return to the land of manliness

There was a long stretch in my life, a few summers at least, when I was convinced there was nothing I couldn't fix with a six gallon air compressor and a 16-gauge finishing nailer. And though I'm really out of practice with either, I have never stopped wanting my own. That tool-lust stirs with every trip to Home Depot, as I pass through the hardware aisles--as casually as possible, pretending I don't want an angle grinder even though I don't know what they do... besides grind at an angle--eyeballing the objects of my infinite desire like a jilted lover watching his old flame hold hands with his new replacement.

It creeps Heather out, I think.

Well, Home Depot had a sale and the Honey-Do list was growing. Between the two, I came away a much richer man. Six-gallon air compressor and 16-gauge finishing nailer? Oh yeah, and that's not all. Racked up a set of cordless power tools: circular saw, sawzall and a screw gun. Came with two batteries, a charger and a bigass canvas bag, convenient for storing or transport.

And as if that weren't celebration enough, my lady took me to see Wolverine battle Sabretooth and various other bad mutants on the big screen. Oh it was an awful, terrible action flick with gratuitous violence, machismo-cheesy dialogue and characters broadly painted with the most archetypal of human emotions... and its only real flaw is that the producers wanted a PG-13 rating so the violence featured limited blood and the only real swear came when Wolvie said he was gonna cut off Sabretooth's "goddamned head".

Despite that, for no less than 24 hours after exiting the theatre, I believed I could kick someone's ass... or build them a house. I wanted to chomp on short cigars and grow a beard. It felt like a great day to wear a plaid flannel shirt and say things like, "Torque." I stood back and surveyed my land of manliness, which I'd crafted over the past month in a series of home repairs and improvement: laid new floors in the kitchen, trimmed the back door so it don't stick, pulled up 500 lbs of concrete and relaid a walking path in the front yard, and scraped the hillside clear of years-old mulch, pine straw, brush and bushes. Just cut the grass and trimmed the hedges. Soon, I'll install a bathroom light with a built-in fan.

Why? Well... because I'm a man and that's how a man shows his love of home and honey... and because she's having a "goddess party" and wanted the place to look nice so... you know.

Doesn't matter because I also conned her into letting me get a new 42,000 BTU grill with cast iron grates and a side burner. I've been making my coffee on it every morning. Black as midnight. Stirring it with the brush I use to knock off the charred remains of last night's porterhouse steak. Life is good. I have a nail gun, and when I can figure out how to justify it, I'm gonna get a framing nailer too.

Then maybe I'll look into those angle grinders...

my weakness is Kentucky Muscle

It never dawned on me that I'd need to do a follow-up to this Louisville trip—nothing more than a wink and a nod in that direction—but I never thought I'd encounter something like Kentucky Muscle.

After my last blog, milady and I went for a walk. There in the middle of a park, in 50 degree weather, a clean-cut muscular white guy who was so artificially tanned that he looked like C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man stood shirtless and flexing. Two women in matching black outfits chit-chatted with a bystander. C. Muscle Howell smiled and laughed, taking his time putting the shirt back on. I couldn't figure it out. Several scenarios raced through my head, but none fit. Not even the suspicion that it could be the Louisville version of bum fights.

Well, an hour or so later, once we'd finally found a place to eat—that city was three times as big and almost as dead as Macon on a Saturday afternoon—we enter the convention center next to our hotel. Louisville has a system of skywalks that run through its hotels and parking garages, the Louie Link, and given the dropping temperature, it seemed like our best bet.

That's when we saw this poster for Kentucky Muscle.

My brain went off like that closing montage in The Usual Suspects. Everything made sense in the confines and contrived logic of bodybuilding, starting with the shirtless dude and leading through all the super bulked-up guys I'd casually noticed but not noted out around the city. We peeked into the auditorium where they were setting up for the night's events, like peering behind the Wizard's curtain... or, into the Ultimate Warrior's dressing room. A huge black dude stalked the sidewalk with a leather backbrace belt thrown over his shoulder, like he might need it at any moment for a spontaneous lifting competition, like he might have to pick some motherfuckas up.

I soon traded my girlfriend for the college football-loving mathematician that rode up with his girlfriend and us to this conference. We went to a sports bar to watch LSU eventually lose to Alabama. Along the way, I intentionally lead us back to the convention center so I could see what Kentucky Muscle was up to then.

Competitive Arm Wrestling. It was like TV, but live. It was like Sly Stallone in Over the Top, but better. One match was stopped three times because the two dudes couldn't stay clasped together. So the ref brought out "the strap" to bind their hands in mortal combat. Oh, man. Talk about exciting. I looked at The Math Guy and back at myself. We were each wearing sportsjackets and didn't fit any weight class there. Dudes were either hopelessly scrawny and dorky (observers) or massive and titanic (the bodybuilders and their peers). It'd only be a matter of time before they figured us out.

As we exited, a woman walked by in a short skirt. She was pretty and pretty normal looking except her thighs were enormous slabs of ripped meat. Rocky couldn't have boxed those sides of beef. She reminded me of the line Jean-Claude Van Damme had on SNL a few years ago: "I can crack a walnut with my butt."

(Speaking of Van Dammage, check out this trailer for his new movie, JCVD. Got to see that shit.)


Finally, when I went to find the poster for Kentucky Muscle so I could post it, I also stumbled on a page with pics from the "after party" they had. Wow. I don't think Heather Gore is related to Al.