Man Rules
by TC
It's like coming to town just after the carnival left.
No bearded fat ladies, no geeks that bite the heads off chickens, and no hootchie mommas that turn into gorillas. Just the faint smell of cotton candy interspersed with vomit and the grimy hot dog wrappers that stick to my shoes as I walk the empty streets.
The thing is, I get these moneymaking ideas, but I always fail to act on them and somebody else ends up reaping the rewards. I'm always too late. It's like coming to town after the carnival left.
The spork? That ingenious hybrid born of spoon and fork? Mine. Didn't act on it, though. Now there's some spork millionaire driving around in a limo filled with supermodels all nibbling on caviar...with silver sporks, no less.
Bastard!
The snausage? The brilliant blend of snack and sausage that fills the dreams and bellies of pampered dogs everywhere? Coulda' been mine.
Shoulda' been mine. Now there's a snausage mogul living in a snausage-shaped mansion somewhere.
Usurper!
Then there was that one Friday night at NASA back in the mid 80's when I took a rubber gasket intended for the Space Shuttle — an O Ring, I think they called it — and slid it onto my member to ensure a more sturdy erection. It tore a little but it worked great. I put it back in the bin and I think they inadvertently ended up using it in one of the shuttles — I forget which one — but the point is, I could have become a cockring kingpin if I'd had just a little more initiative.
I coulda' been a contender, instead of da' bum, which is what I am.
There have been plenty of other examples, but none more stinging than the one that's sporking my liver right now.
If you've been to a bookstore lately, you've probably noticed the slue of Testosterone-fueled books that are peppering the manscape. Manliness, or at least the attempt to define manliness, is
in.
First there was something called
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, followed by Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield's scholarly but largely unreadable treatise,
Manliness. The latest is
The Alphabet of Manliness by "Maddox." The latter shot to the No. 1 spot on Amazon two months before it was released, merely on word-of-mouth.
While it hasn't stayed No. 1, it's floated around mostly in the top 20 or 30. Today, ten days after it was released, it's No. 25; still damn good.
Excuse me, but that could have been me. I coulda' been vying for number one with Ann Coulter and Tim Russert and Al Gore and even the Dog Whisperer!
Redefining manhood has been my bread and butter since 1998. In the span of time between then and now, I've written some 300
Atomic Dog columns, a good many of them having to do with manhood. If I'd just compiled a few of what I thought were the best of them,
I could have been floating in the Amazon.com ether!
I could have been basking in the admiring glow of women because, as you know, chicks go for writers!
Sure, the chicks are pimply with smudgy glasses and no makeup and make you recite Elizabethan poetry before they let you pull down their over-sized high-waisted panties, but they're still women, by God! I could have been gnawing on the big piece of chicken that Chris Rock says is the reward of the Alpha Male!
But noooooo. I was too slow. When I do get around to compiling the book,
The New York Times will likely say something like this:
A latecomer to the tired genre known as "fratire," TC shows an occasional glimmer of poignancy, but ultimately he missed the boat; he came to town after the carnival left. He deserves no big piece of chicken.
I'll begrudgingly agree, but I'll offer a defense. I'd tell them that most of those books, including the
Alphabet, define a
false masculinity; they
spoofmanhood. Maddox extols pirates, lumberjacks, farting, quickies, and beef jerky, while vegetarians, hippies, and Mozart have earned his disdain.
Chuck Norris, as one might expect of this type of book, gets a lot of ink, most of it being more examples of the Bunyanesque stories that are all over the Internet:
Chuck Norris has no mother, as crawling out of a vagina is unbecoming of a man of his stature.
Okay, that's pretty damn funny, but I think there's room for some serious or semi-serious discussion of manhood. Sure I get pretty puerile in my articles, but there's almost always some sort of take home message (I hope).
And while I can understand and appreciate and echo Maddox's sentiments towards old-world manly virtues that might be exemplified by lumberjacks, there's no way I'm gonna' condemn old Wolfgang Amadeus for being a fop. Nosiree, Mozart gets a pass. God not only touched that boy's head with genius, he gave him a
noogie of genius. I don't care if Mozart sashayed and ate soy, he gets a pass; genius
in general gets a pass.
But Maddox isn't the only one making a joke of manhood. It's all over the place. The Harvard marketing boys over at Miller Lite have given us "The Men of the Square Table" where Burt Reynolds and who I presume are B-list celebrities, including the hiker who hacked off his arm with a jackknife to escape a fallen boulder, debate various "man rules" concerning dating and drinking beer.
Man Rule: If you cut off an arm and earn the respect of the world, don't blow it all by making a series of lame commercials. Cut off the other arm if you must, but escape that Square Table and preserve at least a shred of dignity.
Then there are the Burger King commercials and the TGI Friday's commercials that extol gluttony, a supposedly manly virtue. And while
Maxim magazine and the rest of the lad mags cater to "manly" things, they don't seek to elevate manhood — just cater to its basest elements.
It's all piffle. Piffle I say!
Granted, there ought to be some real man rules and there are; they're just not mentioned very often. And the funny thing is, we all
know what they are. Any one of you could have written the following list:
Have Some Guts.
No, I'm not talking about having the guts to skydive or kill a bar on this tree — -although it's nice to have that kind of courage — but the guts to speak out against injustice, take a stand for something you believe in, or do whatever it takes to make things better for you or someone else.
Believe in Something.
I don't know what it is you believe in. It could be a litany of things like Crash David in
Bull Durham:
I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, long foreplay, show tunes, and that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, I believe that there oughtta be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astro-turf and the designated hitter, I believe in the "sweet spot", voting every election, soft core pornography, chocolate chip cookies, opening your presents on Christmas morning rather than Christmas eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last for 7 days.
Regardless, a man's got to have a core belief system based on
something to help him filter all the input.
Stop Whining.
Whatever happened to suffering in silence? Especially when it's not really suffering. If the kid behind the counter forgot to give you extra pickles, suck it up. If you don't like the taste of vegetables or cottage cheese or tuna, don't go around looking for some food
messiah who can tell you how to tasty them up. Just eat it, you big pussy.
Have Some Dignity.
Don't light your farts, paint your face, or scream like an idiot whenever there's a TV camera around. You're the product of two billion years of evolution. Act like it.
Have Some Integrity.
Hey lunchmeat, if you make a promise or say you're going to do something, do it.
Don't Be Cocky.
It's okay to have a healthy ego, but don't get too cocky, kid. You might be the toughest mother on your block or the smartest guy in your Battlestar Galactica club, able to recite the production date of every episode of Battlestar Galactica, but there are lots of other blocks and lots of other Battlestar Galactica clubs in the world and chances are, there are a whole lot of people tougher or more knowledgeable about Battlestar Galactica than you.
Respect Everyone...At Least a Little.
Scrutinize everyone and any thing and you're likely to find some blemishes, some underdeveloped body parts, but that's okay.
It's not all bullshit coming at you through the airwaves, the Internet, and the magazines and newspapers. While everyone may be full of shit to a certain degree, they can all, to a man, teach you something.
Don't Screw Your Friends. For That Matter, Don't Screw Anybody.
Nuff said.
Have Some Guts Regarding Women.
If you see something so juicy it makes you forget to breathe for a moment, seize the moment. Say something, anything. Give your number or email address. Ask her to have a cup of coffee. Tell her your uncle drives a meat delivery truck and if she meets you at 4AM at the corner of Elm and Pinehurst, you'll flag his truck down and make sure she gets a discount on some ham loaf.... anything!
Take a shot.
Keep taking shots and sooner or later, it starts to pay off and you'll have something around all the time that makes you forget to breathe, at which point you'll have to start carrying around one of those asthma inhalers.
Be Open Minded.
You're pretty much the sum of the chemicals in your body, your genes, your parent's opinions, your friends' opinions, and the TV shows you watched or the books you read or didn't read.
In other words, unless you make a conscious effort to open up that brain towards other ideas and opinions, you've been reduced to a formula, a recipe.
Open that dusty sucker of a brainpan up and accept some radical new ideas once in awhile.
Quash Emotional Vanity.
You know that feeling you get when you go to the gym and see some pudknocker doing curls in the squat rack or putting 400 pounds on the bar and doing squats with such a short range of motion that you need to set up a high speed digital camera to detect it? You know how you feel like telling the schmuck how to exercise correctly?
That's emotional vanity. You want the recipient of your knowledge to realize you're an evolved bastard.
Listen, don't give a damn how someone else works out. Yeah, yeah, I know, you feel it's your duty to give them some advice, but take it from me, no one ever takes exercise advice from a stranger and no one ever will.
And yeah, it's great when you find an incorrect fact on a Website or magazine article or hear one on a newscast, but you don't necessarily need to fire off an indignant and highly superior sounding email. Okay, so Amy Smart was in
Varsity Bluesand not
Friday Night Lights, big deal.
Be Nice to Women. And Animals. And Occasionally Children.
Women smell good. They have breasts and other fun stuff. They're nice to be around. Life wouldn't be worth the trouble without them. Why the heck would you be rotten towards something like that?
And animals? Fuzzy-wuzzy four legged or six legged or eight legged people who haven't been fucked up and who will never ask you to lend them money or help them move...tell me they don't deserve kindness!
I don't really like kids so I'm nice to them largely by ignoring them. Okay, okay, I'm working on it. I never said I was perfect, bubba.
Learn Something.
Store something on the hard drive of your brain other than lines from
Napoleon Dynamite. Really. There's plenty of space. Read something once in awhile that makes you furrow your brow or, better yet, is complicated enough so that you have to read it twice.
There's a trade off, though. The more you learn, the less funny or interesting some of that other stuff you used to be interested in becomes, while simultaneously a lot of stuff you didn't used to find interesting becomes interesting. (You might have to read that last sentence twice.)
Practice Some Freakin' Restraint Once in Awhile.
There will always be more beers, more Doritos, or more pizza, despite what the commercials and run-of-the-mill books on manhood tell you. Having a big appetite is not necessarily a virtue.
Remember, too, that your penis is a tool, and when I say
tool, I don't mean that you can use it to buff out your Classic 1969 Chevy Camaro. I simply mean that it's a useful appendage; it does not define you.
Just because something has a hole doesn't mean you have to automatically stick your penis in it.
Shut the Hell Up.
You're a man, for crissake. Act like it. Stop and listen once in awhile.
I think I'll heed that last piece of advice now because I've gone on long enough.
How about you? Do you have any man rules?
© 1998 — 2006 Testosterone, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
The original piece can be found
HERE
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