A Guide for Boys: Adventures and Other Ventures in Human Capital
NICE GUYS
All Nice Guys are Boys, but not all Boys are Nice Guys. Don’t get us wrong, it’s always good to be nice. It doesn’t always pay to be nice, but it doesn’t always pay to do good. Doing good doesn’t usually fill the pockets of those who own the means of production, so we do good for free instead. The best things in life, Boys, are usually free. At least for now, air and water and jokes and dog licks and pictures of Jeff Bezos wearing a cowboy hat and pictures of Mark Zuckerberg wearing sunscreen like clown makeup while surfing are all free.
Nice Guys aren’t very nice at all. Nice Guys whine about the object of their affections liking other people, and see women as objects rather than people, and approach human interactions as inherently transactional. In exchange for a bare minimum of decency, Nice Guys believe they are owed attention and love and sex from the women of their choice. Nice Guys are too busy complaining about women preferring Bad Boys to recognize that wearing a leather jacket and riding a motorcycle doesn’t make a Boy bad so much as protecting a fragile ego by projecting insecurities onto women-shaped trophies. Nice Guys are the worst sort of Boy ever invented.
We have no evidence of this, but our operating assumption is that the first Nice Guy was created in a lab by Erwin Schrödinger, who rated the sexual prowess of every women he slept with in a diary, molested the teenagers he tutored while acknowledging a special interest in teenage girls on the grounds that his intrinsic genius was ideally suited for their innocence, and attempted to groom a twelve year-old cousin. Considered by one biographer to be a “male supremacist,” it’s fair to say that, were his decomposing body locked in a steel chamber, Schrödinger would be simultaneously alive and dead, simultaneously the Father of Quantum Physics and the Modern Nice Guy.
When they were called Pick Up Artists, they openly wore ridiculous clothing in order to “peacock,” and “negged” women in order to break down their confidence and resistance to manipulation. When they were called Men’s Rights Activists, they lobbied for sociopolitical changes that would reinstate the power of Boys over women in every domain of life. Now called Incels, they harass women online and demean women in person and complain about their involuntary celibacy as if they are owed a sexual gratification beyond what they can do with their hands (and mouths, if sufficiently flexible). Regardless of era, regardless of whether to a friend or only in their head, the worst sort of Boy to ever exist always refers to himself, individually, as a Nice Guy.
In this life, we are responsible not only for ourselves, but for those around us. This is why we rinse and recycle every single used food container (despite knowing that two-thirds of all such things will end up in a furnace), and why we come to a complete halt at every single stop sign, and one of the reasons why I have dedicated the final weeks of my life to this guide.
Boys, the hardest thing I will ever ask for you to do is to read this book in its entirety. Your attention spans are so short. They have been ruined by Tik Tok and neoliberalism. Please don’t skim or skip around—you’ll miss too much. Boys, the easiest thing I will ever ask for you to do is to not be an asshole. Be nice. Don’t be a Nice Guy.
NO BOY IS AN ISLAND
Boys struggle to make decisions. For instance, Kurt, our least headstrong coworker among a group of people who could dig a hole through the Earth to China solely by repeatedly smacking the ground with their foreheads, has considered quitting his miserable job for years but cannot make up his mind. Kurt regrets most of the decisions he has made in his life. Kurt’s last name is actually Cautionary-Tale. Every time Kurt makes up his mind about whether to quit his miserable job or not, he questions whether this feeling is informed by conscientious reflection or by the same flawed decision-making attributes which got him into his mess of a life in the first place. We empathize.
It is so confusing being a Boy. The good news is that it is so easy to decide to not put on pants when leaving the bedroom in the morning, and even easier to decide to microwave Bagel Bites for breakfast and eat oven-toasted Pizza Rolls for lunch. The bad news, however, is that everything is so uphill from there that the hill obscures everything else in sight.
Raise your hand if this is you, Boys. Come on, Boys. Be honest. Let us see those hands. When you finish chewing that Bagel Bite, grab a napkin. With that napkin, wipe the edges of your mouth. After burping, be honest. Raise your hand. When the sad Boy poet John Donne wrote that “no man is an island,” he meant that we all belong to a continent constituted by the human and animal and plant life around us. He meant that we are all in this together. He meant that there is no such thing as an I, not really. Only us. Only we.
INTERMEDIATE SMALL TALK
Blurt out something about football, or the weather, or television. Never blurt something out about politics. You will either say something trite, or the person you hardly know will say something trite, and one or the both of you will feel worse about continuing to live in the world. Memorize these three categories. Commit these three categories to memory just like a benchwarmer commits an intentional foul in the dying moments of a basketball game, when his or her team’s best strategy is to maximize the number of possessions remaining while sending a poor free-throw shooter from the opposing team to the line. An intentional foul results in a pair of free throws typically shot by a center who can be statistically expected to make one out of two, and a three point-shot is worth, well, three points. It’s simple arithmetic.
When it comes to these topics, Boys, you cannot really blurt out the wrong thing. It’s simple socialization. It doesn’t matter if the starting quarterback of your city’s team was just credibly accused of sexual assault by twenty-three massage therapists and counting, or if there’s nothing interesting to say about any type of weather, or if every character of color in Modern Family is an offensive stereotype. It doesn’t matter if there’s writing on the wall, and that writing suggests the incumbent president is planning a coup, and you’re dying on the inside that seemingly no one in power is taking this threat seriously. Discuss the chances that your city’s team makes the playoffs or say “it’s really coming down out there!” the way your father does or compliment Claire Dunphy for staying with her moron of a husband, Phil, for the good of the children. Do not say anything about your country’s gradual descent into authoritarianism and minority-rule.
Congratulations, you are beginning to mingle! You might even be ready for PTA meetings with a few more years of practice!
ADVANCED SMALL TALK
Once you have begun to socialize, it is important to practice. Practice makes perfect, regardless of what former Philadelphia 76ers All-Star shooting guard Allen Iverson has to say on the matter. While a beginner focuses on silence and discomfort, and an intermediate small talker blurts out anything at all on the topics of football or the weather or television (and never politics), an advanced small talker has spent enough time among humans to consider whether he or she cares to engage in further small talk at all. An advanced small talker focuses on the cheap disposability of the exchange, the rote ritual undertaken for its own sake, the mind-numbing agony of expending breath in the service of performance when silence alone preserves dignity.
WHAT OBSCURES THE ENTIRE ANALYSIS
All Boys wish to rub their fronts against the fronts of their mothers, before or after killing their fathers, according to Freud. According to scholarship, Freud developed his theories after self-selecting a patient population predisposed to justify his pre-conceived theories and was hopped up on cocaine pretty much all the time. According to us, Freud has compelling thoughts about the uncanny, but is pretty much useless otherwise. According to a suspiciously well dressed doctor we’ve long believed to be a Russian spy, our father is in ill health. He must begin to take his condition seriously, for once. Each and every time we broach the subject, we offer a word unit. He responds with half a word unit. We offer another word unit or two, and then share, for a while, an indivisible silence. We have truly learned from the very best practitioner of advanced small talk east of the Rio Grande.
VISIT THE BATHROOM AS FREQUENTLY AS POSSIBLE
The Bathroom is a hilarious novel by Jean-Phillipe Toussaint and the place where most of you Boys do your best thinking. This is, after all, one of the reasons why Jean-Phillipe Toussaint set the novel in a bathroom the protagonist never wants to leave. We do so much bad thinking in general that it can be a relief to spend time luxuriating in the one realm in which we have a structural advantage. In fact, most of the best sections of A Guide for Boys: Adventures and Other Ventures in Human Capital (Ages 6+)were inspired by bathroom thinking. The various bathrooms around the office have been one of our primary hidings spots when Manny makes his rounds, after all.
As you sit on the toilet, or squat above the toilet, or stand beneath the shower head, or lie within the tub, you will think about any number of things. You will think about how mortal enemies John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day within five hours of each other, and how you’re convinced Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky will experience a similarly perverse interlocked fate. You will think about how the Pacific Ocean once belonged to the Panthalassa Ocean, a superocean that covered 70% of the Earth’s surface and completely surrounded the supercontinent Pangea. You will think that the Spurs desperately need to trade Demar DeRozan and LaMarcus Aldridge to pivot from the disastrous Kawhi Leonard trade and rebuild in earnest.
As you pause between wipes, or water drips down your face, or your fingers develop a pervasive pruning, you will consider the time-old question of what distinguishes a bathroom from a restroom. Surely a bathroom must facilitate bathing, at minimum. But what about those so-called half-baths in which there is a toilet and sink but no tub or shower? Surely a restroom must be a place of rest. But why are we discouraged, then, from taking our sweet time in public restrooms through the intimations of violence from balding Boys with prominent tattoos of the bald musician Moby should we not immediately evacuate our bowels and urinal or stall? The sad truth, Boys, is that there is no difference between a bathroom and restroom. Human beings disguise acknowledgement that we discharge waste (that we shit and piss) through the cloak of euphemism. This is not unlike how we Boys disguise our singlehood from peers by inventing vaguely described girlfriends who we “met at summer camp” or how we can’t help but disguise our loneliness by using the plural pronouns we or us to apply to situations that could have only possibly happened to the author of this book instead of the singular I or me.
GESTURES
Ignore the power of gesture at your own peril, Boys. Valentine’s Day comes around every year, as does your birthday, as does the birthday of your person, as does the anniversary of the day on which you first messaged your person over the social media platform you both hate above all other social media platforms. You Boys are so good at certain gestures, and so bad at others. You Boys are so good at miming oral sex while yelling “Get off your knees, you’re blowing the game” at referees during high school and college and professional football games, and miming slitting your throat at rival fans during high school and college and professional football games, and miming crying during high school and college and professional football games when your team has lost and the season is over and nothing will ever be okay ever again, at least until next season.
These gestures effectively convey a clear message, deserved or not. Meanwhile, Valentine’s Day comes and goes, as does your birthday, as does the birthday of your person, and so on, and so on and so on, and yet you make no gestures. You say “The true sign of commitment is treating every day like it’s some special holiday, providing the love and respect and appreciation we need to sustain ourselves every day rather than on culturally-designated calendar dates.” All of you Boys say this. Some of you Boys truly believe it, but all of you Boys are lazy.
Your person might agree. All the same, you might buy flowers, or chocolates, or a card from a pharmacy. Your person might express appreciation. But they will be disappointed. They will yearn for an intimate gesture. They will yearn for the symbolic—for a sign that their love is recognized in all its singularity, that the thing between you is sufficiently potent to sustain through decades of life’s tumult. They will express this desire, in one way or another. Suddenly, it’s the last Valentine’s Day. Suddenly, you’re climbing the four floors to the shared apartment. You hug your person, suddenly, Boys, from behind, and say, “The true sign of commitment is treating every day like it’s some special holiday, providing the love and respect and appreciation we need to sustain ourselves every day rather than on culturally-designated calendar dates.” Your person might agree. All the same, your person will make a sudden decision years in the making. Mostly, of course, for other reasons.
SPIDER INSPECTOR
Some Boys are scared of spiders. Other Boys are not. Some girls are scared of spiders. Other girls are not. I am not scared of spiders. I respect them. I am far more reluctant to live amongst cockroaches than spiders, presumably on account of my upbringing in Texas. In Texas, cockroaches fly overhead while you’re lying down before the living room television, and are discovered smushed beneath a pillow when flipping over the pillowcase one morning, and are found crawling on an exposed toothbrush when you awake for a drink of water in the middle of the night. Still, I would not say I am scared of cockroaches—more like extraordinarily disgusted—and I am definitely not scared of spiders.
This is fortunate because my person is afraid of spiders. For the record, she is also afraid of ghosts, of her animals dying, and the fate of reproductive rights in the U.S. As she adds soil to pots which have had their every crevice inspected for the presence of spiders, I inspect every crevice of the next pot, and the next pot, and the next pot. There will never be enough pots for all the plants that my person wants to grow. This is a good thing, because I am not afraid of ghosts, because I will be a source of emotional comfort when the animals die, and because I will help us leave the country if and when the reactionary party strips women of their last bodily right.
I wants nothing more than to be there for my person, forever. I am not scared of spiders—I am not even scared of the Axis of Evil or Cancel Culture or mortgage payments, anymore. At this point, I am only scared of one day no longer being in a position to be there for my person. Of one day no longer being the spider inspector.
This is what fear is.
FIGHT TOOTH AND NAIL
There will be times when you Boys desperately want something you will probably not get. This is the time to fight tooth and nail. Sharpen your incisors so that a bite becomes a devastating weapon. File your pinkie nails so that you can stab unsuspecting competitors. Retrieve the sock full of nails from one of the many pockets of your unfashionable cargo pants and wallop the government agency or academic transcript or defense contractor standing in your way. This arsenal is foolproof—even foolish Boys know how to bite and finger jab and swing around a heavy sock—which is why we fight tooth and nail for the things we can’t live without.
Unfortunately, there will be times when you Boys desperately want something that teeth and nails cannot secure. There will be times when the person you love is no longer sure that they love you. Do not bite or finger jab or sock them with a nail-filled sock. List the various reasons why you belong together until the person you love begins to cry. Ask whether they are crying for their own sake or yours, and then abruptly interject that you don’t want to know, actually. Beg and plead and moan, crying not to demonstrate that you are in touch with your emotions but because you have been cleaved in two, so bitten and finger jabbed and bludgeoned with a nail sock that you are unrecognizable even to yourself.
Cook the person you love more than life itself dinner every night for months. Suggest going to the park to throw the frisbee every day after you get off from work. Refrain from asking, every few days, how they are feeling about you. Refrain from sharing, every few days, how the absence of certainty in their feelings for you is gradually eroding your metaphysical being in a pain beyond words.
Give them space. Pray to the deity of your choice. Fight tooth and nail by doing everything that you can possibly do to demonstrate your commitment while preparing for the worst. Because fighting tooth and nail isn’t always enough. Usually isn’t enough.
A LESSON ON LESSONS
As we chop the black olives and snap peas and bell pepper into consumable bits—as we spin the merry-go-round of sliced lettuce and remove the seasoned croutons from the cupboard—Boys cognizant of maintaining a healthy and balanced diet begin to think that the salad just might be the loneliest meal. Nutritional and practical, the salad does not stimulate the taste buds or mind. It sustains existence but provides no reason for excitement, no zest for life. As we carry the bowl to the sofa and fruitlessly flip through various streaming platforms for this night’s salve, we estimate the number of salads we’ve eaten alone. We estimate the number of salads we’ll eat, alone, from here on out before we no longer need eat anything at all.
We fall asleep, and wake up, and drive to work. We send emails, and attend meetings, and shake our heads with fury or bemusement depending on whether we have more power than the speaker or less. We drive home and untie our ties and remove our tasseled shoes, open the blinds and watch television, before eventually closing the blinds and standing before the refrigerator, hungry. As we release a stream of avocado cooking spray onto a rectangular sheet of aluminum foil—as we equally distribute frozen tater tots and corn dogs on the lubricated foil covering the toaster oven’s baking sheet—we begin to think that a medley of tater tots and corn dogs just might be the loneliest meal. We stand before the toaster oven, not thinking much of anything at all by that point. We feel like garbage, which reminds us that it’s Thursday, and that we must take out the trash before morning.
You Boys are undoubtedly waiting for the lesson. The lesson to this entry is that there isn’t always a lesson. Good things will happen, and bad things will happen. At times you will feel lonely, and at other times you will feel overwhelmed by love. You don’t deserve the pain of life any more than you deserve the pleasure. The universe is indifferent to our plight and random in its reason. There is usually no greater meaning to things than that.
Unless, of course, you run your sprinkler system in the heat of the day. If you run your sprinkler system in the heat of the day, you deserve every bad thing that’s ever happened to you, and every good thing that’s ever happened to you was intended for a different recipient.