Man-Rule: Don't Try to be Manly

This is another one of those Rules that appears to be counterintuitive. How can you be a Man if you’re not trying to be manly?

Here’s the deal: If you’re a Man, you don’t have to try to be manly – you just are. By contrast, if you’re not a Man, and you try to be manly, you just look like a dweeb.

I didn’t want to share this, but if I’m going to be true to the guidelines of Manhood, I have to be as up-front and honest with you as I possibly can. That way, you’ll know you can trust me and that the Man Rules as a whole, and this blog in particular, are accurate and dependable and based on facts. So here goes: There was a time in my life when I wasn’t manly. I know it’s hard to believe now, but I wasn’t always the awe-inspiring symbol of Manhood you see before you today. Let me give you an example.

It was the evening of an Easter Sunday a few years ago. We had done the traditional Christian family Easter celebration – chocolate, baskets left by a rabbit, eating pork, hiding multicolored eggs. Oh, and a brief mention of eternal life and salvation thrown in there for good measure. It was bedtime for the boys, so I was rocking Josh (who was about a year old) in his room as he began winding down for night-night.

And I heard a Noise.

We lived (and still do) in a bedroom community of a suburb of a mid-major Southern city. We're not inches away from our neighbors, but neither do we have to hike four hours to find a phone or a Mexican restaurant. So other than the occasional loud neighbor party or nuclear Armageddon, noises have never been too common after 9 p.m.

It was a strange Noise; it sounded a little bit like an angry wasp on steroids. It was definitely outside the house, so that was good; one never wants a hulked-out, pissed-off wasp flying around inside one's house at bedtime. However, I couldn't figure out what it was, so I dismissed it.

I put Josh to bed, and joined Kristin downstairs. As we settled into bed, she looked over at me.
"Did you hike to the Mexican restaurant at some point today?" she asked.

I was a bit befuddled, but honesty is always the best policy when one's wife asks strange questions at random. "No."

She pondered a moment in silence.

"Did you ask for a flight of propeller-driven planes to dive-bomb our house as an Easter surprise?"

I weighed my answer to this question a bit longer, because I was beginning to think I was in serious trouble for some reason. Finally, though, honesty won out again: "No."

"Then what in the world is that Noise?"

We listened a bit as the Noise waxed and waned, waxed and waned, and then waxed a whole hell of a lot. Kristin, whom I have sworn before God and everybody to honor, cherish and protect, was looking at me; obviously she expected me, as the Man, to positively identify the Noise and then make it stop. I thought about mentioning the Beefy Wasp Theory, and then discarded the idea.

"Sounds like somebody working on a motorcycle engine," I offered.

That was Kristin’s cue to belittle ... not only my interpretation of the Noise, but my deficient intelligence and lack of Manhood.

"That's not a motorcycle," she announced. "That sounds like a chainsaw. I can't believe you'd think that was a motorcycle. I can't sleep with that Noise going on. It sounds like it's right in our backyard. Aren't you going to go check it out? What if there's someone running a chainsaw in our backyard? I’d think it would bother you that some guy could just come into your yard and run a chainsaw."

I hadn't considered the possibility of a chainsaw-wielding maniac in our yard, but once my lovely wife had mentioned it, my mind fixated on the image of Leatherface pruning the weeds. I didn't really want to go out there.

But a Man's gotta do, yadda yadda yadda. I opened the back door, prepared to leap backwards and utter a gibbering scream of terror (in a manly manner, of course) if Leatherface lunged at me. Fortunately, that didn't happen. I realized the Noise was coming from the other side of the ridge behind our house, at least 300 or 400 yards away. I reported this to my wife.

"So what are you going to do about it?" she asked me.

So here it was: a test of my Manliness, right in front of my wife. Thinking quickly, I remembered watching a movie, many years ago, about these Shaolin monks who were so skilled at martial arts that they could fight off guys attacking them with swords by using only their bare hands. What they'd do, see, is they'd wait till the sword guy chopped at them with the sword, then they'd bring their palms together really fast and catch the sword between their hands in mid-chop. Then they'd snap their wrists to one side very quickly and break the sword, and they'd finish the fight by elbowing the now-diminished swordsman in the face. I could see myself carrying out this same type of maneuver against the mystery chainsaw man. That would prove to my wife I was manly!

So I told Kristin my plan. "I'll hike across the ridge and get all Shaolin on his butt while I break his chainsaw with my bare hands."

She gazed at me pityingly. "Why don't you just call the police and tell them we have a noise problem?"

I thought about this. "Okay, but I bet they haven't seen the Shaolin monk movie. I bet they couldn't even handle swordsmen, much less this chainsaw guy."

So I used my manly pointer finger to dial the police. The dispatcher was less than helpful. "You've got a noise problem?" she asked in a bored voice.

"Yes."

"Did you or anyone in your family eat Mexican food today?" she asked

"No. It's coming from the ridge behind my house. We think it's somebody running a chainsaw, but it could be a roid-raged wasp. Be sure you send somebody who's seen the Shaolin monk movie about the swords, or at least somebody with some Raid."

Apparently somebody at the police station had just told the dispatcher a funny joke, because I got the distinct impression she was laughing at something, but in between chuckles she said something about sending somebody to my house. It was 10:30 at that point, and I didn't really want to have to wait up to let cops in. "No need to send someone here, my good woman,” I said, in my deepest and manliest voice. “Just tell the police to cruise the other side of the ridge behind my house. I'm sure you'll find the culprit there."

"Which ridge is that, sir?"

I sighed, then turned and pointed. "That one there. Behind my house." I even held the phone receiver out as I pointed, so she could get a sense of the general direction. I couldn't believe how stupid this woman was.

"The officers will be at your house in a few minutes, sir."

Great. So Kristin retreated to the bedroom, leaving me to wait up and deal with the cops when they arrived.

They showed up in a commendably short period of time. The two officers appeared to have recently exited puberty, but maybe they were the only Shaolin-trained guys on the force. I explained about the Noise. Naturally, at this point, the only noise was coming from the bedroom, where Kristin was sighing audibly in frustration and shame every seven seconds. I took the policemen into the back yard and pointed to the ridge, just like I did with the phone earlier. Stupid dispatcher.

And obviously, my pious observance of Easter had been well-received by God, because at that exact moment, the Noise started up again. The police listened a couple of minutes, and agreed with my wife that it was somebody running a chainsaw. "Probably from that construction site over on the highway back there," one said. They agreed to go cruise around the other side of the ridge (which is what I TOLD the dispatcher) and see if they could find the guy running a chainsaw at 11 p.m. and tell him to knock it off. I thanked them, and they left.

I went back in the bedroom and reported the results to Kristin. I had to speak loudly, because the Noise had intensified, as though mocking my attempts to make it stop. She was glad the police were checking it out, but her manner clearly suggested that I was a weenie-poo in her eyes for not taking care of this myself.

So I announced I was going to cruise around the highway back there myself, just to see if I could track the guy down. "What are you going to do if you find him?" Kristin asked.

I assumed the Shaolin monk pose I remembered from the movie.

"I won't wait up," she responded.

So I cruised around for a while, but I didn't hear the Noise any more. The police probably got the guy to stop. I went back home, crawled into bed, and tried to get to sleep while wrestling with the knowledge that my wife thought two barely post-pubescent cops were more manly than I.

Some good came from the evening, though. Thanks to my experiences, I wrote a screenplay for a sure-fire hit movie – “Shaolin Chainsaw Monks.” I don't want to give away too much, but since you're reading this blog I’ll share this with you: in the climactic scene, the monks, who are being attached by giant wasps wielding chainsaws, pretend they’re going to break the chainsaws with their hands, but then they eat some Mexican food and whirl around and bend over to melt the chainsaws with the Blue Anus Flame of Justice.

So if you're a wealthy movie producer and want to have a sure-fire hit on your hands, just send me a truckload of money and we'll get cracking.

I smell Oscar. Or Mexican food. I'm not sure which.

(c) 2012 John Puckett