Heavy Duty Impotence

Cute, is it not? 

Most of the car-ride in was the usual: a drive on a state road that is full of lights and side streets and shopping centers that is often like a video game in which the object is to avoid being T-boned by some schmo who is incapable of judging velocity and distance; who simply must pull out four seconds after you have deemed it impossible for him to be stupid enough to actually "try it."

With this in mind, I set my speed at around 55 MPH. It is a 50 MPH road.

About ten minutes from school, a bald guy, with dark glasses, in a shiny, absurdly clean, massive, black heavy-duty pickup truck with tinted windows and double tires in the back started riding my bumper.

(I won't get into my anatomical theories about guys who buy heavy duty trucks and don't use them for heavy duty; this is a family-friendly blog.)

He stayed there. I kept my speed. We were in the right lane. He could have passed, but I guess that would not have been as much fun.

We both turned onto the same rural road (speed limit of 50, dropping in increments to 45, 35 and then 25 as we neared the schools). He stayed on my bumper as I adjusted speed to about five over the posted limits, as I always do.

As we approached an intersection, he, disgusted with my mere existence, set his lips, shook his head and gave his heavy-duty pickup the heaviest duty it would see that day by whipping to his right, down a side road.

I hope he never finds out how little that head-shake meant to me. Oh, it would have angered me in the past, before I became actually able to feel what we all know to be true: that we shouldn't care about the opinions of random strangers. Twenty years ago, I would have gotten that stomach burn; that pre-fist-balling fight-or-flight impulse. Not anymore. That stuff makes me chuckle now.

I'd hate for his carefully (and monetarily) cultivated sense of superiority and masculinity to wind up being as impotent as his...nice, clean, useless heavy-duty truck.

Me Chris...Me Like Bang Drums.

I think I finally figured it out the gist of something. For years, comedians and critics of both sexes have been getting a lot of mileage out of joking that men are "simple" women are "complex."

I think most people realize this is silly. All people are complex, even when they seem simple. The human brain is complex beyond comprehension, male or female. Still, it makes for good jokes and it seems true: men can appear to be simple oafs. But I think it has more to do with (can I use this term?) "primality" than with simplicity.

Men are not, generally, simpler than women, but they have remained more connected to their primal roots than women seem to have. Maybe this means women have actually evolved further than men. I don't know. But I do know that even the most philosophical and most metaphysical of men still have a bit of the chest-beater in them even when they pretend not to.

A Japanese Taiko drummer.

We want to be strong and tough. These two qualities might not be as immediately and as literally useful as they were when we were living in fear of being ingested by three-headed swamp creatures or of getting clubbed by someone from the tribe over the hill during a cattle raid, but the primal need for these qualities remains. How they manifest themselves is up to us.

If we pick fights in bars, we are being morons. Those of us who do this are the ones who deserve the whatever oafish label they get. There are a lot of these guys around.

The rest of us (the majority) tend to channel our strength and toughness into other directions.