Hello everyone. I am here today to talk to you about men.
It is well documented that men are inept at performing two tasks at once. “A watched pot never boils,” was in fact an idiom used to describes men’s failed efforts to pay attention to more than one thing in the kitchen at the same time. This sits right alongside the more popular yet not quite as snappy, “An unwatched pot boils over and spills scalding water all over the hob which you then try to feverishly mop up only to burn yourself, sending your hand in an arc of pain that knocks over a nearby bowl of miscellaneous small things that then perform the impressive task of scattering over the kitchen and beyond in the broadest spray pattern possible with many being discovered in regular intervals weeks later in the most unusual places, such as in the soap in the bathroom”. Y’know, that old chestnut.
And while we may like to tell our potential bed partners that we are wildly proficient in performing two tasks at once (It’s... It’s just not true... We mean well, though) in fact there is only one simultaneous act in the space of human history that men can perform successfully. That’s the art of starting up the car and putting on the seat belt whilst in motion.
We regularly indulge in this magnificently dangerous trait for two reasons; it saves a modicum of time, and it makes us feel cool.
Boldly skirting road safety issues for the sake of saving a precious few seconds of time is vital to your average bloke. There are many places we need to rush off to so we can spend just that little extra bit of time sitting down and vagueing out, whether it be in front of a beer at the pub, or in front of the cricket at home.
Doing things to make us look cool, much like water, makes up about 80% of the human male being. It is the vital coal to fire our machismo furnace. Despite nearly swerving into parked cars as we make the awkward grope behind our shoulder for that flamin’ belt as our better halves scream at us for being stupid we all know, deep down, that their loin hair is bristling with excitement at just how cool we are. The physical touch of a slap to the head is merely an affirmation of this thought.
If we don’t look and feel cool, then no-one will love us. We know this to be unequivocal, unarguable truth; every day we awake with the crushing pressure of needing to violently spin the stick of cool once more* lest the wobbly plate of psyche comes crashing to the hard floor of truth.
This is why we lean out of cars and holler obscenities at passing cyclists; this is why we use words like ‘holler’; this is why is we wear our belts around our knees to show you how much we’ve spent on our underpants; this is why we crack out the G-banger on special occasion to accentuate our sweet crotch area (Just me on that last one, then? Rightey-o). We want to look cool, because we need love.
So next time your inwardly sensitive ball of testosterone sticks his tongue in the corner of his mouth in concentration as he attempts to fasten the belt, even whilst veering dangerously close to that parked Mercedes with a pissed off looking rich guy in it, grit your teeth and say “Wow, honey... That’s so impressive!” It might just save a cyclist being yelled at.
ALLLLAN “BFGAII” SKOOOO... Sorry, I was trying to type and sip coffee at the same time there.
*this is not a wanking metaphor
