southsamurai

Well, tbh, the world is an ugly place. The kind of friend you would kill or die for, and would do the same for you, that’s a powerful thing.

And yeah, dude was pretty fucking chilling. Loyal as it gets, but definitely one scary motherfucker. Strangely, as broken as he was, a really great dad and husband. I once saw him whack a guy in the teeth with a bottle over a spilled beer, but he cried like a baby when his kid was born. Which is a whole story on its own tbh.

It kinda depends.

Men can be incredibly intimate friends, sharing everything, having deep emotional bonds, and doing so in complete stereotype breaking ways like not making jokes of things, or playing it off, and being fully present and supportive directly.

It is not, however, the most common way men express friendship. Like, I’ve had male friends that would be ready to kill someone with me, but wouldn’t even think to offer a hug. I’m not even exaggerating, I had a bad breakup once, and a very good friend watched me cry, and asked me if I wanted to go kill her. He wasn’t joking, he said he knew a place we could bury her where nobody could find it, dead faced serious.

Which, tbh, did shock me out of crying.

But you’d be surprised how supportive men can be. Most of my friends over the years were not afraid to hug, to listen, and talk. It isn’t all blank faces and pats on the back

Then again, I tend to develop friendships slowly and value people that are emotionally open.

I’m not knocking the kind of friends that will give you a listen, offer you a beer, and then take you into the game room to blow up digital enemies. Or the ones that’ll get you drunk and let you cry it out that way. Or any other expression of support. Because a lot of men, that’s the kind of support they actually want, and some need.

See, there’s a certain degree of the whole stereotype of men not wanting to show emotion that isn’t just patriarchal bullshit. There’s still a connection to that, but it isn’t the only reason we stay as self contained as possible. Sometimes, if you let shit out at the wrong time, in the wrong way, it gets out of control. So having a buddy that’s going to stay calm and by doing so help you keep your shit together as you process in a healthier way, that’s as valuable as someone that’ll hug you and let you fall apart.

A lot of men, they’re also going to be your biggest hype man. The same dude that will stone faced listen and then pat you on the arm can be the one that tells you you’re a fucking boss, so don’t put up with that shit job, he knows a guy that can recognize your potential, or will drive your ass around town finding a better job, or give you a couch to crash on while you’re broke in between jobs.

The expression of friendship may not always look intimate, and it may not fit the definition of it being based on communication of personal thoughts and feelings. But sometimes you don’t need that kind of expression because you just get each other and words would devalue the connection.

Me? I’m a lucky motherfucker. My best friend is one of those guys that can do it all. His husband is pretty much the same, and also someone that’ll wrap you up in his arms and hold you up when you’re falling apart, and they’ve both done that for me. The guys from my support group are also the kind of friends that if you call one of them, all five of them show up on your porch ready to get you through whatever it is.

I try to be a good friend to all of them too. I would literally kill for my best friend and his husband. No doubt, no hesitation, there would be bodies on the ground if anyone ever goes after them. Last time someone laid a hand on my friend, it didn’t end well for them as it was. I’m also willing to drive my ass across three counties in the middle of the night when someone is in crisis, just like they are.

Men can be very intimate, in ways you wouldn’t expect. The key is to accept them as they are, and to recognize their expression of intimacy, friendship and love. You do that, and as long as they’re a decent person, you’ll be fine.

The younger guys are usually better at the emotional openness than us guys from gen-x and earlier, but there’s never been a complete lack of that kind of intimacy from men, it was just rarer. But us old farts have learned too. My dad is much more of an emotional connection to his friends and family than he was twenty years ago. But, there’s the flip side that some of the younger guys push the emotional intimacy too much, they treat it as a kind of mandatory thing rather than as something offered freely.

You asked about men, so that’s where I’m leaving it, without comparing it to women, but there are differences there, as well as similarities.

It depends.

Part of what makes a cologne or perfume really work is how it interacts with your own body.

There have been “tests” that indicate some do better than others specifically for attraction, but I’m dubious about the reproducibility.

In any case, I have a few that I receive consistent compliments on, particularly from women that ended up doing more than just sniffing me. From men too, as far as that goes, though none of them did more than sniff since that’s not my orientation.

The single most significant one has actually had strangers sniffing at me in places where you wouldn’t expect anyone to sniff you. Lagerfeld. Their standard cologne. It hasn’t been a month since a lady got uncomfortably close to me and said I smelled so good. My wife calls it the panty dropper. My dentist asked me what I had on back when I first started going to him. He wears it now, but it smells a little different on him.

I started using that back in high school. I had been doing the usual teenage boy stuff. Old spice, brut, avon brands, basically junk (except for one of the Avon, but I’ll get back to that). But my grandmother had one of those hyper sensitive noses, and started complaining about not being able to breathe through her nose and got involved in my scent choices lol.

Lagerfeld was my uncle’s cologne, that my aunt had picked out for him. She recommended Lagerfeld for me, and out of the various types they got me on a shopping trip, it was the one that I loved. It’s an amazing scent by itself, but on me it really is great, it takes on this extra woody note with a hint of musk that isn’t there in the bottle. I really could tell a page of stories about being sniffed and followed around when wearing it, it’s fucking crazy.

Anyway, it didn’t bother my grandmother’s nose, and everyone liked it. The girl I was dating at the time made note of how good or was compared to the junk I’d had before.

I have met a few guys over the years that it didn’t smell right on, but none where it smelled bad unlike some popular scents like polo that can end up smelling like cat spray on some guys.

Now, back to Avon. They have a scent called wild country that is very spicy. It really is a tad too heavy overall, but if you go light with it, spraying into the air and walking into it, then moving as it dries, it can be nice. There’s hints of amber, sandalwood, maybe some cedar in there too. But it’s mostly like allspice to my nose, right out of the bottle. It was a runner up with my grandmother, but if I went too heavy, it was all she could smell.

There’s always cool water. It gets a bit over citrusy on me for my preferences, but not offensively so. And I’ve never smelled it on anyone where it smelled bad at all. It’s a bit cheesy because it got too popular and every frat boy would bathe in it, but if applied properly, it’s a fairly clean scent.

Aqua di Gio is one that’s been reliable over the years for me. Not my favorite, but sometimes you want a change just for the heck of it. It’s floral, with hints of citrus. On me, it ends up muted, like it’s been sitting on a shirt in the sun all day and is about gone. But I’ve smelled it on other guys over the years, and it tends to hold its own scent more than most, so it’s one I tend to recommend guys try out if they’re having trouble with cologne not smelling right on them.

But, again for me, Lagerfeld tops everything. To an extent that I sometimes won’t wear it out. My wife isn’t the jealous sort, but even she gets annoyed when there’s one of those extra effective moments of it. And I’m not actually a big fan of being touched by strangers, which has happened before because of the scent (also my beard, and also my shoulders. Women can cross boundaries about that kind of thing where men wouldn’t. Like, I’ve never had a dude cross the line and touch my beard, but I’ve had a double handful of women do it over the years).

Hell of a solid list. Might swap a few positions, but I wouldn’t argue about it at all.

Sorry about that, I wasn’t trying to say the question wasn’t asked in good faith, it was meant light hearted what with the general tension with the recent election.

Which, I think that also points to the likely pick for me, though I’d definitely say that Johnson is a damn good bed example of a president. I mean, dude came in after a civil war and set back part of what was accomplished by playing wimp with the ex confederate states. He single handedly set up another century of oppression and strife.

Best though? That’s actually harder. To be the best you have to have done something that stands out, which means there has to have been something big during your presidency to give you that opportunity. It means that some of the good presidents might not have shown their greatness as presidents because they didn’t have anything to work on, or maybe didn’t have a Congress willing to work with them.

That being said, Franklin Roosevelt has to be an option for best. The man made plenty of bad choices, but he was the leader that the country needed at the time, and did his best at every step (even when it turned out less than stellar), and that is pretty much all anyone can do.

Lincoln is another pick for the same reason. Gets elected during the most turmoil ridden era, and manages to get the country back together during a war that could well have led to a permanent split.

Strawberry, for sure

Going for the low hanging fruit, huh?

Dude, bugger off with this shit

I never said that, and you know I never said it

Since that was what I said, just phrased differently, maybe you can see how it looks like you’re trolling.

Maybe also notice that you’re the only one that took it that way.

Disowned may not be the right word.

But Fucking Ryan is kind of the one member of the family that everyone dreads to some degree or another.

Notice I called him Fucking Ryan. This is what he is called by everyone that curses. Which, since the last person that didn’t call him that died years ago, that’s essentially nobody.

And both of his parents are alive. They don’t call him that all the time, but they slip up sometimes.

So, we’re not talking about him being totally cut off from everyone. He lives with his parents, and some of the family as a whole will put up with him. However, he is fully, strictly banned from my home on pain of having his ass beat again. That’s again because when I told him that if he ever darkened my door again, I would beat his ass down the road, he didn’t believe it and got his ass beat down the road.

So, going backwards from there.

He shows up after being warned never to come back or I would beat his ass down the road. He pulls into the driveway, gets out, and is coming up the steps when I make it out the door and start beating his ass. Now, I’m not speaking figuratively. I took my damn cane and was beating his actual ass with it, down the steps, down the walkway, and then down the road. Once he was down there and fell into the ditch, I told him to gtfo. He said he’d go back to his car in a minute, and I said “the fuck you will. Step in my yard and see if I don’t beat your ass right back here.”

He believed me. Asked me to call his mom to come get him. She drove his car, he drove hers. When I called her, she said something to the effect of “jesus, he didn’t show up did he? How bad is he?” Not shocked I beat his ass, not upset I beat his ass, just disappointed she was going to have to pick him up, and wondering if he would need a doctor.

So, backtrack to why he was banned from my house. The straw that broke the camel’s ass was him standing in my living room, doing a southern goodbye that was one sided. He picks up DVD I had sitting on the entertainment center and slides it into his pants. Right in front of me. I told him to put it back and gtfo. He asked what I was talking about. I pointed and said that fucking dvd you just put in your pants. He said he did no such thing.

I grabbed him by the arm and pulled the DVD that was still visibly poking out of his pants out and told him I was done with his bullshit, to leave and never come back.

He starts trying to talk his way out of it and picks the DVD up again. I tell him to put it down, or I was going to beat his ass.

He says “what DVD”.

So I beat his ass. Popped him in the nose and then literally kicked his ass out the front door and down the steps. I told him if he ever came back, I would beat his ass down the road. I meant it more figurative, in that I would just whup him again until he left, but once he came back, I kinda wanted to make a point.

So, why did that merit assault and battery?

Wellllll, pull back to a long history of shit disappearing into his pants, pockets, or coat. Never anything huge or super valuable. Like, a fork. Or a post-it note pad. That kind of shit.

One time, we’re having dinner. Hamburgers. My wife had never seen him go full fucktard before, she thought I was exaggerating.

He gets up, says he needs to use the bathroom. He picks up his burger and takes it with him.

He comes back out, and there’s fucking ketchup and mustard on his left pocket. He starts making another burger. Now, I know Fucking Ryan. I know damn good and well he didn’t eat the burger in the bathroom. He put it in his pocket. But I tell him, “dude, if you wanted a burger to take home, you didn’t have to pocket it.” Dude straight faced asks me what I’m talking about. I point at the juicy bulge in his jeans, and I’m not talking about his cock. I’m talking about the hamburger that’s now dripping juice through the denim.

He then spends fifteen minutes playing dumb until I tell him to go the fuck home.

That’s Fucking Ryan in a nutshell.

Like, years and years of that kind of thing.

Back in the late nineties, I go over to his place. Well, his parent’s place. His bed is gone. There’s just a mattress on the floor. I ask him what happened. He just says he ordered a new one. Knowing Fucking Ryan, on my way out after we fuck around gaming for a while, I ask his parents what the deal is. His dad starts saying they took the damn thing before Ryan’s mom shushes him and says the posts were in the way and refusing to elaborate.

Just one of those Fucking Ryan things, right?

Well, a few weeks later, I’m at the hospital pulling a shift as a fill-in down in the er. Talking to some of the folks there, swapping war stories, I hear that some guy came in with anal injuries from having gotten stuck on the post of a bed.

Again, I know Fucking Ryan, so I know damn good and well it was him. Years later, his dad tells me the story of Fucking Ryan yelling for help and him having to figure out how to pull his adult kid off of a bedpost

So, you may be thinking that Fucking Ryan at that time must have been some teenage idiot. No. He’s only a year younger than me, and I was creeping up on thirty. The hamburger thing? We were in our forties.

You may also be thinking, “Gee, this sounds like someone with some kind of serious neurological issue, maybe something like autism combined with other things.” Nope. His parents spent a good bit of his teenage years and early twenties schlepping him for various tests and exams because he’s always been a fucking twat. His IQ is well above normal, no autism, no obscure disorders, no brain abnormalities.

Nor is there any hint of abuse from his parents or anything like that.

Dude pulls down mid to high six figures, does freelance computer shit, like security, cryptography, that kind of thing, not just tech support.

He’s just Fucking Ryan.

Oh! Back in the eighties! So, his mom is my grandmother’s niece. My grandparents did really well for themselves overall. Had a decent sized house, a few acres of land, that kind of thing. One section, where my grandfather built us kids a treehouse, is basically a half acre of trees we called “the jungle”. So, this was when I was maybe 14 or 15, during the summer.

All us kids were out running around and playing and such one Sunday. Ryan has disappeared. I go looking for him because I was the oldest kid, so it was in my head that I had to take care of everyone. I head towards the back of the jungle and there’s Fucking Ryan fucking a tree. Not humping, not grinding. He’s got his pants around his ankles, and his dick shoved into a hole in the tree, fucking it.

He later on, maybe a year or two after that, dug a hole in the ground and fucked that. How do I know? Because I’m the one he asked to put bandaids on his dick. I told him if he didn’t tell me how it happened, I was telling his mom because I was worried someone had done it to him. I didn’t believe him, because even though I had seen him fucking a tree, I didn’t think anyone would fuck a hole in the ground.

Nope. He took me to the hole and there was jizz in it.

So, allll of that is what justified beating his ass twice.

Oh! And I fucking forgot!

After beating his ass the second time, dude calls me maybe six months later, asks if maybe we can go shooting over at our uncle’s farm. I’m kinda dubious, but a bunch of us had been talking about a family get together and shooting session. So I call around see if he’s welcome. Strangely, nobody objects.

So, we’re all out there and he comes walking around the old barn. No gun, no ammo. Of course he wants to borrow something, and be provided ammo. But, hey, it’s whatever, wouldn’t be the first time his dad wouldn’t let him borrow one of his guns for a family shoot.

I loan him my 22 rifle (ruger 10-22 for anyone that cares), load him up a few magazines, and fun is going to be had.

And it was, for a while. He’s actually got a great sense of humor usually, and he’s a good listener. However, he’s also Fucking Ryan.

He pops off a few rounds at a target, misses, then swings around to crack a joke, while the rifle ends up pointing at multiple people, including me. And, as luck would have it, guess when his finger hit the trigger. If you guessed it was right as it was pointing at my leg, you win the prize.

Luckily, it just barely creased my leg. No damage to muscle at all. Hurt like a motherfucker, and I thought for a few minutes I was going to put a bullet in him, but my family includes a few smart folks, and they secured all the firearms well away from the angry, cursing dude with a bleeding leg and a ruined pair of pants. They were also smart enough to bustle him away and into his car and send him the fuck home, because shot leg or not I would have beat the fuck out of him if I’d seen him again.

So, yeah, Fucking Ryan.

Are you fucking joking?

If that’s really where you thought I was going with that, you’re the racist.

If you’re trying to troll, good job because now I think you’re either a troll, a racist, or an idiot. I prefer to think you’re a troll.

It’s artificial boosting of the same bigotry that’s been ongoing for generations. The new part switching the target.

See, there’s been a very concerted effort to radicalize the right wing of the American populace by media oligarchs. It’s part of an overall strategy going back to at least the post-nixon era.

Want to crush black people? Find a way to villainize them indirectly. “Inner city” crime. Step up arrests for things that are disproportionately a part of black people’s lives. Spread drugs into the chaos brought about by destabilizing black communities to engender greater violence between gangs. And it worked. Look at how many black people are in jail compared to pretty much any other group.

Go back to Stonewall, when the biggest movements for gay rights got going hard, and remember that trans people were involved from the beginning, but didn’t have a convenient label, they didn’t have a way to be a distinct group. Gay rights efforts worked to some degree. Enough that the far right plans to use gay people as the enemy had to find another target the same way that they had to change targets from black people to Hispanic people in the form of “illegal aliens”.

When your plan rests on fomenting anger, hate, and fear to stir up the lowest common denominator of a populace you have to have a target, ideally more than one since there’s always going to be gaps where your desired audience will fall prey to the manipulation for one hate focus, but not another, like when you run into conservatives that aren’t actually racist, but hate anyone in the LGBTQ+ umbrella because of religion, or sheer stupidity.

So, when gays weren’t a useful target for hate any more because enough people knew gay people, and there were enough gay people of prominence to make it harder, why not switch to the next best thing? Trans people!

See, we had a major shift in awareness of trans issues back in the late nineties and early naughties. That’s was followed by a large shift in trans people now having a serious chance at transitioning as medicine advanced, funding shifted, and there was just enough support that more people could transition and not be alone.

This meant that the assholes pushing their agenda to gain and maintain both wealth and power had a gift given to them. A new label to attack, using the exact same rhetoric they’d been using against gay people. “It’s unnatural”, “but what about the children?”, along with the ability to use lingering misogyny via to attack trans women in specific since they are now women, but used to be men (in the rhetoric), so they must be groomers sneaking into bathrooms.

It’s the exact same bullshit over again.

People have forgotten that the same methodology has been in place every time people in power needed to scare the populace enough to achieve a goal. Remember reefer madness? Before my time, but the entire thing was built in order to continue the oppression of black people, to keep them firmly under the boot.

Go back further, and it was the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, whatever group was “other” at the time.

But the modern version is so directly a rehash of the anti gay rhetoric that’s not even fifty years in the past that I’m amazed it isn’t glaringly obvious even to the people that have jumped on the bandwagon of both.

I’ve said it before, but people are stupid. They’re easy to manipulate, easy to fool, and that’s the majority. Even the ones that aren’t easy to manipulate can still fall prey to it if they aren’t paying attention. People are also lazy, and have little long term thinking ability, or attention spans. That’s why we got zero lasting changes after George Floyd was murdered. Anyone that’s made it this far, think for a second. How long did it take you to remember that name and what it means? Now, ask yourself how many people didn’t remember at all.

That’s why trans hate is working. People suck. The vast majority are easy to control, and will believe anything fed to them with the right language behind it. It just so happens that while all of the distractions being used to build up the hate also created a smoke screen to hide gerrymandering, which ends up with more and more control over what language is being used everywhere.

So, here we are with a manufactured, strawman enemy being propped up as the target and then painted with the word “trans”. None of the bullshit used to build up the hate is true, it isn’t accurate, and most of the people behind the hate actually know it’s bullshit, but they aren’t allowed to hate the blacks and the gays out loud any more. They can’t just scream the n word or call people faggots at whim the way they used to.

So, now they’ve got trans people to hate. And they want that hate because it means they don’t have to look at themselves, their own lives and choices. They don’t have to stop and think that maybe everything they’ve built their identity around is empty, so they scream about “wokeness” and “transgenderism” as code words.

There’s no serious, legitimate arguments against trans people being allowed to have the full protection of the law, to have full medical access, to have whatever gender they want on their driver’s license. There’s just the bullshit excuses to have someone to hate. There’s not even a good argument about bathrooms, they’re all built on bullshit too, and that’s the one that’s the low hanging fruit because it seems reasonable to people that aren’t buying all the bullshit immediately, but aren’t quite bright enough to think it through all the way on their own. Which, again, that’s the majority, stupid people too drowned in lies and manipulation to bother thinking.

So, Don, if you’ve gotten this far, I know I went wide of what you asked, but it really is all related. It all comes down to the same thing in different faces over time.

For anyone else, I know this got a little ranty in parts. I know it is long enough to look a little crazed. IDGAF. This shit is patently obvious, it’s not even a secret. The people that have been running the right wing of things for my entire lifetime and before have outright and publicly talked about it. One part of it, the “southern strategy” they brag about. It’s infuriating, so I get ranty.