TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

#78 – Being a Guy – Part 1

#78 - Being a Guy - Part 1

I wanted to say “vagina” as the start of this piece. It’s a real word; you may have heard that men are unable to utter it, speak it or admit that it exists. I thought I’d throw it out there to blow up a few things at the start because most guys will admit that this is how every movie should start. Or do they? Or you can go to one-person performance pieces like “Defending the Cave Man” or “The Vagina Monologues” or read stuff like “That B@st@rd on the Couch” (their words, mind, not mine) and be confronted by a lot of people trying to break up a lot of stereotypes that haven’t been working their entire lives.

For better or for worse, I’ve been trying for a very long time to document a few basic realities that exist for me. To re-use the phrase that Bruce keeps thrusting upon me, the role that I’m in. And it is a role – it’s a part in the play; when the curtain falls and I get in the Jeep (no longer the Camaro), my part is over until I walk into the building the next business day. Role-playing: it’s not just for bored middle-aged couples. I play roles: at work – I’m a big fish in a small pond confronted that while I may have been where I’m at for going on five years, I’m also like the little kid in Afghanistan who wandered into a minefield and now walks around with a few missing limbs. I play that role – the humble but learning guy. Everyone’s younger brother – Jay North’s “Dennis the Menace” to your Mr. Wilson. I don’t know how I feel about it – some are born in roles, some achieve roles and others have roles thrust upon them. I’m somewhere between option two or three.

As before, this is just me talking. This is me attempting to articulate a few nebulous points that me as the tiny speck in the universe has been orbiting around. How do you know that black holes exist? You can’t see them, you can only see what they affect. These roles, these rules I’ve been living with / under / around are kind of the same way. There isn’t a book, there isn’t an instructional manual and there certainly isn’t a technical certification that proclaims “Tim Woolery – He Knows What is Going On” or anything like that. It’s all trial and error, it’s an obstacle course whose only reward is, after snagging you elbow and barking your shin on various traps, is to come out intact on the other side and listen to other people say “Yeah, I coulda told you how to avoid that.” And before you ask, no, you are not allowed to kill them.

Along the way, you learn things about yourself. How you solve one problem defines how you solve the next and so forth. Pretty soon, you find yourself through the natural order of things, solving things in pretty much the same way. This works better some times than others. If you’re lucky, you’re never confronted with problems that will not be solved outside of your knowledge base but alas, I’ve never been that lucky. Pigeonholed / Role-Assigned – I’m sure there’s a college class going on right now where some professor or counselor is proclaiming a technical term that I can only describe in the broad strokes. Page 146 of a college-level Psych textbook; it’s called something like “Barton-Tate Syndrome”, I’m sure of it. You get these roles thrust upon you – just like that directions-guy thing I’ve been complaining/musing about in previous entries. I’ve had that role assigned to me through forces completely unbeknownst to me for reasons that I have never figured out. And this isn’t just me talking out of my ear, either. Random strangers do it; I just have that kind of face.

Men play roles. I’ll pause while you fall off of your seat at that revelation. It’s not really a revelation and no, I don’t expect you to fall off of your chairs. Society in general exists on some pretty well-defined rules and regulations. Some of these rules have existed for hundreds, even thousands of years only to be challenged in the last 60 or 70 years. Yes, men play roles, just like women play roles. I know they do and so do you; ever look at the cover of Glamour or Cosmo while you’re in the supermarket checkout line? If not, take a look the next time you’re there and then do a casual scan of the females in your line of sight. See anything wrong with this picture? No supermodels in sight…well, most of the time…especially at the Safeway on Decoto and Alvarado / Niles Blvd. We all play a role of some kind, we all have some assumptions made about us and for us and we all know how well assumptions work in daily life.

But my role as a male…I’ve never seen a movie or read a book that really described it for me. Where I could read, watch or listen to someone and go, “Yeah, that’s how I feel.” I’ve been sitting outside the classroom for my entire life waiting for someone to call me in and show me just how it is that you tie your shoes. Or do something that appears to be as second-nature as the general population makes it look. No one’s ever come up to me just as I got out of high school and said, “Guess what? You won’t really love being a system administrator but boy howdy do you have a knack for meeting new people and writing process documents. Sit down right here, there’s a monitor with fake blood spattered on it just for you!” Never happened for me. And while that doesn’t seem to be that unreasonable, what is strange is how many people behave like I was born knowing those facts.

I wasn’t.

I wasn’t born knowing much of anything about myself at all. In fact, you can wad up most of the assumptions about myself that I have and they’re about the size of a snotty, used tissue. That’s not because I want it to be that way, it’s because every time I got anywhere near to a steady rhythm of this-is-me-this-is-me there was something that would come out of nowhere like a tire flying into the stands of a NASCAR event and just end me. That is, end that assumption that I had about myself.

I’ll mention him for two reasons: 1. He helped me push-start the Jeep yesterday and 2. He proves my point. Chris is a senior in high school. He drives a ’69 Mustang fastback that he’s in the process of restoring and souping up. It’s got an old 351 Cleveland and drum rears but a nice paint job. He even installed four-point competition belts and hood pins. It looks awesome. Chris has got a white board in his parent’s garage that lists all of his favorite things. Favorite book, movie, car, band…you name it, Chris has put it down. Chris knows what he likes and has gone so far as to document it on a whiteboard, even if it’s only in dry-erase ink.

Every time I’ve gone so far as to attempt to document me, that is, me in a definitive This-is-me-and-if-you-read-it-you-will-understand-me kind of way, it’s never happened. Someone told me about five years ago (and he was serious) that people should come with Owner’s Manuals. Everyone should have their own owner’s manual so that they can hand them to a new person in their life, have them read it and get along much better as a result. He’s not wrong; everyone needs to have their own. There’s too much ambiguity about who you are and what you need to be happy. Throw two strangers together and they’ll either murder each other or get married – there’ s an equal chance they’ll go either way.

So, what’s Tim’s role. What part does he play in the great machine? It goes along something like this: Tim is a man, a husband, a manager, an employee, a brother, a son and a friend. He’s a few other things too but the preceding roles seem to be the ones that most define how all the subset roles are played out. All the roles are based on the role first mentioned: Tim is a man. What is that like?

The Tim-is-Man role is based on a lot of life experience that pretty much involved me putting my foot in it and always during the worst time possible. Out of chance or necessity, I’ve been thrown into a lot of situations where there was a better-than-even chance I wasn’t coming back out. This isn’t the story of Abraham Lincoln and none of the stuff involves crazy tales of derring-do. It’s mostly a lot of messy, uncomfortable and awkward situations. The death of innocence that soldiers come to know on an up-close-and-personal basis. I could have ended up dead a few times over growing up as a kid with all the accidents and illnesses I managed to pick up. I could have ended up dead or in prison during my formative years where there was an equal chance of me becoming a decent man or a pox on society. A lot of either/or situations and by good fortune, good people and God above, I’m still around to tell you about it. That’s not a blithe statement: I do believe that God is part of the reason I’m still breathing and typing here on a Thursday night. I’ve got a lot of evidence to back that up, too but this simply isn’t the vehicle for that.

I can tell of a thousand vignettes that led to me being the person I am. It’d take all day, the next day and probably through the end of the week. Most of them boil down to one simple word: struggle. I’ve had to struggle for a lot of the things I’ve got in my life. Cars / job / wife / life. It’s not been easy. Let me be more clear: it’s never been easy and for that, I maintain an active dislike of people who were born on 3rd base and go through life thinking that they hit a triple (Thank you, Barry Switzer). It’s never been convenient, I’ve mentioned that before. It’s been interesting, exciting and when I’m feeling magnanimous enough to admit it: life has been good. I’m aware of that, you can’t open a newspaper and flip more than two pages without coming to the realization that “Man, Tim – you should just shut the heck up, dude. You got it good compared to some people.” And you’re right, I do. I do have it good and I know that I have it good. I’ve had things go right for me at the right time and my life is great because of it.

I don’t think of myself as either a pessimist or an optimist. I’m a realist. A pragmatist – “a person who takes a practical approach to problems and is concerned primarily with the success or failure of her actions” according to dictionary.com. That old joke about the realist who drinks the water while the optimist and the pessimist argue over whether the glass is half-empty or half-full. A type-A pragmatist with a lot of symptoms of Adult ADD. Fun, huh?

Back to the role thing – think of every stereotypical male role you can think of. Now you know who I’m not. That’s not by choice – I think I’d rather have one of those pre-packaged lives that I see people living because God knows there’s a bunch of stuff I’d rather be doing than hammering at a keyboard for no money, no glory and only a stadium cup of iced tea (regular iced tea, not the Long Island variety) at my side. The kind of role or life where the questions never come up because you’re never aware of them. They exist but you dismiss them as one of those things that only wierdos, fags and sensitive wimps think of. Then you flip on Monster Garage and cheer Jesse James on as he retrofits a cement mixer to make the world’s largest pudding maker. You go to work, laugh at morning DJ’s who alternate between misogyny and bathroom humor and have what I heard someone describe as ego-boosting affairs with the opposite sex.

This level of angst only comes from a lifetime of exclusion. The guy who not only can’t play kickball, he’s first tagged out in dodge ball, last kid picked for sports, to dance, to go to parties, to do pretty much anything defined as a group activity. Spend all your years growing up alternating between “I hate everyone!” and “Why am I always left out?” Your parents alternate between old sayings like “Just be yourself, you’re special!” and “Suck it up, Tim – life isn’t fair!” Conflicting messages, or maybe just difficult ones where you finally realize after twenty years that your parents were no better at it than you were and they had no answer for you because they couldn’t answer it on their own.

It’s very easy when confronted by that kind of situation to sink back into a world built out of indulgence and self-pity. Build a clannish, exclusionary club that very few are invited to join and all activities are designed to support. I have family that does that, I know other people who do it, too. They don’t fit in so they build their own little clubhouse and keep everyone else out. I’d do it myself and build a nice little life where my world fits the assumptions and all of this self-doubt and soliloquy fades into days, months and years where no one challenges me and all problems are solved before they start.

But, I can’t do that. I can’t do it because I’m pragmatic, practical. I want to see things how they really are. I want the reality that I accept to make sense to other people. Like the little alien that punches through John Hurt’s chest in Alien, this inability to just accept the fever-dream explodes in me and I have to get it out. I can’t give up, I can’t roll over and die. I’m not ready to fade away. And so, like a GI pinned down under a machine gun nest, I’m running through the tracers with my little satchel charge, hoping against hope that somehow I’ll manage to sling it over the sandbags and live to see the sun go down. It’s dumb, it’s stupid, and it’s anything but practical.

Back to the roles – how I see the modern man exist and try to superimpose that on my own experience. Didn’t have a lot of close friends, even the friends I had…well, there were just some places I couldn’t go with them. My brother and I had a fiery relationship born out of the fact that we were prisoners together in an 8 x 10 room with no privacy for the first 18 years of my life. Not just no privacy from each other, no privacy from the folks either. Dad never used door knobs, Bill Cosby gets laughs when he says it but living it ain’t so amusing. Just get your pants off, your drawers off to have your dad crash into the room. What does he want? It doesn’t matter – dad wants to see you and it doesn’t matter if you’re wearing a 3-piece suit or your birthday suit; his issue is more important than your privacy. Stuff like that; none of it is designed to help you build up whatever self-esteem you’ve got. You give yourself your self-esteem, you won’t find it anywhere else. When you get into that sassy, rebellious stage of being a teenager, you’ll find you’re not above a slap in the chops once or four times until you get the picture.

I digress – this isn’t a “My parents hit me and I’m mad” thing. Corporal punishment is an effective disciplinary tool; kept me out of the streets when I was a child. I’m telling it all to you to make a specific point: none of it was handed to me. I had to work for it. Self-esteem, respect, call it what you want. I started with the necessities and I’ve gotten pretty good at living with them. Take away my favorite car, it hurts but I’ll survive. Take away my house, I’ll live. Take away my job, money, position – I’m still here. A Chinese proverb says, “In the course of a long life, a wise man will be prepared to abandon his baggage several times.”

Out of that experience, my role has been to be the guy who tries to joke you out of a bad mood. The gregarious fool who makes friends with the bad guy and the good guy simultaneously. I’m also the guy who people tell things to. The personal details that you wouldn’t admit to your priest. I don’t mind; I’ll probably tell you a story where I’ve done worse to make you laugh. The guy who tries to say it’s not so bad while being forever unable to heed his own advice. My life is the unending conflict of ideas. Conflict with the place where I am and the place where I want to go. Conflict between who I am and who I want to be. What I own and what I want to possess. It never ends, it never gets to the point where I can sit in the eye of the hurricane and go, “This is it, baby. Send ‘round the cocktail waitress and mix me a pitcher of Mai Tais.”

There’s some basic life experience I feel I missed growing up and have been spending a lot of time either trying to make up for or understand it. A lot of it has to do with the male posturing that develops during puberty, as I think Orson Scott Card described it. Male posturing, rules for male behavior. I’m forever trying to make up for that class that everyone else took around 7th or 8th grade in “How to be a man” or “How to be a woman” in 10 Easy Steps complete with diagrams and flowcharts on page 17. There’s a lot of unspoken rules and solutions that are applied by most everyone around me at a subconscious level while I’m sitting over here with my finger in my nose going: “Duuh…3?”

Reading what some learned (pronounced “learn-ED”) minds are saying about the male role in modern America, I still find that a lot of it is about the practicality of the male stereotype. How problems men solved generations ago present themselves as the same problems in new packages and how what men learned growing up doesn’t equip them to solve it. Men who are breaking the stereotype and learning to embrace change. Men who can articulate how women project their assumptions and hopes onto men just as much as women complain about me who do. “The Men Who Drink In Bars and Spend Money Recklessly and the Women Who Love Them – Next on Geraldo”. For me, none of this captures the point I’ve been waiting for someone to make: Tim is one of those out-there guys. He’s constantly trying to make up for what he doesn’t know and he’s waiting for someone to come along and explain it to him. He’s got a sinking feeling that this won’t happen. Ergo – he’s doing some thinking on his own and this is the length and breadth of what he’s come up with.

I’m going to break this up into a two-parter. Time for a whiskey and the sack.

- Tim Woolery, 04/29/2005