Wherein Max Tyson turns 40.

Posted on November 28, 2025 by Max T Kramer

Well, I just celebrated another birthday. It is therefore time for my annual state of the Max address. Especially because this one was a milestone. I just turned Forty. Four Oh.

More like Four Oh No.

Statistically speaking, I am just over halfway through my expected lifespan (what with average lifespans actually beginning to drop for the first time in decades thanks to the unfortunate modern trend of everything getting worse all the time in the good old USA).

As I reflect on the past 40 years, and what limited achievements I have accomplished in that time, and as I look ahead toward the next 40 years, most of which I assume will just be spent working in a job that pays the bills but does very little to fulfill the needs of my soul, I can’t help but wonder…is this it? Can life really be so…small?

Physically, I can tell I’m halfway done. Mentally, I still think of myself as a young man, but all the ominous creaking and cracking noises that are being produced by my body make it clear that I’ve definitely begun slipping down the inevitable decline into infirmity and death. That or I’m turning into a tree. Assuming that I am not undergoing an unprecedented arboreal transformation, I am clearly feeling my age and then some. While I am sure parenting a small child isn’t helping with my physical well-being, my body has noticeably changed in the past year or two. I feel tired. All the time, tired. Here’s the thing, I’ve been an athlete my entire life. I know how to maintain this rotting flesh prison which I inhabit. But now, no matter how much I sleep, how well I eat, or how consistently I exercise, I simply lack the boundless energy of youth, and my carcass wants to trend more toward fat than muscle. Instead of rocking and rolling like a cracked-out energizer bunny, all my corpus wants to do these days is take naps and pack on pounds like a bear preparing for a long hard winter. I’m not saying I am infirm…yet. I can still do everything I used to. I can still run, and jump, and play. It’s just harder to do so, and it takes longer to recover after. Plus, when I look in the mirror or see myself in pictures, I get startled. A touch of the dysphoria if you will. I’m having a hard time because mentally I don’t think of myself as Old Max. I just think of myself as Max. And Max still thinks of himself as a stud. He doesn’t recognize the fat, greying cadaver with achy joints and a widows peak glaring at him from every inconveniently placed reflective surface.

Which begs the question: Who am I without my physicality? Will I still be me once my body declines to a point where I lose the physical capabilities that I have thus far always taken for granted? With something so intrinsic to my sense of identity and self-worth already slipping away, who even is Max? And why is my body already rotting when mentally I’m still just a young warthog?

That gets a lad thinking, it does. How can I, a practical infant, be halfway dead, when I’ve hardly even lived yet? I’m just a little baby boy after all, grey hair and dad bod notwithstanding. Mentally, I simply don’t feel old. Hell, I barely feel like I’m an adult, even though by all pertinent metrics, I am and have been one for over twenty years. I mean, I’m married. I have a mortgage. I contribute to a 401k. I have a child. That all sounds pretty grown up to me. So query – when will I feel grown up?

This isn’t a uniquely Max phenomenon either. Pretty much my entire cohort, the much-maligned millennial generation, are experiencing a similar crisis of disbelief. Let’s face it. We’re all old now. We’re parents and grandparents. We’re the bosses at work. We’re in the government. We’re the creepy couples at the bar sending younger women drinks because we like their vibe. And yet we somehow still don’t feel like grownups. Why ever could that be?

My theory? It’s the money. Economics, that spicy bitch, has bamboozled us once again.

It used to be that a young person could graduate high school on Friday, marry their sweetheart on Saturday, get her pregnant on Sunday, find a well-paying manufacturing job on Monday, and buy a house for sixteen dollars and thirty-four cents on Tuesday. Less than half a week after graduating high school, and they were doing things that take millennials until their thirties or forties to achieve – if we are ever able to at all. It’s probably easy to feel like an adult by forty when you’ve already been doing all the adulty things for over half your life.

For millennials like me however, that progression just wasn’t feasible. First, we grew up being told that if we ever wanted to make a dollar and didn’t want our bodies to spontaneously disintegrate by 22, we absolutely had to go to university. While there, we obtained degrees that ultimately did nothing to secure us employment, as we graduated into the first of several “once in a lifetime” global economic recessions with nothing to show for it but an unhealthy binge-drinking habit, lifelong crippling debt, and three to seven sexually transmitted diseases. Since there were no jobs, we mostly all just graduated and moved back home with our parents and younger siblings. It’s hard to feel all grown up when your mommy is still washing your laundry and making you lunchies, and you’re still on the family mobile plan, and seeing your childhood pediatrician under your parent’s health insurance policy to fix those pesky STDs.

You know what else is hard to do when your bedroom has a decorative cowboy wallpaper border and shares a wall with your parents’ master suite? Bring guys or girls home for fuckin. Or you know, for dating and marriage and all that jazz. The cock-blockery in effect against my age-group was astounding. So, by our mid-twenties we moved out. But jobs still paid pennies, and housing prices were, and still are, astronomically high, so our options were to be homeless, or rent a shithole with several roommates. Which sure, helped us get to the fuckin, but still wasn’t conducive to getting married or having kids.

So that leaves all of us to finally start achieving these milestone adulthood events like getting married and buying a home, not in our late teens and early twenties like previous generations, but instead in our thirties and forties. And even then, we aren’t having children, and if we are, it’s even later, because we can’t afford to support a family on a single salary, so both parents need to be working and established in a career to pay for a kid nowadays. So yes, mentally and emotionally we may be behind the curve for feeling like adults, but in our defense, it took us this long to be able to afford to do adult things. Which is sad, because our kids are now all going to be raised by old, tired, poor parents who still think they’re young and cool.

It’s a tragedy I say.

And you know what else is a tragedy? You know what else was “killed by millennials”? A good midlife crisis.

You all know the formula. The kids are finally getting older, and possibly already out of the house, and mom and dad realize that even though their lives are half over, their schedules have opened up, and they have plenty of disposable income, so it’s time to start having some fun. Maybe they buy a corvette, or an RV, or a boat. Hell, maybe they get all three. Maybe they do a little plastic surgery, nip a bit here, tuck a bit there, take a quick trip to Turkey for some hair plugs. They get really into grilling meats or watching WWII documentaries. They have an affair. You know, traditional midlife crisis stuff.

Not us millennials. Our lives may be half over, but we’ve still got young kids in the house, zero free time, and negative disposable income. So, our midlife crises rarely include sports cars or all-inclusive trips to world class swingers resort Hedonism II in Jamaica. No, our midlife crises involve all of the existential dread and anxiety of being faced with our own impending mortality, with none of the fun of road-tripping in a convertible for a weekend getaway to a key party at a timeshare in the Poconos with the old lady.

So that’s where I’m at these days. Too poor and tired for a good mid-life crisis. Too old to feel good physically. And too young to feel comfortable with being old. As my body changes and my life enters its downswing, I struggle with the philosophical weight of redefining who I am vs who I once was, and who I will eventually become.

It’s not all bad though.

Used corvettes are getting pretty cheap.

Posted in Max's Journal | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Rest In Peace Chuckle

Posted on April 8, 2025 by Max T Kramer

This past weekend I had the bittersweet opportunity to say goodbye to one of my dearest friends and brother in all but blood, and I am struggling to put into words how much he meant to me, and how special of a guy he truly was.

Charles and I dressed to impress

How can one encapsulate and quantify an entire existence with mere words? There isn’t a language in the world capable of conveying the depth of feeling I’m experiencing, nor accurately portraying the unique, wonderful, oftentimes perplexing individual that was Charles Anthony Cino III. Anything I say is insufficient, and any thoughts I type come out broken, but I will try all the same, because Chuck deserves my best efforts to express how important and beloved he was.

So again, how does one describe the indescribable? Limited and insufficient as it is, I will attempt to use an analogy.

Are you at all familiar with Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold powder? This process takes a beloved object which has been broken and painstakingly glues it back together in a way that doesn’t hide, but celebrates the damage, resulting in a new item that is all the more unique and beautiful because of its cracks and imperfections. Visually, to me Kintsugi pieces look like imperfect vessels struggling to contain a secret inner brilliance, like they are so full of intrinsic beauty that their bland, ordinary outer shells cannot fully contain their wonderous true nature.

That was Chuck.

An example of Kintsugi pottery

Charlie struggled for the better part of his life with physical and mental challenges resulting from a childhood accident. I never had the privilege of meeting him before his accident, but instead came into his life after he, like a kintsugi bowl, had already been broken and put back together, changed yes, but still beautiful and golden all the same.

Although Charlie’s life was filled with hardship, he somehow never became defined by that struggle. He was dealt a raw deal but never became bitter or cruel. It is said that Gods’ hardest struggles are given to his strongest warriors, and Charlie was nothing if not resilient and strong. (Seriously, for example the number of times he broke his foot and just kept walking around on it was deep into the double digits. What an absolute mad lad.)

Like I said, I never met Charlie until after the accident that changed the trajectory of his life. I don’t know who he would have become if not for that freak fluke of bad luck. Probably a total stud. Certainly, somebody impressive. Undoubtably somebody amazing, because he was amazing even as the damaged boy, and then man, that I got to grow up alongside. A person just broken enough to let his secret golden inner core shine through.

Chuck was well over six feet tall, and well over three hundred pounds, but he radiated such a gentle, generous energy that he was never intimidating. He was truly a gentle giant who never quite fit in his body, like a clumsy puppy that has not yet grown into its too large paws and floppy ears, and he absolutely radiated puppy energy. Anything he could do for you, he would, happily, without a second thought. I met Charlie, who was a couple years older than me, through his younger brother Matthew, who was my age, and once Matt and I became friends and I started spending time at their house in middle-school, Charlie never played the aloof, too-cool, put-upon and uninterested Older Brother Being Forced To Interact With His Nerdy Younger Brother’s Nerdy Friends persona. He simply pranked me with some gentle hazing, because he was a young teenage boy after all, and then immediately welcomed me unconditionally into his orbit. That unconditional acceptance and unequivocal offer of friendship did more to shape my young and malleable psyche growing up than any number of other experiences or acquaintances. Ultimately, Charlie was Kind, and I have become a kinder man thanks to his influence.

That was Charlie though. Kind with a capital K, and Generous to a fault. Even when he had nothing, if he saw somebody in need his immediate reaction was to help. It was just an integral part of his personality to offer what little he had to share with those he cared about.

I will be forever thankful for the time I got to spend with Charl, and that through the closeness we developed after decades of friendship I got to see the true depth of beauty that was his soul. Despite being an enormous, literally larger than life individual, Chuck could actually be quite shy and would oftentimes draw into himself physically and emotionally in new company, but once he got to know you and let down his walls he bloomed into the gregarious, charming, magnificent creature that he really was.

Let me be clear. Chuckle was Good. But he was also Strange. He was perpetually childish. Endearingly innocent. He was a perplexing cryptid, a fae creature, an elusive Charlie Beast.

And boy was he Stubborn. Like, exasperatingly stubborn. With his litany of physical hardships there were oftentimes activities that he simply could not or should not take part in, but trying to talk him down once he made up his mind to try was like speaking to a brick wall. Which may account for several of those broken feet now that I think of it. I can’t blame him however. He just wanted to belong, and was willing to go through great discomfort to avoid missing out on our childish adventures. It’s admirable really, even if at the time it was quite stressful trying to tell the enormous man child with diabetes that maybe he shouldn’t try to bike ten miles with his brother and I without eating anything because he would definitely pass out, and then us having to split up with Matt left tending to him and me desperately searching for a store or restaurant along our bike route to load up on sugary snacks to bring back because he absolutely did pass out on the side of the road. Or like when we all went to the Poconos for vacation and on the first day there, he bought a bottle of Jack Daniels Honey Liquor, which is basically liquid sugar, and insisted he could drink it because it wasn’t very sugary and then spent the entire rest of the trip practically crippled from gout.

That was our Charlie Beast. He was certainly a unique fellow. He definitely danced to the beat of his own drum, whether the tune was Guns N Roses or DMX. He was Impatient. He was Impulsive. He was strangely lucky at card games he didn’t even understand how to play. He was prone to Charlie-isms like calling 16 times in a row while refusing to leave a message as if it was a world ending emergency, just to ask if I wanted to hang out sometime. Not even for a definitive plan that needed immediate scheduling, just to verify that at some time in the future I would like to continue being his friend and do friendship activities together.

Yes Charlie. Yes, I would.

Chuck in his element, surrounded by Framily

And you know what? Even with all his stubbornness, and impatience, and impulsivity, what should have or could have been annoying behavior ultimately was endearing. Because it was Chuck. He became the big brother I needed. He was a role model and an example to live up to. Because of who he was and what was important to him. Loving his Family. Loving his Friends. Having Fun. Wherever he went, laughter followed. There are certainly worse philosophies to live by.

I wish we got so much more time together, but what a gift to have known him for as long as I did. What a blessing to have had my life brightened by his light. The body that caused him so much pain may be gone, but the light he produced remains. He’s not gone, just going through some changes.

Fairwell Chuckleberry Finn. I’ll carry you with me always and I will do my best to teach the lessons I learned from you to everyone I can.

Really, what could be a better legacy than that?

I’m feeling the love Chaaaaaarlie.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

January 6th, or Here We Go Again

Posted on January 5, 2025 by Max T Kramer

It’s almost January 6th, 2025, the anniversary of MAGA idiots storming the Capital four years ago, and once again Trump is back, like fucking herpes.

The first time he won the election, I was annoyed and disappointed, but not especially surprised. It was fairly foreseeable that after 8 years of having an articulate, intelligent, humorous, classy, black man in office, electing a woman would be a step too far, and that our shitty, racist, dumb fucking country would swing all the way around to electing the exact opposite. I figured that the bigots, idiots, and racists that voted Trump into office would calm down and crawl back into their holes after getting that trashy genital rash elected. I thought they were electing Trump as a symbolic gesture, a sort of fuck you from a vocal, assumedly, inbred minority of the country, to the less idiotic majority, as a way of saying look, you made us listen to a well-read negro for eight years, so now we’re going to elect an incompetent asshole as revenge. Neener Neener poo poo.

Obviously (I thought), nobody actually expected the criminal blowhard billionaire to actually do good for the country. They just wanted to get him into office to hurt their enemies. You know, people of color, queer folk, women, minorities, people who know how to read, people with all their teeth, etc. I thought it was by design a pyrrhic victory; the dingbats who voted for Trump the first time knew the incompetent orange boob wouldn’t help them in any way, and would actually hurt them equally, but they voted him in all the same, like how a wild animal stuck in a trap causes themselves the most pain by lashing out blindly.

Then, after four years of bumbling and fumbling and watching Trump be exactly as much of a piece of shit as he’s always been, the folks that voted him in the first time would say, okay, I think we’ve proved our point, don’t test us again, and then crawl back into their stinking burrows to let smarter and more level heads retake the Republican party, and have a less divisive, and frankly, less retarded nominee run in the next election.

At least, that’s how I expected it to go. Instead, a large portion of the population saw exactly how shitty Trump was as president, how selfish and self-serving he was, and exactly how bad things got while he was in charge, and for some frankly incomprehensible reason decided, yes, he was their guy, and they would support him come hell or high water. But like…why? He’s not at all a likable individual, and it’s not like his many (so many) personality faults can be overlooked because he was a competent policymaker, or in any way good at the job. Since he very much wasn’t. So, why him? Why the whole MAGA movement? Why hitch your horse to this wheezy sack of rotten garbage? To the point where thousands were willing to storm the Capital when he lost and then transparently lied about it, like the whiny spoiled crap sack he’s always been? The fuck? Why would such a blatantly manipulative and consistently selfish bad actor endear such devotion? It’s completely unfathomable, but hey, at least he lost. That time.

Enough people were rightfully disgusted by Trump that they were willing to vote for Biden, a frail, mumbling, ghoul of an old man, just to get Trump out of office, and you know what, Biden did good enough. So the complete collapse of our Democracy at the hands of foreign agents and domestic would-be oligarchs was delayed. A bit.

But then here comes old herpes-sore McGee, crawling back out of the sewer, freshly convicted of yet more crimes, continuing his one-man crusade against human decency and coherent discourse, desperate to slink back into office to avoid jail time, and just our luck, his opponent this time around is both a negress and a woman, so you absolutely know that all the worst parts of society scrambled to get their votes in to prevent THAT from ever happening, and here we are once again, with another shitty Trump term to look forward to, and frankly, I’m going to be losing friends over it.

If you voted for Trump the first time around, shame on you, but whatever, you wanted to send a message, and fair enough, message received.

Then, after seeing just how crap he was, how much he constantly lied, and how he drove off anybody competent, and surrounded himself with crooks, criminals, and sycophants, if you voted for him again, Jesus Christ, what the fuck is wrong with you, but oh well, no harm done, at least he lost.

But now? NOW? After years of this clown dominating our media, avoiding justice for his many and varied crimes, and showing exactly how unfit he is to control our nation, if you voted for him this third time? Yeah, kindly go ahead and fuck off. Never speak to me again, because we are not friends.

This isn’t a case of “different political opinions” that can be laughed about over a case of beer. This is you proving that you and I live by entirely different ethical and moral guidelines, and that we cannot co-exist peacefully. Frankly, you’re a piece of shit, you’re unforgivably stupid, and you’ve fucked our country you stupid fucks. Like, do you realize how fucked we are? For the next several generations? All because you voted for a human skid mark over a boring brown woman? He’s going to sell us down the river to every billionaire and corporate interest he can, and the people cheering him on beside you look a lot like Russian plants and Nazis because they are Russian plants and Nazis. You get that, don’t you? That even though you might not consider yourself a bigot or a traitor, you support the same person that is supported by bigots and traitors. Hey, guess what that makes you?

That’s what this all comes down to after all. Trump is, by all normal standards, quite evil. He does evil things. He lies, he cheats, he steals. He cheats on his wives, he sexually abuses women, he stiffs his workers and contractors. He steals from charities. He operates fraudulent scam businesses. He looks up to dictators and looks down on peacemakers. These are the actions of an inherently evil man.

My principles prevent me from supporting such evil acts. Therefore, I do not support Trump. If, knowing how evil he is, you still support Trump… you’re more than a little bit evil too. Whether you admit it or not, if you align yourself with evil, whether overtly or just tacitly, you are evil as well. So, thanks, but no thanks, let’s not be friends.

It’s the hypocrisy more than anything that upsets me.

It’s the hypocrisy of “Christians” voting for an individual who has never once embodied a single Christian virtue. He is not humble, he is not kind, he is not forgiving. He is greedy, proud, deceitful. Covetous, envious, cruel. Adulterous, lustful, and hateful.

It’s the hypocrisy of the “thin blue line”, “blue lives matter”, “law and order” crowd supporting an unrepentant criminal. If you claim to support law enforcement, or are actually a law enforcement officer, how could you, in good conscience, ever vote for him? My dude is a criminal. Like a career criminal. With decades of proven criminality. Like, proven in court, with due process and everything. Like holy shit, that’s a lot of crimes. So by voting for him, you’re either admitting that you know he’s a career criminal, but you don’t actually care about law and order, and your entire identity is a hypocritical lie, OR you’re claiming that law and order matters, but that he somehow has been unfairly targeted by a corrupt and unjust system (for decades, for…so many alleged crimes), and that he is actually an innocent scapegoat who has been the victim of an unfair system…but… if you’re law enforcement… or a law enforcement apologist…you ARE the system. So, by supporting him while also allegedly supporting “law and order” either you complicitly uphold and take part knowingly in an unfair, unjust, and corrupt system which convicts innocent people, or you admit he’s guilty and you just don’t care. Either way, that makes you a hypocrite and a lying liar who lies.

It’s the hypocrisy of women supporting a known convicted rapist, adulterer, and misogynist.

It’s the hypocrisy of the toxically masculine somehow finding his cowardly, whining, thin-skinned, argumentative, bullying ways to be something to aspire to.

And, it’s the hypocrisy of people who claim to be fighting back against a government that is supposedly controlled by a shadowy cabal of unscrupulous billionaires, voting for an unscrupulous billionaire. One who has been bought and paid for by other unscrupulous billionaires. Who are now openly gaining control of the government. Like, what was your argument for voting for him the first time? That he was such a good businessman that he was too rich to be bought? First of all, the quality of his business acumen is …. highly debatable, but more importantly…when you’re in business, everything has a price…because all you care about are profits. So, of course the unprincipled, fraudulently “rich” businessman (conman) with zero morals or ideals was going to immediately sell out our nation’s future well-being to the highest bidder. Even the slightest amount of common sense would indicate that was inevitable.

So, congratulations. You did it. You won. I hope that keeps us all warm and fed once your orange overlord guts every worker protection our ancestors waged bloody war for, removes every restriction keeping greedy corporations from poisoning our air, land, and water, destroys our access to affordable healthcare or education, and rolls back every right granted to LGBT, women, and minorities in the last 200 years, all while sucking Elon’s Musky dick and getting railed from behind by Putin.

You’re a bad person and you deserve my castigation.

Posted in Max's Journal | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Wherein a Reunion is Attended

Posted on August 30, 2024 by Max T Kramer

Last Saturday night was my 20-year high school reunion. They’re not cool anymore so I didn’t attend. The end.

Just kidding, of course I went. Why wouldn’t I? I had a lot of friends that I cared deeply for when I was a youth. Even if I haven’t seen them in twenty years, the caring never stopped. We may have grown apart, or failed to keep in touch, but I still consider them my friends. I’m still invested in knowing about their triumphs and tribulations. At this age, I treasure every opportunity I have to see any friend, let alone a lot of them all at once. I wanted to find out how my former classmates have been, and to let them know hey, I’ve missed you, I still think about you, I hope you’re doing well.

Also, I was hoping everyone would be real fat.

Sadly, they weren’t.

Well, somebody was. Twas I. I’m the fat one.

I don’t know what forbidden sorceries my graduating class has had access to over the past twenty years, but everybody looked exactly the same. Like flies caught in amber, they have remained untouched by the (what I thought was) inevitable march of time. They all just seem to have cumulatively decided to…not age?

Mistress Kay and I must not have gotten that memo. We have aged POORLY. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still me. We’re still us. We’re just far worse in every way. Sure, my total volume of hair has probably remained constant, but it has mostly changed from brown to grey and traveled from my head to my back. And sure, Mistress Kay might still be an ethereal beauty, a total babage, a true Venus, but the Venus she resembles these days evokes more Willendorf than Milo. Even so, even with my balding head and brittle bones, and Mistress Kay’s paleolithic fertility goddess shaped body, we’re still laughing at the same jokes, enjoying the same activities, and succumbing to the same hedonistic urges we always have. And those urges still include partying with our pals.

So, heck yes, we went to the reunion. And naturally, we brought our Molds with us.

Look, after nearly twenty years of loving (barely tolerating) my dumb ass, Mistress and Molds have already met many of my friends, but the majority of those friends are people I became close to as an adult, in college or after, NOT friends from my childhood. I looked forward to introducing the ladies in my life to the various dumb idiots who knew me in my most formative years and helped shape me into who I’ve ultimately become (a dumb idiot). I thought it might help explain some things for them (such as my idiocy). Plus, I got to show up to the event with two babes and pretend I was cool for once.

Also, I liked my childhood, I thought high school was fun, and I remember it fondly.

Sadly, it appears that not everybody else felt the same way. Turnout for the reunion was okay, good even, but it was certainly not a majority of my graduating class, and a surprising (to me) amount of my former classmates attended without their spouses, or didn’t attend at all.

And I took that personally.

Look, logically I know that not a single person who received an invitation to the reunion thought, oh, I wonder if Max will be there, and then made their choice on whether or not to go based on my RSVP. I’m barely the main character in my own story, so I doubt I’ve earned even a passing mention in the appendix of anybody else’s. So yes, I know, of course I know, that nobody was making any social decisions based on my absence or presence. And yet, I can’t quite ignore that vicious little voice whispering in my head that the people who didn’t attend chose not to come because they hate me personally and didn’t want to see me, and wish I was dead. Which is sad, because I sure wanted to see them. I wanted to see everybody.

I’m ever so lonely.

Even taking the people who never RSVPed, or declined, or simply couldn’t be tracked down to receive an invite into account, at the end of the day, attendance was still pretty good, and seeing the people I got to see was a real treat. And I suppose I can forgive the people that couldn’t or wouldn’t attend. Twenty years after graduation is a tough time for a reunion after all. We’re all approaching 40, most of us are now married or seeing someone. A majority have bought or are renting our own homes, and those homes are mostly located far away from our small, expensive, redneck bourgeois hometown. We’re also in our prime money-making years and are all very busy with our jobs. For those of us that have children, most of our children are still actual children, not yet independent teens or adults. So, I get that taking time off work, finding childcare, and traveling back to our boring hometown to spend too much money eating and drinking and making painful small talk with people we haven’t seen in half a lifetime might be a tough sell.

For me, all of those barriers were actually incentives. Yes, I’m married, but like I said, I wanted my current world and my former world to mix and mingle. Yes, work sucks and I’m busy as hell, but that just means I could really use a break to drink heavily with other adults. Yes, we have a toddler who still requires constant supervision, and yes, we live moderately far away and had to travel back to my old stomping grounds, but wouldn’t you know it, two birds one stone, my mother still lives in my childhood home, and she was more than happy to get some quality grandma/granddaughter slumber party time in while the girls and I were out drinking and dancing like our knees don’t hurt with people I haven’t seen since my knees didn’t hurt.

Really, my only worry was, what if I wasn’t able to really relate to any of my former peers? What if after twenty years apart, we have all grown too distant, and we couldn’t find common ground to reconnect? Thankfully, my fears proved to be 100 percent unfounded. Reconnecting with everybody after such a long time was a complete joy. We may have an additional twenty years of growth and development and unique individual experiences, but we’re all still ourselves. The people we have become are all built on foundations created back then. The thoughts in my head are hopefully at least slightly more mature and complex than they were when I was a child, but the brain they’re running on is the same hunk of salty meat and electricity it always has been. The me I am today may not be completely familiar to the me from twenty years ago, but that teenaged me is still in there, and he absolutely recognized the teenaged versions of my high school friends, even if they too have been wrapped up in sophisticated adult packaging in the intervening years. I am happy to report that just as I was in awe of my friends twenty years ago, I am even more in awe of them now. They done grown up good.

Be that as it may, I still wish more people had come than just the gorgeous ageless vampires who showed up. I wanted to see the freaks and weirdos. The misfits. The philosopher kings. The poets. The mad artists. The queer, the fae, the fantastical. You know, Interesting folk. Instead, I got to see the hot kids who grew up into hot adults standing around being hot. Which, to be fair, was still pretty nice.

To those of my former classmates who went to the reunion, you look incredible, it was wonderful to see you, I’m so glad we got to catch up. To those who did not go, I wish you did. I miss you. Give me a call sometime.

Ultimately, it was a fun night. 10/10, would do it again in another twenty years.

Posted in Max's Journal | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Male Loneliness Epidemic, or Dadding in the Newish Millennium

Posted on May 27, 2024 by Max T Kramer

It was Gavin Rossdale of the British rock band Bush who somewhat presciently penned the lyrics “I’m never alone, I’m alone all the time” as the start of the second verse of their hit song Glycerine (the fourth single from Bush’s multi-platinum 1994 debut album, Sixteen Stone), and boy let me tell you he was on to something. That line could easily be adopted as the official motto of modern-day fatherhood.

Ladies, if you have a lad in your life, please check on him because I guarantee he’s on the struggle bus and he doesn’t know how to get off. Honestly, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, after all it’s not like I’m the one who coined the term “the male loneliness epidemic”.

Loneliness, however that may be tracked, has risen exponentially amongst everyone in recent years, partially due to global health crises keeping us home and isolated, partially due to the internet, partially due to how media is currently produced and consumed – with content algorithmically designed and presented to intentionally separate and silo consumers, and with on demand and streaming shows allowing individuals to watch whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want, on however many screens they want, instead of being forced to sit together with their family in one central location in their home to partake in the communal consumption of one Unified Unit of Media, and partially due to economic factors effecting work/life balance to the detriment of us laboring poor.

All of those factors impact men and women more or less equally, so why then is there specifically a MALE loneliness epidemic?

Basically, it’s because us guys are worse at loneliness. Or, to put it another way, compared to women, we’re amateurs. Mere dabblers. We merely adopted the loneliness.

Women on the other hand were born to it. Molded by it. For generations. What I am talking about, of course, is motherhood.

Look, at the end of the day, parenting a child is incredibly isolating. You need to put the needs of another ahead of your own, all day, every day, for years on end. That is a burden. The emotional damage that lack of agency and independence has on a psyche can be catastrophic, and historically, for good or ill, most of that burden has been placed on women. While men for the most part traditionally worked outside the home to provide financial support for their families, women stayed home with the kids. Although going to work outside the home can obviously be stressful and difficult, it usually involves interacting with coworkers, or clients, or the general public, even if only superficially, so it wouldn’t necessarily be isolating. Taking on the lion’s share of child-rearing, however? That can get you feeling alone real quick. So why, if women have been bearing that burden for generations, are we not talking about the women’s loneliness epidemic? Why is male loneliness the topic du jour?

The reasons, I believe, are twofold. The first, unfortunately, is that, generally speaking, women’s issues are often downplayed or ignored altogether. So even though women may have been languishing in loneliness for centuries, the response has simply been apathy. It’s not like actual people were suffering, they’re only women after all. But now that this issue is affecting real people (men), it deserves some recognition.

The second reason is because women have experienced this issue for so long, that they’ve learned how to deal with it. There are cultural and social constructs in place to help alleviate their isolation. This is the idea of the “village”. Many women have other women that they can share their burdens with, and a burden shared is a burden lightened. Men generally have no such support systems in place. From boyhood, men are usually taught to hide, suppress, ignore, or otherwise minimalize their own feelings, which results in emotionally stunted automatons who are woefully ill-equipped to process Big Emotions. But why does this matter? Men have successfully stumbled through life with the emotional maturity of a moderately socialized inanimate carbon rod for generations after all. Why is it only an issue now?

I would argue that it has always been an issue, but it is MORE of an issue now because, well, times, they are a-changing.

Basically, thanks in part to some long overdue cultural progress, but mostly due to the slow collapse of the Great American Experiment, which has resulted in a rigged economy designed to benefit only the top few percent at the expense of the great majority of the American citizenry so that it is now almost impossible to support a family from a single source of income, destroying the old socio-economic pattern of one provider (usually male) and one stay-at-home parent (usually female), the responsibilities of parenting are now much more evenly split, which, to be fair is a good thing! (the equal parenting thing, not the devastating financial situation) Dads, they be a’dadding these days, creating much healthier and more equitable relationships with their children, and their partners, but with these new more progressive parenting arrangements come a more equal share of the burdens, hardships, and isolation of parenting, and wooh boy, us guys are not equipped to handle them.

Parenthood is hard. It just is. Parenthood is that Bush lyric I mentioned earlier. You’re never alone, and yet paradoxically you’re alone all the time. Parenthood is being isolated from your family and friends, and even your own partner, while being subservient to the fickle whims of a miniature sociopath. It’s feeling deep, crushing, devastating loneliness, but without a moment of privacy or relaxing solitude. It’s constantly being needed, and never being wanted. Always required, never desired. Mistress and I have one adorable, well-behaved, pleasant child, just one, and we’re hanging on to our sanity by a thread. By the end of every day spent keeping our little bundle of expenses alive and well, we don’t have the mental, physical, or emotional capacity to devote any effort into ourselves or each other. Like wounded animals we just scurry off to our own dark isolated corners to lick our wounds and stare listlessly at the wall. After a full day of parenting, Mistress is generally so over-stimulated and touched out that she would rather set herself on fire than snuggle with me, whereas I am so starved for adult companionship that I would happily get into a windowless van driven by a blood-covered stranger if they pulled up onto my front lawn and asked me if I wanted to hang out.

Of course, when the going gets tough, Mistress can and does at least commiserate with her girlfriends about the trials and tribulations of parenting. She has a robust support system of female friends and family who understand exactly what she is going through, and who are ready to lend a shoulder to lean on and an ear to vent to.

Me? I’ve got several close guy friends who are also new dads that I assume feel a lot of the same feelings and think a lot of the same thoughts I have about parenthood, but I don’t know for sure because we have never once had a conversation about our parenting experiences.

Guy friendships just aren’t like that. Generally, they are very topic dependent, in that the friendship, such as it is, will revolve around one or a few specific topics, and that will be the extent of the relationship. A guy may have a few golf buddies, or a few cards buddies, or a few bike buddies, or a few work buddies, and their conversations will remain centered around those shared themes. This leads to very shallow, but very safe relationships, without drama or stress, but also without a deep connection, and without that deeper connection it is incredibly hard to open up about any real issues, concerns, or difficulties that the guy may be wrestling with, so those issues remain bottled up and unresolved. If the guy is lucky enough to have deep, meaningful, close friendships with other guys, this learned avoidance of taboo or uncomfortable topics still remains. So ladies, that is why if your man was out with his friends and he mentions to you that his buddy said his wife has cancer, or that they just had a child, or something of that nature, he will almost never have any additional follow up information. What type of cancer? We don’t know. How bad is it? We don’t know. How was the labor? We don’t know. What is the child’s name or gender? We don’t know. We have not been trained to deal socially with heavy topics or heavy feelings, so we don’t. We just dissociate in the moment and wrestle alone with our thoughts and emotions in solitude.

And that is why involved coparenting feels especially isolating for men. We don’t have centuries of experience with this situation to fall back on. We don’t have “the village” that many lucky women do. Hells, in many cases we can’t even ask our own fathers for advice, because they were the last generation who experienced fatherhood/child-rearing in the old way, aka they relied entirely on their wife to handle it while they pounded lunchtime bourbon and flirted with their young secretaries. So even though guys are now experiencing all of the isolation of parenthood, like the emotionally obtuse idiots that we are, we’re just not talking about it. Every man an island and all that.

Fuck that.

Change may be hard, but stasis means stagnation. Adapt or die, right? Eventually, men will have to learn to reach out, and connect with each other, and talk about their feelings. That, or I guess we’ll just evolve to have longer and more dexterous toes, to better manipulate a shotgun trigger. You don’t want that. I don’t want that. So change it is. Guys, let’s talk about how lonely we are. Let’s talk about how difficult fatherhood can be. Boys, let’s build a village.

Posted in Max's Journal | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment