Dear Dockers,

You ran an ad on television during the Superbowl this year showing a bunch of pantsless men running through a field chanting, “I wear, I wear, I wear no pants!” At the end, you see a guy in khakis and a voice-over proclaims: “Calling all men: It’s time to wear the pants.”

How clever, I thought at the time, an ad playing on that old idea that “men wear the pants.” I’ll admit, it was kind of cute.

Dockers, “Men Without Pants” (2010)

But then you ruined it, Dockers. You followed up with a print campaign on the same theme that took it in a wrong direction. I copied this down from the streetcar shelter near my apartment a couple weeks ago:

“Once upon a time, men wore the pants, and wore them well. Women rarely had to open doors and little old ladies never crossed the street alone. Men took charge because that’s what they did. But somewhere along the way, the world decided it no longer needed men. Disco by disco, latte by foamy non-fat latte, men were stripped of their khakis and left stranded on the road between boyhood and androgyny. But today, there are questions our genderless society has no answers for. The world sits idly by as cities crumble, children misbehave and those little old ladies remain on one side of the street. For the first time since bad guys, we need heroes. We need grown-ups. We need men to put down the plastic fork, step away from the salad bar and untie the world from the tracks of complacency. It’s time to get your hands dirty. It’s time to answer the call of manhood. It’s time to WEAR THE PANTS.”

First of all, I’ll admit it’s catchy and you actually had me for a minute there. People should be more respectful of the elderly. Yes! People should be courteous and hold doors open for each other. Yes! It is even true — as I’ve personally heard many young women insist – that men need to step up their game again, turn off the XBox, engage with the world around them, and make decisions. But Dockers, then we come to your vague and completely unexplained attack on androgyny and what you call the “genderless society.”

Here we’ve spent decades getting to the point where people are starting to feel comfortable about the specific point on the vast gray area of identity that they occupy and in your small way, Dockers, you are trying to undo that.

Men and women — and those outside and in between — have, more and more, been encouraged to behave and dress as they please. Or, as I believe philosopher Judith Butler would put it, be the artist of their own gender performance. People are generally happier and more loving people when they are free to do this without criticism.

I have no scientific evidence for that claim, but Dockers, doesn’t it ring true? If a culture accepts and loves you for who you are, doesn’t it make sense it would breed the same in return? Cities and families crumble because of narrow-mindedness, Dockers.

Way back in 1984, Paul Westerberg wrote a song called “Androgynous” for his album “Let It Be.” The song was covered by the Crash Test Dummies in 1991 for “The Ghosts That Haunt Me,” the first tape I ever bought. As I explored my sexuality and navigated the treacherous path of what kind of person I would become, this song about the flexibility of gender expression made me believe I had limitless choices and that it was all okay.

Crash Test Dummies, “Androgynous” (1991)

I love in particular the lines of reassurance to the kids who dared push the gender boundaries, some of whom, in the state where I am from, were beat up or even killed for it:

Mirror image, see no damage, see no evil at all
Kewpie dolls and urine stalls will be laughed at
The way you’re laughed at now

And Dockers, notice at the end of the song – if I’m understanding it correctly — Westerberg reverses it so that the guy, Dick, is wearing pants again and Jane is wearing a dress. Naturally, some women — most, probably — will want to wear dresses and some men will want to wear pants. In other words, a lot of people will choose to be feminine or masculine in traditional ways.

Dockers, I am concerned. I found a number of follow-ups of your original commercial on YouTube, more than one of them involving children intrigued by the ad.

JEDiJAWA360, “Alistair wears no pants!” (2010)

I’m not saying this kid has any idea what sort of propaganda he’s learning from your campaign, but Dockers, that’s exactly the problem. I know you need to come up with clever, provocative ads to sell your product — in my own way, I do the same thing all the time — but you have a responsibility to do it conscious of the fact that you are, as a side effect, educating children.

Joan Jett covered “Androgynous” four years ago. In the video to the song, Jett is teaching a bunch of schoolchildren that love can exist between two people comfortable with who they are, no matter how they dress, or act.

Joan Jett, “Androgynous” (2006)

Dockers, after watching that don’t you feel ashamed? Do you still want to make a lot of good people feel bad about themselves?

Dockers, I have to cut this letter off now – I’m about to head out to the disco. But I want to make sure I’ve made my feelings clear:

I think your ad campaign is a piece of shit.

Sincerely,

- Micah Toub

From Star Trek Voyager, Season 4, Episode 12: “The Mortal Coil” (1997)

Like most teenagers, I thought I was immortal. I placed my life in great danger several times — mostly while hurtling my dad’s Jeep Cherokee down the highway at highly illegal speeds — to prove it. And I’m still here. See? Immortal.

I’m a fan of the great science fiction films and television (I’m talking about “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” here), so my contemplations on immortality were not limited just to a feeling of youthful vigor. I considered it literally, sometimes while listening to Enya. I used to say this to people at parties every chance I got: “Just because no one has ever not died doesn’t mean that it is impossible.” Nobody seemed to agree. But I felt in my heart — even when not high — that there was a way to escape death. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

Carl Jung talks about the acquisition of knowledge in this videotaped interview from late in his life: “I don’t believe,” he says. “I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing and then I know it… I don’t need to believe it.”

Carl Jung, (circa 1959)

The evidence Jung presents to explain why he believes — I mean, knows — that there is a “psychical existence beyond time and space” is that people have dreams about the future. In his memoir, Jung gives an example from his own life of how he had a vision while on a train that “the whole sea turned to blood” in the weeks leading up to the start of the First World War.

I don’t know how I feel about Jung’s evidence. I mean, I could come up with some other explanations for these things other than an existence outside of time and space. They could simply be coincidences. And isn’t there always bloodshed happening somewhere in the world? But this doesn’t stop me from agreeing with him that death is not the end. I suppose everyone just has to find their own evidence. As a teen, I had no data to support my own immortality theory, but I have been amassing some explanations over the years.

My current idea is that eternal life can be glimpsed if you consider how time is experienced as slow and fast irrespective of its length. When you go on a trip to a foreign location, for instance, the first day feels like it lasts much longer than a day. You can’t quite put your finger on how long it feels — a week, a month? — but it has an epic quality. There’s something about the novelty of strange streets and sights that makes each second of the day stretch out. But then as the trip goes on, it seems we only have a certain capacity for that kind of intensity of experience and the days start to feel shorter and shorter until by the end, as you settle into a routine and stop gazing at every inch of the world as you pass it, the days feel about the same as the ones back home (The exception is those odds days back home that for whatever reason — tragic or triumphant — take on a similarly epic length).

Just the other day, I saw a movie about fractals that gave me a physical picture of how this might happen. I should mention first of all that I was shocked to find out that fractals were still being used in cutting-edge science (Maybe others know this — I sometimes live in a cave). Anyhow, I hadn’t thought about fractals since I was an immortal teenager wearing t-shirts with fractal prints on them.

A fractal is always the same shape. In other words, when you look at it, it will always look the same. It doesn’t change. But when you look into a fractal, you realize that it is never fully recognizable. Its iterations go on eternally so that you could keep looking into the shape forever (or until you died, if you’re one of those people who do that).

Similarly, a second in time seems to have a beginning and an end when you are looking at it, but if you look into it, its center is a broken ground from which sprouts an unending flowering of possibilities.

Fractal Zoom

Jung almost died from a heart attack in 1944. As he lay in his hospital bed, he had a series of drug-induced near death visions. In one, while floating in space, Jung came to a giant black rock with a door, inside of which sat a Hindu in a white robe. He describes the experience in his memoir:

“As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me — an extremely painful process. Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me. I might also say: it was with me, and I was it.”

When Jung recovered, he says he became depressed being back in what he called the “prison” of real life. Calling to mind the plot of The Matrix, he wrote, “Although my belief in the world returned to me, I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.”

I think what Jung experienced was a true experience of time, where Jung himself — not a boxlike abstract concept (i.e., a minute) — is the unit.

Ingmar Bergman, “Hour Of The Wolf,” (1968)

If you view subjective experience as the measure of a moment, a minute or a second in time does not just have a length, but also a width. The width is the unlimited exploration of consciousness available during that time which, as it fractalizes outward and inward, becomes so great (eternal, actually) so as to make death feel almost non-existent.

I say almost because no matter how far the spiraling possibilities reach, there is still that black nothingness in the center of the fractal towards which every one of those possibilities reaches but never touches. Could that be death? I have to admit that I don’t know yet what’s down there in that hole.

I suppose I’ll only know when I die, if that happens.

- Micah Toub

Chauncey Billups, “CB: The Beginning” (2009)

Dear Chauncey,

You probably don’t remember me, but we went to middle school together in Denver. You were the number one star basketball player at the school and I was its number two spelling bee qualifier. Back then, you were already a foot taller than everyone else. And, as if to rub it in, you wore your hair another foot above your head like a crown.

I used to head out to the basketball courts at lunch to play pickup with the boys who gathered there. We were a disorganized swarm of tangled arms and legs, all of us running at once after the ball, not even attempting established formational strategies, shouting “yo momma” insults as a form of offense. You’d stroll by sometimes, dribbling your ball, heading to wherever it is that future NBA starting point guards go during lunch. One time, we saw you walking by and called out to you.

“Hey Chauncey! Play with us! C’mon, play with us, just for a little bit.”

You said no, but we begged you so you finally agreed under the condition that it would be you against the rest. The fifteen or twenty of us laughed, but then proceeded to be schooled by you as you spun around us, leapt above us, and shamed us by passing to yourself through our legs. You made all your shots and blocked all of ours. Most of the time, you stole the ball from us before we even made it to half court. We didn’t dare slag your mother, either.

That year, when I was threatened and assaulted by a kid in social studies, you took him aside and told him not to fuck with me ever again. I was afraid to come back to school until you did that. (Maybe you remember this, though I doubt it was the only time you stepped in to keep order in the school).

Now you’re a four-time All-Star, and won yourself both the MVP award and a championship ring with the Detroit Pistons back in 2004. Over the years, I’ve watched you on television when I got the chance. You can drive to the hole with the best of them and you can sink three-pointers in your sleep, but you pass more often than most players who possess those skills. I’m not the first one to mention this — it’s talked about often. You’re unselfish, a leader who brings out performance in your teammates. This is the reason you might not make the Hall of Fame, but also why the teams you play on are so good.

NBA, “Chauncey Billups: Career Playoff Top 10″ (2009)

When I watch you play, I am proud like a father but also admire you like a son. A piece of you is me when you play. Not your shooting arm or pivoting foot -- I’m not that arrogant -- but maybe one of your sweat glands?

Chauncey Billups, “Chauncey Billups Intro At The Palace” (2009)

You were traded back to Denver in the 2008/09 season. You’re playing for our hometown. My father and I celebrated your return by getting tickets to a game when I was home for the holidays. It wasn’t your best game. You played okay, but we got our asses whooped by LeBron James, still with the Cleveland Cavaliers. After that, though, you helped take the Nuggets on a crazy win streak and all the way to the conference Finals. And now that you’ve been with the team for longer, I think taking the Cavs down in a rematch next year will be no sweat.

Anyways, I just wanted to write a letter to tell you you’re one of my heroes. You’re two days younger than me — and you shaved off your crown — but I still look up to you.

Your fan,

Micah

- Micah Toub