Sideline Judges

Sooner or Later - N.E.R.D. (mp3)
Truth Be Told - Chris Cubeta (mp3)

“Please don’t. Please please please.”
My ear was flush against the wooden door, and I couldn't move, almost as if it had been glued there...
_________

Nothing is easier than judging from the sideline. When you have no skin in the game, when you have no actual responsibilities, when you can create a fictional, hypothetical and heroic version of yourself, insert them into your own imagined version of real events, and play out every detail however you like, it’s easy to judge real people in their real moments.

He should’ve done that differently. How dare she allow that to happen. How can they go on with their daily lives and ignore that. And so on.

The story is long stale, I guess, but I’m still haunted by Penn State, by an alleged child molester, by the chain reaction of choices and reportage that fell short of sufficient, and by the flood of opinions from all over the country about how easy and simple all of this would have been if only they had been in the center of the hurricane rather than these power-hungry jock egotists at Penn State.

Having been a teenage victim myself, how could I let this story quickly die? I have great hope that this story is the beginning of a national wake-up call, that we might finally be at a place, as an entire society, where talking openly about male-on-male sexual abuse is pulled into the light.

I’ve had these conversations. With real people. It’s easier to talk about, to write about, to debate and discuss Two Girls & A Cup than it is to talk about being molested by an older man.

Think about that, please: adults are more comfortable talking openly about having watched a video where two women make out by orally swapping one another’s fecal matter while naked than they are about boys being raped or molested by other men.

The sooner we can talk about it, collectively, with greater comfort than we talk about decapitation or the N-Word, the sooner we'll reduce the number of victims and minimize the recidivism of predators.
_________

Another reason this story moves me is because I’ve also been the coward.

My first semester in college, I was in my dorm the final night of exams. Because I had to bum a ride from someone else headed back to Tennessee, I was there on a night when at least 90% of campus had gone home, and what remained was a random skeleton crew of students and adults. Four of us from my dorm ended up playing some drinking game and getting shitfaced in one girl’s room, and then I walked the girl I liked -- don’t worry, she was just a friend -- back to her room. On the way back down to my own room, some 20 minutes later, I walked past the room where we’d been playing and drinking, so I was going to poke my head in and say goodnight, but the door was locked.

I knocked. Nothing. I put my ear to the door and heard low mumbling.

The two were making out, and they clearly hadn’t even heard me knock. As I began to walk away, I heard her say something about how they had to stop, how it she couldn’t do this. (She had been dating one guy since she’d been a sophomore in high school, and we all knew it.)

I walked back inside the suite and put my ear against the door. You’d be amazed how thin those doors were. Her voice was scared, yet it also sounded like they were still making out, like she was OK with kissing him, but just not OK that he wanted more.

I felt like such a voyeur. Would they think I had been out here the whole time? Had anything really wrong happened yet? How long could I wait until it was really a serious problem? OhGodOhGodOhGod whatamIsupposedtodo???

It was a cowardly moment for me. No way around it. My "I've been molested" defense felt thin and still does. All my comic book worship and superhero study couldn’t excuse me from sitting out there in the hallway, frozen and horrified. To this day, I still refuse to believe my inaction was a crime. Cowardly, pathetic, perhaps even inexcusable. But criminal?

I can tell you things worked out. I can tell you they stopped, and he didn't rape her. I can tell you I had two future events in college that allowed me to make things right, karmically, to prove I'd learned my lesson. I can tell you lots of stuff, but in that moment, I was frozen, and useless, and utterly uncertain about everything. Most days, I think that feeling of fearful pathetic paralysis was even worse than being the victim. It's certainly haunted me more over time.
_________

To Mike McQueary: I’m sorry fate put you in that spot. I’m sorry you didn’t act, but I won’t judge you. I believe you sincerely tried to do the right thing, even if we can all look back and proclaim it “wasn’t enough.”

To everyone who thinks this is about football or power, I think you haven’t been paying attention. This is about a culture afraid to acknowledge predators, afraid of stirring up uncomfortable situations. It’s about a 28-year-old at the bottom of the totem pole in a country where, I’m sorry, the police would probably have done nothing once he reported it.

Let’s pretend he reports it. You think it’s some magic open-and-shut case, where the police arrest the former assistant coach, the leader of a popular non-profit group, where they lock his ass away forever based on one witness and a simple trial? I hope you’re all that naive as you pass judgment.

He could have reported it. The police could have investigated and arrested. They could have chosen not to press charges. McQueary could have lost his job for not going through the proper channels before making such a dangerous accusation. He would have been unhirable. The charges could have been dropped, and Sandusky could be right where he is at this very moment, just now facing justice for the same increasing and disgusting illness.

But it’s easier to not think. It’s easier to keep things simple, to throw that stone, to use words like “enabling” and “cowardly.”

It’s easier to tell ourselves, as we go to sleep as night, that we’re better people.

Sleep tight, better people. One day, your test will arrive, and I hope you have your Number Two pencil ready.

Me? I pray every night God is grading on one seriously generous curve.

It Happens.

Pillar of Davidson - Live (mp3)
Message In a Bottle (cover) - 30 Seconds to Mars (mp3)

The rough estimate is something like this: One in every six men were sexually abused as children.

For some, the abuse is an ongoing endless nightmare from a trusted mentor, loved one, relative. For others, it is a lightning flash nightmare that happens so briefly in the history of their lives that it’s almost easier to convince yourself it never happened.

The subject has become slightly less verboten of late.

The scandal of the Catholic church started to open this door. Lately, a handful of celebrities have emerged to admit their own history of victimization. Sugar Ray Leonard, Tyler Perry, CNN anchor Don Lemon -- all African-American, but more of a coincidence than anything of statistical relevance -- have all come out recently to share their stories of sexual abuse at the hands of another older man.

Tyler Perry joined 199 other men who stood together on an episode of Oprah last fall in the hopes of making it clear that the problem is all too frequent and too easily swept under rugs.

I don’t remember how old I was when I finally told my mother I’d been sexually abused. Maybe 28. Maybe 30. I think I’d already become a father. We were in a hospital cafeteria, I think waiting for my father in ICU. But I couldn’t tell you the year or the season.

What I do recall was the feeling in my body. That this horrible volcano of truth was about to come out of me and rock her world in ways that would be altogether different from the way it rocked my own.

I’d told probably a dozen people by that point, including my wife only a few months into our relationship, but telling my mom was the toughest of all, and there wasn’t a close second.

The experience of being sexually abused is not a story anyone is excited to tell to anyone -- much less a parent who had no way of knowing, no way of preventing, no way of protecting. It’s a story that was bound to leave my mother conflicted with haunting thoughts of her own and, therefore, a story that for the longest time I thought best never to share.

I was hardly a defenseless toddler when it happened. I was 16. But in matters of sex and intimacy, I might as well have been 9, because I was completely inexperienced and naive beyond belief.

It happened at a summer church camp where I was a first-time counselor. I was as much an odd bird then as now, but far less comfortable in my skin. The other counselors, some of whom were classmates of mine, all came from two other churches in town. They were mostly the cool and attractive kids, and I was just me, desperate to fit in, over-eager to please, eager to be some flashlight device shining The Light of Jesus on kids.

Translation: I was easy pickins.

The most charismatic man at camp took me under his wing. His name was David, and everyone thought he was this amazing mixture of cool and warm. He carried himself with such ease and grace, yet he also was able to make you feel like he genuinely cared about every person who crossed his path. The first few times we spoke, it was daylight. They were Jesus talks. About my faith and my life. And we’d be walking down a sidewalk, passing all these kids, and all of them treated David like a rock star.

Then one night he asked me to walk the grounds with him after lights out, when the counselors were a little more free, and we talked more. I felt special that he’d singled me out for this honor. I remember him sitting on a stairwell. It was on the outside of a building, but covered and lighted, and I stood leaning back with my arm extended and hand on the rail, swaying back and forth while we talked about the miseries of teenage-dom.

I remember him concluding our talk by hugging me. I remember thinking of that hug over the years, realizing that I had, with the allowance of a simple hug, invited him like some vampire into some other realm of my existence.

All the counselors slept in a single room, on sleeping bags on the floor. And this is the part that is the most surreal. We got back from that walk, and everyone was asleep, and I went to my sleeping bag. I was on the verge of sleep when he crawled next to me. Was it an hour? Twenty minutes? Half the night? I have no idea. I only know we were in a very dark room with perhaps eight, 10 other teenagers sleeping all around me.

Did any of them wake up? Did they just not say anything? Why didn’t I scream? Why didn’t I fight? Did it go on all night, or just a few hours? How many Bible verses could I recite from memory, over and over, in the hopes of pretending I was somewhere else, pretending this wasn’t happening?

The next morning was a fog, as were the mornings after that. The rest of camp became two sharply-divided stories. The first story was daylight, a time when I zombie-walked past people, trying to figure out what was happening while not giving away my fears, my experiences, my attempts to somehow connect all of it to my faith. In the daylight, there were several days when I truly thought it might not have happened, that it might actually be some weird recurring dream. And I was freaked out by how easily I could separate what was happening to me from the daily act of living.

Every day, this man would stand up in front of hundreds of children and talk about the love of Jesus, and his words held sway. He was, I truly believed, girding the faith of a lot of kids, possibly even getting them to rededicating themselves to their faith. Surely he wasn’t doing these things to me. Surely it was a dream.

Night, however, was a time of paralytic fear, where I felt almost like a prisoner incapable of realizing the only bars and restraints were ones I permitted, were ones in my own innocent and frightened mind. I’m pretty sure it happened four nights. Maybe three. Maybe five.

The fact that I can’t remember details is, oddly, what makes me all the more accepting of the reality. If I remembered everything, I’d somehow worry that I’d crafted the entire tale.

The story has an oddly almost-happy ending.

The last day of camp, as everyone was packing and preparing to return home, David dragged me away to a place I suspect he had scouted and picked for just this moment. David asked if he could drive me home, and we could stay here and help clean up the camp before heading back. It was clear what he was asking, and I remember my entire body almost convulsing with fear.

Although I had allowed it to go on for several nights, somehow in this instant I found the courage to say no, to push him away, to find some deep and intense resolution to stand ground. Had David gotten truly violent, I would not have succeeded in walking away that day, but he didn’t, because he was ultimately a coward. And I managed to get this sense that I'd ended the experience with some miniscule sense of control and power.

I’m not writing this pushing for a book deal, nor am I writing it to create in my friends or acquaintances who read BOTG a sense of awkwardness or guilt. Most of the folks who read this and know me have known me long enough now to, I think, get beyond that kind of reaction, at least eventually.

I’m writing this because a lot of semi-famous and brave people have recently added their names to the long list of men who were, at some point in their lives, taken advantage of. I’m writing this because surely for every man who carries these experiences with him into adulthood, at least two women can match him.

In college, I told four female friends about my abuse, and three of the four had been raped or molested, and they told me their stories in return, and I remember feeling so humbled by their experience.

A hundred million bottles, lost upon the shore...
A hundred million castaways, looking for a home...

I just finished the disturbing book ROOM this week. At one point in the book (SPOILER ALERT) the abducted woman at the book’s center is being interviewed on national television, and she says: “I wish people would stop treating us like we’re the only ones who ever lived through something terrible.”

This was precisely the feeling (except my experience was by comparison a drop in the wasabi bucket). You don’t want people thinking you feel special or unique in your suffering. You don’t want sympathy when a tsunami can wipe out entire areas of Japan.

Over the years, I’ve tried providing my information to key people in the hopes this man could be tracked down. I’ve never worried about wanting punishment for his crimes against me, but I occasionally still worry about others he might have abused because I didn’t step up and report or accuse. My Google searches and my reports to several web sites and my sharing information with several people in law enforcement led almost nowhere. Too little, too late, too bad, so sad.

Oh yeah, and David was black. Which added, you know, a whole ‘nother layer of confusion and challenge to the experience.

Anyway, I can’t stop him. He could be arrested or dead by now for all I know, or he could still be working in a religious setting with children, still seeking out the vulnerable and lost sheep.

But at least I can write out some of the basics. At least I can add my name to the long and disturbing list of men who carry this with them. At least I can, hopefully, serve as an example to others who go through it that you can lead a fairly normal adult life, that it’s possible to heal and recover and carry on.

Sure, you have moments when it’s there. Certain things trigger the experience in one way or another. For example, everytime I hear “Pillar of Davidson,” for some reason I think back on it, even though the song wasn’t out until I was in college.

Funny how you can spend two months trying to write this, and you can take 1,700 words, and you still can’t get it organized, you still can’t get it all to come together. Maybe because all of that would be a great excuse to continue delaying the act of getting it out there.

So I’m not delaying anymore.

I was sexually molested as a teenager. I survived. The experience and the memory is as messy and disorganized as this attempt at explaining it.

But it happened. And it happens every day to boys all over this country, all over the world. And we really ought to start figuring out a way to make it less shameful for the victims to come out and admit it, even if I don’t have the first clue where to start on doing that.

In Praise of Manboys

Because Bob's kitchen and beyond is currently gutted, being cleared of its lead paint, and otherwise off-limits, he cannot access his CD collection in the basement. If he could, he intended to post Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul's song, "Men Without Women," to go with the post. He hopes to continue post music at some point in the near future.

It is no great revelation to point out, as popular culture has done for decades, that our society is full of men who refuse to grow up in one way or another. But it may be a bit of a surprise to realize that I am one.

Not that, as someone who has taken a "mancation" to New Orleans for the better part of the past ten years should be at all surprised to discover his own boyishness. But, as the famous writer once said (I'm updating the English), "The life so short, the craft so long to learn."

Now, at the risk of glossing over the subject, I'm going to summarize those trips fairly quickly--drinking, gambling, overeating, oogling, bead-soliciting, sports watching, women watching, sex joking, fart joking, gay joking (about sharing a bed with another man), carousing, karaokeing, spending, public urinating, boasting, sarcasticing, batchelorette-party crashing, bragging, jukeboxing, masturbating-joking, strutting, risqueing, lawbreaking (real or imagined), bow-necking, and probably some other equally-long list of related gerunds.

In fact, I was sitting in a bar in New Orleans with a former student and his girlfriend (hopefully, soon fiancee) having a few beers with them when the boyman's parents and sister came into the bar. I had met them years ago when he was a student and they remembered me and we greeted each other and they knew their son had been drinking all day, so as they passed on through, they cautioned him, "Be careful." And then his mother looked at me. "You be careful, too," she said.

That's when you know that you are a manboy.

But all of that serves as an admission. Yes, I am a manboy. Tell me something that I won't acknowledge with a little prodding.

What I hope to do, though, is to offer an impassioned defense of this phenomenon. Manboying is good. Manboying is productive. Manboying is essential.

Today's man is a heavily-controlled creature. His boss owns him, the days of a participative work environment having long since passed in favor of the tight reins of economic fiscality. His parent or parents still want to see him as a son who will react positively to all of the advice that they have to offer about child-rearing, investing, relationship-managing, and any other life lessons that haven't quite taken hold yet. His wife lives in the fear that if he gets too far off the leash, he will implode in some significant way, endangering both family and future.

And so, if he can get off into an environment that is relatively-safe but with a lot of freedoms for just a few days where he can just be one of the boys, that is an effective carrot to dangle in front of him to keep him in line much of the rest of the year. And when he gets to that few-day escape, society expects the worst of him. Those close to him really don't want to know what goes on. If it's true that "what happens in the French Quarter stays in the French Quarter," then the real reason is because no one is asking. When he leaves town, the responsible safety net around him takes a collective deep breath and can only fully exhale when he returns to the fold safe and sound.

But that misunderstands the purpose of such a trip. All of those behaviors I listed up above, for the most part, are minor, occasional, sometimes only-happened-once aspects of such a trip. They are not the focus. They are not sources of danger or risk in any significant way. Yeah, one of our ranks almost got kicked in the head by a police horse, one regularly embarassses himself on the karaoke stage, one tends to drop a couple of hundred dollars in the casino each trip, one likes the cheap drinks in the Chart Room, but so what?

What really happens, what really makes a manboy trip so productive is that the men involved compare notes. They spend perhaps 80% of such a trip doing exactly that. Men need to debrief with each other about work (theirs and others), about marriage, about children or career paths, about, in the broadest sense, what is working and isn't working in their lives. While those on the outside think that their men are off doing things that they need to turn a blind eye (or several) to, in fact, their men are rejuvenating themselves for nothing more than a return to the fold. With nothing to hunt, with nothing to gather, they are simply out in the "wilderness" reminding themselves of what is there as a rev up for domesticity. And so, manboying is essential.

Sure, when he gets back, your man may be a little coarser, may drive a little faster, may go to the fridge for one more beer than he usually has, but those are just leftovers. If anything, as this last trip demonstrated, men disappoint each other more than anything else. They arrive in the Emerald City with grand visions of debauchery and end up (for the most part) in bed before midnight, bloated on beer or po-boys or maybe just freedom. They can't gorge on too much of it before their bodies shut down.

Or, depending on their ages, they may reach that crystalline moment when they realize, hey, I'm the oldest person in this bar or hey, this song I'm singing is older than most of the people in this room. Or, hey, it will be nice go to bed a little early and sleep in as long as I want and maybe eat something tomorrow that someone might tell me I shouldn't be eating, but this one time I can enjoy it guilt free. Is that rebellion?

I know nothing of women trips. I only know that my wife went on one and really didn't like it. But I can only hope that, in their perfect state, they accomplish the same things our manboy trips do--allow us to talk way more about doing than what we'd actually ever do, enable us to talk safely about sensitive issues, push us to step only tentatively and slightly across whatever lines we might have drawn for ourselves. And go to Krystal at midnight for a double cheese Krystal and a Chili-Cheese Pup, if we so desire. Somehow, that's living.

See you next year, boys. I hope. Or men.

Ah, Grasshopper

Another Country - Tift Merritt (mp3)
Tell Me True - Sarah Jarosz (mp3)

Dorm duty.

Every night of the week, in every dorm, an adult is responsible for shepherding the little lambs from dinnertime to bedtime. Most advisors live in the dorm. A few, like me, don't. For nine years, I've spent one night each week walking dormitory halls, sitting at a hallway desk for 4-5 hours, striking up the occasional random conversation with adolescent males.

Friday night was the second-to-last night of dormitory obligation. Tonight will be my last. Fitting that my tenure concluded with an encounter that reminded me how full the teenage years are of awkward, uncertain, personality-altering conflicts and experiences.

One of the boys in my dorm -- let's call him Billy -- is a solid student and fairly unassuming guy. Bookish, but not homely or too introverted. In the last month or so, he has become increasingly dismissive of dorm life rules, and his personality in our interactions has shifted in a negative way. Little things here and there, which all speak to a passive-aggressive attitude towards authority.

My last two nights of duty, his behavior has reflected the typical red flags of drug use. Dilated pupils. Locked doors at random times (their doors are supposed to remain unlocked unless they're gone). Goofy or spacey or plain ol' odd responses to standard conversation. So, late on Friday night, I pulled him into a vacant room and offered my theory that he might be making, what we like to call on our campus, "bad decisions."

I hit the barn but missed the target.

Billy has a girlfriend. His first ever. They've been dating almost five weeks. Which, for Billy, is four weeks and six days longer than any other gal-pal he's ever had. The hope of this relationship, of escaping his bubble of dorm life and homework and XBox, rinse and repeat, inspired him to stop taking two very important drugs. He's all but ceased taking both his anti-depressant prescription as well as the meds he takes for ADD.

"The ADD stuff... it really does help me focus and stay on an even keel and avoid distractions, but it makes me feel like a fucking --"

I tilted my head. "Oh. Sorry."

"Thanks. Go on." I'm no prude, but I don't particularly think we're preparing them for life if they feel comfortable hurling naughty words willy-nilly in the presence of adults.

"Adderall makes me feel like a robot. Does that make sense?" (He asked that a lot over the course of our 45-minute conversation.) "I know I need it for my grades, but it feels like it's killing the rest of me. I get this girlfriend, and I wonder if the grades are even worth it anymore."

"You feel more social without the meds?"

"When I take them... I feel removed. Like I'm watching everyone on TV."

What happens often, when adults dive into an intense conversation with a teenager, is that you get more than you had expected, and in entirely unexpected ways. I confronted him expecting a conversation about his own drug use; I was getting a flashback into my own awkward miserable adolescent soul. Except thank God I never had to deal with all those damn meds.

Billy said the girlfriend was negatively affecting all his other relationships. His parents, with whom he often talked several times a week, felt him growing distant. His friends were annoyed with his goo-goo eyed attitude. His teachers were frustrated with his lost focus on school. I was annoyed with his personality change.

"All because of a girl," he said. "Does that make sense?"

Christ almighty, I wish it didn't. "Unfortunately, yes," I said.

His reply: "Well it doesn't make sense to me."

Billy went on to explain that his step-brother was 30 and barely getting by because he'd spent his adolescent life experimenting with drugs. Watching this older brother screw up and witnessing the havoc it wreaked on his life helped Billy know that drugs weren't a particularly wise option. [The irony: he's expected to take two "acceptable" mood-altering medications daily.] Because that so closely mirrored my own reasons for staying away from "bad decisions" in high school, I instantly believed his sincerity. (Sometimes we determine others' honesty by nothing more than how much their statements reflect our own reality... which is rarely the best way to judge it. But I digress.)

Then he offered up the Big Kicker: his new girlfriend was a serious pothead who frequently dabbled in other drugs. LSD. Cocaine. Significant amounts of alcohol.

She just turned 17.

"I know she's bad for me. I know this can't last."

I didn't say anything.

"So... why can't I give her up?" Billy asked, fighting back tears. He managed, the entire time, to be always on the verge of breaking down without ever actually losing composure. It was quite moving. "It's so stupid. I feel so stupid."

It sounds absurd because adolescence is absurd. The cruelest part of learning is the lessons from which no adults can save you, no textbook can prepare you, no test prep can adjust you, no ADD medication can fix you.

Billy spent most of his adolescent years trying desperately to catch a girlfriend. Finally, at long last, he caught one, and instantly everyone is telling him to throw her back and keep fishing. But how long will he have to go fishing to catch another one? A month? Five years? Never? And who's to say the next one he catches won't be equally fucked up? There's plenty of fish in the sea, sure, but that's hardly comforting if you suck at fishing for them.

Billy waited and waited to have someone whose hand he could hold, someone to kiss, someone to sit across from him at a downtown restaurant or with whom to dance at a school dance. He was patient most of the time. Occasionally he probably resigned himself to having no shot. But then... then he found one! And he's supposed to give her up immediately because she's bad for him? Yeah right.

Ironic that all of his problems surround the gaining of a girlfriend, yet acquiring one makes him feel more isolated than ever. His life, previously routine and robotic and boring, has been electrified by this blessed chance at a coveted relationship, and his Frankenstein-esque cadaver has come alive and finally fits into the social puzzle... yet it's all wrong. And there's no clear path towards a happy ending. All roads lead to (temporary) downfall.

As if being 16 and 17 wasn't miserable and frustrating enough, but to throw in the drugs and the alcohol... I dunno. Maybe there's some reward in numbing your adolescent brain from all of it. Diving into a psychadelic distraction from the angst and loneliness until you can emerge older and more capable of handling it. But I don't buy it. Attempting to dodge the misery by postponing it seems to only give the hydra more heads and make them more venomous.

It feels like small concession that he shared all of this with me. Maybe just getting it all out to an adult helps. Maybe.

But being miserable and unsure and (maybe) in love and lonely and desperate to experience a better, cooler life beyond textbooks and classrooms... not all the talk in the world with an adult is going to change or numb those desires.

As adults on the periphery of their lives, the absolute best we can hope to be is a temporary balm.

Maybe that's enough.

The Art of the Stab

Gold Guns Girls - Metric (mp3)
Wink - Blue Mountain (mp3)

The April 1 NYTimes op-ed piece entitled "The Myth of Mean Girls" was published on the perfect day, because the authors are fools. They use the story of Phoebe Prince's suicide after she was barraged with threats as a time to talk about how girls aren't violent.

The op-ed writers work themselves into a lather rattling off statistics about how non-violent girls are, never once paying attention to the fact that the statistics they use -- assault, robbery, murder, other physically violent crimes -- had fuck-all to do with the kind of things that led to the girl's suicide. It's like using the story of an earthquake in Calexico, California, to talk about the failures of Obama's healthcare bill.

Phoebe Prince wasn't punched or stabbed or shot. She wasn't dangled off a building or dragged around behind a horse. She was emotionally beaten to death.

Boys use knives. Girls use mental daggers. Boys sweep the leg. Girls shred the synapses.

A handful of my female coworkers have teenage or college-aged daughters, and every single one of those girls said, without hesitation or uncertainty, that the middle school years were the cruelest and most uncomfortable years of their lives. These girls attended the all-girls school in town, and they all said the misery began to abate in the ninth grade and was more or less gone by the end of the sophomore year.

In coed schools, the misery stretches out a little longer, as the hallway locker battle of loves and crushes constantly swirls around them. I remember watching Heathers with some of my mom's students, and two of the girls kept laughing and saying, "Did the writer go to Red Bank?" and "Oh GOD I know that girl!!"

Part of this is about maturity. Girls tend to have greater control of their impulses. They take fewer risks. They throw fewer punches. They struggle less with ADHD.

But part of this goes back beyond Macbeth and Delilah. Why should women go around hitting and kicking things when they can get some doofus moron beefcake who's easily led around by his elephant trunk to do all that violent shit for them?

You never saw Don Corleone shoot anyone. Why should he when he has dozens of people eager and willing to do the wetwork for him? Same with girls. They stick with the mental cruelty. It's tougher to prosecute, and the scars last longer.

If you think I'm knocking the female gender, I beg you to reread, because that's certainly not the case. But women aren't all sweet li'l innocent angels. The blood they draw in fights are drawn out of the soul, not the skin. Black eyes and broken arms make for good pictures in a trial. You can't take a picture of a bleeding psyche. It's almost impossible to catch mental cruelty on a hallway camera.

So back to that op-ed piece. They're right. Boys are more physically dangerous, and it's not even close. If anything, the physical violence gap is growing. But don't go letting those facts lead you to believing girls are harmless.

Ask any teenage girl. They'll set you straight.

Metric's 2009 album Fantasies is just about the most addictive thing around and just won't leave my repeat list three months after I bought it. Blue Mountain played a cool set when they came to Chattanooga.

Better Love I See

Better Love - Drew Holcomb + the Neighbors (mp3)

Live music exists for the moment that superglues itself into your memory.

Nine times out of 10, I'd rather spend $50 buying music on iTunes or eMusic than buying a concert ticket, because the ability to listen to any and every song I want when I want and when I need it is more important to me than the chance of catching musical lightning in a live concert bottle. Bob, on the other hand, is the Bill Paxton character in Twister: only truly happy when chasing musical tornadoes with his merry band of climatologists.

But certain concert moments, even if they're just a part of the nightly act... well, those memories don't leave.

Michael Stipe's introduction to "World Leader Pretend" on the Green Tour in 1989. Him, with his funky mascara, alone with a snare drum.

I've got dozens of these little snippets, but I guess they probably don't mean much to anyone else. Concert memories are, like miracle golf shots and SNL jokes, very much "guess you had to be there" stories.

But my most recent one is worth sharing.

A senior at our school was able to arrange a special seniors-only mini-concert during the school day before Spring Break. The duo of Drew Holcomb and his wife Ellie played a stripped-down 40-minute set. Attendance was voluntary, but virtually every senior showed up. [NOTE: The rise of the married couple turned singing partnership has to be at its zenith in 2010. The Weepies, Mates of State, Drew and Ellie Holcomb, Arcade Fire... I know I'm forgetting plenty, so go ahead and add yours to the comments!]

Because I got there late, I don't know quite how the chemistry formed, but I have a few clues. First off, we're an all-boys school, and Ellie Holcomb is just about 120% adorable. Adorable singing adult women can hold 120 boys at attention with little difficulty. Second, Drew Holcomb is a pretty laid back and cool dude. The kind of singer-songwriter that adorable singing adult women like Ellie undoubtedly find irresistible. The two of them had the perfect amount of relaxed sincerity, a delicate quality teenage boys respect.

Then Ellie kicked it up a notch with a verbal gaffe. Between songs, she commented, "I've never been with this many guys before."

And with that, and her ability to live with the teen testosterone guffaws, Ellie was made an unofficial member of the class.

To close out the performance, they sang a song I'd never heard before. Neither had, I suspect, 95% of the seniors in that room. "Better Love" is by no means the greatest song ever. In my experience, the best songs are rarely made that much better in concert. Rather, it's the decent ones that have plenty of room to grow and improve that can take flight in a concert.

The chorus to "Better Love" is all too simple. And repetitive. "Better love, Better love I see." On the third chorus, Drew and Ellie kinda asked the crowd to sing along.

Um, hello? Drew? Ellie? Maybe y'all don't understand groupthink. Maybe y'all don't understand teenage boys. But, um, they don't do sing-alongs. A room of 120 17- and 18-year-olds don't start singing along with a chorus with the word "love" in it, not unless it's in some shredding hard rock or punk or screamo anthem for the age. Certainly not in the quiet hush of a single acoustic guitar and two voices.

But sing they did. At first maybe a dozen or so guys added their voices to the mix. But the numbers were enough to build on, like that first attempt at The Wave at a sporting event. By the third time around, a room adolescent males were singing a heartbreaking chorus about hope and dissatisfaction, and I was wiping tears from my eyes.

In all of our stereotypes about boys and males, it's important to remember that the forest doesn't always speak for the trees.

A moment like this one, hearing a hundred untrained and unexpected male voices join the intimate chorus, is why educators will never disappear.

Boys: A Pseudo-Scientific Observation

Back Breaker - Hit the Lights (mp3)
Highschool Stalker - Hello Saferide (mp3)

The school at which Bob and I work has several hundred boarding students, all male. Every weekend, one faculty member must spend Saturday and Sunday afternoons leisurely walking around the campus. That person must also walk into every dorm and enter every single dorm room on the campus.

Some call this responsibility "Suicide Watch," in honor of the original reasons this policy was first enacted roughly a decade ago. Others call it "Faculty Snoop Patrol," because it can at times be a little creepy and a little awkward, entering the sole private living spaces of boys, most of whom you hardly know. I call it "Prostitute Watch," because it amuses the boys and lightens the mood. Better to imagine scouring the campus looking for Vivian Ward in a compromising position in a boy's twin bed than to be thought of as searching for someone who's hung himself from sheer misery.

I was on Prostitute Watch last weekend, and I found myself studying our little incubator of adolescent males based solely on what I saw while walking through the dorms and across campus two afternoons on a weekend in November.

First, on average, our boarding student body is wealthier, smarter, and whiter than your average bear. We are not without color, nor are we without boys whose parents are middle or lower-middle class. Just wanted to get that out there so you know what kind of boys I'm mostly talking about.

Muhammed Ali: Still the Greatest
This was the observation that began my pseudo-scientific study. The first dorm I entered has maybe 20 rooms. Of those 20 rooms, at least eight had a poster of Muhammed Ali. It wasn't all the same poster, either. Throughout all the dorms, I can think of at least five different posters, maybe six. All but two were variations of him lording over his unconscious prey in the ring (mostly from the Sonny Liston fight, I think).

An African-American who converted to Islam*, whose last significant bout occurred 31 years ago, was easily the most popular icon on dorm room walls of mostly white boys from generally more privileged economic backgrounds. And these boys are fairly conservative both politically and religiously. Am I wrong to find that strange and somehow encouraging? Despite this fear and feeling that issues of race and religious prejudice are festering and refusing to heal, a ton of white boys admire the black man formerly known as Cassius Clay?

Strangely, I can only recall two posters of Michael Jordan, and only two or three of Tiger Woods. Roger Federer and Michael Phelps were much more popular... which is precisely what I would have expected in dorms of mostly well-to-do white boys. But none of those dudes had a thing on Ali.

Video Games Are a Social Activity; Accept It and Move On
Many of my coworkers spent the first years of the 21st Century lamenting the slow death of boys going outside to have fun. More and more boys, they cried, spent hour after hour staring at a television screen in isolation from their peers and the beautiful world around them. These boys were losing social skills and disconnecting with reality.

As someone who spent his Atari 2600 youth crammed into a basement spending hour after hour playing Dungeons & fucking Dragons, I can merely attest to the fact that one need not have modern technology and a TV screen to isolate oneself from the beautiful world and stunt one's own social growth. Fighting a Class Nine Hydra with a paladin named Lucius, his elf thief friend Shadow, and their wise wizard father-figure Ebenezer, does the trick just fine, thank you very much. I daresay that before D+D and before video games there were millions of other ways for boys to be anti-social or nerdy or wrapped up in some odd world. Hell, I'm not sure why sitting in a deer stand for seven hours is all that more admirable than playing Halo.

Most of the boys were out of their rooms on Saturday afternoon, but many were there on Sunday, and most were grouped as couples, threesomes or foursomes watching a movie or playing a video game. Some of the boys played sports games like football, basketball and soccer, while other boys played first-person shooter games like Halo and Call of Duty, and others played those long-range strategy games or shit that's way past my comprehension like World of Warcraft.

My point is, these boys talked. They socialized. Their use of the TV screen and XBox controllers was no different in its purpose than a bowling alley. Boys prefer having an excuse to gather first. The conversations and socializing is vital, but secondary. Boys don't generally meet over coffee. They meet to compete, or to play a game, or to throw a frisbee, or to watch a movie.

Girls, it seems, are completely comfortable with the idea of simply hanging out and talking. One frequent reader meets monthly with her local pals to play "Bunco," which they call "Drunko" because they haven't actually played the game in more than a year. They just use the game as an excuse to sit around and gab, because it makes more sense to their husbands if they explain their activity being centered around a game.

Boys Are Best Enjoyed Without a Microscope
For the last several years, I've struggled to enjoy my dorm responsibilities. The job requires that I police the boys somewhat stringently at a time in their night where they are desperate to unwind. Further, teenage boys have and will always seek to push limits, experiment with freedom, and buck authority. These are important and essential things, and when I see the boys at our school as a forest, I find myself feeling very happy and optimistic. They are, on the whole, good kids. Smart kids. Talented kids.

Unfortunately, when forced to get to know a semi-random assortment of them on a deeper level in my dorm job, I must get to know boys I might like less than usual, and I must deal with their inevitable imperfections more than usual. It is, in some sense, having to be a foster parent to a child you don't really like. Worse, it's almost a direct correlation between how unlikable they are and how much of your time they suck away. The squeaky wheels, as they say, get your grease.

It's so easy for boys -- and men, and girls and women -- to carry on this illusion of being an "all-around good person." Our students especially are smart enough and raised in the kinds of environments where they can play the parts they feel expected to play, and they can do so dutifully and with great skill and flair. It is only when they are observed so closely, when almost every waking moment exists under the watchful eyes of adults, that their flaws surge to the forefront, when their every misstep and mistake risks risks being brought to light. It's like asking Eliot Spitzer to be on The Truman Show.

And who really wants to watch that??

Hit the Lights and Hello Saferide are the kind of bands that have no illusion of going multiplatinum. They must do it because they're possessed by evil demons. Consider supporting them.

* -- or the Nation of Islam, if you're into splitting hairs

Boys Will Be Boys (Even When They're Men)

Ryan Adams--"Boys" (mp3)
David Bowie--"Boys Keep Swinging" (mp3)

Yesterday, here at school, was a day of boys. Our annual "day off for fun and games in the spring" was a coed event for the first time (girls arrived in the afternoon), but it was still a day of boys. It was a day of:

running,
shooting,
throwing,
grabbing,
jostling,
diving,
chowing,
swinging,
swilling,
sweating,
belching,
squirting,
climbing,
kicking,
showing off,
gorging,
puking,
rocking,
swearing.

In short, a boy day.

Overseeing this day of fun were a group of (primarily) gentler (primarily) men. Even during this day of spring frenzy, we expect our guys to be somewhat gentlemanly. We expect them to respect guidelines, stay in boundaries, look out for those around them, adjust their competitive spirits to accomodate those girls, be gracious hosts to those girls, share in chivalrous ways, etc. We expect a lot. Example: as the day was winding down, I called out to some guys in the sno-cone line, "Hey, could you let the girls go ahead of you? They need to leave soon." One of them looked at me and replied, "They can leave now." He was half-kidding; I was half-shocked. But, he didn't let anyone ahead of him. And I didn't make him.

And then, alas, my mind takes me back just a couple of weeks to a "Guy Trip," a "Mancation," a bachannalian frenzy of a visit to New Orleans that I was a part of with a group of (primarily) gentler men. And, of course, it got me thinking. If you've never been on one of these "guy trips," first of all, you're missing out because, first, they are very fun, but, second of all, seen from a distance, these trips follow a fairly predictable schedule of:

drinking,
seeking out good food,
binging,
insulting each other's sports teams,
oogling women,
eating junk food,
making gay jokes about each other,
making bathroom jokes about each other,
making "that's what she said" jokes about each other,
trying to get each other to pay for drinks,
making jokes about each other's musical tastes,
farting,
playing quasi-sports like Golden Tee and Air Hockey,
dancing,
talking about what women do when they're together,
swearing.

In short, a guy trip.

Most of all, though, a guy trip is about sheer camaraderie (unless, of course, one of your pals is spending all of his time chasing bachelorette parties). You talk about things you wouldn't talk about around the lunch table. You learn things you might not want to know. You confront real fears and weaknesses. The facades come down, the daily issues that clog intimacy are not present, the need to impress in any way except the most ironic, self-depracatory way is pretty much gone. If anything gets too close, you resort to insults and put-downs.

Let's face it, whether or not we are all alpha males in the strictest sense, we are all alpha males in our own homes, we are all kings of our own castles, and so the managing of egos and desires on a "guy trip" is a delicate endeavor, one fraught with greater tension and compromise because a "guy trip" is always too short-lived to do everything that we thought we wanted to do. And that's what keeps us coming back. And next time, we'll do everything we did that we liked last time plus all of the things we didn't get to do and then some. We're guys. We're boys. We live in the world of endless possibility.

It's not unlike watching, in miniature, 650 boys cut loose on campus to do what they please with minimal supervision and mostly only each other to keep each other in check. There may be one-upsmanship, but there is rarely fighting. There may be ravenous hunger, but everyone gets the chance to eat (let it go by, and you may not get the second chance). There may be unchecked competition, but there will be concern when someone gets hurt. And above everything is that sense that whatever you are doing, you like it that a bunch of other guys are doing it with you. You stray outside that brotherhood, and maybe that's when you get in trouble.

But boys will be boys. And men, well, God forbid we ever lose that boyishness. That's when we die.

Ryan Adam's criminally-underrated Rock N Roll and David Bowie's "Boys Keep Swinging" are both available at Itunes.