The Dolphin Coiffure

There isn't anything complicated about my hair. It's straight. You can describe it in linear units and you've pretty much got the picture. It's been everything from an inch long to three feet long, and gravity writes the rest of the story. Don't look for the strands to show any initiative or imagination. It's all just going to hang there to whatever point it's whacked off.

This means it's not much help to put in layers so as to give the illusion that I have a normal-shaped head. Most people's heads are round in the back to accommodate the standard Homo sapiens operating system, but my head is just flat. It's the size of an ambitious walnut. You cut layers into my hair in the back, they all hang straight. Layer cuts give me all the volume dolphin skin gives a dolphin.

This worked out very well for me at age thirteen when I had long straight hair that didn't even need ironing, not that I didn't iron it once or twice. Classmates who soldiered through fitful nights with their hair on soup cans would have killed for my hair, and that was my stock, because until the tits grew in I had nothing else to bank on.

And I've never been able to decide what linear dimension my hair should be. The last time it was real long and I cut it off, I thought it needed to be to my shoulders at least so that I could hide my pudding neck. But that doesn't work. My pudding neck considers itself a Feature and is somehow aware I'm never going to threaten it with surgery, so it just flops out there, shameless. Doesn't matter what angle you take the picture, my pudding neck photo-bombs my head.

Then I sheared my hair off to a nice stand-up crewcut in case that would volumize my head but that required Product and attention, and even then it was still flat in back. So I let it grow out and hoped at some point I'd know when to say "When."

And I have! My trusty barber has managed to take the limp shower-curtain look out of my head and it got to just exactly the right length and now I have a Look. Wrap a scarf around the pudding and I'm good to go.I went back today for a trim and asked her if she could cut it without making it shorter. English isn't her first language so she did not have a large bullshit lexicon to draw from. She just said "No."

Okay, cut it anyway, I said.

The fact is I would get my hair cut every week if I could. I would pay someone to just fiddle with my hair. Every follicle is attached to its own happiness nerve. Throw in a little electric-razor action at the nape and a light touch in the ear region and I will follow you home and roll over for a belly-rub. I still remember the feeling when Pastor Lange put his hand on my head during my confirmation as a genuine Lutheran. (They try to confirm you when you're still the age to be weirded out by Death and Eternity but before you get to the point where you're thinking, Now, hold on just a minute. What is that you want me to believe?) When the good pastor floated his palm over my hair, I would have told him I bought the whole story.

This is how I survived babysitting. I am not a natural babysitter. But girls of a certain age will happily play with long hair for hours as though you are their personal giant Barbie. And I will let them. I will even consider forgoing the 50 cents an hour, but think better of it later.

I'm sure I was meant to have my head patted. I was wired that way. And it's no trouble for anyone. This is why God made me short. I think that's what Pastor Lange was trying to convey.

Reigning Cats And Dogs

Here is a way you can tell you're a dog person. Several times a day you say "Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit! Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Sit. Good BOY!"

Here is a way you can tell you're a dog. You are lost in adoration of your favorite person who is barking at you in a friendly way and after a good long while you pop your butt down on the floor for one second and back up again and your person is so very very happy! You did it! You made your person happy! Nothing makes you happier than making your person that happy and it only took one butt-pop! OH MY GOODNESS THERE'S A TREAT! It's a wonderful world!

Here is a way you can tell you're a cat person. You are, yourself, sitting, all of your own volition, and there is a cat on your lap, and you have to pee pretty bad, but you don't get up just yet because your cat looks so comfortable. You think there is something perfect about how very comfortable your cat looks, as though your cat has got everything figured out and is not given to worry. You are in a world where everything's going downhill on a greased sled at every level from the biosphere to your own personal craposphere, and if you could just feel as comfortable as your cat looks, for just a little while, you could manage to hang on. If you do anything to disturb your very comfortable-looking cat, you are toying with the mechanics of happiness in ways you might never fully recover from. Somewhere in the universe there are credits piling up in your favor for the amount of times you have not disturbed your very comfortable-looking cat, and some day, if there is any justice at all, you will be able to redeem them for a reward. As long as your cat is still in your lap and looking comfortable, you are not a failure. You have purpose.

Here is a way you can tell you're a cat: you're comfortable.

You're never not comfortable. Your head may be upside-down or cranked sideways and you've got one foot draped over an edge and the other sticking straight up and the third over your eyes and the fourth missing altogether, but you're comfortable. Periodically a portion of your pudding will quiver and twitch in pursuit of a dream mouse, but then it will settle back down into a state of even deeper satisfaction. You can be decanted into any shape space and fill it like a bag of beans. You are strenuously content, and any departure from that condition will be regarded as a tragic misalignment of the proper world order. You are boneless. At any moment you can rig up a functional skeleton for the purpose of self-maintenance or hygiene but as soon as your immediate requirements are fulfilled, you will soundlessly revert to custard. You will settle back down into the perpetual eye of all the world's storms. In a plush onesie.

And you will be comfortable.

To See, Or Not To See

My eyeballs are starting to get obstreperous, and it's really no wonder. The mystery is why it's taken so long, because I have treated them like crap since forever.

 

We all start out with little baby eyeballs made of rubber and goo and they increase in size dramatically after we're born. For most people, they top out in size in the teenage years. Mine peaked at age seven, leaving me with Bedroom Closet eyes. Age seven was also when my eyeballs realized I was never going to be tall and they started to squash down flat to fit in the available space, which really did a number on my ability to see anything more than a foot away.

 

So I got combat lenses when I was fourteen. Contact, I mean. That was about eighty years after the first contact lens was invented and no doubt an improvement on the original, which was made of glass and covered the entire eye. I'm not sure who volunteered for that or if they included any lubricating solution, but opium was widely available. Modern contacts are made of fun and frog hair and you wear them once and fling them into the air like Mary Tyler Moore's hat. My first pair were hubcaps and you inserted them with a drop of Tabasco. In a pinch you could pop them out and open a bottle cap with them, but in ordinary use they served to collect grains of sand to rake over your corneas. If I am not mistaken, they came with a little Dremel tool set to grind down your eyeball abrasions for a perfect fit. Even so, if you blinked too hard they'd travel sideways and embed themselves into the eyeball area Formerly Known As White, sometimes with enough suction that they needed to be pried out with a fingernail, leaving perfect bloodshot circle tattoos behind.

But I must report I could see really well with contacts unless there was dust in the air, when I would be paralyzed with my eyes shut waiting for a friend to come along and tow me away by the elbow.

One time, because for some reason I had not yet gone blind, I used my roommate's wetting solution, just to try it--the way you try other people's shampoo--even though she'd bought it in Mexico and the bottle was labeled in Spanish, and even though (as it turned out) it was not wetting solution at all, but cleaning solution, and boy howdy it got loud in that bathroom that morning.

Throughout all of this I became so comfortable with touching my own eyeballs that I did it routinely, licking a finger to scoop out eyebrow hairs and eyelashes. Thank goodness those have all fallen out by now.

Anyway. It's no wonder my sad little soldiers of sight are starting to squawk. After twenty years of success with trifocals, effortlessly navigating the three zones of correction, now none of the zones work all that well, and even new prescriptions are more of a compromise than a solution. And of course there is the matter of the piano glasses specifically prescribed for reading sheet music, which are not quite up to the task. I have discovered that if I pull my glasses out about a centimeter from my face, everything looks pretty good, although bringing the music that much closer does nothing at all. I do not understand this. 

But I can achieve just the right distance by wedging a tampon at the bridge of my nose. It's fine. It's not like I'm at the concert hall all dolled up in a long black gown. 

 

The string is a little distracting.

The Scroll Bar Of Old Age

Baby Murr

Ironically, one of the ways you can tell you're old is you don't remember how old you are.

Last month I heard the COVID booster shot was going to be available for people 65 and older and my first thought was Oh, shit. Then I remembered that not only was 65 already in the rear view mirror, it was pretty far back in the block.

There are other signs. For instance, you can tell you're short when you cut off the bottoms of your new pants to hem them and you discover the remnants could make a tube top for a harbor seal. You always knew you were short, of course, but it can slip your mind because you can still see everything from where you're standing, as far as that goes. You're not going to know you're shorter until they mention it at the doctor's office, and then you can go ahead and argue with them over it. After all, your height, down to the quarter-inch, is a known commodity and a matter of record. Also, you're still eight years old.

So back to that.

It's a sign when you see a particularly tasty specimen of a 25-year-old man with brown eyes and silky hair and a hint of humor in the eyebrows and graceful movement of his splendid but not overdone musculature and the first thing you think is I wonder if he does ladder work? I could use my gutters cleaned.

 

It's a sign when you're watching baseball and someone named Michael Yastrzemski gets up to bat and you think Holy cow! I wonder if that's Carl Yastrzemski's son! Good old Yaz with the Boston Red Sox! Why, it was just yesterday I was living in Boston during the '75 World Series! GO YAZ!! and you look it up and the dude is his grandson.

 

It's a sign when you're trying to get your Alexa thingy to do something for you by calling her name and all you can say is Hey, Lady!

 

Old Bat Murr

But mostly you are wieldy with the internet and a thoroughly modern person, not at all old, until you navigate an online form and when you have to put in your birth year you have to spin that scrollbar twelve times like it's the Wheel Of Fortune.

 

All of this can come as a shock to you. And that is because you are the same on the inside as you ever were. Your packaging may have changed--maybe a lot--and your contents may have shifted but those contents are the same as they ever were. You are in the bridge of a tugboat that's still chugging and the view out the window is the same as ever, except the dock is getting closer.

 

But I guarantee when I pull up to that dock I'm going to be thinking Hey, I wasn't done yet and I was just about to get serious.

Halloween At The Crappersons'

They say that ignorance is bliss, although some of the most ignorant people out there seem to be pissed off all the time. Still, there's something to it. There are all sorts of things I remember enjoying more when I didn't know as much. And not just pâté de foie gras.

I used to be able to ignore ads for big-ass cars. But now when I see them ripping through a wetland or jolting up a rocky incline to pose like a conqueror on a precipice overlooking sacred scenery, all I can see is ruined habitat and squashed lizards and noise and clamor and poison, like a poster for everything that's wrong with humans.

And I used to like Halloween decorations more. I'm still all for it, old-school. I like when people go to the trouble of making little ghosts out of sheets and hanging them up. Or carving pumpkins for the front porch. The Halloween decoration industry has really revved up though. Everywhere you look there are gravestones, skeletons, and fake cobwebs. I approve of the sentiment. For one thing, it's all liable to scandalize Christians. Not the Jesus kind, but the kind you don't mind pissing off.

So while I generally approve of the effort involved, now it just looks like more consumption, with all that entails. It's a lot of oil. It's plastic. It's fun, and it's trash. Turns out the polyester cobwebs even snare birds. I would never scold anyone for it, but I wouldn't buy it either. Thirty years ago, if I'd seen a Tyrannosaurus skeleton, I might have wanted one, but I think twice about every such thing now. The kids' costumes are troublesome too. Lots of plastic masks. Glitter: microplastic. The coolest costumes I ever see are all homemade and have a lot of thought in them. Couple years ago we saw the most compelling pint-sized girl in a voluminous long white dress and prim collar, her hair bundled into a bun, carrying a small white book and a candle. I had to ask.

Emily Dickinson's ghost, as I live and breathe!

Well, one of the over-decorated yards in our neighborhood is at a house that gives me shivers all the rest of the year too. It's not haunted. It's just not nice. The people who live there make a point of turning away as you approach, when everyone else smiles or pauses to chat. Their lawn is an unholy green in August with the tell-tale brown patches that betray there is no healthy life therein and the only thing propping it up is frequent infusions from Chem-Lawn. Their dogs are out in a kennel. And the Halloween decorations that aren't completely plastic require power to inflate.

I mentioned the dogs to their next-door neighbor once and she told me she finally went over there one night around 11pm, in her pajamas, when their dogs had been barking non-stop. She knocked at the door, and the lady of the house appeared in the window, jutted out her lower lip and bobbled it with her finger--the poor-baby mime--and withdrew. Really? Holy shit.

When the gigantic Trump signs appeared in their windows on Insurrection Day, yes, that day, it was almost a foregone conclusion.

But they didn't have the courage of their afflictions. The signs were down the next day. They had to figure in this neighborhood someone was liable to leave a Public Radio tote bag full of shit at their door. Or seed their lawn with arugula.

Also? We know real witches.

"I Am [In] The Way"

Have you heard the Good News? Religion is making a comeback! To those who cheer these things, it's a sign that goodness and morality will prevail over the forces of darkness. As a force of darkness myself, I'm a little irked.

 

The religious revival has closely tracked the requirement in certain areas that individuals get vaccinated against a pandemic-causing virus. And that is because one way out of the jab is to file for a religious exemption. Cue God.

How do you prove a religious objection to vaccination? Why, you declare a sincerely held belief. That's it--a sincerely held belief is all you need. I am not sure why the sincerely held belief of a person claiming the cloak of religion should have any more weight than my sincerely held beliefs, and I surely have some. For instance, I am appalled by state-sanctioned murders done in my name, such as executions or drone strikes. I am appalled by the rape and plunder of our mother Earth for profit. But all I know how to do is agitate and protest and vote.

God doesn't have my back on this. If there is a God who has my best interests at heart, lightning would already have obliterated the Republican side of the aisle and zapped Joe Manchin on its way out. But if you sincerely believe God told you not to get vaccinated, you've got your ticket punched.

God is always telling people what to do, not that he ever agrees with himself. So it's not hard to dig up something God said to suit your needs. God could easily have whispered to someone in London during the blitzkrieg that unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness, and things would have gotten real loud real fast.

Basically, we're letting the schizophrenics run the public health show.

So it is my sincerely held belief that public health is served by the judicious use of proven methods of reducing a deadly virus's available host population through vaccine--in fact it's a no-brainer of a sincerely held belief--and that we could thus save countless people from suffering and death across the globe, but my sincerely held belief will not even tip the scale against the sincerely held belief of someone who fully expects to shake Jesus's hand in the sky some day, as long as she promises not to use her brain.

I decided to look into these beliefs. The St. Thomas More Society offers four sample exemption request letters on its website. Here's one:

The vaccines act at a genetic level that invades the province of God. Our genetic physiology is His design, extraordinarily complex as only He could make it, and understood only as He can understand it. Our understanding is shallow. I cannot morally participate in tinkering with a powerful and dangerous thing, within this temple, that we poorly understand.

 

Dudes. Here's a thought. Unshallow your understanding, because we most certainly do know how this works. It doesn't diminish the glory of God in the least, if that's the way you want to look at it. But if you think this vaccine is tinkering in the temple, I don't want to see you eating a Twinkie.

Somewhat more persuasive a rationale is the notion that the vaccine was developed using fetal cell lines derived from an aborted fetus. This is true, or probably true. There are a few fetal cell lines that have been used to develop vaccines. Not very many actual fetuses have contributed. Human fetal cells obtained from two abortions in the early 1960s are still growing in labs and are used to produce vaccines for chickenpox, rubella, hepatitis A, shingles, and rabies. We effectively took out polio with an earlier line. But I get it, a cell line from a fetus aborted sixty years ago is one aborted fetus too many. Okay. Fetal Lives Matter.

But here's a thing. My sincerely held beliefs about our responsibilities to each other in a public health crisis are in strictly mainstream, love-thy-neighbor territory. Why are mine unimportant?

Go ahead and plant a moral flag for that sixty-year-old fetus. I can admire a sincerely held belief. But stick with it. You or anyone you love get Parkinson's? Alzheimer's? Arthritis? HIV? Keep suffering. Oh of course nobody you know has HIV. My mistake. Stroke? Spinal injury?

And if it's your sincerely held belief that aborted fetuses are ground up and put in the vaccine, you're just wrong. If you're determined to find a rationale to screw your neighbor, get your facts right. And understand that screwing your neighbor is what you're doing.

There's A Stat For That

Oh boy, it's World Series time again! I'm paying close attention this year because we have a real shot at a new major league stat. We could witness the first non-Dominican to four-hit in two consecutive games while Uranus, Neptune, AND Chiron, which is barely even a planet, are in retrograde, with the Dow above 35,000.

 

Baseball statistics. It's how you can tell a regular enthusiastic fan like myself from a serious fan who is pretty far along on the autism spectrum. The serious fan hoards statistics like a pika hoards hay. Statistics are the difference between Holy crap that big dude really crushed that ball! and Yankee slugger Giancarlo Stanton tied his own record for the hardest-hit baseball in history at 122.2 mph in a game against the Royals in August 2021 and retains the record for the hardest-hit home run at 121.7 mph.

 

We have this statistic courtesy the Statcast system, which has only existed for six years, and yet it is considered safe to assume that no one has ever hit a baseball  harder than Mr. Stanton for all of recorded baseball history. It is safe to assume that because it is demonstrably unsafe to quibble with a 6'6" 245-pound man with a big stick. How big his stick is might conceivably be of interest to a number of fans but that is not the sort of statistic we are now compiling.

The Statcast system employs two cameras to replicate binocular vision and that, apparently, provides death perception to easily distinguish between bodies on the field. Oh wait, that's the Civil War. Statcast provides depth perception.

 

I became aware of this new layer of baseball stats last year when the announcer blithely reeled off the induced vertical break of a particular pitch. Well. That turns out to be a measure of the amount a pitch sinks in relation to where it would have crossed the plate if it just came out straight from the pitcher's hand, taking gravity into account. In inches.

 

The inches and miles-per-hour thing is important because it underscores baseball as being a great American sport and not some sissy metric-ass lollygag-in-the-park.

 

Your serious fan might note that the pitcher had achieved an induced vertical break of over seventeen inches. Your casual but enthusiastic fan would just say he had a wicked curveball. Or something. There are all kinds of pitches. There's a slider, which is actually a sandwich. There's a cutter, which is a ship; a changeup, which will cost extra when you're remodeling, a forkball, which is just plain rude, or an eephus, and nobody knows what the hell that is.

 

Anyway, with this new Statcast system, you get all different stats like the Catch Probability. This is the likelihood a fly ball will be caught based on such things as how far the fielder has to run, how much time he has to get to it, and whether he's in any danger of smacking himself into salsa on the outfield wall. All of this is information readily available to the regular enthusiastic fan using her own eyeballs but now the serious fan can tell you Tampa Bay right fielder Margot Manuel is currently in Outs Above Average based on his cumulative catch probability stats; and somewhere in a dank basement a nerd wearing stretch corduroys and an accountant's shade is working out an ideal roster for the Boss and not watching any baseball at all.

It's getting to where baseball is entering the same territory as that one dang butterfly that causes a hurricane halfway around the world by flapping its wings. Can we quantify how much the weight of the second-baseman's tobacco wad pulls him aside in his initial step toward the ball in play? Stay tuned.

In the meantime, with Statcast, at least we know exactly how it's hanging. They're talking about a fly ball, but it seems promising.