This morning I woke up,  had what felt like a seven-minute pee, made myself some coffee, coughed up a little phlegm, sat down at my desk, looked at my computer and realized -  I’m ready to be a husband and father.

To just about every guy who knows me this radical epiphany will be as shocking as it is absurd. Moreover, most of my married and/or father friends have expressed envy over my freedom to, say,  sleep in until noon, walk around the house in my ratty underpants, or screw any woman I want without guilt (a logical fallacy completely at odds with the reality of my ratty underpants, but never underestimate the lurid imagination of a married male).  By contrast, my male, single, childless friends protect their metaphysical turf more fiercely than a Mexican drug cartel.  Both groups would probably regard my newfound desire as…well, unmanly.  The more I think about it, though, the more I’m thinking there could be no decision more daring or masculine than to restrict yourself to one vagina for the rest of your life whilst setting an example for the progeny that your penis and that one vagina produce.

So what accounts for this seismic shift in thinking? It’s not as though I’ve been dwelling on it, and came to a conclusion after months of serious deliberation.  I wasn’t struck by lightning,  I didn’t visit a hypnotist,  and Goddess recently made it clear that if forced to choose between dating a hobo or me she’d have to think about it.   There is no immediate, rational reason for why I should feel this way…except, perhaps, for one.  That reason’s name is  John. Fucking. Cusack (the “other JC” as I like to call him).

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In the 17 days since I last posted anything, I have done the following:

• spent a sordid Easter long weekend in a Chicago hotel with a woman OTHER than Goddess
• fired fully automatic assault rifles with members of a SWAT team
• ran after a cop to videotape him as he chased a suspect in a shooting who was fleeing the scene on foot, whilst realizing that perhaps only cops wearing Kevlar should tear after people who might have a loaded weapon on them
• was bitten by a police dog…voluntarily.
• spent another weekend in Memphis where I drank far too much, mostly because I found out that the one woman I’ve ever known carnally that I wanted to marry just got engaged to someone else
• did most of that drinking with a black blues musician who calls himself Dr. Feelgood Potts as we watched an attractive English girl with hot pink hair dance with some annoying Australians who had haircuts that made them look like the Doodlebops, all of which served to add a mild Wes-Anderson-like quality to my melancholy
• attempted to sneak upstairs at Graceland, was caught and escorted off premises by security.
  

  Bemused on Beale

• after several attempts finally finished Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby, which is no reflection on the excellent book or its author so much as a signal of my reluctance to commit to anything that might take longer than a few weeks
  

  The aftermath

• have put on at least 5 pounds eating Southern cooking, including (but not limited to) country fried steak, fried chicken and waffles,  chicken and dumplings, old fashioned barbecue served with either fried okra, fried pickles or cheese grits…oh, and biscuits and gravy too.
  

  Unfortunately the Lewinski doll was out of stock.

• visited the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, where amongst other things I purchased an actual Bill Clinton action figure that makes various famous comments from the man when you press its chest (strangely “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” was not one of them)
• last but not least,  I have spent 10-14 hours a day recording the efforts of police officers as they try to prevent students from making bad choices,  despite the students’ determination to make them anyway.

So you might say I’ve been too busy living my life to blog about it.  More to the point,  I’ve been too busy living life to actually assign meaning to anything that’s happened in the past two weeks plus. Which is not to say it’s not required – there are a few items on the list that will need to be unpacked in subsequent blog posts, and my experiences there may’ve helped me become a Better Man.  But I haven’t consciously sought betterment of any kind, so I can’t say for certain.  As you can tell, I’ve been…well, preoccupied.

I have been anxious, which may be no surprise if you’ve read any of my past entries.  However,  this time it’s not a general malaise. The source of my angst is very specific, and strangely it’s giving me a certain measure of satisfaction.  You see, I’m worried because I haven’t penned anything in 17 days until now.  What makes that gnawing anxiety oddly gratifying is that I’m uneasy not because I haven’t written anything for you to read so much as I haven’t written anything, period.

There is a saying that goes “once you sell it, you never want to give it away again.”   When it came to creative self-expression, that was precisely my attitude.  I once enjoyed the privilege of working at jobs that allowed me to show off -  I was indulged and permitted to demonstrate how smart and funny and clever I could be.  However, in so doing I developed a rather mercenary attitude.   I couldn’t see the point of expressing anything unless there was someone there to pay me for it. Even when I started this blog,  I had plans for what might come of it;  a rapturous audience obsessed with each new post and whose slavish devotion leads a broadcaster to give me a TV show, or a publisher to give me a book deal, or a maitre’ d to give me a good table at a nice restaurant.

None of that has happened, of course, but that hasn’t kept me from posting and I’m realizing why – I feel better when I’m writing, and I feel worse when I don’t.   Money’s got nothing to do with it.   This is a major breakthrough for me.   Despite a career in communications,  I could never find the internal motivation to articulate even my most basic feelings.   The result is that I was strangely disconnected from myself.   I’d pursue some ill-advised course of action or mutated strand of logic that made little sense to anybody, and I didn’t have the resources or the self-awareness to realize how far down the rabbit hole I was.

Thanks to writing,  I can summon the self-reflection needed to see and possibly avoid such things.  Moreover, writing so that one or two people can read it and possibly identify with my experience puts a little more distance between me and that nagging feeling that I’ve been behaving insanely inappropriately my whole life   Or perhaps I have been acting insanely inappropriately and only now I can understand why, thanks to people who’ve perpetrated the same anti-social behaviour and can tell me they relate.

Of course, life will continue to rob me occasionally of the time needed to write, and the Muse may not visit as frequently as I would like, but it’s going to take a lot to dislodge my newfound motivation to write, to make sense of the world and my place in it.   If there was ever a big step in becoming a Better Man, this is it.

The last post provoked some feedback, mostly from people who think that it’s highly impractical for me to NOT follow the Brad Pitt Rule with regards to Goddess.  I will concede that that there is a lot of common sense in their point, but I hope they will allow me to counter with four examples of men who defied the BPR and nonetheless managed to win their lady’s hand.  This by no means a comprehensive list – I encourage you to add your own examples, whether they be famous or personal.    Obviously, stories of successful defiance of the Brad Pitt Rule are preferred, but cautionary tales are also welcome.

Johnny Cash.   The man was a wreck when June Carter met him, but he couldn’t help himself – he says he loved her the first time he saw her.  Despite his wretched shape, Johnny repeatedly asked June to marry him, and repeatedly she had the good sense to say  no.    Perhaps it was the sheer force of his will, or his genius, or the fact that no amount of mistakes can the hide the goodness inside someone, June finally said yes (in Canada, no less).  They were married a week later, and stayed married for 35 years.

George Burns.  Gracie Allen was actually engaged to someone else when she first met George, but that didn’t stop Georgie from asking for her hand several times (“to share business expenses” he said).   Eventually, she relented.  They were married for 37 years until Gracie’s death in the mid-60s.

Odysseus.  Of all the guys who’ve had a tough time persuading a woman to love them, few guys had it as tough as Odysseus.  He had been separated from his wife Penelope for twenty years while he’s off fighting the Trojan War.  He nearly loses his life on the way back, and when he finally gets home, Penelope doesn’t recognize him. Now, because a) she was something of a looke and had to fight off potential suitors the whole time he was gone, and b) she knew her husband was a pretty remarkable dude, Penelope puts him through a bunch of tests.  First she has him compete with a bunch of other suitors to see who can string and shoot his own bow (only he does, of course).  Then, she makes him kill the other suitors (no easy task, even for Odysseus) THEN he has to answer a skill-testing question.  C’mon girl! He’s been fighting Trojans for two decades! Give the man a hug already!

Florentino Ariza (The male protagonist of the Marquez novel “Love in the Time of Cholera”).   Based on his behaviour, I doubt Florentino had ever heard of the Brad Pitt Rule.   Most of us spend our whole lives looking for someone who’ll captivate our imagination,  but the poor lovesick poet was lucky enough to find Fermina Daza very early in his life, and then unlucky enough to have her reject him for another guy.   Fermina made Florentino wait 51 years, 9 months, and four days before she relented and agreed to marry him.   Now THAT is what I call persistence.

So that a lot of lovin’ going on despite the Pitt Rule and other incredible odds. And it seems to me, these men have proven that overcoming the obstacles to achieve the hard won favour of a good woman, makes it all the more worth it.

Writing new blog posts lately is like crapping a pineapple.   Thoughtful points, clever turns-of-phrase -  I have to dislodge them from my brain with a pneumatic drill.    So when the muse visits, I have to capitalize on that brief moment of inspiration, because you never know when she’ll visit again or what form she’ll take.  Well, the muse is here RIGHT! FUCKING! NOW! and this time she looks  a lot like a dude named Peter.

Peter is a new reader (who probably discovered me through that AMAZING blog The Art of Manliness – thanks for the shout out Brett!) who was commenting on my text correspondence with Goddess, the woman who is partial inspiration for this blog.  Peter writes:

I’m sorry dude, but you’re not going to get this girl. Really. She doesn’t see you like that and she won’t. Apply the Brad Pitt Rule…(it) basically says that if G liked Chris, she would simply drop her “off the market” plan and just go on a date with him. If Brad Pitt would have asked her on a date, she would have said yes.

The logic of The Brad Pitt Rule (or Hugh Jackman Rule, or George Clooney Rule, depending on your taste) has proven to be as irrefutable as gravity,  which is why I was a strict observer of it in the past.  If I was fortunate enough to date a smart, beautiful woman,  it’s not because I was irresistibly suave or devilishly handsome.   Most times, I could never tell if a woman liked me or not unless she was being glaringly obvious.     On those occasions when I did go ahead and confess my affections, I was usually shooting blind, and it usually turned into a festival of pain.  That’s  why I gave up pursuing women altogether.

Now, I’m not ugly, but I’m no Brad Pitt. I’m not humourless, but I’m no Jack Black. I can’t bend it like Beckham, although I can bend it somewhat when bending is required.

  To be honest, I’ve been more than a little surprised by my luck.  I can only hope  my lovelife is evidence that there are natural orbital fields in dating, wherein everyone just gravitates to those most likely to love them.

I DO believe all the women I’ve dated to be inherently lovable. If they had one major flaw, it was  being unlucky enough to want me.   The miracle of predisposition and biochemistry had done most of the heavy lifting for us. You know that adage “nothing worth having comes easy”? Well,  with those relationships I had something worth having, and screwed it up precisely because they came easy.  I thought I risked nothing so I got bored quickly, and my thoughts would drift to the next woman.   It got to be  so that when the end  came, I felt bad but not that bad.  Oh sure, I may’ve pulled a Brian Wilson a few times, or tried to listen to “Blood on the Tracks” from start to finish, but I wasn’t really miserable so much as playing a miserable person for the sake of others.  After a while, I was glad they were gone. I had no idea how unworthy I was.

Even now, I can think of exactly one woman before Goddess (let’s call her pre-Goddess) that has inspired me to put in an effort, and the result is I think of her to this day as “the one that got away”.    It’s very likely she would’ve added little to my life except for misery, but I can’t help it.   I will unpack the baggage from that relationship in another post.  For now, it’s enough for you to know that pre-Goddess made me work for it, and that has made all the difference.

So essentially, I’m living proof that The Rules CAN work – the harder you make it, the more invested I seem to be.  To put it another way,  I tend to cherish the things I earn more than the things that simply fall in my lap, and that extends to women.   Mind you, these days we have a curious mindset about the effort required to start a relationship.  A lot of people treat love like economics -  trying to create scarcity around their “product”, even if their product sucks. 

They want other people to come to them, despite finding the ones who do  a little contemptible.   I have yet to resolve this paradox,  mostly because I’m endlessly charmed by stories from old couples like the ones in “When Harry Met Sally” – the husband meets his wife at the kosher deli and is consumed by a sense of destiny and she isn’t but through charming persistence she sees his quality and falls in love with him.   I dig those stories way more than the ones where two people meet and just KNOW.

Could that happen with G?  Frankly, Peter is right – all early indications are it is highly unlikely. But the same intuition that tells me tells me my chances for success are non-existent also tells me that Goddess is a person of character, and if there was ever anyone worthy of an effort, it’s her. I remember reading an essay by Vaclav Havel about hope.  Essentially, he said that hope is a state of mind, not of the world.  It’s not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

So you might say I have hope for Goddess – the idea of being with her makes sense to me, no matter how it ends.   I suppose a smart man would let G save herself for BP.  I’m not completely impractical, and perhaps at some point I will heed Peter’s advice and move on.  For the time being, though, I prefer to think G might be charmed by someone as dumb as me.

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As part of my year-long human reno, my soul-body reclamation project, I’ve resolved to eat better.  Already, I’ve cut out many things  – hamburgers, pizza, pasta, potatoes – and opted for healthier options.  Surprisingly,  it hasn’t been that hard.  I used to balk at the discipline it would require to eat more vegetables, fewer carbs, drink more water (and less JD) but I find that as I get older, it just becomes rational choices to which my self-restraint seems up to the task.

That’s why I decided to add a meal supplement to my diet.  It’s called “Vega” and it claims to have 100 percent of nutrients I need to take in a single day, plus a few things I don’t need.  I showed it to a dietician friend who said there are some vitamins in it that only pregnant women require.  Once she assured me that I would not develop gynaecomastia ( aka man-boobs), I started taking it.

That’s when the trouble began.  By trouble, I mean I started to shit six times a day.  The label had indicated that in the early stages there would be some, “gastrointestinal distress.”   I dismissed this as another one of those remote and exaggerated side-affects you see on American drug commercials. You know, the ones where the side-affects sound worse than the condition they treat? (btw, wouldn’t it be great to have those warnings on people? “Dave may cause head trauma if taunted.”  ”Be sure to take Paul with a grain of salt.”)

I can assure you though, my guts were highly distressed.  I knew when it was time to go because I could feel my colon shift, my stomach would make the sound of an old bilge pump and then I’d have to make a mad dash to the bathroom before catastrophe struck.

What came out was like a kind of green toxic sludge. Soylent Green I called it.  It’s as if this supplement is a kind of organic Liquid Plumr, purging the dark corners of my twisted intestines like some kind of gastro-Stalinist hit squad.

This continued for a month then morphed into something that I’m told is better for me; now my stools are on the offensive and fire out my ass like an artillery shell. I don’t have to even wipe in most cases, my sphincter just slams shut. What comes out now could sink a destroyer; it’s large calibre, hard as a rock and takes mere seconds to release.  Sometimes, it’ll take

upwards of four flushes to get it down the toilet.  Lucky for the environment, I only go once a day. You can you set your watch by it, since the spirit moves me  EXACTLY four hours after I take the magic powder.   In order to still have something of a life, I’ve been trying to take it at 8am everyday and then I schedule no meetings before noon.    I used to give myself 15 minutes on either side of noon, but in the extreme use of the word “regular” now I find that five minutes is fine.

Yes, my time on the commode has been stunted.  I’m all business when doing my business and THAT’s what has caused me the greatest distress.  You see, like most men, I enjoyed my leisurely toilet time because that’s when I like to read.    My lazy bowel was my passkey to a world of imagination and wonder, the commode a place where many of life’s great mysteries were revealed to me.  I think many men can claim the same. Were it not  for toilet reading a lot of us would be illiterate, or at the very least, ignorant. Myself included.

I don’t know a woman who isn’t disgusted by this phenomenon, but until they have TVs in bathrooms, it will be the gentleman’s reading room. I could spend hours there. Sometimes I’ll even bring in music and glass of wine. Try doing that at the library.

Until now.

Now I’m forced to read in the same places women do: couches, park benches,

in bed  –  places properly meant for watching TV, watching girls, sleeping and fucking.  These places are tools designed to facilitate a particular task so as far as I’m concerned, this is like using a shoe to hammer a nail; its inefficiency is matched only by its pathos.

So thanks to my new and improved intestinal tract, I now have a reading disorder.  I shift uncomfortably in bed, book in my lap, unable to focus.  The reading light in my bedroom is bad.  “It’s fine in the can,” I often grumble.  In fact, I’ve tried reading in the bathroom even when I don’t have to evacuate my bowels.  I just sit on the toilet with the lid down.  It feels like I’ve been neutered.

The only viable solutions are reading in a restaurant when waiting for my breakfast, or when taking a bath.  Since I can’t afford to eat out daily and I’m worried about the effects of lingering in a bath for hours at a time, these methods seem unlikely to stem the rising tsunami of ignorance that threatens to wash over me like an illiterate Katrina crashing into the Ninth Ward of my brain.

But there is a third possibility, reading with another person.  Not reading the same thing, but simply two people together in the same room, reading.  My ex and I used to read often…some might call this a failure to communicate, but to me if felt as though we were united in the common purpose of elevating our consciousness.   It felt good and it’s got me thinking, certainly GODDESS likes to read.

[For those of you who are just joining us now;  Goddess is my muse,  the kind of woman who makes you think "yeah, I could live without her, but it hardly seems worth it".  I realized that the remote possibility she might consider dating me was made even more unlikely by the fact that I'm in a terrible place in life. Thus, she unknowingly set this whole self-improvement juggernaut in motion. Unfortunately, due to circumstances  (and douchebags)  beyond my control, she has sworn off dating and has confined our interactions to text messages and communal hang outs.]

But I think Goddess might consider reading with me (if she didn’t currently require us to have chaperones in public places)  so perhaps I should suggest a reading date? It seems benign — no lurid come-ons, no threat of sex, not even talking.  Only reading.  I think this could be an outstanding idea that answers the prayers of so many like me;  people with unrequited affections who just want to spend time with their special someone without risking a restraining order.

And maybe I’ll get through a book again.  I mean, have you seen my Better Man reading list?  In the meantime… read any good cereal boxes lately?

C’mon, you’ve seen “Run Fatboy Run”! Self-improvement starts with trying to get the girl. And the girl in this instance…well, she’s the kind of girl that gets thanked in the liner notes of a Wilco album; the kind of girl that inspires friends to give her bone marrow, or threaten death  if you hurt her in any way. She’s loved by animals and small children. She can tell a joke like Sarah Silverman, knows all the words to “Queen Bitch” (hell, all of “Hunky Dory”) and reads to blind seniors (but would never tell anybody about it). When she passes by, you can sort of hear the theme song to the “Mary Tyler Moore

Show.” She can turn the world on with a smile. She can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile. Seriously.

In so far as my puny, cynical heart will let me believe in love at first sight, I think I have fallen for Goddess (not her real name). I’m not exactly a jumping-on-Oprah’s-couch kind of guy, but in a fit of pique I might have confessed to a close friend that I had met the woman I will marry. Now, if only she felt that kind of drama for me… I can assure you I wouldn’t be here writing about my newly-minted crap life. We would be making the sweet love.

Sadly, you’re reading this because I believe she finds me to be an irritant, like a skin rash. I mean, I thought I was pretty funny to start — clever, self-effacing, even playful. Unfortunately, she will not let me get through even the first date so I can propose to her (any sooner would be just creepy….right?).

Now, I’m not entirely to blame for this…thanks to mutual friends (who were all too happy to betray Goddess’ confidence in this matter) I discovered the poor girl is a victim of serious douchebaggery – not once, not twice, but three times! and all in 2009. I’m not the only one having a shit year.

The result is that she’s sworn off my gender — ALL men — which, apparently, includes me. Three anonymous jerkwads with no appreciation for how good they could’ve had it have now spoiled it for ALL jerkwads, this one in particular. Despite my charming advances, she tells me that she’ll only see me in group outings — that’s right, CHAPERONES, those unwelcomed extras best left to Jane Austen’s gang and school dances.

I figure it must be a sign. I’m simply not ready for her jelly. I mean I’m at my lowest point here, and don’t have much to offer the average beauty, let alone an Angel walking the earth.

I know, I know,  it sounds like the plot for a bad rom-com. At NO TIME in real life have I heard of any guy meeting a girl who was mildly ambivalent/actively hostile towards him, and then softening that girl’s heart such that she falls in love with him. In real life, if they start out ambivalent/hostile, they tend to stay that way and frankly, what guys once called a “challenge” is now referred to as “high maintenance” and  best avoided. Getting through to Goddess will be hard, like a long distance call on two cans with string. But to paraphrase Michael Chabon, my gesture is  doomed but I make it anyway, not on the chance it will be understood, but as if such a chance ever existed.

Besides, most of the stupid, ill-advised things I’ve done in my life I have

done to try and impress a girl. The first time, I was 12, and I did a Back Scratcher off a ski jump to get Tiffany Hagberg’s attention. It was the first time I’d ever done one, and I looked “radical!!” on take off. But a crucial part of any successful Back Scratcher is actually bringing your skis back down, a small fact that in my zeal to win Lady Tiffany’s heart I’d neglected to consider. I landed like a wet hand hitting a table top and slid down the rest of the hill on my face, a lesson in how quickly and violently joyful hubris can turn into wheezing digrace.  It’s been downhill ever since, if you’ll pardon the expression.

(However, I can report that I did get Tiffany to notice me. Just not in the way that I’d hoped.)

Trying to be a better man, getting Goddess’ attention – do these have the same potential for humiliating, soul-crushing disaster? Absolutely.   However, I’m older and presumably wiser now.  I realize that such acrobatics take practice, and if I need to impress other Tiffanys with my “back-scratching” until I KNOW I can stick the landing for Goddess…well, I can do that too.

Betterment is a pursuit, after all….