ATOMIC DOG

Alex wanted to drop kick his baby boy down the hall.

Sure, give it a thundering Adam Vinatieri kick and send it through the two I.V. stands at the end of the hall for three points.

He knew he was supposed to feel elated and be brimming over with pabulum-warm love for his newborn son, hold him up in the air for the world to see, just like in The Lion King. At least that's what everybody told him he'd feel, but all he felt was anger and revulsion.

The anger came from...well, he didn't exactly understand where the anger came from, but the revulsion? That was a visceral reaction to the horrific thoughts that were tearing through his skull.

What kind of monster hates his kid? What kind of monster wants to hurt his child?

But all he could think about was what having a son meant to the life he'd known, the life he'd loved. Gone were the uninterrupted nights of sleep. Gone was riding his Harley whenever he felt like it. Gone was any hope of uninterrupted fucking, not that he'd feel much like fucking her anyhow, not with all the baby puke in her hair and the baby shit underneath her fingernails.

Jebus!

And he'd have to wear one of those stupid mock Arapahoe-Indian child-toting vests, the ones where you wear the brat in front, close to your breast in lobster bib fashion so he's comforted by your beating heart and your cloying hands.

Good luck, kid, because the way you feel right now, the heart you hear is going to be beating like the White Stripes chick banging out Icky Thump and your fragile, blossoming nervous system will be permanently swizzle sticked by a couple of methamphetamine-fueled flailing drumsticks so that you'll still be pooping your drawers when you're thirty.

Maybe wifey would let you get away with carrying the kid in a conventional backpack. That way, you could, one fine day in the very near future, claim to have heard an oncoming wayward bus driven by Sandra Bullock, spun around suddenly and oops, decapitated junior's head on the sharp edge of a stop sign.

Better practice some clichés in preparation for that day:

"He's in a better place now, hon."

"As long as we remember him, he's not really dead...."

Ha! Beautiful!

Your Small, Warty Schlong

You might be happy to hear that Alex didn't drop kick his kid down the hall or clang his soft-boiled egg of a head into a stop sign. Neither did Alex bolt and take the next plane to Venezuela. He stuck it out and, more quickly than he thought possible, grew to really love the whore spawn.

What Alex didn't realize back then was that his anger was probably the result of fear of another door closing in his life. He knew things would never be the same and that terrified him. He was also clearly afraid of not loving his kid enough, or at all, which meant, by definition, that he couldn't be a good father.

Too bad Alex didn't have anyone to talk to about his feelings. Too bad he didn't know that there are lots of guys that felt/feel the same way.

Maybe if some of these guys had talked it out, there wouldn't be as many angry, fatherless kids punching holes in the drywall and terrorizing mommy.

And what about the guys who are having, shudder, "relationship" problems? Who the fuck do they talk to?

Who'll tell you the reason she's leaving you is probably that you never gave her the attention, energy, and caring she needed, let alone talk to the bitch, so she left you?

Oh yeah, oh yeah, you gave her so much, put a roof over her head, gave her food, let her know when her shoelace was untied, let her enjoy your small, warty schlong, but the ungrateful bitch left you!

Well Schnidely, who'll tell you that you did the same thing for the dog (except the part about the untied shoelaces and maybe the warty schlong)?

Who the fuck will tell these guys that it's natural for their wife or squeeze to want to be with someone who at least appears to be interested in them and that has at least a glimmer of what it takes to give, share, and grow?

Probably no one. That's why there are so many clueless single guys walking around, making sweet, sweet love to screensavers of Emily Scott and wads of toilet paper every night.

Maybe it's your woman's fault that you're having relationship problems but you can't figure out what to do or whether you can even trust your muddled feelings.

Who'll tell you that it's easy to figure out if you're supposed to be together?

Yeah, you love her—love is all, like a horse in a stall—but that's not enough. Just ask yourself, "Hey, self, do I respect, admire, and appreciate her—not just her tits, but the whole package?"

If the answer to those questions is no, leave. Go to Venezuela.

Who'll help you out when you're trying to figure out when you should marry her?

Who'll ask you if you have similar goals and purposes? For instance, if you want to devote your life to staying home and being the best damn florist on the Upper East Side, specializing in tropicals, and she wants to spend her life exploring dry desert basins, it ain't going to work. Maybe you can set up a florist shop in Venezuela.

But if Alex, or any poor male slob suffering from some emotional conundrum had tits and a hoo-hah, he'd have been emotionally covered as there all kinds of forums, books, mags, blogs, and therapy groups for hoo-hah bearing people to help them out.

Okay, sure, there are therapy groups for guys with prostate problems or erectile problems or hair loss and probably even tooth grinding, but those are largely physical problems and not mental or emotional problems.

Women? Sheee-it, they've got resources for every psychological tic from cheese addiction to fear of testicles.

Not so much with men, but that's partly because men haven't been trained to talk about shit, let alone how they might feel about something. It's as if part of that crumbling mass of nucleotide sequences known as the Y chromosome carries a trait for alexithymia, which is a condition characterized by an inability to describe feelings in words.

What about the stoic tough guys idolized by guys like mob boss Tony Soprano?

"Whatever happened to Gary Cooper—the strong silent type? That was an American. He wasn't in touch with his feelings—he just did what he had to do."

Maybe Cooper, or at least Cooper's character, was the "strong, silent type" because men, then and now, weren't trained to talk about shit other than cars (horses), sports, and women. Hell, maybe Cooper had alexithymia.

The trouble with the notion that the strong, silent type is more advanced is a canard. The truth is, a lot of these sumbitches are often the least emotionally developed, having subjugated every human emotion for anger, which is the only emotion "real men" are allowed to show.

Sure, these strong silent types, or at least the fictionalized version of them (think Colonel Quaritch from Avatar) appeal to my masculinity meter, but experiential evidence shows me that a lot of these guys never advanced beyond being little boys; they just learned to hide it better, or made the very minor transition from pouting, kicking, and screaming to bellowing, hitting, and busting up stuff.

Of course, discharging anger in some way, or at least discussing it, is better than suppressing all your emotions. It's hard to imagine that not discharging negative emotions over a long time wouldn't make a man depressed, or prone to a whole slough of other mental and physical problems.

"Junior, Time to Loofah Mommy's Back!"

I'm somewhat loath to admit this, but I tried putting together a men's group.

Before you conjure up images of a bunch of guys crying about their inability to love or blaming their inability to achieve an erection without fantasizing about Betty White on those times when mommy would call them into the bath to loofah her naked back when they were little boys, it was nothing like that at all. Well, not much like that.

My motivation was pure:

I was tired of friendships that consisted of discussions that aren't about shit. I want to explore human nature, buddy, and the only way I'm going to learn anything significant about you is if you tell me a story, open up a bit. If someone in your family croaks, don't tell me that person's "in a better place," tell me what you're fucking feeling and it's gotta consist of more than "bummed out."

If you lost your job, I want to know what's going on in that unemployed noggin of yours and it's gotta consist of more than "it's a drag."

If your boss is on your ass and you want to kill the miserable fuck, tell me about it.

Of course, I might tell you that an adult, instead of blaming his problems on his boss, wife, parents, or the Big Dawg in the sky, takes responsibility for every need, want, pain, failure, and success. Oh, and look not to guys like Mark McGwire, John Edwards, and Jayson Williams, who took some measure of responsibility for their actions, but anywhere from two to eight years after the crime.

Maybe you wouldn't want to hear that kind of advice. Tough. That's the kind of stuff that might actually help you.

Moreover, I was tired of dealing day after day with people whose opinions were formed and set eons ago with about as much chance of changing or growing as a petunia seed stuck underneath a giant stone Buddha's ass.

Man, when you have an opinion or belief about anything, thinking is dead.

So I invited a group of friends, all successful business owners, to join me in a series of private classes with an instructor who's a guru in mental and emotional development acting as mediator. I had hoped they'd get something out of the group sessions. Moreover, I thought that the sessions would make us better friends.

What a colossal clusterfuck.

All of these guys have made appreciable amounts of money, so they thought that fact alone qualified them as experts on life.

In truth, they'd been taught by culture, their parents, and their peers, to care about security, approval, and entertainment, and most didn't give a shit about acquiring any understanding about themselves, or life, or living in general.

I'd overheard one of them mention to a customer that watching the Mickey Rourke movie, The Wrestler, hit a "little too close to home." He meant that, much like Randy the Ram, he came home to the equivalent of a trailer home, having nothing to do except play a woefully archaic Nintendo platform and nobody to play it with except a neighbor kid who's all to aware of how lame the Nintendo game is.

However, when confronted by the group, he claimed that his life was "perfect."

Another had let slip to me that his wife was divorcing him, but when asked about his life by the group, claimed that everything was "perfect."

And so it went, almost to a man, an apparent onset of mass situational alexithymia.

In retrospect, I think it was too late for any of them to change.

Too bad.

I like (and try to live) most of the old notions about manhood, but this strong, silent type thing has to go. It hasn't worked.

Emotional crap is just another engineering problem, albeit a human engineering problem. Sometimes you need to consult other experts, or at least people who can get you to look at the problem differently. Otherwise the machine breaks down.