13 Splinters

You ever read the Wiley at Heart by the John Eldredge? I have. Unless you already know who you are and what you think about things, don't read this stupid book. It's a pretty great book, but unless you exude the fathomless brand of Christian maturity that I do, you'll misinterpret what the book is saying and you'll get contradicting ideas. In fact, you should probably check with me before you read anything of consequence. Especially the Bible.

So according to the Wild at Heart, the modern Christian man is having his raging masculinity oppressed and is consequently bored and unfulfilled. Check. I can't tell you how exasperating it is to be able to glide seamlessly from desk to pew to couch without ever having to kill anything. Because I think that I'd be awesome at killing things. Especially muskrats. That notwithstanding, there is some truth to what the Wild asseverates. It seems sometimes that there's nothing left to conquer. Or at the very least, we're not allowed to conquer it.

A friend of mine's web presence featured another one of those mindless pop-culture memes that are so prevalent. It said "Disney gave me unrealistic expectations about men." Below that snarkey comment were the visages of what I assume are Disney-brand princes. I only actually recognized the guy from Sleeping Beauty, but based on the context, my conclusion seems logical. Anyway, in its own useless fashion, this trivial piece of bandwidth flotsam hits on the same disjoint that the While at Hart talks about ad nauseam. Unlike what is suggested in the fairy tales upon which a generation of stargazing doxies have been raised, most guys are not princes. It's not our fault, it's just the way that goes. And even if there were dragons roaming around, PETA would probably tell us to keep our greasy mitts off of them.

Don't worry about that though. Despite the way things seem at times, there are still frontiers to be braved and there are still ways to be dangerous and masculine, even in today's prefabricated world. It's called whiskey. You should drink as much of it as you can.

I don't think that I mentioned this before, but I pretty much beasted Wild at Heart in one day. Christmas day, actually. After having completed the final paragraph, I felt an urge to go do something manly, so, seeing as how I was already in beautiful downtown Fortville staying with my folks, I decided to go roaming in the woods, despite the fact it was very dark and muddy. Eventually I came to a point where I felt as though I had to cross the creek, and as providence would have it, there was a very large tree that had fallen over recently and it reached to the other side. It's a little bit difficult to describe the topography, but what you need to understand is that to get to the trunk of the tree, I had to climb over a clump of its roots. Like I said, it was really dark and muddy and on my first attempt to get on top of its roots I noted what a slippery combination darkness and muddiness can be. Instinctively, I grabbed onto whatever I could to avoid falling into the creek. Unfortunately for me, what I grabbed was a stalk of rubus plant, and in so doing interred 13 hair-like thorns into my right hand. It stung for a while, then it didn't hurt at all for a while, and now it just itches a lot.

-Ryan