by Don Hall

The laughter at my expense was not the kind of guffawing that accompanies a sense of genial ribbing but of Biff Tannen cracking up at the awkward geekiness of George McFly.

"What do you think queer means, Don?"

"I always thought queer meant gay."

Laughter. "No. Queer means refusing to accept the binary in sex."

"Isn't that bisexual?"

Cackles. "No. Bisexual is having a sexual attraction to both biological sexes."

"Who the fuck decided that? Was there a memo sent out?"

The evolution of language is, taken as a long tail concept, natural. When the Miriam Webster Dictionary enters finna (contraction. DIALECT•US, verb. finna: going to; intending to. "I'm finna make a scene") one has to grudgingly accept the fact. It is both the codifying of slang as standard and the pushing the envelope of common dialect. It can get confusing but it is as normal as language itself.

The term fragile is very popular in 2021 but I'm not certain the people who use it as a political label have an understanding of what it means. The redefinition seems to be a synonym for defensive but that isn't even close to the original so it doesn't play. Considering how loaded the term has become politically, I'd suggest we take a look at the pre-DiAngelo meaning and embrace it some before we continue forcing the evolution.

Back to that handy tome of mutual agreement of terms, the dictionary has a few definitions of fragile:"easily broken or damaged", "flimsy or insubstantial; easily destroyed.", and "not strong or sturdy; delicate and vulnerable".

A nine year old boy is enticed to have penetrative sex with his fourteen year old babysitter one afternoon while his little sister watches Joe Namath as "C.C. Ryder" on the television a room away. 

This is either molestation or an uncomfortably early rite of passage. The argument can be made that a nine year old cannot give consent but that's not how I remember it. A more fragile person might see this experience as traumatic. He might internalize shame and let the shame fester until he finally explodes like a liter of Diet Coke and a Mento tab. An anti fragile person might see it as no different than playing in the streets when the sewers back up the neighborhood becomes a river in the rain. No stigma, no shame, no harm.

The anti fragile adult is going to have a happier life if not the attention lauded upon a fragile victim of circumstances beyond his control.

I was a latchkey kid.

We lived in an apartment complex on the less than affluent side of town. Mom worked several jobs and the step-dad at the time was a preening, disco-dancing domestic abuser. As such, I found myself out and about without a lot of safety nets in place. I played in a septic ditch just on the outer parameter of the complex. On the other side was an abandoned housing development and I frequently went over there alone to practice my karate (which I thought I was learning from watching David Carradine in Kung Fu, a popular episodic featuring a white man posing as an Asian man who saved people with his peaceful but forceful side kicks). I’d kick holes in the drywall pretending it was comprised of bad guys.

On the north side was, in my mind, a forest but in reality was just a bunch of trees in several abandoned lots. Whenever I ran away from home (a feat that usually lasted until I was tired or hungry) I would go to my forest and “read” the tattered copies of Playboy and Penthouse I had stolen from the aforementioned step-parent.

To the south was a playground for the kids in the complex. A rickety swing set, a teeter-totter, and a broken merry-go-round surrounded by garbage dumpsters. A cursory examination of the dumpsters—a routine activity for a vagabond third grader—revealed a coterie of used hypodermic needles, marijuana roaches, empty liquor bottles and fast food trash.

It’s likely that parents reading this have already crossed themselves or knocked on wood in deference to the fact that their children would never be put in these positions. That their children are safe.

One day, as I had exhausted myself from kicking holes into drywall villains, I headed to the playground. There was no one else around and I decided that I wanted to swing but not on the actual rubber strap. I unhooked the strap from the hefty S-hook it hung from and grabbed it like Tarzan on a vine. I started to swing around in circles holding as tightly as I could to the chain.

Slowly, I began to slide down until the S-hook punctured my white jeans and then into my scrotum. I felt some discomfort and looked down and saw blood on my crotch but I couldn’t disengage. I was hooked, by my ballsack, to the chain. I panicked and did my best to scramble up the chain but the S-hook was firmly in there and the chain just followed me up.

I screamed for help. No help arrived. I struggled and the blood started running down my left pant leg, flowering out like a Rorschach. It seemed I was hanging there for hours but the reality was more likely a few minutes until the hook, now greased with blood, slid out of my nuts and I fell to the dirt. 

Leaping up, I dropped trou on the spot to inspect the damage but there was so much blood that I couldn’t see what was actually a small leaking hole. I cried. I squalled. With my pants around my knees, I ran home.

I smashed into the front door screaming bloody murder that my balls were bleeding. My mother, shocked by the sight of her 9-year-old kid, reddened pants around his knees, crotch covered in blood, and in high hysteria (I mean, who make among us wouldn’t be?), laughed out loud. A giggle turned into a laugh transforming to a barking guffaw.

The more dramatic I was about it, the harder she laughed. Out of shock, out of horror, out of knowing how melodramatic her son was prone to be. She giggled as she washed my junk off and saw the tiny hole. She giggled episodically as she put an ice pack on it and tossed me in the car to go to the emergency room. She stopped laughing by the time we reached the hospital and I received two stitches on the underside of my underside.

A more fragile person might grow up with this experience in desperate need to pay someone to listen to his trauma.

"My mother laughed at my bleeding scrotum!" he'd wail as the therapist did her best to stifle her own laughter. He might write a book much later after his antidepressants and struggle session with his mother commenced entitled "Men and The Mothers Who Giggled at Their Nuts" and an article in The Atlantic "Incels and Their Reasons."

An anti fragile person might see this as pretty fucking funny.

In 1992, I was mugged just outside the Granville Redline stop in Chicago. It was around 2:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning. I had just played a gig on the Southside with a big band known as The Outcasts and, still in my tuxedo, decided to walk the block to an all-night diner for some breakfast when three young black men hit me with a two-by-four and then proceeded to kick the shit out of me on the sidewalk.

They stole $14.00 in cash and a check for $200.00 from the gig.

Bruised but not broken, when I told the police that I was mugged by three young black guys and what were the chances I'd get my money back, they laughed. Not like Biff Tannen but more along the lines of Denzel in Training Day to a naive Ethan.

Later, when I met with Gil, the drummer and band leader, to have him cut me another check, Gil muttered as he canceled the first "N****rs are the fucking worst." It would have been cause for some sort of reckoning except that Gil was black.

A fragile mind might find himself going over and over the incident, blaming himself, blaming black men everywhere, blaming the cops. 

An anti fragile mind understands that shit happens and you can't dwell too much on it because that means you're spending a lot of time thinking about shit.

The more time one spends dwelling on shit, the worse the place smells. It's like living with five cats. At some point, you have no idea that your apartment stinks like cat asshole but your Tinder date sure does.

Commonsense Media has polled some info out and it seems that the kids are wallowing in catshit.

23% of 14- to 17-year-olds say they "often" came across racist comments on social media in 2020 — nearly double the number in 2018 (12%).

"Sadly, but not surprisingly, the teens and young adults who are most likely to be affected by such content are also most likely to encounter it — or recognize and remember it," says the study, which was done in partnership with Hopelab and the California Health Care Foundation.

Black young people are more likely than whites to see racist comments "often" (34% vs 23%). LGBTQ+ youth are more than twice as likely than non-LGBTQ+ youth to encounter homophobic comments (44% vs 18%). Females are more likely to encounter sexist and body shaming posts than males.

On top of all this feline fecal material, it turns out that both actual mental health issues as well as the frequently self-diagnosed PTSD cases are dramatically on the rise. Where, in my formative years, comparisons of how many push-ups one could do was common, today's kids compare anti-depressant cocktails.

Under almost any definition, this is the behavior of fragility. Fragile like a Fabergé Egg in the back of a pickup truck on a dirt road going 75 miles an hour.

Surrounded by catshit, constantly seeing the injury you're looking for and thus finding it everywhere, always feeling aggrieved and victimized. What the fuck can you do except feel like you need to be bathed in Bactine just to survive life's never-ending abrasions?

First, decide what's more important than your feels. 

Most people let their every waking moment be dictated by feelings—both theirs and everyone else's. This is a one-way path to thinner skin, gentler sacks, and a general inability to live in a world outside of an echo chamber that has been hermetically sealed.

Becoming anti fragile is the process of understanding that there are a lot of things more important than your feelings. Romulans are fragile; Vulcans are not. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t have the feels—just don’t let them make your decisions for you. It might feel great to scream at the obnoxious woman at the Walgreen’s counter but it’s smarter to mind your business and buy your condoms and Zagnut bar while shutting the fuck up.

Second, get better at feeling bad and keeping it to yourself.

Just like most people allow their lives to be led by the nose by their feelings, most people think they are somehow important. They aren’t. You aren’t. The way skin thickens up is by taking some hits and learning that there are far worse things than being insulted, micro-aggressed, or shamed publicly. Grow a sack and a sense of proportion.

Finally, as the Stoics go, assume you have something to learn in every interaction rather than you have something to teach. I mean, who the fuck are you? To most people, you aren’t anyone of note so suck on the bitter teat of humility and join the throng, kiddo.

As Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī once wrote "Yesterday I was clever so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise so I am changing myself."

Be wise because clever people write for McSwenis and those assholes suck.