one thing, I can swallow without making a clicking sound louder than a shotgun blast in a sewer pipe. But it’s mostly a matter of perspective. I get his reasoning: We’re supposed to feel hesitant, or balk completely, because physically pushing someone to their death is different than flicking a switch; it’s more personal, more direct. With the switch option, you don’t feel the fleshy give of man-bosoms as Diabetes McSugarfiend plummets to his squishy demise. 

 

It doesn’t matter, though. Because either way, I’ve got blood on my hands. Both options result in the sacrifice of one life to save five; both boil down to essentially the same decision. The only question is whether I have the upper body strength to budge a man with enough whoopie pies under his belt (or over it) to stop a speeding train.

 

This makes me a twerp, maybe. But not a psycho.

 

Whether or not our replies indicate deep mental imbalances, it’s an interesting moral dilemma to consider. Sure, it raises plenty of questions – Are the five people violent terrorists? Will the fat man one day invent a vaccine that protects people from rabid aardvarks? – but that’s what makes it a fun hypothetical. The fact that we’re prone to ponder these farfetched scenarios says more about us than our answers.

 

Now let’s ponder an actual name for Psychologist Guy, since he doesn’t seem to have one. I vote for Peanut McSmackylips; call him P-Smack for short. And seriously, somebody get the man some water.

 

The trouble with the maples

Origin stories fascinate me. Everyone and everything has one; they have to, or else nothing that is would be. (Huh?) But the geneses of certain things are shrouded in mystery and probably always will be, which makes them both enticing and deeply frustrating. Like a gorgeous woman who wouldn’t notice me if I was on fire and wrestling a polar bear.

Lately I’ve been pondering the origin of maple syrup. Partly this is due to the current maple season and a crack-like addiction to pancakes, but it was a recent trip to a nearby sugarhouse that made me wonder: How the hell was this stuff discovered? Not even the Internet can say for sure, and that’s how you know you’ve got a Holmes-level mystery on your hands.

It’s not like the stuff is easy to make. Production of the viscous treat is such an involved process that its discovery couldn’t have been pure chance; it’s unlikely that someone stepped in a puddle of sap, accidentally set their boots on fire, licked the bottom ’cause they were a weird goober and then said, “Hmm, this is actually quite tasty. Start production immediately!”  There’s way too much science in play, requiring a heap of shiny equipment that looks as though it could power the lunar module of Apollo 11.

One of the contraptions employed by a lot of modern maple producers is this thing called a reverse osmosis machine, and no, that’s not a device Lex Luthor uses to read the minds of Superman and the Justice League. In basic terms, it removes moisture from the raw sap so it can boil at a temperature higher than the boiling point of water. Apparently this is important. Exactly why, I couldn’t say – it sounds super technical, so it must be – but it reflects an understanding of the syrup-making process which is the end result of centuries of the craft’s evolution. The first person to make it certainly wasn’t using a reverse osmosis machine, but they understood something about maple sap that, once refined by subsequent generations, culminated in a gizmo that rivals the complexity of an early car motor.

And that’s pretty amazing.

Which makes the fuzzy origin even more vexing. There’s comfort in knowing how things started; it gives us a frame of reference, some orientation. Peter Parker became Spider-Man because he was bitten by a radioactive spider, giving him arachnid-like abilities, such as scaling walls and breathing through a thick film of cotton underwear. Cell phones became smartphones when late Apple CEO Steve Jobs decided that people were making way too much eye contact on the subway. These are things that have clear, definable beginnings. Heck, even the origins of the universe itself are less mysterious than those of maple syrup; once an infinitely hot and dense nugget of plasma, it exploded into being, giving rise to galaxies, stars, and J. Edgar Hoover. Tie it up with a bow, Mavis.

The best we can do with maple syrup is trace it back to the indigenous people of northeastern North America. Archaeological evidence suggests that these natives were processing sap long before Europeans arrived in the region; when the Europeans did come, they apparently liked the sweet goo so much that they set to work refining production techniques. Good thing, too, because by that time most of the natives were sick with influenza.

But there are no authenticated accounts of how it first crossed someone’s mind to boil sap into syrup. Wikipedia, my lazy source for most of this information, says that various origin myths and legends exist, most of them involving mystical spirits or anthropomorphic squirrels. As much as it pleases me to imagine a talking squirrel boiling sap in a pan over a roaring campfire, I’m more inclined to believe in a tooth fairy, or a fast food burger that doesn’t taste like a foot.

There are a lot of things we enjoy in everyday life whose stories have pages missing from their inaugural chapters. Beer was brewed at least as far back as the ancient Mesopotamians, but it’s not like there are historical accounts of some dude named Billy Beernuts deciding his fermented cereal grains had a nice kick to them; scientists had to pin down the general era of beer’s inception by performing chemical tests on old pottery jars. Coffee, same deal. Like maple syrup, mythical stories of coffee’s origin abound. The most interesting concerns a Yemenite Sufi mystic named Ghothul Akbar Nooruddin Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, whose insatiable appetite for consonants resulted in a name longer than most of the puzzles on Wheel of Fortune. “Joe,” as I like to call him, allegedly spotted birds of unusual vitality while traveling in Ethiopia, and after consuming the berries the birds had been eating, got a jolt that’s surely familiar to anyone who’s stayed up all night playing Nintendo and guzzling Mountain Dew. A cute story, but it smacks of B.S. Like other staples of modern life, its beginnings have been fuzzied by the sands of time.

The appeal of these mysteries is that they may never be solved, but that’s also what makes them so maddening. We don’t think about why we douse our pancakes in syrup; we just do it, as part of a practice handed down to us by the ancient mists. The way I see it, I’ve got two options. The first is to build a time machine and dedicate my life to pinpointing the long-lost genesis of maple syrup, skipping through the decades like a stone on the surface of a pond. The second is simply to shut up and enjoy my damn waffles.

It’s settled, then. Please pass the Eggos.

The Days of Grays

It finally happened. I knew it was going to eventually. It’s an unavoidable rite of passage, and unlike other milestones, like a first kiss, or first shave, this particular life event has an ominous quality – a whiff of age, and the future promise of joint pain in a living room that smells strongly of butterscotch candy.

Standing in front of the mirror, gazing at the untrimmed growth on my chinny-chin-chin, I spotted them, peeking out at me innocently betwixt the usual follicles of familiar brown.

Gray hairs. Two of them. Side-by-side and at attention, like well-trained members of a military corps dedicated to overthrowing the regime of careless youth.

Crap.

When you’re young, you look forward to seeing certain signs of aging. One of the hallmarks of childhood is relentless impatience; you hear older kids speak with those deepening voices that sound like the unstable crackle of cellophane, and you think, “Man, my voice is too high.” You see lanky teenagers with peach fuzz over their lips and wispy sideburns hugging their jawline, and think, “Man, my face is too smooth.” Each stepping stone along the path of maturity is a small victory, because rather than enjoy our fleeting childhoods – which only seem fleeting in retrospect – we will ourselves into grown-up status with alarmingly grim determination. The first time I shaved, it was like, “Okay! I’m ready for my cognac and my copy of the Sunday New York Times. Be a dear and fetch my slippers, ma! Tonight I settle in with a cigar and a dirty movie!”

What inevitably happens, of course, is that at some point we cross the threshold from c’mon-hurry-it-up to whoa-slow-it-down. And instead of victories, each crow’s foot or random nose hair is just another of Father Time’s merciless gut punches. He’s a jerk, that guy.

Granted, as markers of age go, gray hair isn’t exactly reliable. It happens to everyone at slightly different stages of life, so it’s not like you can spot someone’s cotton-ball mane and pinpoint exactly how old they are. It’s unique in that sense. Consider other phenomena: If someone is peeking at a dime novel through a pair of bifocals, there’s a pretty good chance the person in question isn’t too far off from a qualified membership to the AARP; a person using a walker to get around is likely an octogenarian. Contrast that with Richard Gere, who I’m pretty sure was graying at the temples while learning how to use the potty, and it’s easy to see how freaking out over two silver follicles can seem a bit over-the-top. It’s not like I need sponge baths from a nurse. Although if the nurse in question is a sultry brunette with a smoky barroom voice, I’d consider it anyway.

But see, what’s alarming about the whole deal is that I’m now in the Gray Club. This is kind of like Fight Club, only there’s no fighting, no Brad Pitt, and everyone’s in bed by ten. So I guess it’s not like Fight Club at all.

The reason Gray Club is so distressing is because it acts as a sort of dividing line. To illustrate what I mean, think about the people and groups who are not in Gray Club: College students, YouTube sensations, trendsetters, Katy Perry, and 98 percent of professional athletes.

Now look at the people who are in the club: College professors, cable access hosts, Floridians, Larry King, and the two percent of professional athletes you wish would just give it up already.

To be clear, this is not to knock Gray Club in any way. There are some truly awesome members of Gray Club. Patrick Stewart. Metallica. Gandalf. Me. You, maybe. Betty White, definitely. Harrison Ford. The list goes on. Far from being a mark of shame, Gray Club can be considered an honor, in a sense; it means you’ve made it, you’ve survived X number of years without choking on a hot dog or getting hit by a van full of meth tweakers. 

Thing is, as inconsequential as admittance to Gray Club actually is, nobody wants their first membership card. It forever cuts us off from the young’uns, with their sparkly belly buttons and carefree shenanigans.

A friend asked me recently if I would consider dying my goatee. I don’t know if I believe in that. The natural look is just more honest; I figure if I’m slowly going white, then I should wear it proudly, defiantly. Besides, it connotes experience, and I’ve always been more comfortable as a grizzled veteran of something rather than a wide-eyed rookie on the make. If I can con people into thinking that I’ve “seen things,” or “been through stuff,” or “been around the block a few times,” this can only work to my advantage. Especially if I’m staring down a gunslinger through the smoky air of a 19th Century frontier saloon. This seems unlikely, but I’m a believer in being prepared.

So yeah, mixed feelings, for sure. Mostly what I’m dreading is the next marker of getting older: Standing in a bathrobe on my front porch and yelling at my neighbors to turn their music down. Hopefully that’s a ways off.

And now I’ve got to go into hiding for a while. Because I’ve broken the first rule of Gray Club: Don’t talk about Gray Club.

Like you didn’t see that one coming.