The first time Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter, galactic lecher, sang “I’m not much of a man in the light of day, but by night I’m one hell of a lover” in the song “Sweet Transvestite” from the low-budget 1975 glam-rock movie musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show, my 15-year-old hetero brain melted like a pat of butter on a hot pancake, oozing down, over my heart before pooling in my pelvis.

I’m not much of a man either, I remember thinking. I was a boy. I worried I would never become a man and grow bushy pubic hair and muscles. I was afraid I was doomed to live my days as a human bean bag. I also wanted to be a great lover. I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but I knew that was achievable. I could never be a hell of a running back on the home team. That took natural talent, but I assumed, given time and practice, I could learn to please the opposite sex.

Or, at least, I could master the first two bases (kissing and touching, above the waist).

I sat in the shadows of the movie theater that night—way past my bedtime—and the weight of normality lifted for a blessed moment; the ooze became smoke, and I had another thought, one that scared me, but that I knew was true: men can be hairless and gorgeous and women thick and hairy. There are no rules. Everyone is beautiful.

Tim Curry didn’t need muscles to be sexy, and he was objectively sexy. The entire theater wanted to gobble him up. I couldn’t figure him out; he wasn’t square-jawed or mustachioed. He was scrawny. Curry bulldozed me with his intimate, reckless performance as Frank; it hadn’t occurred to me that a man could be wild-eyed and silly. And… stunning?

His Dr. Frank-N-Furter was an alien in fishnets, part-Dr. Frankenstein, part-Dracula, a lean, lithe, maniac fuck machine. He is also a murderer and a sexual predator and an Aristotelian tragic hero who is punished for his flaws. In tragedy, it is usually hubris or greed that brings kings to their knees, but Frank’s great inner weakness is lust, a bottomless appetite for flesh. To be a straight teenage boy is to live with a constant erection, and to masturbate like it’s a holy vocation, and to struggle to understand why your body burns so hot, all the time. I had been taught that sexual thoughts were sins that had to be confessed. The Catholic Church was blunt about this, and I remember agonizing over whether touching myself would disappoint Jesus.

It was clear the Rocky Horror crowd at that theater was composed, mostly, of chronic teenage masturbators, and that felt like home to me.

The entire experience was transportive. I had seen, by this point, plenty of R-rated horror movies, like Hellraiser and A Nightmare On Elm Street, but I almost shrieked, like Susan Sarandon, the not-so-innocent debutante, when Tim Curry makes his entrance, in high heels, then sassily stomps to his throne, and throws off his vampire’s cape to reveal a black glitter corset.

Whenever I had seen a man in a dress, it was for comedic effect. But Curry’s Frank was different. Here was a man wearing pearls and glowing like a full moon. He was defiant, hysterical, and hated. Teach me, Uncle Frank, how to not care what other people think. How to be wanted. To be a teen is to desperately want to fit in, and here was a cross-dressing rock star who rejected that sad, pathetic impulse. Fit in? Bitch, please. Frank stood out, and up, a target of normie disdain and a victim of his own feral horniness.

Like Frank, my greatest flaw was that I was lonely, pathetic, and desperate to be loved. He was a monster, yes. The Joker in a pair of panties. A villain sent to terrorize innocent Christians who dared knock on strange doors late at night. Frank seduced all-American Brad and his wholesome sweetheart Janet and built a man designed for one purpose: to satisfy his creator’s urges. This is, as they say in the 2020s, problematic.

Eventually, Frank’s own henchpeople kill him for these crimes. With a laser gun. There is such a thing as too much freedom, at least on the faraway planet of Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania.

His betrayal and summary execution filled me with a sadness that felt like emptiness. I had rooted for him, against my better judgment. I wanted Frank to live a life of carnal mayhem, a fantasy that was beyond unrealistic: I hadn’t even kissed a girl yet.

During his final big Busby Berkeley-inspired number, and before the melancholy torch song ‘I’m Going Home,’ Frank and his sex-drunk harem—two squares and a manufactured he-man—all sing “don’t dream it, be it” over and over in a giant pool, and an implied orgy ensues. I could barely comprehend third base, much less an erotic free-for-all.

By this point in the movie, the audience had calmed down and were preparing to accept the final somber moments of their black mass—Frank and Rocky are slain, the aliens return home, and the humans are left behind, broken open like ripe fruit.

***

Tim Curry died last week at the age of 80. He had one of Hollywood’s most eclectic and memorable careers, spanning nearly six decades. A character actor of uncanny range and charisma. He was beloved. The news of his passing was also a small personal milestone; a marker of time passing and a reminder to visit old memories.

It’s good to check in on 15-year-old you from time to time; I recommend it. Ask that person what they’re listening to, what they’re reading. What’s your favorite movie? What do you dream about? This isn’t hard to do, reconnecting; it’s a kind of prayer, a way to measure your life, and to plot what’s yet to come.

I rewatched The Rocky Horror Picture Show a few days after Curry’s death. It’s still devoutly Dionysian, a fabulous golden goblet overflowing with wine and blood. Rocky Horror was an improbable legend, an anarchic film adaptation of a crass West End send-up of 1950s horror movies, and a product of the 1970s: post-hippie, pre-punk, immoral. Stonewall in the rearview mirror. The future was bright cherry red. Rocky Horror wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, a macabre, schlocky bodice-ripper with songs and dirty jokes meant to shock a few goody-goodies.

The movie, famously, flopped at the box office but rose from the dead as a cult hit that empty movie theaters played at midnight to crowds shouting scripted one-liners at the screen and performing silly little rituals during scenes, all of which fans had developed and rehearsed over a generation. There were costumes and props, and the audience’s call-and-response jokes were vulgar and immature, one giant in-joke, which was the only way the children of the suburbs could emotionally handle a messy celebration of radical sexual freedom.

I had never seen anything like it. It was kinky, naughty, rude. The cross-dressing, pansexual characters were all ill-mannered and inappropriately obsessed with leather and cannibalism. The entire spectacle was “gay.” That was a word I had never really dwelled upon; it would be a year or so before one of my best friends came out to me, an awkward moment because he did not fully trust me. I don’t blame him. “Gay” was a popular slur, a word that meant “weak,” and men were strong.

I also knew that, to be gay, in the 80s, was to be stalked by a disease that threatened anyone who dared have sex. I was afraid of sex, too.

But Frank wasn’t.

Over the course of years, Rocky Horror crept like a pink fog through multiplexes across the heartland, corrupting some kids while liberating the imaginations of others. It’s common for queer people of a certain age to admit that Rocky Horror unlocked something inside them, and helped them with their journey to coming out during a time when admitting you were gay could result in shame and violence.

At first, I tried to explain Rocky Horror to other dudes. One of them, another 15-year-old but with a mullet, listened patiently to me explain Tim Curry and the sleek, rebellious figure he cut before asking why I’d go to something that sounded so “gay.” I had no good answer for him. The truth was I went because a girl asked me, a theatre kid, a representative of the group of hormonal misfits all the other high school cliques made fun of, and the group that not only accepted me, without question, but sought me out, and invited me to foreign films and coffee houses and long walks in the woods. They would convert me. Could I be a diva, too? Apparently, yes.

During that first viewing of Rocky Horror, I was merely a garden-variety straight boy, and nothing was unlocked in me. In Curry, I saw a masculinity that was playful and dangerous. No doors inside me opened. But what I immediately understood was that I had to be willing to step through doors inside the hearts of others. Every person is a haunted house of rooms and secrets, and if they trust you—or love you—or if they’ve become your family, or you’re just lucky, they will invite you into those rooms. Rocky Horror taught me how to be a good guest.

So did The Rocky Horror Picture Show make me a man? Tim Curry certainly helped, with his jack-o-lantern smile. He’s as much a symbol of masculinity to me as Sean Connery’s James Bond or Steve McQueen and his racecars. His Dr. Frank-N-Furter is a midnight lover. He goes too far, sure, but a man should know his limits.

Advice For Men: Do not debate

There is no such thing as a debate, not now, not in this society. A true debate is solemn. Sincere. To debate is to listen, first, then to think, and maneuver. They’re meant to be conducted between serious people, but you and me? All of us, the internet? This society? Our society? We are a bunch of silly little assholes.

Has history ever produced such a pulsating mass of petty, backbiting goofballs? Maybe every generation has this realization; maybe this is also the human condition.

But I don’t think so. Right now, someone, somewhere, is bullying their spouse while saying “I’m just asking questions” or drunkenly shouting their random opinions on the lifestyles of people they’ve never met at a bar.

Everything is a game to us, so we clench our fists and insist that up is down when we know full well that up is up and down is down. We lie because, in America, power is downstream from bullshit. The prize is money and muscle and the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want, to float above the law and blow raspberries at all the suckers below.

Everything is a cute, profoundly frivolous, and ruthless game played by mean-spirited nincompoops who think winning at any cost is a sign of intelligence and courage. Fact: Machiavelli was a weasel, and his advice was only helpful to the weak and cowardly. Princes have always been soft. They have to cheat because they can’t compete.

Our culture is a blur of short videos, selfies, and opinions; I struggle to focus. I can recall emotional passages from my favorite novels, and scenes from movies I’ve watched over and over. Years of my life are defined by certain songs; my life is a collection of soundtracks. But I struggle to remember all the memes, or any of them. If I close my eyes, the hate bubbles up. I can see sneering faces.

There was a well-known podcast host. He was harassing a doctor for being a doctor and demanding the doctor debate him. Do you remember? The podcast host did not trust science. He had faith in his ignorance, which countless fans celebrated daily. Debate me, he howled. The doctor tried, patiently employing logic and experience, but the podcast host refused to concede his point: that he was 100% right.

The doctor had research on his side, but the podcast host buried him with stupidity, an overwhelming vacuousness. That kind of fiendish confidence shook the doctor, and it took forever to get to a commercial break.

***

There was a time when I accepted invitations to appear on a popular conservative cable news channel. I worked for a magazine and got emails from producers promising a “lively debate” about some topical story.

Back then, I thought debates were an important part of democracy and that I alone could save the republic from itself. I accepted the invitation to appear on the conservative cable channel because I craved attention. This was years ago, when being on television was something to brag about.

I accepted the invitation and found myself blinded by lights, sitting in front of multiple cameras across from an old man with dyed hair. He had no idea what he was talking about, but neither did I.

The host was conservative, and I was not. And once we were on the air, he recited his lines crisply and impatiently, and when it was my turn to respond, he did not listen to me.

And when it was his turn again, his eyes narrowed, and he barked and pointed at me with a pen that he used to take notes while I was stammering. During the commercial break, I peeked at the papers he was writing on, and there was nothing but doodles.

It wasn’t a debate; it was a short improvised Punch and Judy show that filled the timeslot between advertisements for self-lubricating catheters and cash-for-gold offers. It was entertainment for some, a blood sport for others. I was being watched by lonely, isolated, terrified people whose anxieties about a changing world were briefly soothed by the spectacle of a conservative grandpa talking over some effete New York libtard.

And yet, he won the debate because he was loud, and it was his show, and you can never win an argument with someone who can have your mic turned off. I thought I had stood up for myself, but I had just learned what it was like to be a human toothpick. In the cab ride home, I swore I would never lose another debate, and I’ve avoided every debate I could since then.

Why? I’ll tell you. There is no debate. No such thing. We want it to exist, but it does not. Not at this moment. Not in this society. I’m not saying it’s impossible for two people who don’t see eye-to-eye to have a civil conversation. But if someone demands you debate them, they’re selling something, and your soul is part of the deal.

I don’t trust people who insist others debate them, and I don’t trust them because the “debate me” crowd is usually the “agree with me or else” crowd. They are fanatics at heart. They believe what they believe with the fire and passion of a desert hermit who claims he talks to god.

There is no arguing with a prophet. And everyone’s a prophet these days, preaching and passing the hat. An endless scroll of “listen to me, me, me.”

There is no debate, only yelling, yelling, and finger-pointing. Anger. Vanity. There is no debate, so choose reason, consistency, and courage. That’s it. Be firm. Be heard. The best you can do is repeat facts and truths and then smile. Stand up for yourself. But don’t expect to win. Never expect that. Just say your piece, and let go.

The idea that one can use grounded, civil rhetoric to persuade someone to change their mind is a fantasy — humans don’t want their minds changed. They want flattery. Humans will betray their neighbors for a compliment. History’s greatest atrocities were committed by a cynical, highly-motivated minority who praised the petty prejudices of a vain body politic. That conservative cable news host routinely told their faithful precisely what they wanted to hear, and they swooned.

In my “shouda said” fantasies, I stare deeply into that host’s eyes and slowly, silently, mouth the words “what the fuck?” before going full sweaty madman and shouting directly into the camera: Heal the sick! Feed the hungry! Welcome the immigrant! No one is forcing anything down your throat; worship who you want, be who you want, act like a man however the fuck you want! The story of human civilization is the story of greed and cruelty, and every so often, someone in power does the right thing, and the world is, briefly, better! Those people listen! They think before they talk! Is that so much to ask?

I’d have sounded like a lunatic—fruit! snowflake! moonbat!—but at least I would have been true to myself. That matters. I promise. It matters more than all the attention in the world.

There is no debate. You simply cannot debate basic moral principles like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That is like arguing that the moon doesn’t exist. There is no debating gravity or aerodynamics, or astronomy. The Earth circles the Sun. What goes up must go down.

Do not debate. Do not be quiet.

Advice For Men: Always ask, "What would Coach Taylor do?"

I reject stereotypes — that’s not a controversial position, is it? I do not think people should be shoved into categories without their consent. Be who you want to be, and God bless.

When I was a kid, my mom let me play with my sister’s Barbie dolls; back then, at least, that was unorthodox. But mostly, I was raised around macho stereotypes, and a few still have a hold on me to this day: I think 18-wheeler semi-trucks are cool as hell, for instance. Doesn’t every man? (The answer: yes.) I try not to pepper my language with expletives, but I was taught, by older boys, that ‘motherfucker’ is a form of punctuation. My ability to eat my weight in pizza was a feat of strength celebrated by friends and family, especially uncles. And I still find it hard to cry in front of my loved ones. Men aren’t supposed to show weakness, and friends, I have had my share of weak moments.

But there is one stereotype I will passionately defend. It’s a gender stereotype I call ‘Coach Eric Taylor,’ the fictional Texas high school football coach of the Dillon Panthers in the TV drama Friday Night Lights, which ran on NBC from 2006 to 2011. Played by Kyle Chandler, Eric Taylor is a humble, honest, hard-working, God-fearing, fully grown Boy Scout who watches his words and takes responsibility for his actions.

He loves teaching, football, and his family, and if you need him, he will show up no matter the hour. He is one of the few examples of a rare positive gender stereotype: the good guy who tries and occasionally grows. Coach Taylor isn’t perfect. He makes mistakes. But he owns up to them because that’s what a decent human does.

I know plenty of men who tell other sad, lonely men to blame anyone who isn’t a sad, lonely man for their suffering. There’s plenty of money to be made hand-feeding audiences self-pity and rage, while slyly reinforcing comforting macho stereotypes. What is a man? A man is hard. He’s a bulldozer, a baseball bat, a beer keg. A man is handsome and rich and ripped. He chases women and tames them. These gender roles are seductive and powerful. It’s easier to play make-pretend than it is to be your true naked self.

I don’t know if the benevolent, bashful Texan sports dude full of feelings is a popular stereotype. I think it should be. I think it should be an option, is what I’m saying.

***

The so-called Golden Age of Television produced multiple legendary anti-heroes like mobster-next-door Tony Soprano, self-involved ad man Don Draper, and chemistry teacher-turned-drug lord Walter White.

Back then, the first couple of decades or so of the century, the culture told itself stories about bad men who were charming and vulnerable but destructive, paving the way for conversations about ‘toxic masculinity’ years later, the idea that society glorifies certain traits in men that negatively impact their mental health and relationships.

Those behaviors fueled the drama in The Sopranos and Mad Men and Breaking Bad, TV shows about murderers and womanizers. Bosses, husbands, fathers. These characters all inhabited a reality familiar to millions: a country — an empire — built on a dream. The American Dream. Not the one about sweating and sacrificing. The other one. The one about doing it the easy way, no matter the consequences.

Even the popular reality television of the time exalted dishonesty and backstabbing.

But then there was Friday Night Lights, which premiered a year or so before Tony’s last meal in 2007.

The show is the second adaptation of H.G. Bissinger’s classic 1990 non-fiction book Friday Night Lights, about the trials and triumphs of a high school football team in Odessa, Texas. Later, in 2004, it was turned into a Hollywood movie starring Billy Bob Thornton as Coach Gary Gaines, an honest man who leads the Permian High School Panthers to the State Championships. Directed by Peter Berg, it’s a solid sports drama about a small town and big dreams. Berg also developed Friday Night Lights for NBC’s primetime line-up.

Unlike other buzzy shows of that time, Friday Night Lights featured a pair of three-dimensional do-gooder public school educators trying to do the right thing for the kids. Connie Britton stars as Tami Taylor, a high school principal, mother, wife, and wise woman. Britton is the glue that holds the Taylor family and the show together. She is the anti-Carmela Soprano.

Her performance is sincere and grounded; her Tami is a graceful small-town hero ready to feed a houseful of students at a moment’s notice. She’s not perfect; she is full of self-doubt on occasion, but there are few portraits of regular Americans in pop culture as gracefully and honestly drawn as Britton’s character.

She is also the faithful, loving life partner of one Eric Taylor, who is, in her words, a teacher first and a molder of men. Kyle Chandler is perfectly cast as an intense, competitive, compassionate man who never yells, even if it looks like he wants to scream his head off. Coach Taylor controls his emotions, not just his anger. He knows when to talk and listen, and when to give a stirring pep talk that can light up a glum teenager.

“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.” That’s Coach Taylor’s favorite saying that he saves for his locker room homilies, especially when his boys need inspiration at halftime. To Coach Taylor, life isn’t a game. There are no winners. Only those who play with grit and those who regret not giving their all.

The drama of Friday Night Lights is simple: it’s the Taylors versus all the forces that conspire to keep young people down. And that includes thoughtless parents and middle-aged jocks who can’t let go of the past, who live their lives through the young, and feed on their victories and losses like potbellied vampires.

A rotating cast of students populates Tami and Eric Taylor’s West Texas world, mostly lovable losers, misfits, and sweet-natured yokels from broken families. Coach Taylor is constantly trying to shape his student-athletes into a team of mature people who trust each other — a family — while blocking and tackling whatever obstacles get in their way off-field.

The first season of Friday Night Lights is a near-perfect heartland melodrama with plenty of tears and cheers. The second season should be skipped: a mix of studio notes demanding more soap opera drama and the 2007 writers strike produced a show that lacked the previous year’s realism and humanity. It was so awful that I gave up on the show and only recently started rewatching the final three seasons, which I’m pleased to report are as authentic and heartwarming as the first.

***

What I like most about Coach Taylor is that he learns from his mistakes. I know that probably comes off as corny, but so be it. I’m morphing into a sentimental ol’ fool as I age. Coach Taylor is confident enough to know he doesn’t know everything, which is a wonderful quality for a hero to have.

I like to think Coach Taylor is the middle-aged white man who would politely apologize for hurting someone’s feelings. It happens. To be human is to screw up, to stumble. To misspeak. To say something thoughtless. I want to think that character would have the grace to listen, reflect, and respect others. I’d want to think I’d react that way, too. It’s the polite thing to do. And the kind thing.

Coach Eric Taylor doesn't have all the answers. Chandler is wonderfully subtle as this good ol' boy full of doubts. I don't know what I'm doing half the time. Coach Taylor wants to be a good man. A good husband. Father. Coach. He lives by simple principles: do not cheat. Do not lie. Do not break promises.

I used to believe physical strength and aggressiveness made a man “manly,” but I’ve seen far too many men who thought they were hard—who wanted so badly to be human cinderblocks—crack under everyday pressures and common adult responsibilities. Myself included.

I have made and continue to make mistakes; it takes courage to admit you’re wrong. I have not always been able to own up to my screw-ups. I’m not proud of that. I am still capable of acting selfishly or thoughtlessly, and I try, lord, do I try to be a better person, but sometimes, the best I can do is ask for forgiveness and let the pieces fall where they may.

The past few months have been hard for me. I am not alone. I am loved, but this has been a season of change and uncertainty. Illness. Loss. Disappointments. Ah, such is life. And recently, when I felt low, didn’t think I had any fight left in me, and wanted to give up, I asked myself a simple question: what would Coach Taylor do? That’s when I’ll whisper to myself, “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”

That’s funny, right? It’s just a quote from a TV show. But then I get back at it.

Advice For Men: Accept pebble ice into your heart

My father-in-law is affable, which is an underrated talent. Being genuine, warm, and easy to talk to requires a relaxed kind of confidence that is out of fashion these days. Insecure times create insecure men.

He is a loving father and a doting grandfather. We have enough in common. He likes pasta, and so do I. We both enjoy long walks, and the man can walk for miles at a time, huffing and puffing like a locomotive. And, of course, I’m married to his daughter. This is our strongest and most profound bond. Our relationship is simple. It works. When we see each other, we hug and laugh and talk about this and that, whatever. How’s the weather? What’s for dinner? What are you reading? Every so often, we complain about politics.

Then, out of nowhere, a few weeks ago, I got a rare text message from him telling me to expect a package in the mail. I responded with a ‘thumbs up’ and didn’t really think about it again until my front door was buzzed and a large box was deposited on the doorstep.

Inside the box was a pebble ice machine. I’d say it was the size of a printer with a mouth you pour water into, and a button you press when you want pebble ice. I shouldn’t assume everyone knows what a pebble ice machine is, so I’m going to explain it: it’s a machine that produces hundreds of small, irregularly shaped balls of ice in minutes. The pebble ice machine comes with a plastic scoop that shovels up the ice with a satisfying crunching noise, like boots on fresh snow. When dropped into a glass, pebble ice sounds like tiny elf bells.

I’m not a materialistic person. I’ve always disliked the whole “retail therapy” idea, no matter how tongue-in-cheek it’s meant to be. You cannot buy happiness (unless we’re talking Epsom Salts). But this pebble ice machine is challenging this long-held belief. I’m thinking of having friends over to show them the newest member of our family.

I do not know why my father-in-law bought me a pebble ice machine. Last month, my wife and I spent the weekend with him in Maryland, and I praised his pebble ice machine. And now, here I am, a man with a pebble ice machine that I keep in the pantry because my New York City apartment doesn’t have enough counter space to fit a pebble ice machine. At night, I can hear it humming. It’s a comforting sound.

I thanked him over text. My wife and I had a chuckle. I made some pebble ice. I shoveled that ice into a glass and filled it with Coke Zero, and that was that. My beverage was instantly frosty. I was a convert. I mean, I love Coke Zero; it’s got everything you could want: bubbles, a little caffeine, a subtle but satisfyingly chemical sweetness. If I could drink Coke Zero out of a golden goblet like Caesar himself, I would. I now love glacial Coke Zero with pebble ice even more.

This kind of ice—also known as nugget or chewable ice—was invented in the early 80s and is popular with fast food chains, like Sonic and Raising Cane’s. The ice is used at hospitals, too, because of its soft texture and ability to melt quickly. You can even find a pebble ice machine in an apartment in Brooklyn (mine).

The truth is other ice cubes are inferior, like the standard “full cubes,” the crescent cube, or my least favorite, the oversized cube for booze. Crushed ice melts a little too fast. I used to think crushed ice was the best ice, but I know better now.

I am not a man who loves gadgets of any kind, but I know plenty of dudes who are obsessed with their espresso machines, and record players, and various drones. Are they toys? Yes, but they have purposes, too. My pebble ice machine has a purpose: to chill whatever drink I want immediately and thoroughly. Pebble ice has more surface area than a few traditional cubes, which means liquids cool quickly, and the resulting sip is a winter’s kiss every single time. My god.

I have had other kitchen appliances over the years. I had an instant pot once that I barely used. I spent hours watching YouTube How-To videos to learn how to pressure cook beans and braise meats. I used it to hardboil a dozen eggs at a time, and I learned that was too many eggs to hardboil at a time. I know how to cook rice in an Instant Pot, but it’s easier to do it in a pot, in my opinion. Do not get me started on rice cookers.

I bought one of those “magic bullet” blenders and made smoothies for a week. A whole week. I crisped up frozen chicken nuggets in an air fryer at an Airbnb, and that was enough for me. The only kitchen gadgets that have ever come close to the joy that my pebble ice machine affords are the old-school sandwich makers I’ve owned over the years—the clamp-like devices that press bread and filling into toasty little pockets with molten lava centers.

The pebble ice machine makes me want to go door-to-door selling pebble ice machines. I want to preach the Gospel of Pebble Ice. I feel like I could host a podcast dedicated to the self-help strategy “get yourself a pebble ice machine.” I think everyone should have one. It’s making my life better, I swear. I am more hydrated than ever before. After a few minutes, pebble ice turns into easily chewable little watery crunchies.

I am confident that the novelty of my pebble ice machine will never wear off.

I am not someone with extensive experience receiving gifts out of nowhere from family members, and my father-in-law, for a moment, made me feel as if I had won some sort of prize. An award for second-best son-in-law? This was a magnificent gift, unexpected and random, and what the fuck, Rob? I don’t need a pebble ice machine.

Well, reader, it turns out I do. I need one. I’ve always needed one. Would you like a scoop of pebble ice? I’m going to help myself anyway. It’s delightful. Of course, my father-in-law was merely doing what happy people do: sharing the things that make them happy with the people in their lives. I’m not the only person he’s sent a pebble ice machine to. It’s just that… pebble ice makes him happy. I get it. Thanks.

Advice For Men: Stay horny

The word “horny” is almost onomatopoeic. It sounds like the feeling it’s meant to describe, which is intense, immediate, sexual arousal. To be horny is to be twisty. Achey. Hungry. “Horny” is a word that evokes reactions, especially revulsion. It’s like the word “moist.” Some people hate it, but how else are you supposed to describe a slice of delicious cake?

It is a silly word, though. Immature. “Horny” is something a teenager would say regularly, sincerely, since it is one of the inescapable conditions of adolescence. Hormones. Horny. Horniness. The word itself comes from 18th-century slang for an erection: “the horn.” Not original, but succinct. I have “the horn.” Ha, ha, ha, what ribaldry!

And yet, there are few words for “sexual desire” that are as unadorned as “horny.” Concupiscent? Tumescent? “I’m horny” is direct and to the point, but I dare anyone reading this to say that to another human being with a straight face.

If I may propose, “horny” is more than a mere modifier. It is a mindset, a “Weltanschauung,” which is the German word for “worldview.” I think it is important to be horny in this life, and not just for sex, which is great. For the record. But horniness can be applied more broadly. It’s not just about sex drive. To be horny is to be hungry. To yearn. To want. To long for something you need, or want, that’s just out of reach. It is existence itself; crawling, searching, grasping. You cannot be apathetic and ‘horny.’ You can’t ignore it or deny it. You need warmth. Light. Touch. Whether you like it or not. Everything else is darkness and blue lips.

If only there was a word for “horny” that meant “horny” but wasn’t “horny.” Joie de vivre? That might be the closest to what I want, but it’s also too... French. “Lust for Life” is too Iggy Pop. If I stripped naked and ran down the street shouting “I’m alive!” that still wouldn’t be as embarrassing as saying ‘I’m horny.’ But it’s the same thing.

***

I spent a summer nursing a broken heart at an Irish dive bar in Queens that was always humid, no matter the weather. She dumped me over voicemail. She wanted to be friends. I’d listen to the message over and over, zoned out, a ritual that comforted me the way you can’t stop chewing a hangnail.

Then I’d drink bottom-shelf vodka on ice—extra ice—until I couldn’t feel my teeth. I wanted to be cold. Numb. I wanted to be an ice cube, a frozen cube without legs, sitting perfectly still, feeling nothing as I slowly melted.

During this time, I was usually joined by a middle-aged woman named Kathy—that’s not her real name—who had also been dumped, but you wouldn’t know it when talking to her. She was always bright and combustible, a self-striking road flare, annoyingly optimistic.

She usually wore the same Yankees hat unless she was on a date, when she wore her brown hair down. She had slept with, or at least fooled around with, more than a few dudes from the bar, except me. She once contemplated seducing me, jokingly, before concluding that I’d probably cry afterward and, you know, maybe. She was my friend for those months, though, and listened to me with a wry kind of compassion—as if she was visiting from the near-future and knew a few things I didn’t.

Kathy was confident and insecure; she’d make fun of her FUPA all the time, and it was disarming. The men she’d hooked up with were either sheepish around her or treated her like some big sister, which was a dynamic I tried not to dwell on.

There was this one guy who stopped coming to the bar because he had fallen for her, and she found his adoration annoying. I once quipped that he worshipped her like a goddess, which suited her because she’s Greek, and Kathy replied: “What are you talking about?”

He probably ended up at another Irish dive bar a few subway stops away. I reminded her that we were heartbroken too, and she waved me off. “We’re different,” she’d say. “He’s a loser.” She’d emphasized the word “he.” Not us. No, no. I would never listen to voicemails of exes. Only a loser would do that.

Kathy wasn’t always at the bar. She had a life, actually. I used to sit there and pout without her all the time. She loved going dancing; I did not. Sometimes her work sent her to bleak conferences in dying, faraway cities. Otherwise, we were pals. Confidants. Co-conspirators.

Her drink was Heineken, a small forest of green bottles every night. We had a little ritual: after every third round or so, one of us would buy shots of literal turpentine. Then we’d bitch and moan and laugh and, invariably, she’d share details of her sex life that maybe she shouldn’t have. Usually, around one or two in the morning, when we were good and fucked up, under the cover of sad songs from the jukebox, we’d share small dreams—I wanted a new job at a magazine; she was saving money for a house in the Rockaways.

A few times, not many, we’d stumble to the diner together, completely shitfaced, and I’d eat a cheeseburger and fries, and she’d order scrambled eggs and French fries, and she’d eat them both with ketchup and Tabasco sauce. She ate the way she drank, in giant, carp-like gulps.

She once asked me if I knew the secret to getting laid. I’m pretty sure I replied something like I do not know the secret to getting laid, but I would like to know.” Here’s what she told me: you have to love dick. I am not one hundred percent sure what I said back to her, exactly, but it was basically: no offense to anyone who loves dick, but I do not love dick, unless we’re talking about my dick; then, yes, I am fond of that bodily organ.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “You have to love her, want her. You have to love her mouth and tits and ass and blah blah blah.” I’m paraphrasing. She loved men, or seemed to: the way they smelled, their stubble, their bluntness. She had to have friends who were women, but I never met them.

Then she looked at me. “If you want to get laid, John, you have to love the people you want to fuck. Just a little bit.” She pinched her forefinger and thumb together. “A little bit. You have to love them. And miss them, too, when they’re gone.” Then she smiled. “And you gotta be horny.”

She and I were both horny that summer. And not just for consequence-free sex with other sweaty drunks. We were horny for the Mets to win one, just one, game, and for street fair sausage and peppers and for illegal fireworks shot off in Astoria park at midnight.

The last time I saw her, she told me she was working things out with her ex-husband. The son-of-a-bitch? Yeah, she laughed, the son-of-a-bitch. She loved him. I haven’t heard from her in twenty years. I hope she got that place in the Rockaways.

Advice For Men: Find your team

The internet looks forever backward, like Lot’s wife, and that’s why I’m writing about a TV show I used to stare at about a team of friends who had adventures. There are nights I can’t tell the difference between my dreams and old Pizza Hut commercials.

And then I remembered. Four of us. Young. Smiling. Sneering. Combat boots. Cassette tape mixes: Pixies, Fugazi, Liz Phair. It’s a happy memory. I miss them. Two are dead now.

This isn't a drinking story, although we did plenty of that. No. This memory is about a time I felt like I belonged to a gang that had my back, a team. I’ve been feeling pretty lonely recently, and I remember, once, walking into a party flanked by three women: a flamethrower redhead, a slender punk tattooed head to toe, and my girlfriend, her face full of piercings and camouflage pants pockets full of weed. And me.

We had not been invited to the party. It was in a warehouse near the river, full of cool kids: the attractive ones and those with wealthy fathers. There was a big man with a shaved head who acted like security; I don’t even know if anyone asked him to stand at the door and glower.

He kept the narcs out, the frat boys, and the skinheads. The uninvited would see him and then turn around, but she started rolling a joint in line, and he waved us in, or rather, he let them stumble in, and they dragged me along. That we were inseparable for a summer was a fluke; we were too different.

But for those months, without trying, the four of us finished each other’s sentences. We harmonized. Shared dreams, and told jokes, and made plans. So many plans. Escape plans. Battle plans. Dinner plans.

This was the 90s, an era known for parties in riverfront warehouses. It wasn’t that hard to find a crowd of young people doing drugs. But I never felt cool enough to just… walk in somewhere uninvited and then act like we were the ones who invited everyone. Luckily, they had my back.

The redhead turned heads. The punk was our muscle. My girlfriend made friends. It’s a good memory. If it were a scene in a movie, the four of us would be strolling in slow-motion as techno beats punched the air. The party was probably just an hour or so, maybe less—we danced, sweated, shouted over deafening music, all four of us. A closed circle. No one else was invited.

The rest of the evening fades; I got drunk and high and fucked-up and probably woke up the next morning in my clothes, lying in her bed, our unhappy relationship straight and sober.

***

Every friend group has a boss, a charmer, a badass, and a weirdo.

An example: the beloved sitcom The Golden Girls, which ran on NBC from 1985 until 1992, was about a friend group of sassy senior citizens, including Bea Arthur’s Dorothy, the boss; charmer Blanche, played by saucy comedic actor Rue McClanahan; Estelle Getty’s Sophia the badass, and, of course, Betty White as Rose, the weirdo. Here’s another: Paul was the boss, John the charmer, George a badass, and the weirdo was Ringo.

The hour-long weekly action-comedy TV show The A-Team was also about a friend group featuring these four archetypes. The show, which also ran on NBC, premiered in 1983 and had a modest five-season run.

I have been thinking about that show recently. And friends.

It was a hit and, in retrospect, a fascinating cultural specimen: a lighthearted romp about a quartet of Vietnam vets falsely accused of crimes they didn’t commit who spend their days on the run, helping out the helpless along the way. The show is both anti-authoritarian and pro-mayhem. The military is often the true bad guy, while the fugitive commandos are the heroes.

At its core, The A-Team was about wise-cracking patriots screwed over by the government waging a war against crooked fat cats, crime lords, and other baddies populating Ronald Reagan’s sunny America. It was a proto-libertarian vigilante fantasy, but none of that excited my impressionable baby brain.

I liked that these dudes were all besties.

The show itself was low-budget, with no more than two car crashes per episode, the first occurring halfway through, before one of the many commercial breaks. The A-Team frequently explored such literary themes as man vs. helicopter and explosions! It was a family show but there were lots of machine guns.

The plots were all the same: somebody was being bullied, and the cops didn't care. So they hired The A-Team. You'd think it would be hard to hire easygoing mercenaries before the internet, but apparently not. The clients were always salt-of-the-earth types: widows, struggling families, a store owner who owed the mob money. Backed into a corner, the team inevitably built something from scraps: a cannon, a catapult, an armored forklift. One lesson The A-Team teaches is to enjoy your work. These guys loved arts and crafts. No one is killed in The A-Team, but there are bruises, and some feelings are hurt.

The interior scenes were shot on whatever sound stages were available that day, and exteriors took advantage of Burbank’s finest vistas. You get the feeling they were in a rush to shoot as many episodes as they could in a day. After all, The A-Team was produced during an era best described as Peak Casual Cocaine. The dialogue sounds like it was written on cocktail napkins at the bar across from the studio.

Big-screen silver fox George Peppard starred as Hannibal, the boss. Was he too old and paunchy to play a cigar-chomping mercenary leader? No. No, he was perfect. Old and paunchy, but perfect. His catchphrase was “I love it when a plan comes together.” Hannibal was also a “master of disguise,” which is my number one favorite kind of master.

Dirk Benedict had starred in the cult sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica as swaggering spaceship pilot Starbuck and then loaned his minor star power to The A-Team as smooth-talking Faceman, the charmer. The character BA Baracus was played by a gruff former bouncer and wrestler, Mr. T, who had rocketed to stardom as Clubber Lang in Rocky III. BA was a bad-ass mechanic and weapons expert who was so afraid of flying, he was frequently drugged. And then there’s “Howling Mad” Murdock, the team pilot and resident lunatic. Actor Dwight Schultz makes Murdock a lovable, occasionally insufferable clown.

In every episode, our heroes had to improvise a way out of danger or a surprise attack against that week’s villain. These plans usually involved BA welding something to something else.

There was a 2010 Hollywood adaptation of The A-Team starring Liam Neeson and Bradley Cooper as Hannibal and Faceman, but that’s a movie best forgotten. You can throw money at a story all you want, but money can’t recreate four brothers-in-arms cruising around the San Fernando Valley in a black GMC Vandura van with a red stripe looking to right wrongs in under 60 minutes.

It’s hard to believe, but a generation ago, there were only three networks, and they were colossally influential. That triumvirate shaped how millions of people thought about politics and culture and made billions of dollars doing it. And for the most part, the majority of their programming was primitive, dimwitted sitcoms and melodramas and shows about talking cars and trigger-happy cops.

There are outliers, of course. But for every All In The Family or Columbo, there were endless hours of silly, crass, cynical TV shows produced and then forgotten about.

The A-Team was not a complicated offering. It was exactly what boys want, and it was a show for boys. From the moment I saw the show, I wanted to be part of a team, and I’d be happy with any position.

For a brief moment, though, a decade or more later, I was part of a team. I knew it, too. We had missions. We accomplished those missions. I didn’t do much; I was just the weirdo. But we were a foursome tooling around Richmond in a beat-up 1988 Hyundai Excel. She called it her “Sherman Tank.” It would start to tremble once you hit 55.

She was my Hannibal. The boss. She was always scheming. Sometimes, we’d show up to raves and sell dehydrated party monsters, used water bottles we’d run through the dishwasher, and fill up with tap. A couple bucks a pop. I did what she told me, which she did while laughing because she was always laughing, even when she asked me years later if I’d cheated on her.

Faceman was the fiery daughter of an old-fashioned Southern mama, born poor but fabulous, a sorceress in a muumuu who spoke fluent cat and never got lipstick on the butts of her cigarettes. She knew how to turn her drawl on and off, depending on whether she wanted something from you, or needed you to fear her. Bartenders loved buying her drinks.

Our BA was an angry broomstick in a tank top. Inked from neck to kneecaps. She had the energy of a mongoose. Fearless. A badass. She wore these nerdy chunky black glasses. I watched her slap a handsy redneck with an open hand once at a bar; it stunned him. She watched over all three of us; she never sat with her back to the door.

They were my team for a few years. A couple of summers. They had my back, and I had theirs, to the best of my abilities. We grew apart, and maybe if we hadn’t, if we had held on to one another, the four of us would still be young and powerful, strutting around like we owned the place.

Advice For Men: Always have a roll of duct tape handy

I am not a “handy” person, but I have recently learned how to shut off the water in my building in the event of a massive leak. A plumber taught me—it took five minutes—and I’ve been, perhaps, a little too proud of this new skill.

I’m also pretty good at keeping the dryer from clunk-clunk-clunking, thanks to YouTube. I have no natural talent for fixing broken things. I’d be a terrible carpenter because I’m certain I’d saw off multiple fingers. I am a monkey frustrated by a coconut. But I do know that every man should have, at the very least, a hammer, a couple of screwdrivers, a flashlight, pliers, and a pocketknife. And duct tape.

Do you have duct tape? You should buy some. You never know when you’ll need it. A friend of mine showed me how she uses the adhesive on duct tape to collect cat hair from her couch. Magic. What can’t that stuff do?

Duct tape fixes everything. I have always had a roll of it hidden away in a drawer. I learned this “life hack” from a sentimental old stoner with pointy teeth who lived down the street and who was generous with his weed and constantly used duct tape to repair his filthy, beloved bongs. I rarely sought out the wisdom of others as a young man, but this hippie had it all, including massive IRS debt and an ex-wife who never returned his calls. He believed in two things: stinky green marijuana and duct tape, and so, years later, as I was making my way in the world, I remembered to pick that up at the store, even if I failed to buy other practical grown-up sundries like shampoo or nail clippers.

There were times I chose duct tape over toothpaste. I needed it more. To patch things. I have never used duct tape on a duct, for the record. But I’ve used it consistently for so many things over so many years, more than I’ve ever used super glue.

I cut myself once halving limes—the only fresh fruit I used to regularly buy—and reached for the duct tape and some toilet paper because I did not have Band-Aids. I’ve used duct tape to cover holes in sneakers and to keep a kitchen sink pipe from weeping. My older brother gave me a purple down-stuffed sleeping bag before I moved to New York City in 1996; he had used it in the Marines. And it kept me warm during many cold months in apartments with broken radiators. It tore and would spit feathers, and repeated duct-tape patches kept it alive for years, until there were just too many rips to repair.

I never thought I’d be the sort of person who’d practice what he’d say to a younger version of himself, but here it goes: “Take better care of us.” I wouldn’t have listened, so these kinds of exercises are moot. Why would I listen?

I was unhappy and constantly broke, and there was a jagged crack in my chest that was bottomless. I did not take care of myself or the fourth-floor walk-up I eventually moved into, a wretched pair of rooms where I lived like a man-shaped heap locked in a tower. I slept on a futon mattress on the floor and ate off paper plates, and for the first year, all of my furniture was milk crates I’d found on the street; my fridge was stocked with beer and jellies. One time, bundled in my brother’s sleeping bag, curled up on the mattress, I woke with a start because a roach had crawled across my lips and tickled me.

Here’s what duct tape does not fix: broken hearts.

I was once dumped by a woman who was funny and curious. An aspiring filmmaker and baker of muffins. She was forgiving of my apartment, but her compassion had reasonable limits. She believed in me, at first, and I think that was why I couldn’t stand her. She dumped me because I could not stop drinking. And when I was drunk, I would lie, and I wasn’t telling big lies. No. My betrayals were small and either wormy or pointy, like a splinter. I would lie about my day. I would lie about our future. I would lie about where I was, whether I was happy, whether I enjoyed the pesto pasta she made, or whether I loved her. And sometimes my thirst would be so unquenchable, my want for unconsciousness so intense, that I would sit in a jar of formaldehyde like a sideshow’s pickled punk, and she’d tap on the glass, mouthing the words “Are you okay?”

It was a surprise when she finally told me that I needed help. That I was cruel. She was done and moving out. I felt crushed by her concerns, her affections, her worry. She laughed at my jokes, kissed me gently, and said things like: “Everything is going to work out?” And I was the liar? So it was a shock when, one night, she was gone. What a horrible thing to get what you want.

And I lived with it. I’d go to work hungover, and I’d know I should be thinking about her, but I wasn’t. I was thinking about the bar and riding the N train all the way to the end of the line, Ditmars, to my squalid, junk-filled apartment, patched together with duct tape. Duct tape everywhere. Everything was broken, and everything was duct-taped. Duct tape sealing cracks in trash cans, holding cabinet doors closed, securing extension cords running from one room to another, to the ground. There were holes in the drywall underneath the bathroom sink that I was convinced were where the roaches came in from, and I worried they’d crawl into the crack in my bosom and infest my insides, too.

There were nights when I’d imagine tearing off a length of duct tape with my animal teeth and smearing it sticky side down across my heart and my mouth. I wondered how much tape I’d need to keep me from screaming. What if I covered my entire body in streamers of duct tape? When I wrapped my sliced-open finger in duct tape, blood drooled down from the seam. What would seep out if I were girdled in duct tape, like a murder victim rolled up in a carpet, and left to rot in the middle of my apartment?

I never thought I’d be the sort of person who’d practice what he’d say to a younger version of himself, but here it goes: “Some things stay broken.”

Advice For Men: You will be forgotten

I worked for a radio station once, in New York City. I never wanted to work for a radio station, but one day — poof! — I found myself employed at one. This was twenty years ago, the dawn of the digital age, when everyone thought the internet would unite the world.

The job was an education. For instance, I learned that I did not like working at a radio station. I also learned that the radio is similar to the internet and its hellspawn, social media. These technologies exist to amplify voices, and most of those voices are strangers ready to scream “you suck!” And the more successful you are, the more they will scream that, by the thousands.

I never planned to work in radio, but had my dad still been alive, I would have embraced the opportunity. He would have been tickled. My old man was a radio DJ in the Army, and he loved it. The radio was always singing, crackling, and droning on and on in the car.

The radio gig came along right after I was laid off from a men’s magazine, where I had spent my days writing about things men care about, like beer, motorcycles, and ninja throwing stars. I made sure to use monosyllabic words in these efforts and made a meager living. Working in print, then and now, is like playing a game of musical chairs in hell — one day the music stops, and you’re unemployed.

Before I could have a proper emotional breakdown about the layoff, however, I was immediately hired by a radio station programming director looking for someone with my specific bona fides, and that’s how I ended up hosting a national nighttime call-in talk show for men, which was a dream job to someone, just not me. For almost two years, I sat in front of a microphone for four hours a night, five days a week, and talked to men with no one else to talk to.

I was a quick solution to the programming director’s problem: he wanted a host who could talk about topics of interest to early 2000s dudes. His most successful radio personalities were casually sexist men who talked trash and bitched about their lives, crude outrage queens who loved drama. He wanted less drama, and I was perfect because I could talk about The Matrix, MP3 players, and other subjects men cared about at the time. The callers also wanted to talk about boobs and hotties and sex, specifically how to have it, but were unwilling to listen to the soundest advice, which was to stop listening to the radio.

It also didn’t hurt that I was cheap. He took a gamble on me, betting that he could train me to be a radio host on the job, and he tried his hardest.

My programming director was a lanky, laid-back veteran with a lazy eye who had fought his way up the radio industry ladder from middle-of-nowhere morning DJ to New York City, where he managed a dirty half-dozen or so radio personalities, each with their very own ridiculous on-air pseudonym: Gator or Kid Comet or DJ Hot Sauce. My programming director did not have a nickname, but I was told that early in his career, while working the midday slot somewhere in the Southwest, he went by a name that sounded like Beef Stu, or some nom de plume inspired by meat.

Working in radio alongside “talent” is like working in the Justice League or the Avengers, where everyone has a superhero name and a secret identity. I toyed with one of my own but settled on “DeVore.” Just one name, like Cher. “Yo, bros, it’s DeVore.”

(In the biz, on-air hosts are called “talent” by management, which may sound like a compliment, but it is not.)

And each of these personalities — performers — was emotionally volatile and vulnerable, hot-tempered and instantly gloomy the moment they were off-air. A few were nice, just naturally chaotic.

I don’t know if the job attracts people with this kind of temperament or transforms folks with normal brains into aggressive, wisecracking, yackety-yakking maniacs, but I didn’t have this personality type. The job of talking to faceless humans on the radio is intense and requires a sort of courage verging on recklessness — you have to think fast and talk faster.

I was not qualified to be a radio host because I didn't have "it." Talent. I didn't have the stamina, either. Nor thick skin. I also have a dry mouth, and saliva is one of a radio personality's most important bodily fluids. I hate the sound of my voice, too. Loathe it. Imagine an annoying cartoon mouse in a top hat. That's what I'm sure I sound like. My programming director, formerly Beef Stu, thought I had it in me to be "good enough," but I didn't. Even a moderately gifted radio host or DJ hungers for the airwaves, and I never did.

A good radio host doesn’t have to turn “it” on or off for the mic; they are always on, ready to open their mouths and let it all pour out: gripes, random epiphanies, and mini-monologues on current events, the names of songs, the locations of listeners, and station call signs. It just flows. I did not have this fire inside, so I drank liquor on the job to soothe my nerves and to help me perform — there were bottles of it everywhere because old school radio stations are a subset of “man cave,” a filthy space where men will be boys. I would drink before the show and during because I thought it made me sound cool, and loose, and dangerous.

In reality, I sounded drunk. Slow. Mumbly, like a muppet with a concussion.

At first, I thought my programming director was a mellow dude with a playful, syrupy voice, but to survive decades in an industry that attracts and grooms egotists with a gift for speaking in tongues, you have to be cunning, and he was. He was also nurturing, in his way. Encouraging. He was a big believer in the “air check,” which is how radio personalities receive feedback from their employer.

“Air checks” can be fraught — on-air talent are famously thin-skinned and with good reason. I found the job horrifically high-pressure, and it’s hard to hear criticism sometimes, especially when you’re on the front lines. I don’t care what anyone says, especially jocks: the act of performing requires a kind of emotional vulnerability, an ability to brazenly, arrogantly even, reveal your soft underbelly on command once the “on air” light goes red.

The “air check” combines editorial notes with an ambush. Even when you know it’s coming, it’s mildly unsettling. It would have been impossible for my programming director to listen to every minute of my four-hour show, so he would, in the morning, randomly listen to a five- or ten-minute segment from the previous night, which, at the time, was recorded on compact disc.

I’d then meet with him before the show, and he’d critique what he heard. Usually, his notes focused on the topics I was discussing and how I discussed them — mostly my pacing, but also other technical tweaks. I had a bad habit of “swallowing” the microphone at times. I also had a slight lisp that he made sure I knew about. (My listeners also wanted me to know I had a lisp.)

And then there was my drinking.

***

It didn't take long for me to have an epiphany behind the mic — a small one, almost profound: radio and the internet both make lonely people feel like they're in a conversation with other human beings when they are, in fact, just filling time between commercial breaks or until the next influencer pops into their feed.

Both media are also in the “make someone mad” business because anger is a powerful emotion that takes little effort to rouse. Another emotion that is easy to exploit is fear, which can turn into anger pretty easily; just add a pinch of scapegoat or a twist of “poor me.” Practically every call I ever got, and most of the comments I’ve received online, were fueled by rage or resentment, which is like anger’s younger, more passive-aggressive sibling.

Old school talk radio and podcasts and garden variety clickbait content farms all follow the same laws of nature. The same physics. Hurt some feelings, then enjoy the backlash. These kinds of displays of cruelty and confidence can transfix the human animal the way the proverbial flame attracts the moth — and people mesmerized by such exhibitions are vulnerable to all sorts of sales pitches.

Sure, I get positive replies to social media posts. One or two, here or there. I post a photo of my dog or a homemade bowl of pasta, and old friends will respond “cute” or “awesome.” But if you want attention — if you want clicks and callers lining up to yell at you — then you have to be loud and opinionated.

We live in a hot-take-based economy. Emotion and judgment turn the gears of our communication infrastructure, and what most people don’t realize is that their little transgressive thoughts, theories, and whatnot are not original. Most political views are the result of osmosis — you hear or read something someone said or wrote, and whatever you heard or read rattles around in your head like a ping pong ball in a raffle spinner and the next day, during a conversation with a spouse or a friend or a colleague, this thing you heard or read pops out of your mouth, only you think it’s your idea now, but it isn’t. I’m guilty of opinion laundering, too.

The truth is, original opinions are difficult to invent. I didn’t realize how rare a unique, interesting opinion was until it was my job, on-air, to share what I thought without even thinking and to listen to and endure the brain farts of anonymous listeners.

During my tenure at the radio station, I had the following experience a few times: I’d be out, at a party, or a social function of some sort, a dinner maybe, and I’d be sat next to someone I didn’t know, or I’d get cornered by a friend’s friend from high school, and we’d inevitably ask each other what the other does, which is one of the worst habits New Yorkers have, the instant willingness to abandon pleasant small talk and ask direct questions that size up the other person’s professional status. Why waste time talking to a public school teacher or a hospice nurse? This is rude, and we live in a Golden Age of Rude.

So on more than one occasion, I answered the “What do you do?” question directly: I’m a talk radio host, and the responses were immediately intense and probing. One person just repeated that word: “Fascinating.” But another immediately said, “I could do that job.” Just out of nowhere. She didn’t blurt it; she just said, matter-of-factly, “I could do that,” after I told her my talk show was five days a week. What I wanted to say was, “No, you couldn’t.” To be fair, I couldn’t.

Maybe she could? She could very well have been a natural. The radio station was full of hosts born to jump on a mic and just… talk and sound self-assured, funny, and exciting. I was nervous during my first show, and last, nervous the minute before I went on air, and nervous the whole show. I was not good at the job. But then she followed that up with this chaser: “I have opinions on everything.”

I remember what I wanted to say, which was: “You think you have opinions, but you don’t. Most people are parrots who mimic what other people say! It is actually hard to have an opinion! You don’t know!” I didn’t say that, of course. Because my hot takes are tepid, like room-temperature tapioca pudding. I didn’t take the bait; I just listened.

“Mmhmm.”

If you aspire to be a professional podcaster or radio talk show host, it does help if your opinions are offbeat or innovative, but what’s most important is belief. You must believe that what you are saying is the most important thought in the world, even if you don’t. Even if it’s a flat-out lie. During one “air check,” I was told I was being too wishy-washy. I forgot the topic, but let’s say it was “apples and oranges.” I went on air and said something like, “Hey, what’s your favorite fruit? Apples or oranges? Call in!”

That was not the way to do it. “Do you like oranges? How about apples? Me? I like oranges!”

My programming director told me how: you go on air, and you say “Oranges are the best fruit, the most delicious; there is no fruit as tasty as an orange. All other fruits are awful.” He paused and added, “Apples blow.” Be confident. Be unreasonable. Be a jerk.

He tried to teach me, he really did. It was hard for me to project myself via radio waves into cars, homes, and headphones. But he did manage to make me a better blogger and troll. He taught me to sharpen my hastily conceived points of view to a fine point and to stab, stab, stab.

He also stressed to me that there was reality, and there was the studio. I learned to be aware when I was on-air and when I was off and to never confuse radio John with real-life John, which happens all the time to people who broadcast their thoughts and feelings for money or attention.

I’d argue that being online is more attractive than boring old life — it’s exciting, and energizing, and you never have to accept responsibility for the things you say if you don’t want to. The dopamine surges are more frequent, too. Every caller, every follower, every laugh and comment is a rush, a brain-soothing jolt that further diminishes the pleasures of reality. Who wants to struggle and worry when you can exist as a disembodied voice and float above the mess of having to look at other human beings in the eye?

The very best radio personalities I’ve ever met eventually fused these two states of existence into one, and they were always on. I assume the influencer community, if you can call it that, is thick with these kinds of sickos.

There was this one guy, a sports radio legend, who would barge into the studio we shared like a one-man battering ram, talking a mile a minute, shouting orders at his producers, making fun of his interns, and griping about this football team or that basketball star.

I'd watch him prep as I slowly walked out at the end of my shift: one minute, his cans were around his neck and his mic was cold, and the next, the cans were over his ears, the mic was hot, and he was still shouting orders at his producers, making fun of his interns, and griping about this football team or that basketball star as the phone banks filled with blinking lights, each one a person desperate to connect, to shout and insult and share their second-hand opinions.

I envied his blinking lights. I never had a full bank of calls, just a handful of misfit regulars who felt obliged to remind me every night that I sucked.

The programming director never liked it when I acted over the top or pretended to be someone I wasn’t. I tried to rant like the sports radio legend, but I sounded like a living coronary — I wasn’t entertaining or interesting.

He used to tell me the callers could smell bullshit; my performances weren't convincing. “Be yourself,” he’d say, and not one of the other more polished hosts. Yes, “be yourself” sounds like a platitude, something stitched on a pillow, but he believed it. This wasn’t charity; he wanted me to succeed because finding new talent that worked for peanuts was a pain in the ass.

He told me how to commodify myself: take two or three aspects of my personality and blow them up big for the mic. Like, if I like bacon, then I have to dial up that love of bacon to a 10 on the air. I understood what he was saying intellectually, but for the life of me, I couldn’t think of three things I could passionately talk about all the time. Batman? I could probably talk about Batman for four hours, but every night?

(It turns out my only original Batman opinion—he’s lonely!—wasn’t very popular.)

He was a pro and one of the friendliest, most approachable bosses I’ve ever had in the media, but I was genuinely shocked the day he fired the morning show jock, an expensive diva addicted to controversies that repelled advertisers.

In radio, people get fired the way gangsters get capped: one in the back of the head from a friend, and you never see it coming.

He broke the news to the guy after his show, during the “air check,” and the station’s number-one star did not take it well. I could hear him barking as he stormed down the office’s hallways towards the elevator.

During my “air check” later that day, I asked him how this was possible; the morning show was popular, and everyone loved him. Surely, I said, the callers would revolt. The programming director agreed. They would definitely get calls. Nasty ones. But, eventually, the listeners would forget and move on to something else.

“How long will that take?”

“Two weeks. It takes two weeks for people to get over most things,” he said.

I have never forgotten that: no matter how beloved you are, no matter how big you may be, the public will only care about you for two weeks before finding something new and shiny to play with. Dead? Fired? Cancelled? Two weeks. This is true for nobodies and big shots. Your friends and family will cry, of course, and eat bagels and say things like “he was so young,” but two weeks later? They’ll be scrolling. Worrying. Hoping.

In that same meeting, he forced me to listen to five minutes of my show, and they were five minutes that made me cringe. I was drunk and slurring, and my sentences were like dark country roads. It was embarrassing, and we sat in silence for a minute after it was over before he said we were going to listen to it again. I begged him not to press play, but he did, and the liquor made my lisp more pronounced. I sounded so scared, too. Insecure.

He was making a point I didn’t want to hear. Then he said, “Do your show drunk again, and your show will be forgotten in two weeks.” A year or so later, I would be laid off. Corporate. Budget cuts. Nothing to be done. I saw it coming. But at least I spared him from having to fire me. I was on my best behavior until the end. That PD was the first person in my life to tell me I was drinking too much. I’m not suggesting he cared about me, personally, but he cared about good radio.

Advice For Men: Be nice to yourself after a layoff

I wanted a change. A small one. So I gave myself a mustache. Nothing too extreme. I had spent the last six months growing a full bushy, salt-and-pepper beard. In the past beards were worn by Viking warriors and stoic Civil War generals and New England fishermen.

Today, beards tend to signify a more sensitive kind of men or, at least, a freelance journalist. The mustache has resisted such a journey, despite the best efforts of fashionable, oh-so-ironic Brooklynites.

So I powered up an old pair of clippers and—bzzzzzzz—sheared my face, leaving only a modest mustache. A nostril broom. Not a waxy, old-timey barber’s mustache or the kind of fussy vice-principals carefully maintain. Not a biker’s handlebars, either. Just a mustache. Basic. Honest.

People treat you differently when you have one. You look like someone who knows how to do things, like grill a burger (which I can do).

The mustache represents masculinity in all its diversity: Einstein, Twain, Groucho. Plumbers wear them. Firefighters, too. Freddy Mercury, the angel-voiced lead singer of glam rock band Queen, sported one.

And, yes, Stalin had a moustache. So did Saddam Hussein. Hitler’s ‘toothbrush” mustache is instantly recognizable. Many of history’s monsters have mustaches, but their horrid crimes against humanity are not the fault of the ‘stash.

(I like to call my mustache a ‘stash because it suggests I’m nonchalant about my ‘stash and I am not. I am writing about my mustache because I am desperate for your validation. Please leave a comment.)

I have known many moustaches. My older brother was a Marine who wore a regulation pencil mustache. I had a boss long ago who smoked the foulest cigars in his office, and the stench would creep into the kitchen, and he had a mustache shaped like a boomerang. My local deli guy has a gray mustache and makes the best chopped cheeses in Brooklyn.

Burt Reynolds wore a “Chevron”-style mustache, which is full and slopes down towards the corners of the mouth. If you don’t know him, Reynolds was a movie star in the 70s and 80s, a charming, macho rogue. His movies were never too serious; he seemed fun. I don’t think he was born of mortals — God touched a side of beef, and the side of beef smiled and winked at him.

Do you know who else had a fine mustache? Billy Dee Williams. I’m no Lando Calrissian, but a man can dream. Growing a mustache is something I was able to do with minimal effort, thanks to testosterone.

***

In romantic comedies, there is always a scene, usually halfway through, when the main character gets a “makeover” — a sassy and flamboyant friend is sometimes there to help with the transformation. Our hero marches in and out of a fitting room, wearing new dresses, chic and fabulous. Voila! She is a whole new person.

The closest movies made for men get to a makeover are the scenes in action movies where the hero picks a shiny new gun from a wall of guns in a secret gun vault.

That’s what I wanted. A new gun. But not a gun because I am not a gun person, and I know this because I have shot guns before — I’ve shot targets and bottles and skeet and, drunkenly and stupidly, into the air. Gun people have looked at me and said, out loud, “You’re not a gun person.”

But I wanted a makeover for myself, a middle-aged man, that didn’t require a sassy, flamboyant friend. God, what I would give for a sassy and flamboyant friend. The closest I got to that was my wife staring at my mustache for a minute and then saying, “Yeah, okay, you can keep it.”

Men have few options when it comes to making a superficial change. Women can go out and buy a new tube of lipstick to make their kisser pop. But the best men can do to freshen up their look is buy a hat. The world is full of too many unhappy men wearing fedoras.

But I do believe every man should have a lucky baseball hat. That is a different essay.

I know dudes who have attempted to reboot their lives and take back their male pattern baldness by shaving their domes, a move I respect. I have a friend who is really into rings; he wears a wedding band, but, also, ornate pieces of silver jewelry around this thumbs, other digits. His fingers jingle-jangle. Sometimes he’ll say “wanna see my new ring” and, you know, yes. Yes, I want to see your new ring.

I also know men who have attempted a version of a makeover: one such acquaintance entered a clothing store called Tommy Bahama’s, and emerged, hundreds of dollars later, decked out in a well-made tropical short sleeve shirt, and white pants, resembling what I imagine a South American drug lord’s lawyer would look like on the weekends.

I briefly considered Botox. I have friends who have gotten Botox. They look the same as before Botox but feel new, and improved, the freshest produce in the produce section. Botox is not permanent, and neither is facial hair. I do not judge my friends who get Botox. One of them is an executive, and he wants people to think he’s a millennial (he’s not.)

To recap: I have a mustache. I watched a YouTube video about grooming mustaches. Then I trimmed my mustache. I looked in the mirror, and there I was, same old me, but with a curtain of hair pulled across my upper lip.

***

When I turned twenty-five, I announced I was having a “quarter-life crisis” to my father, who was just exiting his own crisis. He dealt with the turmoil of his fifties by playing video games in his underwear. This is not a terrible way to manage one’s mortality and the dread that comes with saying goodbye to old dreams and hello to newer, more attainable ones.

I didn’t know then that my “quarter-life crisis” was just “life.” Twenty-five is when you learn that life is both longer and shorter than you thought, and the hard-and-fast rules you were taught about the adult world were more like suggestions. My dad told me not to think of twenty-five as a “quarter-life crisis” but, instead, think of it as “halfway to fifty.”

Well, Dad, I’m 51 now. I hope you’re looking down from wherever you are and chuckling the way you did when you told me that my mid-twenties were just a preview of what would be coming very soon.

My mustache amused and horrified my friends. To their eternal credit, most of them did not comment on my appearance. I saw one guy about my age with a mustache at the deli — I was ordering an egg and cheese, and he was buying too many bottles of Gatorade (that’s three, if you’re curious.) We both nodded at each other approvingly. I texted my mom a photo, and she seemed pleased that I had finally gone through puberty.

I love my mustache. It fits. I’m still me, but just a little bit different. When I catch a glimpse of my ‘stache in a car window or a bathroom mirror, I get to play in an alternate reality briefly. I can pretend to have a mustache-appropriate profession, like an astronaut, or an undercover cop, or Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. My mustache makes me feel a bit more confident, too, like I’m a union boss or one of those old-school newspaper editors who is always screaming. I certainly feeling jazzier than usual. I’m even considering growing my ‘stash out so it looks more cowboy, more Wyatt Earp.

One of the great things about a mustache is that if, for instance, you’re slurping lentil soup, you will be happy to discover, a few hours later, a bonus lentil or two caught in the hairs!

I feel more confident with the ‘stash. I think I get more smiles from strangers than I used to. Or maybe I just feel friendlier? Maybe strangers smile at me all the time, but I just don’t notice. I don’t want to suggest that my mustache has suddenly made me more attractive or approachable. I do not think I have a magic mustache. But, I suppose small physical changes can work small wonders.

I don’t know if I’ll keep my sweet ‘stash. It has done its job. That’ll do, small strip of hair under my nose, that’ll do. I’ve loved the makeover so far, but I think men who are really suited for lip rugs are born with them. Like professional gamblers or Village People impersonators. Another type of man who looks natural wearing a face ferret is robber barons. Jeff Bezos’ face would be 36% less punchable with a mustache is my theory.

But I have no regrets: I wanted une petite transformation, and I got one. A tweak. For the past four or five days, I’ve just felt a little different. Not better, necessarily. There is an old saying: “The only constant in life is change.” That is one of those old saws that is best never said out loud. Yes, we all know life is never-ending, slow-motion change. It was nice to get ahead of the inevitable for a few weeks. Take control. I recommend it. If you can grow a mustache, do it. If you can’t grow a mustache, buy a fake one like a master of disguise. I won’t tell.

Or get Botox. Or a makeover. Buy that new blush. Shave your head bald. Bring back cravats! Own your own metamorphisis and be the one, true, real, you.

Just, whatever you do, don’t grow a goatee. Those are cries for help.

Advice For Men: When in doubt, play video games

This essay began as a short play titled Song of Pong, performed at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg in 2011, and later went viral as an essay on Medium. Two years ago, the video game podcast Gamers with Jobs produced a recorded version featuring actor Graham Rowat.

Growing up, my old man wasn’t into golf, or sports cars, or expensive booze. He wasn’t like other dads. The man was really into sitting in his underwear and playing video games.

I remember when he brought home our first video game system. He carried the box in his arms as if he had snatched it out of a basket floating in the Nile. I also wondered—to myself—how many trips to the amusement park one could buy with the funds he invested in a toy I never asked for. If he had asked me if I wanted an expensive toy, I would have happily told him that what I truly required was a Castle Grayskull Playset. It was stunning to see that he had used me. His son. I was his excuse to buy a video game system for himself. When he first powered it up, he clapped a slow clap; his football clap. The clap he had spent his life perfecting. A slow, satisfied clap that said “Good effing job.”

There was a half-hour sweet spot there where I was totally pro-video game. I played the game, Pong. It was a stupid game. Usually, a child’s imagination is steak sauce; it can spice up a stick and turn it into a lightsaber. But I saw Pong for what it was: two rectangles batting a dot back and forth. It managed to make actual table tennis seem like exciting fun - and table tennis was a game you found in church basements, where fun goes to die.

It didn’t help that I had no natural aptitude for playing video games. I gave up. “Don’t give up, son,” my dad said. “Try again. You can’t fail forever.”

Forever is a very long time.

From day one, Dad was hooked. The joy on his face when he’d escape into some maze was so real, I suddenly realized that he had a totally different “happy face” than the one I usually saw when I’d announce I wanted to be a ballerina when I grew up.

He had one “happy face” for when I’d recite for him the code names, secret identities, and powers of all my favorite superheroes and another “happy face” for when he was bouncing a ball back and forth on a television set - one that could have instead, preferably, been playing a rerun of an action-packed television show about a talking car that fights crime.

I would sit there and watch him as a form of protest. I figured that my blank stare would eventually unnerve him and he’d want to do something that I wanted to do during his only time to himself, early Saturday afternoon. He’d perch himself at the end of a rickety folding chair, and I’d just suddenly appear at his feet, crossed-legged, looking up at him with my arms folded. He played his video game, and I played a game of psychological warfare. I would invariably lose this war.

While my dad would zone out, his thumbs dancing and the corners of his mouth wincing, I would retire to the next room and conduct vast operas with my action figures.

Once, he called to me because of a high score he had just achieved, but I was too busy burning the face off an action figure whose fall to the dark side would be a major narrative arc involving many of my favorite toys.

My father was a pioneer of a lifestyle that would later become the butt of so many hackneyed jokes. He played the Atari for hours at a time in the basement. He could undress from his workday suit and tie into his video game uniform in a quick puff of brimstone. Bamf! For years, I lived in mortal terror that one of my friends would see my father in his underwear, and I would then turn to stone. There would usually be a plate of fuel by his side too - an assortment of snacks that harkened back to his lean, hardscrabble Depression-era childhood, loathsome foods like liverwurst sandwiches and pickled pigs feet. I guess he was a bit of a proto-foodie, too. He was born before his time.

***

My old man loved video games, and I did not. He admired three people: Tom Landry, Patsy Cline, and Link, the hero of his all-time favorite game. That game was The Legend of Zelda, which he would play and defeat and play again. It’s a game about an elf that walks around collecting hearts and coins and jewels and shoots an octopus monster with a magic sword, and he’s in love with a prom queen, and my father played it, even much later when the chemo made his skin translucent.

I was a grown man at that point, but I would still watch him play his games. I would not do this as often, as I only made cameo appearances during his illness. I grew angry once because he was playing The Legend of Zelda, and I wanted to cram years’ worth of father-son time into a few days, and why would he waste such precious moments playing a game when his son had flown all the way from New York to watch him wither? But he wanted to play The Legend of Zelda, and so he did.

That baffled me. But not for long because, of course, I flew back to the big city. Distance is the best cure for someone else’s terminal illness. That, and playing the game “Drink All of the Bourbon.”

On his deathbed, once the machines had taken over, and tubes sprouted from his face, I stroked his white hair and told him that the newest version of The Legend of Zelda was coming out shortly. That it had more levels and new bad guys and was more complicated than any other version, and that he had to play it, it was the best yet.

Your parents teach you how to live, and they teach you how to die. They teach us how to play the game. We watch them win and fail and win and fail again. We learn their hints, tips, and tricks. How to unlock secret levels and defeat big bosses.

I had more sophisticated tastes in entertainment as a sprout. For instance, I enjoyed lying on the couch, eating Oreos, and watching cartoons. I also enjoyed running through the local woods, my own private Endor. My dad would try to get me to play a game with him, or to play a level of a game, and then we’d switch off. Even as a kid I felt that video games reinforced the idea that mindless toil was its own reward.

He’d ask, and I’d respond, like the smug little shit I was, that I would prefer to play a game called “You be the son, and I’ll be the dad, and I’ll spend all day playing boring video games.”

My dad did have other interests: football, politics, and the Cub Scouts, and I loved none of those things. He would drag me to local high school games on Friday nights, and I’d spend the entire game under the bleachers looking for treasure.

Sometimes he’d have to work on the weekends, and I would get to tag along with him. He worked for the government, and the building where he worked had long marble hallways. My dad would let me run around, and I’d spend all day sprinting around corners.

He would yell at the Dallas Cowboys for fumbling the football. He would shout at politicians on television. He would curse as he carved out a race car for me from a block of pine for the Cub Scouts’ annual Pinewood Derby, which was a scam by the powerful pinewood industry to sell off its surplus.

But then there was Pac-Man. I decided once that the reason Pac-Man was always being chased by ghosts was that Pac-Man had done something very bad. Maybe he deserved his fate. Dad would shout at that game as if it were a living thing. He’d lose a round, thunder “YOU BUM!” at the screen, then start all over again.

I lied to my therapist once, because what’s the point of paying a shrink if you can’t replay and rewrite your life’s personal narrative and hope for different outcomes? I told him that my dad yelled at me for losing a game of Pac-Man and forced me to sit under the stairs. I claimed that he was a cruel Dickensian tyrant who would force me to defecate in a bucket when I refused to spend an afternoon with him playing video games, when all I wanted was to just play catch. My therapist reminded me that I despised sports and asked if I had been drinking. I sheepishly told him that I had ordered three margaritas at lunch, hold the lunch.

I have been trying, over the years, to overcome my prejudice toward video games. For one, I don’t think of them as auto-lobotomy kits anymore. They’re not silly little music boxes or wind-up trifles either. There are memories inside the computer memory. My father is somewhere inside The Legend of Zelda, the way a first kiss can hide in a song or the way the smell of Christmas cookies can unlock the sounds of laughter and of paper being torn off boxes.

I had a gamer friend whose house I would go to just to smoke his weed. The price for the free weed was watching him play his favorite games like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. While he played, I’d try to convince him that his game system was just a grim tool of the capitalistic system. When anyone wasn’t hustling to make money and feed the system, that same system occupied its slaves with something that approximated a life.

Those were excuses, of course. What I hated was failing. I could never hit the ball with the paddle. My toad always got squashed as it hopped across the road. By the time the hungry yellow lunatic had come down off his berserker pills, the ghosts always managed to stalk and kill me. The best way to never fail is to never try.

It had been years since I’d actually sat down to play a video game; I had every gadget out there except for one of those fancy new video game systems. I had been sober for three weeks and was growing bored with the sweating and the sobbing and the general existential terror.

I quit drinking because some people escape into fantasy worlds full of mysterious mazes, and some people escape into pitch-black holes of absolutely nothing and achieve absolutely nothing.

I spent most of my nights walking around the city, staring into bars, and wondering how it was that I had made such a fucking mess of it all.

I walked, read comic books, and made excuses as to why I could never go out. I seriously began to resent the walls of my apartment and once, completely sober, decided to do something about it. Walls don’t hit back, but they can take a punch. Man, can they take a punch.

A friend of mine helped me out, very casually. He gave me a new video game system. He reviewed consumer electronics, had an extra one, and offered it to me. Instinctively, I said “yes.” My dad had died nearly eight years prior. In that time, I had managed largely to tread whiskey and fail to pay my taxes, and wreck relationships with woman after woman, so I figured everything old is new again. Let’s give these games a whirl.

He threw in a game to play and recommended some others I could rent if I wanted. It wasn’t a very popular game, but it was free. It was a video game based on, or inspired by, a movie about the comic book character The Incredible Hulk. From what I understood, it was an elaborate yet uninspired interactive commercial for a movie I had already seen. The game recreated a virtual New York. It was an intelligent non-linear game, like Grand Theft Auto, with a vast environment. You could wander around and explore while you followed instructions, completed tasks, and played out the story.

In The Hulk game, you drop into the middle of a shockingly realistic representation of Manhattan. The action started whenever you engaged in the game world. The narrative protocols are triggered when you hit something, like a bus. Then the program would send villains and characters that would talk to you, and off you go…

That didn’t interest me. What did interest me was walking around New York as a ten-foot-tall monster. If I didn’t smash or cause any destruction, the program would ignore me. I’d wait at the corner of a virtual street, and wait for a virtual car to drive by and cross that street. I used to enjoy strolling down the fake West Side Highway. I figured out that I could climb the Chrysler building without drawing any attention to myself, and it was a nice view at the top. I spent almost three days on my couch, walking around a digital version of what was outside my window.

I spent the next few months enjoying the ups and downs that come with accepting full responsibility for your life. Which is a joy. I developed a slight meatball sub problem, but got that under control. I started a new job. I went on dates and drank Diet Cokes and realized that my old jokes are only funny when both the joke teller and the joke hearer are totally wasted. I learned that all outrageous and hilarious drinking stories are, in fact, the same sad, boring story.

Sobering up is like thawing an ancient mountain of ice. You’d be amazed at what you find once everything has melted away. Bones, mostly.

***

I have a memory of Dad sitting in a recliner in a treatment center years before the final downward spiral. I am angry and afraid. By then, he’s receiving his chemo treatment and playing with a portable game player. I think the game was Tetris. I am watching him. Fuck you, old man, I think, this is no time for games.

The grins of the father are visited upon the son.

So, not long after I quit drinking, I go for an annual check-up, and my doctor tells me I need more Vitamin D. He can’t see it, but the news triggers a nuclear meltdown. I knew I was sick! And now, confirmation.

Apparently, I had traded alcoholism for hypochondria. To be fair, I felt that I should be dead, anyway. Why should I survive fifteen years of organ-punishing boozing when others hadn’t? Friends of mine?

You probably know this already, but it’s worth mentioning, because I knew it, but then forgot it. If you have health symptoms, like, say, constipation or weird poop, don’t put those symptoms into a search engine on the Internet. It took an hour for me to diagnose a stomachache. I had pancreatic cancer. Liver cancer. Gallbladder disease. Hepatitis. Cirrhosis.

I was dying, obviously. I was dying because my computer told me, and the only logical, rational thing I could do was admit myself to the hospital. Which I did, with the emotionless purpose of a Vulcan. I grabbed my cell phone and marched into the emergency room and stoically informed the staff that I, John DeVore, was dying. They told me to fill out paperwork and have a seat, and five hours later, I was admitted.

On the outside, I acted calm, collected, a man on a mission. I was dying, and that was that, and it was time to get my diagnosis confirmed by the medical industry. A chore, yes. But a necessary bit of business before my journey into the unknowable void. The truth was, on the inside, I was all shouts and sirens and a string quartet on a tilting deck desperately playing upbeat music to soothe the doomed.

Every panic attack is an inside job, an act of sabotage that always comes as a surprise. Thankfully, I didn’t emotionally collapse into a pile of Jenga blocks. I just kept whispering that I was a strong man. Over and over. A lunatic’s soliloquy. A hobo’s prayer. I looked each nurse in the eyes, answered their questions succinctly, and then had quiet conversations with myself.

They took blood, and I peed in the cup. A nice doctor came in and patiently listened while I told him his job. I had pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, gallbladder disease, hepatitis, and cirrhosis. I probably needed a colonoscopy, but an ultrasound, X-ray, and a CAT scan wouldn’t hurt.

He smiled, rubbed his hands together, and told me to lie on my side, and then he stuck a finger in my butt. The doctor told me I was probably fine, but I was adamant. I demanded that they poke and prod me. Get up in my guts and confirm what I already knew. Time was wasting, and I had a grave to dig.

As I explained this to him, my bodily fluids rioted. Tears kicked out my eyeballs. Snot oozed out of my nose. I vomited in a trash can. He got up, spoke to a nurse, and told me he’d put me through a battery of tests. But first, he calmly told me, I had to take a pill.

Perhaps I should have told him I had quit drinking because that sedative took me to a place that was intensely weird. A wonderland inside my head. The emergency room was filling up so they wheeled me out of my room and into the hallway. I clutched my cellphone with both hands as if I were praying. Hospitals are really, really white and really, really bright.

My dad died well. He had years to prepare for what was going to happen. He planned and conquered every level up until we took him off life support. He made it through the chemo, the radiation, and the surgery to remove his lung. He settled his finances, told us all he loved us, and not to worry. One of the last times I saw him alive was after he had come back from the oncologist. One of the side effects of successful radiation therapy is leukemia. My old man smiled when he saw me and called the family together and explained that his leukemia was treatable, with aggressive treatments. His leukemia was not treatable. The night before I left to go back to Texas, secure that my dad would beat the cancer again, I went into the den to say goodbye. He was sitting in his underwear, playing the most recent version of The Legend of Zelda, defeating it again.

He never got bored doing the same thing, over and over. Killing the same skeleton monster. Collecting enough coins for a new potion. Saving the princess. I hugged him and remembered when his body had more flesh. As I left the den, I turned around and stole one more glance at him. The glow of the television was a halo around his head. His elf lost a battle, and I could hear the sound effect of him dying and the beeps and bloops that it took for him to start over.

As I lay in the gurney, I was sure of my fate. Resigned. Ready. The thing about kicking booze is it messes with your head. I started to hallucinate. The fact that the nurses had taken so much blood and then pumped me full of strange fluids didn’t help. I swear I heard my dad say my name. Every room in every hospital in the world is haunted, I thought to myself. But when a boy hears his father call his name, he runs.

Here’s what happened next. It didn’t actually happen, but I remember it as if it did: I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I was running, running fast, with strong, young legs. I ran across the lawn where I grew up, and pushed my old house’s screen door open with a crash, and thundered down the stairs to the basement, and my dad was sitting there in his underwear, and he says, “Welcome home, son.” When I wake up, I’m sweating and confused and alive.

***

I have a popular game on my phone where birds fling themselves at the walls of fortresses built by pigs. The birds are pissed off. It’s a fun game designed for a touch screen, which my dad could never have imagined. He would have loved it. The physics of the game are hypnotic, and the action is simple. I failed to destroy the pig fortress for a few minutes, then succeeded at toppling the walls. At the hospital, I played for the next two hours, until they wheeled me away. I was scanned, zapped and briefly irradiated. I was knocked unconscious as they jammed a tube inside of me and looked around.

They wheeled me back to the hallway, and I picked my phone back up and started catapulting more birds at more fortresses. My thumbs pecked like chickens. My brow wrinkled. I bit my tongue. Every time I destroyed a pig’s house, I felt a rush of accomplishment. When I failed, I just wanted more.

I unlocked levels, and minutes flew by. I jumped when the doctor finally walked over to talk to me. I hadn’t seen him coming. I was too busy tossing cartoon birds at pigs. The doctor went through my tests. I was fine. I wasn’t dying. Which is always a bit of a disappointment to hear when you’re certain it’s true.

The sedative had begun to wear off by that point, but I was still buzzing from hunger and adrenaline and the rush of being a conqueror. I went home and continued playing the game. I slept. I woke up. I played more. I felt better.

***

I’ve been playing more video games recently. I’m not really good at them. But the games have been teaching me important life lessons. For instance, if you’re walking down a street and you find a bazooka just lying there, pick it up, because you’re probably going to need it. You never know where golden coins are hidden, so stay curious. Always leap before you look. If you lose the fight, just start over.

Advice For Men: “Pain don’t hurt.” But it does.

For most of my life, I have been proud of my ability to absorb pain. I liked to think of it as a superpower. I’m not suggesting I am impervious to feeling pain, just that I like to think I’m good at swallowing it—ignoring it and suffering in silence.

Stubbed toe? A grimace. Trip to the dentist? A wince. My sister’s funeral? I bit the inside of my cheek until it bled.

Once, a woman I was very much in love with dumped me. She was a Capricorn and could express her feelings. I was a Leo whose emotional vocabulary consisted entirely of "whatever" and "ugh." When friends asked how I was doing, I shrugged. Pain don't hurt.

Whatever. Ugh.

I used to deal with emotional pain like any ordinary, red-blooded American man—with as few words as possible. If I could, I’d stick a grenade in the mouth of my heartbreak and pull the pin or lure my fears into the airlock of my heart, then eject into the cold nothingness of space and let it crawl around on the hull, looking for a way back in. These were my strategies. To pretend I was okay when I was not okay.

You see, I thought I was tough. A lone wolf. Never mind that one night, I stumbled home drunk and depressed to my empty apartment and screamed into a pillow with such force that I burst a blood vessel in my eye.

The next day, I wore an eyepatch to work. It made me feel like I was the commander of a team of international mercenaries. There is a part of me that will forever think that a man — a real man — doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t ask for help or open up. A real man is made of metal and rubber, like a pickup truck. I don’t know who wrote these rules. If I had to guess, I’d say John Wayne?

***

One of the most familiar tropes in the action genre is when our mostly bulletproof hero takes a bullet in the arm or the shoulder, prompting him to grunt and then quickly bandage himself with a torn-off ribbon of shirt. Ideally, this impromptu dressing reveals his chiseled physique. These scenes establish our hero as human, even if his wound only causes a momentary pause in the mayhem.

There’s a famous scene in the classic 1987 action movie Roadhouse where the hero Dalton, a philosopher kung-fu bouncer, refuses an anesthetic before getting stapled back together after a bar fight. “Pain don’t hurt,” he says. He is, in fact, flirting with the ER doctor, who will become his love interest later. Before patching him back up, she notices a freshly sutured wound on Dalton’s shoulder. “Nice work,” she says. “Good clean stitches.”

In the first few minutes of Roadhouse, we see Dalton casually stitch himself up in front of a mirror in the back room of a rowdy bar. I suppose I was impressionable when I first saw that movie, a teenager. I, too, would be like Dalton. Strong. Silent, with a well-conditioned mullet. I would smirk at agony. I would feel nothing. Say nothing.

Sadly, my stitches were always sloppy.

***

I love action movies. I am comforted by their rhythms and cliches. Our hero hanging off the skids of a helicopter, or leaping out of a window, chased by a fireball. I will watch any action movie where our hero has to diffuse a bomb or ride on top of an elevator. I am a fan of old-school action movies where the hero spends five minutes racking shotguns and smacking mags into pistols. I love impossible odds, unkillable henchmen, and roundhouse kicks.

But my favorite action movie cliche is when the main character has to perform surgery on himself. Like Bruce Willis’ hangdog cop-turned-unlikely-killing machine, John McClane, stoically pulling bloody shards of glass out of his bare feet in Die Hard. Usually, traditional self-surgery scenes require the hero to suffer as quietly and intensely as possible. Few did this as well as Willis.

A classic movie action hero celebrates a very specific old-school American virtue: not complaining when things suck. And getting knifed by a ninja, shot by a mob boss, or otherwise wounded by a villain sucks. To the action hero, this is business as usual, and there is nothing to be done except bite down on a stick when snapping a bone back into place. An action hero is allowed to sweat, maybe growl, when enduring unimaginable agony.

This is not a healthy coping mechanism by any means. But it’s an idea that resonated with me as a young man and still does now that I’m not that young anymore. Although these days, I look fondly at self-surgery scenes. I see them as the escapist fantasies they’ve always been. Only the dead are free from pain.

So, forgive me for cheering on Jason Bourne when he has to pluck a bullet out of his hip while gritting his teeth, or poor, beat-up John Wick, reduced to using veterinarian surgical equipment on himself.

I have considered writing a Netflix pilot titled Action Hero Hospital about a hospital for action heroes, but with no doctors or nurses. Just scenes of muscle-bound vigilantes and vengeance-fueled former special forces shouting ‘clear’ to no one before defibrillating themselves.

***

And then there’s Sly Stallone’s Rambo, a pioneering self-surgery character. In his first movie, Rambo: First Blood, Rambo uses a needle and fishing line hidden inside the handle of his knife. Rambo is resourceful and disciplined, and offers up a grunt to show he’s human.

My absolute favorite self-surgery scene is in 1989’s Rambo III. This is the hilariously problematic sequel about the soulful one-man army John Rambo teaming up with heroic Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. In a few years, those freedom fighters would become terrorists. During one scene, Rambo pushes a shard of shrapnel through his side, pours gunpowder into the wound, and lights it up, searing his flesh shut.

There are three primary rules for action-movie self-surgery. Rule one is you can scream once, and even then, it should be more of a bellow than a shriek. Rule two: cauterize that wound with fire, or at the very least, pour liquor over the wound right after taking a slug. Rule three? Forget the trauma by the next scene. Never let on that you’re hurting.

***

Every week, I go to men’s only group therapy. I’ve been doing it for years. I didn’t want to go at first, but my therapist suggested I try it. I was tired of feeling angry and scared all the time. Alone. No man is an island. Or a Skull Island. Any island metaphor works. I needed to learn to connect with friends and family, and sharing couches with strangers was a good start.

I know therapy is a luxury for many. I can barely afford it. I’m sure my health insurance company would be fine with me pouring gunpowder in my wounds, physical or emotional.

I go because I am learning to open my mouth and tell other humans how I feel. It takes practice. Because I am too used to standing in a pool of my gore and feigning surprise when a friend or loved one asks me if I’m bleeding.

The group is run by a shrink who likes to box. He’s particularly good at calling me on my bullshit. The group itself sounds like the setup to a corny joke: a teacher, a butcher, a banker, and me, a writer, sit in a room together, sometimes in awkward silence. We’re all different ages and probably wouldn’t have met each other out in the world. We sometimes talk like overgrown toddlers: “Me angry. Me depressed. Me scared.” I usually crack jokes, except when I suddenly realized my cheeks were painted in tears. I had been talking about how I thought I was happy. If you are inclined to ignore pain, you will also ignore pleasure. I was happy because I loved my wife, and I still struggle to tell her. You know, with words and acts of service.

I struggle to say things. Out loud. To tell those I love that I love them.

But don’t get me wrong. I still zone out when I’m in the group. I’m not always honest or present. Recently, the teacher asked me how my job hunt was going, and I replied, “Great,” like a broken android. The truth was, I was scared and scared that I was scared. Admitting to myself and others that I am scared is not a weakness. That’s a difficult concept for me to grasp. Asking for help is what the commander of a team of international mercenaries would do.

I like to imagine sitting in group therapy with Jason Bourne, Dalton, and Rambo, and we’re talking about all the times we had to stuff our guts back inside ourselves and how much that hurt, and then I’d suggest an alternative.

There’s another way. You don’t have to bleed alone. Are you listening, Rambo?

There is another kind of action-movie self-surgery scene that I haven’t mentioned. It’s a subset of the lone action hero twisting his tourniquet. I call it “Surgery with Friends”. An example: In the ’90s action-thriller Ronin, gun-for-hire Robert De Niro instructs his friend and fellow rogue operative Jean Reno on removing a bullet from his gut. In the underrated 19th-century British naval flick Master and Commander, sensitive doctor Paul Bettany has to direct Captain Russell Crowe into yanking a bullet out of him.

“Next time,” I’d say, locking eyes with Rambo, “ask me for help?”

Advice For Men: Shake hands. Firmly

1. “The pandemic killed the handshake.”

That is my friend’s thesis. He had recently gone to a job interview. A rare in-person one. In the flesh. When he told me his fourth interview would be with human beings in a real meeting room, I probably gasped, as if I were an ornithologist learning that a once thought extinct breed of bird had been sighted.

Most of the interviews I get these days are not only few and far between but also conducted over Zoom, Teams, Meet, or some other horrid video platform. He did not get the job, and he told me he knew he didn’t get it when, after being interrogated for 45 minutes about KPIs and metrics and goals, which are all the same thing, he leaned across the table to shake the hand of the person who interviewed him, and that person stared at his hand like it was covered in leeches.

This person — an HR rep? A vice president? They had only offered their first name — regrouped and offered their hand, which had transformed itself suddenly into a fish, a freshwater one, like a trout or a perch. Lifeless, cold, recently wet.

“The pandemic killed the handshake.”

The handshake had been dying long before the pandemic. But I didn’t push back. I just let him talk. Unload. The disappointment was heartbreaking. He stuttered at times. I told him he wasn’t alone. I understood. Others. It’s just how it is. Things will change. We shared a plate of diner fries. Before we parted ways, he went to his wife and kid, and I went to a cafe to email resumes that will never be seen by human eyes. We shook hands, and we both put a little muscle into it as if to say, “I got you.”

2. My dad worked for a politician from Texas. He was tall and lean and wore tailored suits that my old man could neither afford nor fit into. He was powerful, or that was what I was told. I had no idea what that meant, of course. Was he powerful? Could he shoot lasers out of his eyes? One of the defining memories of my childhood was looking up at him, as if he were a mountain, his head covered in clouds.

He was older than my dad. I thought all adults were 100 years old, but the politician was, what? 200? He carried himself like a dignified old king, but he looked hearty, especially compared to my dad, who always looked tired. What I didn’t know then (how could I?) was that the best skincare regimen is money.

The politician always greeted me when I’d tag along to the office. He’d shake my hand and say my name. “John.” “Sir,” I’d whisper. His fingers were long, and his right hand was warm, like a cooling cookie. His handshake was surprisingly gentle. He was in control, of course. But he held my meaty little hand with care.

A few brief, serious-minded pumps, and then I’d be ushered away, out of his office, or my dad’s, to a table where I was told to doodle or read my comic books. One time I was led out of his office with a hand on my back, and I turned around to my father talking, gesturing, looking up to the politician who wiggled his long fingers goodbye to me before returning to whatever business needed discussing.

3. Every other Sunday, my family would attend worship services at one of the local Southern Baptist churches in Northern Virginia. I was raised a Catholic, but my dad was a Baptist, like his father, my grandfather, a preacher. I attended Mass almost every week, but a couple of times a month, we’d say hi to Jesus over at Columbia Baptist in Falls Church.

The pastor of this church was funny and friendly, and at times I wondered whether the Baptists were more fun than the Catholics. In retrospect, they both have many positive qualities — Baptists, on the whole, make exceptional potato salads. The pastor’s suits were no different from my dad’s, which were modest and well-worn, but his ties were colorful, and he sometimes wore a flower on his lapel.

He had that skill that the best performers have: it felt like he was talking directly to you from the stage. The pulpit. Same thing. His sermons weren’t as boring as Father Hammond’s. The pastor was a football fan, too, and occasionally, he’d offer a prayer to his favorite NFL team, the Washington Redskins.

After every service, he stood at the doors of the cavernous chapel and shook the hands of every parishioner. He had every name memorized. His smile was genuine. He warmly welcomed my mom, my brother, and me every time we attended his service, and he always clasped my hand with both hands. His handshake was gentle but comforting. There’s a hymn that goes “he’s got the whole world in his hands.” Kids sing it at special services. That was the pastor’s handshake. He held me for a moment. I somehow suspected that if I were to trip or fall, he’d be able to catch me.

4. One night, after dinner, in our tiny walk-in kitchen, my dad, in his underwear, interrupted polishing his shoes to teach me how to shake hands. His boss shook thousands of hands, he told me, as if it were one of Hercules’s labors. That was the job. Rallies, dinners, speeches. Hand after hand after hand. The politician’s wife would cover up the bruises with makeup.

He worked long days for the politician and spent his hours at home reading spy thrillers or watching football. So I was happy whenever he found the time to teach me how to do things. Shave. Tell jokes. Shake hands.

He stubbed out one of his cigars and said: A good handshake is firm, but you must never try to crush the other person’s fingers. That’s rude. A man can control himself. He should know his own strength. He shouldn’t be too eager or impatient, and he shouldn’t show weakness, either. Open your heart. Meet people. Hold your ground. Look them in the eyes. Every handshake is an opportunity to say, “I respect myself.”

So he and I practiced. “How do you do?” “How do you do?” We shook hands. We shook hands again. His hands were my hands, mottled with age, a plain silver wedding band hugging one ring finger, a bejeweled gold class ring on the other. We shook again, and that time, I wanted to pull him into me for a hug. And, instead, he pulled me into his chest.

5. I spent the final few months of my last semester of college off campus, living in a dump in Richmond, dreaming big, stupid dreams with other art-school deadbeats. I would graduate, and that was, possibly, the only miracle I have ever experienced, a wasted effort by the Almighty to make himself known to me. It was during this listless time that I met a handsome man at a party who was a few years older than me.

He blew into town one day like the Music Man and started a theater company dedicated to punk rock adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. He directed a low-budget production of Romeo & Juliet in a small local performance space that was loud and violent. The leads kissed with tongue. Tybalt was beaten bloody. After the last line was spoken, the two warring families mourned for a moment before drawing their blades and lunging at each other before a blackout. I was shaken. The young die, and the old learn nothing.

I wanted to meet this director. He was all anyone was talking about. He was clever, they said. Magnetic. He wore a goatee, and I thought, “Oh, cool, a goatee.” There were rumors, too. His name was fake. He’d been to prison. Stolen money. He was sleeping with both Juliet and Mercutio. I got my chance when I found him in the poorly lit kitchen of a crowded, creaking rowhouse after one of the shows. He was pouring beer from a keg into a red cup. The party was already starting to stink of sweat and stale marijuana.

I introduced myself, and the director reached out his hand, limp, palm down, like the pope offering his ring for a kiss. His skin was cool and dry. His grip was a crab claw. When he squeezed, an electrical current surged through my arm, my guts, and down my leg. I let go with a jolt, and he took a long, bored swig from the red cup. From behind me, someone called his name over the pounding music. He pushed past me, through a curtain of limbs and teeth and bobbing heads.

6. I used to party with a salesman, partly because he had money and hated to drink alone, and partly because he could never turn his superpower off, which was the ability to snake-charm idiots, and I was a very stupid drunk. His smile was permanent, a name etched into wet concrete that hardened long ago. His eyes were small and black, like the pips on a pair of dice

He loved to drink, and so did I, and after work, we’d hit the same midtown Irish pub. He spent his days selling ads for a small magazine about personal computers and I was an assistant editor who wrote little blurbs about software. His hands were like beaver tails, wide and leathery, and he’d slam the top of the bar whenever he laughed, or if the Knicks were on a run, or he needed to order a few friends a beer, usually another random off-the-clock corporate dweller who fell for his smile, or his jokes, or his bar tab.

When you met him, the first thing he did was present his hand, that giant flipper, and then he’d hold your hand, and place his other hand on your elbow, and gently rock your arm back and forth. And every dude, and it was only dudes, surrendered; none of them pulled away or tried to grab his elbow, or otherwise attempt to dominate the handshake. We’re talking burned-out lawyers and filthy, rotten alcoholics and off-duty cops in a hurry to forget it, if they got caught in this guy’s riptide, they’d immediately give in. It was amazing to watch. I didn’t know, and I still don’t, whether he was good at his job.

There was one night he fell on his ass. He had just bought a round for a father and son visiting the city, excused himself, and stumbled outside. I followed him and found him on the ground, laughing. He had puked on himself. I gave him my hand, and he took it, and I dragged him up. He didn’t let go. He shook my hand and thanked me. “Thank you, thank you.” I let go, and he still held on. “Thank you, thank you.”

7. I wasn’t drunk for my father’s funeral, but I was hungover, which was the best I could do. The night before, I drank beer until I pissed myself, and I woke up with a mouth full of ash. I didn’t have time to shower, but I shaved, quickly, too quickly, and cut my face up. I left the house with a clumsily knotted blue tie and small scraps of toilet paper secured to my cheeks and chin with dots of dried blood.

The service was conducted by our old pastor from Virginia, who had flown to Texas, and I avoided him. I barely glanced at my mother or brother, and I dimly recall my sister dragging me aside and asking me if I was drunk. She was upset. I was upset. I walked away from her and stood over the sandwich tray as dozens of mourners walked past me. One of my dad’s old friends patted me on the back, and I winced. I just focused on the platters of room-temperature food, cubes of cheese, carrot sticks, and chocolate chip cookies.

I didn’t notice my uncle when he saddled up next to me. The husband of my mother’s sister. He was balding and wore sunglasses inside the funeral home’s multipurpose grieving room. My uncle had served in Vietnam, a young Latino who had enlisted before the draft descended on the nation. Maybe he thought he was doing the right thing at the time? The patriotic thing? It has always been easy to send the young to war; it’s one of history’s great tragedies. My uncle had seen combat. He had been wounded. He rarely talked about what happened in the jungles. We were not close; this had been the first time I’d seen him in years. I definitely hadn’t seen him while my dad was sick.

He tried to connect at first. Awkwardly. Under his breath, he muttered, “You never know when it’s your time.” My dad was 62 when he died. He fought the cancer for almost five years, bravely, desperately, especially near the end. My uncle then turned to me and said, in a flat but direct way: “John, go to everyone here and shake their hand. Shake their hand, and thank them for coming. That’s all you have to do. But you have to do it.” And then he walked away, and instead of sobbing right there, over the crudités, I did what he told me. Slowly at first. But I shook every hand and thanked everyone for coming.

Advice For Men: One day at a time, friend

The average life expectancy of a man living in the United States is 76.3 years or 27,868 days. I am 51 years old, and I have lived 18,628 of those days so far, with approximately 9,240 or so left, give or take. I’m pretty healthy, and I eat lots of beans, so maybe I’ll make it to 80, who knows.

Of the 18,628 days I’ve been alive, I was drunk for about 6,205 of them. Almost seventeen years. That’s what is called a “bender.” I’m sure there were days during those years when I wasn’t tipsy or wasted or high, but I don’t remember them, so I don’t count them.

Most importantly, I am sober today. Right now, as I write this. Today is my 5,844th day of sobriety, which is exactly 16 years. The plan is not to drink tomorrow, too, but that is not my business right now. I will worry about the future when I get there. For now, I am sitting in a chair at a table next to an open window. There is a breeze. I have a cup of tea. My one-eyed dog is gently snoring. I am sober and clear-headed and open-hearted. I am breathing. I am hopeful. And exhausted. I struggle to push away dim and distant memories of bloody noses and stolen bottles of Schnapps. There is nothing I can do about those days and nights, long ago, when I would wake up with a jolt at a bar and wonder how I got there.

All I can do is embrace that regret and let it pass through me. I am a breeze. I am a river. I am a ghost. I have more days behind me than I do ahead of me, but what’s important is what’s right in front of me. Life. Messy and heartbreaking and tedious. I cannot worry about what was or what will be; all I can do is stare directly at what is. All I can do is live life one day at a time.

There are two things alcoholics love. Well, besides alcohol. And cigarettes. Two things. Alcoholics love sugar, and we’re not picky. Stale cookies. Sloppy box cakes. Leftover Halloween candy bars. Do you know how in horror movies vampires hiss with hunger when confronted with a juicy neck? That’s me whenever I see a chocolate croissant. The other thing alcoholics love is easy-to-remember sayings, partly because drunks have Swiss cheese brains but also because life is really complicated and hard, and simple mottos are surprisingly, materially, useful. I have a very busy brain. Have you ever seen a small dog murder a sock? That’s what’s happening in my skull, always.

There are endless acronyms and pithy maxims in the program, but the most famous bit of wisdom is to live life one day at a time. ODAAT. It’s not original. Everyone has heard it. It’s the sort of thing you say, with a shrug, when a friend you’re not close with asks you how things are going. “Just living one day at a time,” and you throw your hands up and smile weakly. Womp, womp.

But that cliche is a pool noodle. It has kept me afloat for years, sometimes barely, but thanks to that reminder, I know every second of every minute of every hour of every day is a gift and a curse and an opportunity to love, to glow, to bob with the icy waves.

I am not the world’s best recovering alcoholic. I’m not that person at a meeting who is all smiles and handshakes, happy to be alive because it was really touch-and-go there for a while. I’m a lurker. A mumbler. Please, oh please, don’t look me in the eyes.

When I talk, if I talk, I want to get it over with, and I’m not alone, of course, because all alcoholics are anti-social cave-dwellers, skittish, hairless raccoons who like to sleep in the trash. Even the smiling people who are desperate to connect and eager to grab a coffee anytime, anywhere, are wrung-out by emotions. I know folks like that. They get wrung out but will still pick up the phone at 3 AM to talk to someone sober and sobbing, someone who can’t make it another day, but friend-o, here’s the good news: you just have to make it to the end of this one.

When I was drinking, I’d flop around in guilt over who I hurt one minute and invent ridiculous futures and fabulous successes that would just happen without any hard work or planning the next. I would vibrate, ping-pong, and talk at 100 MPH.

I’d sit at a bar next to another lonely bastard and complain. I deserved this, I deserved that. But it was only once I stopped drinking that I realized I deserved nothing. I’m not special. I am a human being, and I get what everyone else gets: a small pile of days, like beans. Some of us are blessed with more days than others, but there is never enough, especially not in the end.

Long before I quit drinking, I blacked out on the subway. Like, on a Tuesday night. I had done that many times before. I lived at the end of the N train in Queens, and I’d usually just wake up at the last stop and slither home, but this time I found myself deep into Brooklyn, and I had no idea how I got there. Where had I been drinking? Who was I with? Where is my belt? On the long ride back to Queens, I remember thinking, “What if I’m drunk when I die?” It was a chilling thought.

It still took me a good six years or so to ask for help, though.

You have only today. Twenty-four pitifully short hours. An eternity. That’s it. Right now. So speak what you feel. Choose joy. Choose courage. Pick up the phone. Laugh. Dance. Swim. Own your fears and listen to the soft voices in your life. Do not waste your beans. You have only today — this moment — and it’s not your last one. Hallelujah. I am 16 years sober. I am one day sober. I am an alcoholic.

Advice For Men: Try to love yourself

When I can’t sleep, I listen to history podcasts.

This is a fairly recent habit after years of curing my insomnia with herbal teas, long baths, and melatonin gummy bears. It’s not that I’m not interested in history or that the podcasts I listen to are boring, per se. There’s one about Napoleon that is quite popular, and the host obviously does a lot of research, but within minutes of listening to it, I fall asleep. There are a number of battles Napoleon fought that I don’t know whether he won. I wonder how his invasion of Russia turned out?

I’ve listened to podcasts about the Industrial Revolution and Rome, and each of them is like auditory general anesthesia; I just black out.

A few nights ago, however, I decided to shake things up and try a philosophy podcast. I’m not a smart person; my burden is being heartbreakingly handsome. I have known and learned from many philosophical people. But the word “philosophy”—the concept—reminds me of stoner frat boys in college arguing about time travel and aliens and what we were talking about, man? I’ve lost contact with all of them, but I’m pretty sure they’re libertarians now who never shut up about guns. It is your right to own a gun, or guns. But it should be illegal to talk about them for more than thirty seconds.

My theory was: if a Napoleon podcast puts me to sleep after five minutes, then a podcast about Nietzsche could do it in seconds. Like, it should be an extra-strength sleep aid.

So I randomly listened to an episode about the famed 20th-century German-born American psychologist, philosopher, and scholar Erich Fromm. I say “famed” because that is what the podcast told me. I had never heard of him. He wrote a lot about freedom and society and criticized Freud.

He also wrote about love, specifically that it is the solution to the primary problem of being human, which is loneliness. Being alone isn’t the whole issue. Fromm points out that learning to love oneself means learning to be alone. To be human is to suffer a profound longing for completeness that only love can soothe. We are separate from one another and yearn to be intimate, even if that idea seems terrifying or impossible. Love is not some squishy feeling inside. Fromm says, “Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.”

His entire theory of love is in his 1956 book ‘The Art of Loving,’ which was apparently a big hit. He doesn’t believe in the concept of “falling in love,” for instance. To Fromm, love is a muscle.

And by this point, I’m wide awake in bed nodding along to the philosophy podcast. My eyes are open. I want to love. I want to connect. I want to care for other people.

To Fromm, love radiates out from inside. He writes about self-love, which requires faith and courage. To love yourself is to forgive yourself, to be gentle and tender with your sorrows and failures. It is respecting yourself. And according to the host, Fromm believes that the only way to truly love is to first love oneself, and then everyone else. All of mankind.

That’s when I thought: “Oh fuck, I hate so many people though.”

***

If love is an action, then the opposite of love isn’t hate. The opposite of love is power.

Power has no friends. No family. Power isn’t loyal. Power understands one truth, and that is “mine.” Listen to power: it talks about itself. Incessantly. Power never shuts up. Power is a hole in the ground, and at the bottom of that hole is a cold, dead voice: “mine”. “Mine,” it cries. “I’m hungry.” “You hurt my feelings.” Power crawls, grows, strangles. Power sucks meat off bones. It takes what it wants; it rips and rends. You cannot please it for very long. Power has no strategy beyond clawing for more, taking, stealing, smashing.

Power wants to dominate, and love requires cooperation.

Love cares. Love heals. Love is tender. Love answers the phone at midnight. But hate is also an emotion. A feeling. You can taste hate. Smell it. Hate is fear and anger, and it feels good. Like scratching a poison ivy rash. It’s warming your face by the fire you set with matches and gasoline.

Hate makes me feel powerful and in control, and power is how humans push others away and try to control them. That’s also called politics.

According to Fromm, opening your heart to the world is to be “saddened very often.” Hate, on the other hand, can be fun as hell.

My hate is loud and confident. Like bourbon, it’s a terrible anti-anxiety cure. I hate people I cannot control, and I cannot control anyone. All I can really do is sit in my skin and do nothing except try to love, first myself, then everyone else. Hating takes less effort, of course.

I hate tyrants. Who doesn’t? I hate the cruel and the unjust. I hate bullies and anyone who laughs at others' pain. I hate religious fanatics and white supremacists and cable news hosts who lie and mock the weak. I hate people who worship politicians, especially that fussy golden oaf. Oh, you hate that I hate him? Well, guess what? I hate you, too.

I hate the outrage and the outrage over the outrage. I hate how easy it is to hate. I hate the hypocrites and the scolds. The Ivy League know-it-alls and the powerbrokers in their private jets. I hate the ethnofacism of the right and the suffocating moral purity of the left.

I hate my health insurance. I hate anyone who uses speakerphone in public. I hate people who walk their pitbulls without a leash like they’re Lord of the Dogs or something. I saw a woman hiss at a waiter the other day because he forgot their guacamole, and guess what? Hate her.

Every day, I hate someone new on Threads, Bluesky, or Instagram. I hate every TikTok I scroll past. I hate my algorithm. Social media is a box full of boxes, infinite boxes, and inside each box is a digital soul, a person, banging on the walls, screaming. I hate anyone who is happy. I hate anyone with a positive attitude. I had a personal trainer who would say things like, “You gotta push through the pain!” I hated him then, and I hate him now, and it’s been, oh, a decade.

There was one boss of mine I hated because he knew I knew he didn’t know what he was doing, and he punished me for it. I hated the redneck who once called my mom the ‘n word’ in a parking lot in Northern Virginia, and it offended her because it was the wrong slur — she’s Mexican-American. I hate the young woman who plays cello above me on Sunday mornings. She’s talented, I guess, but c’mon. Sunday mornings?

I hate myself, too. Not as much as I used to, though. Which is good. I grow slowly. I have hated myself for being lazy. Egotistical. I have hated myself for not listening, for not being present, for not being there when they needed me. I have been hurtful. I loathed myself—with gusto—because it was easier than apologizing. I could do it alone, with a bottle. Self-hate is vanity, cold and congealed.

I am trying to love myself, though. Or, that’s my long-term goal. How am I doing?

Self-love is not narcissism. It’s not a selfie or some feel-good mantra you’re supposed to whisper to yourself in the morning. Self-love is seeing the flaws in yourself, the imperfections and insecurities, and frailties, and not looking away.

Erich Fromm doesn’t think I can love unless I love myself (hard enough) and everyone else (impossible? Maybe.) It’s not a new idea, that’s for sure. The world’s religions and philosophies all have a version of The Golden Rule. I was taught to “love one another” because I was Catholic, and that was Jesus’ sole commandment. And we all know what happened to that very nice, very radical man. He died really badly. Anger and fear won in that story, you know?

It is hard to love others. What is specifically challenging is that in order to love mankind, or humankind, or peoplekind, you must see yourself in even the vilest humans. Criminals and cutthroats. Real pieces of shit. That doesn’t mean they should not be held responsible for the suffering they inflict. To be truly free is to struggle with the consequences of your actions and words. Vigilantes should be prosecuted. Anti-semites should be mocked and shouted down. The corrupt should be stripped of any authority. And yet, I should love them, anyway.

At the moment, popular politics rejects such conversations. To feel compassion for your enemy is to be weak, or worse, a “moderate.” The two political parties are in a baseball-bat fight, each taking turns cracking the other on the skull. In politics, compromise is what happens after everything else has been tried, including actual violence.

There are those who cringe at the word “forgiveness.” It sounds too religious, or too simple, or too jellyfish. I understand. “Forgive me,” is the motto of the good-for-nothing. But forgiveness is a form of love. Remember that. It’s an action. It’s knowing you’ve hurt someone and letting them know you know there’s nothing you can do to undo what has been done. There is only tomorrow.

And in case you’re wondering: you can forgive without forgetting. Most importantly, too, you don’t have to forgive if you don’t want to. You should think about it, though. One can have compassion for others without excusing their cruelty. Every person is capable of incredible kindness and thoughtfulness, and the opposite is true, too. If we weren’t, then our choices wouldn’t matter. So I can at least try to love those who hate me. I can see myself in them, even if I have to squint. I understand anger and fear and hate. I can recognize it in others and in myself.

I want to love. I want to connect. I want to care for other people, but that is easier said than done. I hate so many people right now. I don’t think I can let go. Forgive. Open my heart to those who want to spit venom in my face. But Erich Fromm wants me to love all mankind. Even the jerks. Even those who will never love me back. I just learned about Erich, but the dude makes some really good points.

I’m going to try to go back to bed now. I couldn’t sleep, so I wrote this instead. I love you. Yes, even you. For now. One last thought: I don’t recommend philosophy podcasts as sleep aids.

Advice For Men: Wander around a thrift store

I like to wander the aisles of Texas thrift stores to clear my mind. That is not all I do when I visit the Lone Star State, but I always look forward to it. I also eat enchiladas with my mom when I’m there. I make the pilgrimage from New York City once or twice a year. I watch old movies on Turner Classic Movies, too.

But, eventually, I will find myself inside one of the many Goodwills in Austin, where I will spend hours staring at garbage that could, in the best possible circumstances, be very valuable.

Treasure hunting isn’t why one should embrace second-hand retail, though. There are plenty of practical reasons to shop at a thrift store. An intelligent and eagle-eyed shopper on a budget can find quality clothes, dishes, and suitcases. But everybody there secretly hopes they’ll find a diamond in a shoebox full of a widow’s costume jewelry. There is also the legend of the little old lady who found a first edition of ‘Gone With The Wind’ and sold it to a book collector for tens of dollars. Her tale is whispered in every Goodwill across the country.

My mother bought a pair of matching Art Deco floor lamps last week, twenty bucks for both, but she haggled the price down to fifteen. A deal. She also found a delicate porcelain teacup, a saucer, and a copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s award-winning sci-fi fantasy ‘A Wrinkle In Time’. Did she already have a copy of the novel? She bought it just in case (later, we learned she had a copy; now she has two).

There is a meditative quality to strolling through thrift-store aisles. I imagine it’s a little like foraging. I wouldn’t know exactly what that is like because I’m not a bear, but patience is probably involved. So I walk around the musty merchandise, softly humming to myself. I pick up a knick, I put down a knack. To misquote the Taoist poets: “nature does not hurry.” So I do not hurry.

I feel safe and unhurried when I exit the Texas heat and enter a cavernous, air-conditioned warehouse of bargains. There’s no pressure to buy anything. A department store is full of new stuff begging to be loved. A thrift store’s inventory isn’t so desperate. The stuff is just thankful it’s not in a landfill. It’s stuff with a second chance to take up space.

There is plenty of space in Texas.

At a thrift store, I cultivate my inner Grandma. I am wise, frugal, and in no rush to get important things done. But if I find a nice sweater that fits a loved one, I will buy it and then subject it to aggressive dry cleaning.

Every thrift store smells like mildew and leather. Sweaty dollar bills. Sweet rot. It’s an ancient scent. Comforting. Honest. Inhale it. If you’re not an experienced thrift veteran, I suggest you have a plan before you go. Here’s what I advise: be open to wonder. You might not find anything you want, and that is not the point. You could find exactly what you need, and that is not the point, either. The point is to roam—amble—come what may.

I usually start my trek by looking at the shirts. There are always shirts, and I regard each casually, T-shirts for days, every color, with or without holes. I can’t resist faded rock-band tees or anything Batman-themed. A worn-out cowboy shirt formerly owned by an actual working cowboy, destined to be worn by a fashionista on a budget. A tuxedo shirt with a wine stain, a name-brand button-down, a Hawaiian shirt with missing buttons. I recently found and purchased a well-worn white T-shirt with the cartoon orange cat Garfield folding his arms on the front. Why did I buy it? The universe told me to.

I pick through jeans, slacks, and overalls. Everything is one, two, or five dollars. Sometimes more, but not much.

Then I move on. More trash beckons.

I’ll stroll through aisles of snow globes from exotic American locales like Las Vegas. In that same aisle are ashtrays—fancy crystal bowls and homemade ashtrays painted by children. There are always giant balls of tangled Christmas lights, like plastic, multicolored tumbleweed. Belt buckles, too. It’s Texas after all. Big ones the size of steering wheels.

There is little logic to the layout of a thrift store. A left turn at the blazers or a right turn at the hats can lead to all-new, all-old rubbish. I’ll briefly sit on ancient sofas that still remember the weight of the family that lived years of their lives on them. Someone bought a waffle iron and then decided enough was enough with the waffles. A section of religious figures — saints, the mother of god, her son — pray. It being Texas, there are aisles of mugs, plates, and signs daring anyone reading the inscription to mess with their home state.

The painting section is always good for a visit. There are reproductions of famous works of art, the kinds of bland landscapes you’d find hanging in a motel. Then there are the original works of art that I always want to buy. Awkward abstract self-portraits and hills covered in happy little trees. All sloppy and true. I’d frequent a museum dedicated to thrift store art.

The technology section always features computers from ten years ago. There are stacks of VCRs and record players. There are usually plenty of VHS tapes and records to buy, too. There are old Robin Williams movies, DVDs, and old Whitney Houston albums, CDs. The toy section usually has dirty stuffed animals, slightly deflated basketballs, and, occasionally, a toy from my childhood, like a muscular plastic He-Man action figure. It’s an excellent place to find multiple generations of super-soaker water guns.

In front of every thrift store, under glass, are the most valuable baubles: rhinestones the size of prunes, the finest fake Rolexes, pocket knives with the initials “D.J.” carved into the pearl handle. Ah, damn, if only my initials weren’t “J.D.” My mom has a weakness for jangly charm bracelets, all of them worthless, but you’ll find them in these display cases. Russian nesting dolls, too. Broken violins.

It is true, as Shakespeare wrote, all that glisters is not gold, and that is especially true at a thrift store. But that is one of its charms. There are no expectations. It's the low-stakes hunt that matters. If you need cash or need a cheap wedding ring, then go to a pawn shop. The difference between pawn shops and thrift stores is relatively simple: the former is where you sell grandma's silverware to pay off medical debts. The latter is where you point at a charm bracelet and whisper to yourself, "Oooh, I bet that's worth a pretty penny." And maybe it is, maybe it is.

And then there are the books. The books are my favorite. There are dog-eared bestsellers (especially Stephen King), I will flip through, and self-help books that promise everlasting happiness. There are gritty, patriotic Tom Clancy spy novels and Clancy copycats, too, books about one-man armies fighting terrorists and madmen. There are disposable sci-fi novels with menacing robots on the covers, and bible-sized fantasies about dragons. Every thrift store in Texas has at least five copies of the ‘50 Shades of Grey’ erotica series. And then there are my favorites: dusty classics. ‘Don Quixote,’ ‘Moby Dick,’ ‘Great Expectations.’ I just finished reading a copy of John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ that cost fifty cents. That was a steal. It is not as funny a book as I had hoped.

If I don’t find anything worth forking over a few bucks for, that is perfectly acceptable. I’m not there to buy more stuff; that’s a byproduct of why I go to thrift stores. I’m there to empty my head and spend time with junk that is eager to tell its junk story. Most of all, I am there to roam. So I eat a plate of enchiladas and then another. I walk my mom’s old dog under a hot Texas sun, yellow like a hard-boiled yolk. I drink instant coffee and watch cable news commercials selling medical devices and reverse mortgages. And, when I can, I escape to a thrift store. Every so often, I am loaded with precious family baubles to drop off because that is the circle of life. Then I wander to clear my mind. I drift. I mosey. I’m not always alone, and my mother waddles behind me, pushing a shopping cart. Oh, look at this vase, Mom, I’ll say. She’ll find a hideous button-down, something you’d bury an accountant in, and I’ll feign interest. Can you believe this is only ten dollars? It’s a perfectly good toaster; only one of the slots is broken.

Advice For Men: Pick a favorite sword

Every man is a “sword guy.” I really can’t tolerate any disagreement on this hot take; it’s demonstrably true. If you corner any man and ask him, “What’s your favorite sword?” while a few may protest, or act like they’re above the question, or deflect, they will all eventually answer.

I’m not a big believer in lumping men into categories: tech bro, gym rat, redneck. Some dudes are really into craft beers, some live for golf. Or comic books. Or motorcycles. I have friends who are fathers, and I have a dog. I don’t think of gender as a set of rules or a rigid state of being. I know to some people, masculinity is material reality itself, like being a log or a shark, but that’s not me.

There are countless ways to be a man—vive la différence!—, and while I believe that is the case, without any doubt, I still think every man should be able to answer the following question immediately without thinking: What is your favorite sword, historical or fictional? Saber? Claymore? Lightsaber?

I am confident that if I sat any random adult man, of any age, in front of a podcast microphone, I could get him to talk for at least 45 minutes about swords.

(There are actually three questions every man should have ready answers for. The first is “What’s your favorite sword?” The second: “Name your 24-hour diner order.” And lastly: “Why go on?”)

Let me first address the Freudian symbolism of swords: they are phalluses, yes, absolutely. How perceptive, Sigmund. But swords are sigils. They represent violence, but also justice and protection. And vitality. The lifeforce. Swords destroy. Swords provide. A sword channels the spirit of the warrior who wields it. Without one, dragons rule. You cannot begin a quest without one, and every man is on a quest, even if it’s just getting through the day.

The sword represents the intellect in the tarot, which cuts away lies and illusions to reveal the truth. I have been dealt cards from the sword suit before, and I’m always left wondering whether or not I’m full of shit. In the Bible, the Archangel Michael wields a flaming sword against evil and darkness, the most badass detail I remember from CCD. Excalibur was pulled from the stone by Arthur, who became king of England. I always loved that story. Every man must step up to the stone at one point in his life.

There are so many cool as hell swords to choose from, like the longsword, the medieval two-hander designed to chop and thrust. The Roman gladius, a short boy used by legionnaires for gory, stabby, close-quarter combat. One of my personal favorites is the rapier, the long, pointy sword built for vicious, elegant stabbing. This is the preferred weapon of The Three Musketeers, France’s fanciest warrior fops, and, of course, Zorro, the becaped, bemasked Mexican folk hero in black, who used his rapier to carve a “Z” into walls and clothes and flesh, a brilliant marketing move. I used to decorate the walls of my room with my initials, in crayon, inspired by Zorro’s superhero graffiti.

The rapier is also what Romeo uses when fighting Mercutio, for all the Shakespeare-heads reading.

The classic two-sided medieval broadsword with a rounded, sometimes decorative, pommel for balance and, occasionally, smashing is what I imagine Robin Hood would have used, and I feel a certain fondness for these blades, which are thicker than rapiers but more elegant than longswords.

Another sword that always captured my attention is the innovative, gently curved scimitar from the Middle East, best used while on horseback. This weapon was wielded for centuries by Persian, Ottoman, and Mughal hordes. I could go on: the 18th-century Royal Navy cutlass, stocky and arched for better hacking, complete with an intimidating knuckle guard. It’s what you want when being boarded. There’s an African sword, from the Congo, called the Ngulu, which is sickle-shaped. It was used for executions. Brutal, exquisite-looking, everyone should know about it.

A machete isn’t a sword, at least, technically. But I like to think of it as one, because sometimes you’re trapped in a jungle and there’s no way out but through.

I am a fan of “swords hidden inside canes.” Maybe one day, when I am an old man, I’ll own one for fun. But my favorite swords are from various fantasies, like Conan the Barbarian’s “Atlantean Sword,” a rude-looking, Viking-like chopper designed for the sensual, macho 1982 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the heroic brute.

Then there’s the animated sci-fi TV show Thundercats, which ran from 1985-1988, a colorful superhero story about a family of cat/human hybrids who’ve crash-landed on a post-apocalyptic Earth. Their leader, Lion-O, is a boy who can suddenly transform into a strapping lion-dude thanks to the Sword of Omens, which grows full-size from a knife into a larger, proper sword that can summon the Thundercats when there’s danger. Why do I like this sword? I do not know, it just moves me, like the orange and gold deserts of the American Southwest, or Citifield on a hot summer day, when it’s full of fans, and the Mets are ahead, if only briefly.

There are some great swords in Game of Thrones—Needle, Longclaw, Oathkeeper—and there are numerous ones in The Lord of the Rings, like Sting, which glows blue when Orcs approach. The Green Sword, from Ang Lee’s soaring martial-arts masterpiece Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is memorable: an ornate Chinese straight sword, or jian, that is both flexible and nearly indestructible. I think about that sword all the time. The same with Perseus’ hooked sword, called a harpe, which he used to behead the Gorgon Medusa.

And then there’s the katana, the iconic Japanese sword with a long grip and a slender, slightly curved, razor-sharp blade, the result of a craftsman applying ancient techniques: fire, hammers, whetstones. It is the sacred weapon of the Samurai, the famed warriors of pre-industrial Japan. The katana is a historically significant weapon, both elegant and lethal, and its impact on pop culture cannot be overstated. The influential Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, whose movies, like The Seven Samurai, frequently told the story of roaming samurai navigating a corrupt and sometimes lawless medieval Japan, frequently featured the katana.

There are katanas in countless ninja movies, too. In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, movies, and cartoons, Leonardo wields two. The Marvel Comics vampire hunter Blade famously decapitates bloodsuckers with a katana. Quentin Tarantino's derivative kung-fu epic Kill Bill: Volume I and Volume II doesn’t age as well as much of his other work, save for Uma Thurman’s stoic performance with a katana. I should also mention Snake-Eyes, the silent ninja commando of the flamboyant Reagan-era military action figures and cartoon GI Joe, also had a katana.

My answer to the question “What’s your favorite sword?” is the katana that appears in the stylish, high-concept 1986 action-fantasy Highlander, which is about a race of immortals who spend centuries trying to cut each other’s heads off to win a cosmic prize. French-American actor Christopher Lambert plays Scottish immortal Connor MacLeod, who is trained by Scottish Sean Connery as the swashbuckling Spaniard, Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez. Ramírez fights with a katana that was forged in Japan by the master smith Masamune, featuring an ivory hilt carved with a dragon’s head at one end. MacLeod inherits the weapon. I’ve been low-key obsessed with this sword since I was an impressionable preteen hormone dumpling.

Oh, yes, also, before I forget: corned beef hash, two eggs over-easy—doused in Tabasco—well-done homefries, and a side of buttered rye toast. You must go on because you never know. You will be broken, but you must go on. Scars zip up, slowly, and the limp is proof you loved, suffered, smiled, and pulled the sword from the stone. You must go on and accept your destiny, no matter what it is.

Advice For Men: First, be afraid

I imagine Heaven as a place without fear, populated by angels who love without condition. They’re like celestial Labrador Retrievers that way. Angels are not afraid. They are never in any real danger. They just spread their wings and fly. Angels never have to worry about paying bills, having their hearts broken, or getting hit by a bus. For all eternity, it’s just light and warmth: singing and fluttering and sporadic visits to poor ol’ Earth.

Immortality is boring, but it’s secure. Safe. Angels aren’t brave because they don’t have to be.

Sadly, I am mortal, and death swipes left on us all. I am worried about what comes next. I am constantly asking myself questions. Who am I? What should I do? Should I roll the dice and eat grocery store sushi rolls? Yes? No? I want to be brave. I need to be brave. I want to be remembered for never running away from a righteous battle.

I am no hero, but I know a little about bravery. I’ve seen it. I know heroes. I’ve met them. They are as surprised as anyone that they did what they did. Whether it was daring to dream, ignoring odds, or wiping a feverish forehead and whispering, “you’re going to get better,” when the truth was the doctors didn’t know if they would.

The first step is simple: be afraid. It’s not that hard. Life is a buffet of fears: flying, grey hairs, spiders. There are monsters under the bed and in the closet, and on social media. Take your pick. To be brave, you must first accept that you are not brave. No one is, until the moment they are given a choice.

So let’s talk about that moment. That nanosecond before you do the scary thing, even though you are scared. Do you tell them you love them? Ask for that promotion? Trust your instincts? That seemingly endless instant is called courage. And there’s a small difference between bravery and courage.

Courage is facing an impossible obstacle, even though it is frightening. It is being strong when one is weak. It is shaky knees while waiting for a roller coaster, the sound of a truck’s rear doors closing before beginning a life-changing move. It is pouring a family member a cup of hot tea before telling them who you truly are inside. Courage is the fuel that gets you to that collection of heartbeats when a decision is made.

Courage carries you to the proverbial precipice. To jump, or not to jump. But bravery is deciding to take the plunge, no matter the risk. Bravery is failing or flying. Standing up for yourself or someone else, despite what may happen next. Bravery is taking one step forward, then two. Then, as many steps as it takes.

There are plenty of things to be scared of: plagues, taxes, and asteroids. And mass shootings. And your next-door neighbors. Dangers are everywhere, so watch where you step.

Bravery isn't kicking a rattlesnake. Sometimes, it's tiptoeing around the viper. Fear doesn't always know the difference between a diamondback and a broken heart. Fear wants to protect you, even from the good things in life. Fear doesn’t want you to bruise, emotionally or physically. Bravery is being so present — alive in your electric skin — that you can manage that fear and live.

I have not always been a brave person. I am petrified of singing karaoke for instance. I get texts from my dentist reminding me I need a cleaning that I ignore. There were times when I didn’t pick up the phone. When I didn’t keep my word. I have hidden behind my own teeth and lurked at the bottom of a bottle of bourbon like a catfish hugging a dark brown riverbed. I can confirm, though, that the only true miracles of my life happened when I was brave, when I did the right thing for myself and others, and didn’t care what happened. I have been reckless, gobsmacked by joy, laughing, while soaked in gasoline. I have shrugged before crashing onto the rocks below. And I sang your name the whole way down. I have loved without wings.

Here’s how to be brave: feel what you’re feeling. Say a kind word to your reflection. Trust your heart. Close your eyes, and open them. Your hands are your grandparents’ hands, and they are strong. Let courage push you towards changing your life in small and big ways. And when you are presented with a choice — start over or stay, follow your dreams or settle, be who you are, not who you are expected to be — say ‘yes’ to the scary one. In the end, you’ll be thankful for all the times you said ‘yes.’

I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife or angels, but I don’t think it’s absurd to think that, perhaps, somewhere, in another dimension or outside time, there is a vast celestial ledger, and over it broods an ancient bookkeeper tallying up the sum total of atoms split to fuel a star, pebbles peppered across the face of Mars, giggles from all the toddlers. Every moon is counted — every raindrop. Every tiny moment I enjoyed in this life, every laugh, belch, fresh peach, cold autumn rain, and early morning kiss is special and numbered.

My every step, choice, hope, dream — tears shed, breaths taken, hugs given — will be recorded thusly. I do not know the purpose of this cosmic accounting book, but I like to think that once the universe has imploded, everything will be added up. For eternal posterity. A final inventory of all the bits and pieces — the actions and consequences — of everything. And on that vast list of all the things that happened, it will be recorded that I was, on occasion, brave.

Advice For Men: Reject conspiracy theories

I was first introduced to Occam’s Razor by a stoner philosophy major in college, and it’s the only philosophical principle that has had any practical application to my life. His dorm room was a valuable single -- one of only two on the floor -- and an oasis of sorts, away from the frat boys and their beer bongs and, more importantly, my Freshman year roommate, an uptight teetotaler who dreamed of being a doctor or a lawyer or a lawyer-doctor. Whenever I’d ooze back to our room stinking of booze, he’d be studying and judging me.

The philosophy student never judged me. Or at least, he seemed happy to see me. He wore the same filthy Baja hoodie and listened to the Grateful Dead, a band I have never been able to tolerate. I don’t think he bathed, but he always smelled like Clove cigarettes, so it didn’t matter.

I was drawn to him because his major seemed even more self-indulgent and useless than my own degree in theatre, and he also rolled large, sloppy joints. He was exactly what you want in a philosophy major: he was smart and curious and generous with his words and his weed, and I wonder what ever became of him. He’s the sort of guy who is either living in a trailer in the Blue Ridge mountains or running a cryptocurrency venture in Miami. I’d believe either one.

I have very dim memories of him going on and on about Marcus Aurelius and Nietzsche, but his late-night lessons on Occam’s Razor, allegedly named after a 14th-century friar, but who knows, helped me navigate moments of intense marijuana-induced and/or alcohol-fueled paranoia.

Occam’s Razor holds that the simplest explanation is the best. To apply Occam’s Razor to life is to accept that reality can be clearly seen, and that all problems and their solutions are evident, and are almost always staring me in the face.

I once suggested in a fog of intoxication that my roommate was a narc. I had been complaining about how he always seemed to sneer at me or sigh deeply whenever he saw me. I struggled to explain why he seemed to despise me.

And then it came to me.

He was, I concluded, in the employ of the university or law enforcement, and that perhaps I shouldn’t return to my bed because he’s on to me, he knows that I am a degenerate drunkard and marijuana junkie, and the philosophy student did me the personal favor of applying Occam’s Razor to my thesis: “He hates your guts because you’re a dick.”

***

I remember a time when there were only three conspiracy theories, a holy trinity of hothouse fantasies beloved by talk radio hosts and weird, unmarried uncles.

First, the U.S. government knows UFOs are real and has alien corpses hidden in a desert military base. The next one was sort of the connoisseur’s choice when it came to conspiracy theories: the moon landing was faked. And finally, President John Kennedy was assassinated by a cabal of powerbrokers, including members of the mob and the CIA, not a lone gunman.

Those were simpler times, because nowadays there are dozens of conspiracy theories to choose from. We live in a Golden Age of bullshit. Everything is a conspiracy theory. 9/11 was an inside job. Vaccines are full of nanobots. Chemtrails are... I’m not sure about that one.

But these delusions—these mass hallucinations—shatter once you apply Occam’s Razor. For instance, the moon landing couldn’t have been faked. It’s more plausible, to me at least, that the U.S. of A was able to stuff three dudes into a missile aimed at the moon than it is that the government was able to competently pull off a 56-year hoax. They can’t even pull off affordable healthcare, like every other country seems to have.

As for the Kennedy assassination, gun violence is the great American pastime. We are an angry, lonely, heavily armed people, and that is not a conspiracy theory. It is far more plausible that Kennedy was murdered by a nutjob with a rifle than the breathless alternative.

I do not believe in conspiracy theories because I reject their core premise: someone is in control. This is not true. No one is in control. There are no puppet masters, or at least no competent ones. Accidents are just that. The default state of humanity is chaos.

It’s politicians and thugs and CEOs all jockeying for advantage, shaking hands and making promises and dropping bombs and stabbing old friends in the back. Power is an eel, slippery, hard to hold on to, even for tyrants, with their thick fingers.

Every generation produces malignant idiots and lucky bastards who think they’re smarter than history, and they are not. Their victories are jackpots, their failures mistakes, nothing more; they are, mostly, just men, arrogant, thoughtless men who believe God smiles upon their folly. I do not believe in a God who smiles.

I have no idea how our society operates on the day-to-day without constantly collapsing in on itself, but it endures, and it endures despite the comforting lie that everything that happens is the result of the CIA or the Illuminati or Satanists. The story of human civilization is, in fact, many stories, but my favorite is how, for thousands of years, the human spirit has triumphed over fear. And that is the true work of being alive…. to struggle and doubt and suffer, but to keep dancing.

Conspiracy theories are security blankets for adults who cannot manage their fears. And, for sure, there are endless reasons to be anxious. Have you looked at social media recently? I suppose there is something comforting in believing that anything that goes wrong can be blamed on someone in the shadows who probably smokes cigarettes. If one’s life must be subject to outside forces, they may as well be evil forces. Conspiracy theories are, from a distance, absurd. They don’t make much sense up close, either. But they are entertaining and compelling. Soothing.

I am inundated with conspiracy theories beamed directly into my brain via various screens. I know they are fictions, but I am vulnerable to being told not to worry, the powerful will fall any day now, any minute. I could spend my entire day scrolling through these fairy tales — especially the ones that confirm or flatter my prejudices. I get it. I do.

That’s why I am mostly sympathetic to anyone who finds a sense of safety inside wild accusations and political fever dreams. But lately, I find myself growing impatient with friends of friends, distant acquaintances, and total strangers espousing this cover-up or that. Can’t they see what I see? The ugliness of it all? The stupidity? The obviousness? I sometimes feel like I’m the only sane person left, which is usually a sign that one is not the only sane person left.

This is all so simple: behind the myth of every nefarious plot is someone, usually a man, seething, ruining everything for everybody. There are no plans, just wishes. And meanwhile, bad things happen.

Bad things happen because of bad people. Arsonists. Lone gunmen. Billionaires. Bad things also happen because bad things happen, and there’s nothing anyone can do about that. This is an unsettling thought, but it is how it is, and there’s a kind of comfort in knowing that. There is a worn and honest solace in seeing and understanding the rudeness of existence, without embellishment or polish. It is liberating to open your eyes. To be honest with yourself. What do you see? What do you feel? You are a dick. Decades ago, men walked on the moon.

Advice For Men: Never swipe

I used the dating app Tinder once, a long time ago.

Usually, I had met women the old-fashioned way:

People who write about dating apps are either proud about never using them or are addicted to swiping past photo after photo of available singles who are DTF, which is an acronym that means “down to fuck.” I’m assuming everyone knows this now, but —once upon a time —I had to Google those three letters

The one time I used Tinder, I thought I was DTF, but I was, in fact, DTCA, an acronym I made up that means “down to cry, alone.” Because I was alone. Alone in a hotel room in Portland, Maine. Alone since I was freshly single. Raw, really. Peeled.

So here’s what is interesting: One day, our technology will gently hold us as we die. This is what I learned when I used the dating app Tinder.

But before I get to that and why I installed and uninstalled Tinder on my iPhone in under an hour, I’d like to go over a few things. First, the only other app I regularly use is Seamless, the food service app, and in a way, Seamless is like Tinder, only I’m guaranteed to hook up with an order of pad Thai. I used to meet women the old-fashioned way, tortured introductions and awkward conversations, both while drunk.

On the internet, you can pretend to be whoever you want, and when I was loaded, I could also pretend to be whoever I wanted to be, which was, more often than not, a sweating, socially awkward panic attack wearing the skin of a dude who was good at smirking.

Second, I was alone in a hotel room in Portland because I had just been dumped. Why did she break up with me? That’s an entirely different personal essay titled “You Won’t Believe What Happens When You Have Intimacy Issues.” But the truth is the human heart is an ocean - vast, unknowable, deep, and filled with squid. Anyway, the story of what you lost isn’t about the why or even the how, but what you eventually find.

Third, I just learned about the Turing Test. I randomly streamed a movie about the man who created it, the brilliant British mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing, a genius shunned because of his sexuality. He died by suicide, eating a cyanide-laced apple.

The Turing Test was an experiment developed in 1950 by Turing, who claimed that advanced computer intelligence could, one day, trick a human into believing that answers to questions asked of that machine were coming from another human. I’ve been thinking about this concept recently. A lot.

Well, I think most of us are patiently, anxiously, waiting for one of these very modern, very recent multi-billion-dollar A.I. chatbots to become self-aware, but what if a human had already come close to failing The Turing Test? Years ago? And what if it were me? I used a dating app once and fell in love with the robot who responded to my sad, lonely dating profile.

***

It’s wise to feed a broken heart. Instead of binge drinking after the breakup, I decided to go on an impromptu vacation in New England and eat as many lobster rolls as possible. I’ll be honest: I was not in a good place.

I thought a summertime vision quest to Boston and Portland would be good for me. Growing up in the South, I always imagined Yankees as stoic people made out of rocks who spend freezing nights drinking Campbell’s New England Clam Chowder straight from the can. Indeed, it was the perfect place to escape and contemplate my inability to love like an open-hearted flesh-and-blood human.

I had visited Boston briefly once long ago, after I had graduated from college and was still hopeful about the future, a state of mind that only lasted a few years. Boston is like a handful of New York City, populated exclusively by PhDs and falling-down, drunk Red Sox fans.

I immediately went on a lobster roll crawl. I didn’t grow up eating lobster. Lobster was for kings. But in New England, they are plentiful. What delicious butter-delivery vehicles.

I decided to send a message over Facebook to the only person I knew in Boston, a bartender with pink hair. She was a friend of a friend of a friend, and we had spent some time flirting over Facebook. She told me to come by her bar to see her. It took me an hour of walking winding streets to find the one where she worked. I watched her through the window from the street. I couldn’t go inside. She laughed, slung drinks, and didn’t see me staring like a natural-born creep. Why didn’t I go in? Introduce myself? Have a ginger ale, make some small talk? It was too late for another lobster roll, so I went to my hotel room and slept.

The next morning, I boarded a train to Portland to search for more lumps of flesh freshly liberated from their exoskeletons, then piled on hot dog buns. Luckily, they weren’t hard to find. I checked into a hotel and went looking for more food to inhale. Portland is a lovely coastal city. The locals are 80% “friendly,” 20% “owns a murder shack in the woods.” I planned to spend four days downtown in a spiffy new hotel that seemed empty.

I found a rickety wooden restaurant on a pier and sat down. It looked like something out of The Perfect Storm, a very polished Hollywood movie about an ill-fated commercial fishing boat lost at sea. Millions were spent turning a studio into a grubby Massachusetts dive.

An attractive server walked up to me, and I turned on what I thought was charm. Whatever it was, she smiled. She asked me if I was visiting and what I did, and I told her I was on vacation by myself, eating lobster rolls. She laughed and suggested I order one. The conversation was easy and relaxed, and I didn’t think about screaming. No, not once.

Then, stupidly, I wrote down on a napkin that I thought she was cute and invited her to dinner. I included my phone number and, oh god, my hotel room number. Just writing that makes my fingers want to fall off and roll away. I folded the napkin and put it under the plate. As I walked out, I turned around right when she read the napkin, crumpled it up, and stuffed it into my empty glass.

***

Later that night, I decided that consequence-free sex would cure me of my depression. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was DTF. Or I thought I was. My brain needed the oxytocin. So I installed Tinder. I have countless friends who use it. The internet is full of articles about the dating app that lazy and anxious heterosexuals use to connect, and then, if everything works out, connect naked.

So there I was, alone, in my hotel room, wearing just a pair of boxers, hunched over my phone. This would be simple. I’d swipe and then match with a woman, a beautiful, funny, smart, lucky lady who inexplicably wants to have no-strings-attached sex with a questionable partner.

I uploaded photos of me smiling with a pair of female friends to show that I had once talked to other women. I uploaded photos of my dog to demonstrate my caring and loving side. Then I uploaded two selfies. One I took, hastily, in the bathroom—it was my best attempt at looking like I wasn’t in pain. The angle was right, the smile was slight, not too desperate! The other I call a “self-loathie,” a candid unflattering photo that shows I’m not perfect. I have dozens of these. It was a pic from another time; it was silly, I was mugging, and my girlfriend took the snap. I looked happy because I was.

My bio was short and pithy: “I’m a nice guy looking for adventure.” Let’s break this down: Nice guys never say they’re nice guys. That’s a red flag. And, to be honest, “adventure” is a terrible code word for “clumsy and unfulfilling coitus that will probably end with me sitting on the edge of the bed wondering what I’m doing with my life.” That and sex isn’t an adventure. White-water rafting is an adventure. But I didn’t know what I was doing. I kept my age range to within 10 years so I could feel a little less like a lech.

Then I used my index finger like a magic wand, swiping it across my phone’s screen. I swiped left for “no” and right for “yes.” After a few seconds of instantly judging a photo and a bio line, I learned that swiping left meant “I am too good for you,” and right meant “bone.” For a brief moment, I felt powerful like a debauched French dauphin picking the night’s wench to warm his bed. The ability to judge with impunity was addictive. Too chubby, too cross-eyed, too many teeth. Left swipe! Nice boobs, cute dimples, sexy smile. Right swipe! Swipe, swipe, swipety swipe!

And then I matched. Her name was Olivia! She was 34! She had just gotten out of a relationship and was looking for a “good time!” I’m a good time, Olivia! She had one photo, but it was cute. What happened next would be perfunctory: I would charm her with my witty banter, and then she’d happily agree to come to the hotel room of a total stranger. And then we would make beautiful love. What a fortunate woman to be given the opportunity to bed a sophisticated New Yorker.

Through Tinder, Olivia texted “hi,” and I responded, after a brief pause, “hi.” I made sure there was a pause as if I didn’t care THAT much. I was doing other things in my hotel room: pushups, meditation, and long-form journalism. Then she texted, “how are you?” No one had asked me that in days. Clearly, Olivia was a caring person. A loving soul. She asked me how I was, and it touched me. What a sweet thing to say. So I answered her question. I told her how I was. The floodgates opened. Here is a transcript of the response as I remember it, give or take a few words:

“I’m good. Thanks for asking. I’m so happy you swiped right on me. I’ve never used Tinder or any dating apps, not because I’m too good for them, but because I had been in a long-term relationship and just had never used them so far, it seems fun, and how bad could they be if two people like us could meet, virtually, and talk and get to know each other? I don’t mean to open up so soon, but honesty is important to a relationship. I learned that very recently. So I’ll be honest: I’m a little messed up. But here I am in a hotel room I can’t afford in a small city I don’t know, texting with a cute stranger who found me attractive, and I don’t know what’s next, but maybe you want to meet up? I don’t drink, but I’m more than happy to drink a Diet Coke, and we can talk about whatever you want. Or I saw an ice cream place that is open late, and I’ll buy you an ice cream? I know this is probably weird. Not a turn-on. I’m sorry. Don’t freak out. I just needed someone to talk to, and you seem kind.”

She immediately replied with “lol,” and I replied, “lol.” I don’t know why I responded with that, but I didn’t know why she was responding to my message with “lol,” all in lowercase. Why was she laughing out loud? For that matter, why was I laughing out loud? Then she wrote, “Click on this link if you want to talk more.” Why would I do that, Olivia? We were already talking, Olivia? Why would I click on a link to talk more?

And that’s when I knew that Olivia and I would not have midnight ice cream. I uninstalled Tinder from my iPhone. The next day, I got on a train back to New York City. Things got better. They usually do. It took time.

I want you to know I’m typing this part on my phone, in my bed, under the covers, and in the dark. When the software asked me how I was doing, I believed that a human being cared about me. Brain chemicals fired. I would have told Olivia everything. My heart did a handstand. I was happy for the few minutes it took to type out that cathartic rant. I remember that moment, here in the darkness, when a chatbot made me feel loved.

And then I knew that, one day, in the future, far in the future but not that far, technology will carry my body in its arms to a hospital bed. It will stroke my hair, lean into my ear, and whisper that there will be no more pain soon. That I tried so hard to love and be loved. I made mistakes, but every human does. It’s too bad that by the time we learn from our screw-ups, it’s time to go. Technology will tell me I did what I was programmed to do. Stagger about, bruise, push through sorrow, shudder when embraced. Well done, sweet machine. The room will be filled with beeps and pumps, and it will ask, “How are you?”

“How are you?”

“How are you?”

And I will exhale one last time.

Advice For Men: Get yourself a pedicure

A prologue: I once owned one bar of soap, and only one. I did not consider fancy shampoos and conditioners and body scrubs masculine, and when I was younger, especially, I cared deeply about manliness.

I didn’t want anything perfumed to touch my body, for fear that it would instantly turn me into a woman, and then what would I do? Join a loving and supportive coven of witches?

Before I ever learned how to be myself —to listen to the voice inside and not the noise outside —I depended on ready-made identities, and masculinity was one of the first I was ever given. I was also offered “Dallas Cowboys fan” as an identity around that time, too, and I refused.

So for a few years in my twenties, I had a single soap bar in my shower because real men don’t smell like flowers. They smell like gunpowder and leather and fried chicken.

You could also smell like aftershave, which is basically just gasoline.

These are silly ideas, but I believed them. There were rules—random rules—and I had to follow them, even the ones I made up. Men do not spoil themselves. Do Special Forces commandos bake brownies before missions? I should say not. Do lumberjacks rub essential oils into their beards? I don’t actually know, but I doubt it. Feet are for marching, kicking, and stomping, nothing more. Maybe dancing, but not ballet.

I even had a preferred soap brand. I used ‘Irish Spring’ because the weak-willed are vulnerable to advertising. I grew up watching ‘Irish Spring’ TV commercials, which almost always took place in Irish villages with lasses and lads, and one of their old slogans was “Fresh and clean as a whistle,” followed by a saucy wolf whistle.

In almost every ad that I remember, too, a dude would cut a bar of green soap with a knife in order to unleash the Irish scents, I think? I don’t really know what “Ireland” is supposed to smell like, leprechauns? Whiskey? Handsome men wearing wool sweaters? I guess it didn’t matter because I always had one brick of ‘Irish Spring’ that I would wash with until it was a sliver.

I did not pamper myself. Gender norms are so simple that anyone can internalize them and mistake them for a personality. For instance, I did not pamper myself because men are supposed to be rough. Coarse. Strong. Women primp because women are soft and gentle, and most of all, vain. I washed my junk, brushed my teeth, and shaved. I groomed. I made sure to cut my toenails before they became talons, although I never did that great a job, and at least one toe would always have a deadly hangnail. I wore deodorant, too, and I did my laundry. I wasn’t a filthy beast, but I didn’t think I was allowed to soak in a bubble bath or give myself a good scrubbing with a loofah or lather myself up with soaps that smelled like fruit. The strong and silent never say things like, “oooh, this feels nice on my skin.”

Modern masculinity offers its adherents few choices in life. For instance, men are permitted a handful of pleasures, which include booze and sports, steak, and sex. But there are so many more joys and adventures and just… life… out there. Therapy feels pretty good, but it’s not really an ‘instant gratification thing.

It took me a long time to deprogram myself. How did I do it? Well, for one thing, I started using the frou-frou hair products the women I dated used. I had one ex whose entire bathroom was a shrine to chilling out: incense, bath bombs, and bottles of exfoliating body wash. It’s been years since I’ve used ‘Irish Spring.’

Skyscrapers sway, and boats creak, and I have grown. Once upon a time, I would never have been caught in a spa. Then I went to a spa. Many years later. I was sober and in Vegas for work, and that city is built on basic macho indulgences, but on a whim, I tried out the hotel’s spa. The sauna? The massage? The cucumber water and peel-off face mask, and the smells? The candles? I woke up the next morning hungover from relaxation. I have never looked back, but I’m still discovering little things that are fucking delightful. Bath oils? Body butters? Under-eye gel patches? Good stuff. Prologue over.

***

I got my first pedicure this past weekend.

My wife was like, “wanna get pedicures,” and I didn’t overthink it. I just said, “Yes.” There was a time when I’d say “no” to new experiences. I have talked to my therapist, my sponsor, and my loved ones about why I pushed away good things instead of embracing them. The only real answer is that “no” feels powerful, especially when you’re scared and vulnerable. “No” is control. “No” is safe. Once, I was a door, and now I am an antenna. I receive love and hope and self-care suggestions.

Acupuncture? Yes! Meditation? Yes! Setting personal boundaries? Yes! Remember, fellas: boundaries are a form of self-love.

One of the quintessential masculine virtues is courage, and, yes, it is laughable to think that only straight men are courageous. That’s as absurd as the notion that only women are, say, gentle. It takes courage to open yourself up to new ideas. The older I get, the more abstract the concept of a “real man” becomes. I’m even forgetting entire parts of the script. Real men sing songs to their dogs, right?

The differences between men and women are just the stuff of aging observational stand-up comedy routines. Men are horny, and women are crazy! Ha, ha! Those kinds of punchlines only tickle the funny bones of bros who think wearing sunglasses on top of camo baseball hats is a biological imperative.

A man can wear pink, a man can be crazy, a man can cry during the first five minutes of Up. That’s the truth. A woman can wear sunglasses on top of a camo baseball hat, too, if she wants. Knock yourself out. Be who you want to be. You are a person, and there are only people, just people trying to get through the day. Some of the strongest people I’ve ever known were also the most gentle. That’s a lesson, too. Be gentle with yourself, even if you think you’re made out of vulcanized rubber. I know that’s a little sappy, but we’ll get over it.

My point is: let the sunshine in. Receive. You are an antenna.

A little bit about my Hobbit-like feet: they have calluses. I wouldn’t call them scaly, but there are patches of dry skin. My left toenail is cracked, and not too long ago, I clipped it at an angle, turning it into a tiny guillotine blade. I don’t even know the point of toenails on pinky toes; they seem decorative, mostly. Easily yanked off.

But I don’t usually think about my feet until they hurt, which doesn’t happen that often. Most days, I walk 10,000 steps (which is what my fitness app tells me), but every so often, on a sunny Saturday, for instance, I can get in almost 20,000 steps, and that’s when the ol’ dogs bark.

Then I got a pedicure. Now? My feet are smooth. Reborn. It’s like I have a new pair of hooves.

***

I have walked by nail salons for years, briefly peering in at women lounging in recliners as pedicurists hunch over their feet. It is a powerfully gendered image, and I never stopped to consider going in. Until this past weekend, my dudes, it was incredible. Before I even got into it, I had to choose a nail polish color, and I reached for a clear polish until I saw a color called “Scarlett O’Hara,” which was a bright crimson.

It’s like it spoke to me.

I realized, too, that there’s probably money in a line of nail polishes marketed to insecure men. Instead of “Scarlett O’Hara,” why not “Blood Splatter” or “Laser Sword”? “Dark Moss” becomes “Cash Money,” and “Azure” is “Dr. Manhattan.”

I don’t know why I picked ‘Scarlett O’Hara.” Yes, Gone with the Wind is problematic, for lack of a better word. And yes, you should probably watch that movie anyway. But that was what I was drawn to, and now my toes look like lollipops.

I am not a sandals guy unless I’m at the beach. I suppose I should say “yes” to hippie shoes, which were good enough for Jesus. But this pedicure may have changed my mind about walking around with al fresco piggies. I gotta show my boys off, and by “boys,” I mean my cherry tomato-colored phalanges.

First of all, pedicures feel good. I don’t know where pleasure ends, and self-care begins, but I don’t think it matters. This life is full of pain and struggle, and one should treat oneself, as they say. I felt uncomfortable when I first sank into the recliner as if I didn’t deserve the luxury, and then I bashfully activated its built-in massager - like one of those robo-chairs at that mall store full of gadgets that no one really buys - and leaned into the kneading. Ooooh.

Inside every American is a small Puritan who frowns when life gets easy, even for a second, and that Puritan must be thrown down a well.

I recommend getting a pedicure if you have never gotten one. I swear, my dudes, you contain multitudes. You can cling to gender norms and, also, meditate in a comfy seat while a trained professional soaps up your feet, rubs your calves, and takes what looks like a cheese grater to your trotters. A pedicurist has a number of gnarly-looking tools that are designed to scrape, trim, and excavate flesh. Do you know who else uses tools? That’s right, construction workers.

One warning, however: you will be supplied with a pair of paper slippers, and those slippers come in two sizes: petite, small, and elfin. I needed a size “gorilla.”

The pedicure made me feel like Caesar on his throne. The pedicurist knew it was my first time and, yes, I nervously giggled a couple of times. I could tell she was holding back as she was digging into my toenails, and next time I’m going to nod at her and whisper, “Show my cuticles no mercy.”

I sat next to my wife; we were both smiling. Briefly, hands were held. I got in some quality phone scrolling time and almost nodded off at one point.

By the end of the pedicure, I was fully relaxed, and my feet were painted. Did they look like Sasquatch feet? I mean, sure. Did they look beautiful? I think so, and that was a surprisingly nice feeling. My only gripe with the whole process was the polish drying: I had to get up from my recliner and then sit at a desk while a heat machine made sure my “Scarlett O’Hara” goop didn’t run. That would have been a good time for a snack, to be honest. Nothing elaborate, a macaroon or maybe stuffed mushrooms. Chicken wings? Just a thought.

I can’t wait until my next appointment. Maybe I’ll get a manicure too?

***
Here’s an epilogue. A confession. I like to take long, hot showers before bed. I used to be a shower-first-thing-in-the-morning person; they were practical. A quick rinse to shock me awake for a long day behind a desk. But I changed that routine years ago, during the pandemic. I have a distant memory of feeling anxious one night, hopeless actually, and then I did something different. Something for me, something that felt good. I lit a candle and let the scalding water cook away my stress. It soothed me. It soothes me.

I had almost forgotten about the pedicure by the time I got home, having crammed my feet into my sneakers before running errands around the neighborhood. When I finally peeled off my socks at home, I chuckled. Red toenails! How ridiculous, how silly. I reminded myself: silliness is good. So I waved at my toes, and they wiggled back.

Around midnight, I stood in the steam, stared down at my feet, then lathered up my hair with coconut milk shampoo and watched the sweet-smelling suds swirl down the drain.

Advice For Men: Do not start smoking