That’s right, audience, I’ve got a brand new book for you to read and enjoy. PLEASE NOTE: this is a detective thriller novel meant for mature cool cats like you. Do not let children/overly sensitive neurotics read Falstaff Gets Found. Its full of nasty words and dirty deeds. Murder, even!
To give you a better idea of what this thing is about, here’s the back of the book summary for you:
“John Falstaff is dying in the dirt of a Las Vegas scrapyard when The German gives him a job: find the gangbang killer. Reluctantly, Falstaff agrees as his heart stops beating.
Falstaff is no hero. He never wanted to be a detective. He cannot fight. His only true love is whatever dope he can get his hands on. He alternates between running from responsibility and running face first into trouble. But he has two tricks up his sleeve. He can withstand an astounding amount of physical abuse, making him very hard to kill. And he can read the dirty little secrets written all over your face. If only he could keep his big mouth shut.”
Exciting? DARN TOOTING. And this is only the first book in the series. Get on board now, and look forward to 7 more stories (give or take) featuring our favourite walking disaster, John Falstaff.
If you would like a physical copy and you’re near me, I will directly sell you a copy of the book for $15, which is $10 less than the Amazon Mega-corp will charge you. Take that, Jeff Bezos! Just contact me through the various methods and we’ll set things up.
Is there a species that has, as the kids say. “fallen off” more than the panda? A bear that can’t fight, barely reproduces, and has trouble with basic physical coordination. They fall out of trees and off of playground equipment made for human toddlers. The panda is no longer equipped for survival. It cannot recognize danger and even if it could see trouble coming, it would be unable to do anything about it.
And I gotta tell you, there are some things about the current state of our human species that uncomfortably remind me of those black and white failures-to-thrive. Before I explain, I need you to know that I am doing my level best to restrain the unhinged rant that the paranoid alarmist in my head wants to unleash.
Not today, crazy Me. Not today.
That isn’t to say that the remainder of my argument is well-thought out and reasonable, it’s just more reasonable that the stuff I keep shoved in the back of my mental closet. So you’ve been warned. Do not take any of this as professional advice, and certainly do not make any changes to your own life based on a theory I put together while unloading the dishwasher.
What are the panda traits I see in humanity right now?
Difficulty in procreation
You’d think making babies was a skill that was impossible to lose, but we’re doing our best to forgot how. Global fertility rate has fallen significantly over the last 70 years.
The magic number on this chart is 2.1. When your nation’s fertility rate drops below the rate of 2.1 children per woman, your population starts to shrink. More deaths than births. Its not a great scene. There are some countries that still have robust fertility rates (most of them in Africa and southeast Asia) but that won’t last forever. As countries become richer, their citizens have more choices for how to spend their lives. Parenthood is a considerable commitment of time and resources, and young men and women in prosperous nations are choosing to spend those resources elsewhere.
Another symptom of prosperity is a lack of pressure for a child to leave their parent’s home to start their own adult life. We can keep our kids at home, protecting them from the drudgery of adult obligations, until they are well into their twenties. But biology does not care about that. Both men and women hit their fertility peak around 23 years of age. So when you finally send your adult child out into the world at 25, they are already on the fertility downslope.
And then add a layer of rigid sexual norms that inhibit normal human interaction. Sure, the young folks talk a lot, A LOT, about sexual identity, but they adhere to increasingly puritanical restrictions around sex. Who is allowed to approach who, what difference is age is acceptable, what lengthy and legally binding consent agreements must be in place before holding hands. It’s enough to make a Victorian lady nod in restrained approval.
It’s also not helping that we think we can order the perfect partner via an app, like picking from a dessert cart. There is no perfect mate. Great partnerships (and babymaking is arguably the most important partnership you’ll ever have) are built on mutual growth and understanding. It’s not who you are today that’s important, but who you’ll become in the years ahead, and you build that parental version of yourself collaboratively.
Danger blindness
(I just made that phrase up. If you don’t like ‘danger blindness’ you can go be mad somewhere else. We don’t have time for that here). Survival depends on seeing danger ahead of time, and choosing to get out of its way. But we are victims of our own survival success. We are so much safer today than we were 20 years ago, and astoundingly safe in comparison with our ancestors. Most of us live a life of ease and comfort, surrounded by miracles like on-demand clean water and instantaneous communication with anyone around the world. That doesn’t mean we have stopped looking for danger, but it does mean that we’ve lost the ability to accurately recognize it. Whatever made us angry/scared/uncomfortable most recently is designated as The Big Problem, and it consumes our attention and resources. But at least we never check to see if our efforts to fix The Big Problem are actually having an effect.
Lack of personal responsibility
I’ll start by taking responsibility on behalf of my species: humans have done a great job in wiping out the wild pandas, and we should not have done that. Our love of shaping the natural environment to our liking has shoved the pandas out of their ecological niche. Our bad. But under that pressure from humanity, pandas haven’t really risen to the challenge of adaptation. I’m not panda-blaming, but a more resilient species would have at least explored an adaptive strategy.
So now the pandas needs humans to curate a safe environment that provides all the resources they need. Even in the wild, humans have to help the pandas survive. And a panda in the zoo has absolutely no self-sufficiency left in their body. They sit patiently in their play tree, waiting for food to show up. If they are grateful for the food when it shows up, I’ve never seen it. (Note: I do not watch pandas regularly. This is all a tortured metaphor)
That same attitude is prevalent in the complaints of modern society. An expectation that society owes you food and lodging, and to keep you in the manner in which you believe you deserve. But a thriving species needs to be self-reliant. Each adult member of our species is responsible for providing for their own basic needs, and for the basic needs of those who depend on them. In the case where an adult is incapable of providing for their own needs, the state should intervene to help them so that they can be as self-sufficient as possible. But “I don’t like working” does not qualify for state intervention.
Fatness
To be fair, I don’t know if pandas are carrying too much weight. Other bears seem to have a lot of junk in the trunk, so maybe the pandas are appropriately chubby. But for the sake of this argument, let’s assume pandas are fat. We certainly are.
We are fat, and getting fatter. No, it’s not because of GMOs, or seed oils, or microplastics, or systemic oppression. We eat more calories than we use, and the excess is stored as fat. Our meaty bodies are designed to expend as little energy as possible, while consuming as many calories as possible. And boy oh boy are we great at that. We eat too much. Our food is too rich. And our lives require very little physical effort. It all adds up to obesity, and obesity is detrimental to our survival.
But do not despair! Put down the donut of sadness! Look instead at places like France and Japan. Both have much lower rates of adult obesity. I’m not suggesting we embrace either country’s dietary and exercise regime. But it’s important to remember that other humans are succeeding at something we want to succeed at. It is not a lost cause.
What does it all mean?
I don’t think we’re doomed for extinction. It’s my crackpot pessimism that wants to bemoan our panda similarities. The things that I’ve listed are real challenges, but the human spirit is much harder to snuff out. Our big brains love to find new puzzles. Our gentle decline in population could be addressed by robotic workers and cloning. We may have found a cure for our overeating (though I’d like a little bit more evaluation time before I sing the praises of Ozempic for all).
But for our resiliency to shine through, we have to take risks. Being risk-averse leads to calcified societies afraid of loud noises and scary shadows. Humans thrive on adventure, and the biggest adventure available to us is space. To the stars!
I like to think that I’m tough. Don’t we all? That we can face adverse events and unpleasant surprises without being set off course. But then a tiny little medical situation made the assumption of resiliency coming crashing down.
I had a bad nosebleed right before New Years. And then I dislodged the scab twice in the following week, causing two more bad nosebleeds. A visit to the hospital emergency room ended with my nose cauterized and packed with some gauze. A few days later, back at emerg, they removed the gauze and no more nosebleed.
Until about a week after that when I had another bad nosebleed. Cue a return trip to the emergency room, where I sat waiting for the doctor as my precious blood slowly leaked past my pinched nostrils, or dribbled down into my mouth. If I tried to talk or breathe at the wrong moment, I’d disperse a tiny shower of blood droplets in random directions.
I discovered weeks later that there were droplets on my running shoes
You may not realize this, but waiting is difficult to do when your body refuses to keep its most vital fluid inside where it belongs. The nurses who checked in on me were sympathetic, which is nice but not really helpful. I don’t want you to feel bad for me, I want you to plug this leaky nose.
Now, I knew that I was objectively in no real danger. Though I was seeing way more of my blood than I ever wanted to see, it was still a minor amount. But that objective awareness did not stop the fear. And a thought of profound terror struck me as I sat hunched over a tupperware container that contained a mix of blood and bloody paper towel: if I can barely handle this trivial emergency, how will I endure it when real crisis shows up? Because everyone gets medically fragile as they grow old. I was almost brought to a complete emotional meltdown by a nosebleed. How will I get though something worse?
A strange understanding accompanied this moment of fear. This sense of powerlessness is why people turn to god. When given a choice between having no hope, or having the illusion of hope, the idea of an all-powerful being who could end your suffering instantly is very appealing. I can’t say that I stopped being an atheist, but I see why people need god in one form or another. Otherwise, you are left to the mercies of random chance and a universe that is profoundly disinterested in your continued existence.
But let’s come back down to reality from these heady realms of amateur theology. I waited no more than 10 minutes to see the doctor. He gave me medicinal cocaine to constrict the blood vessels in my nose, which was a strange way to learn that I would hate the sensation of doing coke for fun. As our Canadian medical expert the Weeknd told us, cocaine is also has anesthetic properties, so it numbs your nose and lip. I don’t care for the lack of sensation. I like feeling my face! And then the nice doctor burned the inside of my nose again to cauterize the pesky nasal arteries that were leaking, and plugged my nostril with a stiff cotton log of gauze. Feel free to refer to the gauze log as an extra large nose tampon. And it worked!
Well, mostly. My nose was still finding a way to trickle a tiny amount past the plug, which I found upsetting. So I decreed to my wife that we were returning to the ER. My decree ended up sounding a bit panicky, which understandably upset my wife. We drove back to the ER, waited about 5 minutes, and saw the same doctor. He pulled out the plug, which was moderately uncomfortable, sprayed the area down again using the clotting agent they give to trauma patients with gory serious injuries, burned a little bit more of my nose, and then escalated the plugging plan. If you thought that cramming one extra large nose tampon deep into your nasal cavity was unpleasant, imagine a second one being shoved into the very same hole. And then imagine what happens when those two stiff tubes of gauze absorb blood and snot. They swell.
My poor, poor nostril. As least I could breathe through the other one.
So for 5 long days, I had a perpetual headache from my poor left nasal cavity being over capacity. The pressure was constant and distracting. But there was no additional blood. Hurray for that. I slogged my way through those uncomfortable days and stuffed nose nights, and then it was time to go back to emerg to have the plugs removed. I can recommend that if you have a say in when you go to the emergency room, pick 8AM on a Sunday morning. There was almost no wait at all. They prepped my usual room for me, and a new doctor came in to pull the plug.
Here’s a fun fact: your body will adjust to most ongoing conditions. So if your brain gets used to the pressure of your nose being packed, then it registers a sudden lack of that pressure as pain. I was surprised, in the worst possible way, at how much it hurt having these gross crusty bloody wads of cotton extracted from my poor, battered nose. I think a gave a tiny grunt/scream at the midway point. But they came out, and they did not bring a deluge of fresh blood with them. The lack of bleeding was a relief. The post-removal headache was not enjoyable, but it ended soon enough.
And if you’ve read this far, you’re probably hungry for an answer of why did this sudden nose crisis occur. What mysterious illness or condition turned me into a blood faucet? What caused such a prolonged ordeal? After much thought and investigation with my family doctor, we came to the most reasonable culprit.
My nose got too dry.
That’s it. Really. Dry nose led to the skin breaking, like when your capped lips start to bleed. Bad luck placed the tiny cut in my nose right on top of a fun spot called the Keisselbach plexus (or Little’s area) where several tiny arteries knot together. And then through dumb decisions like blowing my nose or breathing too hard, I subsequently dislodged the scab that had formed to stop the initial nosebleed.
So now I pay too much attention to how dry the air is, and I try to keep my nose adequately lubed up and moist at all times. It’s a strange thing to have as a priority. And just to make things more interesting, my aging body has decided to have seasonal allergies. Tree pollen now gives me a constant post-nasal drip, and irritates the lining of my nose and my sinuses. And what can that irritation cause? A tiny amount of blood in your mucus. So I’m on a low-dose nasal corticosteroid until the the trees stop molesting my immune system. But, and I say this while knocking on all the wood around me, no more nosebleeds since the winter. I’m happy about that, because I like it when my blood stays in my body. It’s easier to keep track of that way.
But as much as this very minor medical episode messed me up and traumatized me, it was manageable because of my wonderful, strong, and supportive wife. A regular Florence Nightingale! She kept me calm and hydrated as we sat in the hospital, and she kept the house and our lives running smoothly even though I was out of action. I am lucky to have a partner who cares for me when I am low. Love that woman!
Chris Loblaw, Author 