Exaltation from Above

It was a sultry July night and the static in the air was up to no good. Every occupant of the tenement pushed opened their windows into the dark indigo night hoping for a respite from the heat, a change in the mood, but there was no breeze to speak of, just a dull hum and the occasional frenzied cackle carried up from the street. The guy in the unit upstairs took this opportunity to stand by his window and slowly unravel an entire roll of packing tape. Without pause, slowly unraveling the tape as well as the rest of us.

“Hey man!” I yelled up to him through the stone-thick vermin-infested ceiling, “What are you DOING?” But the tape roll ran its course for the next 40 minutes straight. Only the distant intense wailing of a small child broke my tape-gun fixation. I wondered, was that child the guilty party behind the rotten diaper garbage stench that filled the entire building today? And just as the riotous clucking of the nocturnal tree-fowl heightened to an unbearable crescendo, I realized, we all die alone and this may be the last and most sublime sound that will enter my human ear holes before my corpse is shucked clean of its soul by an almighty demon god. [inspired by true events]

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Typical mustache-themed pollution found among the thriving aquatic plants in Oakland’s Lake Merritt

Baby hipster

Fake mustache tolerance runs rampant

Oakland is the only city in California listed on the notorious “America’s Most Mustache Friendly Cities” report. Hence, we predictably encounter the detritus of the inexplicably still-popular parody: the fake mustache. The use of the fake mustache attempts to mock society, yet at the same time blindly follows its hackneyed fads. The paper backing shown above had been pulled from a stick-on mustache that was undoubtedly attached to the tender upper lip of an innocent toddler, who I assume was also donning a hoodie and sunglasses. This whole charade just goes to show that no toddler is truly innocent and that young Oakland parents want their kids to look like the Unabomber, or just porn stars. Either way, the babies are exhibited as the farcical caricature of well-manicured sexually mature men—the male counterpart and precursor to the immoral abomination we know as the pageant girl.

Sexy (Asian?) baby

Sexy baby parties

a.k.a. male infant

To those parents, congratulations! You have a sexy lil man as a baby! I know you reveled in launching that miniature grown-up man from your womb. America loves a sexy baby, so thank you for contributing to this perverse movement. However, if you knew that your baby was fully facial-haired in utero you would have ripped him from your loins and torn him piecemeal, shrieking like a banshee, and you probably wouldn’t have thrown a mustache-themed Lil Man party for him. What if he offers mustache rides to all the little pageant girls at the party? Try to hold back from sexualizing your stylish child. If you’re fortunate, he will eventually grow up to be the Big Man of your dreams:

Your baby, full grown

Lil Women?

Alternately, the female version of Lil Men could be Little Women, which summons images from Louisa May Alcott’s famed Victorian novel about four young girls who fussed about their hair and lamented over their poverty. Their dear mother “Marmee” tells the girls, “If Jo would only wear a fake mustache, she could get a real job and support us useless womenfolk.”

In adult society, the faux whiskers are applied in an empty, slapdash manner. Lest we forget what happens when such an unexceptional object receives high ironic status and is bandied about willy-nilly:

Woman wakes from surgery to find doctors put moustache and teardrop stickers on her face

Finally, you’re welcome for not posting any images of real babies with fake mustaches. But please, when in public, pick up your mustache-shaped litter so the ducks don’t choke to death on your self-adhesive charm.

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