You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About (3 page)

W
e live in ridiculously convenient times. Think about it: Whenever you need any kind of information, about
anything
, day or night, no matter where you are, you can just tap your finger on your “smart”
phone and within seconds an answer will appear, as if by magic, on the screen. Granted, this answer will be wrong because it comes from the Internet, which is infested with teenagers, lunatics and Anthony Weiner. But it’s
convenient
.

Today everything is convenient. You cook your meals by pushing a microwave button. Your car shifts itself, and your GPS tells you where to go. If you go to a men’s public restroom, you don’t even have to flush the urinal! This tedious chore is a thing of the past because the urinal now has a small electronic “eye” connected to the Central Restroom Command Post, located deep underground somewhere near Omaha, Nebraska, where highly trained workers watch you on high-definition TV screens and make the flush decision for you. (“I say we push the button.” “Not yet! He’s still shaking it!” “He should have those red spots looked at.”)

And then there’s travel. A century ago, it took a week to get from New York to California; today you can board a plane at LaGuardia and six hours later—think about that:
six hours later!
—you will, as if by magic, still be sitting in the plane at LaGuardia because “LaGuardia” is Italian for “You will never actually take off.” But during those six hours you can be highly productive by using your “smart”
phone to get on the Internet.

So we have it pretty easy. But we have paid a price for all this convenience:
We don’t know how to do anything anymore.
We’re helpless without our technology. Have you ever been standing in line to pay a cashier when something went wrong with the electronic cash register? Suddenly your safe, comfortable, modern world crumbles and you are plunged into a terrifying nightmare postapocalyptic hell where people might have to do math USING ONLY THEIR BRAINS.

Regular adult Americans are no more capable of doing math than they are of photosynthesis. If you hand a cashier a twenty-dollar bill for an item costing $13.47, both you and the cashier are going to look at the cash register to see how much you get back and c rboth of you will unquestioningly accept the cash register’s decision. It may say $6.53; it may say $5.89; it may be in a generous mood and say $8.41. But whatever it says, that’s how much change you will get because both you and the cashier know the machine is WAY smarter than you.

A while back, my daughter asked me to help her with her math homework, which involved doing long division without a calculator. There was a time, somewhere around 1963, when I definitely knew how to do long division; I figured this knowledge was still lying around in my brain somewhere. I mean, I can remember many other things from 1963. That was the year when the Beach Boys came out with their album
Surfer Girl
, and I can recall every word from every track on it, including an obscure and genuinely idiotic song called “Our Car Club,” which contains, among other lyrics, these:

We’ll get the roughest and the toughest initiation we can find

And if you want to try to get in, we’ll really put you through the grind

’Cause THIS club’s the VERY BEST!

I haven’t heard “Car Club” for decades, but I typed those lyrics without looking them up. My brain stashed them away in a safe place, in case I would need them someday in a lyrics-related emergency. My brain did not, however, elect to save the instructions for doing long division. So when I tried to help my daughter, I was useless. I had a vague recollection that you start by dividing the littler number (or maybe just part of the littler number) into just the
first
part of the bigger number, then you multiply something and then you put the result down below. But I wasn’t sure
where
down below, exactly, you put the result, and I had no idea what you did with it after that. ’Cause THIS club’s the VERY BEST!

I tried for several painful minutes to show my daughter how to do long division, at which point she gently told me I should go back to watching
Storage Wars
and she would figure out long division on her own. And she did. I don’t know where she got the information. Probably from the Internet. Possibly even from Anthony Weiner.

But it’s not my inability to do long division that really bothers me. What really bothers me is that, like many modern American men, I don’t know how to do anything
manly
anymore. And by “manly,” I do not mean “physical.” A lot of us do physical things, but these are yuppie fitness things like “spinning,” and “crunches,” and working on our “core,” and running half marathons and then putting “13.1” stickers on our hybrid cars so everybody will know what total cardiovascular badasses we are.

That’s not manly. I’ll tell you who was manly: the early American pioneers. Those guys didn’t even know they
had
cores. But they definitely had large manhoods. They set out into the vast untracked wilderness with nothing but a musket and a sack of hardtack and hominy, and they had to survive out there for months, even years, completely on their own, sleeping on the ground in bear-infested forests. That’s why they brought the hardtack: to throw at the bears. They had no idea why they brought hominy. Like you, they had no idea what “hominy” means. It sounds like some kind of disease.

Patient:
What is it, doc?

Doctor:
I’m afraid you have the hominy.

Patient:
Not the hominy!

But the point is, these pioneering men did not do “crunches.” These men
crunched the damn continent—
blazing trails, fording rivers, crossing moud mcrossinntain ranges, building log cabins, forging things with forges, etc. We modern men can’t do
any
of those things. We don’t have the vaguest idea how to ford a river. We’d check our phones to see if we had a fording app and, if not, we’d give up, go back home and work on our cores.

What happened? How did American men get transformed from masculine, self-reliant doers into Teletubbies with abs? I think we can place the blame for this—as well as almost every other bad thing, including disco, “light” beer and Donald Trump—on the Baby Boomers. We grew up soft. Our parents had the Great Depression; we had Captain Kangaroo. They were the Greatest Generation; we are Generation Wuss.

I know for a fact that my father was way manlier than I am. He was not a particularly large, muscular, hairy or masculine-looking individual; he was a bald, nearsighted, mild-mannered Presbyterian minister. But here’s one thing he did, and I am not making this up:
He built our house.
Yes. He couldn’t afford to hire a builder, so he did it himself. He cleared the land by hand, dug the footings with a pick and shovel, poured the foundation, framed the house, nailed the roof on, installed the plumbing and electrical wiring, hung the Sheetrock, installed the windows, doors and floors, and so on. My earliest childhood memories are of my dad working on our house evenings and weekends, wearing a diaper tied around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes. It took him years to finish. But when he was done, guess what?
We had a pretty crappy house.

No, that’s harsh. Our house did have problems, though. It was drafty and it leaked, and often the only way to get the plumbing to work (this became one of my chores) was to go outside and climb down into the “pump house”—a dank, dark hole that was home to seventy-eight percent of the Earth’s spider population—and prime the pump by manually blowing air into a disgusting, slime-covered thing until Mom yelled from the kitchen that the water was back on.

So it was not a perfect house. But it
was
a house, and my father, who had no training in construction, built it pretty much single-handedly. It was not until years later, when I became a homeowner capable of causing several thousand dollars’ worth of damage by attempting a simple toilet repair, that I really appreciated the magnitude of my father’s achievement. There’s no way I could do anything that remotely approached it. My father had a utility room filled with serious tools—winches, axes, sledgehammers, a variety of drills and power saws, even an adze, which is a very manly tool, although it, too, sounds like a disease. (“If we don’t treat that hominy, it could develop into full-blown adze.”)

Here’s what my homeowner tool collection consists of: duct tape, a smallish hammer and 283,000 tiny random pieces of hardware for hanging pictures. Hanging pictures is my only real manual skill. If we have a global nuclear war and civilization is wiped out and I happen to be one of the small band of surviving humans, I will not be a big help.

First Survivor:
I’ll forage for edible roots.

Second Survivor:
I’ll look for water.

Third Survivor:
I’ll build a shelter from fallen trees.

Me:
And I’ll hang pictures!

First Survivor:
We’ll eat him first.

The scary thing is, the wussification of American men is getting worse. Pathetic as we Boomer males are, we’re Daniel Boone compared with the generations that have come after us. Forget about fording rivers; these kids today can’t move out of their parents’ houses! They’re twenty-eightfattwenty- years old and their mom is still doing their laundry! And this “rap” music they listen to! You call that music? I call that shouting! Why, back in my day, we had
real
musicians, bands like the Beach Boys, who . . . Wait a minute! Who pooped in my drawers?

But getting back to the issue at hand: We American men have lost our national manhood and I say it’s time we got it back. We need to learn to do the kinds of manly things our forefathers knew how to do. To get us started, I’ve created a list of some basic skills that every man should have, along with instructions. You may rest assured that these instructions are correct. I got them from the Internet.

THINGS A MAN SHOULD KNOW HOW TO DO

How to Cook a Steak on the Grill

1. Make sure you choose a good steak. The main “cuts” of steak are the Brisket, the Loin, the Round, the Chuck, the Rump, the Groin, the Niblick, the Flanker, the Grommet, the Cosine and the Stirrup. They are all basically the same because they all come from the inside of a cow. You should select a manly looking steak that is approximately the size and density of a standard manhole cover and does not have too many visible fly eggs.

2. Many people like to enhance the flavor of the steak by soaking it ahead of time in marinade or rubbing it with a blend of herbs and spices.

3. These people are pansies.

4. Place the steak horizontally on the grill oriented along an east-west axis.

5. Drink a timing beer. (VERY IMPORTANT: Not a “light” beer.)

6. When the beer is done, check the steak by prodding it firmly yet gently with your right forefinger. If it feels cold, you need to light the grill. (This should have been Step 1.)

7. Drink another timing beer.

8. Turn the steak over, using barbecue tongs or a No. 2 profilated Phillips screwdriver with a ten-inch titanium-coated shank.

9. Drink another timing beer.

10. Check the steak to determine how done it is, using this chart:

11. If the steak is covered with molten or flaming plastic, you failed to remove it from the packaging. (This should also have been Step 1.)

12. Spray the steak with a fire extinguisher if necessary and serve it outdoors in a dark area.

13. This might be a good time to switch to tequila.

How to Survive If You Are Lost in a Forest and Night Is Falling

1. Always remember that the most important rule of wilderness survival is:
Do not panic.

2. Granted, there are probably dangerous wild carnivorous animals lurking nearby.

3. Wolverines, for example.

4. According to Wikipedia, “The wolverine has a reputation for ferocity and strength out of proportion to its size, with the documented ability to kill prey many times larger than itself.”

5. And do not get Wikipedia started on the question of venomous snakes.

6. But you
must not panic
.

7. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GET A GRIP ON YOURSELF.