Some guys drink to drown their sorrows and others drink to destroy themselves. What kind of drinker was my dad? Hard to tell, because I never drank with him. I can assure you, however, that he was a macho drinker. He didn't drink like a sissy. Nothing tentative about it. When he drank, he drank. 

That would be the surface of the story, at least. The one shared with the public. He spent a good deal of time drinking and crying, too. (He referred to this as a "crying jag.") I remember those moods––remember staying as far away as possible from him then, and being taken out of the house so dad could be alone....

Ah, the wonderful memories that come up when you write about an alcoholic father!

But even crying alone is macho if you're using alcohol to do it. Because drinking (or some other form of self-destruction) is the coping mechanism of macho robots everywhere. It's accepted macho behavior to get absolutely shitfaced when your woman dumps you, when you lose your job, when your favorite team loses the big game, etc. It is socially accepted on a massive scale, regardless of how much damage men do to themselves with it. 

Even if––for instance––you go and get shitfaced because you didn't win an election and go out and try to kill somebody. When my dad did that, it was certainly macho, wasn't it? Can't say he was being a pussy. When he went out, he went out like a man, dammit. If it wash' acceptable, at least it was understandable. Because that's something men ae known to do, right?

I had much more to say on this topic as I stood taking my endless video selfies, but when I watched them, I saw that a lot of what I said was bullshit. Me dancing around the issue of how ridiculous it is to think that self-destruction is manly. Never able to come out and really so it. But I'm in the mood to boil shit down right now, so I've boiled things down to one small snippet of video that proves, once more, how I'm not nearly as macho as my father was.  

And it unfortunately proves that I'm still wrapped up in bullshit thinking about the connection between drinking and machismo, because I can't get my own behavior right. I still drink to punish myself sometimes, and when do that, I hear my father's voice in my head.

C'mon, Steve. Have another fuckin' drunk. Then my imaginary father puts a glass in front of me––thunks it down hard on the bar as if to say This is what we do when life sucks. Suck it up. Hurt yourself like a man.