"What Makes A Man Manly?" or "Holy Shit The Seil Tag Is Being Misused"

[Seil]

So I've looked at me past threads and they've collectively been a pity party. At the very least, they haven't held up to the usual standard - which was pretty low to begin with. This might go either way!

But the last time I traveled out of town, I picked up the first season of Hannibal and I really enjoyed it. The last time I went out of my way to get out of town and took a vacation, I wound up with a book.

I am not saying that this is the next Freak The Mighty, but so far it's been an enjoyable read.

Originally Posted by I Am Sorry To Think I Have Raised A Timid Son

I have applied to roughly thirty thousand NYC-based jobs via Craigslist. The fact that no one stole my identity made me feel worse about myself. I was turned down by the likes of Central Park Zoo (maintenance man), a blind Iranian scientist (orator), and a tour company (pizza cicerone). YU were the only ones to call back. They treat me kindly enough. I emerge every couple of hours to wash toner off my hands and see the sun.

I told the faculty that there'd been a minor family emergency, which was not untrue. Dad was dying. Again. Still.

"What is living but dying?" Dad says, and has said, for as long as I myself have been breathing. He insists that this is it, though. The big one. I know it is not. Cannot be. He will be released from this coil only when taking the lot of us out with him, we've decided, my sisters and I. That's the only time he's fancy-free - behind the wheel, with his babies on board. Then, everyone and no one is safe. It's both terrifying and not, having him as your ferryman. I can certainly think of worse ways to go out than: wheels on air, Russels a-scream, the Taurus chassis leveling into parabolic free fall.

I'd be inconsolable were he to actually die without me, however. That is a future I can't even begin to fathom. Talk about your wide-ass gyre. Though I take heart from the fact that, like all your small, skittering, chitinous creatures, he is hard to kill. Always have. Have, in fact, watched the man: walk through a sliding-glass door; unwittingly barehand a copperhead; set his commemorative Donkey Kong shirt on fire while stirring a pot of Hoppin' John in the a.m. I was in the vehicle when he got t-boned by a cerulean F-150. I was not when he did likewise, loaded, to a cocaine cowboy's yellow Lamborghini. I have seen him close a door on his own face.

After every injury, physical or otherwise, he yelps a "Shit!" and is fazed, but he does not accept help or consolation. There is no help or consolation. Suffering itself is the point. Shame is medicine, and to drink enough will cure you of everything.

It's the kind of worldview a mental-health professional could dine out on, a lot, at expensive brasseries. But he will never go to a mental-health professional. Mental-health professionals are the black helicopters of the self, dangerous interlopers to take cover from and bust back at. Suggestions that he "talk to someone" come across like grenades rolled into the officer's tent.

No, in this family we shit on the talking cure. We consider psychology to be the hero's grave. We rub dirt into what pains us, and then we walk it off.

As a result, I have come to fetishize opaque brutes. Adventurers, gunfighters, all the dumb rollicking killers. Dudes for whom torment and doubt are inconceivable (or at least incommunicable). Homer's sublime dolts, gloved in blood and not wanting to talk about it.

Which is quite possibly better than anything that I could have written here. But really, what makes a man manly? Is a man a man when he is tough, grizzled, spouting one liners as he holds a machine gun in one hand and a buxom blonde in the other? Is someone a man if they're on top of things, if they have their shit together? Is a manly man a good father? Can he cook? Can he build a cabinet from scratch? Fix a car? Drink whiskey? Has chest hair?

Is gender as strongly defined as it was in the middle ages, in the beginning of the twentieth century, even right now? Are we pushing people to be themselves" while still pushing the alpha male action movie stars as the ideal men?

Is manliness even concretely defined?