You spend enough time at the bottom, down here in the quiet, beautiful, and completely honest shithole of the world, and you start to see things. You talk to the men who’ve fallen through the cracks. The homeless guys freezing on a park bench, the cons doing their slow waltz in the prison yard, the old bastards rocking back and forth on some leaky houseboat on the Willamette, living off a social security check that wouldn’t buy a decent whore for an hour.
And you listen. You really listen, past the booze and the bullshit and the quiet, simmering rage at the system that chewed them up and spit them out. And you hear something strange.
Yeah, they’re angry. They’re frustrated. They hate the machine that ground them down. They hate the family members who threw them away like a piece of used Kleenex, the kids who look at them with a quiet, polite, and completely devastating contempt. “Oh, that’s just Dad being Dad.”
But underneath all that beautiful, ugly, and completely righteous anger, there’s something else. A quiet, strange, and almost peaceful kind of contentment.
They’re alone. And they’re okay with it.
They don’t want your government check, not really. They don’t want your Jesus, your salvation, your quiet, respectable pity. They don’t want a handout. What they want, what they crave, is just to be left the hell alone.
I saw it in my step-dad, Jimmer. A good man. A quiet man. He’d spend time with a woman, sure. But live with one? Christ, no. He wanted his alone time. He liked his quiet. He wanted to wear the pajamas he wanted to wear, sleep on the goddamn floor if he felt like it, without having to explain himself, without having to compromise a single goddamn inch of his own quiet, beautiful, and completely fucked-up little kingdom. Was he lonely? Maybe. But he wasn’t alone in the way the world tells you is a sickness. He was just… free.
And you see it in the homeless guys. They’re not looking for a family reunion. They’re just looking for a quiet corner where the cops won’t hassle them, where they can drink their cheap wine in peace. They’re angry at the system, sure. But they’re happy to be alone.
And you have to ask yourself, why? Why are there so many goddamn men washed up on this particular shore? You don’t see armies of homeless women. No. Society, that beautiful, hypocritical bitch, she takes care of her own. She’s got shelters, and programs, and a whole goddamn safety net woven out of guilt and good intentions for the fairer sex. But the men? Fuck ’em. Let ’em freeze.
Is it just that men are tougher? Or is there something deeper? A quiet, buried, and completely honest desire in the male soul for… solitude? A need to be the lone wolf, the cowboy riding off into the goddamn sunset, away from the fences and the noise and the quiet, suffocating comfort of the herd?
Most men, they don’t get to answer that question. They get caught in the grinder. The beautiful, efficient, and completely soul-crushing machinery of the American Dream. The job, the mortgage, the wife, the kids, the whole goddamn package deal. And once your foot gets stuck in that thing, once you’ve got the house and the car payment and the quiet, simmering resentment of a woman who expects you to be a provider and a poet and a goddamn mind-reader all at the same time, it’s hard to leave. You can’t just cut off your own goddamn leg. Not easily, anyway.
So they stay. They become the quiet, respectable, and completely castrated ghosts you see shuffling through the grocery store on a Saturday afternoon. They’ve been domesticated. Tamed. Like those fleas in the Mason jar. They used to be wild, beautiful things, capable of jumping clean out of the whole goddamn system. But they hit the lid a few too many times, and now they just… stop jumping. They forget they even could. They accept the boundaries of the cage, even when the door is wide open.
And me? I enjoy being alone. I like the quiet. I like the freedom. I’ve got a woman coming over on Friday, and yeah, I’ll be happy to see her. But I’ll be even happier to see her leave on Saturday. That woman I had living with me in Scottsdale, the one who paid her rent in quiet, beautiful, and completely exhausting sexual currency? It was fun for a while. But having someone there, all the time, needing things, wanting things, having goddamn expectations… it drained me. And the second she started to act like she had some kind of authority, the second she started trying to put a lid on my jar? I pushed her away.
Maybe it’s the cowboy in me. The ghost of that old, beautiful, and completely bullshit American myth. The man who herds the cattle for months, alone under a big, empty sky, and then rides into town for one night of whiskey, women, and a quiet, honest fistfight. He doesn’t bring the saloon girl home to meet his mother. He doesn’t ask her to help him pick out curtains. He just takes what he needs, pays his tab, and rides back out into the goddamn silence.
This new thing, this modern American sickness of needing your wife to be your best friend, your therapist, your goddamn soulmate? This quiet, creeping codependency? It dissolves the very essence of a man. It turns a wolf into a lapdog. It makes you weak.
And when the system finally turns on you, when the job disappears, when the wife leaves, when the whole goddamn, beautiful, fraudulent machine starts to twist and grind, you’ve forgotten how to fight. You’re just a domesticated animal, standing there in the middle of the road, waiting for the headlights.
So here’s the final, beautiful, ugly, and completely honest piece of wisdom from your drunken guru.
Know the difference between a pet and a wild animal.
The system, the job, the woman, the whole goddamn beautiful illusion around you… it might look like a pet. It might lick your hand. It might keep you warm at night. But it’s a Rottweiler. And eventually, all Rottweilers bite.
And when it bites you, leave. Don’t give it a second chance. Don’t try to train it. Don’t apologize for pissing it off. You put the goddamn dog down, or you walk away, and you don’t look back.
Keep your eye out. Don’t get caught in the grinder.
Because once you’re in, once you let them put that lid on your jar, the only way out is usually in a goddamn box.
