With the interplay between men and women, boys and girls, you got to know some things. To the extent that we're different is something so laughably obvious, you're surprised it's even debated in ostrich-headed academic circles by flute-snoot jokers whose pitiful brains are far removed from the boots on the ground as they flap around with their terribly stilted, awkward bodies that are overly involved in the world of abstracts. I don't need statistics to demonstrate to be that not eating a balanced breakfast will cause you to flunk tests when your mind is wandering over to "The Golden Arches" instead of "The Ivory Tower", as if nothing about reality can't be vouched until pendingly verified by reams of research, oftentimes slanted by an agenda. And you can eat that, too!

There was a girl I loved in high school.

She was the stuff of "boxing nuns", peanut-butter crackers, a stuffed goose with a bow tied around its neck, even in the 9th grade. To the extent that I was a somewhat ponderous young man-- who was akin to a father figure, an older brother, or even a gray-haired "Silus Marner" tromping along behind her with a cane, hiding his aches & pains because he wouldn't want to spoil her happiness. He would build her a doll house as a craftsman, hammering away in complete devotion. It's the emotional, relationship-based flightiness that ultimately makes women "a little silly" and unable to face up to things. But yet it's that lightness that can make men feel necessary, and at their best make them feel the obligation to fight for home & country.

What girls can't seem to understand is the heaviness of goal-oriented failure, when men want to crawl under a bench and not be seen. . . . . to fully withdraw from the world of social contact and ache in silence unlike women with their emotional support group found in a gaggle of friends.

When I came across as such a ridiculous person in my heaviness and was unsuitable as a date, her friends made me "the laughing-stock" which only made it worse. "Ridiculous" is the last thing an earnest young man wants to look like and there was "no cave" to retreat to and recover my dignity. Not in a household with a henpecking Jewish mother and a media that was becoming all the more dishonorable and "loose" in a way I found very threatening, which is probably why I became so right-wing and angry.

I suspect that a lot of politics is ultimately rooted in attitudinal relationships between men & women and I guess you can call me a raving nostalgic moderate who likes his girls perky and wholesome and smart, just like Darcy all those years ago. I just wish the things we held so dear were not cheapened. I would "go the distance" for a girl like that, because the good things in life are not a dime-a-dozen. Like daytime talk-show hosts on "the estrogen hour".

Meet me in St. Louis and slay me there. . . . . for Tyra Banks walks the earth like post-content scum. Why, I'd sooner revolve my life around a "Blackberry"! And sip coffee at Starbuck's. I am an enlightened primitive and feel the urge to club something. . . . . and rest assured it is neither Darcy nor a baby seal though I would buy my woman a fur coat just to raise the hackles of the PETA/NAMBLA/ACLU crowd who believe that dolphins are our planet's rightful heir, not man.

You hold on there, "Lady-Bug". I'll be back with some scalps. . . . . you make it real, you know.