SYM. That's one of many names affixed to the bulk of my close male friends. Single, young and male. Kay S. Himowitz thinks that because 20-something men are marrying in fewer and fewer numbers, that we have somehow become a universally corrupted lot of slackers. That for us, as men, to ever practice responsibility and discipline we MUST be husbands and fathers and homeowners. The article is filled with several tiers of nonsense, the least significant and perhaps most predictable is that her opinion is rife with fallacious aggrandizing of the mid-century experience. Following that, she has applied the behavior of childish -men across a broad swath of 4 films and two novels to deduce that me and you are slackers who fend off adulthood with a bong in one hand and an issue of Maxim in the other. The most significant and enraging thing here, for me, is that she perpetuates the atavistic stupidity that our ultimate goal should be children and home ownership. Maybe we've grown up watching every institution fail us, and thus feel marriage is a farce. Maybe we watched our parents dilute the vitality of their life by pissing it away on marriage and children before they ever did the things they really wanted. Maybe cultural evolution has allowed us such greater freedom that, while some of us have become slackers, the majority of our unmarried generation has realized they can do anything they want if they simply avoid a few pitfalls.
I start volunteering at a maximum security prison in the next few days. I'll be alone in a room with a guard outside teaching discarded men god knows what. I'm trying to learn something from them. It pleases me that this is a Sacrament. Perhaps the one forgotten by all these assholes trying to tell gay people they can't love each other, and that thoughtful analysis of this complicated world is immoral.
When I went through this Buddhist phase I became convinced that the masculine disposition was what was wrong with the world I saw as corrupted and misaligned.The world is still corrupted and misaligned . . macho fucks are still pissing on the dream and all of that. But now, grown man shit I guess, I've learned to appreciate manhood. No disrespect to the billions of beautiful, bad-ass women out there. But, I learned to heave and pull and have rough edges and floss my sweat and channel the teeth-grinding urge to compete over every inch. All this physical training I've subjected myself to has my sedentary body cranking out unprecedented testosterone and begging for burdens. My libidinal urges raging against long, lonely nights. At the bar I just want to armwrestle with these skinny cats I linger with on free-nights.
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