I’m all man, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
I have to remind myself of this every now and again. And no, not like that. Jeez, no class you people.
Not long ago, I had the divine cinematic pleasure of watching Toy Story 3. Learning of this fact before attending the screening, and having recently watched it herself, my mother-in-law proffered to the girl and I, “Bring a box of tissues with you; it’s a bit of a sad one.”
“Ha! Bless your little stressed-elastic socks,” I said to her, lovingly knocking the side of her chin with a soft fist, and flicking my mane away from my eyes in a gesture bristling with testosterone. “For I am Man, and Men do not secrete fluid from their eyes.” At this point I upturned my depleted pipe and, using my pullover clad sleeve as a fulcrum, emptied my ash onto the carpet. Then I crushed a beer can on my head, and unleashed a heroically wet fart, insisting everyone take a good, long nasal draught of it. All man.
Now you have the keen, cold eyes of an intelligent person, so I won’t waste your time with any further journalistic dawdling; I think you know where the story goes from here… A few hours later, there was Toy Story mainstay Andy contemplating the big symbolic handover of his beloved Woody doll, and with it his childhood, and there was I, darting my hot eyeballs to the roof of the cinema and gnashing my teeth feverishly into my bottom lip in a vain attempt to distract the small reservoir of tears that had pooled at the base of my eyes from making a break for the forest of whiskers on my chin.
I survived that particular one – no tears, all man – and was able to palm off the whole experience with typical conjectural guff such as “Woo! Hot in there, eh? My eyes are all prickly,” and “Man, it’s too dark in those cinemas; I went for a handful of popcorn and accidentally thrust my fingers into my eyes instead”. And at least I was with the dear lady wife at the time – such utterly non-manly sensitivity can actually score some needed brownie points around the homestead (to distract from the pipe ash on the carpet, for instance). The fact my lower lip was bleeding heavily didn’t help though.
A worse occasion was watching Pixar’s Up with my younger brother. O yes, the younger sibling. Next to a buck’s party with the Canberra Raiders, the younger sibling is one of the last people you want seeing hot tears snaking a path of shame down your reddened cheeks. But o no. Pixar only had to go and put in those heartstring plucking montage sequence, and old blubberguts here was cranking like a rusty sprinkler.
Yup, there’s a lot of pressure out there for the overly emotional man to suck it up – the cinema can turn into a dungeon of shame, a smile from a baby can result in paroxysms of tears, and woe betide you lock eyes with one of the kittens in the pet shop on your way to the post office. Emotional landmines are set to erupt everywhere. The only way past it is to ball all this emotion into a cave of repression, and let it manifest itself in the healthy mode of cracking loud obscene jokes during emotional bits in film, giving smiling babies a well positioned V-sign, and meeting a kitten’s loving eyes with a firm boot in the kisser.
Bile and venom. All man.
