Well.  It has happened.  I have lost my manhood.

The beginning of the end came just the other day when I painted a woman’s nails.  That’s right.  I admit it.  I painted her fingernails.  There’s no point in keeping this to myself.  The woman whose nails I did doesn’t care too much for decorum.  Eventually she will tell everyone anyway.  So there you have it.  Struggling to hang onto at least a thread of my manhood during the process, I did request painter’s tape to cover her cuticles the way a house painter would cover window glass and chair rails.  She had none and wouldn’t have let me use it if she had.

I guess I’ve always sort of been “in tune with my feminine side.”  That’s really just a nice way of saying that I never really understood public male crotch scratching, power lifting or turkey hunting.  And I came about it naturally, I suppose.  When I was a very young child, the only two people I hung with, my only two role models, were my mother and older sister.  My dad traveled with his job quite a bit back then, and when he came home from those trips it was mostly just to fix family problems.  You know – mow the yard, tweak the plumbing, those kinds of things.  One day during one of his fix-it visits home, he saw me in the bathroom, relieving my bladder the way my two role models always did.  That’s right.  I was sitting.  My dad looked at my mom, pointed wildly at my sister and me and said to Mama, “You’ve got to separate those two!”

That bathroom incident and my dad’s demand started me on my 52-year journey into manhood.  And for the most part, I succeeded.  For quite a while.  I play and watch sports.  I DVR NASCAR.  I drink beer and have even been known to crush beer cans on my forehead.   Well, I did that once.  I eat beef WITH ketchup.  Sometimes I spit in public.  I have used the word, “Babe,” when not referring to a legendary baseball player.  When I see a voluptuous woman or hear even the slightest sexual innuendo, I say, “Oh Mama.”  I play golf, and I drink at football games.  And sometimes I wear the same pair of socks two days in a row.

Oh yeh.  I stand up in the bathroom now and have for decades.

But the final nail in my male coffin came just a day after the manicure incident when, for the first time ever, I DVR’d a soap opera.  Not for a wife on day shift or a female friend out of town.  No.  I did it for myself.  The woman whose nails I did got me hooked on the soaps.  Or at least on a soap.  “One Life To Live.”  

Analyzing my life and relating it to that show title could be an entire series of Lunars.  You do know this, right?  The material is endless here.  But for now, let’s just say that it’s over.  It’s done.  I’m done.  My manhood is over and done.  All 50-plus years of it.  And I have to tell you, these hot flashes and night sweats are killing me.  

And - I just Googled “quilting parties.”    Oh yeh.  I’m done.

Hitchcock couldn’t come up with this stuff. Click HERE for “Birdhood” at More Lunacy.