𝘞𝘪𝘭𝘥 𝘢𝘵 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵 lousy at describing men.

God created men differently from women, true. But he didn’t create all men exactly the same as one another.

Every once in a while I come across a book so annoying I just have throw it across the room. But I can’t do that with library books… nor books that belong to other people. Actually, I think the last book of mine that I pitched in this way was Left Behind—yes, I do actually own the bloody thing; it was on sale, okay?

I couldn’t pitch Wild at Heart because it belonged to my brother. (That, or he was borrowing it.) We were vacationing in Lake Tahoe at the time, and I had an hour to kill, so I picked up his copy and started reading.

John Eldredge, the writer, has the premise that God created men differently than he created women. (Duh.) The main difference, Eldredge believes, is that men are meant to be wild, free, and adventurous. He didn’t necessarily put it this way, but we men are to be hunter-gatherer camping and hiking types, and occasionally Mel Gibson-like warriors from Braveheart. The reason we aren’t is because… well, it’s not because of the women (because Eldredge doesn’t want to alienate women; they might buy his book for the men in their lives). Not because of the conservative women, anyway. Liberal women, maybe.

What makes a person become a man? On the most basic level, it’s a Y chromosome instead of an X chromosome. That’s all. This garbage about what makes a “real” man is subtle toxic masculinity as a marketing ploy; it gets guys who imagine themselves macho to buy more books, and maybe more camping gear.

• “Real” men are supposed to be adventurous? Buddy, everyone is supposed to be adventurous.
• “Real” men are supposed to pursue the desires of their heart? Depends on the desires—if they’re good, yeah; if they’re sick, no.
• “Real” men are supposed to camp and hike and eat meat? Only if they enjoy it. Otherwise there’s something to be said for electricity, indoor plumbing, comfortable mattresses, and unclogged arteries.

Anyway, it was so much ridiculousness that I had to at least put the book down and announce loudly that it was crap.

My brother-in-law didn’t agree. He likes the book, actually; something about it resonates with him. Okay, I can see how it would resonate with lots of people. But it certainly didn’t resonate with me. I am not a nature freak. I like to look at nature—from the comfort of my tent. I’m not fond of hiking around in it and shooting at things in it. I like civilization. Men built civilization, you know.

As to the desires of my heart… well, that’s why I’m back in school.

By and large, men who feel like they’ve been too domesticated really like reading books about how they should throw off said domestication and become the “real” men they were meant to be. There was that men’s movement thing in the early ’90s; there was the Promise Keepers movement in the mid ’90s (and it’s trying to come back, it seems), and now there’s Eldredge’s book.

Look, if a man feels like there’s something amiss in his life, he should stop blaming other people and look at what he’s doing. Is he not being true to himself? Well, he should first figure out whether that’s a good thing—secretly wanting to be a pop star is one thing; secretly wanting to be a porn star is another—then do something about it. Forget blaming women, or society, or bad parenting, or illegal immigrants—if you’ve created a less than satisfactory life for yourself, you have no one but yourself to blame. If you’re not living up to your potential, it’s your own bloody fault. Do something about it. If it takes Eldredge’s book to spur you on, fine. But I can’t recommend it.

What the [bleep] do these people know?

Seriously though: What the bleep?

I finally finished watching What the [Bleep] Do We Know? which is a bizarre little movie.

It’s a documentary, but half of it consists of Marlee Matlin as a manic-depressive photographer. Her unhappy life is occasionally interrupted by philosophers commenting about what the universe consists of and how that affects us. A lot of their statements sound like profundity. Only a lot of the things they say are self-negating statements—like, “I don’t know how to define God, but I have a real sense that he exists.” (So how do you know if you can't define him?) Or, “There is no good and bad; there’s only things that cause us to evolve and things that don’t.” (Which implies evolution is good… yet there’s no such thing as good?)

The philosophers begin with quantum physics. (Many of them claim to actually be quantum physicists.) They are rather fascinated by it, and what it means when we look at how it affects the structure of the universe. Except—and here's their biggest problem—the universe we live in doesn’t work that way.

Our universe is made of matter, and physics analyzes the way that matter interacts. When we deal with things other than matter—namely the quantum particles, i.e. quanta, which matter is made of—we’re no longer dealing with matter. We’re dealing with quanta. Quanta doesn’t follow the same rules as matter, because it’s not matter. So we have a new, largely theoretical science—quantum physics—that studies the way quanta behaves and interacts. And while that’s neat (and a little bizarre) we don't live in a quantum universe. We live in a physical one.

No, it actually doesn’t matter that matter is made of quanta. The only quanta we ever have to deal with is light, electrons, and the neutrinos which harmlessly pass right through us. (And in the physical universe, these particular quanta function predictably by the rules of regular physics). To say that our experiences are based on quantum mechanics is like saying that human behavior is dictated by the proteins produced by our cells.

Which, amusingly, the movie then attempts to prove.

Their conclusions are that we create our own universe based on our personal perceptions of reality. But they don’t mean it in a subjective way, like I do; they mean it in an objective way. Things might literally cease to exist—not just cease to exist from my perspective—when we stop looking at them. Why? Because it’s how quantum physics supposedly works.

It’s a lot like saying that white blood cells kill bacteria… so this is why humans commit murder.

In the end, Matlin’s character chooses to love herself… and chuck her meds. (Apparently she hit the manic part of her manic-depressive cycle, when most bipolar people choose go off their medication because they figure they’re “happy,” and therefore “cured.”)

And in the end, the talking heads’ names are given—and their actual credentials. One of ’em happens to be a 35,000-year-old spirit from Atlantis channeled by a medium. And they’re not talking about their field of expertise. They’re just manipulating the data to fit their theology. Christians (like “creation scientists”) pull this crap all the time. The only difference between one and the other is that this movie is produced by New Agers.

What the bleep do they know? They admit they don’t know very much at all. But that won’t stop them from coming to conclusions, given with absolute certainty, about how we should therefore live our lives.

Ignoring the Emmys.

Last night I watched 60 Minutes and The Simpsons, as usual, and was interrupted regularly by footballaters who wanted to know the scores, and why on earth a red-blooded American male would not be watching one of the several games played that Sunday. You want to know the freakin’ score? Get on the internet. The TV takes too long.

While the men were focused on football, the women were focused on the Emmys. This is not because anyone actually watches the shows that were nominated; who has time? Mainly it’s for the fashions, to make fun of who wore what. I didn’t watch any of it. After The Simpsons I watched a few minutes of The Mummy Returns, then decided I had more than enough TV for one evening. Even though Shaft was on later. (Shaft’s a bad mothershutyourmouth.)

I have no patience for award shows. All of them take too long, and all we really want to know is who won. If we even want to know that. I don’t care who won so much as I care about whether the shows I like are going to stay on the air, and winning awards doesn’t necessarily help or hurt a show’s ratings. And the award shows usually pre-empt the halfway decent shows that are usually on in that time slot; but fortunately this year the Emmys show was on CBS, and only pre-empted another godawful made-for-TV movie, featuring Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen playing married actors who so desperately want to work together that they’ll make godawful made-for-TV movies.

I have no patience for the fashions either. Much too much is made of the fortysomething actresses who are—let’s be honest—actresses, and are too busy acting to know jack squat about fashion. Yet the people who clothe them convince them to push their boobs together, squeeze into unflattering, untelegenic outfits that don’t match their skin tones, yet the designers are convinced that they’re “daring” enough to get the actresses (and thus the designers) noticed; get their hair coifed into something that no sane human being would want to wear since the fall of the French Monarchy; and look like this throughout a widely televised and photographed ceremony. And, as a result, Joan Rivers continues to have a career bad-mouthing the stupid, when she should have been lobotomized during her last facelift.

And then there are the useless shows, which are popularity contests where you vote for your favorite. There are several of them—some even produced by Dick Clark—and while the MTV awards are still the most amusing, they’re still extremely useless. But the celebrities gotta show up for them or they’ll look like self-centered bastards; and to put these pseudo-awards on your resumé makes you look even more pathetic (“Winner, Teen Choice award for ‘Most Bootylicious,’ 2003, 2004”); and even though the shows’ ratings sometimes suck they get enough viewers to break even.

As you can tell, I really don’t like award shows.

But I did enjoy my own awards. Back at Sac State the staff members would have an end-of-the-semester award presentation, where the editors would award their staff for best article, best editorial work, etc. I had a staff of seven, but I didn’t see any of them as standouts, so I replaced the usual stupid awards with the “Dementia Awards.” These were not traditional categories; these were awards for “Biggest whiner,” “Scariest look when unshowered,” “Most reckless driver,” “Biggest pothead,” and so forth. These were all inside jokes, so they were more appreciated than the knock-off versions created by other editors in the following semesters.

I actually had one guy complain when he didn’t win the “Biggest pothead” award, though. True, he was a pretty big stoner, but the winner traded his entire summer job earnings for three Hefty leaf bags full of weed. He’s now a college professor, of all things.

Those awards were fun. The others are just obnoxious.

Having read 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘢 𝘝𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘪 𝘊𝘰𝘥𝘦...

I hang around with too many literary types. They read pop fiction, then want to know my take on it, and I have to gripe at them that I tend to read history and philosophy and don't have time for pop fiction… and then it leaks out that I just read Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, whereupon they exclaim, “Aha! You do read fiction!“ and then I have to explain the difference between classical and pop, and… sometimes it’s just easier to read the bloody pop.

Fine. Have it your way. I blew four hours of my life reading The Da Vinci Code. Are you happy now?

Unfortunately, when one reads a book of this type, and one happens to also be a Christian, the inevitable is gonna come up: “What’d you think of the premise?”

The premise is that a Harvard professor and a French cryptologist have to solve a murder mystery, which at the same time is wrapped up in the secret of where the Holy Grail is hidden. Yet the Grail, according to the book, is not a cup. “Holy Grail” is a mistranslation of “Holy Blood,” so the Grail is actually written records proving that Jesus has direct descendants, through his wife Mary Magdalene, that exist to this day, descended through the Merovingian kings of France, hidden by the Knights Templar. Supposedly both the book’s murder victim and Leonardo da Vinci were grand masters of an organization holding the Catholic Church hostage with this secret; and now the Church wants it destroyed. And if I say much more I’ll ruin the ending.

A lot of this Jesus/Mary love child stuff can be found in Holy Blood Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, (which I’ve read; which is stupid) and there’s no end to the speculation about what secrets the Templars discovered in Jerusalem during the Crusades. Conspiracy theories about the Templars go way back. This is nothing I haven’t heard before. The only difference between then and now is that the theories are in a popular novel.

There were conspiracy theorists about the Kennedy assassination long before Oliver Stone’s JFK came out; the movie just gave them credibility because it was so well-made. Same deal with The Da Vinci Code. It’s actually a pretty good book. So people might read the book and start taking them seriously, just as people started believing Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy after JFK came out. People don’t bother to sift through the evidence as to what is fact and what is fiction after they see it in pop fiction. They just enjoy the fiction… and in order to enjoy the fiction, they suspend disbelief… and after the fiction’s over, they’ve suspended disbelief just long enough to actually accept the fictional conspiracy theory as plausible.