Tuesday, April 03, 2007
The Guy Trap
I think Dave Barry is beginning to get to me. As you may have noticed, some of my recent posts - not least the last - have been distinctly guyish. The guy is the hapless, helpless hero of much of what Barry writes. This is a particular fine example. The linked video is a gem - 'Powers was lucky - he had broken his back...' Jumping the St Lawrence in a yellow Lincoln Continental travelling at 280mph (pulling, so the commentary says, 30Gs!) was a pointless, mad, dangerous stunt, but, as Barry's headline says, 'A guy has to do what a guy has to do', and Kenny Powers did seem to get the blonde chick of his dreams. But what is a guy? In these terms, he is a fairly pathetic but vaguely heroic post-feminist figure, a man who has to do what he has to do while knowing that women are altogether more serious creatures. A guy, above all else, gets on with other guys. He is not deliberately destructive like the lad and he is certainly not a lout. Indeed, his guyish stunts can actually be creative, though always with the footnote that they are quite pointless. But the truth is that a guy is lost in a wilderness of his own making; he knows not who he is nor what he is for. My Barryesque transformation is beginning to trouble me.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Sir, I am not convinced that a "guy" would worry about being a "guy". In which case, you are not one. This, I think, is a cause for celebration, followed by immediate self-examination, recrimination, and guilt. Anything else is decadence.
ReplyDeleteSir, I am not convinced that a "guy" would worry about being a "guy". In which case, you are not one. This, I think, is a cause for celebration, followed by immediate self-examination, recrimination, and guilt. Anything else is decadence. Or an episode of "Top Gear".
ReplyDeleteWhisper it softly...but one of the greatest guys I ever knew was popular, blokey, and was nearly a rocket scientist/astronomer, but gave it up for an English degree because there were more women on it.
ReplyDeleteGuys + brains = girls worshipping them.
Although it is probably quite guyish to make an overnight decision to stop wearing jeans (and therefore avoid the trap of bloke-ism), the fact that you are so self-conscious about which category you might be in probably excludes you from actually being in any of them.
ReplyDeleteI dunno Brit; it might suggest intellectual undergoing the infections of herd poisoning and becoming aware of the dangerous infection. Chip's description of the blog may have been very apposite but a kind of chronicler of an insane/inane age is not something devoid of danger to the soul. A little further down the wilderness of one's own or God alone knows who's making and the alarm bells of self-awareness might become a distant echo. Careful, Bryan; time for thoughts on Andrei Rublev perchance.
ReplyDeleteDon't worry, Byran. Your books, blog and journalistic output all point to someone who has the breadth of view and the depth of intellect to avoid the dumdum bullets of contemporary categorisation. As someone once said, mature manhood means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play. I like that. It seems apt in your case.
ReplyDeleteA brilliantly consoling thought, Neil. And I guess you're right, Brit. I think it's the blog that has created this new self-consciousness.
ReplyDeleteAah! But do you piss in the sink?
ReplyDelete