Listen to your Guru: Don’t Buy that Book

Delving ever deeper into the nether rungs of the hell-text, Eat Pray Love, I come upon the passage in which our hero decides that she needs a guru. And that’s when it hits me: being a guru is a pretty good gig. No need to freeze your robe off on a frosty mountain top. Just set up shop in a New Delhi ashram, and let the wealthy Westerners come to you. Speak in horoscopic platitudes, nod as if you harbor oceans of understanding, and dispense wisdom so broad that it applies to nothing and everything at once. Keep it vague enough and you can’t be wrong.

Your clientele will range from palatable celebrities (George Harrison, say) to obscure weirdos (like, every other divorcee from Marin County, California). Every now and then, some cynical wanker will exploit you for a book. But mostly it’s a good life, there in the tranquility of your surroundings, meditating on your mantras. Your acolytes adore you. And on the odd chance you sense that their worshipfulness is waning, gently raise the prospect of a suicide pact.

I’ve never had a guru. But I used to see a shrink, and she was something like a guru, only with a shorter beard. Getting to her office, through cross-town rush hour traffic, was more difficult than summiting an alpine peak. She carried herself like a spiritual teacher, sitting in her throne-like chair, answering my questions with more questions. When my bank account ran dry, I decided I was cured.

Not everyone’s a quack. But a sucker is born every day, and two to buy a book like Eat Pray Love. It reminds me of those days, in my early 20s, when I bought into all kinds of packaged self-improvement: seminars, books-on-tape, Sanskrit chants before sweaty yoga. I had a girlfriend then, who was too sharp and mature to date a guy like me. One night, I showed up at her pad with my latest purchase: a bottle of dried herbs that some snake oil salesman told me would give me peace of mind and heighten my IQ.
I believed him.
“Well,” said my girlfriend in a non-judgmental tone. “If you never buy another bottle, you’ll know it worked.”

Valentine’s Day Advice for Julia Roberts: Eat, Pray, Dump Your Agent

If things were different, I’d have no axe to grind with Julia Roberts. She’s a movie star and does what movie stars are supposed to do: get your face plastered on 80-foot high billboards and whine about the paparazzi, mix multimillion paydays with occasional low-budget Oscar stabs, compulsively marry and divorce (at least once to a grim Texan singer with a thyroid condition), and otherwise demand silk hand towels and raspberry bon-bons in your hotel suite and berate stage grips whenever the latest hubbie is on the outs. Ok, our fact-checking staff took the week off, so don’t hold me to any of this…but with movie stars (and people in general) it’s always best to assume the worst.

But the real point here, as I already mentioned, is that Julia is probably just swell. Even her breakthrough role, Pretty Woman, considered by many to be the chickiest of chick flicks, is actually something very different from our reviled genre of that-woman-who-could-be-you discovering some eternal truth and/or true love itself by following her heart right to the…er, box office. A story about a prostitute who snags a millionaire is in fact your good ol’ fashioned fairy tale, y’know, like stuff that can never happen. And hey, we are not here to bash Cinderella (though she can get pretty annoying too…).

Of course both before and after Juliarella schtupped her Prince Charming, she has accumulated a long list of puke-jerker roles in bona fide chick flicks: from Mystic Pizza to My Best Friend’s Wedding to Mona Lisa Smile. Fortunately for the sake of humankind, we have assigned ourselves the formidable task of sabotaging the next, and maybe biggest and baddest of them all: Eat Pray Love.

But first, we have this past weekend’s Valentine’ Day movie, ingeniously titled…uh…Valentine’s Day. Here Julia pulls off her version of late-career Marlon Brando, appearing on screen for upwards of 10 minutes, no doubt for the cool rate of two million smackaahs a minute.  Don’t ask me what role she plays or what this asinine production is about. Save it to say that it is a waste of everything: time, money, Julia’s bon-bons, the ink that reviewers have used to bash it. If you happened to have seen it, there are two possible explanations for why you’re reading this right now…A. your web browser is busted B. you have finally stumbled out of the theater after such a travesty and found us the way Moses discovered the burning friggin’ bush.

There are, in any case, plenty of you out there, either to save or pity. The appropriately initialed VD shot to the top of the box office chart, cashing in 52 million bucks in its first weekend. Our little rant and all the big bad reviews obviously mean nothing in the face of well-executed marketing campaign — and right now, some icy Hollywood executive in an SUV hybrid is on his cell phone taking credit for green-lighting Julialicious’ 20 million role. The commentary in the trade press, and beyond, will be self-congratulatory and celebratory and someone will even declare that just such a vacuous box-office hit is the clearest sign to date that the worldwide economic crisis is over.

Still, we are focused on the long view. And in particular, in this moment, on Julia’s career. The filming for Eat Pray Love is in the can, the final editing is getting wrapped, and the glaze-eyed sharks of the publicity department are set to take over. It would all seem destined for another Victory for America’s favorite actress. Only this time, we are here too. And right now, to mark Valentine’s Day, the holiday and the film, I would like to address myself directly to Julia…

Don’t take this the wrong way. Like your fabulous new girlfriend Elizabeth Gilbert, you are simply collateral damage in the war we must wage. The loathing tone, the four-letter words, the general disgust with that smile of yours is actually nothing personal. Indeed, this is for your own good. We care more about you than that money-grubbing agent of yours! It’s been too long since the whole Erin Brokinwhich thing. Where is that mix of roles? When are you gonna tank up to 195 lbs for that Angela Merkel biopic? You’ve been too focused on the box office, on those quintessentially Julia roles, and if you don’t snag another Oscar nomination soon you’ll go down in history as just another Sandra Bullock. But if before August, we can manage to sabotage this next monstrosity, you will be liberated, and maybe Meryl Streep will even stop bad-mouthing you behind your back. But it’s understandable if you still don’t see the benefits of our protests…and as always, feel free to take it out on that idiot stage grip.

-JEFF

Eat Pray Love begets Drink Curse Hate: The Making of a Blockbuster

Like counter-terrorism experts, we hack writers are always trying to learn from the last big event. When a book about a racehorse became a Hollywood blockbuster, all of us went looking for the next Seabiscuit. When Dan Brown struck it rich with The Duh Vinci Code, the Internet collapsed under the collective weight of our frenzied search for new medieval cults.

And now comes Eat Pray Love. With Elizabeth Gilbert’s touch-feely atrocity hurtling toward the big screen like a Scud, the most resentful among us are taking cover, all the while thinking: Why not me?

Two weeks after launching this blog — the most ambitiously bottom-feeding attempt to cash in on male bitterness — here is an inside look at the creative process that led to the one and only response to what is sure to be the summer’s most revolting film.

Crap Wipe Wash Potty training turns traumatic for an Upper West Side toddler when his fumbling efforts at post-egestive hygiene earn him a withering reprimand from the hired help. Distraught, he flees the family’s lavish flat, stumbling past the doorman and onto the subway for a wild ride to the Bronx, where he winds up in a tenement and comes to the edifying discovery that not all homes have live-in nannies.

Binge Burp Purge A henpecked middle-aged husband, under constant assault for his dietary habits, develops a debilitating case of manorexia, a “silent killer” of countless spineless men with overbearing wives and low self-esteem. A humiliating scene involving nachos at a sportsbar ultimately sends our hero to a recovery clinic, where a fiery love affair with an obese custodian gives him the inner-strength to file for divorce, move to a new apartment and balloon happily to 700 pounds.

Golf Fuck Golf The Tiger Woods Story

Fellate Felch Floss A stomach-turning documentary about oral sex, crude erotic manuevers and their deleterious effect on dental health.

Drink Screw Curse Despair Loathe Hate The inspiring story of three underachievers who channel their resentments and petty jealousies into an impassioned blog, which spawns a book deal, which begets a movie, which inspires similar small-minded animosities among legions of other underachievers, who launch their own blogs and sign their own book deals, further accelerating pop culture’s ever-quickening downward spiral.

–JOSH

Be My Valentine. Or Else.

To buy or not to buy, that is the question. Of course, it isn’t really a question at all. As any bloke who treasures his wedding tackle will know, this weekend of all weekends, NOT buying is a ticket to a night in the spare room rubbing antiseptic gel into ones sore goolies.

Yes, it’s Valentine’s Day again, the next Hallmark Card-sponsored event that sends us trooping off, sheep-like to the florists and chocolate emporiums, to buy cards adorned with teddy bears, bottles of pink champagne with helium balloons attached, and tip the maitre d to drag the violinist over to your table for a John Denver melody. The Horror, the horror.

Some of us hold out, citing the conspiracy by the greeting card companies to extract a little bit of pre-Easter cash from our hard-pressed wallets. We look into their eyes, and lower our voice: “If I want to tell you I love you, I don’t need to wait til February the 14th…”

“But you never bloody do!”

Nevertheless, Valentine’s Day for me remains a day of resentment and annoyance as women buy-in wholesale to this most blatant of all marketing cons (bettered only by Guinness’s monopolisation of St Patrick’s Day) The subject arose at a lunch with my parents at the weekend . Mum announced that she had never EVER received a Valentine’s card from dad (he’s my hero: they met in 1946 and married in 1953), then went on to recite word-for-word the poem inside the card that HE’D received from someone called Betty Todd while mum and dad were dating. WORD-FOR-WORD!! Nothing like a woman with a grudge.

Many men around these fair isles who usually take the ‘I’m not buying nothing’ approach will, I suspect have had their stubbornness tempered this year by the behaviour of a Mr. John Terry.  Mr. Terry is the captain of the England Football team and the UK press has been having a field day with the revelation that he’s gotten his mistress pregnant and paid for an abortion. OK, no big deal, you might say. What else should a juiced-up athlete be doing with his spare time? A choir boy next to Tiger Woods, who plays golf after all. But there’s more. The ‘lady’ in question happened to be dating another famous footballer at the time, who happened to be a friend and former teammate of Terry’s at Chelsea. And to cap it all, the crowning turd in the water tank, the pair of them were most likely due to fly out with the England team to this summer’s World Cup in South Africa.

Terry has, after a media witch-hunt, been stripped of the captaincy, but his former pal will probably pay for being cuckolded by being dropped from the team altogether (he’s not as good a player as Terry, you see). Meanwhile the subject of both their affections is selling her story to any tabloid newspaper that thinks its worth the cash to stump-up for a tawdry sleazy story. (All of them).

Now I don’t want to get into a debate about who-did-what-to-whom-and-where-and-how-hard? It seems to me it takes two to Rumba (or in this case three) and as much as shagging your mate’s missus is deplorable, the woman who is being pitied in the press and day-time TV as the wronged woman in all this, seems to me to be to be guilty of more than one misdemeanor herself.

But that, I’m afraid is a lost argument. For all the reasons you have and will read elsewhere on these pages, she will be seen by women, and therefore advertisers, and therefore newspaper and TV companies, as the victim. As more and more lurid details of the affair emerge, she’ll doubtless get a newspaper column, and maybe a book deal, then the film (starring Jennifer Aniston or  S-J Parker, who will bring their own well-documented woes to the part). As sure as night follows day, and Tiger follows Waitress, she will come out of it as Mrs. Squeaky Clean, while Mr. Terry will be lambasted throughout the land as a complete and utter cad (unless he scores the winning goal in the Final, of course ).

So forget arguing about it, mates. The pressure is on. Get your credit card out. Messrs Woods and Terry have given them all the ammo they need: We are all dirty, lying bastards, shagging ourselves senseless with the girl at work. But Sunday morning, after you cough up that dozen roses, just don’t go over the top. She’ll know you’re up to something.

-MIKE

Sarah Palin is Chick Lit Too

It’s this blog of course, but these days everything and everyone –particularly if they’re famous and female – makes me think of our favorite Lady Author and the insidious plague she propagates with her prose. (Oooh, that was nice…) Though I’ve been lounging around Europe for too long, the internet and my yankee DNA make it easy enough to identify who happens to be the most famous American female of the moment. It’s not Lady Gaggle or Miley Circus. No, it’s still her: the AlaskanThatGirl-cum-SoccerMom-slash-FoxNewsStar, who you may know better as a Once-Failed-Vice-Presidential-Candidate-Soon-to-be-Failed-Presidential-Candidate. Sarah Fuckin’ Palin. I just skimmed a story that had Ms. Palin dissing Obama with this line: “”How’s that Hopey Changey stuff workin’ out for you?” What the hell is that…!?

I am generally forgiving of my country and those Americans who don’t necessarily think and act like me — maybe more so because I live abroad. I find myself able to accept that a generous portion of my fellow citizens order Diet Coke with their sloppy Big Mac and super-sized fries… or love their shotguns more than their neighbors…or even might think my nappy hair is just there to cover my hidden Jew horns. But I can NOT accept that this kind of hokey shit goes over. Ultimately, I don’t think it does, or will (see above: Palin will be the gift that keeps giving for President Hope). But even if it won’t win out at the polls, this empty blather is at the center of the eternal sapping of what folks over here in Europe call Culture. But I don’t mean it here in the Eurosense. I have no patience for pretense and old world airs and those who hold that learnedness is life’s ultimate prize. Culture to me is simply the collective human expression of a particular time and place. (Oooh, another nice one!) Anyway, ours right now is pretty darn…uh, suckey.

So if you’ll indulge me, this is where I bring it back to Lizzy G. Though she boasted that she was happy that her latest bestseller knocked Palin’s book from the No. 1 spot, the point is that they are together at the top of the list. Playing to a captured audience. Delivering exactly what they thought they were getting, cloaking it in manufactured surprise. All just waiting for the call from Oprah. This is culture in the multiplyingmedia age. One tells us to Eat Pray Love. The other scripts the words Hopey and Changey to launch a bid for the White House. And, as Mr. Dylan once said…the newspapers all went along for the ride. I love Obama, and may be the last guy not taking cheap shots while he tries to save the goddamn human race from itself. But maybe if Hillary Clinton had won, she might have finally put a dagger through the heart of this decrepit chick lit culture.

-JEFF

“Marry Him…” A Different Kind of Chick Lit. Still Sucks

All right folks, Man and Woman, the glorious Publishing Biz has launched its latest operation to cash in on the lobotomized state of our so-called civilization, and bring down our respective opinions of each other. Even lower. First, it is worth offering — for this post, and Drink Curse Hate in general – a quick clarification about our thoroughness and professional good-standing. We absolutely do NOT have to read or watch any of this crap in order to write about it. In fact, the farther we stay from the actual pages and frames of Chick lit/Chick flicks, the clearer our thinking will be, the better we can stay on message….and the more time we can devote to Sartre and Flynt. We’ve allowed for one principal exception: Josh, our most bitter, most literary mouseketeer, has been assigned the initial task of actually reading Eat Pray Love (talk about falling on the hand grenade), but only in order to mine it for material to help us tear it to pieces, and fill up all the damn blank space of this blog.

But back to the latest bestseller-to-be — Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough – which will not get such royal treatment from us. The red carpet, however, is coming out from the dog-and-pony trainers from coast to coast. Here, here, here. I have glanced over a bit of this coverage, but like with our principal target, Eat Pray Fart Love, the title tells us all we need to know. This one is particularly insidious for a different reason. At first glance, it might seem to share the Drink Curse Hate leitmotif (Mike: definition here). It is saying: Hey ladies: No don’t go run off to Italy, India, Indonesia…stay right there in bloody Ickleton or Muncie, Indiana, for life is not a fairy tale, and fair-to-middling is the best you can expect. Agreed. We are in fact here to demonstrate just exactly how disappointing the human male can be. But Ms. Gottlieb’s book still sucks for the same reason as the female fantasy romps.  It’s stupid. It insults the intelligence of the women it cons into reading it. You even get the feeling that the author herself – an NPR contributor!? — would rather be spending her time elsewhere if not for the massive advance her agent was able to land.

This so-called Advice, Self-improvement genre is as much pure marketing as that scrap of coupon left in the shopping cart you just grabbed. For women, whether liberation fantasy or step-by-step cynical, it always seems to revolve around these invented well-being measurements that are somehow connected to a Cosmopolitan magazine list of 10 things… For men, instead it’s the Joel Osteen saccharine mix of spiritual “priority setting,” which is just a different way of saying: how to get as rich as you can without becoming a hateful human being. (We’re gonna push the bounds on that one) But it’s all the same crap: repackaged intuition, warmed over sloganeering, shortcuts to fulfillment, the selling of a faith that doesn’t require the proverbial leap.

If you’re gonna write a whole goddamn book, at least begin with the goal of telling us something we don’t already know. Or just tell a good story. Of course Eat Pray Puke claims to do those things too. And for that, it remains the worst of the lot.

-JEFF

Health Check Time and a Fragrant Bloke in Denial

A woman in the office recently emailed me to ask if she could take a morning off work to attend a company-sponsored private health check.

“I’m not sure how long it’ll take,”she added “have you been on one, Mike?”

“Have a guess.  I’m a bloke, of course I haven’t been on one! “

I live in denial, that’s what being a bloke is all about. There are a few I know who torture themselves by attending a once-a-year medical, then suffering huge bouts of depression for weeks afterwards. Why would you? I invite you all to come see me and give me your hundred quid. Better still, set up a direct debit into my account and read the following once a year:

You drink too much. Give up the fatty foods. Take more exercise. Stop smoking. Porridge is a slow-burner and fish is a good source of Vitamin X, Preparation H, or something like that.  If you carry on like this you’ll be dead by the time you’re 40/50/60* (delete if you have the strength), and FOR GOD’S SAKE STOP PLAYING WITH YOURSELF!!!

As a great man one said “My body and I divorced years ago but we’re still forced to live together.”I couldn’t agree more. My body has long been a source of annoying pain, strange creaks and noises where once it was in tune with my every need.  Now it resists my every move, creaks at my every bend, aches at my every step, wheezes at my every breath, sweats at my every thought, farts at my every pint.

Now I hear you say “well do something about it, then.!” OK, but at what cost? Have you seen your colleagues coming into the office after their lunchtime jog? They look terrible!! If I looked like that after being in a pub, I’d never go in one again. And they sweat. I mean THEY SMELL BAD. There’s a guy who sits next to me (cyclist) who has apparent disregard for the others in the office. I’m told women find male sweat alluring. Well this bloke must be the most alluring man in London . He allures like a skunk. No, I’ll stick to being ‘big-boned’ and fragrant, as opposed to skinny and rancid.

According to my girlfriend’s  Wii Fit which I bought her for Christmas, I am overweight. Cost me a hundred quid for that one too.  But it doesn’t matter, does it? As any woman will tell you, they don’t like a man for his body, it’s his MIND that attracts them. They want someone who makes them laugh, gives them a cuddle, buys them flowers and puts the loo seat down. They’re not interested in money, six-packs or big willies. The only thing that matters to them is that you’re caring and understanding, and you don’t piss the bed after a night on the booze with the boys. What the hell DON’T they want????

-MIKE

Eat, Pray, Decline China Massage. One Man’s Quest to Digest Pork Lung Without Cheating on his Wife

When Elizabeth Gilbert set off on her year of eating, praying, loving, it seems that she avoided Shenzhen, China, the commercial boomtown an hour north of Hong Kong where I sit tonight. Not a lot of loving or praying since I got here. Just a lot of eating, including the pork lung with cellophane noodles I had at lunch. After the meal, I also opted out of my chance at loving—my host, an earnest young Chinese attorney, had offered to escort me to a nearby “massage” parlor—happy endings being hard to come by when your gut is filled with half digested pig parts. “You mean, you don’t like woman?” my host inquired.

Believe me, I like woman. The truth, however, is that paying for the “pleasure” of a half-hearted tug job has never been my idea of ecstasy. Maybe I’m too cheap. Or maybe I’m too deep. Reducing the exchange to a financial transaction never struck as the path to satisfaction. If all that I was after was the climactic moment, I could, as it were, handle things myself. What drives a man to cheat is not the final payoff. It’s the flirtatious build up, the chance to fantasize, the titillating sense of expectation. We don’t need to hit a home run; we just want to make believe that we’re still in the game. What I’m trying to say is, we men have substance.

“You are very American,” my host declared, after suffering through an explanation of my world view. “Chinese people are more practical.” Shenzhen, he said, was a prime destination for men from Hong Kong, who shuttle here on weekends for mistress-cavorting or a quick massage before shuttling back to Hong Kong, satisfied, renewed. “Doesn’t it feel just a little bit empty?” I asked him. “And what about guilt? Don’t you ever feel guilty?” He looked at me askance, as if I’d just been beamed in from another planet. Then he laughed so hard I thought a cellophane noodle would shoot out his nose.

-JOSH

Liz Hurley and Liz Gilbert: King Cnut takes on the Queens of Fluff

One is an actress, the other an author, but it is Elizabeth Hurley who invented Elizabeth Gilbert. Let me explain.

When the alleged quality newspaper I was working for put Ms Hurley on the front page in 1994 wearing that dress, my heart sank. I can’t remember what else newsworthy was going on in the world that day, but I do remember being pretty sure that ‘Woman Wears Dress Shock!’ wasn’t page 1 news.  You remember the one- all safety pins and cleavage. It was intended to boost the ‘profile’ of this young actress (sorry, actor)  and it worked. But to me it was the thin end of the wedge. My world would never  be the same again. Yes, she was fit and yes she was gorgeous, but was this really worthy of the front page of a proper newspaper?  The decision was made by white, middle-aged men, the sort who tend to get a bit excited by milky-white cleavage.

The price for their thrills (and shortcut to newsstand sales) was opening sluice gates for torrents of fluff and puff invading the front pages of our journals. Forever, perhaps. Soon we’d be treated to The Spice Girls on page 1, but have to flip to page 27 to find out which country we’d invaded that day. Some days on broadsheet covers we would read the memoirs or love letters of some actress or female writer, chronicling her life between the sheets and inside the Tiffany stores of the world. But wanna know who won the election in Pakistan – there’s a nib on page 57.

Those original smut-peddlers may have thought they were working in the best interests of men, providing a free and legitimate ogle at  a starlet’s chest. What actually happened was the feature writers, woman’s writers, fashion editors and the like saw a golden opportunity to push all the bright and shite up front, relegating  anything of any real worth or substance to deep inside the paper (to the ugly pages, as they are known).  If you are female, pretty (blonde is a bonus) then you could floss your teeth and stand a chance of page 1. If you ‘re planning on dying in the near future, make sure you’re a brunette with big tits and you’ll get far more coverage than the bloke who discovered a cure for cancer.

The rest of the media machine has followed. On Britain TV soaps, fluffy quizzes, panel games and reality tv rule the ratings, in a county where drama, documentary and the voice of the BBC news was once king (or Queen). Dance very strictly, dance on ice, dance on the street dance ANYWHERE and they’ll make a show out of you- as long as there’s some saccharined bint in orange chiffon clinging on your arm.

Now what does all this smut have to do with a proper, educated lady like Ms. Gilbert? She’s the alibi. She’s meant to be the intelligent – and even enlightened – aisle in this dumbing-down supermarket. Man and woman cannot live on gossip alone. Every once in a while we must seek some higher place, we must be bloody transformed. (Short-lived as it always is…) That is the intention of this supposed artistic genre at which Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love now stands at the epicenter. But Chick Lit’s take-hold-of-your-destiny mantra is a marketing ploy just like the other Liz’s safety-pin dress. Worse, in its  vapid and not-so-subtle response to the T&A images of the rest of popular culture actually just leave men and women farther apart than ever, and give us wretched blokes a damn good excuse to keep looking at the latest shot of proper English cleavage . So I stand here, King Cnut-like, in the hope that the tide will turn. And I do feel a proper cnut.

-MIKE

What Makes a Modern Man? Back Problems

I threw my back out the other day, for the second time in three goddamn weeks. Not good. But it was feeling a bit less tender yesterday, and with two precious weekend hours free, I decided to go across the river to a sort of smaller, Parisian version of Home Depot. Ah, the Expat life…

I set out by Metro, ready to demonstrate I had both the estrogen and balls to be an all-around kick ass modern dude. Marching with conviction into the bustling store, I headed straight to the picture frames section. We had splurged on a pair of artsy photos in December, both of which were not standard measure, which meant I would cost me some extra dough. But at least this would give me the chance to pick out something fabulous! In five minutes, I had chosen two different custom designs, a chrome-like frame for the black and white shot from Sicily, and a kind of faded wood with a hint of green for the color photo of a cow (trust me, it’s a cool fucking cow) in a foggy meadow. The guy behind the counter seemed impressed with my decisive eye and original taste, but the whole time I had the suspicion that this stubble-faced fellow with a tape measure on his belt thought I was a bit of a wuss. “You can come back Feb 11 to pick it up,” he told me, though I know he was thinking: The last man who picked out a frame like that was wearing a mauve tutu and eyeliner…

The real coup anyway was still to come. In the office furniture section. I had to buy a computer table for the bedroom, after la signora had bought a desk last year that was about 10 inches too high (Is there an architect in the house??), which may very well have contributed to my back problems. But this isn’t the place to pick a fight. Not yet, at least. It would take just five minutes to spot the perfect little table — duly described to and approved by la signora via cell phone — and snagged for a nice fat 10 percent discount because only the one on display was left in stock.

With the bill paid, the moment had arrived to dig down, way way deep deep down, to rustle up the tiny relics of my inner, uh, man. I had to get the goddamn table home, and my Advil was wearing off. Taking a taxi was not an option, since it would suck out all the joy and every French nickel of my 10 percent discount. So I headed for the bus. The table wasn’t particularly heavy, and definitely didn’t look heavy. But because of my bad back, I had to stop every 20 yards on the busy sidewalk to rest. Others might have been humiliated, but I knew in my heart that I was single-handedly schlepping an entire computer table across town on the strength of a sesame-seed-breadstick-for-a-backbone of a body, all for the good of my beloved family. By the yardstick of my life, this was bona fide heroism. Not only was I demonstrating an above-average resistance to physical pain, but I had picked out two gorgeous frames. I was the damn poster boy for the 21^st century grownup male.

But as usual, my gender bending exploits would pale next to the superwoman that is my signora. I arrived home to see her pinning down the sugar-overloaded kids, preparing an aperitif for our visiting friends from Rome, and had just fixed gotten the broken radiator in the living room running again. Oh, and did I mention, she’s the main breadwinner in the household? My little table was looking smaller and smaller.

Of course in some other century I would have walked through the front door with a friggin bear carcass, not some bonsaipiece of multi-use furniture; and my back would be too damn straight and strong to “throw it out.” The 14^th century me would ask nothing in return: no kudos, no kisses, no brownie points. Ok, maybe sex whenever and wherever I wanted. (and golf on Wednesday afternoons).

I’m not saying the old model for the masculine life is better. I wouldn’t want my wife stuck in the kitchen. And I wouldn’t want my relationship with my kids to be limited to the passing bear-hunting aphorisms about life.  I just know that I spend an inordinate chunk of my mental energy trying to figure out just exactly what my role in the family, and the world, is supposed to be. But modernity has also given me this blog to wail off on all of that which twists me up, banged away on a lightweight table of a proper height with what will certainly be a pair of just lovely framed photographs hanging nearby. My back, though, is still killing me.

-JEFF