what I'm doing...

With 3 1/2 more watches to stand, I'll be starting the tour wrap up some time this evening after I sleep this morning/afternoon. Business-related paperwork is mostly filed- a few logbooks to annotate as the need arises, but the deskwork is hopefully about done.

          Currently about to turn over a quick cargo. Load oil at one dock, load diesel at another, then pump both to a ship this afternoon. Hopefully it's that simple.

 I'm a little peaky this morning, it being 3am and all. I stayed up too late reading Larry Correia's alt-noir book "Hard Magic" which is a real sleeper hit- I had no idea how much I'd enjoy it.

         With my wife down in South America, I've taken the time for a little more non-fiction reading, too. I've taken an interest in the Manosphere, the section of the web that deals with men's issues; specifically, dealing with marriage, children and bolstering the concept of a positive, alpha masculinity in a time and place that offers much social denigration for men who are unapologetically male.

 I'm a guy- something of a man's man, in many respects, and I say that slightly shamefaced, which I absolutely shouldn't, and that's the whole nature of the problem. I'm well-educated and relatively articulate, and spent enough time on the periphery of academia to know that I'm not being paranoid when I say that as a group, men are being herded away from our natural inclinations, and the resultant decline, or, more accurately, resultant failure to thrive, is of direct consequence. Men are failing and flailing, by my reckoning.

 My 9-year old boy is inundated with efforts to indoctrinate him into a sense of his own self as a second-class person by virtue of his gender and natural inclinations. He's criticized regularly for being aggressively competitive in academics and persuing only leadership in group situations... my kid doesn't like to not be the boss if he thinks he knows what he's doing. I will not quash that, and thus, I am a bad person, a caveman, and my poor wife has to field most of the teacher-interaction, even though my boy's teacher still hasn't figured out that my foreign-born wife has no idea what the woman is saying, just that she talks a lot.

 It ain't easy, as we all know, and no one is perfect, so I've been looking into ways to undo the subtle reframing of my natural inclinations and instincts that happened (without positive result to yours truly, btb) in college, and even as far back as the all-female teaching staff of my Catholic education... Magnifying the positive, discarding the negatives- you get the idea. I've come to the conclusion that I personally have dealt with enough shame-as-a-substitute-for-discussion when it comes to that sort of thing. I like being able to tap into the innate capacity for violence all men have, and being able to discern when and when not to do exactly that. I just don't want to agonize over who I am when I basically like who I am, and that's exactly the part of the innate male psyche that is under threat, in my opinion.

 So, if you're a guy, and any of that resonates, or if you think I'm full of shit... or both, please check this out:

"The male brain is also built to solve problems and end sufferings, from the cleverness of the hands to the wiring of the brain, when confronted with a problem, the male brain limits empathy so it can do what needs to be done to end pain or fear. It is built to take risks heedless of pain. The male brain is wired to find bodies intoxicating: a glimpse at someone attractive sends the male brain into a euphoric trance. The male brain feels crisis when it doesn’t know how to sort its relationship to another person.

Beneath the wiring and physical machinery we have the deep psyche of the man. In it there is a cast of characters, heroes, monsters, wild men, and saints gathered around a meaningful darkness. Man is built to wield the power to harm and to kill, as well as the power to protect and nurture. Man is built to accept pain, injury, dismemberment, and starvation – even to be able to choose these things, without his whole self-image being shattered."


     Thoughtful stuff, and that's what's got my brain ticking over.




http://wildman.newworldscoaching.ca/?page_id=23