TB’s Book Club: Ghost Rider

As I think I’ve said here (and definitely said elsewhere in various peoples’ comments) I’ve spent the last week and some change reading Neil Peart‘s book Ghost Rider:  Travels on the Healing Road.  I’d seen it heartily recommended sometime in the past on some motorcyclist web site, and noted it for the future, but never pursued it.  It’s only been recently, as I got into Peart’s music with Rush a bit more, that I started to think about it again, and so I checked it out of the local library.

I really love it when you’re only about five or ten pages into a library book and you say to yourself “I HAVE to buy this book.”

I’ve read a lot of authors that don’t write as well as Neil Peart does.  The fact that this is his “other” job astounds me.

To give the most basic plot summary, Peart lost his college-age daughter to an automobile accident and shortly thereafter, his bereaved wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer, passing away less than a year after their daughter’s death.  Utterly destroyed, Peart withdrew to a cabin in Quebec alone, only to find himself slipping into a dark depression.  Plagued by survivor’s guilt, he found something inside him.  He describes it:

Earlier that summer, contemplating the wreckage of my life, I had determined that my mission now was to protect a certain essence inside me, a sputtering life force, a meager spirit, as though I held my cupped hands around a guttering candle.  In letters I had begun calling that remnant spark “my little baby soul,” and the task before me now, I decided, was to nurture that spirit as well as I could.

His little baby soul was restless, and as many parents do, he decided to take it for a ride.  Ghost Rider is the story of how Peart kept moving, inwardly adopting a lonely-stranger persona that he called the “Ghost Rider” of the book’s title, until at long last he could slowly come to grips with his tragic losses and redefine his world (a world in which capricious fate could do such things) and his place in it.

Peart saddled up his BMW motorcycle and rode from Quebec to Alaska, down through California and the American Southwest into Mexico and then Belize, stopping to visit various friends and family along the way but spending most of his days on the road and his nights in a series of hotel and motel rooms – alone, with nothing but his journal and his letters to his friends and family to keep him company.  After avoiding his familiar home for Christmas, he left his motorcycle in Mexico and flew home for a winter of hiking and skiing in his secluded Quebec home, then flew back and resumed his motorcycle travels all over again.

In a little over a year, he rode 55,000 miles – alone, working out his pain and his confused emotions in his journals and correspondence.  The result is not only a travel memoir, and not just a journal of tragedy and grief overcome, but an immensely personal combination of both.  There’s a lot for motorcyclists to love here, certainly – the descriptions of the vista and the roads contain elements that motorcyclists will more readily understand than the average reader.  But nonmotorcyclists should be able to enjoy it as well, I think.  And perhaps even learn a little something about why motorcycling is such a big deal to some people.  It certainly served as a transcendental sort of therapy for Peart.

(If you’re looking for lots and lots of Rush stuff, though, this probably isn’t your bet.  Yes, there’s some material there, about the guys and their relationships, but not very much at all.)

This one gets a very high recommendation from me.  Check your local library!  Me, I’m already re-reading this one before I give it back to the library.  And sometime soon I’ll be ordering My Very Own.  Because someday I’ll be back on two wheels again, and I might need some reading fodder of my own.

You can pick your friends…

…but you can’t pick your relatives, as I’ve had cause to tell a few people in the past month or two.  And as I told those folks, that’s a saying in my family – and there’s a reason for that.

Dead Charming posted a quick blog about heading to his family reunion today, and I started to leave a story about family reunions as a comment, but it ended up being a little too long, so I decided to bring it here instead.  Later reading Amy’s post about a family funeral only hastened my plan.

My favorite family reunion story involves my mother’s family.

There’s my branch of the family.  Let’s see.  My grandparents had three girls, who went on to have a total of seven grandkids.

Oldest girl’s children: (both girls)

• Relatively harmless pothead
• Psychotic one-eyed crack whore (lost an eye in a drugged-up fight, you know)

Middle girl’s children: (both boys)

• Eccentrically smart metalhead – once longhaired, now shaven-head [this would be yours truly]
• Semi-party animal, now budding redneck

Youngest girl’s children:  (all boys)

• Slightly developmentally disabled “gentle giant” (wouldn’t hurt a fly, though he’s about 6’10” 280)
• Ridiculously spoiled “golden child,” now an Oxy-head reprobate
• Several years younger, freaky-deaky possible future serial killer

My grandfather and his brother and three sisters (one now deceased) and their families get together with some regularity.  Those can be amusing.  (Note the mention of the Sunday-before-Christmas gathering on this old blog.)  There’s always my blue-haired great aunt.  There’s my older third cousin who somehow took a mutual liking to me when I was about three and he was probably ten or so, very straitlaced and Christian, and also a graduate of Virginia Tech (but I try not to hold that against him).  There’s my association of other third cousins and their assorted children with various and miscellaneous spouses.  There’s the mixed-race children which still get funny looks from some of the older generation.  Hell, occasionally as an adolescent I sat out in the car reading Tolkien just because I couldn’t hack all the old-people’s-eyes drama.

But also, once a year we also get together with HIS father’s siblings and their families as well.  Now THOSE are the big ones.  We meet in an old schoolhouse, now a bingo hall (of course).  They open the Pepsi machines for us, which as a child was probably the Coolest.  Thing.  Ever.  (Free drinks, and you got to see the inside of the machine, woohoo!)  There’s probably a dozen chickens either fried, barbecued, roasted, or casseroled.  There’s a few hogs’ worth of ham and bacon, maybe a roast beef or two.  There’s a table loaded down with green beans, black eyed peas, turnips and turnip greens, and similar southern veggie, all cooked in butter and smothered in butter after they’re cooked.

And then there’s the dessert table.  Ye gods.

My favorite story is of the first of these reunions that I took Dyskinesia to.  She’d just moved from the Midwest the month before, and was still having a wee bit of trouble decyphering the heavy accents of my rural Virginia family.  We ate our fill of lunch and turned to the dessert table, and I think Dys almost went into a diabetic coma just from looking at it.

See, her Scandinavian family does a lot of fruit stuff.  Carrot cake, apple pie, all that good stuff.  Nothing wrong with that.  But my family is a serious southern cookin’ family.  If it don’t take five pounds of butter n’ sugar, well, it ain’t worth havin, shugah.  About the sweetest thing Dys had generally had at such gatherings was a rhubarb pie.  I think she actually once asked me “chocolate pie?!?” which made me (and all of the people within earshot) say, “You’ve never had chocolate pie?!?!?”  Hell, in my family, they start feeding it to the babies along with rice cereal and pureed peas.  (Not true, but damn near.)

So we both surveyed the Table O’ Diabetic Doom and chose a few select morsels.  I took some banana pudding (mmm, Nilla Wafers), some of my grandmother’s chocolate pie, and some of a chocolate-and-whipped-cream eclair concoction that looked good.  Dys took a bit of the eclair stuff as well.  While I was demolishing Granny’s pie, Dys took a bite of her eclair and said, “WOW this is good.  I mean, if I eat more than this I think I’ll die, but holy CRAP!”  She took another bite and said, “There’s something I can’t place to it, too.”

I took a bite and started laughing.  “You wanna know what the secret ingredient is?” I asked her.

“Uh, yeah?” she said, hopefully.

So I told her.

That’s Southern cookin’, my family’s style, folks.  Mmm-mmm good!

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

No kidding, I was just on my Dashboard page here on WordPress and I saw this:

Top Posts

Asking a girl out – the high school edition, 521 views

The Birthday Cake of Doom, 454 views

The Taoist Biker Glossary, 291 views

Top Searches

the taoist biker,  Flawed tits,  r2d2 cake

Most Active

Whew., 19 views

The Birthday Cake of Doom, 17 views

Buzz off., 16 views

Hmm, interesting, I’ll…WAIT A SECOND.

“Flawed tits?”

Who in the hell is searching for “flawed tits?” And how the hell did they end up on my blog?!?

Internets, you’re one strange puppy.

A Day (Off) as an Aspie Parent

Woo boy, did I have a day off.

First, I slept in. WOOHOO! Nothing wrong with an extra two hours of sleep, right?

Then I got up and made some Cocoa Pebbles for the boy and myself. I typed up my quickie blog while he watched some cartoons, then took my shower and got dressed. Then I told him we were going somewhere. In response to his questions, I did NOT elaborate – although I did hit us both up with some sunscreen, which definitely got his attention.

I woke Dyskinesia and got her moving a little bit, and she confirmed that I was okay to take some money from our account for our little outing, so I piled the lil’ guy into the car and we headed off.

Along the way, I finally decided to tell him where we were going: to the go-kart track just outside town. His response was a big fist-pumping yell, which always gets a big fat grin on my face. I told him for a reason, though – I noticed last time we were there that he was old enough and big enough to drive his own kart. So part of the reason we were going right at opening time on a Tuesday was so that we could have a relatively empty track in case he did want to drive for the first time. You know, less pressure, less distraction, and less people being pissed off if he, say, got sideways and blocked the track.

I raised the proposition to him, and his response was to consider it for a minute, and say “Umm, no. I think I’ll ride with you this time and drive my own kart when I’m 10. (Two years from now.)

This is obviously not the response your typical boy would give, but what the hey, it sometimes comes with the territory when you’re an Aspie parent. When he’s ready, he’ll do it, and when he’s not, he won’t. Anyway.

So we get to the place and immediately head for the go-kart track, since it was 10am and already somewhere in the neighborhood of eleventy-billion degrees. The track was lightly populated, and I again offered him the option of driving his own kart, and again he thoughtfully turned it down. Oh well, I says, we hop in and start whipping around some curves. He was again having a blast with the dummy steering wheel, and I’d holler as I executed a particularly tight apex – as daring a maneuver as I could really manage, given that the 2-person karts are slow enough that I never let off the gas for the entire lap.

We poked around and managed to pass one kid on a “little kids” kart, while being passed by a couple of people. I admit it, maybe this is one of those rare areas where I’m unreasonably competitive (or unusually, uh, male I guess) but I hate it when I’ve got my foot to the floor, I’m taking the ideal racing line, and somebody’s catching up to me. I hate being limited by my equipment. [No jokes, damn you.] It’s bad enough when it’s one guy and his wife in the single-rider adult karts, but worse when it’s another dad-and-son on the same kind of kart we were on. I mean, come on! Help a brotha out here, he should not be able to overhaul me in half a lap!

But, being the guy I am, I kept a close watch out for faster traffic and, when they caught up, I slowed down and swung to the outside to let them by. Because the only thing I hate worse than being held up by my slow car is being held up by somebody slower ahead of me, on a freaking racetrack ferfuxsake, and one that’s barely two karts wide and prominently displays its “NO BUMPING” rules and kart-shutdown mechanisms.

So we put in about twenty minutes of that and walked off to the putt-putt course.
This is where my day started to go south.

In the previous trip (same link as above), my son had actually played a competitive game and had a lot of fun doing so. This time, he shot a 13 on a par 3 third hole, and decided in his quickly ramping frustration that “this is no fun, I don’t want to play anymore.” Wait a second, I just paid $10, we can’t stop at the third hole!

So I convinced him to stick it out, which might have been a mistake. I try to teach him that he can not let his frustration get the better of him, and that the answer to “it’s hard” is not always “I quit,” but perhaps it might have been better to try that on a day when it wasn’t 100-plus with the heat index before noon. Seriously, I pulled off my cap to wipe some sweat off my head at one point, and before I knew it I was actually slinging big drops everywhere. I didn’t know I was sweating THAT much. I also eventually noticed that the one thing I missed with the sunscreen was the back of my neck. Not good when you’re putting. (Luckily I didn’t get too red.)

At the end, I gave him a par-mulligan on that hole and he came back to within one stroke of me at the end. Since I went first this time (his idea) I didn’t have the opportunity to throw the game at the end like I did last time. We finished the game with him definitely in full-grump mode, and we took a few extra minutes of sitting outside in the shade to let him get calmed down before we went back inside to the arcade.

Once inside, though, he cooled off mentally about as quickly as we cooled off physically. Standing over an air hockey table helps, I think, so it’s a good thing that was his first choice. Me, I love air hockey. Some full-contact disc-flying “DUCK!!” air hockey with a mean-lookin’ dude named Hurley are among the few good memories I have from my first few years of high school. So I may have tanked this game a little bit, but not much. I didn’t guard against a couple of goals like I could have, and I didn’t take a couple of hard straight shots that were open, but otherwise he held his own. That’s all I ask as ol’ Dad.

He played a couple of other games but not nearly as much as I expected him to. Then we had a little more time on the karts to our names before it was lunchtime. I asked him if he wanted to take another ride. He thought about it. “I’d like to take two.” Okay, no problem. I offered him another shot at his own kart, but he was still not interested, so I bought another ticket for a ride and we went back out on the tandem karts for a few laps, and had a good old time. I pointed out once that there was a smallish kid in one of the kiddie karts, then forgot about it. We were walking out of the track when he finally said, “Okay, dad, I’m ready to drive my own go-kart now.”
Well, hell.

“Well, son, it’s lunchtime now. Maybe you can do it next time.”
“Oh. Okay, dad.”

Then as we walked across the parking lot, I thought to myself: “When is next time?”
“You know what, son? I’m going to go buy some more tickets and you can drive your own kart.”

So I did, and he did. I paid for another ride in my own kart myself, and so I got to tool around with him, watch his back, and generally bask in his excitement. Since my kart was faster, I had the options of sitting back behind him, pulling up alongside to see the big smile and thumbs-up, passing him to give him somebody to “race” before backing off and letting him go by again. All in all, that was ten minutes and $10 well spent. He came away so excited that I dialed Dys at home and gave him the phone so he could brag about it to her before the gush wore off.

We then had lunch at a VERY busy McDonald’s (as per his request) before heading back into town to do some shopping for Dys’s birthday. This is where we hit another minor snag. Not with Dys’s birthday present – the boy picked out exactly what he wanted to get for her immediately (and it was better than what I’d had in mind, even), and I found what I wanted easily as well – but I’d wanted to buy the little guy something as well. Yes, I know I bitch constantly about the boy having more stuff than is good for anybody, but I never get to give him stuff. So I told Dys I was gonna, and she was behind that. I knew what I wanted to get for him, but when I suggested it he talked about how frustrating it was to try to unlock all of the cars for driving. I told him that I’d help (I always do) but he still wasn’t all that into it, and we left empty-handed and both a little let down. Especially when I told him that we wouldn’t give Dys her present until her actual birthday, when he wanted to go play with her (and it) to-frickin-day. Oh well.

So from there we went to the music store Dys and I visited while he was off gallivanting with his grandparents, the place where we may start him on drum lessons later this year. He was initially quite impressed – he always loves to look at musical instruments of all descriptions, actually, and his autistic eye for detail has been sparked by Rock Band such that he is starting to be able to tell a Tele from a Strat like Forza has taught him to tell a Saleen edition Mustang from a “plain old” GT. But ultimately he said it was “boring” and “no fun” because nobody was playing the instruments. That’s when I pointed out a sign that advertised their music lessons by referring it back to the “School of Rock” movie.

Me: “What do you think that is?”
Son: [wonderingly] “A school where they teach you to …rock?!?”
Me: “Yep. How would you like to go to rock school to learn drums?”
Son: “Dad, I can’t do that! I’d get tired!”
Me: “Huh?” [pondering] “Oh, no, son, it would just be for half an hour once a week.”
Son: “Once a week?”
Me: “Yeah, like every Tuesday.”
Son: “So I’d go to school on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and go to rock school on Tuesday?”
Me: “No, son, you’d go to school every day…”
Son: “Except Saturday and Sunday!”
Me: “…yes, except weekends, and then you’d go to rock school after I got home.”
Son: “Ohhhhhhhhh!” [He thinks for a minute.] “Okay dad, I’ll do it on Tuesdays!”
Me: “No, son, we might not get to pick. We’ll just have to see. And I think it’ll be better to see how school starts out before we worry about it. We’ll have to talk about it with your mom anyway.”
Son: “Okay!”

Nevertheless, he was thoroughly on board.

So we made a quick detour to the grocery store and went home, where after some cajoling I got him to write in his birthday card for his mom and help me wrap her present. Luckily for them both, I think, he gets his radical impatience honestly and Dys indeed decided to open his present last night. So she did, and they both got to play it. And presumably have done so a bunch today as well.

All in all, some trials and tribulations, but all that comes with the territory when you’re an Aspie parent. But when it all came down, that was a hell of a good use of a vacation day.

Day Off

Yep, after the frantic activity of last week, I’m taking the day off. 

There are lots of reasons.  Said frantic activity is one.  Another is that Dys is also in the midst of a crunch time at work and so she could use the help around the house.  And still another is that my son’s two buddies here in the neighborhood are on a trip for a few days, so he’s bored and wants attention.  (And notice that Dys is all tied up, see above.)

But mostly it’s that I intended to take some time and do some cool stuff with him this summer, and there hasn’t been as much of that as I’d intended.  And it’s sadly only a few more weeks before he starts school again.  (WTF is up with that?  MY school year never started until the day after Labor Day.  Of course, I also typically was in school until mid-June…) 

So b’gawd, we’re gonna do some today.  I think that, aside from some shopping for Dys’s approaching birthday, the go-kart track and putt-putt course are calling our names.  Hopefully I’ll have some fun anecdotes for y’all later on.

Caught up!

Dang, people. Seriously, there were so many new blog entries that by the time I got to the end and refreshed my feed reader there were MORE. No shit. But it’s made for a cool day so far!

Well, all except for the fact that there was a comment on Vix’s blog from “Taoist Biker” that was NOT me. That’ll raise your eyebrows, won’t it? Then I saw “Oh, it’s a Blogspot address, not a WordPress one, so somebody else just is using the Taoist Biker handle. No big deal.” Except the Blogspot link didn’t work. So whu-huh? It wouldn’t take much to pretend to be me and piss off a whole hell of a lot of people, but what are the odds, really? And why the hell would somebody bother?

In other blog news, I changed my top-right sidebar widget a bit. It was way too repetitive with the top-bar menu (which I still wish I could change a bit, but can’t – grr). It still duplicates the Glossary and the FAQ, but I think those bear repeating. Now, my question would be, are there Frequently Asked Questions that I should address? Terms I should define in the Glossary? Other “About” things that I should cover? Does anyone give a rip?

Anyways. Now I just want to throw out a couple of moto-racing tidbits for the hell of it. First, a note from last week’s US Grand Prix at Laguna Seca, California (if you haven’t watched by now, you can’t holler SPOILER!”):

[Image stolen from the fine people at my favorite racing site, SuperbikePlanet.com]

“You won’t gimme any racing room? ME? I’m Valentino Fuckin’ ROSSI. I’ll MAKE racing room.”

Yes, he actually cut across the dirt. Unintentionally, surely – he overcooked it into the entrance of the Corkscrew and blew his line (you don’t voluntarily take a roadracing bike across the dirt unless you have a parachute and a high pain tolerance), but amusing nonetheless. Heheh.

(If you don’t know the Corkscrew, it has to be seen to be believed. It’s a blind crested entrance into a left-right chicane…that also drops a few hundred feet from beginning to end.)

And for those of you (like me) lucky enough to be going to the Indianapolis Grand Prix in September, this weekend’s NASCAR race should have raised eyebrows. I really don’t follow NASCAR, but my dad called me last night and mentioned in passing that NASCAR actually ordered periodic cautions during the race (see note #2) because the track was so hard on tires. Combine that with the infamous Formula One debacle at Indy a few years ago when several teams refused to race because they agreed with Michelin that it was just too dangerous to race on the tires they had available.

This bugs me a lot more since Michelin laid a goose egg in bringing tires for the MotoGP racers to Laguna Seca last week. Hmm.

Monday Music

Aaah, back to the usual grind. I know I said I’d be caught up on everybody by midweek, but HOLY CRAP people, y’all were busy while I was…uh, busy. Seriously, at least three quarters of my feed reader is lit up like a Christmas tree. I gots lots of reading to do!

Anyway, Monday Music time and all.  Hey, my 50th edition of Monday Music!  Woohoo!

Into Eternity, “Severe Emotional Distress”

Don’t read anything into either the song title or the lyrical content (it’s about cutting) – I just really like this tune. And damn does that double-bass sound great in my car stereo. [Note to non-metalheads out there – if you can’t stand the screaming, skip to 2:25 in the song and just listen to the end, you’ll probably like it.]

I saw these guys open for Dark Tranquillity and The Haunted last year, and not only did they play an AWESOME show. Yes, they can really pull off all of that live. Tim Roth, the offensive-lineman looking dude, not only shreds but sings some kickass backups, and Stu Block, the singer, is frickin’ phenomenal – tell me somebody else who can pull all this off. Anyway, afterward I bought the album and while there are weak points, it’s not bad overall.

Beyond that, they seem to be a really great group of guys. They were the second band on a four-band bill in a small venue, so they played their show, drank a beer, then moved all their own equipment offstage, and sat their manning their own T-shirt table the rest of the night, talking and taking photos with anybody who wanted ’em. No rock-star attitude at all. Awesome.

Whew.

That was three BUSY days at work.  I think we got it knocked out, though. 

And I’ve now had a big chunk of my half-gallon of Captain Morgan to help put it behind me.  That helps. 

Just wanted to confirm that yes, I’m still alive…sorry for my silence both here and on lots of your blog comments – hopefully I’ll be all caught up by midweek!

 

Edit:  It’s a bummer that there’s only one page of “My Comments” on the toolbar, ain’t it?  Grumble grumble.

Buzz off.

There is a huge fly in my department that keeps buzzing his ass into my office, butting up against my window for a while, then buzzing the hell back out again just before I get up and whack him with a rolled-up TPS report. Little bastard.

Not much to say for today, and I’m going to be tied up all morning if not all day for the next few days in meetings (joy joy). So I’ll leave you with a link to something I’m really geeked up about: the trailer to the Watchmen movie that’s supposed to be coming out next spring, based on the completely kickass graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. [Warning:  The plot summary in the Wikipedia entry is complete, and thus full of SPOILERS.  You’ve been duly warned.]

I’ve been terrified of the fact that a movie’s being made of this because I’ve never been able to fathom how they’d possibly capture all of the nuances of the book – it’s designed for you to keep noticing little symmetries and parallels and allegories after repeated readings – but I have to admit, this thing looks awesome. I’m amazed at how well they captured so many of the images from the comic panel-for-panel, but I suppose with the director’s success with 300 I shouldn’t be so shocked. Anyway, enough geeking for now.

Y’all be good, mock me while I’m unable to retaliate, and I’ll catch ya on the flip side.

AAWMS: On “Southern Manners”

Hey y’all, it’s time for “Ask a White Male Southerner!”

Allison writes:

When I worked in the customer service department at Camping World (RV accessories), my favorite callers were southern men because of the politeness and accent. I dreaded the calls from New Jersey men because of the un-politeness and accent. The women from the north and south seemed to fall in the middle of the extremes. What is your take on the politeness of southerners…men in particular?

This is an excellent question that I don’t have a real “answer” for – just several impressions.  So I’ll share those.

First, there’s the question of politeness in general.  I have a few theories here, beginning with the funny and obvious one of “Well, down here 100 years ago you had to be polite or you might find yourself in 10-paces-turn-and-fire territory.”

That’s not entirely true, but it’s not entirely untrue, either.  I think that southerners of a hundred years ago or so used their peculiar blend of manners the same way Victorians in England (or upstate NY, or what have you) used them, as a way to separate themselves from the masses of the Great Unwashed.  It was a way to distinguish themselves as a class.  That may sound Marxist, but I think there’s some truth to it.  The masses themselves then attempted to emulate them, to varying degrees of success.  You could say that maybe a lot of it was completely faked, like telling a guy “Good day, sir” when you’d rather stab his eyes out, but that sort of faking was encouraged.  Whatever your true feelings were, you couldn’t be a “man of honor” if you didn’t display the proper manners.  And so you did, no matter what your real feelings were.

Now as for modern-day politeness, I really don’t have a clue.  Maybe a bunch of it is still fake, or just for show’s sake.  I don’t know.  I could say that southerners nowadays have a sort of need, conscious or no, to define themselves and/or their southern-ness by this display of politeness, but I don’t really think that’s a major factor.  For me and people like me, it was just something that you were taught growing up.  Taught by example and taught straight-up by having Daddy or Grandma or whoever whack you with a wooden spoon to teach you not to reach across the table for the salt.  It seems completely normal to me, such that I have a hard time pointing out why it should be different for other people who grew up elsewhere.  I can’t imagine that they weren’t taught the same way I was, and I can’t imagine that if they were, why they wouldn’t behave similarly to the people I grew up around.

For myself, I know I’m a little unusual even among my fellow southerners.  I personally still take my hat off whenever I’m indoors, which all of the older male members of my family do (at least that I can think of), but others of my generation-including my brother-don’t, and aren’t necessarily corrected for it.  Now that I’ve moved around a bit, I see a lot of guys that aren’t that way.  I don’t think any less of them for it, but I kinda like that it makes me feel a little more unique.  Not better, just different.

I also have a little mannerism in that I say “sir” and “ma’am” a lot.  Not only to my elders or customers or that sort of thing, but often to my peers and even to people younger than me.  I noticed a few older guys that I worked with – black guys, if it matters, which it didn’t to me at the time but now seems like an interesting cultural footnote – doing it, and I thought it was a very nice thing to do, so I started doing it myself, and now 15 years later it’s pretty well ingrained.

I’ve had people (mostly guys, now that I think about it) think I’m mocking them before, which really shocked me.  I wasn’t being overly reverent, but I wasn’t being flippant or smartassed about it either – just being jovial and friendly.  I’d say “Yes sir, let’s go do that” in the same tone and inflection as if I’d say “Yeah man, let’s do it” or “hell yeah” or “Sure thing, m’man.”  It’s like they couldn’t accept at face value that I was using a term of respect, so I must be being a sarcastic asshole.  Which of course I may be, but it wasn’t the intent at the time.

Now, there’s the other half of your question, the “men in particular.”

I think “guy manners toward gals” are a completely different set of behaviors when compared to manners as a whole.  And there are some facets of that that I think are uniquely southern, it’s true.  I used to open doors and carry packages and stuff for women from time to time, people I knew and people I didn’t.  (Actually I still open doors for strangers, male and female.)  Dyskinesia said it made her uncomfortable when I did it early in our relationship, so she broke me of being so chivalrous toward her.  Now she says she regrets that.  D’oh!

Anyway, if you were raised in a southern household like mine, you were raised to hold women in a special sort of regard.  In the situation you’re describing, I definitely think that the fact that you were a lady answering the phone probably made a difference to a big percentage of the southern men who called.  They might have been hopping mad, but something in their upbringing made them back off rather than take their frustration out on a woman, whereas women and/or men not raised in that culture might feel no such compunctions.

A feminist viewpoint on this might be that it’s chauvinistic or demeaning, that it’s mocking the strength of a woman, subtly insinuating that she needs your help or protection, and thereby insinuating that she should be in some subservient role.  Personally, I think you can offer help to someone without insinuating that they’d be helpless without it.  I don’t feel bad by saying that I’m generally stronger than most of the women I know, so if there’s manual labor around I feel like crap if they’re doing it and not me.  (Or at least without me doing the hardest and crappiest part of it.)  There are women out there who could physically tie me in knots, and that doesn’t bother me.  But the culture in which I was raised suggests that I put what little brawn I have to the service of those who stereotypically if not actually have less.  If that’s chauvinism, then it’s a level of chauvinism that I’m comfortable with.

But I think that there are still sexist attitudes that predominate large swaths of southern culture, both white and black and of all walks of society.  I don’t think stereotypical southern manners are a cause of it – arguably they’re a symptom, but definitely not a cause.  Some feminists might say that the mannerisms should so that they won’t continue to be a reminder to the worst elements of the inequalities of the genders.  I personally think that if you take away the manners, the sexism would remain – and that if you took away the sexism, then the manners could still exist and not hurt anyone.  Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s what I think.

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That was a fun diversion, I think.  I’ll happily open it up for discussion now – what do you think?

Oh, and I’ll gladly take other questions for “Ask a White Male Southerner” – just leave a comment, or email me at taobikerblog at gmail dot com!