A glimpse at the world of truly manly men
posted in OmegaDad, Pop Culture |On Saturday, OmegaDad tumbled down the stairs, carefully cradling the shopvac while variously his ankle, knee, hip, ribs, and arm whacked (bump, bump, bump!) against the stair risers.
I was busy vacuuming (using the Dyson, which truly sucks, yay!) the uncovered heating phalanges in our bedroom, so I didn’t hear the catastrophe. OmegaDotter, playing in the oh-so-crowded living room (all the bedroom furniture had to find a home, eh?), heard, and solicitously followed to make sure he was okay.
That evening, he sported a truly awesome baseball-sized goose-egg on his ankle. We iced and wrapped and elevated, and he gobbled ibuprofen, and after a few days he was decorated with the putrid yellow and green markage that shows a bruise on its way to healing.
Then, yesterday, it started hurting again. Carrying the dotter up the stairs on his shoulders (ahem, OmegaMom is rolling her eyes here for a variety of reasons) made his ankle feel “weird”. And yesterday night, when we examined the bruising, there was a new, large, purplish line of bruising underneath his ankle. Hm.
So, to err on the side of caution, we marched off to the urgent care center this a.m. to have a doc look at it. The doc agreed an x-ray might be a good idea, so we had that done, and as luck would have it, all looked okay, and OmegaDad has been pretty much told to tough it out and gobble more ibuprofen.
Anyway, while we were awaiting the doc, we cruised the urgent care clinic’s magazine collection. I picked up Time and Newsweek. OmegaDad picked up Field and Stream.
Then he had to share his running commentary.
He started from the back of the magazine.
Featured on the back is a truly Klingon-esque crossbow. Scarily medieval looking. Lots of pointy stuff. Lots of cut-outs. Flashy. Truly studly.
OmegaDad started flipping forwards through the ad section, muttering, “You need to see this…the whole point to this magazine…Nope, that’s not it…nope…nope…”
He paused momentarily so I could gape at a small ad featuring a picture of Big Foot, or maybe an Ent. Or possibly a walking haystack. OmegaDad disabused me of these notions, snorting, “Woman! Don’t you recognize manly camouflage when you see it?!” I pointed out that in the picture, the man, walking across a mown green lawn, wasn’t camouflaged at all. “Picky, picky!” complained OmegaDad.
He continued flipping. Then he hit two full-page ads, and proclaimed, “Ah-HAH! Now, see, this is what hunting is supposed to do for you! You go hunting and become a Manly Man!”
The ads were for “male enhancement”. Har!
He soon found another ad for “male enhancement”, which featured an amazingly urbane looking gray-haired dude in suit pants and white tailored shirt (this is a hunter? Where’s his camo?) with a True Babe climbing up his body, her legs wrapped joyously around his waist, her back arched, her long red-brown hair tumbling down, her head back…
OmegaDad said, “Just by reading this magazine, a man’s penis grows long enough so he can have intercourse with a woman riding his shoulders!”
Then he flexed his arms and gave a manly “Hunh!“
Then we paged forward some more to look at rugged, manly ATVs in full-blown camouflage. And knives (”Hoo hoo hoo!” hooted OmegaDad, like a gorilla). And more crossbows.
You could feel the testosterone oozing from the pages.
OmegaDad, let it be said, grew up in Oklahoma and spent his entire late teens and early 20s out hunting with his buds. So he is behaving kind of like me if I started poking at my now-deceased eldest brother; it was okay for me to diss him, but I didn’t want to hear anyone outside the family dissing him, y’know? Thus OmegaDad and hunting/fishing magazines.
Next time, we need to do Cosmo. Or Ladies Home and Garden. Or, god help us, a teeny-bopper’s magazine…
(Update: I can already foresee that this particular post is going to end up being one of my most popular ever. It has been up for all of two or three hours, and already I have a hit on “male enhancement”. Har. Surely it will outstrip gl0bal warm1ng in no time at all!)
