Posts Tagged → wrestling
Frank Biddle, I will miss you old friend
I have attained the age where all of my cohort seem to be skating on ever thinner ice every day. Anything, it seems, can jump the hell up and surprise grab you like a big Nile crocodile, and you have so litle time to react, to know what is happening before the curtain closes as the beast drags you down.
Cancer, heart attacks, car accidents, falling off cliffs (for real), and my own litany of self-inflicted near-fatal accidents while working or recreating in the remote mountains. It just seems that the odds at our age are ever more stacked against us. Which sends the message that we must live every day, every minute, with purpose and enjoyment. Take nothing for granted, leave nothing on the table. Give life and your friends and family everything you have, withhold no love, leave no bridge unmended. Even if we live to a ripe old age, it all flies by anyhow. So, make every day count.
Recently one of my high school + college friends died of something avoidable. GERD or gastric reflux disease is sometimes detected, sometimes silent, and always fatal if left to its own purpose of silently gnawing away at your esophagus or tongue. Eventually, the acid etching creates the conditions where cancer starts. My friend Frank was unable to get in-person medical care in 2020-2021, because of Covid. Doctors could not diagnose him from internet video calls, and so the cancer spread unbeknownst to anyone. By the time he was able to see a doctor in person and get hands-on care, it was too late. It was throughout his body. He died two weeks ago, peacefully, surrounded by his family. This should not have happened.
Frank was one of the most wonderful people I have had the pleasure of knowing. He had an honest charisma from his joie de vive that served him well in business. Handsome as the day is long, to paraphrase one of his own quips, Frank married well, raised two fine young men, and ran a successful business. He worked hard, played hard, was a model citizen, lived a life most Americans aspire to. Frank had more positive character traits that I wish I had than I can list here.
His obituary is here. I cannot attend the memorial service, but an old friend is reading my farewell to Frank. It is for the best, because left to my own time frame and guided by my horrible sorrow, I would regale gathered mourners with endless tales of hilarity, adventure, and friendship starting from from almost five decades ago. Frank and I covered a lot of territory together at the time of your life when you are developing most. After high school, we decided to go to college together because it was close to our central PA home turf and had a good wrestling team. We never stopped being friends, though we ended up living on opposite coasts and mostly staying in touch by text and phone calls.
I have had a few regrets in my life, and not spending more time with Frank is the newest and acutest. People, make time for your friends and family, no matter what. And if you can’t be with them in person, always remind them you love them.
Godspeed on your spirit journey, old friend. You have taken a piece of me along with you.
Frank in a 1960s Ford Bronco with “Bernard” in 1982
Gillette’s toxic femininity falls flat
If you have missed the latest in big virtue signalling and social justice nonsense, go find the Gillette razors “Be the best a man can be” advertisement.
[And here is a measured analysis of it by Matt Christensen]
This ad is directly insulting to men and basic masculinity. It tries to re-define basic masculinity into a weenie, a wuss, a pansy, a wimp, a limpwristed femi-man who doesn’t look at anyone unless spoken to and who doesn’t speak his mind without raising his hand first and asking permission.
The ad is full of straw man depictions of stupid boorish behavior that any normal person would roll their eyes at, hardly representative of actual men, but it is also really super full of and targeted at behavior that is perfectly normal and healthy. Like two little boys wrestling on the grass at an outdoor BBQ. Yes, even little kids wrestling is considered bad by the wusses at Gillette. Even Gillette is now part of the war on boys and boyhood.
I wrestled, from seventh grade into college. Wrestling is a great sport, because it gives a wholesome outlet to naturally masculine urges to fight, make war, and to win contests through strength. These are traits that humans acquired over 70,000 years of evolution. Anyone who thinks that these urges are dead everywhere except in bad old America is willfully blind to the terrifyingly brutal wars being fought all around the world. In case the people at Gillette haven’t noticed, America is actually a very safe and civilized place, but the onslaught of violent rapists from across our porous border is changing that.
Little kittens play-wrestle, too, as do puppies. Are these natural and long-learned behaviors among cute little animals going to be targeted next for eradication? Teaching the recent descendants of fearsome wolves to makey-nicey amongst themselves may well be on Gillette’s to-do list, but it will probably be as unsuccessful as their attempt to dumb-down we humans.
What is really at work here is toxic femininity, the sexist, destructive and unnatural political force unleashed by a small group of male-hating women and their weakling, feminized male enablers (who would not survive in a hunter-gatherer society for one minute, an indication of how innately unnatural they are). These people are trying to bully the rest of us — we successfully masculine males and our enabling blatantly heterosexual female mates — into adopting their pathetic approach to dying out quickly on Planet Earth.
Toxic femininity is yet another politically correct assault on the basic pillars of human civilization, just one among the many we have witnessed in recent years. But don’t worry, friends, this silliness is falling flat on its face as we speak. But even if it were ultimately successful, the true knuckledraggers down the road would eventually come knocking, kill everyone in their way because by then everyone would be weak and pathetic, take whatever they want, and burn the rest on the way back home. Toxic femininity would be the very first victim, as it is inherently vulnerable, indefensible and undefended. So even if it wins here in Western society, it will ultimately fail.
P.S. Gillette and Proctor and Gamble are now added to the ever increasing list of companies I will not buy from, like Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Nike, and Levi’s. All these companies have made the carefully considered decision to attack me, demean me, mis-characterize me, and take policy positions contrary to those I hold. They are driving me away as a customer by their own choice. So I am exercising my right to choose what to buy, and I am choosing not to spend my money on their products. We shall see who wins that contest in the end.
