be a man

as i type this, my fingers are stained with motor oil, car grease and whatever else my pickup has picked up on it's undercarriage for the past 15 years. i washed my hands for 20 minutes yesterday and the stuff just won't come off. it's under my finger nails and entrenched in the recesses of my dry skin, and i love it.

for the past three weekends the captain (captain carl - my father-in-law) and i have been tediously and meticulously attempting to replace the clutch in my 1993 chevy S-10 pickup. the labor costs at a shop were in excess of $300 so we decided to do it ourselves. with haste and optimism, i ran down to the library, picked up a copy of chilton's and got to work.

keep in mind the following factors: (A) it's been bitterly cold here in the NKY. we have not seen a day above 39 degrees to do this work. last weekend, there was ice on the ground and eventually snow coming down from above, but we worked all the same. (B) we don't really know what we are doing. sure, carl has done some work on cars in his lifetime, but we're pretty much just loosening bolts and putting stuff where we think it should go. (C) carl has a lot of tools (the sign of a real man) but we don't have all the right tools. for instance, the truck itself is jacked up on some janky structures, and each step of the way, when we can't get a bolt to come undone, or when we're not sure how to fasten some piece of metal to another, we just find a tool, whether it be a lead pipe or a chisel, to make it work (for instance, we used a saws-all to cut through a bolt that we couldn't get off of the barrel housing (that's right, i just dropped a mechanical term on you... deal with it) and took part of the frame with it. NBD). and (D) there is a terrifying prospect that we have done something (or many things) wrong and this will all be one giant headache that gets us nowhere.

why do i share all of this information with you (other than to illicit your sympathy)? because i feel like a man. at the end of every day that we work on this piece of junk, i come into the house covered in grease, with my fingers falling off from near-frostbite, and my back and arms sore and tired and i couldn't be happier about it. my clothes are ruined and my eyes have specs of metal and crud in them and i feel like a million bucks.

i grew up in the country. growing up, my weekends consisted of chopping and stacking firewood, mowing the lawn, filling pot holes on our gravel road, trimming goats' hooves, painting fences, making and setting aflame large brush piles, and various other manual labor projects.

then i moved to southern california and lost all ties to my masculinity. no longer did i have need for work boots or gloves. no longer did i toil under the midday sun. i spent my time at the beach and studying systematic theologies. i began to care about my appearance and spent my money on fancy clothes and took time to make my hair look good. i don't regret any of this, but i forgot what it was to be a hard-working man.

well it's all coming back to me now. i now understand how a manual clutch works on a motor vehicle. i can point to a variety of pieces of metal in a car and tell you what they are, and perhaps what they do. each day as i place my body underneath a ton of rusted metal, and pray to God that the thing doesn't collapse on me and sever my lower half from my torso (a distinct possibility if you could see the way we have the truck jacked up. heidi is continually terrified that i will actually die as a result of being crushed by this truck), i am vindicated by a return to the value of hard work.

so if the reader would take heed of some simple advice, get to work. build something, destroy something... just because it's a blast to swing a sledge hammer. change your oil of your car or lubricate the chain on your 10-speed bike. pile up a bunch of junk, douse it with gasoline and watch it burn. drink russian imperial stout and smoke a cigar (i hate cigars, but according to my friend kenny, that is what makes a man). take some pieces of wood, a hammer and some nails and just start swinging the hammer. make sure you allow the head of the hammer to demolish your thumb and while you scream every explicative you have ever heard or conceived, smile wide, knowing that you are a man. and that's the best thing you could be (unless you are a woman, in which case i will refrain from making any comments here because i know that i already will get torn apart by the two female readers of this entry).

i am a man. and you're welcome.