Candy and Strangers

Taking candy from strangers isn't a bad thing.

In fact, once someone's old enough to realize that subsequently getting in a big white van is dangerous even if it's headed to church, taking things from strangers almost becomes a social expectation. After all, those pink boxes of Christmas donuts and chocolate left anonymously in the office aren't going to eat themselves!

High school politics and fundraising utterly depend on folks taking candy from strangers. The relentless battery of lollipops dished out during these popularity contests for class president represent a much tastier approach to locking in votes than going around kissing illegitimate babies and promising to hire Deadmau5 for a residency in the cafeteria. (Full disclosure: I myself won a landslide election for class VP out of a barrage of opponents numbering exactly zero.) Without candy sales, how could the marching band afford to go pummel the morale out of lesser schools at competitions? How would the Shakespeare club raise money to perform at festivals if it weren't for bake sales? Put on shows or something?

This whole anti-social candy doctrine many kids learn is part of a house of cards just waiting to come crashing down on ol' Saint Nick and the tooth fairy. As far as I was concerned as a young Lego-eater, we were expected to speak when spoken to and eat what us country folk called a "polite bite" whenever someone kindly offered up food. We went out crusading in itchy yet conversation-inducing costumes on Halloween, totally banking on getting treats instead of tricks at each house before returning home to brutalize our stomaches and tease out diabetes at night's end. We would go out to meet the ice cream men, and as long as they could speak English good, they were okay in our book.

If at seven years old I had been told to not take candy from strangers, then been kicked out my front door to go sell boxes of Girl Scout cookies to them, I'd have had a conniption over the horrific logic. Really? I could talk to strangers to sell them candy, but couldn't take any from them? That hypocritical stance would be like saying China could sell high-tech products into the US, but couldn't get any in return (oh wait, that's real). I'd also be really embarrassed and mad at the person who decided to smuggle little Jesse into Girl Scouts in the first place.

The fact is, taking candy from strangers and striking up small conversations as we grew up taught many of us to be more normal than anything. Maybe a little fatter. Heck, for all I know, those interactions might be the only thing standing between me and tin foil hats right now. All in all, there's little reason to be scared about taking candy from a stranger, as long as that stranger isn't one of those rampant weirdos that steals kids.

Socially-Awkward Dog

Late the other night, I almost tripped over a silhouetted Mittelspitz on a sidewalk who, despite her owner's pull on the leash, had planted herself right in my path as I was walking by. Her owner quickly apologized to me, quipping, "she's a sidewalk hog". I chuckled a bit and walked past, soon realizing that:

I HAD JUST MET SOCIALLY-AWKWARD DOG!!!

The backstory leading up to this humiliating level of excitement had actually begun several months earlier. Like Pongo in 101 Dalmatians, I had started each day by spending a few minutes judging owners and their dogs as they walked through the neighborhood on their missions to stake claim to every fire hydrant in sight.

Having never actually owned a dog or other attention-hungry animal, I had in these few months found it fascinating to watch dogs' interactions whenever they met on the sidewalk. Like a bunch of 5-year-old kids, most dogs wanted to play. Like a bunch of 15-year-old kids, a few shamelessly wanted to do the nasty, while others ran for the hills. And then, like a stoner competing in the Special Olympics, there was Socially-Awkward Dog.

This dog surprised me. At first I thought she was just shy. Whenever she encountered another dog who wanted to wish her Top o' the Morning, she hid behind her owner and faced away. Occasionally she would freeze in place and pretend to be in a happy place watching grass grow. Being partial to awkwardidity myself, seeing Socially-Awkward Dog would thoroughly make my day, and I soon started keeping an eye out for her specifically. The night I nearly tripped over her in the dark though, I realized that she didn't quite understand that she'd just lined herself up to take a shin-kick to the face, and it dawned on me that she's not just awkward, she's actually stupid. And it got me to thinking.

Everyone knows a "special" dog or two. I've met a couple that tend to bury themselves in strangers' crotches, haven't figured out how to turn left, or like to bulldoze their way across carpet using their foreheads. If these dogs were human, they'd be in mental hospitals. But they're not...they're just funny.

The underlying issue here is that, with the advent of veterinary clinics and breeding over the last 15,000 years or so, the process of natural selection has been almost entirely removed from the canine species. No longer is it survival of the fittest, but rather survival of the cutest. We're breeding beautiful, docile little creatures whose crowning achievements include warming feet and bringing in the morning paper. Granted, we do have dogs that spend their entire lives looking for drugs, but again, if they were doing that as humans they'd have ended up in the slammer a long time ago.

Over the past thirty years or so, dog companionship has been steadily on the rise. They say a dog is man's best friend. They also say that someone can tell a lot about you based on the company you keep. Needless to say, the signs aren't looking good. At this rate I'll be tripping over people standing on the sidewalk by the time I'm 50, but that might be because natural selection is a joke for humans now too...and it's not very funny. But at least we'll all be pretty!

Why Duels Should Make a Comeback

If you're like most folks in the Western world, one of the few phrases you won't see much in popular media is "defending honor".  It certainly seems that over the course of the last century or so, honor has taken a back seat to self-determinism, independence, and spiting your parents for the fun of it.  It's high time for it to make a comeback.

What is honor?  According to the Oxford Dictionary on my Mac, it's respect, esteem, or a woman's chastity.  I'm only arguing for the first two definitions here.  The problem today's young whippersnappers have—this so-called Millennial Generation—is that we're way more focused on feeling good about ourselves and our buddies in the now than we are on being socially proper or respectable over the long haul.  In general, we jump from job to job as we get bored, get married when we feel like it instead of when we're "supposed" to, and value instant gratification above reputation and dignity (because that picture of you in high school with a toilet seat around your neck, beer in hand, is WAY too funny to keep off of Facebook).

How can we go about re-instilling honor in the West?  It obviously works well for our Asian counterparts.  A Japanese third grader vying to protect his family's honor academically could run laps around most English-speaking college freshman.  Thanks to a national sense of honor, communist China has its act together well enough to own a quarter of the US debt (though even China crosses the street when it sees European debt coming down the sidewalk).  If history has any answers for us, we may find that re-legalizing duels to defend our honor will work wonders in revitalizing us so that we are better people physically, mentally, and socially.

For anyone who favors bringing back the draft, this should make sense: people who tremble for their lives are far more likely to appreciate what they're defending when what they're defending demands it.  It's kinda like Stockholm syndrome but cooler.  Tell people their honor is at stake whenever someone drops a glove at their feet or builds a mosque in Lower Manhattan, and you'll have a clan of honor-hungry people looking to off anyone and anything that threatens them.  After all, that's what made Rome great!

Duels work like this: you offend the honor of some holier-than-thou person with a rod up his backside, he gets his underpants all in a twist, and then he challenges you to defend your own honor with your life.  You either accept the challenge, or slink away solemnly to live out your days in shame.  If you accept, you get to pick the weapons, be they swords, pistols, or perhaps sausages.  You and the Holy One each pick a best mate to try and litigate on your behalf first, and if that doesn't work, then GAME ON!  Alternatively, if you're more hands-on you can duel by partaking in "gouging", which is more like wrestling with an aim to gouge out the eye of your opponent or—less preferably all around—mutilate his genitals.  This was prevalent in the American south of the plantation era, where it would probably still be favored today by the best trailer trash still vying for Darwin Award nominations.

The constant, giddy excitement one would feel from never knowing when he'd be invited to a duel would lead to some pretty great perks.  One, people would stop slagging on their least loved brethren for fear of death or castration.  Two, everyone would have a reason to take fencing classes, which would both invigorate the economy and trim down the increasing population of fat people.  Three, everyone would have a great new story to tell about themselves or their friends.  And four, losers of gouging would have a fabulous opportunity to put on pirate costumes and put their eye patches to good use at Halloween parties.

Sure, there might be some opponents to this, such as the Catholic Church who would call this practice barbaric or ungodly, but they also banned crossbows and contraception so their sense of fun is a bit passé.  Politicians might also make an example of the duel between Alexander Hamilton, the original architect of the US economic system, and Aaron Burr who was VP to Thomas Jefferson at the time.  But, Jefferson didn't like either guy so most of us don't really care.

The long and the short of it is, duels are a great "Invisible Hand" that would whip us into shape both physically and socially.  And given what we've learned about prison reform, being in better physical shape makes us feel better about ourselves.  When we feel better about ourselves, we are more likely to get along socially and might even achieve world peace.  Then, every Miss World contestant would see her cliché wish come true and fall into a fit of ecstasy, and really, who wouldn't want to see that?