Real Joe

I’m always a little surprised when I get into a funk and don’t seem to notice it for a few hours. I keep thinking I’ve gotten to a point where as soon as I’m bothered, I’ll realize it and take time to figure out what goofball thinking I’m entertaining and change gears.

On Monday, I started mentally stewing about our finances and recurring cash flow shortages. It was a background anxiety that I wasn’t really aware of and then at some point it got louder in the form of thoughts like Shit, maybe I’m not cut out for this self-employed life and Why am I so lousy at managing money? and If only I could get my book done and start generating some recurring revenue, then we’ll turn the corner and I’ll be at ease.

And then it hit me that this thinking was the source of my suffering, not my money situation. New message to self: There are things I can do to improve our situation now, so just do them. And besides, we are among the richest 1% of the people in the world already. If I get beyond these minor money problems and don’t change my habitual thinking, there will be a new set of problems to stew about. Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant provide helpful daily reminders of this.

Ahh, that’s better.

Last night, I was leaving the racquetball club and whining to a buddy about my knee being more sore than it was 2 months ago. “It’s been almost 4 and half months… I should be ready to start practicing hard, getting in shape for April tournaments. But it’s not going to happen at this rate. I might not even be ready for trials season.”

As I left the club, it occurred to me that this kind of thinking had been in the back of mind all week. And then I readjusted my brain with, This is a ridiculously minor problem. Just last week my friend Mike cut off his index finger with a table saw and a fellow trials rider had a truck on a hoist drop on his chest, crushing all sorts of internal body parts. There are probably a thousand people who were informed last week that their cancer has returned. My own wife has had a very bad week with her severe tinnitus that’s never ever going to go away. I’ve got access to the best health care in the world and I’ve got full mobility as it is. Time to knock off the stinkin’ thinkin’.

Ahh, that’s better.

My birthday dinner with my sibs didn’t happen as planned last week as my sister got sick. We’ve rescheduled for next week.

My wife challenged my Ego Orgasms blog post last week re: my rationale for not participating more with my son’s canoeing after he wrecked his knee on my motorcycle. I said it was my sciatica problem. She contends I was just not that interested in canoeing and not willing to do less motorcycling. Ouch. I do remember my sciatica being an issue but she’s right, I used it as an excuse, too. Back then, my ego was running my life. Good thing I’m beyond that now. heh.

DL writes:

“… tonight I was at church rehearsing with a trumpet quartet. I’m an average player, but the guys I play with are excellent. I also play a pretty decent piano, but of course I know many who are better – there is my inner critic working – it’s always been there throughout my life – no matter how good I’ve gotten at something. (I’m much better at recognizing it now).

I can pretty much handle these – but then I see one of the guy’s kids – a 2nd grader – playing the piano very well and a very bright kid. My son, in his 3rd year of piano, can’t play anywhere close. Where my mistaken thinking comes in is comparing my son to his son and to his life in general (you know – lawyer, talented, family seems perfect, etc……). But mostly to what I perceive as limitations of my kids. Griff – did you ever deal with that when your kids were young? I hope so much for them – but they are who they are and they have their limitations. Again, my inner critic comes in saying what could I do as a parent to make their lives better – or what haven’t I done?”

There’s a point at which my natural parental pride in my kids goes too far and becomes an ego thing. And that’s when there’s a mistaken idea lingering somewhere, that somehow, I’m deficient, and therefore my kids need to make up for it.

I remember this most clearly when my oldest son Collin tore his ACL on my trials motorcycle at age 13, just as he was starting to show some real talent in the sport. He never rode again. I’d often get little “ego orgasm” pangs of envy when my good buddy Jim would show up at events with his two sons. At some point, I let it go. He got into canoe racing and though I didn’t join him in that because of my sciatica, we stayed connected through his teen years till he left home.

In retrospect, I think the key was finding ways to be with one another in which we both ended up enjoying one another. Camping, bicycling, frisbee, board/card games, computers. The pure enjoyment of his company ended up being stronger than my desire to have an ego orgasm over his performance at something important to me.

It helped to know that my own father desperately wanted me to become a model Catholic, that he couldn’t enjoy being with me in my adulthood, that it not only got in our way of enjoying each other, but also prevented him from having any kind of decent relationship with his grandkids. I could understand how he got to that place, but I really wanted to avoid a similar fate.

My response [expired link] to a dad who’s struggling with his mistaken thinking about his son’s performance.

Real Live Preacher is working on a book, based in part on stuff he’s posted to his weblog. Which means he’s got a new hat to wear that’s he’s not entirely comfortable with:

Here, at the end of a long year of writing, I can actually say the words I’ve never been able to say before, though I still want to run and hide when I say them. I am a writer.

I think I’ll follow his blog more closely, as I’m struggling with the same task — getting my Small Business Blogging book done.

Kent Nerburn is using the January dagger and lack of social contact to get his book done.

On the my Ego Orgasm blog [defunct], I posted this definition last November:

An ego orgasm is whatever I do or happens in life that I think gives me a psychological boost but that turns out to be false. Mistaken. Often times destructive. And once it’s over, unless I see the mistaken thinking behind it, the hunger for another one quickly returns.

Here’s Eckhart Tolle’s definition of ego in his book, The Power of Now:

As you grow up, you form a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phanton self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through continuous thinking. The term ego means different things to different people, but when I use it here it means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind.

To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it — who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. It says: “One day, when this, that or the other happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at peace.” – Eckhart Tolle

The “seek some kind of release or fulfillment” in the future that he describes is the orgasm that seems to be tripping me up most of the time. Current example: “When my knee heals and I return to racquetball and trials, THEN I’ll really be…” What? Somebody! Oy. Whoever that ‘somebody’ is must be rooted in my past, and I’m trying to keep it alive with this mistaken thinking about the future.

As part of my day job, I was just invited to attend an upcoming conference in Mpls titled Trend Agenda. One of the organizers is Cecily Sommers, Principal Strategist, UNIT 1. When I went to her company’s website, I found this essay in her weblog: Between Mook and Metrosexual, it’s a No-Man’s Land: Will the Real Man please stand up! She’s citing some of the same cultural shifts that Susan Faludi wrote about in the book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man only she’s more current… and Faludi’s book came out before the so called backlash kicked in, epitomized by The Man Show. I didn’t know the term “mook” – maybe because I’m only up to season 2 on Sopranos DVDs. I also wasn’t aware of the term “manity,” coined by Faith Popcorn in her 2003 trends report. (Why is it that it’s women who are chronicling the male cultural shifts?)

Sommers’ piece is a good read. She’s not bemoaning the trends, just noting them. While the dichotomy isn’t as extreme in real life as its protrayed in the media, it’s evident in my life. My good buddy Jim just hosted an open house for his new monster garage/workshop, calling it the Southern Minnesota Men’s Crisis Center (photo gallery).

We sat around and drank beer and watched Jackass and talked motorcycles and had a grand time being mooks. But the fact that there are photos of women there (wives and daughters infiltrated towards the end of the night – maybe even earlier) betrays us. We’re family guys, involved in our communities, trying to stay in shape, and — more than we care to admit — trying to be a little more fashion conscious for our sweeties. (Trim that nose hair! Don’t wear the same ten year-old shirt 4 days in a row!) So we’re influenced by the culture, no doubt, but I think there’s probably more than a few us who are moderating its extremes.

Here’s a snip from the essay:

True masculinity is no longer a simple question of to quiche or not to quiche. No, the measure of today’s man swings between whether he watches “The Man Show” or gets a manicure. Whether he hangs out at “Hooters” or is a culinary master, sports a beer gut (a “1-pack”) or a finely chiseled abdominal 6-pack, drives a “Beemer” or a pick-up with fuzzy dice.

Now there’s nothing new about how groups of people generate their own culture with distinct signifiers of belonging. But there’s something going on here that’s more than just a matter of demographic differences; the sheer volume of the two trends in popular culture, as well as their polarity invite a deeper look.

Trend-watchers are paying attention to this emerging dichotomy in male identity. On the one hand we have what trend guru Faith Popcorn calls “Manity,” a marked increase in straight men who’ve grown a taste for facials and interior design. The facts speak for themselves: according to the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, the number of plastic surgery procedures on men in the U.S. has increased threefold since 1997. Clearly at home in the pursuit of aesthetic improvement, this fashion-conscious man of the new millennium has been dubbed the “Metrosexual.”

In what looks like a backlash to the feminized Metrosexual is a portrait of a man on the opposite end of the spectrum. Here, in defense of the more traditional male rites of boozing and belching is — in the words of Tony Soprano – the “Mook.” This testosterone-driven lug is becoming all the rage, to which the phenomenal success of television programs such as Jackass, Girls Gone Wild! and The Man Show gives credible testament.

There’s a natural tension between opposites. The fact that the Mook and Metrosexual have such a heightened presence right now suggest that they are an expression of a deeper tension in the contemporary male psyche. It’s an identity in search of self, and as tension generally heralds change, it’s also an indicator of a deeper cultural shift that’s underway. As ever, popular culture will be both the instrument and the witness to this struggle and its effects.

As I was struggling to do a complete 555 routine yesterday, I noticed that many of thoughts that came galloping into my head were of the “shit I haven’t done but should do” variety.

I then remembered this paragraph from Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now:

The psychological condition of fear is divorced form any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you are identified with your mind and have lost touch with the power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be your constant companion. You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection — you cannot cope with the future.

And then I remembered that I bought this book about a year ago but never read it: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen (website here). Here’s a snip from his Chapter 1 (the full text is available on Barnes and Noble):

The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can’t do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you need to do something, and store it in your RAM, there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time. Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do them both at the same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be pinpointed. Most people have been in some version of this mental stress state so consistently, for so long, that they don’t even know they’re in it. Like gravity, it’s ever-present-so much so that those who experience it usually aren’t even aware of the pressure. The only time most of them will realize how much tension they’ve been under is when they get rid of it and notice how different they feel.

So now that I’m aware of how often I’m entertaining anxiety about the undone, I’m more motivated to read Allen’s book and get it resolved. Or it could end up being just another “should” on my shitlist. We’ll see. I just searched this Real Joe weblog and discovered that I first wrote about Allen’s book back on May 17, 2002. And then, omigod, again exactly one year ago. I guess that’s a sign. 😉

I’ve not gotten to writing up Part II of my transcript (see Part I) but I don’t seem to be making much headway in the past week. My busy, noisy mind just keeps working overtime. And while I thought I was on top of the negative noise, I was surprised to find myself in a bit of a funk yesterday, triggered by my struggles with my new laptop and switching all the apps and files. I eventually caught myself and spent 20 minutes getting my head resituated. And it may have served a purpose to not get so cocky about how easy this shit is.

I heard from CJ: “In a curious coincidence, at the urging of another friend, I bought the CDs of Tolle’s Practice of the Power of Now and listened to them while driving from airports to gigs in California and Texas over the last month. I do find myself intrigued. He captures, even through his obtuse rhetoric, my situation. The minds works all the time, overtime, overtaking and overruling other sources of direction and energy. So, it is fascinating to think of getting outside the mind and thinking of it as something that might be observed, rather than consistently serve. You can characterize me as your workaholic, Type A, ENTJ (Myers Briggs) colleague who thinks entirely too much, and sometimes not too well. The trick for me is to get that non-thinking second to expand into a minute or so. That’ll be big.”

This week I’m going to redeploy the 555 technique as a way to reign in the noisy head, while continuing to WWMNTIGTB – wonder what my next thought is going to be. And I’m going to explore “echoing” described in this article How to Echo Talk by Shinzen Young. “Without a doubt the biggest challenge facing most people in the early years of their practice is dealing with obsessive internal chatter, also known as monkey mind. Among the coping strategies commonly adopted are attempting to sooth the chatter through a mantra (as in T.M.) or carefully observing it (as in standard Vipassana). The echoing process combines the strengths of both these methods in a clever way. (My motto is, “If you can’t be disciplined, be clever!”)

And a tip of the Real Joe hat to Norm who corrected me on two items: one fills a humidifier, not a dehumidifier; and the actor in The Last Samurai was Tom Cruise, not Brad Pitt. I told my wife that I probably wouldn’t make a similar mistake with, say, Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts.

My physical therapist told me I could mess around on the racquetball court by myself, as long as I didn’t swing hard, torqueing my knee.

But as my knee started to feel better and get stronger, I kept doing more and more hard swinging. Last week, it occurred to me that I couldn’t stop myself from doing this so I cut up the strings on my racquet. Not unlike an alcholic who takes antabuse.

Jeesh, you’d think I’d have more self-control than this but apparently not. And of course, just because I don’t have use of my own racquet now, doesn’t mean I can’t borrow one. Oy.

I have dinner with my sibs tonight… older sister and younger brother. For the past two years or so, we’ve been getting together for a long dinner 3-4 times per year, just to talk and be with one another. We grew up pretty emotionally distant from one another and, having recognized this, are trying to do something about it as we’ve also recognized that we’d like to be closer.

I told my daughter this morning that I’m always tense before these dinners and she asked me why with a hint of incredulity in her voice. She just had a birthday dinner with her brothers and is always thrilled to be with them.

I think I’m overly cautious when I meet with them, now that I think about it. My relationship with them is so tenuous, I guess I try to stay safe… and maybe that’s getting in the way. So tonight, I’m planning on being more open, less fearful. Take more risks. And to not concern myself with any outcome. To paraphrase Larry Brilliant, “I’m entitled to the joy of dinner with my sibs, I’m just not entitled to the results.”

I’d also like to see if I can keep my “silent watcher” engaged, so that the stuff I say to them isn’t totally fueled by my fears and desires.

Be present as the watcher of your mind — of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react. Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future. Don’t judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don’t make a personal problem out of them. You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher. — Eckhart Tolle

My buddy Curt steered me to a new book called The Progress Paradox : How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse whose author, Gregg Easterbrook, was recently on MPR’s Midmorning. He also has a weblog on the New Republic site called EasterBlog.

He was on the PBS show ThinkTank last year and that link has a transcript of his interview. Here’s a quote:

Ben Wattenberg: So ten thousand per year, per capita income would mean a husband and wife, two children is a income of forty thousand dollars a year.

Gregg Easterbrook: Yeah. That’s the point at which additional income in research decouples from happiness and getting more money has nothing to do with how happy you feel in life. In a sense this is the proof that money cannot buy happiness. But researchers who have studied people, higher income people are no happier than lower income people. Members of the Forbes Four Hundred, the list of the richest men and women in the world, are not any happier as a group than people who earn the median income. Money doesn’t buy happiness. The proof is now in. If anybody doubted it, that’s true.

I think the modern era creates a materialism jealousy effect that didn’t exist before that you might call catalog induced anxiety. In previous centuries there’ve always been people of spectacular wealth and most people knew that they existed but they didn’t know the details of the lives of the Rockefellers or the Astors. All they knew was that they had lives that people could only dream of. Now we see every possible detail of the life of rich people, uh, on television, in Vanity Fair, in People magazine. The way the rich live is covered in extraordinary detail. And I think it makes people feel, even people who are themselves relatively well off, not wealthy but live in a nice house, don’t worry about where their next meal will come from, because they see the details of the lives of wealthy and the celebrities, it makes them feel that they themselves haven’t gotten what they wanted.

A telling statistic on this is that if you—no matter how much an American earns, he or she tells pollsters that twice as much is required to live well. So a person who earns twenty-five thousand dollars says you gotta have fifty thousand. A person who earns fifty says you gotta have a hundred. A person who earns a hundred says you gotta have two hundred. We’re programmed to think that we can’t live well unless we get much more. You can find individuals who have realized that money doesn’t buy happiness and that endlessly chasing the last dollar of maximized income is a formula for unhappiness. But as a society as a whole I don’t think we’ve realized this yet.

I think you might call this the revenge of the credit card. Your American Express card absolutely cannot buy you happiness. It can buy you unhappiness. If you use it too much, get into debt, you have debt problems, you have to work around the clock to pay your bills, the credit card will buy you unhappiness very reliably. But it can’t buy you happiness.

In the movie The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise’s character learns from his Samurai captors how the state of “no-mind” helps him be a better fighter.

In Eckhart Tolle’s book Practicing the Power of Now, he puts no-mind to use for more mundane stuff:

Instead of “watching the thinker,” you can also create a gap in the mindstream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw the consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation. In everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself. For example, every time you walk up and down the stairs… wash your hands…”

Here’s Part I of a snapshot of how this went for me this morning. I wasn’t quite ready to take on a gang of Nazi skinheads by the time I was done, but Tolle’s right, it’s a satisfying thing to do.

I’m sitting in the rocking chair in our living room, the place I like to sit in the wee hours of the morning, drinking my first cup of coffee, reading my favorite daily quotes, reviewing my compass, doing a little spiritual reading, and planning my day.

I close my eyes and focus on my breathing.

I’m breathing in, I know I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out, I know I’m breathing out.

5 seconds later

I hear the furnace making that noise again. I wonder if the service guy is coming back this morning?

WATCH THE THINKER
Ah, I don’t need to think about that now. Just focus on breathing.

I’m breathing in, I know I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out, I know I’m breathing out.

5 seconds later

I hear a car. Sounds like a hot rod. Last night I was talking with Gilly about American Graffiti. I need to plan our weekly date night. I should meet with my sons this week when I’m in the cities. Next week I’ll meet with my own sibs. My brother and I are going to have an argument…

WATCH THE THINKER
Hmmm. I notice FEAR kicking in now. I better take some time later to figure out what that’s about. But I don’t need to bother about that now, I just want to sit here with no-mind, breathing.

I’m breathing in, I know I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out, I know I’m breathing out.

5 seconds later

Shit, my shoulder aches. I’m planning for my knee to be ready to play a racquetball tourney in 6 weeks but what if my shoulder isn’t ready? It’d be cool if I came back after a 6 month layoff and wowed a lot of guys on how well I’m playing.

WATCH THE THINKER
I notice DESIRE kicking in. I’m planning for a racquetball ego orgasm. Mistaken idea. But I don’t need to bother about that now, I just want to sit here with no-mind, breathing.

I’m breathing in, I know I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out, I know I’m breathing out.

5 seconds later

I gotta get going. Lots of work to do. Need more new weblog clients this month, as I’m behind on monthly income goals and Robbie’s getting more worried.

WATCH THE THINKER
I notice FEAR kicking in. What’s that about? Must have some mistaken ideas about money. But I don’t need to bother about that now, I just want to sit here with no-mind, breathing. And this time, I’m going to focus on physical sensations to see if I can stick with no-mind a little longer.

I’m breathing in, I know I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out, I know I’m breathing out. I feel my stomache expanding and contracting, feeling my breath puffing out my lips as I exhale. I hear my breath. Sounds like I’m wearing scuba gear. I can feel it in the back of my throat.

30 seconds later

Ahhhhh

(More to come in Part II of no-mind.)

I got this email from a regular reader.

Howdy Griff. I’m wondering if you would do me a favor. I’ve written a little script of a bedtime story that I would like to record and have my oldest, anxious son listen to whenever he feels like it – but primarily for when I am traveling away from home. It’s focus is affirmation. I know you like them, so you are a bit biased, but I’d like a second opinion on my intent and method.

He gave me his permission to post it here (word doc) to see if anyone else has some helpful feedback for him.

I’ll attach my comments to this blog post. Others can do likewise or use the Contact form.

Time’s cover story this week: The Power of Love.

I’ve not yet read it, but I notice that they use the word “sex” in the URL, not love. Shocking!

It’s been another unplanned hiatus from Real Joe and Ego Orgasms. It seems to happen every few months, usually a combination of things that take priority over blogging. The details will emerge over several posts.

I’ve been intrigued with trying to get better at watching my thinking. It’s been triggered by two of Eckhart Tolle’s books, Practicing the Power of Now and Stillness Speaks.

His stuff can be a little hard to read if new-agey lingo drives you apeshit. But I’ve found that some of the ways he describes some timeless spiritual principles to be helpful. Like this:

The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not “the thinker.” The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence.

Nothing new under the sun there, but it’s caught my attention. A simple technique: I sit down someplace quiet, close my eyes, focus on my breathing or some other body sensation (my forearms on the arm of the chair), and then say to myself, I wonder what my next thought is going to be? And then I watch for whatever my mind serves up, notice it, and then do it again.

A little harder, but more interesting: doing the same thing when going about my daily routine. While putting my pants on: I wonder what my next thought is going to be? Walking down the stairs. Making coffee. Filling the humidifier. I wonder what my next thought is going to be?

Hardest of all: when talking and listening to someone. “Hey, Sweetie, good morning.” I wonder what my next thought is going to be?

I’ve done this before in my feeble attempts at meditation. I’ve focused on the now (eg, the 5-5-5 technique) in routine as well as anxiety-producing situations. And I use journal writing to examine my mistaken ideas whenever I’m troubled about something.

But I’ve never really made an attempt to watch the thinker while staying present, also while — and this is significant, methinks — keeping a small part of my mind aware that there’s a higher (deeper?) level of consciousness to the whole scene. “Aware of being aware,” is how many have described it. It’s cool. And somewhat strange, because it’s a way of reliably activating a sense of peace that I don’t normally experience.

When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice — the thinker — but the one who is aware of it. Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom.

I part company with Tolle a bit when he says it’s enough to recognize the thought non-judgmentally and then go back to the now. It works better for me to examine it for mistaken thinking. More on that later.

New Year’s Eve was our thirtieth wedding anniversary. Since the last ten have increasingly been blissful — in part because we’ve worked at it — I’m kind of proud of us.

Our kids took us out to dinner and then shocked us with a surprise visit from our oldest son Collin and his girlfriend who drove non-stop from Dallas to get there. For me, the whole night represented the kids’ appreciation of what our marriage has meant to them.

They still remember a fight we had when they were little… they ran from the room crying “because you might get divorced.” They equally remember some of the times when they walked in on our romantic escapades. I like that they laugh about that.

I do feel grateful, too. We had enough trouble on and off in the first twenty years of our marriage that we could have easily ended up divorced. Why didn’t we? Fate? God’s grace? I don’t know, but dumb luck was clearly part of it.

We’re planning a little getaway but haven’t decided on where yet. I want to head north to Lake Superior and some snowshoeing. She wants to head south to Chicago and some museum-hopping. Oh oh.

In the Jan. issue of The Rake: Sex & the Married Man: Lady Remington. By Stuart Greene.

Ladies, how do you like your men? I realize variety is the spice of life. Some women like burly football-players, some like ’em hairy, some like ’em boyishly bald. My precious and I like a clean work area. Recently, I’ve enjoyed taking it all off down there, and she seems to like it too. Razor burn is always a problem, but we’ve got our secret formula. Three words: Magic Shave Powder. This stuff is a chemical depilatory supposedly designed for the beards of black men, but women have been on to it for years. What the hell, guys, give it a try. Like the barber always told you, it’ll grow back. You’ve got nothing to lose but your inhibitions.

Hmmm. It never occurred to me.

Like a few million others, I’m reading The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown.

US News & World Report did a cover story a couple of weeks ago titled Jesus in America that details the phenomenon around the book. (Full text no longer available for free there but it can be found on Dick Staub’s site.) Staub’s site has plenty of quotes and links that trash the book, and one source that’s frequently quoted is Dismantling The Da Vinci Code by Sandra Miesel.

I’m enjoying the book as a thriller and it does make me curious about the historical research that Brown used.

My initial reaction: those who are screaming that Brown’s theory is preposterous — that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s wife and chosen successor; that the Holy Grail was Mary Magdalene; that she bore him a child who went on to found France’s Merovingian dynasty — should consider that the story of Jesus as we’ve been taught could be considered preposterous, too. If you’d never heard of Christianity and someone told you there was this guy, born of a virgin, who walked on water and rose from the dead, what would you think?

Today’s Arlo ‘n Janis is on the familiar theme of husbands not listening to their wives.

I get particularly deaf during the holidays and this week even my daughter said to my wife, “Dad doesn’t listen.”

I’m generally okay when the subject and tone are serious. But when it involves instructions or Uncategorized descriptions or upcoming appointments or most any kind of social chatter and the setting is mundane — house or car — then I’m bad, amazing even myself. My wife’s pretty tolerant, unless I’m running a deficit in our emotional bank account. Then she gets offended.

I’m thinking there’s a simple two-person solution to this for a happily-married couple like us, but I’m stuck on what it might be.

Ron describes a road rage incident between himself on a Harley and a guy in a pickup truck, thirty years ago.

I risked my life to make a point? Ego? Whose? Not mine.

Sure it was. You and your buddy were more than just threatened by the asshole. He was trying to intimidate with his truck, his unconscious brain thinking something like: “Here are some tough-looking fuckers on their motorcycles. If I can freak them out with my truck, then that means I’m tougher than them.”

Nobody likes being intimidated or having our lives endangered but if our ego is additionally threatened — our image of ourselves as guys — then we think we have to take additional action to save face, even if it means taking a risk that could hurt us.

If that was a little old lady who endangered you and your buddy because her eyesight was failing and her reflexes were shot, you would likely have had a very different reaction — maybe you would have made sure you got her license and reported her to the police in hopes that they’d contact her relatives to get her the hell off the road. Or maybe you’d let the air out of her tires or yank her spark plug wires at the next gas station. 😉

So trying to teach this guy a lesson by out-intimidating him, man that’s an ego orgasm I’ve dreamed of having ever since I was a kid and my dad accused me of being a wimp. I’ve desperately wanted to be that tough, and only have one measly fight as a 5th grader to relish.

But consider this: even though you know it was a dumb-fuck thing to do, there’s probably a part of you still trying to have little ego orgasms over it 30 years later. I got tons of examples of me doing the same. Stay tuned.

I got in the middle of a conflict between a local unit of goverment and a group of local citizens over a public policy issue. I’m on the board of a community network that has web tools at its disposal for conducting public policy discussions and gathering feedback. The citizens group believed that government was controlling the public input process in unfair ways.

I wasn’t very familiar with the issue, but I knew that this was a perfect opportunity to “bring government to its knees” and show them the power of a networked citizenry, with our little non-profit at the center of attention and me as ringleader. Power! Recognition! Fame! I relished the thought of it as I explained the situation to my wife and kids and some of my fellow board members.

But a little something in the far reaches of my brain kept nagging me and when I sat down for my morning SOS (shot of solitude), I electronically stumbled on my “prayers I can relate to” section in my PDA and saw the first line of St. Francis’ Make me an Instrument of Peace prayer.

And I knew there were some things I could try to diffuse the conflict. A few phone calls and some email exchanges and I had one of those win-win agreements (I hate that phrase) in place. When one of the citizens asked me how it happened, I joked that “I used my charm.” But later, when telling my fellow board members about it, one of them pointed out that the government’s change of heart was probably due to the intervention of a certain public official. I agreed but my ego took an immediate hit.

And so when I sat down to reflect on all this, it became crystal clear that as the day progressed, my “make me an instrument of peace” prayer had development an ego-orgasmic addendum: “Make me an instrument of peace and then make others be impressed with my peacemaking.” Insidious shit, this mistaken thinking.

Stuart Greene’s Sex & The Married Man column for the December issue of The Rake is available: End of Discussion: Why are married women afraid to talk about sex? Here’s my letter to the editor:

Stuart Greene accurately describes the polarization that exists in a many a married couple’s sex life. Sure, it happens in part because we’re wired differently. But it also happens in part because of a pattern that develops, a downward spiral from those days of heated passion when both partners were usually as interested in each other’s bodies as their souls.

Over time, the more us guys tend to neglect the emotional stuff, the more our wives tend to neglect the physical stuff, the more we tend to neglect… and pretty soon, our respective positions become entrenched.

I’m guessing that’s why Stuart’s pals Pete, Don, and Ben are stuck in boredomland. They’re at the point where they don’t go out of their way on the relationship stuff and their wives sure as hell aren’t going to go out their way to make a trip to the toy store.

Fortunately, downward spirals can gradually be reversed by each going out of our way. The more I… the more she… the more I….

And at some point, it might occur to us guys that we do like to be desired in lots of ways besides our studly ways, and to our honeys that they do like plumbing adventures as much as the Oprah stuff.

By staying healthy, parents give a gift of great value by Karin Winegar. “Our parents have given us a gift: not our health, but their health. I have come to recognize this as one of the greatest and rarest bequests, something to be deeply thankful for.”

It’s a different perspective that I’ve not considered: a fit old age as a gift to my children and grandchildren, rather than just something for myself. Even past the age of 114? Sure, why not?

Nov. 23 update
An opposing viewpoint: Of luck and compassion

A new Pissing Match category for Ego Orgasms. First entry: Freeway space cadets.