Grace Under Pressure

Well, as some of you may know, July 2 marked the fifty year anniversary of the death of Ernest Hemingway.  Without doing so deliberately, this anniversary coincided with a little Hemingway kick I have been on lately.  In the last month or so I have gone through several of his short stories, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.  All of these stories are great, and I recommend each of them to you, especially For Whom the Bell Tolls.

It is funny reading literature.  I am not really a literature person--I much prefer non-fiction to fiction.  But having taken a few weeks to just focus on this one author, I have realized what it really means to be manly, and I now know that I am not a very manly man.  I sit around on this blog, whining and complaining about how hard my life is because I can't eat all the sugar I want, then I read about these men being shot, wives dying in childbirth, and even a man dying of an infection caused by a scratch on the leg (talk about a hopeless, ridiculous way to die), and I realize that I am a complete coward.  That is the word people, coward.

I probably do not have enough brain capacity to count all the complaints I have made on this blog, but when it comes down to it, being a true man means not complaining.  Grace under pressure my friends, that is what guts are.  I realize only now, in my fourth decade of life, that I don't have guts.

It is pretty hard, realizing you have no guts.  Realizing that if you had to stare a lion down--even a weak and injured lion--you would probably run away like some kind of sissy instead of looking straight into its eyes.  Realizing that if you had to hang under a bridge with enough explosives to blow up a mountain, you probably couldn't keep yourself from shaking so violently that you would drop the explosives instead of expertly attaching them to the bottom of the bridge, then detonating them to destroy the bridge, thereby saving the lives of your comrades down the road.

Anyway, I have been trying to think of what I could do about this cowardliness.  A few weeks ago I tried to grow a beard, the most manly of male traits.  It bugged me so much I finally had to shave it.  This really disappointed me, because I thought it would be an easy way to become more manly.  This week, I have succumbed to a reality that I admit I saw a early on in my Hemingway reading.  Yes, my friends, I hate to say it, but there is only one thing to do.  I must buy a gun and shoot something.  Yes, I must become a hunter--and not just any kind of hunter, I have to become a "big game" hunter (I am not sure what that is, yet, but it sounds better than a "small game" hunter).

The nice thing about this is that it will save a lot of money on meat.  Since protein is a large portion of my diet now, this is a good thing.  Plus, I think big game meat is lean and good for you because it is "closer to the earth."  I also figure I can give the skins of animals I shoot to Emily and she can sew up some clothes with it (I intend to be a use-all-of-the-animal type).  Anyway, this new avocation will take some time to develop, so stay tuned . . . it is only three months until hunting season!