Those of you who arrived at this site accidentally (which, judging from my analytics, is most of my readership) were probably looking for either the penis enlargement site, or this guy.

Toothy here goes by the name Wayne Levine, and at first glance you might think he’s also selling penis enlargement, through the power of positive thinking.  In fact, Wayne is a counsellor specializing in men’s issues, and has published a book called Hold onto your N.U.Ts.

For the uninitiated, N.U.Ts. stands for “Non-negotiable, Unalterable, Terms”.  Levine says a man needs to define himself by the things on which he won’t compromise.  It could be anything from “I will not lie” to “I will not eat pork” to “I will not jerk off with my left hand, cuz it feels like cheating.”

Levine argues that N.U.Ts can be big or small, but regardless a man must hold onto them.    Being committed to something, to the extent that you refuse to sacrifice it for the sake of expediency – that’s what defines a man’s character and values, and imbues him with self-esteem.   When a man is forced to repeatedly give up his N.U.Ts, it leads to resentment, despair and feelings of worthlessness.   I know this firsthand, and if you doubt me you’re welcome to ask my mom or any of my ex-girlfriends.

I like the concept of N.U.Ts, and not merely because the acronym allows me to write lame double entendres for this entire post.  All men should have N.U.Ts, and for me to be a Better Man, it would help to know what mine were.    So the other day I sat down with pen and paper and wrote them out.

Initially, it was difficult – perhaps a sign of how poorly I knew myself.  Over time, however, it seemed to get easier. After about 3 or 4 hours I’d figured I’d left my N.U.Ts on several pages.

However, upon reading them back I was both amazed and embarrassed at how trite most of them are (i.e. “I will never sell my Anniversary Edition of The Big Lebowski) which is a sign that I was writing about something other than N.U.Ts….G.N.A.T.s is more like it (Generally Negotiable, Alterable Terms).

The things I was writing down weren’t really getting to the heart of the matter.  I’d only been scribbling in the centre of the page, figuratively speaking. To truly know where my N.U.Ts were, I’d have to take my crayon to the edges, find the boundaries, the very limits of what I could accept.   To do that requires imagination, the ability to conceive of worst possible scenarios and how you would react if you found yourself in them (127 Hours, anyone?)

When you think of it that way, you realize N.U.T.s aren’t about bare minimums, or the least you can accept.   They’re not a line in the sand over which you won’t let others cross.   N.U.Ts are for you and you alone, and they should be aspirational.  They should be the kind of terms you try to achieve every day, even if you don’t succeed.   At least, that’s how I see them.

Anyway, imagining worst case scenarios seemed to work – I suppose given my past year I had less trouble than I thought I would.  Some of you may have attention spans as short as your…well, you know…so for you I’ve successfully managed to whittle my list of N.U.Ts to these:

Take a Look at Chris’ N.U.T.s!

1.) I try to understand why it is someone pisses me off. Even if I don’t want to understand,  or can’t expect the same consideration.

2. ) I try to listen to what people have to say, even if they’re mostly full of shit. Who knows – there could be kernels of truth in that turd.

3.) I don’t waste time worrying about the crap that’s happened, and channel my energies into dealing effectively with the mess.

4.) I take care of both my friends and my body. It’s the only way to prevent either from betraying me (too badly).

5.) To paraphrase Da Mayor from a certain Spike Lee joint, “always do the right thing” – even if doing the wrong thing is easier. One must set an example, even in the face of stupidity.

6.) I won’t regret any bad choices I made if I acted decisively using good judgment and the best information available at the time. For those times when I didn’t, please see #5. For those times when #5 doesn’t apply, please see #3.

7.) Trust, but verify.

8.) I remain curious and eager to learn – the more I know, the better I feel. In other words – everything once, no matter how ill-advised.

9.) I will keep my sense of humour, even if I think I’d be better off selling it on eBay.

10.) I will not wallow in despair or cynicism when things are bad. The answer to anyone who asks “why me?” should be “because it’s your turn.” – bad times about the only thing that can help reveal how much you can take.

11.) I will not stop trying to do my best and give more than is asked of me, no matter how much others tell me my best effort sucks.

12.) I will dress well, groom well, eat well, and generally live as well as my meagre means allow. Abandon your tastes, and you abandon your self worth.

13.) I would sooner die on a motorbike than live without one.

Okay –  it’s not exactly Walt Whitman, but nonetheless I have found my N.U.Ts and I hope to maintain a firm grasp on them.  For those of who arrived at my site thinking their big problem is a little penis, perhaps you should ask yourself if the issue isn’t your N.U.Ts instead.

If you were like me, you probably had no idea who Dick Winters was – that is, up until around 10 years ago, when two fellows named Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg (have you heard of them? Mark my words, they’re going to be BIG some day) decided to make a mini-series about his life.   It was called Band of Brothers and it outed the intensely private Dick Winters for the quiet, noble hero that he was.

Richard Winters was the Biggest Brother of Easy Company – part of the US Army’s 101st Airborne paratroopers that dropped into France on D-Day.   Based on the performance of actor Damian Lewis (who played Winters in the series) and interview comments from Winters himself, a picture emerges of a smart soldier, a humble man and a highly capable leader, imbued with a deep sense of purpose and duty.

Winters led by example, rarely asked any man to do something he wouldn’t do himself, and went through several tribulations (near death and court-martial, for starters) for the sake of his men.   The result was the soldiers of Easy Company had a deep respect for Winters. In turn, he knew he could count on them because he’d shown they could count on him.

In TV and film, the truth can very pliable,  often bent into unusual shapes for the sake of drama.  After watching the mini-series, I took the time to read the book on which the series is based, and I think this is an exception, and that Lewis played Winters straight.  Winters was affable, able to make judgments without being judgmental, and willing to dispense both praise and punishment in equal measure – but flamboyant or dramatic? Hardly. Apparently, Winters was saving the drama for his mama.

Over the next ten months leading up to the end of the war, the men of Easy Company distinguished themselves for both their competence and bravery.   Winters himself was promoted three times – from platoon leader to battalion XO to battalion commander – and won a Distinguished Service Cross and a Bronze Star for his actions in combat.

In short,  Dick Winters was a man’s man – like Clint Eastwood, he wasn’t macho because he had nothing to compensate for.   He’d been in one of the worst situations imaginable, and it had brought out the best in him.   And while Winters took the task of leading Easy Company very seriously, he never took himself too seriously. He was always aware that a leader is only as good as the group he’s leading.   After leaving the Army, he returned to his quiet life in Pennsylvania.  No doubt he would’ve continued that way had Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Hanks not intervened.

I bring this all up because Dick Winter’s died shortly after New Years of this year at the age of 92.  Typical of both his humility and sense of propriety, Winters had asked that news of his death not be made public until after his funeral.

A part of me wishes very much that I’d knew him personally, because I’d love to ask his opinions on our current generation of man-children – men who’ve replaced mantras like “courage, honour, sacrifice” with “gym, tan, laundry.”  My guess is he would reserve judgment – he wouldn’t say a harsh word, but he’d probably give a knowing look, like he understood that men these days are missing something – a sense of purpose, or personal responsibility, or maybe just a feeling that they are part of something greater than themselves.   Winters would probably spend less time bitching about man-children and more time devising constructive solutions to help them cross over into true manliness.  We should all hope to be a brother like him.

In the first year of his presidency, Ronald Reagan spent countless hours trying to persuade congressmen to approve a crucial sale of military planes to Saudi Arabia.  By all accounts, it was a grueling effort that a took a personal toll, so when Congress voted (by a narrow margin) to approve the deal, Reagan turned to an aide and said “I feel like I’ve just crapped a pineapple.”

That’s pretty much describes my feelings all year with this blog.  And just like anything you might expel from your bowels (pineapples or otherwise) I’m not sure if I’m proud of the results so much as glad that the year is over.

To recap: 365 days ago I vowed to become a Better Man by today.  In my first post, I wrote about waking up Christmas morning to find the tires on my car slashed.  It was the final insult in a year’s worth of indignities, and the parallels weren’t lost on me: my easy ride on the wheels of good fortune had been suddenly deflated by the ugly vicissitudes of life.

And so this blog was born, a chronicle of my efforts not only to reverse my fortunes, but to change for the better – to find the wisdom and fortitude to overcome my crises. I’d resolved to do this by taking on several laudable, hare-brained and occasionally dangerous projects, all designed to improve the quality of my character.    In the process,  I learned a few lessons:

LESSON #1: It’s Okay To Make Wildly Unrealistic Plans That You Fail to Achieve.

When Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, he laid out several Five Year Plans that came with virtually impossible economic targets the workers had to achieve.  We’re talking crazy goals, like wheat production that required more farmland than physically existed in the entire country.  When the workers failed to achieve their targets, Stalin made sure heads rolled…literally. That’s too bad, because in spite of the “failure” the Soviet Union still achieved phenomenal economic growth, outpacing even some capitalist countries.  Cranky, homicidal Joe was so focussed on what didn’t happen that he couldn’t see the progress his country had made.

In my Better Man-ifesto, I came up with nine very ambitious projects, ones with high numbers for both artistic merit and technical difficulty.  I did not stick the landing on most of them.  Project “Do Me a Solid” was all about volunteering, yet the most  I ever volunteered for was seconds at dinner. The God Project was another disaster – although I must admit my heart wasn’t in it. Having grown up going to church, suddenly going back felt a little like going to the fridge for the milk, finding it had gone stale, then putting it back thinking if I return later it might be good again.  In all, I failed to complete ANY of the projects in their entirety,  including the seemingly easy goal of being a Better Asshole (Project Ari Gold).

Now, it’d be easy to pull a Stalin and dwell my failures, but that would mean overlooking the unanticipated successes of this year.  Take Project Renaissance Man (self-reliance and technical aptitude) – I didn’t pick up ANY of the skills I’d set out to learning.  However,  I’ve since compensated for it by discovering my inner Boy Scout – for example, I may not know how to fix my motorcycle, but now wherever I ride I carry a space blanket, canteen, and a survival knife in my saddle bags.  That way if I break down on the highway, at least I won’t die of exposure, dehydration, or bear attacks.  In fact, my house is now littered with how-to guides, and wherever I go I carry tools for most crises, even if I don’t know how to use them.

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Last month Esquire found space between the guide on watches you’ll never afford and the Minka Kelly photo spread to reflect on the everlasting popularity of Clint Eastwood. The magazine had recently conducted a survey of men aged 20-50 to see who they thought was the coolest man in America. Dirty Harry was the winner, hands down.  He even beat The Situation.

The magazine was trying to offer a rationale for why Eastwood – whose been eligible for Social Security for 15 years now, who probably tells kids to get the hell off his lawn every day (Gran Torino was all about it, actually), and now understands what Costanza’s dad was on to with the “Man-ssiere” – remains the biggest swinging dick in America.  It might’ve been Gladwell-esque, counter-intuitive thinking, but Esquire suggested Eastwood’s appeal isn’t about machismo, but rather it’s exact opposite – restraint.    Eastwood “has always been about needing and having and showing less. His gift as an actor and director is his economy of motion and expression; his moral vision is of men who struggle with and eventually master their bloodlust and lust and their desire for booze and self-propogation.”

Fewer things have sounded as right as what the magazine wrote about Eastwood (although the economy of expression comment could also apply to Ah-nold and Keanu Reeves). I suppose I’ve always thought “macho” is about preening –  trying to compensate for personal shortcomings by affecting some grandiose, one-dimensional aspect of manliness.  Eastwood, on the other hand, has never needed to compensate for anything.

Where I think the magazine gets it wrong is assuming this is why he’s popular.   This is the age of the End Zone Dance,  the Weepy Press Conference Apology, the Dubious Public Career Resurrected By A Reality Series. People are posting their credit card info on Facebook and writing confessional blogs (whoops).  Matthew McConnaughey apparently can’t afford shirts, Charlie Sheen has yet to find a hotel room he doesn’t want to torch, and a man can achieve TV stardom for siring 8 kids – and then get even MORE notoriety for leaving both them and his shrew wife for the hot babysitter.   It’s hard to notice quiet composure above the din of people clamouring for attention.  Most times it has to be pointed out, usually with a press release from the public figure’s publicist explaining their client will happily take questions from the media about  how quietly composed they are.

My guess is men like Eastwood more for his habit of shooting large calibre weapons and dispatching villains with snappy one-liners that are quoted for decades afterwards. Somehow, those things don’t exactly scream “low profile” or “private grace”.  If his popularity had anything do with his efforts to maintain his profound personal dignity, then The Bridges of Madison County should be Clint’s biggest picture ever.

So you might say Eastwood is like Whitman – big enough to contain contradictions.   Certainly his later work illustrates the distinction between machismo and manliness…macho wants attention, while manliness prefers to keep it on the DL.   In this regard, Eastwood could be one of the least macho men around.  There are others – my dad, for starters – and of course, Don Mann.

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Sure, it was the English who colonized much of the world and gave us Shakespeare, but what has Modern England done for us lately?  Even just forty years ago, their greatest exports included the Stones, the Who, and Terence Stamp – now it seems the best they can do is the Beckhams and televised singing contests. Their films can high-minded and snooty, their cuisine is based mostly on a dare, and judging from their teeth, I can only guess that most English dentistry is done in the dark.

The English are redeemed, however, by two things – Carey Mulligan’s dimples and the TV show Top Gear, BBC’s top-rated automotive program.  Like most arrested adolescents, I love anything that blows my hair back, and Top Gear celebrates such adrenal, blood-pumping, visceral pleasures – but in way that’s not just witty and fun, but nuanced as well.  The producers try to serve up a show that celebrates one of humanity’s engineering marvels but also attempts to confront its effects (both good and bad) on the world.  I will admit it’s not perfect at this, but compared to what Americans might produce, Top Gear is a grown-up homage to the automobile and our relationship to it, in all it’s complexity.  I laugh when I see the English media refer to Top Gear as “testosterone fuelled” – I suppose it’s telling that lowbrow for them is highbrow for much of Canada and the US.

What truly distinguishes the show is that you don’t have to love cars to love the show.  The things they do on Top Gear are inspired and interesting, and viewers need not possess any kind of specialized knowledge of or particular interest in automobiles. The presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard “Hamster” Hammond, and James “Captain Slow” May are not only clever, personable, and passionate, but they deliver their information in wry, witty way that suggests they have informed opinions and a rich thought life that exists beyond cars.   Most reality TV these days require their stars to be experts on one subject to the exclusion of all other things.   Top Gear, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to mind if its hosts come across as fully formed human beings.

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In my last post, I wrote about the Ben Franklin Moral Virtue Matrix – a series of charts that Benjamin Franklin designed to turn himself into a virtuous individual. In light of all the man accomplished (after all, he IS the subject of countless rap songs) I figured this was one lofty self-improvement project worth blatantly stealing. So, in the middle of this year, I started putting myself through the Matrix. I vowed to become a Better Man through pure, virtuous living.

Of course, I had misgivings – perhaps I took all my Sunday School classes to heart, but I always thought of myself as highly prone to sin, in spite of my hyper-developed capacity for Christian guilt. I could also recall the indignity of the last time I used a chart to monitor my progress – in Ms. Minter’s grade four class. Ms. Minter had a disdainful, Nurse-Ratchet-like countenance. She looked upon my classmates and me less as young minds for the molding than as a bunch of future violent offenders whose unhealthy impulses required behavioural modification. Ms. Minter was a firm believer in shame-based learning, a daring initiative whose central focus and principal educational weapon was the ‘star chart.’ Whenever my classmates or me answered a question correctly in class, we’d be rewarded with a star, placed on a chart on the classroom wall. It’s a common practice in many classrooms, but in Frau Minter’s re-education camp, with its special emphasis on targeted yelling and surreptitious corporal punishment, the chart took on ominous overtones. For me, it was a kind of ironic humiliation – whenever she asked me a question in class, I would freeze – I was so overwhelmed by panic over having my starless failures chronicled so publicly that I simply couldn’t summon the action needed to acquire even one. I’d like to think Ms. Minter would be proud to see that I’ve come so far as to now endure such humiliation voluntarily.

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For as long as I can remember, both my brother Mick and my brother-in-law Mike (no joke – Mick and Mike are their actual names)  have sported mustaches.  The follicle slashes above their lips are so fully integrated with my perception of them that on those rare occasions when Mick and Mike shaved them off their “Mos”, I almost couldn’t recognize them. Their smooth, unfettered faces seemed foreign and vaguely sinister, like they’d each sprouted a clone who happens to be French.

Mick and Mike are part of a tiny legion of men who wear mustaches well, men whose faces seem built to wear them. Their genetic gift rises above such petty concerns as fashion or style. It’s as though they were pre-ordained to wear a mustache, and wearing one imparts to them a masculine credibility that’s denied to lesser, clean-shaven brethren.   When I look at their faces, I instantly think of warmth, character, and supreme manly competence.   I think this despite the facts that Mick once took his car to a mechanic claiming “it’s broken”, and Mike is an amateur tinkerer whose well-meaning but hare-brained “projects” around the home regularly endanger the lives of my sister and their children.

So naturally, you can see how the idea of a mustache might appeal to me. Here, I’ve been taking the year to be a Better Man, yet it’s looking highly likely that I will fail to achieve most of my self-improvement goals.  I need a quick fix, a shortcut that will downgrade my failure from “abjectly humiliating” to “mildly disappointing”, and a mustache could be the answer.  Michael Chabon wrote in the excellent book Manhood for Amateurs that an essential part of being a man is to “flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is yourself.”   My brothers possess a manly bearing that it is in no way justified by their actual manly skills, all thanks to a four-inch stretch of hair on their face.  If it works for them, then perhaps it could work for me.   I’m almost mad I didn’t think of this sooner – I could’ve grown a Mo in January, declared the Better Man project a success and taken the next 11 months off.

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Some of you might remember that recent flashpoint of American conservative angst, the dreaded Ground Zero Mosque.  Perhaps you don’t, and in no way is that a bad thing. In fact, if you can’t remember, then stop reading right now – it’s not my place to remind you. Go back to checking Facebook or watching squirrel porn.

Are they gone? Alright.  Let’s proceed.

To me, the mosque fracas was a hollow story, a paper giant intended to frighten Americans by the size of the shadow it cast, even though it posed no threat.  Despite this, the issue tied everyone up in knots, including Barack Obama.  On a Friday, the US president reminded everyone that in America, people are free to practice their religion however and wherever they want.  Then the very next day, Barack walked it back and said his fierce defense of religious freedom should in no way be construed as rendering an opinion on the location of the mosque.  It was flip-flopping at its flip-floppiest.  About the only person who probably struck the right tone in this whole mess was Jon Stewart.  The subtext of his comments, in cased you missed it, was simple: the people who started this story are fuckheads, and you are a fuckhead for getting upset about it.

What made this story especially pernicious was just when you thought it was over, when you thought pundits had found some new way to make Americans shit their pants, or some fact exposed the controversy as a farce (that the mosque is actually several blocks away from Ground Zero, that there’s a mosque even closer to Ground Zero that has operated for years, that the principal investor in the mosque was also a principal investor in Fox News, that the mosque isn’t even a mosque) something happened or got said to keep it alive;  a xenophobic rally in downtown Manhattan, a fringe pastor decides to burn Korans, “revelations” about plans for activities in the mosque, or a new blogger late to the story writes about it (oops). The Ground Zero Mosque frenzy survived well past its sell-by date and promised to continue indefinitely, a festering boil on the ass of public discourse – not life threatening per se, but really fucking ugly, and uncomfortable for anyone who tried to sit on it.

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There’s a great quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson I’ve always loved: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” I always thought the same could be said of guys who brag about how manly they are. The more they thump their chest, the more reason you have to doubt it – or more specifically, the more reason you have to think that they doubt it. Sadly, there is no reciprocal effect for guys like myself, who openly doubt their manliness – when we say we’re aren’t men, people tend to believe us.

That’s probably why many guys keep their manly doubts to themselves, and why it often feels like masculine angst is something unique to me. It doesn’t help that I have several friends discuss my efforts to be a Better Man in the same soothing tones they might use with mental patients brandishing firearms, or blind children who say they want to be a pilot someday. Still others point out that as an educated, (failed) professional, urban-dwelling, single, childless adult heterosexual male about to breach his forties, my personal experience is too removed from the reality of an actual male’s life to have any relevance.

Well, to those people I say IN! YOUR! FACE! Move over skinny jeans – male angst over being unmanly seems to be the new black. How do I know this? Because Newsweek tells me so. This past week, the magazine made the male condition the subject of its most recent edition. The cover features a father holding a child, with text in a large font, barking at all males lingering in newsstands between airport layovers to “MAN UP!”

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Work on a major project has kept me from posting of late, and now that it’s over I feel cursed with something akin to phantom leg syndrome – I still get an itch to work on it.  Four weeks ago, I hated the project and everything about it, and wanted to be free of it once and for all.  Now that it’s complete, I find myself missing it, perhaps because while I was doing it I felt like I had the kind of purpose that’s been been conspicuously absent from the last few years of my life.

Now, I find myself untethered and a little lost. I’m not fully present in my own life – I’m like a ghost, playing mute witness to the things that directly affect me. I’ve been sitting on another post all week – a little opus about the joy I get from planning my own funeral – but no matter how much I tweak it,  it doesn’t seem to fit my mood.  That’s not to say it won’t – my own funeral is proving to be one of my favorite daydreams – it’s just the act of writing about it feels vaguely foreign, like I’m discussing someone else’s daydream. So I’ve abandoned that for the moment to try and write something more in keeping with what’s on my mind, and while trying to come up with the right combination of words it would seem Matthew Weiner has already found them for me.

Weiner is the writer/creator of Mad Men, whose brilliance has been dissected sufficiently that I need not do it here.   As much as I love the show,  however, I was uncomfortable with Don Draper in previous seasons. As his faithful copywriter Peggy astutely points out he “has everything, and so much of it” but he also failed to appreciate it and remained isolated from everyone.  That was something I might’ve been privy to but not now, and I see little point in looking backwards.   This season, however, has been different.  Don and I now share similar paths, in that his life (like mine) has really gone over the cliff.  The freefall was perhaps not as enjoyable as he thought it would be, and now he’s looking for a soft place to land.

It’s with that particular trajectory in mind that Weiner fashioned the voiceover that punctuates the end of the most recent episode (called “The Summer Man”):

When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere. Just ask him. If you listen, he’ll tell you how he got there. How he forgot where he was going and then he woke up. If you listen, he’ll tell you about the time he thought he was an angel and dreamt of being perfect. And then he’ll smile with wisdom, content that he realized the world isn’t perfect.

We’re flawed because we want so much more. We’re ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had.