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.”
———————————————————
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.
———————————————————
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—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.