The Fabulous Miss Joycee

The most fun girl on the planet is th fabulous Miss Joycee. There's just something about those blonde girls from Oregon. She's an interior designer and finishes painter from Sana Cruz who does extremely girly and very sassy work. She is everything Martha Stewart is not. That is to say, she's fun. Joycee is the person who taught me to be tacky at the right time--like putting a Venus de Milo wall paper mural in your bathroom. This is an important lesson for men. Men tend towards the tacky: blow up NFL chairs, dead animals on the wall, Larry the Cable Guy videos. But men all want to be James Bond. Sophisticated. Suave. Debonair. The two are hard to mix. Thats why Joycee, as girly as she is, is useful to men(well, it's far from the only reason: see Blondes from Oregon; Fun). She can set up a high class wine tasting party for a fiend and dress a dwarf who is coming to the party in Elizabethan drag. It's all the same to her because it is all fun, and Joycee personifies fun.

The Manly Game of Golf

Argentinean Manu Ginóbili won his third NBA Championship with the San Antonio Spurs. Argentina also won the gold medals in the two most popular sports in the world, Soccer and Basketball, and the 2004 Olympics. And a few minutes ago an Argentinean named Angel Cabrera won the USA by one stroke over Tiger Woods. This type of sports success you expect from Germany or the United States or Australia, but not necessarily from Argentina. I just think it’s pretty cool. Not only that, but not since John Daly won the British Open at St. Andrews in 1995 have we had a champion of such manly girth, what the Japanese call “big hara.” This guy looks like a guy who throws back a cerveza now and again.

Uncle Carl

My uncle Carl died awhile back. I haven’t quite figured what to say about it. Carl was a man: a sod shack Texas redneck (literally) who loved hunting and the outdoors. When I was a kid he intimidated me and when I grew up I took a liking to him. We were never close, but I liked him. One thing that always struck me was how much in love he and my aunt Rita were. Every year Uncle Carl would load his family into the car and drive the AlCan higway to Alaska. He told me it cost him a windshield every summer. They’d hunt and fish and live in the wilderness of the last frontier. It’s the kind of thing a man does. They lived in a huge, beautiful old house (which I once tried to fill with water from a garden hose—I still don’t know why) in Portland Oregon, one of the most beautiful cities in America. He provided a good life for is family, which is also the kind of thing a man does. At the reception after his funeral (which I couldn’t attend) people left taking Bonsai plants he had grown—his most recent hobby. It is cool when someone can give life to others even in death. As the saying goes, “here was a man.”