As much as we might think of ourselves as hard-asses because we tackled a project that seemed above our heads, we're much less of a hard-ass if we have to cast our eyes down in shame when the contractor comes to fix the mess we made of our house, the mechanic gets to charge you for the time it takes to reassemble the aftermath of a tornado that used to be your car, or worse: when the doctor gives you a bit to chomp down on while he resets your arm or extracts a screwdriver from the side of your head.
So we've decided to create a scale of manliness...we'll do our best to rate all of our projects similarly, so you can tell if it is too much for you or not.
Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse is a childish figure. Even worse, he has apparently been kicked in the jewels so many times that he cannot drop his balls and even talk like a man. And how many episodes have you seen where Mickey Mouse wants to fix a simple leaky pipe, and ends up canoeing through his basement? Seriously. If you are too much of a tool-bag to not understand that you should shut off your water main before you take apart your plumbing...you are a Mickey Mouse-Type.Your Dad
It might seem like a big jump to go from a castrated, incompetent cartoon rodent to your dad, but in all actuality, your dad (unless he was a contractor or a mechanic, in which case if you have to read this blog to change your spark plugs, you have more issues we can solve today), was the average, perfectly manly man. In fact, the manliness of your Dad should be the minimum you are willing to accept in yourself.
Your dad was a man's man. He liked to mow the lawn. He changed his own oil. He would silently take the brunt of the responsibility of home ownership, just trying to make sure he could feed his family by saving the few dollars he could when he didn't have to call a contractor to fix the hole your dumbass punched in the drywall (see why he said no skateboarding in the house, you idiot?). Once and a while you heard him cussing in the garage, and if you can think of a time when he re-set is own broken bone, or stitched a wound himself....feel free to consider your Dad as much a man as your Grandpa.Your Grandpa
Gramps. Now there was a man. There aren't men like your grandpa anymore, or if there are, they are few and far between. Not everybody's grandpa is the same, but unless his name was Oscar Wilde, chances are he was more a man that you can hope to be (at least if you really need the instruction in this blog). Think about it. What project are you starting. Would your grandpa silently shake his head that you don't already know how to do it? That's because he was simply awesome.
In this example, Gramps was born into the Great Depression. At the ripe, young age of 8 he survived being shanked in an alleyway over a handful of beans. He rubbed some dirt in the wound and walked it off...after all, there was still work to do on the farm whether he was bleeding or not.
Before it was even legal for him to do so, he joined up in the military at the age of 15. It was one less mouth for his father to feed, which was reason enough, because Gramps had respect for how hard his dad worked. He sent every paycheck home to his mom, because even at 15 he was taking care of his 22 brothers and sisters. He liberated Holland, stood his ground at the Battle of the Bulge, and volunteered for more crazy wartime nastiness just in time to get to Iwo Jima and even though he was there, offered to hold the flash of the camera instead of being in the picture of the flag raising. Know why? Because he was modest about it.
Then he came home. They gave him ticker-tape parades, but he didn't ask for them. He got a job. He built the highways, he built the skyscrapers, he built a country after all the hell he had been though before the age of 20, and never complained for a second about any of it. Know why? Because complaining doesn't get you anywhere. when he was done not complaining, he built a house. By himself. By hand. For all you know, he didn't need a saw, because he could probably chew through the boards. What have you made? Yeah, all of a sudden that birdhouse you slapped together with some glue in Cub Scouts isn't all that impressive, is it?
Nothing compares to this. To come up with something more manly than your Gramps, we had to go to some serious extremes.Chuck Norris
The image of either your dad or your grandpa pulling an 8-penny nail out of their own hand, or using a grease-stained rag to silently and contently wipe the sweat off of their brow is hard to get over. Not much can be more manly than that. In fact, the vast majority of projects will be filed as either mickey, dad, or gramps level difficulty. Every once and a while, though, there will be something more. And what is more manly than a dad+gramps one-two punch? Chuck Norris.
He's fought the commies countless times. He actually stood up to Bruce Lee. He was Walker, Texas Ranger. He drives an ice cream truck covered in human skulls, and once he played chicken with a wall...successfully inventing the door. He knows the solution to all problems, a roundhouse kick to the head. When someone wants to go all "Hulk" on something, it can always be trumped with going "Chuck Norris."
If you need any more explanation for why this quasi-mythical figure belongs on this list...take one look at his beard. It is epic. Simply epic.Ernest Hemingway
And finally, the cream of the manly crop, is Ernest Hemingway. How can it possibly be that something was more manly than Gramps? We had to go with the mythical Chuck Norris for that. If we had to use him to beat Gramps, how can we possibly, ever expect you to believe that there is something more than a roundhouse kick to the face? Because, if you asked Gramps to name the most manly man that ever was a man, he would say Ernest Hemingway. Anyone that Gramps thinks is a manly man, must, necessarily, be so beyond our miniscule understanding of manly that he must be at the top of the scale.
Together with individuals like Teddy Roosevelt, the Ernest Hemingway type knew how to hunt. Everything. Hell, he probably hunted a man at some point in his life. He's the kind of man that knows which whiskey is best. The kind of man that takes down the Wild Turkey, but doesn't brag about it to his frat buddies. He drinks it because it is what men are supposed to drink. He carries a gun, but when he needs to use it, he uses his fists instead.
When WWI started, he tried everything he could to get there first. When a bunch of pansies in Congress said it wasn't time for American involvement just yet, he found a way around it. You and I would go to Canada to dodge the draft, Papa Hemingway went to Canada to get into a war EARLIER.
He was the first American wounded in WWI. How, you ask? He was a medic, the most gruesome and sometimes the most dangerous position on the field of battle. When one allied soldier went down in Italy, a fellow medic went out to help, but was wounded himself. Ernest ran out and picked his friend up, got him back to the line, turned around, waving off the protests of all the full-time, guns-blazing soldiers, shrugged off the wound in his leg, and ran out for the second wounded soldier. No wussy dragging by the scruff of the neck for Ernest, he picked the dude up, threw him over his shoulder like a professional wrestler, and trucked it back to the ambulance.
When a mortar shell went off nearby, it almost took off his other leg. There wasn't much left but charred, burnt meat and a shred of cracked bone, and under normal circumstances, a man would have just dropped from the pain, as well as the inability to walk. Not Ernest, he stood back up, the weight of another wounded soldier still on his shoulders, and made it back to the ambulance. We like to imagine, in our fictionalized version of E.H.'s trials, that when the medics went to hook him up to an I.V., he shrugged it off, gave it to his buddy, and choked down some whiskey instead. He saved the lives of other men in the pursuit of freedom from oppression and tyranny. He fought the Kaiser tooth and nail until he was too wounded to walk anymore. And then he just wanted to come back for more.
With a life of similarly awesome stories, Ernest became a famous author, writing about man things like bullfights, fishing, war and other hairy-chested stuff. Besides all of that awesomeality, he is the guy that Gramps looked up to as the one man of all men. Which is why Hemingway-level tasks are those that sit at the top of our ratings list.
So where do we land on this scale? Hopefully somewhere around 1.5. We need to get to 2.0, and if we could pull off a 2.1, we might actually make our dad's proud. Step 1 to getting to 2.0? Know the limitations of your manliness.
