To be a man these days

Five young men went for a walk
Sat on a tree stump and had a talk.
It takes something to be a man these days
Nobody's scared, but we hide anyway.

- British Sea Power, Open the Door

14 April, 2025

On my left hand: five blisters from the hours I’ve spent in the last days removing a tree stump using only the combination of a sharp axe and a very blunt tool—my will. One blister wept red when I drained it.

On the inside of my wrist: a line of blood, no wider than a thread, from the blade of the axe.

On the inside of my elbow: a scar like a white star from my fall on the blue ice of the Gornergletshcer. How far you could see into the ice in that glacier! Its like a clear sky, and the rocks suspended in it are its constellations.

From my elbow, most of the way to my wrist: white lines, irregular, stop-and-start, like the furrows in a poorly-plowed field, the results of a fall down a lava slope outside of Thorsmork, Iceland. My bare arm shaved over black spines as I slid and tried to stop. At least there was a stream at the bottom of the slope—I could wash off most of the blood. I still have a pearl of lava embedded in my skin from that fall. It will be there forever as I have no intention of removing it. Maybe calling it a pearl is too much though: It’s really just a speck of black, my Icelandic tattoo.

Higher on my arm, though resulting from the same injury: three half-inch scars where arthroscopic instruments were inserted into my shoulder. A fourth scar—the long one—is high in my armpit. It looks like a mouth healed shut. That’s where the surgeon accessed the bone, drilled a hole, and re-anchored my bicep tendon, which he’d cut from my shoulder cartilage.

On my ring finger: the wedding band I forged from silver, palladium, yellow gold—forged with that old blunt tool I carry always, like a sledgehammer over my shoulder: my same, stubborn will. Naomi wears a ring forged from the same billet with the same sledgehammer.

Despite all this: as I walk home, I wave ahead a car that has been waiting to turn. Today is one of the first pleasant days in April, and the driver has his windows down. I hear the voice before I realize it must be coming from him. What does the voice say? Perhaps gratitude cannot be shown without condescension, or perhaps he sees me as I am when I wave him on. I am small (by American standards), too slight to be taken seriously, and I suspect you can tell by how I walk, how I stand even, how I wave someone on, that I live in my head. The man did thank me, that I must admit. But then he appended that diminutive epithet I detest.

“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks, bud.”

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Date unknown

The gentle valley running up the center of that pale crescent of her naked back. Her skin is exposed between the hem of her spring-green shirt and the waist of her black jeans. On either side of her back, the elongate fullness of her abdomen wraps around, yet those two gentle crests, running from waist to chest, never meet directly: they leave this delicately-contoured indentation between them, marking in general the path of her spine. I can feel with my eyes the softness of the golden hair, light as the sun at dawn, that must grow there, in the valley of her spine. It is the subtlest meadow. I run my eyes down her back like a finger, just above her skin so our flesh never touches, and against my fingertip brush those hairs of such astounding fineness they are no more solid than a breeze in May.

To look is to steal that valley’s breeze, yet I struggle to look away. I received no permission, so with every glance (and they are numerous), I smuggle away a memory, a sensation, with the guilt of one who has trespassed on the summer field of a woman’s youth. She will never find the footsteps I left there: her field must be wide after all, and I walk with the lightness of a cat. She will not find them, yet I hang my head to know they are there. I cannot forget what I have stolen—and yet I keep stealing.

What a vile beast I can be.

I do not even approach her and admit, my eyes lowered, to what I have done. I should pull back the collar of my shirt to expose my bare neck for the executioner’s judgment.

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May 28, 2025

Of a woman in a writing workshop: her voice drips like water off her upper lip. What she says falls no farther forward than her feet. I feel I must lunge every time she speaks so I can catch her words in my palm before they strike the ground and shatter into meaningless droplets.

One evening, she and I waited with the instructor for the workshop to begin. The instructor mentioned she was looking for someone to sub-let her apartment over the summer. She passed out fliers.

“I’ll take one,” I said. “I’ll give it to my wife. She’s the one on facebook and things like that. She might know someone looking for a place.”

The woman whose voice drips from her upper lip watched me with round eyes. “I always thought you were gay,” she said. I caught her words in my palm. The instructor—who sat nearer than I—either didn’t catch them or pretended not to.

“What?” the instructor said. This afforded the woman whose voice drips a chance to amend her statement.

To her credit, she did amend it: “I always thought you were a bit gay,” she said.

I took a moment to think over my response. I removed my notebook from my backpack, and only then did I speak, clearly and—I hoped—with authority.

“Isn’t everyone a bit gay?” I said.

The instructor liked this response and brought up the Kinsey scale of sexual attraction. That hadn’t been my meaning at all. I meant simply that everyone—save the truly inhuman—has some traits typically associated with being gay. On the male side, a gay man is usually thought more feminine, but even a straight man, so long as he is honest with himself, will probably find he has some traits typically associated with femininity. That’s all I meant.

The woman whose voice drips eventually looked at me again, her eyes perfect, aghast spheres. “I’m sorry I said that. I’m so sorry I said that. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to assume.”

She assumed this—many, I’m told, do. I’m not gay, but I’m not your archetypal male either. Fine. Though it may frustrate me, the need to categorize and ultimately to name is a deeply human trait. If I must be gay because otherwise I am confusingly unclassifiable, then fine.

But something solid sank through the watery apology left in my palm. It was a nugget of embarrassment, which I suppose was understandable, but a nugget that weighed far more than what the situation merited. She’d assumed I was gay (fine); however, through the repetition and vehemence of her disavowal—which was more appropriate for an altogether weightier form of transgression—she seemed to disclose a second and vastly more revealing assumption: to assume a man is gay amounts to an insult.

———————————————————

9 July, 2025

A memory: Christina—that was her name—was also from New Mexico. At an international high school where the number of Americans was capped at 50 of the 200 students, coming not only from the same country but the same state meant we were expected to get along. And we did. For reasons I cannot fathom now, we were even something like friends.

Christina subscribed to an extreme version of feminism in which women are, essentially, the only people among us. Men are ancillary, a decoration or embellishment added atop the true substance of the human race, a decoration that is allowed to persist because its adornment adds a little extra interest to the world. Christina believed men would soon become even biologically obsolete—the technology would soon be developed (by women) to allow women to reproduce without any male involvement. She told me this one evening in the dining hall. Perhaps she saw how uncomfortable her vision of the future made me, because she was quick to console me, a friend whom she’d caused distress:

“Don’t worry,” she said compassionately, “we’ll keep you around because you’re interesting.” I confess I wasn’t particularly consoled.

But that’s only some context of this memory—its core comes from later in the time when we were friends.

The school had what it called cultural days, during which students, grouped by region of the world, would share aspects of their national identity. They would plan an elaborate dinner, either cooking traditional food from their home countries themselves or passing recipes to the kitchen staff to have them prepared. We might have, for example, enchiladas with molé, agua fresca, and poutine for North American Day. The evening would culminate in a performance, essentially a revue show, rehearsed for weeks beforehand with the feverish importance of teenagers, who can still believe the dimensions of the entire world are no greater than the dimensions of their own lives.

Christina and her mom—identifiable by both being shaped like eggs balanced upright, the same straight blond hair cut short, the same round face—sat behind me for the performance at the end of the Asia/Pacific Cultural Day. As part of the show, a group of female students (few of whom were from Asia or Pacific Islands) performed a flowing Indonesian dance that brought to my mind a lotus flower: slender in its individual components, elegantly curved, and—when the components were combined into a single whole, pleasing in the symmetric multiplicity of its elements. However, I also recall the dance made me uncomfortable for precisely how feminine it was. Watching it or worse, becoming engrossed in it, felt strangely voyeuristic, like I was intruding somewhere I did not belong and seeing something I never should have been allowed to see. I might have believed that instead of the red velvet curtain having been raised by a student pulling down on a rope backstage, I’d drawn the curtain aside out of personal curiosity—and beheld, when I pressed my nose through the gap, the motion of a reality I had always suspected must exist but whose particular modes of motion, whose particular human physics, had always been hidden from me. The dance I glimpsed behind the curtain had been going on long before I sneaked in to observe it and would continue long after I—with cheeks reddening by inexplicable humiliation—withdrew. Some worlds should remain hidden from some people. For this reason, I found myself looking anywhere but at the stage. Well, I should probably be honest here: I looked away for this reason as well as another. The dance had continued for a long time, five minutes, then ten, and I felt myself growing bored. I glanced over my shoulder and happened to catch sight of Christina and her mother.

They sat like two versions of the same person, distinguishable only in that one was visibly older than the other. In all other ways, they were identical: their eyes were equally wide in awe, their mouths equally agape, their torsos leaning forward equally as if they could not bear to miss a single twisting motion of the dancers’ hands. They were far too enraptured to notice how I studied them.

Some time later in the show, a group of male students took the stage to perform a Haka, a Maori dance designed to simultaneously muster courage for war and to intimidate one’s enemies. The student in the center of the stage stood a little in front of the others. He began to chant in Maori. Translated, his call began:

“Let your valor rise! Let your valor rage!”

The others, at prescribed times, interjected a loud cry of their own, synchronized with a stomp of their feet or a slap of their (bare) chests. It’s how this Haka starts, the beginning of the war story it tells, and it is the crescendo before the choral chant erupts:

“Ka mate, Ka mate, Ka ora, Ka ora!”

This translates to something like “it is death, it is death, it is life, it is life!” If any doubt remained, this is a chant for those entering battle.

After what preceded it in the show, this sudden noise, which echoed from the walls and shook my stomach, startled me awake as surely as a thunderclap.

The effect on Christina and her mother was not the same. The performers had barely entered the synchronized portion of the chant before the tittering behind me began. I looked back to see Christina and her mom quivering in their chairs. What began as a giggle evolved, as if by some invisible vibration transmitted from mother to daughter, into unabashed laughter. Their actions—just as those of the performers—were perfectly synchronized: every ripple of their flesh seemed to seek out in the other some confirmation until they united in frequency and the two bodies shook in unison. I turned back to watch the rest of the Haka while behind me, almost loud enough to overcome the chants of life and death, came the ever growing laughter.

This Haka lasts no more than three minutes.

The laughter rang out far longer, however, into the interval during which the curtain was drawn shut in preparation for the next act. I glanced back again to see Christina and her mom, equally close to sliding off their chairs and onto the floor in glee.

“It is death, it is death! It is life, it is life!” I still fail to see the humor.