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Do you ever come upon those moments in life where you suddenly realize that Hollywood has had a much bigger impact on who you are and how you see yourself?

I just experienced such a moment.

While filling the kettle with freshly drawn cold water to make my afternoon tea, I clumsily splashed the body of my t-shirt, leaving, as I’m sure we’re all familiar with, that uncomfortable wet spot.

To remediate the problem, I decided to use ingenuity – by using a hair dryer for a purpose other than drying hair – to dry my shirt. Simply brilliant MacGyvering!

It worked. Within minutes of the high powered machine blasting its heated air streams my way, I was dry.

But standing there in front of the clean unspeckled bathroom mirror, another thought crossed my mind…

I have hair, lots of it. And it’s full of potential.

And there, in my hand was a hair dryer, also full of potential.

Should I?

And I did.

In a short few moments I was lost in what was reflected back to me.

Prince Charming, albeit ethnic and handsomer, with locks of stringy coal tendrils flowing behind me, dancing in the warm winds of potential tapped.

And this is why representation matters.

I was reminded recently via a Facebook memory of how I awoke to a strange message on my phone.

I recall reviewing the message metadata before actually going to the message, as any good sleuth would do, I noticed that it was received at 1:23 am.

That by itself was most peculiar.

First, because all the numbers were in sequential order. 1-2-3.

And second, because that’s when I would have been deep in restful, beauty enhancing slumber. Well into it.

I was intrigued.

Bleary eyed, I had opened the message.

What I saw made my heart quicken.

It was an audio message. No words. No pictures. Just the audio clip.

Strange. Very strange.

Against my better judgement, with an ominous electric chill coursing through the length of my spine, I pressed play.

The sound that filled my ears caused the skin on my body to crawl, goose flesh instantly breaking the surface, each little mound capped by a luxurious hair pulled instantly erect by those little pili.

For those who know me, you know I’m not perturbed easily. My affect stable, unshakeable in the face of virtually all events and incidents.

You know the ground beneath my feet typically remains firm. You also know I can’t swim, so that’s why I stay on solid ground.

But this message left me unbalanced, deep to my soul if I have one. It was a new feeling for me. Spinning in an abyss of water. Turbulent. Dizzying. The world falling around me. The collapse.

I can’t even do justice in trying to describe the sound that assailed my ears.

Imagine, if you will, the unabashed, soulful braying of a 75 year old donkey as it does Friday night karaoke after a few too many tequila shots amongst a herd of fornicating bonobos, of which a few are scraping their fingernails across a chalk board.

That’s the closest I can get to describing the horror that assailed my sensitive eardrums.

The tightness in my chest increased as the sound played on. The palpitations. The soft gasps of my shallow breaths, ragged, belying a man under tremendous stress. The small beads of ice cold sweat breaking out on my upper lip. Nearing the breaking point.

Until the sound stopped.

I pressed play again.

I can’t explain what compelled me to do so, but it had to be done.

The impact was no less devastating.

And again. A third time. Trying to wrap my head around what it was that I was hearing…It was not possible, but there it was.

It was not a wrong number.

This was no mistake.

It was a message meant for me.

This was no mistake.

It was punitive, of that I was certain. A veiled threat?

I picked up my phone and shot off a quick message to the sender.

“WHY DID YOU RECORD ME SNORING?”

Always remember to pay attention in high school chemistry class. What you learn could save your leyef. Or the leyeves of your loved ones.

Just like it saved mine this morning.

Toilet cleaner is a base, an alkali.

A hydrogen acceptor of the most nefarious sort.

It is almost certainly a caustic substance know by the State of California to do bad things. Probably really bad things. Just like basically all substances are known to the State of California to be dangerous, usually to cause cancer [keep on keeping the California a safer place, proposition 65!].

And this morning, it almost took something precious away from me.

My eyesight.

While fastidiously scrubbing the porcelain throne with my ergonomically designed, yet discount-priced, bristly scrub brush, basic projectiles, through immense centripetal force created by yours truly, escaped the power of aqueous adhesion.

Tiny blue-hued, ball-like missiles.

They sought refuge in my eyes. A direct hit.

Oh the burn. The fire. My eyelids blinked as fast as they could. Up and down. Attempting to assuage the searing degeneration of my organic tissues.

Two things came to mind in a flash of hydrogen.

The first, the ending couplet of a verse and the following famous chorus from Simon & Garfunkle’s Boxer:

Looking for the places
Only they would know

Lye la lye lye la la la lye lye
Lye la lye, lye la la la la lye la la lye

And second, important lessons long-ago forgotten, but immediately recalled, from the days of advanced high school chemistry and sipping from Erlenmeyer flasks.

The safety drills instilled deep into our core.

My training as a little Arrhenious, no longer crouching. No longer hidden.

I unleashed the dragon.

Instantly I knew what I had to do.

I had to pour acid in my eyes.

A while back when I was at the gym and doing heavy dead lifts, I ripped a callus off the base of my right middle finger.

It hurt like a [insert your favourite cuss words here].

It happened on the upward pull, right at the friction point, where all the weight loaded on the bending barbell was deciding whether or not I deserved to overcome the ever-present forces of gravity.

I did deserve it, in the end. But at great cost. There’s always a cost.

Now a bit more about my callus. It was not just any ordinary callus, but had been transformed from a blood blister callus the week prior. On the same lift. In the same gym. Maybe even on the same barbell.

To make it even more extraordinary, when it ripped off, there was already another callus underneath it, adapted to take more force, more stress. Almost the same, but different. Ready to take its place.

Evolved.

If there isn’t any more proof of evolution than that, I don’t know what will convince you.

As a child I wasn’t permitted to play violent sports.

Instead I played soccer.

Recently with one defiant action, I deconstructed an idea so permeating, so ingrained by society that it touches virtually every aspect of our day to day lives, often unbeknownst to us.

An idea so virulent, so pervasive that it has altered countless lives in so many tragic, devastating ways. It’s nefarious underpinnings surreptitiously able to enmesh and intertwine with our daily existence with minimal resistance, a toxic, clinging Hedera personified. Becoming part of our identities, defining us. Shaping us. Poisoning us.

Men and women.

Children.

Everyone.

No one has escaped its grasp. The secretion of those tiny globules from the unassuming social rootlets, microscopic in size, nanoparticles, able to seep into any crack, any crevice, finding purchase. Formed of  myriad compounds with incredible ability to adhere to any surface, any person. Each particle by itself weak, but together a powerful superglue, securely bonding unwelcome guest to host. Altering it.

We have all been in the presence of its tenacious tendrils at some point in our lives, in some way. Causing us to question our worth. Our value. To ourselves. To those around us.

Those three words.

Each monosyllabic. Independently, benign. But together, razor sharp, as though meticulously worked on the whetstone by deviously skilled craftsmen over the generations. Honed and beveled for the perfect cutting edge. Penetrating.

Be A Man

I steeled myself, slipping confidently into my psychological hauberk, protected against the blades of judgement, shame, and guilt –  its trifecta of Goondas, attempting the dirty work but unable to find fault in my armour, slashing with futility. Each stinging advance parried. Rebuffed.

Not that day. Not me. A lesser man would have failed. Fallen to the onslaught, a victim to all that the statement represents. Represented.

This is the story of my emancipation from those three words.

I made coffee. But soon realized I had no milk. Nor had I any sugar.

Black coffee.

I poured it down the drain. Untouched.

Today I’m sharing with you one of my deepest, darkest secrets. Please keep this between us because looking back at it now through the crisp, clear, polarized lens of adulthood, it’s kinda embarrassing how dumb I was when I was younger.

In my defense, though, it wasn’t my fault. I was but a young, skinny, knobby-kneed child, with unruly hair, and a cute dimple in my right cheek, the face one, not the butt one.

I didn’t know any better. I couldn’t have. My worldview was limited to Sesame Street and Mr. Dressup. I didn’t have the Google™ to teach me things. There were no magic devices with access to all the knowledge in the world tucked into my OshKosh B’gosh™ jumpers. The iPad™ was nothing more than four left over Scrabble™ tiles dejectedly sitting on the rail, waiting to be played one or two at a time, an overlooked anagram for paid, which Apple™ is certainly getting.

Anyway, when I was about 4 or 5 years old, I remember finding out that the sun, the centre of our universe, had already been burning strong for a few billion years. And would most certainly burn out in a few billion more, and humanity as we knew it would cease to exist on Earth.

While I didn’t know what that meant exactly, I knew it had something to do with death and dying. And it meant all of us. No one would be spared. Even my goldfish, whose name I can no longer remember but who was my favourite. 

I never told anyone this. It was my deepest darkest secret, as though saying the words out loud would make it happen. Or make it happen faster. Or make it real. To me. And to those around me, who seemed blissfully unaware of our untimely, impending demise. 

And for years that made me sad inside because I hadn’t met you yet, and I wasn’t ready to die before we connected.