Why We Suck
Page 20
Nowadays, wife wants a cup of tea? Do I grunt and grumble? Nope. I put on my reading glasses and I shuffle down to the kitchen, put on the hot water, open The Tea Drawer and start perusing the titles:
Smooth Move, hon?
Women’s Liberty? No? Okay.
Green Ginger it is.
She’s got a selection of teas the guys who signed the Declaration of Independence wouldn’t have TIME to throw into Boston Harbor:
Azo Passion Tea
Every Day Detox Tea
Yoga Bedtime
Mulling Spice
Yoga Thai Delight
Cinnamon Ease
Yoga Rejuvenatta
Now—they all have their apparent purposes, even though how and when she may need them remains a mystery to me. Does she down a cup of Azo Passion in order to get in the mood? When she needs to loll about on the front porch and ponder the world’s problems, does she savor some thoughtful sips of Mulling Spice? Do three and a half ounces of Women’s Liberty really set her free? I dunno. But the last couple of boxes I dug out of that drawer are enough to bring any man pause:
Yoga Black Chai and Licorice Root.
This is when teatime can turn into a potential witch’s brew—are these the two bags she drops into a boiling mug before telling me to go fuck myself? Is she holding them in reserve in case she one day decides to put me out of her misery? I dunno and I ain’t asking.
I just make her the cup of Green Ginger and wonder what kinda teas they make for men.
Oh yeah. I remember:
Lipton.
End of list.
CHAPTER 16
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON SEMEN
I think we’ve done a good job in the last couple chapters with delineating some of the differences between men and women—now it’s time for this good doctor to put the final nails into what has become a politically correct coffin in this country:
We don’t talk as much as you do.
We just don’t.
Keep in mind this is coming from a man who is not only a doctor but—as you must know by now if you’ve been reading along—a very verbal guy.
I obviously do not have a problem expressing myself.
But you can take all the halfhearted and quarter-assed medical studies done around the world that say men speak just as many words a day as women do and put them in a massive blender and make a giant bullshit shake—I’m here to tell you they are not true.
Go to the gym and watch and listen—guys have headphones on as they run and squat and grimace and grunt—staring up at the TV in between sets.
The women? Paired off on adjacent treadmills or elliptical trainers—yak yakkety yick yak yic, yic yickety, yawbeddy jawbeddy—jic jak yick. Yicketty yacketty blah blah blah.
I don’t trust the tests that say women don’t talk more than men because I know for a fact these tests are being paid for and urged on if not administered by women who are desperate to find a way to prove one more cliché about them to somehow not be true.
Do I have medical research to back up my claim?
You bet your ovaries I do—fifty years of life on this gabbing glob of rock and gas, all of them surrounded by sisters and Irish aunts and female cousins PLUS twenty-five of those years living in the same domicile with my wife.
She talks on the phone to her sister while she’s making dinner and I sit there starving and steaming.
She talks on the phone with her mom while she’s making dinner while I still sit there starving and steaming.
She steams vegetables while talking on the phone ABOUT her mother WITH her sister while I try to decide whose temperature is getting higher—mine or the broccoli’s.
She talks to her BFF on the phone WHILE she’s e-mailing her OTHER best BFF about a THIRD former BFF who’s just now calling on the other line.
We don’t.
We don’t talk when we’re hungry—except to say “I’m hungry—let’s eat.”
We don’t talk on the phone when we’re hungry unless we are ordering food to be delivered from the place where they make the food right to where we are sitting waiting for some food—still one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of eating as far as men are concerned.
Once we have the food—no talking—just chewing.
We don’t even talk while we’re working.
Ever watch a bunch of guys shovel snow? If there’s five of them—they say hello and shoot the shit quickly about the game on TV last night or this hot new chick one of them is dating and/or holy fuck did it snow like a motherfucker then they start pointing and dividing up sections of the area that need to be shoveled and then?
They shovel.
For three straight hours.
And the only talking they do is to redirect each other to parts of the area that need to be shoveled again or piles of snow that need to be moved.
That’s it.
When they are done they talk briefly about the best shovels in the history of shovels and how to invent an even better shovel and then they get in their trucks and drive away.
All you hear when you walk by a construction site is the sound of machines bamming and whamming and shouts of “Get the fuck out of the way, Tommy!” and “Toss me that hammer, Sal!”
If women did all the shoveling or women were put in charge of actually physically building our buildings we would be left with mounds and mounds of snow-covered streets and sidewalks and a cityscape chock full of lumber, cement bags and steel but a skyline somehow free of sky-scrapers. Plenty of recipes would be exchanged and reputations damaged, though.
My studies show that women—on average—use 15,678 words a day.
Men—according to my tests—use about 3,700.
And 2,000 of those are “Uh-huh, honey,” “What did she say then?” and
“Mm-hmm.”
“Yup” and “whatever you say, sweetheart” were also very popular.
Don’t bother digging out all the new studies that say men and women speak exactly the same number of words. I’ve read them all and they are—in one of my daily allotment of roughly 4,000—crap.
As is the BFF idea. And The Frenemy—the female friend who is actually an enemy but still—somehow, incredibly—kept close at hand by your wife or chick.
How many countless times have you heard your girl come home and say “You’re not gonna believe what that bitch Suzie said to me today while we were having a nice, chatty lunch at such and such a place” or hang up the phone after a seventy-eight-minute conversation with her “friend” Emily and say “God how I hate her”?
Here’s what a guy says to another guy who he KNOWS just insulted him or just even LOOKED at him the wrong way:
What the fuck is your problem, dickwad?
And then the relationship is over.
You know that friend of your wife’s who just talks endlessly and not only never shuts up but seems to think every single one of the other women is fascinated by what she has to say when in fact they all wish that somehow she would just stop and take a breath so that they could get a word in edgewise?
Here’s what One Angry Guy says to The Big Loudmouthed Guy who All The Other Guys think is talking too much:
Hey—loudmouth. Shut the fuck up and let someone else fuckin’ talk.
That’s it.
We don’t have BMFs.
And while we are on the subject—let’s get something else completely set straight—guys don’t want their girlfriends or wives to be their best friends. Our best friends are other guys. Guys we hang out with. Guys we play sports and sweat with. Guys we fart openly with and compare coughed-up phlegm with or go to hockey games with or play golf with or watch a heavyweight championship on TV with. Our best friends have beards and balls and hair on their backs and we can watch a sixty-seven-yard touchdown pass from Peyton Manning to Marvin Harrison and just grunt at each other in firm admiration and approval because we know how almost impossible a task that is to pull off. I don’t wanna have sex with my best friend
or give him a hot-oil massage or kiss him on the back of the neck or sneak up from behind him and quietly cup his right breast in my hand while breathing a low and steamy whisper into his other ear.
Here’s a headline—we eat food with our hands when chicks ain’t around. And if we do use cutlery, we grab one of those huge serving utensils—a great big spoon or a fork with four massive prongs—so we can shovel whatever the hell it is we’re eating into our gaping pieholes with even more speed. Getting to the pitchfork first is key ’cause then you can stab at the hands of the other guys when they try to grab some of what yer eating out of the bowl or dish it sits in.
When chicks ain’t around we scratch our asses and tweak our balls and reconfigure our cocks in our pants and spit and moan and stare each other down and call each other pussies and faggot and threaten to kick a guy’s ass and elbow him in the face for a rebound and spit and snort and grunt and cackle and high-five and fart and then cackle about the size of the fart and then high-five BECAUSE of the fart and then piss and moan and snot snotrockets. We piss in sinks and sandtraps and on trees and in sandbuckets and into old coffee cans and almost anywhere we can find when the bathroom is taken or there isn’t one around and we jerk off a lot and it has nothing to do with whether or not we are in or out of a happy relationship it’s just at the very least a release of testosterone and/or a form of target practice because the more we do it the longer we can last and making it last longer is a point of pride when you are trying to make the woman in your life happy in bed. We couldn’t care less about Sex and the City and we’d really rather stare at a six-color double-page Road & Track shot of the engine inside a new Ferrari Testarossa than we would at actresses we don’t know in red carpet dresses from People magazine or even one of the same actresses tastefully naked but airbrushed into ambiguity in Playboy or Penthouse. We like to bang shit with hammers but if we hadn’t invented hammers we would be just as happy to bang shit with big rocks—we like to drive fast and throw sticks and chuck small rocks and peg acorns or apples or almost anything we can get our hands on.
And we barely talk during any of this. Except to yell “Nice goal, Schiller!” or “Pass the goddam puck, Lombardi!” or “Think I can hit that pigeon with this bottle top?”
As a matter of fact, Think I Can Hit That Tree? is a game even grown men can play for hours on end. All you need is a tree, two men, and some loose stones. One guy says something to the effect of “Think I can hit that tree from here?” and the game is on: two adult males will throw flat stones, round stones, rectangular stones—thin, fat, chubby, chunky, we don’t even care—at said tree until they either run out of stones or they see a squirrel. Then they start playing Think I Can Hit That Squirrel? Same rocks, same rules—moving target.
Pretty goddam simple.
We don’t do Extreme Makeovers. You wanna know what an extreme makeover for a straight man is? He comes home, takes his suit off and puts on his torn and frayed Red Sox T-shirt from 2003 and complements it with a pair of boxers he bought during the first Clinton administration. He turns on ESPN and thinks about whether or not he should shave. Decides to wait a couple of days.
That’s it.
We don’t sit around talking about you.
We don’t sit around talking about food.
We don’t break out acoustic guitars and sing “Viva Viagra” in four-part harmony.
Here’s what I have to say about change—we don’t do it. We are as God made us. What you see is what you get. You CAN judge a book by its cover—it’s called “Big, Hungry, Horny, Simple Guys.”
You know that best-selling tome called Eat, Pray, Love? It’s a memoir written by a thirty-something American chick who gets divorced and travels in well-fed splendor to three different countries to heal her broken heart and oh so damaged self-esteem and in the process find her true inner is-ness and being.
The guy version of that book would be called Eat, Fuck, Sleep. And it could be written by any red-blooded American male. In it he would eat, fuck and sleep. And in between those he would work his ass off and also watch documentaries on The History Channel about other men in three different countries and what kind of tools they use and wars they wage and tanks they drive and blah blah history blah until the Red Sox feed from the West Coast away game they’re playing against the Angels kicked in around ten p.m. or so.
Let’s make this all as scientific as we can—I’ve included in my study ink and paper scans of the male and female brains. Take a look:
EXHIBIT A.
The Male Brain
EXHIBIT B.
The Female Brain
In the homosexual male brain, you can replace “Great Sandwiches I Have Eaten” with “Musicals to Die For,” exchange “Dicks” for “Tits” and take out “Starting Lineup of the 1967 Boston Red Sox” in favor of “Judy Garland and Her Secretly Gay Husbands.”
Also—the Red Sox 1967 lineup section may be interchanged with the starting nine of whichever baseball team may have made the biggest impact on your boyfriend or husband’s life during childhood.
These simple diagrams explain many things. For instance—when you sidle up softly and nestle down next to your man and ask that always-upsetting-for-guys question—“honey, what are you thinking about?”—the reason he panics is very very easy to discern. Almost anytime you ask it—except during dinner, sex or sudden death overtime of a Big Important Game—this is what a guy is always thinking—ALWAYS:
SEX SEX TITS FOOTBALL TITS ASS YOUR ASS YOUR TITS HOCKEY BASEBALL PASTRAMI SEX BASEBALL SEX ROAST BEEF NEW SOCKS BLOW JOB MICKEY MANTLE BRETT FAVRE TITS ASS BLOW JOB I WONDER HOW FAR I COULD THROW A FOOTBALL RIGHT NOW NO WARM UP JUST HAUL OFF AND SLING THE GODDAM THING SEX PROBABLY LIKE 40 YARDS CINDY CRAWFORD’S ASS KATE MOSS WITH A RUNNING START I COULD PROBABLY THROW IT LIKE 55 YARDS PIZZA PIZZA WITH A COLD BEER I’M WHAT? MAYBE FIFTEEN FEET AWAY FROM THE WASTEBASKET, BET I COULD TOSS THIS DIET COKE CAN IN FROM HERE WITHOUT HITTING THE RIM JENNIFER ANISTON JENNIFER ANISTON CHEESEBURGER I HAVEN’T SWUNG A BASEBALL BAT IN A LONG FUCKING TIME JENNIFER ANISTON’S ASS JENNIFER ANISTON’S TITS JENNIFER GARNER’S SHOULDERS ARE TOO BIG TITS MY GIRLFRIEND’S TITS MY GIRLFRIEND’S ASS BLOW JOB SEX QUARTER POUNDER WITH CHEESE.
That’s why flop sweat sets in when you ask what’s on our mind because we KNOW that almost any of these thoughts do not fit the mood you might be in or even make any practical sense. But they’re true.
Our emotional makeup is made up of sports and sports memories. We don’t cry—unless our favorite player is forced to retire or we’re watching a movie ABOUT a sport or a favorite player who retires or any movie connected to baseball—which almost always reminds us of our dads. You may wonder why your man won’t shed a tear while you collapse on his shoulder during Leonardo DiPussio’s death by freezing ocean in Titanic—but stick a Field of Dreams DVD in the entertainment center and fast forward to the scene where Kevin Costner plays catch with his dad? That’s a different story. Ever hear of Brian’s Song? Google it. Buy a copy. Slap it in the DVD player. Watch your other half melt into a puddle when James Caan does his deathbed speech to Billy Dee Williams. Guys know what I’m talking about.
Men communicate on a separate plane—almost the way dogs can hear—unless you are one of the species you cannot comprehend. Next time your guy is talking to another guy while they watch a game, listen closely. What they say has a double meaning:
GUY #1: How ’bout those Red Sox, huh? (translation: Hey, how you doin’?)
GUY #2: Yeah, goddam Ortiz, man—he’s killin’ the ball. (translation: I’m doin’ alright.)
GUY #1: You see the game last night? (translation: How’s everything with the wife?)
GUY #2: Holy shit. What a catch Ellsbury made. (translation: Everything’s great.)
GUY #1: I TiVoed the game so I was skipping through the commercials and shit, I almost missed it. But then I watched it three times in a row—amazing. (translation: Me and the wife had sex so I couldn’t watch the game live but I TiVoed it and watched
it with the sound down after she went to sleep.)
And so on and so forth.
You will notice a big bisection of The Female Brain contains an overriding interest in children while The Male Brain seemingly contains none.
Look closer. A man’s interest in children and work is contained in the giant section labeled “Sex.” We go to work to get money to help attract a woman who will want to have sex with us. When we have enough sex with a certain girl for a long enough period of time, our work ethic and the resultant money goes to her to feed and clothe and shelter the kids the sex will produce. It’s that simple. And if you die? We will be very, very sad for a long, long time.