Half Past Awesome

There you go, again

MEN OUT THERE – Do YOU want to know how to read your spouse? Would you like to earn effusive praise, respect and undying love from the woman you’ve chosen as your partner in this crazy life? Want this tip free of charge, no strings attached? Then lean in close for a minute, I’ll whisper the answer I’ve stumbled upon after years of prodigious effort……

*you can’t win*

There. I’ve said it.

Look, I love my wife, I really do, and what I’d like more than anything is to be able to pave the path of our marriage as smoothly as I’m capable of doing. But, to continue this horrible analogy, the job-site plans keep changing on a moment by moment basis. Quite frankly I, and the rest of my gender, are quite incapable of comprehending the fluid dynamics that constitute the parry/thrust of communication  with our wives.

The tradition most guys bring to the table is to meet the threat of violence with escalation. It’s just the human male version of fight-or-flight. You do some tough guy posturing internationally? We will bomb your people back into the Stone Age. You make a freeway lane merge without proper signaling? Then there’s a good chance we’ll fly a finger, cut you off and behave like enraged silverback gorillas, and we don’t even know why. The same methodology applies to the way we approach trying to communicate with you, the spouse.

We want to get along. We want to keep your fury in check. We’d love to be able to read your minds and predict your moods, really. And you just won’t let us, so we react as we can, with confusion and senseless gesturing leading the way. Not coincidentally, we tend to appreciate the value of a good whiskey as we get older. We need you. According to you, we could not function without your intervention; we’d all be hopeless slobs who can’t ever find their keys, who rarely do laundry or eat anything that isn’t pre-processed and has various pig parts as the primary ingredient.

So, to further the species, to better society and because we tend to get lonely and tired of eating pig parts, we enter into binding contracts of various forms with you, the better gender. Easily talked into the most ridiculous behavior with the potential reward of seeing you naked, we begin to eat vegetables again and take jobs with good dental insurance. Mini-vans become “a good idea”. We develop a fine tune filter that you call “selective hearing” that allows us to go to our happy place while you inform us of all of our shortcomings. We seek out other housebroken males in similar situations and lament wasted youth and our collective shock at the migration of hair from our heads to our shoulders. For fucks’ sake, we wear KHAKI PANTS……WITHOUT IRONY.

We do all of this because…….well, I’m not really sure why, but I know it’s what I want to do. It’s called love and it’s covered in marriage, and I guess I should thank you. I am now in a place where, according to you, I would die if left to my own devices. Just tonight, I went to my boys football practice without him because he and I could not locate his jock nor his pants, and he didn’t want to go in his underwear and I was supposed to be coaching. Yes, you brought him a short time later when you used your magical Uterine Tracking Device to find his clothes, and for that I am grateful, eternally. But that look you gave me, the one where one eyebrow shoots skyward as if to say “shouldn’t there be a Lemon-Law in place for husbands like you?” I just love that one. All husbands do, and some of us take that look as a threat and we respond in kind. I’ve learned that’s not the best time to act on that emotion. So I roll my eyes, which, apparently only serves to anger you further. The best thing to do is to accept the fact that I’m never going to win, I’m never going to predict your emotions with any degree of accuracy and you’re always going to feel cheated in The Great Husband Lottery.

To concede at this point would be the smart thing to do. To learn the lesson I’d brought up earlier, about never winning, that might be wise.

But no one has ever accused me of being smart, much less wise.

If I was I probably wouldn’t have written this, either.

Half The Brothers

Nobody’s lives are really like that.

And by that I mean “as depicted by anything you’ve ever seen on television”. I grew up on a steady diet of The Cosby Show, Family Ties and Diff’rent Strokes served as familial meals, and let me tell you I’ve learned one thing: I am not the son of an African American OB/GYN and his extremely talented lawyer spouse, nor the product of a privileged raising in New York City. Okay, maybe I learned something more than that, but that’s the primary point.

I bring this up because I’m taking a quick trip to visit my brother this upcoming weekend, and I always have a good nostalgic jag every time the prospect of a journey home comes onto the radar. Buns, as my brother, is a product of our father’s raising, which is to say, he’s every bit as fucked up in the head as I ever was. I find this comforting. Every shortcoming in my life he’s familiar with, because if he hasn’t at least suffered from the same crippling faults, he’s heard me drone on about them for hours.

We are one screwed up family.

I would point out for you all the ways in which all of my brothers are screwed up, painting myself as the only normal one, and that would be funny, and it would be true, from my perspective. But it would be wrong. It would be wrong to sell them like that, all five of them. People who know them well know their attributes, both hilarious and tragic. To betray their characters by assassinating them here online would be deliciously evil, and I like to save those types of exchanges for when we all meet up, so we can see the results of our insults and slings and arrows in person.

Most people seem to have this kind of dynamic with their siblings: listen to how funny it is when I talk shit about my brothers, but should you open your jaws in the same vein, I will unload multiple barrels of ugly retribution upon you. There is comfort in the sanctity of your own clan of crazy.  And when you’ve moved far from your clan, be it to the middle of the country or across the continents, the need to re-connect to our roots, our families, is an instinctual drive that DOES comfort us.

I’ve broken friendships, I’ve hurt those close to me for no apparent or obvious reason, and I’ve behaved like a dirtbag in general on several occasions. All of us have. Forgiveness doesn’t come easy when you’re a cynical bastard, and for that reason alone, I am grateful for family.We will continue to hurt one another, intentionally or not, through our actions or our neglect, and then in a moment of need, of hurt or of genuine sadness, we’ll turn to one another, since every other bridge around us is up in flames. And because we’re family, we’ll open our arms up just enough to embrace one another with one arm and use the other to deliver a punch or a noogie.

I’m really looking forward to two days with one of my brothers; as we get older and our lives move from “full of potential” to “such wasted potential“, we can and do take solace in the company of someone who knew us from birth. We’ll never be Willis and Arnold, much less the children of  Cliff Huxtable, that much is a fact. In lieu of that, we can savor the ironic results of being raised by our own father, The Lyin’ Dutchman; it’s turned out a lot funnier than any 80′s sitcom I ever endured.

I said, knock it off, you.

Being outraged is a privilege that comes with age.

Today I read online how Justin Beiber has a thing for wearing nail polish. For the briefest of nanoseconds I thought to myself “What the hell is it with these kids today?” and took a swig of Ensure so as to stave off a hip fracture should I fall down suddenly. I went on to read how a member of some pop-music endeavor called Girlicious was busted for cocaine possession (thirteen bags and intent to sell; that chick is making Paris Hilton look like a rank amateur) and will receive (gasp! horror!) counseling and probation. In other newsworthy situations, Amy Winehouse crashed some party that was supposed to be in her fathers honor and sang sober; a television polygamist married his 4th wife, R&B has-been Toni Braxton has filed for bankruptcy again, celebrities with nothing better to do are channeling Marylin Monroe in a bid to remain relevant via faux-nostalgia, Lou Dobbs continues to be cranky about perceived slights to his America by illegal aliens and there’s a political candidate who is running out there on the platform that she’s NOT a witch.

The cynic in me grouchily points out the slippery slope that we as a society are careening down. I angrily shake my fist at the downfall of Our Great Nation, making obscure and inaccurate comparisons to Rome and somehow find a way to drag those damn hippies/communists/anyone who’s ever voted Democrat into the mix. It’s their fault, even if them there subversive socialists in The Media straight refuse to expose this truth.

The realist in my head is far less prone to prognosticating the end of times as evidenced by the success of Justin Beiber. All it takes is a moment to recall the parallels from my own youth, back when we spent time outraging people with the nerve to live past thirty. Justin Beiber taking a liking to nail polish is a veritable rite of passage in teeny-bop culture (TigerBeat, anyone?); David Bowie was shaming Tammy Faye Baker with his makeup applications when I was still in grade school. The Cure’s Robert Smith looked like a pre-op transsexual who was able to make pre-teen girls swoon; some little kid who’s testicles have yet to descend and who likes to put on nail polish is hardly an apocalyptic harbinger. In the 70′s it was almost a pre-requisite to be carrying bags of cocaine in order to be taken seriously as a rock musician. One of Eric Clapton’s most popular (cover) songs is allegedly a warning about the pitfalls of coke and yet I always heard it as some sort of illicit endorsement. He’s clever, that Slowhand. Musicians getting sober, getting broke, finding Jesus at some point, it’s all the same game just with new players and staged histrionics calculated to make you think their behavior is both groundbreaking and scandalous. And witchcraft as a political stagecraft? That’s a move as old as our country itself.

America can tolerate many things, the least worth worrying about being a cranky old newsman who hates Mexicans. We will endure Boy Beiber’s descent into a life of hyper-sexualization followed by a bout of craziness that involves chasing photographers while smoking Marlboro Reds two at a time and his eventual evolution into a Scientologist worthy of redemption and sold out shows at Disneyland Europe. Politicians will continue to sacrifice honor and dignity to the altar of popularity and power. We’ve endured the shame of burning witches as a country once before, so to crucify idiots on Saturday Night Live is just a PC version of highlighting the hypocrisy of the Fearmongers of Fox News.

That notion is quite comforting, really. America The Great is not, then, truly threatened by gay people wanting to be married any more than she is threatened by a cross-dressing pop star nor coke addled celebutantes or skirt chasing commanders-in-chief. As an institution the United States is far more solid than we might be led to believe.

And, along those lines, I guess I’m not old, then, since I’m entertained as opposed to outraged.

I’ll save that emotion for a cause far more worthy. Something like those kids who’ve never heard of belts and insist of showing me their underwear when they slouch around the mall.

Damn kids.