All of my college and post-college friends are married and have children. I will go so far as to note that none of them have babies (which was a cute and novel phase) anymore, all of them have real-deal children, small humans with free will who have some semblance of the capability to reason and to express themselves: children. The kind of whom is said “We took X hiking for the first time” or “Can now ride his bike without training wheels.”

So when our busy schedules line up such that we can catch up, their stories and lives largely revolve around these small humans: kindergarten choices, the “strip off all your clothes and run around the neighborhood” incident etc. I love these stories, they make me laugh, they make me cry. They’re great stories told by wonderful people about amazing small beings becoming wonderful people.

But then, reciprocally, I’m asked “What’s been up with you?” or “What are you doing tomorrow?” and I feel incredibly awkward. Because the truth is, my day-to-day is, to be honest, kind of the envy of the weary, responsibility-laden parent.

So there you are, in the lovely home, decorated with lovely finger-painted pictures, near folded bibs and pajamas and made ready for loading up in to small, sticker-covered dressers in adorable purple rooms bedecked with stuffed animals and they ask you this and, if you reply honestly, you will sound like a complete jerk or someone who’s “rubbing it in.”

“Well I was planning on sleeping until I woke up, then grabbing some pancakes at this brunch place up the street, then maybe reading a book I got from the library that’s due back next week, then a nap, and then going grocery shopping before it gets crowded.”

Jerk

I decided to quit^* Twitter a few weeks ago, but it’s been a long time coming. I’m quitting because I believe that Twitter is harmful for individuals, harmful to the individual’s relationship to society, and is run in a malignant fashion.

Photo of Rhiannon Giddens by Tanya Rosen-Jones for nonesuch records

While listening to Dolly Parton’s America, the musician Rhiannon Giddens was interviewed (at 29:11), and I was absolutely floored by how she dismantled the idea of “mountain music” being per se “White.”

Typographical Note: I’m using White to denote a social construct of race, not to denoted an actual racial phenotype.

My default image of “mountain music” is Dolly, or Kenny, or Del McCoury, or Hank Williams in his rhinestone suit, or Roy Clark “Pickin n’ Grinnin” on “Hee-Haw.” Something like this:

Such images and their imperial power would have us think that everything in such tableaux: bib overalls, straw hats, banjos, etc. were all also White.

But Ms. Giddens deflates that idea noting that luted instruments came from Africa. Think about it: the gourd was the resonating chamber of early lutes, and gourds grow in Africa not Europe. Luted instruments and the designs might have been translated into wooden forms in Spain (Moorish invasion) or Italy (trade with the city-states), but these instruments are fundamentally African.

This Friday I will shut down my personal Blue App and Instagram accounts forever. I’m transitioning to a newsletter for low-volume updates. I hope you’ll subscribe: https://stevengharms.com/newsletter. The first newsletter will go out on Friday.

My motivations are simple: Facebook has failed to steward their platform well, they have cheapened the notion of friendship, and they feed the worst of our voyeuristic tendencies. If you’re interested in my reasoning, please see my blog post on the matter.

Donald Knuth, the Stanford computer scientist involved in most of the major research innovations on that campus — including email, wrote:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.¹

Of Facebook properties this same can be said: it has been plenty for one lifetime.

Posted to Facebook as Farewell

As I prepare to log out one final time, I’d like to tell you about how I wish social media would have gone. It didn’t go this way. Greed and control and perverse incentives got in the way. I’ll tell you how it was in the late 90’s &emdash; how it was small, quaint, and good &emdash; and how it turned into the blighted, “alternative facts” hellscape of today.

The Bulletin-Board System (BBS) Influence

Quoth the New York Times, the kids of today are claiming that the dark under-eye circles are “cool.” This lead me to recall “Billy Madison” where the incontinent field trip farm woman proclaims:

If peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis.

As I wrote my recent post that leaned heavily on the post-Marxist, post-Structuralist philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, I looked about at my living room, stuffed with moving boxes and bags destined for charity donation, and thought:

Why is there so much stuff?

There was stuff I’d not touched for weeks, months, even years. And yet there were also clearly things I could recognize as having gotten after we had moved in to this apartment. Why was there so much stuff? Why had I acquired yet even more of it? And why had I not gotten rid of more of it earlier? The evidence was unmistakable, something, beyond rational understanding had driven and was still driving my urge to continually get more or consume.

When a behavior goes beyond reasonable measure, it suggests that something more is driving it: a compulsion, a mania, mental illness, or, perhaps most insidious of all, a narrative.

With biking and moving out of corona-torpor, I’ve been thinking about the environmental damage of “fast fashion” a lot.

It requires if not child-, very young labor, questionable factory practices, and a lot of petroleum to keep moving fast fashion out of Southeast Asia and to bring it to the closets of America where it endures but a few wears (rarely more than a season’s duration) before being tossed aside or “donated” and rendered “some other poor country’s problem.”

The solution is: buy less, buy better, and repair over replace. This is, of course, a natural mantra for those of us living in sub-1,000 ft² homes, but it would be so much better for every living human if we were to reject planned obsolescence and embraced fewer, higher-quality goods.

When I reflect upon the root causes of

• Some of my most momentous choices
• The events we call “chance” or “coincidence”
• My greatest regrets

I discern again and again some socio-cultural force that I’ve never been able to identify. It has loomed there, just out of sight, just beyond description for as long as I’ve had the ability to do serious, adult-grade self-examination and feel serious, adult-grade remorse.

The words that I had to describe the mysterious force seemed to miss the mark. It wasn’t just “violence” or “homophobia” or “misogyny” or “jealousy” or “competition” or “bullying.” It was tinged with “rage” and “depression” and “isolation,” too. The force also made known to me that it wasn’t going to be a transient moment or series of moments like “heartbreak” or “grief.” It let me know that it was a system that would outlast any one man’s emotional state and would rule us until we stepped into our graves.

When I’ve talked to close friends about pivotal moments where it was there, whispering cues offstage, I’d often find them dismissing it as a regional quirk, hangover of patriarchal Abrahamaic religious indoctrination, or post-Boomer narcissistic greed-culture tenet. But to classify it didn’t provide me relief or insight. Still unresolved, recently I’ve found myself triggered when hearing of friends’ kids encountering it. But I still could not name it until Lauren found its secret name and told it to me.

This force that made so much of how and where I grew up hard to survive and intolerable to me as an adult is called: domination-based masculinity. And here’s the rub, it’s been ruining all of our lives for a very long time.

Named by Mark Greene, this short video shows how it works.

pic.twitter.com/o2RmmBPzp5

— Mark Greene (@RemakingManhood) July 31, 2021

The upshot is that boys are policed from a very early age to “be tough” and “not like women” thus femininity and emotional availability are disparaged. In an effort to scourge the hated woman-ness out of themselves, boys are taught that scourging woman-kind (physically, emotionally, sexually) is a behavior that can be used to augment their masculine esteem.

Lauren and I have both been through COVID twice now and present research suggests that we’re going to be dealing with this virus for years. As such, since once is an aberration, twice is freakish, and thrice is a pattern, I decided to start recording / sharing notes about how to weather this particular illness.

Inside, you’ll find my advice about dealing with the illness, and you’ll find tips about what to expect and how to medicate.

The opposite of luxury isn’t poverty; it’s vulgarity – Coco Chanel

Recently we went on a babymoon, and it was awesome. Nevertheless, there was one part of my trip that really bummed me out, and that was the visit to the area around the Monte Carlo Casino.

As we approached the casino, I was expecting some sign of Old-World, European elegance.

But we did not see this. Rather, class and elegance evaporated as we traversed the approach to the casino. Like a Bedazzled ™ Grecian urn on a neon platform, the old-world casino was festooned with shops of the brands advertised to represent a high-net-worth lifestyle worldwide: Bottega Veneta, Rolex, Tag Heuer, van Cleef and Arpels, Prada, Coach.

Those aren’t special, they’re the exact same line-up of merchants as one finds on 5^th Avenue, NYC; Rue de Rivoli, Paris; Honolulu; London; Rodeo Drive; the promenade in Heathrow terminal 5. Why buy a thing in Monaco that you can get just as well in Dallas on your way home from the Whataburger?

Further, because fashion is a shell game of having pieces made in China and then having the work finished in e.g. Milan so that you can legally affix a “Made in Italy” tag, the fashion is derivative and boring. There’s no “Ah, that’s a closer European cut” or “Why, those French, they’ve gone nuts for pleats.” Instead it’s a homogenized gray goo of fashion where it’s one product fits all.

I’m a little confused by Elisjsha Dicken being called a “Good Samaritan” e.g.: Pictured: Good Samaritan, 22, who killed Indiana mall gunman after he shot (yet another) would be mass-shooter in an American “soft-target” venue (here, a mall).

That parable, as recounted in the gospel of Luke was about, as I read it, a Samaritan finding a man who had been beaten and robbed by thieves who gave the victim comfort and aid (cash, a ride, an inn, wound dressings, etc.) with no expectation of remuneration.

The Samaritan did not happen upon the assault and execute the thieves. Jesus says, after relaying the parable, that its message is for those who would follow Him to truly love their neighbor as their own – regardless of tribal identity (Levite, Samaritan, etc.). It’s a bit of a perversion of Christianity that I read in the New Testament to revise the Good Samaritan into Batman (“Look, it’s the Sam-Signal! To the Sam-Donkey, Robin!”).