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 stubborn will. One blister wept red when I drained it.

On the inside of my left wrist: a line of blood, no wider than a thread, where the blade of the axe grazed my skin.

On the inside of my left elbow: a scar like a white star from my fall on the blue ice of the Gornergletshcer, Switzerland. How far you could see into 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 field plowed by a drunk man, the results of a fall down a lava slope in Thorsmork, Iceland. My skin shaved over black spines of rock 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 before I kept hiking. 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 where it should attach, in the cartilage of my shoulder joint.

Back down, on my left ring finger: the wedding band I forged from silver, palladium, yellow gold—forged with heat and that old blunt tool I carry, like a sledgehammer over my shoulder: my damn stubborn will. Naomi wears a ring made from the same billet, forged with the same sledgehammer.

Despite all this: as I walk home, I stop at a crosswalk and raise my left arm to wave along a car that has been waiting to turn onto a side street. 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, perhaps 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 called out his window. “Thanks, bud.”

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Date unknown

The gentle valley running up the center of that pale naked crescent of her back. She leans forward at the bar, and 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 upward from waist to chest, never meet directly: they leave this delicate indentation between them, marking 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, what I have done. I have looked, and touched with my gaze. I should pull back the collar of my shirt to expose my bare neck for the axe of her judgment.. I would point out to her exactly where to aim. If she cannot bear to strike me or hesitates at the last moment, I will grasp the axe handle and help her deliver the blow myself.

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August 8, 2023

Yesterday, I finished the hike. Four days backpacking, close to one hundred kilometers along the east coast of Iceland, dropping into fjord valleys, around or over the rocky spines of those headlands that intervene. I’m staying in Eskifjordur campground while I recover, maybe another day or two.

The nearest place to buy food is the convenience store down the street at the Orkan gas station. Like all Orkans this one is painted an ungodly pink so you cannot possibly mistake it for anything better. I walk there and back several times a day as I think of more that sounds good to eat.

This afternoon: I walked the main road back from the Orkan when I noticed a young mom and her young son coming toward me on the sidewalk. They held hands. Their hair shone as if it were wet, and the mom carried a duffel bag over her shoulder, which probably meant they were walking back from the swimming pool.

I moved over as far as I could to give them plenty of room to pass. A man, especially a man alone, is a threatening thing. I know that, so I tried to make myself small. I walked the edge of the sidewalk. Sometimes, my feet slid off the pavement into the tall grass alongside it. I tried so hard to shrink, I even thought small thoughts. I tried to merge with the grass. As non-threatening as plant life—that’s me. I also adopted what I hoped was a reassuring smile. I did everything I could to preemptively put mom and son at ease—everything, that is, short of waving my arms and yelling “I’m harmless!”, which might not actually have been too persuasive.

The distance between us closed. I would say nothing, and the mom would say nothing, and that’s how we would pass each other, as far apart as strangers, as far apart as we could manage while still having to share the same sidewalk, share the same planet. Perhaps she would let go of her son’s hand and guide him along ahead of her with a protective grip on his shoulder. Or else, she might switch to walking on the other side of him, the side near me, to put herself in the danger zone instead. She would pretend she hadn’t seen me as we passed, and her son, if he’d been taught well, would pretend the same. A strange man, wearing whatever clothes were cleanest after a four-day hike—no mother wants her son to see that!

As we were getting close, I glanced up from studying the ground. I looked from mom to son, back to mom, deliberately in that order. Never look to the child first. I tried to appear friendly but not overly so. Maybe, if the mom made some sign of recognition, I’d even nod at her as we passed.

And very soon, we would pass.

Only a meter or two separated us. The mom didn’t nod to me—she smiled brightly and rattled off something in Icelandic, something that went on for days. The son smiled too. They continued walking—and they were past. Their kindness receded. Their generosity. Could they know how much it had meant?

I stood there, too shocked to take another step. All I could think to do was turn and call after them something passably Icelandic: “Hallo!”

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May 28, 2025

Of a woman in a writing workshop: her voice drips like water off her lower 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 disperse.

One evening, she and I waited with the instructor for the rest of the people in the workshop. The instructor mentioned she was looking for someone to sublet 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 lower lip watched me with huge 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 like water 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 circles. “I’m sorry I said that. I’m so sorry I said that. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to assume.”

But she had assumed—many, I’m told, assume the same thing. 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 she’d deposited 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 transgression—she seemed to disclose a second and vastly more revealing assumption: to assume a man is gay amounts to an insult.

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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 within that country meant we were expected to get along. And we did. For reasons I cannot explain, 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 biologically obsolete as well—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 upset:

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

But that’s only context for this memory. Its core comes later, though some additional context is needed as well.

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 or passing recipes to the kitchen staff to have the food prepared. Little care was given to the coherence of the menu: we once had, for example, enchiladas with molé, agua fresca, and poutine for North America Day. The evening would culminate in a performance, essentially a revue show, rehearsed for weeks beforehand with the feverish dedication of teenagers who can still believe the dimensions of the entire world do not exceed 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 Islands Cultural Day. As part of the show, a group of female students (few of whom were from Asia or the Pacific Islands) performed a flowing Indonesian dance that brought to my mind a lotus flower: slender in its individual components, each petal elegantly curved, and—when the components were combined into a single whole, pleasing in the symmetric multiplicity of its elements.

However, I also recall that 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. Instead of a student pulling a rope to raise the red velvet curtain, I might have believed I’d drawn the curtain aside out of personal curiosity—and beheld, when I pressed my nose through the gap, 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 through a gap in the curtain had been going on long before I intruded and would continue long after I—with reddening cheeks—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. I looked away for that reason as well as another: the dance went on for a long time. Three minutes, then five. Then seven. If it evolved during that time, the change was too subtle for me to detect. In my growing boredom, 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 slightly larger and visibly older than the other. In all other ways, they were identical: their eyes were equally wide, their jaws equally slack, 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 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 war dance. It is also somewhat more masuline than a lotus flower.

After all that preceded, the shouts, which echoed from the walls and shook my stomach, startled me awake like a thunderclap.

The effect on Christina and her mother was different. 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 resonating between mother and 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 perfect unison. They were like two peeled soft-boiled eggs quivering together. I turned back to watch the rest of the Haka. Behind me, almost loud enough to overcome cries of “It is life! It is death!”, came the ever-growing laughter.

This Haka lasts no more than three minutes. I, for one, didn’t have time to get bored.

The laughter behind me rang out longer than the Haka itself had lasted. I glanced back again to see Christina and her mom, equally close to sliding onto the floor like broken egg yolks.

The Indonesian dance had its beauty, to be sure, that of a lotus flower or a gentle stream through the forest. The Haka is like high granite crags and sharp slopes. It holds a different kind of beauty—at least to my mind.

I’ve thought a lot about this scene with Christina and her mom in the years that have intervened.

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