He may not have been the “best” Bond, but he was my Bond, the one I grew up with.

My parents used to take me to his movies regularly, and it was always a thrill. The iconic, deadly cool theme music, the risque opening in which you could kind-of-and-kind-of-not see naked women, and then the whole camp fantasy of being a handsome and unflappable spy– it was all immensely appealing to a boy on the cusp of puberty.

Kind of like a Wes Anderson film, the Bond movies starring Roger Moore were a child’s vision of the adult world — a comic book fantasia made manifest, but one that promised to be safe, free from the dreary weight of all the unimaginable day-to-day realities that lay ahead.

I was 13 when Moonraker came out. Jaws, a lurching behemoth with steel fangs, was the primary villain, and he was awesome. At the end of the film, after Bond had coasted to victory and Jaws was pulling himself out of the rubble of some foiled plan, a tiny blonde– busty, pigtailed and bespectacled– appeared to help him. Jaws turns and smiles, his metal teeth glinting, and she smiles back. It’s love at first sight, and they then exit into some charming and eccentric future together.

What I remember, and what everybody I have asked remembers about this scene, is that the woman ( Dolly) had braces. This was what connected the two. In spite of their size difference, they were soul mates in braces. It was the sort of thing a 13 year-old kid, the type of kid who might actually have had braces, and that the movie was trying to appeal to, instantly related to. All of us watching, in the midst of our tortured, monstrous throes of puberty, hoped to find a Dolly, too. It was something that resonated deeply and stayed with us.

Anyhow, in returning to the YouTube clip of the scene, I saw that it was clear that Dolly did not have braces.

I mean, I had been fucking positive she had braces.

This braces-less reality seemed utterly impossible to me, like discovering I was a Replicant and not a human at all, but there it was.

No braces.

Anyhow, if like me, you remember Hannibal Lecter saying, “Hello, Clarice,” or Darth Vader intoning, “Luke, I am your father,” or Sally Field shouting, “You like me, you really like me!” while accepting an Oscar, then you have apparently experienced what I have just discovered is known as the Mandela Effect.

Now what the Mandela Effect is, is complicated, Internet complicated, and it’s layered in the sort of conspiratorial proofs that only online culture can provide.

Dive deep, if you wish:

Without tunnelling into the rabbit holes surrounding this phenomena, I will simply say that what clearly emerges from all this is that our memory, be it individual or collective, is incredibly unreliable. Sometimes, what we believe to be true, what we know in our bones to be true, what even our tribe agrees is true, is not true. Memory is mysterious, a product of our consciousness that is constantly being constructed and revised, existing as a work in progress rather than some immutable photograph we can reference at will. Everything is in flux, and the truth, as unpalatable as it is, is that we know nothing for sure, and are very, very easily manipulated. In the furious age of Trump, it’s wise to keep this in mind before launching a scorched earth assault on anything that might contradict our world view. We would all benefit from a little less certainty and a little more kindness, I think.

This took place over the killing of Cecil the lion. This particular animal, one of the most famous and iconic in Africa, was lured out of the animal sanctuary in which he lived by a hunting party that had tied a dead animal to a car, and later shot with a crossbow by an American dentist (Walter Palmer), and then after two days of bleeding and being tracked, was shot and killed by the same dentist with a high-powered gun, and then left, beheaded and skinned.

It was a big story, and it completely dominated all of my social media streams. People were heartbroken (Jimmy Kimmel wept on his late night talk show while talking about it) and generally, the public was mad enough to club the dentist to death. Threatened from all quarters and publicly shamed, Palmer closed down his practice and went into hiding.

In the midst of this raging solidarity of hate, many people took the time to point out that other atrocities, many unimaginable, were taking place in the world, too, and maybe we could pay the same attention that we do to an animal being killed, to a person being killed? I mean, in terms of popular outrage, Sandra Bland, a black woman who mysteriously died in police custody after committing a traffic violation, was running a distant second to Cecil the lion.

It’s a meaningful observation, that, but I don’t think we should jump to the conclusion that the public values the life of Cecil over Bland.

Every single person on the planet can be angry and disgusted at the thought of a rich, white American, a dentist of all things– a person who makes fake smiles for a living– going over to a poor continent, and then killing, for his pleasure alone, an awe-inspiring creature that’s both a beautiful national symbol and resource.

The horror is plain for all to see. It’s a simple story upon which everybody can agree, and it isn’t as politically toxic or geopolitically complex as racism, police brutality and entitlement, or Boko Haram. You don’t need to be informed to have an opinion on Cecil’s demise—what happened was awful and wrong. There was unanimity on this issue and it wasn’t politicized. For a moment, there was a debate-free zone on the Internet, which I think was a huge relief. For once, people could feel that they were right without having to engage in a long, complex debate, without actually having to defend their position.

We process what we’re capable of, and this was an uncomplicated story that was easily digested and then agreeably shared amongst peers. It’s not the most important story of the day, but it has great symbolic weight, and like an emoji, is breezily transmitted without the necessity of much background context or rumination.

The outpouring on Facebook isn’t evidence of a preference for the superficial over the substantive, or of some political polarity, but of people finding agreement, even celebrating it, and existing in a cease fire for a moment. And in this place where right and wrong are universally agreed upon, they find that their voice– which doesn’t carry very far in the humdrum prose of their daily lives– is now amplified, becoming powerful and vivid, strong enough to go places their bodies will never travel.

I wanted to see the pictures, even though I clearly understood that they were stolen property. My desire to see Jennifer Lawrence nude was greater than my moral aversion to invading and violating her privacy. The Internet, as it always does, enabled my reptile brain, and in a way in which it’s very likely that I won’t suffer any consequences for my transgressions.

I don’t think twice about watching pirated TV shows or movies, have no qualms about downloading music without paying for it, and even though I work as a writer, I don’t pay for any subscriptions and get irritated whenever I’m asked to jump through a few hoops in order to get access to content. I guess I feel entitled, and instead of viewing things as private property, I see the online world as communal, shared property, imaging a friend loaning me something like it was a book or an album. My relationship to this material is ephemeral and abstract, and instead of taking solid form and becoming a part of my physical landscape, it passes through me and then drifts back into the fog from whence it came, having more in common with memory than actuality.

When it comes to the stolen nude photos I think I told myself that there was an element of performance to them and that they were the quasi-intentional outcropping of the exhibitionism that is celebrity and were part of continuing seduction, and that they kind of wanted them to be seen, even if this was clearly false.

The truth is that I see celebrities as a brand or corporation—an entity that sells rather than a person that actually lives. They exist as a kind of avatar, a very conscious construct, something symbolic, like a myth, and although our attention is constantly drawn to them, we will never know them. They’re projections, both of our longing and our resentments, and this created persona absorbs all of our vitriol and love, until the actual person at the core of it is destroyed and a new star has to emerge for public adulation and sacrifice.

The Internet accelerates this process. The celebrity is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and our appetite for them has never been so ferocious and predatory. We want all of them, all the time, and every once in awhile the real person behind the curtain gets revealed—vulnerable, flawed, even pedestrian or banal– and we all have to step back and ask ourselves what exactly it is we’re looking at, and what exactly the cost of that might be.

It was not UPS handing me a big box of money, as I had hoped, but a young man and a young woman, shivering and smiling. God had sent them. I rolled my eyes and gave them the “Oh, come on!” look, and then the man began to speak quickly. He handed me a flier and invited me to come to a talk at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses on the weekend.

“I’m a fag,” I said bluntly.

“Many struggle with such feelings,” said the man.

“Oh, I don’t struggle, I embrace those feelings, I embrace them hard and frequently,” I responded.

“You should come to our event, we would welcome you,” the woman quietly said.

“But you don’t welcome homosexuality in your church, do you?’ I asked.

She looked at me with dewy, hopeful eyes, “Our ministry is a ministry of hope for anyone who is seeking to serve Jehovah. Jesus loves EVERYONE, including homosexuals, lesbians and transvestites. He is the Great Healer.”

The man stepped in, “However, Scripture is clear that God intended for sexuality to remain within the boundaries of one-man, one-woman marriage, but a homosexual or lesbian relationship isn’t any more condemned by God than a heterosexual relationship outside the bonds of marriage.”

“God sure is funny about sex. Why do you think he never took a wife? I’ve always wondered about that. I’ve had my suspicions, you know? It just seems that all of his rules, especially against the gays, seems a little over-compensatory.”

“If you come to our event, all will be explained,” he said.

“Will brunch be served? 10:00 is pretty early for me on a Saturday. Also, will there be quizzes. I like quizzes. I do brain training games everyday!”

The woman piped up again, “There won’t be any quizzes, but there will be coffee and donuts.”

“I’ve got to hand it to God, he really does know how to put on a classy event. But look, Jehovah knows all and never makes a mistake, so why would he make me this way, with the feelings, the strong, strong feelings that I have and act on a couple of times everyday?”

“Science is starting to reveal that when a baby is growing in the womb, certain chemicals are released that enable the baby to discern the moods of the mother and sense whether she wants the child. This sense of alienation confuses the child which is why they move to homosexuality later in life,” the woman said.

“So, it’s the mother’s fault, of course! Now it makes sense, and look, just so you know, everybody online thinks that the Jesus on your fliers looks exactly like Kenny Loggins. It’s become a bit of an Internet meme.”

And then I closed the door.

“Do you have air conditioning?” I asked.

“Dah,” he responded in a blunt, unfriendly East European accent.

“Would you mind turning it on, please?”

“It is expensive for me to run AC, it take more energy, you know? So I keep windows open for breeze, OK?”

“Look, I’m sorry, but I’m dying in this heat, and the regulations say that you have to turn it on if the customer asks for it, right?”

The driver, irritated, snorted.

“What?” I asked, also irritated.

“You are weak, little man who can’t take sunshine?”

“Yes, that’s right. I am a weak, little man who can’t take the sunshine,” I sighed.

The driver pretended to laugh, shook his head and said something in a language that I presumed to be Russian.

“Have it your way, little mister boss.”

He then powered up the windows and contemptuously snapped on the AC.

We drove in black silence for the next five minutes.

I hated his fucking guts.

I hoped his native country got obliterated at the Olympics.

Food poisoning.

Nightmares with toys.

No Internet.

Being dunked-on while playing pick-up.

All these pestilences I wished upon him.

As I sat there concentrating my hatred, I began to pick at my fingernails. This is a habit that manifests when I’m angry, and in this case I managed to peel off several crescents of nails, which I then stored in my pocket. This detritus felt disgusting so I opened the window and tried to throw them out of the car.

The driver, his furious eyes staring at me from the rear-view mirror, shouted, “You demand AC like little dictator and now you put window down! You have no manners in my home! You waste my money, it is now five dollars extra!”

“C’mon, don’t be such a prick, I was just throwing a piece of fingernail out the window. Would you rather I left if on the seat?”

“You are disgusting man.”

“Like you’ve never picked at your fingernails.”

“You know who you are? You are like Gollum from The Hobbit. That is you.”

“That tattoo of a bear you have on the back of your neck looks gay.”

The driver slammed on the brakes.

“Gollum throw body waste out of my car, I throw Gollum out of my car. Get out now or I break you into pieces.”

“Really, are you serious?”

The driver looked at me, his eyes softening.

“Maybe I am not myself. My boy is sick and the doctors say he might lose hearing. It is awful and I cannot sleep, imaging his world without music, and then people like you come in and complain about small, small thing and I blow top. You be quiet and sit still, say nothing and I will take you home, but remember, say nothing!”

“Chef, what’s the most important attribute for a young person to have to succeed in the hospitality industry?”

“Chef, would you recommend practical experience working or a diploma for those hoping to enter the restaurant field?”

Stuff like that.

This is the question I sent in:

“What is the absolute worst, most explosive, blood-thirsty battle you ever had in a kitchen?  I once had a bowl of Cheerios broken over my head. Sugar really hurts when it finds it’s way into an open wound.”

I should also let you know that the Chef decided who sent in the best question, with that person winning a $50 gift certificate to his restaurant.

Naturally, I expected to win, but I did not, receiving this email from the host of the event:

“Mike:

The Chef thought your question was stupid and that you were just looking for attention. He said people like you are “all hat, no cattle,” and awarded the gift certificate to Meredith, who used several Italian phrases in her query.”

Clearly, the Chef was an insecure moron. My question was obviously the best and he probably just couldn’t take another Alpha Male in the chat room, and so I sent him this letter:

Chef Dong:

You are stupid (on so many levels) to award Meredith the gift certificate based on her question from Wednesday’s chat. Really, all it takes to impress you are a few Italian phrases? How does this one work?

Siete una ferita aperta scopante.

Nice, eh?

No matter, I’m not writing to address the absurd injustice of your decision or extract revenge for your insults, but to warn you about Meredith. She is a bringer of cockroaches. She keeps a couple in a urine sample jar she hides in her purse and at an opportune moment during her meal she will release them, usually sticking them in a salad or some other vegetable that other diners will suspect came from Mexico.

She will kick up a big fuss, yelling and perhaps even fainting. I once saw her take off a high heel shoe and start banging it on the table pretending to try to kill this pet cockroach. She does this so that you, in a blind panic, will comp her meal and give her a free liter of house wine. You invite the darkness by awarding her the gift certificate for her stupid question. She is a curse. The sun will hide for years if she wins this contest.

There is still time to reconsider, so reconsider.

Michael Murray

In March, over 200, 000 students marched in the streets of Montreal. That’s an awful lot of people, and it warrants some respectful consideration. Personally, when students protest I pay attention. I’m middle-aged now, and I like to know what they think, how they experience the rapidly evolving world, to which we (those generations that came of age before the Internet) are cultural migrants. Because of this, I try to move toward them when it comes to understanding an issue, I want to see it through their eyes rather than try to get them to see it through the eyes of my peers. I want to understand where they’re coming from rather than tell them where they’re going, and I do this for all sorts of reasons, but primarily because I think it will make me a better, more empathetic person.

In the last 15 years the world has changed more than it has in all the centuries it was built upon. The Internet is a more important invention than the wheel, and it’s entirely reasonable to assume that the model by which we’ve successfully lived for 100 years, might not be the model by which we’ll successfully live for the next 100 years. The seeds of a movement like Occupy, that seems so disorganized, loud and dirty to many, will very likely bear revolutionary fruit, and I think that this seismic shift in the way we think about our society, is a wave that’s breaking right over the heads of those who dismiss it as aimless, bongo-playing dilettantism. As Fran Liebowitz said, “ In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country capitalism triumphed over democracy.”

We need to think about that, and perhaps respond to it.

My cousins are students in Montreal and they’re brilliant and so well informed that they’ll make your head spin. And what they are doing in striking and taking to the streets is a purely democratic act. A lot of their money is invested by the government in a way that they don’t agree with and they’re asking the government to redirect that money toward something that they agree with—education.  I want to live in a country where post-secondary education is affordable to people. They think of that as a core value. What is wrong with that?

As Dave Eggers said, “The truth is not two-sided, it’s round.”

The mocking tone of certainty issuing forth from elders on this issue lacks grace, empathy and hope, and perhaps even worse, it lacks imagination. I think that we should see what happens, how the students proceed and what goals they might achieve, before jumping in and telling them that they’re wrong and that when we went to school we had to walk 15 miles in the snow.