How did we get into this mess?

The Column: 12.14.23

The ice hasn’t yet frozen solid on the lakes of Minnesota due to a warm November and the ice-fishing shacks are waiting to be towed out on the ice so men can sit in them and pretend to fish. Their real purpose is to get away from women so they can speak frankly and express improprieties that, on shore, would get them citations from the Woke P.D.

Women don’t go ice-fishing because where would they pee? Men do it on the ice, just as fish pee in the lake and deer in the underbrush. Women scorn this sort of behavior (“Where were you brought up? In a barn?”) and women’s scorn is powerful, a man shrinks in the face of it. Even I do. I feel small just mentioning it.

I’ve told jokes that made men laugh heartily and women sniff and roll their eyes. (“Taylor Swift leads her family on a tour of the stables at her mansion when suddenly a thoroughbred lets a tremendous fart. She says, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. A thousand pardons,’ and her uncle says, ‘That’s all right. As a matter of fact, I thought it was the horse.’”) The women groan and look away and I switch to a different subject, urban zoning, diversity, the Book of Ezekiel.

Men need a space of our own, a garage, a shop in the basement, a shack on a frozen lake, some place where no woman will walk in and say, “How can you stand to sit here in the midst of all this stuff?” We can stand it because we are free spirits, we don’t obsess about straight lines and alphabetical order.

(I used to sit around with men in a saloon but I quit ages ago because the talk was about sports and I think football is inhumane and basketball meaningless and who needs to hang around with people fascinated by meaninglessness and in the end I quit drinking, which made me appreciate baseball and hockey more.)

My space is a desk at the far end of the DR. No walls around the desk but I’ve made it as shacky as I can and due to my poor peripheral vision it feels private but when my beloved walks through the DR on her way from the K to the LR, I can hear her eyes roll. She thinks, “How can he accomplish anything sitting in the midst of heaps of papers?” But I don’t feel that writing needs to accomplish anything, it’s a basic function like seeing or hearing.

I’m a northern person, I need winter. Adversity makes me cheerful, ease and pleasure make me uneasy. Winter keeps me indoors, which is where most good writing occurs. And proximity to chaos stimulates production of sentences that read from left to right, like this one.

Young men are different. They were brought up by feminist mothers and learned to live on women’s terms and speak sensitively and maintain the appearance of neatness. They don’t require personal space, they are socialized and merge well with others. I’m from an earlier era when we worshipped women as angels and goddesses, our superiors in all the ways that matter, and why superiors would settle for equality was beyond me. Why would a smart woman like Hillary want to be president and live in the swamp with the porcupines? So we elected a goofball doofus who would provide us steady amusement. He has been wildly outrageous longer than Joey Ramone or Johnny Rotten or the Sex Pistols. He has given most of the country the luxury of despising him, a great privilege in a democracy, to look down on the powerful.

He has done this by doing guy talk in public that formerly was limited to the barroom or the fishing shack. He stands in front of big crowds, as the press watches in amazement, and he talks just like your old uncle Sid who was the embarrassment of the family, and people eat it up, buckets of it.

I went ice-fishing a few times with a friend’s uncle and his pals and the friend and I didn’t say a word as the old guys ripped into the government, schools, the young, the newspapers, doctors, lawyers, wives, authorities of all sorts. It was freedom of speech on hallucinogens. Nobody caught a fish and it didn’t matter. It was impressive. I never went back. Now I don’t need to, I just listen to Whatsisname.

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