One of Calgary’s gentleman confesses the story behind his suit.
“This man is dedicated to his career and doing him things every day; he is the envy of all his married male comrades. His married counterparts live vicariously through his tales of yacht week and “this one time at the after party….”
Across our Great Plains live a variety of modern men looking to thrive in today’s complicated world. I couldn’t possibly feature all of these genres in one post, so I’ll give you two.
To start, you have the assembled cookie cutter early husband. His hobbies include golf and the two weekends a year he spends avoiding his young family. These weekends are of course spent on golf excursions and entertaining the finest taverns British Colombia has to offer. He wears jeans from wherever the hell his wife bought them (Old Navy) and he stopped giving a shit about new music eight years ago. Please ask him about Macklemore, he won’t know.
He is noble and views his life as a sacrifice to the greater good of humanity, for you see this man is our future. It is his role in society to raise self-sufficient clones of himself, so that they may also wallow in the self-loathing cycle that is sweatpants and Netflix. The circle of life is beautiful. However he does get to escape for forty-five hours a week to his office dwelling. This mundane sanctuary provides a venue for the most primitive needs of all cookie cutters; fantasy hockey and discussions about the weather. I wish there was more I need say to describe the life of this man, but you have already provided yourself an impressively accurate mental image of his life. You know every aspect of this man’s interests and lifestyle, no further detail is required.
On the opposite end of the spectrum we have the Stone-Heart. The triumph of egotistical modern male ingenuity, this man has watched every episode of Californication and Mad Men. He did not watch these episodes and see entertainment, but rather he saw options. He sat up from his unnecessarily brown lazy boy and said, “I want to live and behave like these fictional characters, every day, for the rest of my life”. This man is dedicated to his career and doing him things every day; he is the envy of all his married male comrades. His married counterparts live vicariously through his tales of yacht week and “this one time at the after party….”
He is fashionable and most notably completely sterilized of any emotional capability. He had a cardiac vasectomy immunizing him from any level of human attachment. He also had an actual vasectomy. Given that he already loves himself, he is repulsed by the thought of external love. It is after all completely unnecessary. The extent of his romantic life includes wining and dining women of whom he has no legitimate interest. He is Ryan Gosling in the opening hour of Crazy, Stupid Love. This is no coincidence, because he literally watched the opening hour of the movie and decided he must live the role of Ryan Gosling. He did not however finish the entire movie given that Thursdays are leg day and he was quite tired.
There is however an Achilles heel to our beloved brotagonist (who you won’t be able to change). For inside this man is a broken soul. It could have been two years ago, maybe even a decade ago, but somewhere along the line a woman absolutely crushed him. This tragedy conjured up the curse, turning the man’s heart to stone, he will never feel, and so he will never hurt. The Stone-Heart is a walking defense mechanism, unwilling to permit anyone passed his cold impenetrable well-tanned rib cage. It is his curse to walk the earth giving refuge to the attention of women he himself can never love.
Well groomed, 10% body fat and broken.
By Mark Renton
