"Why, Oh Why Didn't I Take the Blue Pill"

You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes. --Morpheus

It's bad form for a blogger to beat up on his commenters. They really are his friends, for the most part, even the one's he's never actually met. They keep him intellectually honest, or at least they try. On the other hand, male "conversation" can take an awful lot more in-your-face disagreement than most women think and suffer no ill effects to the friendship. It's an undeniable gender difference that was repeatedly driven home to me every time my ex asked, "So, are you and (fill in the blank with opponent from spirited "conversation" at that night's gathering) still friends?" For the longest time, I didn't understand the question. Finally I recognized that the male openness with disagreement--a mode of interaction actually founded on mutual respect--is vastly different from the pretended concurrence that marks many estrogen-driven interactions. The men would get it all out, have the next best thing to a fist fight (enjoying ourselves immensely all the while) and part the best of friends and looking forward to the next round. Meanwhile, the women would conceal and contain their true opinions, part with kisses and hugs, only to say as soon as the car door closed, "I don't care if I never see that b-tch again! Do you know what she said?" The man who dares suggest that his partner should have said something to the offending party at the time will learn rather quickly that he'll fare better if it tries to stop a train in the mode of Hancock.

But, I digress. Both the dumbing down of America and the warming up of the world seem to have seeded conversations on this blog in interesting ways. And though I might have answered in the comment thread that spawned the thoughts which follow, they seem to have general enough applicability to merit their own post. Brace yourself. I'm going to take a stand. You may not like it. (Of course, I look at the paragraph above and think, "I've probably already crossed that line.") Feel free to say so.

In my opinion, arguing that anthropomorphic climate change is "controversial" or "theoretic" is like taking the same stance on evolution by natural selection. If you're comfortable with it, fine. You're in the right country for that. Outnumbered in the developed world in that stance, but hardly lonely in America, where nine of ten adults can't explain what radiation is and how it affects the human body, and where, staggeringly, one in five adults believes the sun revolves around the earth.

If you find comfort in the increasingly minority opinion that our continued pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere can possibly be without consequence, then lucky you. To borrow a phrase from my college physics text, some things should be "intuitively obvious to even the casual observer." I think perhaps the best thing about Gore's movie may have been its title. When even the truth that we can intuit is "inconvenient," we develop an interest in grasping at straws. I should remember how to do that. Many was the time in my undergraduate days when Air Force was down by over three touchdowns with less than two minutes to play and our cheerleaders were frantically trying to convince us all, "We can still win!" Right.

Who needs forests or clean energy or a balanced budget? I think for many the most important question seems to be, "Will the bill come due in my lifetime? Will I see the consequences?" When the answer is "No," it becomes easier still to believe the convenient construction of things, to swallow as it were, the blue pill. For some, it's not even a choice, but a necessity.

We never free a mind once it's reached a certain age. It's dangerous. The mind has trouble letting go. --Morpheus

Related Links

• An Inconvenient Truth
• The Matrix 101

Now where else can you find those two links together? :-) Deconstruct that one, Buck. ;-)

The horse, the cart, the good man

If you had asked me, I'd have told you that getting together with an old friend was always a good excuse to break out the good Scotch and good cigars--Laphroaig in his glass, Johnny Walker Black in mine, and a Fuente Hemingway Short Story for each of us.

What I realize now, after two and a half hours on my porch in the setting sun, is that, really, the Scotch or Bourbon or cigars are really just an excuse to spend time in the company of a good friend and a good man.

If Everyone Cared

A few days ago, a friend was driving her 15-yr-old son home from school. On his notebook computer was a music video by Nickelback. She found it so moving she asked me to find it and see it. I found it moving enough to share with you. I've had the album since it came out (Nickelback has to be, pretty much, the ultimate guys' band on the air at the moment), but I hadn't seen the video. Enjoy.

Don't complexify things

My prolific record of posts since my return from spring break should speak volumes regarding my failure to heed the title's advice. And yet, though I've written little here, my fingers have been no stranger to the keyboard.

I'm attempting to draw one long career to a close and set out on another. Just which other is yet to be determined. But the exploration of possible others has kept me rather busy lately.

The other thing that's kept me busy has been reconnecting with some old friends. Back in May, I stood beneath the center of the new Air Force Memorial, staring up at the stars, with only even an occasional passing car as a distraction. I recommend visiting that monument--in fact, I recommend visiting all of them--well after midnight in the middle of the week. I don't like crowds. But I do like individuals. And those I call friends, I tend to like intensely, and for a lifetime. One of those friends gave me that midnight tour of DC. The monuments were nice, the government buildings were nice, the empty streets were like something from The Twilight Zone, but the best thing of all was reconnecting with a friend I'd not seen in a quarter of a century.

Today, I reconnected with another, after nearly a decade. Over an hour on the phone wasn't really long enough. Our kids were in grade school the last time we talked. This fall, we'll each drop one off at different colleges on the east coast. The last time we connected was his birthday, a decade ago, and he was about halfway through a year-long deployment to Korea. For his birthday, I sent him a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing and one of two Costa Rican cigars from a little shop in Fredericksburg, Virginia, picked up on a visit to a battlefield there as part of a graduate course on the literature of the Civil War (good luck untangling those modifiers). Then, through e-mail, we coordinated so that, at the same time, half a world apart, he smoked his cigar on a morning walk in Korea, and I smoked mine, on an evening walk, in gently falling snow, near Charlottesville, Virginia. The walk itself, a long-range version of something we did rarely, but with intense consciousness of each precious moment, sporting cigars on the starlit terrazzo of our shared alma mater, not quite two decades earlier still. A world apart, a shared, smoke-haloed perambulation--and then, the long drift. I hadn't the heart to tell him today that I'd driven by his house once, or, at least a house that was once his, some four years ago. On a road trip from North Carolina to a conference in Florida, I'd detoured through Alabama with an associate to look at a house he was arranging to live in with his family for a year of school there. At my request, we detoured by another as well. There wasn't time to stop for a real visit anyway, we had somewhere we had to be, "miles to go." But even more than that, there was, has been for years, for me, an unexplainable conflict between yearning and foreboding, more like than unlike that of Frost's most famous traveler. Still, I wanted to see the house, to have an idea in what surroundings to picture the closest friend I made in the four-year crucible we called a college, should one or the other of us bridge that drift again.

So, today, I did. Only I could really. I've moved three times since that December walk; he only once that I know of.

Funny thing about both those reconnections, the one spanning a quarter century and the other a decade: both are doctors. Well, technically, I suppose we all three are, but they're the kind who can cure you; whereas, I . . . well as I've told more than one jumper who's approached me for medical care, "I can describe that injury in colorful iambic pentameter and analyze the subtext within the plot turns of your life leading inevitably to it, but I'm not going to be much help to you, medically--not that sort of 'Doc' . . . sorry."

And both are artists, of one sort or another, so naturally, I'm coming to believe that all surgeons have this alter ego as a feature of their personalities. One gardens and cooks on a level well above my head, and the other draws and paints. Both have a gift for words as well, and it is to today's reconnection that I owe the lovely coinage that titles this post. As we both laughed at our growing collection of reading glasses (I find I'm not the only person with a pair in every room, pocket, vehicle, and end-table) and lamented the utter complexity of our lives, I mentioned a yearning "to simplify" my life. He responded, rightly I think, that we were probably past that point, the better strategy would have been "not to complexify them in the first place."

So, this post is a tribute to simpler times and to one of the simplest and most fundamental of life's pleasures: friendship. Quite honestly, I probably don't deserve the caliber of friends I have, and my gratitude that God has seen fit to bless me so abundantly nonetheless is probably all the explanation I ever need seek for my affinity for expressions of friendship in art. Some people saw Serendipity as a chick flick; I saw it as a buddy movie. I've never seen a better scripted or acted portrayal of that mysterious way in which male friendships materialize than the first few episodes of Deadwood, from Bullock's and Hickok's first meeting to the latter's murder. And you already know that I think Reign Over Me the finest movie to come out thus far this year, in any category. But I digress.

To my friends, thank you for putting up with me. You're really the only readers I have anyway. And to any of the latter who haven't been or aren't yet the former, I hope for you that you are or will be at least half so blessed as I in that arena, for were I only even half so blessed, I would still consider myself a very, very lucky man.

300

We saw it Sunday. I tried to post the following review to Fandango, only to be told that I had to keep my review to 1000 characters or less. No character count mind you, so I have no idea how much too long it is. My answer: Screw you Fandango, I'll post it elsewhere:

"Ooh. That was nice."

The quote is from my 15-yr-old, who wanted to know, more or less seriously, "Where did they find that many ripped men in one place."

As a guy, I loved it as a guy movie. But my friend, listening to my daughter made the astute observation, "You know, really it is sort of a chick flick too." I had to agree.

And that's a surprise, since taking my 15-yr-old was a little of a risk in the first place. I tried to explain to her, "This should give you some idea of what testosterone is really all about." "What?" "Never mind. Consider this a warning for what really makes men tick."

She loved it. Never mind that we're all about battle and one-up-manship. I could hear her ooh! every time the Spartans charged the camera. And I have to admit . . . running and tensing your abs at the same time is not the easiest thing in the world.

I loved it though. From a guy's standpoint: keep "Wild Hogs." That's good fare for the Will Farrell crowd. Give me blood and glory any day. Okay, that 's in Wild Hogs too, but I like mine without the silliness.

Go see it. You won't regret it. Unless you think Idiocracy was a better movie than Gladiator. Then, we need to talk.