Practice humility. Practicing
humility isn’t just for the sake of the sons of bitches around you;
it’s for your benefit, too. You might be the most confident,
overbearing punk on the planet but sooner or later this thing we call
life is going to bite you on your proud ass. I was standing in line for
a cup of coffee the other day behind this tough looking guy in his
middle to late fifties and his stammer was so bad that he couldn’t make
his order clear. Compared to him, Porky Pig is a gifted orator. But the
strange thing was that the stutterer was so embarrassed he had to leave
the coffee shop. You’d think that a man of that age had at some point
come to grips with his stutter, but not this guy. He came
back a few minutes later, though, and began speaking to the owner of
the shop in barely audible tones. The shopkeeper later told me that for
some reason the guy was able to speak without much of a stammer if he
whispered. What the stutterer had explained was the he was a former
Lieutenant Colonel in the Marines who’d recently come back from Iraq
where he’d been bit in the hand by a poisonous snake. The venom had
damaged his nervous system and affected his speech so that he now has a
machinegun-like stammer. He was otherwise unaffected. As
such, this once proud man, a leader of men, had suffered a severe blow
to his self-esteem. Whereas his voice had once inspired and commanded,
it was now an object of pity and derision. The previous
example is of course rather benign when you compare it to all the other
problems that can befall a person. Any new day can bring disease,
injury, or disability and no one is immune. As such, try to remember
that your shit doesn’t stink any less than anyone else’s and act like
it. The only people who deserve to act cocky are those that have won
both a gold medal in the Olympics AND a Nobel Prize and at last count
there wasn’t anyone who fit that bill.
Try not to lie. At the risk of sounding Boy Scout-ish, lying has become a national pastime. Those
that had to deal with the old Soviet Union long enough learned a simple
fact: most Soviets were itinerant liars and what’s more, the Soviets
didn’t consider it to be a character fault. It was just part of doing
business, political or otherwise. Unfortunately, the custom
seems to have been adopted by the US Government and its people. Lying
is fashionable. If you get caught, all you’ve got to do is issue an
apology, no matter how long after the fact! It’s really quite effective. Too bad it diminishes the spirit.
Experience sex. I’m
telling you right now, when I’m on my deathbed, I’m in all likelihood
not going to lament the fact that I missed a couple of workouts in June
of 2003. Instead, I’m going to regret that I didn’t get to screw any
Victoria’s Secret models; didn’t romp naked through fields of wheat
with any NFL Cheerleaders; didn’t spin a lovely naked quadruple amputee
across my satin sheets as if she were a dreidel. Sure
it’s superficial, but to deny these urges is to deny my essence. I like
sex and only have sex with women who feel the same way and I make no
apologies. If I were to do it all over again, I would be
much more forthright in stating my wants to women. I wouldn’t waste so
much time discussing excruciating minutiae in the hopes of striking
some chord that would convince them to allow me to bed them. I learned
that fact eventually, but I think of all that pussy I wasted. What a
tragedy.
Don’t do anything you don’t want to do. A
few months ago, I was doing some serious Major League bitching to Tim
Patterson about having to attend some boring meeting where I’d have to
make nice with people I’d prefer to shove through a meat grinder. Tim
then said something that changed my life: "TC, we’ve worked hard and
we’re at a point that we don’t have to do anything we don’t want to
do." And then the clouds parted and from the heavens sprung forth a
beautiful light. Birds came out of the trees and placed a garland made
of mountain flowers upon my brow. Female pixies arose from the heather
and tickled my genitals with ferns until I giggled with glee. It
won’t always be possible to only do things that I want to do.
Obviously, no male/female relationship can exist without making some
sacrifices, but damn, trying to follow this piece of advice has made
life a helluva’ lot more enjoyable.
Take big chances. If
Tim Patterson didn’t take chances, he’d still be the chief colorist at
the Jackie Stallone School of Cosmetology in Miami Beach instead of CEO
of Biotest and Executive Editor of Testosterone Magazine. Likewise, I’d
still be working at General Dynamics working on cruise missiles and
spending my lunchtime playing football with a football-shaped nuclear
payload and wondering why, later, my pee was bright blue and glowed in
the dark, instead of being chief flunkie to Tim Patterson, CEO of
Biotest and Executive Editor of Testosterone Magazine. See? With great risk comes great reward. Actually,
I’m a little better off than I let on, but it’s absolutely true that
taking chances often leads to huge rewards, both financially,
physically, personally, and in every way possible. If
you’re unhappy in any way in your life or chosen career and the
prospects for natural change seem dim, you owe it to your goddam soul
to change things. Figure out what it is you need to do, plan it out,
and do it. What’s the worst that could happen?
Read everything. In
the movie Three Days of the Condor, Robert Redford reads books for the
CIA. His job is to find codes or messages being relayed via text by
hostile foreign operatives. As a result of the knowledge he’s gained by
reading anything and everything, he’s able to piece together why a
renegade CIA within the CIA is trying to kill him. He can tap phones,
run evasive patterns while being shot at, and even figure out how a man
was murdered when forensics found a dead body with a hole in it but no
bullet and only a few drops of water (the killer made a bullet out of
ice). It’s fiction but the lesson wasn’t lost on me.
Knowledge is cool. It’s like a cosmic lock-picking kit. With it, you
can figure out almost anything or at least figure out an acceptable
solution to everything. Too bad smarts don’t earn a lot of respect.
It’s only when Americans start giving the smartest kid in the class the
same accolades as they do their star athletes that we’ll see all our
problems disappear like so much sausage at a Polish wedding. Most
weight trainers think nothing of spending 15 to 20 hours a week
training their body but hardly spend any time training their mind. Give
the mind equal time.
Try to have some balls. I was driving home the other day when I saw the following vanity license plate:

CMDR 007

Only
it was affixed to a Toyota Camry. Yep, Commander James Bond–Agent
007–traded in his Aston Martin for a freakin’ Toyota Camry. Can the
apocalypse be far behind? Alright, so it’s just a yuppie
nerd who likes to think of himself as Bond, albeit a low budget,
pussified Bond. It probably doesn’t mean anything, but it somehow
struck me as symbolic of our Testosterone-deprived times. For
God’s sake, if you know what mileage your car gets or who has the best
deal on patio furniture, it’s time to stop micro waving your testicles
or whatever it is you do to sterilize them. Look above you. There are
stars in the heavens above. Look around you. There are trees,
mountains, and rivers to explore, women to fuck, adventures to be had.
Screw your car’s mileage. Testicularity is the last
vanguard of civilization; what ties us to nature, what makes us want to
excel, what makes us want to discover, invent, and conquer. Don’t let
your balls go the way of the appendix.
That’s it.
That’s my list. So maybe it’s not the Tao of Lao Tse, but following my
own recommendations–or at least trying to follow them–has served me
well so far.
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