Blog Opener...

The purpose of this blog is to provide a toolbox of sorts -- more specifically, a toolbox for men.

Once upon a time people had traditions which were gender-specific. Girls were taught how to conduct themselves by their mothers, grandmothers and aunts, as well as any friends-of-and-practically-family sorts.

Boys had fathers, grandfathers, uncles and older cousins along with male friends of the father, etc. There were dutch uncles, scoutmasters, et cetera.

My, how the times have changed. It's nothing today for boys and young men -- hell, for that matter even for older men -- to look around in dismay and wonder Hey, where are we going? And what are we doing inside this hand-basket?!?

People no longer really talk to one another and it's no surprise that kids are finding themselves left in the lurch on matters of real importance, things like sex, auto-mechanics, social skills, dancing, professional interaction, etc. Sure, there's the Internet; but who helps weed through this stuff and remove the garbage?

Moreover, as our times become more gender-confused, boys find themselves forced to rely on all the wrong sources because those are the only sources touting any semblance of confidence.

It's not good; it's just not.

A couple of days ago on MSN a list was published by some of the folks at Popular Mechanics, a list titled "100 things every man should know how to do" (or something like that). On said list were several things I already know how to do and many I do not, especially when it came down to the tool section.

Over the years I have oft lamented the numerous things I WISH I knew how to do and yet woefully lack within the confines of my education. Nearly two years ago I tried to get together with a bunch of the men in my new church group and compile a list of things which I felt it would be important to teach children, things both educational and (okay, everything is educational) based on Life Skills. Sadly, the guys at church made a couple of brief suggestions and then dropped the matter; after all, it made no sense to them why anyone would compile a list of everyday things which people are supposed to know -- and way too embarrassing to try and explain to them.

I was raised by the kinds of parents who liked to scream at me to get out of the way and then later berate me for not knowing how the hell to do something I'd never been shown how to do.

It makes life kind of rough, ya know? Worse still, it makes the Mating Game -- already plenty rough -- a complete nightmare. The only thing worse than not knowing how to do something at a critical moment -- meaning in front of a woman -- is standing there looking like a dud because some other guy's dad took the time to teach him, so he knows how to, say, repair the ripcord of a parachute in mid-fall rather than screaming and wetting himself.

He gets the girl; you get the emotional baggage that comes with failure, assuming you're still alive.

Don't get me wrong -- my dad taught me things when it suited him, lots of things; just never the things I was interested in, or things which later turned out to be terribly useful in life. He clearly knew any one of these given things because it's pretty common, even at this later stage in my life, for me to mention to my father that I've learned something new, whereupon he snorts derisively and says "You never knew how to do that? How could you not know that? Everybody knows that!"

All that being said, Life has proved to me that there are fewer gaps in my knowledge than there are yawning chasms, bottomless pitfalls of ignorance.

And bit by bit I hope to use this blog to help organize my thoughts on the whats, not to mention the whys and wherefores on some of those whats, cataloguing things I learn, things I wish I'd learned, discussing why those things might have proved handy to know -- and then slowly passing all this along to my son.

Sometimes these things will demonstrate a theme of sorts; other times it will be random flotsam injected into the mainstream of blog consciousness. Sometimes there will be lists, sometimes those lists will be broken down. Sometimes I'll relay some experience which brought a particular thought to my forebrain, other times I'll just blather on, relentlessly illustrating a point long after all the lines have been colored in.

If anyone, as a reader, doesn't particularly care for that, well... go write your own blog, eh? This one is mine.