TC the Terrible

Gone and back again.  Wasn’t that the working title for Bilbo’s book?  And if it was/wasn’t, does anybody still care?

Another year is in the books.  Not that it really matters because like the man said there’s no rest for the wicked.  Or the Terrible for that matter.  Some of us are fated to tumble from crisis to crisis and only slow down long enough to have our first “cardiac episode”.  Not that I’ve slowed down for that one yet and don’t plan to, but when’s the last time anyone actually planned for that one?  Hell, I’m just glad that I’ve stayed a step or two ahead of it.

I can’t fall into the school of thought that says 2011 is a blank slate.  You drag your psychological Samsonite behind us wherever you go. Can’t just pull a Don Draper and walk away from who you are and become a different person.  And even if you could, would you really want to?  Hell no.  I don’t know about you, but I put an shit ton of work into becoming me.  I’m not about to toss all that effort out the window like it was wasted.  It wasn’t.

Basically I’m stepping up.  Not stepping aside.

Part II tomorrow.  Promise.

Back to my rant about the lack of men, we’re suffering a lack of boys too.  I  figure it this way.  If you don’t have boys that know how to be boys there’s no way in Hell you can have men that know how to be men.  It just won’t work.

Boys are being programmed by society to be something less than boys.  I’m not saying that boys are being molded into girls in some Brave New World kind of way.  Because they’re not.  Even those boys were taught that it was good to rough house and enjoy sex.  Our guys are learning how to be something that’s not masculine, but not truly feminine either.  This isn’t about homosexuality, but it might be about metrosexuality.  I’m all but certain the latter is one of the symptoms of the disease and not the disease itself.

Today our guys are being programmed that it’s wrong to embrace being a boy.  Look around at all the teenagers and twenty somethings that have never gotten dirty.  They never tried to swing so high they went over the cross bar at the top of the swing set.  Those boys have never played a pick up game of football in a vacant lot.  And they damned sure never got in a fist fight.  It shows.  It’s part of the reason so many kids are living in Mommy’s basement until they’re thirty two years old.  They don’t know the thrill of taking a risk and the satisfaction of it paying off.  They don’t know the soul crushing feeling of failure either.  We should be teaching them both.

We’ve failed our boys.

We need to turn the trend around.  I’ve got some ideas.  Stay tuned.

I’ve found myself asking that question a lot lately.  Growing up it seemed like there were cowboys everywhere.  We had John eff’ing Wayne, Clint Eastwood in his pre-Dirty Harry days, and the Lone Ranger.  Cowboys and Indians was played across entire neighborhood with bikes substituted for horses.  These days you can’t find a cowboy worth his spurs for shit.

Really, the problem is bigger than a lack of cowboys.  The problem is a lack of men that are willing to be men in the classical definition of the word.  Looking around the National Capitol Region I don’t see a lot of manliness.  You don’t see many on television either.  Which may well be one of the reasons that Mad Men is so popular.  It’s populated with men that are living like men.  Yeah, they’ve got plenty of flaws but they don’t run from them.  They own their issues and move on.

The world needs more of that.  It needs more of men stepping up to responsibility instead of ducking behind hollow words.  The world needs men who are willing to do things that aren’t going to be popular with the masses.  It used to be called backbone.  Today it’s called being a bully.  Damned shame.

I’m not sure when/why/how this happened.  Don’t really care to tell you the truth.  It did, and that’s a problem.  If there is one thing that men do well – it’s fix problems.  Time for us to get work.  Roll up your sleeves or move over.  That’s the only two options you’ve got.