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Are Your Men on the Right Pills?

Are Your Men on the Right Pills?

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 Our cat Oscar likes to go in the garage. He will do whatever it takes to get there. He bolts past us when we open the door, and when he does we tell him he is the worst guy in the world, that he is a villain. When we say that, we are correct.There is nothing for him to do in the garage, no food for him to eat.He stayed in the garage too long, one recent evening, and when someone finally let him back out he was starving. It had been at least two hours since his last meal.He ate too much. He scarfed all the food he could and threw up on the floor.That’s basically what this newsletter is, this installment of the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand. I want you to know, before we take this any further, that this is basically the writing equivalent of someone puking cat food everywhere.I subbed for four days last week at the high school, the one where I like to be a substitute, because the kids there aren’t unruly—they are in fact quite ruly—and I can work there like I do at home. The students need nothing from me. They do their stuff and I do mine. I get paid to be at the high school, and I also earn money doing the work I would otherwise carry out in my unbelievably furnished basement.I actually get more work done at the school than I do at home on some days. So, the way I see it, when I have a chance to go over there, and I don’t take it, I leave money on the table. About $150 per day.Is that enough? No, it is not. But I have never been paid enough, and this is how it will always be.A couple of years ago, I went to a menswear store, here in Kansas City, and admired the clothing. What blazers they had! What shirts. I looked at the price tags on some of the blazers and shirts and shook my head. I said to myself, “Maybe someday I will afford to put on something nice like this.” I was, at that time, forty-two years old. I realized I must have said the very same thing twenty years before then, when I was twenty-two, at a different clothing store. At the rate I’m going, it will take another eight decades for me to afford a nice blazer.It’s a good thing I am so beautiful. I mean, thank goodness I look a hundred times better in my thrift store rags than the billionaires do in their finery.I ain’t broke, but I am not a big earner. I am of little to no value to this world and its economy. I care too much about the placement of commas in sentences to see a comma in my weekly earnings figures.But I have found, in this week of substitute teaching, that there is no sound that grates on me more than the sound of performative laughter. There was a lot of it at the high school on Monday. A group of kids huddled together and acted more excited than they could have been about stuff nobody really cares about. They described things they saw on TikTok, and as they did it they were beside themselves with put-on amusement. One of them would say something that was meant to be funny, and it wasn’t funny, but the person beside them would snort and hiss in a way that was meant to denote hilarity. It sounded something like laughter. It was not laughter.I thought it was an evil sound. It sounded to me like derision, like the way bullies snicker back and forth to unnerve their victims. I thought it must be the way guards laugh in the off-hours at Guantanamo Bay.After Monday, I didn’t hear much of that laughter anymore. I don’t know why not.But we are living in evil times, and I am thinking of the people I have known who are dead to me, to whom I will never speak again. Or, if we do talk, it won’t be like it once was. They will not hear the noise it makes, but the next time we meet, the door to my heart will slam in their faces.At a conference, some years ago, I was having a good conversation at a bar with a couple of other guys. We got along. We laughed at stuff together, in a way that wasn’t fake. It was, as the Irish say, “good craic.” We finished our drinks. I offered to fetch more of them, and I did. I bought my acquaintances their drinks. When I returned, I handed the drinks over, and in unison the pair of them turned their backs to me. They began talking to other people.It was fine; they were under no obligation to continue entertaining my company. I walked across the room and spoke to a staff member from the university press that was putting the event on. She was nice. When my drink was empty, I left.Maybe those two guys meant nothing by turning away from me abruptly. I doubt they planned to disregard me like that; it was just as likely an organic turning away from someone they were done talking to, who was wrong in thinking that getting us all more drinks implied that the conversation would continue. Maybe they are just like me, doing their best to be good people in a roomful of strangers and coming up short from time to time.But if they were trying their best, they could hardly have done a worse job. Their disregard seemed altogether deliberate, and I trust ...

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