(via livejamie)
funny that this should come up on esquire of all places.
without commentary regarding such an obvious egress (dammit. i’m sure i’ll end up doing just that, though), there’s only six items i was not already proficient at:
4. score a baseball game. [evidently this includes tracking rbi’s and pitch counts. i understand why some guys might focus on this, but baseball bores the shit out of me. did you know that news crews burn less than seven minutes of tape when they cover an entire game? seriously, they start rolling as the pitcher winds up and cut after the play is over and the amassed gameplay (even in double or triple-overtime games) never amounts to more than seven minutes.)]
10. buy a suit. [when i eventually need one i’ll absorb everything i need to know about it before i go in. and after a short-lived labelwhore phase i had a while back wherein my shoes were sarto and my pants were lang or paper and my shirts were all boutique or vintage cardin and my glasses were georgio (fuck exchange, that shit is for people living in new jersey), i trust i will make the correct decision nevertheless]
18. speak in a foreign language [this one i will lament. i tried french, but it went through me like activia]
sidenote on our journey:
“25. Drive an eightpenny nail into a treated two-by-four without thinking about it.
Use a contractor’s hammer. Swing hard and loose, like a tennis serve.”
wrong. “contractor’s hammer”?! my old man has owned hardware stores since i was three and i spent high-school and college working at four different hardware stores and have never come across anything that has ever been referred to as a “contractor’s hammer”. in fact, most contractors i have known, and even even me to this day from my old days as a contractor, own at least six different hammers. also: eight-penny nails aren’t shit, and why would you be driving them into treated lumber unless you’re laying one-by’s as planking on your dock or deck. let me know when you get to sixteen-pennies. you know, like when you’re framing and need a “framing hammer”, not some 16 oz. claw hammer, but a 28 oz. wafflehead rip. and like a tennis serve? wrong again. more like you’re in control of a miniatureized sledgehammer and you’re some old-timey quarry worker smacking a star-bit. a truer title to this one would have been: “25. Drive a sixteen penny nail with one tap and three whams.” it is now evident that whomever wrote this asked his papa to describe and elaborate upon certain situations as per what the prior brainstorming meeting came up with.
27. play gin with an old guy. [cribbage is the only game, other than poker, that i have ever seen old men who encompass all these skills ever play. i’m beginning to guess that the writer of this article grew up in connecticut…]
33. hit a jump shot in pool. [this one is an oddity, due to the fact that i owned a pool table for a number of years. hell, i don’t even know how to do a masse, go figure on this one]
67. shoot a 12-foot jump shot reliably. [basketball just ain’t my jam, y’all]
anyway, i think “76. put an animal out of its misery.” would be more a more fitting addendum to this list that the truth of “76. start salivating just at the moment you’re about to kill something because you know that it’s gonna taste really good after you skin and gut it and roast it over a fire.”
maybe number 77 would have be something about knowing how to polish one’s own shoes or something. you know, just to keep it from sounding like being a man isn’t all about feasting upon the muscle tissue of our most recent kill.