Could've ended up with Natalie Portman

"I know a small part of you thinks you could’ve ended up with Natalie Portman if you had played things a little differently. That’s nice. You can have that. That’s not hurting anybody."
-Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Sayings that are Bollocks

Oh my gosh, you guys, I am so tired of the apocalypse. You know how long people have been writing about it? The answer is all of the time. All of it. Every major religion is based on an impending apocalypse and I know that because I heard it once. Every one.

Why do we love it so much? Is it because we hate civil society and want a reboot? Do you think that in a world without technology you'd somehow become your better self? Or do we think that during the current geopolitical climate/domestic politics/impending ecological doom makes it an inevitability?

If you want to live off the grid so bad live off the dang grid now. There's nothing stopping you, you know. You don't have to have a smartphone. Nobody is forcing you to watch TV or take warm showers. Live the dream, you iconoclast hippy/hyper-right-wing doomsday prepper! You don't like living around people? Let me introduce you to a little concept I like to call most of Alaska.

I know. Everyone thinks that if there's an apocalypse they'll somehow be the one who beats the odds and survives, and then you get to be one of the few starting society over. We'll do it right this time, you say, because my ideas are better than the whole of human society's gradual evolution through trial and error. Like let's all sleep in hammocks, guys! Hammocks. That's my political platform for post-apocalyptic America. Hammocks hanging from the burned out husks of trees, swinging in the desolate winds of nuclear winter.

Or is the world really ending? Here are 26 charts and maps that show that the world is getting better due to human society's relentless progress. Literacy is up, child mortality is down, homelessness is disappearing. All that stuff comes from us working together, but yeah, I see the appeal of being split up into tiny bands of people we don't trust and burying babies on the roadside. The good old days!

Here's a fact for those pining for the doomsday: preeclampsia, essentially extreme hypertension during pregnancy, effects somewhere between 2-8% of expectant mothers and is the leading cause of death for expecting mothers. In Africa and Asia, 1/10th of prenatal death is due to hypertension, and in Latin America, it's one quarter. It took Sybil Branson from us in Downton Abbey, but it also could have taken my wife during her first pregnancy. Add that to the fact that I depend on a monthly supply of medicine waiting for me at the pharmacy to treat kidney disease and guys, I like it here.

There's some scary stuff out there, obvs. Mass shootings, climate change, modern music all sounding just like old music, these are all distressing. Though in spite of all the mass shootings in the U.S., the rate of U.S. violence has been on a steady decline since 1993. Terrorism, though, you guys. Scary. Or Iran. And sure, that's disconcerting, too. You know what else was disconcerting? Drills in schools in the 60s where children were taught to hide under their desks in case of a nuclear bomb. You think the world's "bad" now? Try being a Russian during World War I. Twelve million Russians fought. Nine million died. That's 76% casualties, and that's just soldiers. Another 1.5 million civilians died in Russia due to starvation and disease caused by wartime privations.

And that's not counting the flu! Let's talk about Spanish Flu. Seventeen million people were killed in World War 1. Three times that many were killed by the Spanish Flu worldwide. During the pandemic that conveniently took Lavinia Swire from Matthew, US life expectancy plummeted by 12 years. It infected one-fifth of the entire world. Climate change is scary, disease is scary, So yeah. I'm glad I live when I do with the stuff I have, thank you very much.

Speaking of pandemics, and speaking of post-apocalyptic fiction, I read Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel.

“No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.”

Wait. No more Howie's Book Club?

In spite of everything I said, in spite of me just so over all of this, I loved Station Eleven. In it, a handful of survivors navigate the inhospitable world after a great pandemic reduced the population by something like 99%. What's left are the usual scattered communities of people, this time gathered around truck stops and big box stores. One of our main characters, Kirsten (already we're off to a good start because she has a real name), is an actor in a traveling caravan putting on Shakespeare plays and orchestral music. Another was training to be an EMT. Another is a woman who self-published a graphic novel while becoming successful at business. All are tied in some way to an incident that happened at a theater right before the disease struck.

The narrative moves back and forth between the times before the apocalypse and after. There are the usual musings on the banality of life before:

“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think - this will maybe sound weird - it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts."

"I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite --"

"I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that."

"You don't think he likes his job, then."

"Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”

And the strangeness of life after:

“All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient."

There is another character, a pretty scary Prophet, who repeats the refrain that "Everything happens for a reason," a saying that drives me crazy. If everything happens for a reason, why are the people who say that so often angry on Facebook at something that happened? I'm not buying it.

Station Eleven doesn't have to be put into a category other than just good books. If you're into this kind of thing, I think you'll find it meatier than the usual fare, like a homemade pot pie instead of the ones from the frozen section. If you're bored with these kinds of books, I say give it a shot anyway.

she might find someone waiting

“She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle.” 
-Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

My Second Blog About Jeans

There are few stories as tedious as Last Night's Dream, and yet here I am about to tell you mine. Some backstory first: I just had a birthday. The good old 36, that milestone of milestones. Black cakes, tombstone party favors, some kind of joke about hair loss. You get the picture. I'm dying.

Anyway. I've spent a good long time on a certain website "pinning," as the 2015 vernacular calls it, various menswear. I have this picture in my head of a simple wardrobe built out of a handful of timeless staples that can be combined and recombined into endless outfits. It is my white whale, this wardrobe, in that I would like to float it all in water and throw spears at it.

I took the opportunity of the celebration of my very entrance onto this green earth to pick up a handful of these items. A good pair of jeans (the struggle continues), some chinos, a dress shirt, a tie, and a sweater. I had a list, I acquired, I strutted out of the mall triumphant. I shopped deals when necessary, but also paid Full Retail Price for some items (I am not in the habit of doing this) and I'll be honest. It was empowering. I was Consumer.
It is a short time later now. I have worn all articles of clothing in one way or another except for the sweater because it's summer and I am not a monster. I am going to tell you a very sad secret: there is a part of me that thinks that if I dress nicer, people will take me more seriously. That maybe it's been the missing key all along, the thing that separates me somehow from this idealized version of myself. Yes. I'm a piece of crap and you don't need to tell me though if you do I will only nod sadly, saying "Yes. I am Consumer."

What will probably not surprise you was that I was treated pretty much the same in my new duds as I had been in my old ones. At the fireworks stand I was not given a significant "handsome guy" discount. At Macey's I was flirted with by neither female nor male staff, though IMO the jeans were fly and although all overtures would be kindly rebuked by a fluttering of the ring finger, they would be acknowledged as very flattering and thank you so much.

That night I had a dream. And we're talking Psych 101 interpretation zone here. I dreamed that I was going to the pool with the kids, and this time, upon removing my shirt, I was not disappointed by the usual milquetoast sight, but delighted by a seeming overnight change in physique. I was, as mothers in the 90s often put it, a stud. The teens of today would say I was "swole." The novelty of my new-found rippling torso soon faded, as I realized that the world around me turned in a way that was as mundane as always.

Obviously there's a line here. If I'd walked around the teeming burg of Ogden, UT in my pajama pants with the pixelated skulls on them and a Confederate flag t-shirt, I assume eyebrows would have risen. If I'd worn a tuxedo, maybe someone would ask what the big event was. If I said it was buying fireworks, maybe they'd they'd want to hear the story, or maybe I'd get a handsome guy discount, honestly I don't know. I do know that even when the jeans are fly and confidence is soaring, there's only so much dressing like a normal dude will get you.

At this point, people are on board with you or they aren't. Maybe I even looked dumb in the jeans (impossible!) because they're not my normal fit and people thought a guy's legs shouldn't look that long. At worst someone might think either those jeans are not working. At best the most desultory of human thoughts just fluttered at the surface of consciousness: those are cool jeans, followed by immediate mental dismissal. Maybe nobody gives a crap about clothes and just look to see if my dimples are showing. I have no way of knowing.

My wife was very complimentary, which is always always lovely, and honestly the main reason I want to look nice. My uncle noticed that my shoes and tie matched today, and an aunt said that I looked "sharp." Nobody spat on me and I was not harassed by street toughs or a police officer. All in all I would say I made out better than 98% of all humans who have lived on the planet. It's just that when there's only a bit of pie left and so many hungry people, that last 2% looks pretty damn good.

"Sharp"

Folks, you can dress up ol' Howie in the fanciest duds in town. Like the towniest guy on main street in the old west, the one with the bowler hat and the vest, and he's still going to be that rugged ne'er do well with the repeater under his poncho, chewing a cigar. Your boy simply cannot be tamed.

You know who else can't be tamed? What's-Her-Name, the main character in We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler which is a book I disliked but enjoyed singing "We-Are-Pirates, Dun-Da-Dun-Dun-Dun-Dun-Dun" to the "We are Farmers" jingle so I guess it wasn't a complete waste.