I can't see clearly now.

By Zach Hively

​My eyesight has always been superb.

I hyper-specifically remember testing at 40/20 or 20/10 or whatever really good vision is, back when I got my first driver’s license. The DMV employee’s reaction of awe made me internalize that I was a mofo-ing superhero. I could read street signs an entire second before anyone else in the car, back when people still read street signs.

​Now our phone maps tell us where to turn. But excellent vision has other uses! Like reading a grocery list without having to search for the glasses hiding out atop my own head.

I can’t leave well enough alone, though. Oh no. I take great delight, at the very occasional party I’m still invited to, in steering conversation around to my impeccable eyesight. It’s my primary remarkable physical trait. Statistically speaking, I am the only person my age who didn’t ruin his eyes by reading in the dark. (Told you so, Mom!) I even make my living, such as it is, on computer screens. I have no reason to expect functioning eyeballs.

Especially once they stopped functioning.

You see, I got a stye back around the start of the year. Not one of those little yellow ones that you can pop with plausible deniability. No—this was one of those mighty and inaccessible ones that made a friend ask me if I’d been stung by a scorpion.

​“On my FACE?”

“I mean…” She gestured at all of me, as if suggesting I am precisely the sort of self-explanatory man who might lie—accidentally, I’m sure—with scorpions.

Whatever the cause, my vision was getting wonky, and I concluded my eye was probably infected. I got a primary care doctor and her power of prescription to agree with me—“Yup that’s infected, alright.” The eyedrops took the grotesque factor down a considerable degree.

But the fuzziness remained.

Sometimes I couldn’t focus on mountains. Other times on my dogs. Those unethically bright headlights irritated me even more than normal. I worried, increasingly, about not spotting the difference between, there, their, and they’re. Whatever professional credibility I had left was on the line. At least, I presume it was. Lines were increasingly hard to make out.

So I did what no man wants to do: I made damn sure I knew the difference between an optometrist and an ophthalmologist. One gives out glasses, which I didn’t want. The other is harder to spell, especially without sharp vision. I called that one.

This was two months into my squinting-at-menus adventure. The office set my appointment another two months out. I had ample time to come to grips with my mortality.

I even convinced myself that losing my vision—a core component of my self-worth—was beneficial for my brand. If you can’t trust a skinny chef, what about a writer without specs?

The day arrived, as days tend to do. A series of professional technicians in scrubs led me through the trials. I had, I figured, about a 1-in-10 chance of guessing the smaller letters right. I could eliminate all the easy-to-differentiate ones. The strategy seemed to go well until I started doubling up guesses. “B or E, P or … F? That probably tells you all you need to know, huh.”

​The professional smiled a lipless smile and did not tell me if I had passed the trial.

For the final tribulations, I sat in a classic ophthalmologist’s chair with all the imposing accoutrements. The Big Boss Scrubs put some drops in my eyes.

She told me I would soon be unable to read my phone or anything else, but that I would be safe to drive. This struck me as backwards. I had to prove I could see before they let me drive in the first place. But I let it slide. She soon left me unattended, and I took pictures of a great many things because I am nosy.

And when I looked at my photos, I didn’t. By which I mean, I very much actually could not see my phone.

The phone on which I receive Very Important Writerly Emails. The phone on which, if I were ever awarded some lucrative contract for once, I would read about it. Worse, the phone on which I had typed out that afternoon’s grocery list.

The doctor came in—or so I was told. He intoned with far too much lighthearted joy that my vision, not fifteen minutes earlier, was 20/20—a clear downgrade from whatever it was before!—and that I was merely experiencing a disease (those were his words, “merely experiencing a disease”) that, to retread an old joke, sounds like a random line on a vision chart.

​“Say that again, please?” I begged, my hands grasping for his outline.

“Blepharitis.” Spelled B unless that’s an E; L, unless that’s an I…

No matter how ominous it sounds, this is just med-school speak for “slightly puffy eyelids.” They’re gently nudging my eyeballs. Take some supplements, keep washing your face, you’ll be fine, dude.

The Big Boss Scrubs handed me a cheap rolled-up set of sunglasses and ushered me on my way. My vision got fuzzier and fuzzier. I made it to the grocery store, recognizing that this might be the last place I ever saw. If “saw” is the right word—I couldn’t even see to punch in my telephone number at the checkout. For all I knew, my total was eight thousand dollars. For all I knew, my bananas were plantains.

I pleaded with a higher power: Please, return my sight to me, and I promise I will stop boasting about my superior vision. I will use it only for good! I will enjoy mountains again—and books, beautiful paper books. I’ll even turn the light on to read at night. I promise.

But I’ll never stop complaining about those blasted headlights.

And other AI betrayals.
​
By Zach Hively

I know that AI is all the rage. I know. But I speak as someone who doesn’t fully understand AI: I don’t trust it.

Why not?

Well, I was thinking about writing about the toad that my dog pursued around the back yard the other night. I didn’t realize at first that he was pursuing a toad—the night was, as nights tend to be, dark outside, and the toad was hard to see. I thought he was interested in a particularly animated clump of grass.

I, too, because curious about the grass, and how it could possibly startle my dog. Then it jumped, and so did I.

I remembered immediately, with startling fuzziness, a book I read twenty-six years ago that taught me everything I know about dogs and toads—it was the novel Big Trouble, by Dave Barry, in which the dog encounters a toad and proceeds to hallucinate something or other. When I search for specifics on what he hallucinates, because twenty-six is indeed a lot of years ago, Google tells me there is not an AI overview available for this topic.

​But that’s not the main reason I don’t trust AI.

So I grabbed my dog’s collar to prevent his own hallucinatory event. And I missed it. Because he didn’t have a collar for me to grab.

You see, I like to take his collar off at night. I figure it feels as good to him as taking off my pants at the appropriate time feels to me. Three hundred-plus nights a year, the collar comes off after we go outside one more time.

But not, of course, this night.

Without a collar to grab, I got my dog by the scruff of his neck. This he did not like very much. He is invested in being a Very Well-Liked Boy, and I can extrapolate that Very Well-Liked Boys seldom get scruffed.

Also, I am not an expert scruff-taker, so my dog slipped my grip and darted back to the toad in order to sniff at it some more.

The toad—which is generally more intelligent than we here give toads credit for—had hopped along to someplace else. Or so thought the dog. He sniffed everywhere, erratic, desperate to locate his new friend and/or toadie drug dealer.

Yet I could see that the toad, in its helpful way, had stayed put. He squatted in the one place in the immediate vicinity that my dog, for all his methodology, was not sniffing.

Ultimately I re-scruffed my dog and got him back inside. He was, as far as I could tell, unaccompanied by any vivid hallucinations.

I thought I might write something about all this. I also thought, Hey, this is not the first time I’ve seen a toad out here. Did I ever take a picture of one I can use as a Featured Image for this story?

​I searched the photos on my phone for “toad.” My phone returned only this one shot I took of, well, not a toad:

As you can see, there is no toad herein visible to the human eye. The dog corroborates: he does not smell one, either.

Now, is this photo search feature a function of AI? I have no idea! But I’m inclined to believe so, purely because it did not work. No human could mistake this photo, clearly of a praying mantis, as the work of a professional worthy of publication. Not even here.

​Some things just require a personal touch. No AI could write this exact piece, because no AI has ever felt the panic that the local animal poison control people are all in bed at this hour. And you cannot tell me that you want to trust AI with ANYTHING when it has never, not even for one ill-timed second, wondered if toads can make people hallucinate too.

By Zach Hively​

A little while back, I wrote a style guide called How to Dress Yourself More Better for Tango, My Man—and Also for Life. It wound up being controversial, especially (or entirely) among men.

In this authoritative guide, I called out everyone who thinks—and I paraphrase—that an outfit is suitable for special occasions if it was once launched out of a T-shirt cannon. And I do mean everyone. Even if the only people who think so are men.

​Many men, it turns out, do not want to hear that they present as the fashion equivalent of Great Value garbanzo beans. And that’s when they’re trying to dress nice.

You would think this helpful guide might have landed better coming from me, speaking with the authority that extends from being a man. And you might be right. Maybe the response I got was the best-case scenario. Imagine how badly these many men might have reacted if I had written that headline as literally any other type of human person.

But still, I didn’t expect any real backlash, no matter how adamantly I suggested men might want to tuck in their shirts—shirts with buttons, even—if they wanted a chance at dancing with anyone at all. I am not used to being told I am wrong.

Neither, it seems, is any other dude bro man.

Did you know, for instance, that writing a set of “time to man up” tips means it’s open season on your chosen hairstyle?

​Unless you are a woman, or possibly a member of a non-dominant culture, your answer is almost certainly “No, I did not know that.”

I felt it only appropriate to respond to this follicle-challenged man-presenting individual. I replied, “I almost wrote a section on waxing our bald spots and receding hairlines, but instead I decided not to kick my fellow men in the genes.”

But I soon stopped responding to the trolls. Especially when they’ve already proven that they don’t read past the social preview image.

A demonstrated lack of reading comprehension does not generally stop these men from forming—and voicing—opinions. Did you know, for further instance, that trying to help your fellow man level up (both affordably and actionably) also opens you up for critique on your physique?

Even when your physique is literally out of sight under a suit jacket in the provided photographs?

​Even when the function of a suit jacket is to make any man-shaped person instantly more man-shaped by hiding his actual body so no one can tell exactly how much he doesn’t work out?

Now, I have been acculturated to think that I cannot ever be wrong about anything, ever. Same as all these man-presenting folks. But their commentary was enough to make me start to doubt myself.

Was I … for the first time in my life … a man in the wrong?

Fortunately, no. Men are awful, but not me! At least not this one time. And how do I know? Because many of the people smarter than men are women, and not a single one of them saw fit to demean me in a public social media comment.

​Their perspective is more valid than the men-type people’s, because a great many of them appear to have actually read the piece.

However, just because every woman with eyes and a sense of smell agrees with me—that man-presenting people who shower and wear clean clothes are more appealing—doesn’t mean I’m 100% right. I have been wrong about a few things.

Such as presuming men will never change.

One man sent in a picture that he—possibly for the first time in his adult life—wore slacks instead of jeans to a formal event.

Another man shared advice for finding quality used suits.

​Yet another conceded I was right, failed entirely to attack my physical attributes, and instead just shared his own stance in a healthy, non-confrontational way.

In this process of obsessively lurking on other people’s posts to see how else they might support my ideas or take cheap shots at my hair, I started to realize something: This behavior is what women and other not-men risk dealing with every single time they venture onto the internet, or into public, or exist.

I suspect that these oppositional men were less incensed by my headline, if they even read it, and more peeved that women were out there agreeing with me that men can do better.

Which we do. We, on the whole, really kinda suck.

I suggested originally that men could do better by wearing clothes that fit. But I need to amend that. Men: we need to do better ALL THE TIME, WITH EVERYTHING, EVER.

Yeah yeah, hashtag not all men. But all men. All of us, and often.

So I leave my fellow man-presenting people with one final thought for you all to get mad at me about.

We all know that universal problems don’t beget universal solutions until they happen to a man. Women have been dealing with this crap forever. But now it’s happened to me. So let’s cut it out. Enough is enough. Not even a tailored suit can make us look better when we resort to tearing other people down.
​
[Note: all screenshotted responses were left on public posts, so the commenters are receiving greater anonymity here than they could reasonably expect.]

Why be good when you can be loud?

By Zach Hively

You all, I’ve just had an epiphany on my Epiphone.

​I shouldn’t be surprised. My old man had an Epiphone guitar when I was growing up. That guitar taught me a lot about reading. For instance, I couldn’t figure out for years and years how to pronounce what looked to me, as much as anything, like a backwards number three.

“Three-piphone” didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then again, nothing else about that letter made sense either. It didn’t look like any letter I knew, and I was a precocious reader: I saw letters EVERYWHERE.

I figured out that this was a stylized E probably right around the same time my kindergarten class went on a field trip to the church next door to the school. I, sat in a pew, asked my teacher why they had a large lowercase T on the wall. You can extrapolate that Pops didn’t play a lot of hymns on that Epiphone. I didn’t know the word “heathen” yet, but it sure has an accompanying facial expression that I could read all over my teacher’s attempts at playing it cool.

Nor did I know the word “epiphany.” I don’t know when I heard that word for the first time, but I’m confident it was not the same day I learned that Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior died for my sins by being stapled to a lowercase T on the wall. (I might have been shorted on the context clues.)

But naturally, when I heard of an epiphany, I put backwards-three and backwards-three together and deduced that this new word made as much sense as anything else for a brand name for a guitar. It was also a reasonable pronunciation of E-P-I-P-H-O-N-E and sure sounded like it might start with a stylized letter E.

The truth is quite possibly that I carried this spelling/pronunciation combination with me until I purchased my own electric epiphany at age eighteen and said something about it, out loud, with my face, to a music store employee.

Anyway! With pronunciations sorted, I had this actual epiphany while playing my Epiphone. I hadn’t played it in a long time. Years, really.

There are reasons for that. Not least among them is that not playing makes it daunting to play. Everyone (by which I mean both me and the guitar) will use the occasion of me playing to point out all the times I didn’t play, so it’s easier and cleaner for us all if I just pretend none of this exists.

But then, something stupid and minor happened—so stupid and so minor that it’s not worth the not-ink to tell you just how stupid and how minor—and I needed to burn off the excess stupid and minor energy. I needed to play some music. And I needed to play it loud.

The Epiphone, once I scraped the dust off its case, was ready, waiting, and close enough to in tune for me.

​And this was the epiphany, written in stylized Dantean letters but without abandoning much hope:

NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE FINISHED TO BE WORTHY, YOU KNUCKLEHEAD.

Does the guitar actually care that I abandoned it? No. Would I be a virtuoso if I had played every day in the interim? Heck no. Will my fingertips hurt tomorrow? You bet. But will that feel good? No. And also yes.

For once, I didn’t get caught up in something I did needing to Be Good. Fit for Public Consumption. Not an Embarrassment to All My Ancestors (In Case They Really Are Up There Chillin’ with Jesus).

This freedom made guitar-playing fun again. More importantly, it made it loud again.

I need more of this letting-go-of-results business. To let go of expecting perfect conclusions from everything I do.

​Including the end of this piece.

Pedro Pascal is, somehow, only the second-hottest item in this story. (I am not the first.)
​
By Zach Hively

​Today, I find myself remembering that time my beans nearly burned my house down.
​
And it all happened because I—ludicrous and flawed human that I am—trusted people.

This, I do remember: I, for once, was not at fault. At least I’m pretty sure I wasn’t.

Holding this half-deformed electrical outlet takes me back to the last time I pulled out my trusty slow cooker. It certainly did not have a familiar name brand that might come at me for damages.

I had cooked many beans in this electrical pot in my day, and I had cooked them slowly. Any problems I had with these many batches of beans were due to me and my microbiome, not the generic slow cooker, not the hidden workings of electricity in the wall, not the electric co-op that sends me bills.

And this, the fateful last pot o’ beans, came out as tasty as any of them. Even more so, in hindsight—the savory nostalgia of escaping death and/or an insurance investigation.

It wasn’t until I finally turned off the “keep warm” setting some hours or days later and tried to put the not-at-all-trademarked cooker away that I found I could not. The plug was stuck to the wall. Or, more like, it had merged with the wall. The two achieved oneness: the plastic of the socket, gone gooey and solidified again, claimed the prongs of the power cord as its own.

It melted.
The pot of crock melted the socket.

I did what any man would do in lieu of calling an electrician: I jiggled and yanked on that plug until I broke it free or the wall came down, whichever happened first. I still have a wall, so there’s that.

I did not want to know just how close I had come to my own not-so-slow-cooked end. So I left that socket the eff alone for a long, long time. Pretending problems don’t exist has often served me well.

The cooker? I shoved it, not unlike my sentimental attachment to it, to the back of a cabinet to deal with another time.

Eventually, I brought myself to the hardware store for a new outlet thingy.

I replaced it myself, with no electrical knowledge beyond “turn off every fuse in the box first.” I acquired a more modern, and presumably more trustworthy, brand of cooker.

Today, at long last, I threw out the melted outlet. I don’t need such tangible reminders of why I shouldn’t trust people anymore. I’m feeling weirdly optimistic about humanity; we haven’t burned down the metaphorical house yet, despite our most untrustworthy efforts. And everywhere I look, there’s Pedro Pascal.

So there’s that.

A Manly Humanities Man's Guide to Auto Maintenance
​
​By Zach Hively

The oil warning light came on in my girlfriend’s car the other day, and she wanted me—me!—to Do Something About It.
​
I cannot be the only English major this has happened to.

Sensing the Call to Adventure at this point in our romance, I agreed to take a look. I may have a degree in literature, but I am not otherwise an idiot. I know, deep down, that after I take a look—and if I am a very lucky man—I will get to use some of that gritty orange hand soap that smells so nice.

My struggle must not go unchronicled. Not if it can help thousands of other Manly Humanities Men—maybe even dozens of them—to get to use the gritty orange hand soap that smells so nice.

Here, in MLA style, is how I Did Something About It:

1. I read the manual. The ENTIRE manual. Because I have this affliction where I cannot see words without reading them. It’s bad. It’s how I, alone among my classmates, finished Paradise Lost.

​BONUS TIP: Read the manual while seated in the car itself. It provides the same thrill as reading the Narnia books while visiting England.

2. I determined, using my advanced training in critical reading, that the oil warning light indicates a warning in the oil system. Probably a lack of oil pressure. This can be caused by a misalignment in one of the variables in the equation PV=nRT, which I cite at parties to prove that Manly Humanities Men pay attention in physics class too.

3. I translated this knowledge across disciplines. In humanities-speak: Check the oil, you dipstick.

4. After some setbacks in applying theoretical knowledge in a practical setting, I located the car’s engine.

5. I inspected the long flimsy metal testing rod whose name I can’t think of. This thing required graduate-level interpretation. Oil is a viscous substance that clings to long flimsy metal testing rods and leaves room for culturally filtered nuance even upon subsequent readings. But I concluded that the car did, in fact, need oil.

​6. I hoofed it to a gas station convenience store to buy some oil. I chose the gas station over the auto parts store because I felt that I, and the ascot I was wearing, would face less unfriendly criticism there.

​BONUS TIP: Turn down the offer to buy a funnel. Lie that you already have one. A Manly Humanities Man can take only so much abuse before breaking.

7. I made certain my girlfriend was watching from the window when I opened the hood in the driveway. I knew that this time, I could do so on probably the first try.

8. I poured the oil into the place I am fairly confident oil goes. I glugged only a few glugs in other places. Doing so is just fine. I mean, have you SEEN one of these engines before? Oil is EVERYWHERE in there.

9. My girlfriend made it directly to the dealership’s service center and spent $1400. I’m happy to say that nothing critical exploded or caught fire on her way there, leastwise not that she’s mentioned.

​And THAT is how I earned the privilege of using the gritty orange soap. But I made sure to leave just a bit of dark grease under my fingernails. This will help me intimidate my fellow elbow-patchers by showing them what a real Manly Humanities Man can do.