Читать книгу Alphabet of Manliness (revised and updated) - Maddox - Страница 35

QUICKLY, NAME TWO FAMOUS WOMEN INVENTORS. Too hard? Okay, name one. How about a famous invention made by a woman? Give up? That’s because there are none. Men invented everything. From Plato’s momentous discovery of wrestling (Figure 1), to John Holmes’s perfection of the money shot, all notable milestones of human achievement have come about because of men.

Modern researchers have made estimates regarding the earliest known evidence of the discovery of fire, but they maintain that nobody knows the exact date of this celebrated first encounter. But c’mon, we all know when fire was really discovered. It was found the second that man realized that animals were made out of meat. Since Eve’s better half, Adam, was the first man on Earth, he was the discoverer of fire. Problem solved, question answered.

Speaking of Adam, it’s worth mentioning some of the other noteworthy nuggets of enlightenment he came across before that bitch Eve stuffed her face full of fruit from the tree of knowledge, robbing man of eternal life.

Figure 1: Plato often contemplated the question of whether one could be taught virtue. He regularly invoked the flying elbow as a pedagogical method in which the master conveys his elbow to the pupil’s skull repeatedly, and through this repetition, the pupil eventually comes to enlightenment. Or a coma.

ADAM—THE PIONEER OF SLACKING

In the beginning, when God created the heavens—a vast and expansive cloud of dust and gas that eventually coalesced into planets revolving around a hydrogenous fusion core—he also fancied creating Earth, a planet ripe with the dust of creation. Being the resourceful God that he is, he decided to put all this dust to good use and to create man from it. It took millions of years and countless particles of matter to culminate in the creation of man, and what does Adam do when he’s put on Earth? What every red-blooded man does when he gets some free time: nothing (Figure 2). In his early years, Adam spent most of his time loafing around, limp-wristed out of contempt for all the hardworking animals around him. The ancient Greek statesman Aesop once told a fable about the ant and the grasshopper, in which the diligent ants labored tirelessly throughout the spring and summer months to store food for the winter, while the grasshopper laughed and played, mocking his arthropodic brethren for working so hard.

Figure 2: Adam, seen here bored off his ass, undertaking one of man’s earliest endeavors: loafing.

Adam, like the grasshopper, disdains those nimble, overly productive creatures that give the rest of us a bad name. When winter came, the grasshopper met his cold and bitter demise as he starved while watching the ants reap the fruits of their labor. Adam, unlike the grasshopper, did not starve when winter came because man was endowed with resourcefulness and cunning. So he did what every man does when he gets hungry: he made his woman cook. This bold experiment in laziness paved the path for the men who came after Adam, which is all of them.

ADAM—HOW BLAME BECAME

Adam was one of the most prolific innovators of his time, but simply stating so doesn’t do justice to his brand of lackadaisical genius since there were few others vying for the title in his era. One other, to be exact. But historians don’t prescribe much value to Eve’s nagging toward the contribution of humanity’s intellect. Along with destroying our bid for immortality, Eve set the ball in motion for feminine inadequacy for millennia to come.

That leads us to her infamous deed: eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Here’s a question that not a lot of people think about: What if the culprit was really Adam? Not possible? Think about it; what could be more spiteful than breaking the only law (which is really the same as breaking every law), then bailing out and letting an entire gender take the heat for it? It’s too tempting not to consider. Here’s how it could have played out: maybe Adam was feeling particularly hungry that day, and he decided that it would be bitchin’ if he could grab a bite to eat and disobey a divine mandate all on his lunch break. Or maybe he wanted to eat the apple just to see if he could get away with it unscathed, much like a child standing up on a roller coaster ride at an amusement park in spite of all the warnings. Whatever the reason, it’s possible that Adam was the one who ate the forbidden fruit. After all, history would later prove that men are almost supernaturally wise.

After doing the misdeed, Adam might have put his newfound knowledge to good use by passing the buck on to Eve when God came asking (Figure 3). The conversation might have gone something like this:

Figure 3: Dodging the wrath.

GOD: Who hath grazed from the tree of knowledge?

ADAM: Someone ate from the tree?

GOD: The tree of knowledge.

ADAM: Yeah, wow. Uh…that’s just…wow. I don’t know what to say.

GOD: Do you know anything about it?

ADAM: Well, I did notice something the other day, but…

GOD: But what?

ADAM: Never mind. I shouldn’t have said anything; you probably wouldn’t be interested anyway.

GOD: C’mon, tell me! You have to tell me, you can’t do that!

ADAM: Do what?

GOD: Say you know a secret and not tell me! Just give me a hint.

ADAM: Well, okay. Now, I’m not saying Eve ate the apple, but let’s just say that she’s been talking to Satan a lot lately.

GOD: Get out!

ADAM: Yep. They’ve been talking about lots of things. Temptation, bearing false witness, possibly fruit. Oops, here she comes.

EVE: Hey, guys.

ADAM: Hey, Eve. So did you hear about the tree of knowledge?

EVE: No, what about it?

ADAM: Someone ate from the tree.

EVE: What? That’s terrible. Any idea who did it?

ADAM: No idea, do you know anything?

EVE: This is the first time I’ve heard about it.

GOD: Don’t make this difficult. I know you’ve been talking to Satan.

EVE: I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who told you that?

GOD: I have my sources.

EVE: I swear to—you—that I didn’t eat the apple!

ADAM: Listen, God, I have a confession to make: I ate the apple.

GOD: That’s very nice of you, Adam, but you don’t have to defend her. You’ve been a great help already.

EVE: Adam, what did you tell him?

ADAM: I don’t want to get involved. This is between you two.

GOD: Just come clean and we can move on.

EVE: It wasn’t me!

GOD: Then who?

EVE: I don’t know! Jesus!

GOD: Oh, c’mon now, he hasn’t even been born yet, that’s the best you can come up with?

EVE: No, not Jesus the proper noun, I meant like “Jesus!” the exclamation.

GOD: Now you’re being facetious. I’m tired of playing these games. Since you won’t fess up, I have no choice but to damn your gender.

EVE: But—

GOD: Damned.

EVE: Adam, tell him!

ADAM: I’d like to help you out, Eve, honest, but my hands are tied on this.

GOD: You can start by making seventy-five cents for every dollar a man makes.

And that’s how Eve fucked it up for the entire female gender, thanks in part to Adam’s clever pioneering of the instrument of blame. As abundant as Adam’s innovations were, there were other notable men who tread the path of enlightenment after him.

ODIN—THE PATRON SAINT OF REARRANGING YOUR FACE

Odin is the manliest of all mythological gods. Nobody even comes close to Odin. Thor? Please. Zeus? Get the fuck out of my office. Zeus was possibly the biggest pussy in all of mythology. His specialty was to roll over and take it in the corn hole. Lesser gods such as Ares, Poseidon, and his bitch wife, Hera, were always pushing Zeus around and walking all over him. The only thing Zeus ever did was turn people into rocks or mountains, and he could hurl an occasional lightning bolt. Ooo, a lightning bolt! Oh no, not that, anything but a lightning bolt! Look out, Zeus the all powerful will smite you just as long as you aren’t standing next to a long pole.

Unlike Zeus, Odin was a god who could get things done. Odin didn’t fuck around with lightning bolts, he took care of assailants by smothering them with his giant nuts. Odin was the Norse god of war, wisdom, magic, victory, hunting, and poetry. Yes, poetry. Although poetry is pretty much the unmanliest form of writing, Odin was man enough to make even this most effeminate of written forms rock tits. Here’s a haiku written by Odin:

I murdered a man.

He had a wife and two kids.

I slept peacefully.

Here’s a poem Odin wrote one day when he ordered a sandwich, and they were out of wheat (Odin eats a diet high in fiber because cholesterol kills):

Bitch, say what?

That’s all he wrote before he stomped his foot up her ass and wore her colon around his ankle.

If there was one word to describe Odin, it would be cocksure. Odin had no character flaws, unless you consider an excessively violent response to minor annoyances a character flaw, and I don’t. Case in point: One time some guy went to one of Odin’s temples to sacrifice himself in an effort to spare his village from the famine that was scientifically proven to be caused by Odin.

The guy trid to impale himself on a large stake, but he lost his balance and fell awkwardly on the pole, causing him to bleed all over the place. When Odin came down to collect the man’s soul, he saw the mess and became furious because Odin hates a sloppy sacrifice. Odin was so pissed that he resurrected the man, ate him, and then poked his own eye out and ate it so he could watch the body as he digested it and shit it out.

SOCRATES—THE FATHER OF SPITE

My advice to you is to get married: if you find a good wife, you’ll be happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.—Socrates

Socrates was a philosopher. He was married to an irritable old crone, Xanthippe, whose nagging was legendary. Xanthippe had modest cognitive ability, and it’s rumored that the reason Socrates was so proficient at demolishing asses during debates is because of the sheer level of stupidity he had to deal with daily. Socrates often said that Xanthippe was the most difficult person to live with, because after having dealt with her brand of bullshit, he asserted that he could easily get along with anyone else.

Xanthippe was notoriously thickheaded. The smartest thing to ever come out of Xanthippe’s mouth was Socrates’s cock. Socrates eagerly had three children with Xanthippe, not because he wanted children, but because he wanted to put her through the pain of childbirth three times. He would have had a fourth child if he weren’t seriously concerned that his penis would fall off due to frostbite (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Xanthippe’s vagina.