25 Manly Things Every Manly Man Should Know How To Do

I wear wingtips to the beach. Deal with it.

I’ve been reading Popular Mechanics again. I checked their back issues, just to be certain, and indeed, men used to work there once upon a time. I think men used to read it, too, not just women who wave it under their boyfriend’s nose while saying, “See, Orlando Bloom can defrag a hardrive while giving a foot massage, what’s your problem?”

I thought that I could help. Lend a hand, like a narcoleptic at a bandsaw, as they say. I am, after all, the Manliest Man on the Intertunnel. I know Lawrence of Arabia once brought a horde of Bedouins out of the Nefud Desert, but I once brought a man out of a wine cellar four times in an hour-and-a-half. Seriously.

Since the Dos Equis guy got ten minutes older and now he’s just another guy in the nursing home, I thought I should step up to the plate and offer the youngsters some guidance on what makes a Manly Man. It’s not enough that they should learn simply from studying Freddie Mercury posters while listening to Black Oak Arkansas records. I mean, that’s pretty manly stuff, and it’s a good start and all, but this is Graduate School for Pheromones, baby. Here’s my 25 Manly Things Every Manly Man Should Know How To Do:

  • Parallel park a supertanker
  • Gap a spark plug while windsurfing
  • Bring a woman to orgasm using only cologne
  • Walk into any room, approach the biggest, meanest person there, say nothing, and then punch them in the throat — Bonus points are awarded if there are any adult males in the room.
  • Circumcise a Great White Shark — A boat is cheating.
  • Eat a flash cube — Remember to punch anyone that asks you what a flash cube is.
  • Drink from the skull of your vanquished enemies — If you’re currently battling a squirrel in the attic, it’s more of a shot glass thing.
  • Hear the lamentations of their women — That’s why you should always wear hearing protection. Don’t want to miss out on the lamentation because of tinnitus
  • Carve a holiday turkey with a chainsaw
  • Iron a button-down shirt while you’re wearing it
  • Fell a tree
  • Tree a feller
  • Use a torque wrench to, like, you know, torque things
  • Wear a hockey helmet to a board meeting
  • Drive a stick shift to drink
  • Grow your own lasagna
  • Mix concrete in your wife’s blender and get away with it
  • Replace a broken windowpane using molten glass
  • Know how to treat severe sunburn caused by exposure to the little lightbulb in the refrigerator that holds your beer
  • Perform the Heimlich Maneuver on anyone that sneezes
  • Give a tick Lyme Disease
  • When you’re at work, and there’s a Women’s Studies graduate in the next cubicle, every time you make a mistake loudly declaim: At home I put my wife on top so I can screw up there, too!
  • Lose those love handles using a jack plane
  • Build a fire in the wilderness using only one match and fourteen gallons of gasoline
  • Your mother

A Particular Kind Of Salieri

She’s gone past gray to the shores of Thanatos.

And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and
Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams,
neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven.
And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea’s
broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and
his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has
once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods.

No matter. She was born to be old. I’m sure she wears Cleopatra’s blue eyeshadow still. She would pick up the rice in the church where the wedding has been, but the children of her charges do not marry as she did and there is no rice. Rice kills the birds so we killed the marriage.

She put her hand on my teenaged leg all those years ago and said I could be a writer. I knew I could be a writer without a spotted hand on my leg and left it there empty. She filled her hand with a particular kind of Salieri.

He had another Italian name, one of those names that will always sounds like jetsam from a terrible shipwreck on a foreign shore. None of us belong here; but then again, we don’t belong anywhere. To belong you must stay or conquer, and we could do neither. One coward in Santa Vittoria is worth a battalion of heroes in America.

He loved things overmuch. He didn’t know his ass from his elbow but he loved things. It’s a glorious thing to love things that have no merit at all with a fury that defies all understanding. He would drop the needle on the song over and over and tell you why it was wonderful. No — past wonderful; it was the hinge on which the stripmall of his little galaxy went round and round under the benificent gaze of a Newberry’s god.

Mozart could kick such a man in the shins and hand him a business card that said I’m Mozart on the front and back and he’d still push past him to get at Mouth & MacNeal in the cutout bin. He was a man that wanted desperately to be a lotus-eater but rhododendrons were everywhere and twice as tasty, surely.

I think she was wise to marry a man that would love her like a retarded boy loves a baseball player. He’s dead now and she’s alone forever but at least she can say that she was revered by a particular kind of Salieri, a man that could live with her for forty years and never figure out she wasn’t Cleopatra.

Month: September 2014

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