Sorry! NOT sorry, for the mess
I’m sorry NOT sorry. I do not apologize for my beard or do I. Not only because it is terrible — thin, patchy and asymmetrical — but also because it is inexplicable. Many people have asked me why I grew it, and most of those people are my now x-wife, my girlfriend, my mother and to them and to her I say: I don’t know. I’m sorry, NOT sorry. My mother thinks I’m a wild man. The last time I visited she called the cops and had me escorted out of the house. She had trouble recognizing me. This after 12 years of not seeing her. I guess because I didn't ask permission to be there. I had just drove 3,995 miles to visit. She had, just gone through a mastectomy and was a cancer survivor.
Before my beard I had just a mustache, or a goatee and that was not mysterious at all. In fact, I have grown two mustaches in my life, and one goatee for equally banal, emotionally transparent reasons. I grew the first one in 1999, in the yearlong run-up to my marriage to the woman who is now my x-wife. We’re now separated. I came home to Orlando visit, her and my daughter and I find she moved to Chicago and didn’t tell me. I had ever only been clean-shaven before then (aside from an obligatory early-’90s flirtation with a soul patch in college), and I suppose now I was testing her.
A few very good-looking people I know turn mean when they drink, mocking and abusing the people who care about them. They make themselves ugly to see if people will still love them that way. I think my mustache — thick and dark and unwanted in the middle of my round pale face — served the same function: to be repulsive on purpose. I looked like a bushy 19th-century president who also happened to be a baby.
Luckily, my fiancée, whom I would like to think I have known since high school and brought her in country around that time circa 1999 who had already seen me through various thicks and thins, did not take the bait. She did not confirm my fear that I was an unlovable fraud and did not decline to marry President Chester A. Baby. So I shaved off my mustache and hair on my head the morning after my bachelor weekend in a dilapidated mansion in Atlantic City that I had rented with a group of friends. I cannot remember whether this was my decision or her command. She said, I looked younger.” Maintaining such fogginess about free will is, I think, a secret to a lasting marriage. And ours has lasted.
I grew my second mustache in 2011 when I turned 60. By that time we had onechild, and I grew it for the same reason all of your weird dads grew theirs: It is an evolutionary signal that announces I am done. A visual warning to the mating population of earth that communicates: No, thank you. I have procreated. My DNA is out in the world, and so I no longer deserve physical affection. Instead, it is time for me to turn away from sex and toward new pursuits, the classic weird dad hobbies such as puns, learning trivia about bridges and wars, and dreaming about societal collapse and global apocalypse.
Here is a secret: All middle-aged dads dream about the end of the world as we know it. It is a comfort to them. For some, the fantasy is blunt, vengeful and aspirational. The zombie epidemic is a very popular apocalypse scenario among middle-aged men for a very simple reason: When chaos consumes civilization, you can start over. You get to be young again.
Don't Panic But An Earthquake Apocalypse Is Apparently Going To End The World In November
If you were in the middle of planning your Christmas vacation, don’t bother. That is, unless you are booking a one way trip to the moon, or some planet very far away from Earth. Why? Because the world is ending, again.
The Earth, just like Kirk Douglas, cannot seem to escape rumors of an imminent death. At 4.5 billion-years-old (the Earth, not Kirk Douglas) it is safe to say that the planet has seen better days. From hurricanes to wildfires, visible cracks are starting to show, but could the end of the world really be here?
This has happened before several times; namely the Zero-Day Vulnerabilities the Y2K issues
The Zero-Day Vulnerabilities the Y2K issues at circa 2000, turn of the millennia and the FY2010. Those of us that are geeks and hold jobs in computing and Computing Security & Information Protection know it and remember it well. A zero day vulnerability refers to a hole in software that is unknown to the vendor. This security hole is then exploited by hackers before the vendor becomes aware and hurries to fix it—this exploit is called a zero day attack. Uses of zero day attacks can include infiltrating malware, spyware or allowing unwanted access to user information. The term “zero day” refers to the unknown nature of the hole to those outside of the hackers, specifically, the developers. Once the vulnerability becomes known, a race begins for the developer, who must protect users.
“As police throughout the world secured emergency bunkers for themselves, the TIME magazine and Time Inc. information-technology staff set up a generator-powered “war room” in the basement of the Time & Life Building, filled with computers and equipment ready to produce the magazine in case of a catastrophic breakdown of electricity and communications,” explained then-assistant managing editor Howard Chua-Eoan, in a note that appeared in the magazine’s commemorative 1/1/00 issue.
The Y2K issues, of course, it wasn’t long before it became clear that all the fears associated with the turn of the millennium were for naught. (The day’s most historic moment, Chua-Eoan noted, was actually the resignation of Russian President Boris Yeltsin.) In the same issue, reporting on the folks who had holed up in bunkers in preparation for the new year, Joel Stein found that at least one family was left with 12 cans of Spam they swore to eat, “disaster or not.”
The Y2K fuss began years ahead of the date in question. Back in 1998, the phrase “Y2K” (that’s for “year two thousand,” for those of you who have repressed the memory) first appeared in TIME in a story that explained the problem thusly: “The bug at the center of the Year 2000 mess is fairly simple. In what’s proving to be a ludicrously shortsighted shortcut, many system programmers set aside only two digits to denote the year in dates, as in 06/15/98 rather than 06/15/1998. Trouble is, when the computer’s clock strikes 2000, the math can get screwy. Date-based equations like 98 – 97 = 1 become 00 – 97 = -97. That can prompt some computers to do the wrong thing and stop others from doing anything at all.” That issue also featured an item about John Koskinen, the man responsible for getting the U.S. government ready for the approaching millennium. At that point, though the Pentagon had already begun repairing programs that used two digits to express the year, not much progress was being made.
Though most prognosticators cautioned that the necessary programs would get fixed in time, the fear of a fallout was still scary enough for TIME put the hysteria on its cover in January of 1999 under the headline The End of the World!?! (To be fair, the story’s conclusion was that such an end was unlikely to come. In fact, that cover story introduced the very family that, a few months later, would be stuck holding the Spam.) Y2K-problem lawsuits began to be filed. Wilderness-survival bootcamps suddenly got more popular. NBC made a made-for-TV movie about the coming disaster.
So it’s no wonder people were worried. Though we might make fun of them a little, looking back, we can also sympathize — and, even 15 years later, TIME’s suggestion for how to spend New Year’s Eve 1999 sounds pretty good. “After a season of Y2K anxiety and millenarian doomsaying, condensed history and holiday hype,” wrote James Poniewozik, “we should all be so lucky as to have another boring New Year’s.” AND Nothing really dire happened.
The apocalypse I dreamed of was different, however and presented a different consolation. I dreamed of the end of everything.
Some people live under threat of death from early in their lives. But as a straight, middle-class, mixed race that looked like a white man, the concept that I was not immortal had honestly never occurred to me. And as an only child, up ‘till I was 9 ½ yo I found the idea that the story of creation might go on without me as the hero not merely terrifying, but insulting. But there are moments of clarity in life when all the lies you tell yourself fall away. I remember it as a physical feeling. I was halfway through my 60th year, Mustache 2 in graying bloom, and I was suddenly gripped, just above my stomach, by the dumb, offensive truth we always avoid. Everything ends. Nothing lasts. Not even JohnSilva.
Lucky for me it was 2012. And here were the ancient Mayans and their contemporary acolytes to predict the end of all things, a global cataclysm that would swallow us all. I obviously did not really want the world to end, but I took strange comfort in thinking that I would be there, and that the story of creation would end with me.
You may have noticed that the world did not end in 2012, as the Mayans predicted. Very embarrassing. And, another illusion dropped away. I was not a main character of existence. I would age, be replaced and forgotten, and eventually free up space for younger, hungrier, smarter souls, and that was exactly right.
So, yeah. At that point, why not grow a beard? When you don’t know what to do in your life, there is always the mystery of what happens if you just do nothing. What if I just stop taking care of myself? And what will come out of my face? I did just that…
My beard is the answer. I also bathe or take a combat shower every two or three days, as a water conservation method. You cannot see it, but I must make you see it. Its lushest portions gather on my neck (of course) and terminate to a devilish point on my chin. On the sides, it looks like salt-and-pepper ants climbing up and down my face. The mustache and soul patch of yore are still there, but still refusing to connect to each other.
I knew my beard would turn out badly, or so I thought. I do get compliments on how awesome my beard is. Mend don’t shave anymore it would seem. But I was compelled to grow it. It was a mysterious compulsion. All men, I think, wonder who the secret man who lives inside them is and whom they will meet in the mirror when they stop shaving. Some get tired of looking at the same old face in the mirror. They wonder if that man is better than the one they saw in the mirror of their younger lives. Whoever it is who emerges, they hope that elder sage or fantasy wizard or feral mountain man will be wiser than they, and when they are lost, they hope that dude will light up his staff and guide them through the dwarven mines and out of the wilderness.
Based on the overall effect, the secret man inside me is the part-time bookkeeper for the Church of Satan. I’m the guy who goes in every other Monday and goes through the ledger and complains to the Magus that they are spending too much money on red candles. And what is this $3,500 for cleaning? What was that for? The sex magick ritual? Jesus Christ, you guys … Oh! Sorry! I mean, Hail, Shatan! This is not the man I expected to live inside of me, to guide me through this haunted forest that is middle age, to old age … to hack in life a new path of years forward through darkening woods. But we can grow only the beards we can. I didn’t choose him, but I am counting on him.
Payback is a bad bitch And baby, I'm the baddest (I'm the baddest, I'm the baddest) Go
Now I'm out here lookin' like revenge
Feelin' like a ten, the best I've ever been
And yeah, I know how bad it must hurt
To see me like this but it gets worse (wait a minute)
Now you're out here lookin' like regret
Ain't too proud to beg, second chance you'll never get
And yeah, I know how bad it must hurt
To see me like this but it gets worse (wait a minute)
Now payback is a bad bitch
And baby, I'm the baddest
You fuckin' with a savage
Can't have this, can't have this (ah)
And it'd be nice of me to take it easy on ya, but nah
Baby, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry)
Baby, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry)
Bein' so bad got me feelin' so good
Showin' you up like I knew that I would
Baby, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry)
Baby, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry)
Feelin' inspired 'cause the tables have turned
Yeah, I'm on fire and I know that it burns
Baby, fineness is the way to kill
Tell me how it feel, bet it's such a bitter pill
And yeah I know, you thought you had bigger, better things
Bet right now this stings (wait a minute)
'Cause the grass is greener under me
Bright as Technicolor, I can tell that you can see
And yeah, I know how bad it must hurt
To see me like this but it gets worse (wait a minute)
Now payback is a bad bitch
And baby, I'm the baddest
You fuckin' with a savage
Can't have this, can't have this (ah)
And it'd be nice of me to take it easy on ya, but nah
Baby, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry)
Baby, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry)
Bein' so bad got me feelin' so good
Showin' you up like I knew that I would
Baby, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry)
Baby, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry)
Feelin' inspired 'cause the tables have turned
Yeah, I'm on fire and I know that it burns
Talk that talk, baby
Better walk, better walk that walk, baby
If you talk, if you talk that talk, baby
Better walk, better walk that walk, baby
Oh yeah, talk that talk, baby
Better walk, better walk, that walk, baby
If you talk, if you talk that talk, baby
Better walk, better walk that walk, baby
Baby, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry)
Baby, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry)
Bein' so bad got me feelin' so good
Showin' you up like I knew that I would
Baby, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry)
Baby, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry)
Feelin' inspired 'cause the tables have turned
Yeah, I'm on fire and I know that it burns
Payback is a bad bitch
And baby, I'm the baddest
I'm the baddest, I'm the baddest
Promises no promises
Cut me up like a knife
And I feel it, deep in my bones
Kicking it high but I love even harder
You wanna know?
I just wanna dive in the water, with you
Baby, we can't see the bottom
It's so easy to fall for each other
I'm just hoping we catch one another
Oh na na, just be careful, na na
Love ain't simple, na na
Promise me no promises
Oh na na, just be careful, na na
Love ain't simple, na na
Promise me no promises
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