Good morning!

I climbed a mountain yesterday and I almost wish I hadn’t. It was 3 miles to the top of it and I ran into a few guys practicing to climb a real mountain, Mt. McKinley. They were just practicing but they maintained their male competitiveness, they pushed themselves harder whenever another guy got close to them. I just said, “Go ahead...” and let them pass me, I was lucky to be able to keep going, I didn’t need to turn it into a race.

I don’t understand men but that’s OK because they don’t understand us either. We shake hands and just notice how warm their hand is while they’re out there squeezing each other’s hands really tight to prove what men they are. How silly is that? If anybody squeezed my hand really tight, I would have to smack them a few times to get them over it. What’s the point? I COULD squeeze their hand...I choose not to.

I should make use of this innate thing about men and see who can clean the most of my yard or paint the most of my walls. Where are all the men who’d like to compete now?

My dog is even acting all male now, he’s barking at everything that moves. I have to bring him inside to keep the testosterone kings...the cops...from knocking on my door. So, here he is, eating my hair comb again. I guess it’s about time to get rid of his testicles. There’s far too much testosterone in this house.

Testosterone is at the heart of most of the planet’s problems. It certainly has something to do with war. Only men would think that war, in any form, is fun. Back in the day when they lined up and marched toward each other firing cannons and muskets, ya gotta wonder...why? Couldn’t they just flip a coin? Then they could have made up some great story about how they fought and no one would have gotten hurt. Instead, they just kept coming up with better ways to fight until now...we can just push a button and send a missile into a window. We’ve gotten much better at war, but not at preventing it. I would think that even fake war games would be better than real war. They could all play video games and then declare the high scorer the victor. Or, they could use paint balls. At least then when you do get shot, you can get back up again and go home.

Only men would convince each other that it’s more manly to actually be a warrior that to find ways to avoid war. They have convinced themselves than words like courage, honor and duty have something in common with killing other people. If they would just let the women take over for ONE war...I bet we could show them a thing or two. We wouldn’t want our sons to die so we wouldn’t send them away to fight.

We’d probably just have a pot-luck dinner and after we chatted about everything under the sun, we would just pull straws for the winner.

One of the problems with war nowadays is that nobody seems to know when the hell it’s over and what victory looks like. In Viet Nam, there were a hundred occasions where all we had to do was pull out, go home and claim victory. Who would have questioned that? I think that we could still do that today...if we pulled out of Iraq, went home and claimed victory...who would question us?

But, there’s that testosterone thing again. The men must be able to say that they got a boo boo so that they could win the boo boo medal and drive around with a boo boo license plate. It’s testosterone that makes men think that the guys who get caught by the enemy are heroes. I think that a hero is someone who never gets caught. They shouldn’t give medals to the clods who get caught, they should give them to the guys who are smart enough to evade capture.

But that testosterone is mighty potent stuff. Men say that women dress for each other...I don’t know how true that is but I’m sure of this...men work out for each other. Women don’t want a muscle bound moron who spends all of his time trying to see how wide his neck can get...they’d prefer someone who has spent some time out with other people, learning the social graces.

But, as long as the men are in charge, I guess we’ll all just have to sit back and watch them kill each other. It’s an odd way to spend your time but for now, we can’t get into that clique of controllers so we can just quietly sit back and wait for our turn to run things. It’ll come soon enough.