Just a TV Show

I was watching Without a Trace tonight and there was a soldier who was wounded in Iraq after saving a friend in a firefight. He was sent home to heal and receive a medal of honor.

As it turned out he purposely stood up and caught a bullet so that he could be sent home because his fiancé had written that she was leaving him for another man.

This is apropos of what I was saying the last time. Men hurt every bit as much as and as deeply as women and maybe more so. They just do more stupid things when it happens.

In this case, he ended up robbing a bank because they were going to lose the house and his brother had lost their money in a business failure.

Of course this is just dramatic license, after all it was story telling. But we have all called a woman long after she has told us to go to hell. We have begged and pleaded and acted like idiots.

Women may stay at home for months after a break up and cry, but guess what so do men.

Sensitivity

Women are sensitive, emotional, and afraid of mice. Men are cold, calculating, and warlike. At least that is the conventional wisdom.

It is my opinion, that this is not only a very rash generalization, but a very dangerous, irrational, and ignorant assumption that could not be further from the truth.

Men may be taught from infants that they shouldn’t cry; however, that instruction does not alleviate the turmoil and pain they experience throughout most of their life that is based on their innate emotional selves.

It is my contention that men are not only more sensitive and feeling than women, but that women are more cold, calculating and more purposeful than men.

Let me immediately say that this is not necessarily a bad thing, but a great survival tool for the human race. And there are many benefits to this, which I will discuss in the future. So don’t get upset with me until you read it all.

Let’s begin to look at this, by asking a few questions. Obviously, these are not all of them.

1. Are men more warlike because they feel more deeply about ideologies, country, love, family etc. than you might think? The Trojan War was supposedly fought over a woman, right?

2. Do men seem to go after more sex within relationships or outside of them, because they are looking for more profound intimacies? Though that search is the mantra of most women I know, but I’m certainly not convinced of it.

3. Who is a woman’s worst enemy (other than herself, which is everyone’s problem)? It is another woman, of course. Hence, the reason women can work with men easier than other women. That really isn’t a touchy-feely way to go through life.

4. When a child is in danger, is a woman any less apt to fight to protect them than a man? Look at a tigress and her cubs, or a hen and her peeps.

I subtly go into all of this in Potter’s Wheel. When one of my reader’s began to encounter sections alluding to this, actually it was discussing the main character’s (a man) inner feelings, she simply and honestly stated, I really can’t believe that any man feels that way.

A friend of mine who was there at the time, who was a psychotherapist, said to her, “You really have no idea what a man feels!” I think that is the basis of what I’m discussing.

This is only the beginning, more later…..

Background

Hi, I’m Chuck Rickard. I am 57 and live in Baltimore, Maryland. The past years have been an enormous emotional rollercoaster through the mountains and valleys of daily existence. I have witnessed, experienced, and felt a multiple lifetime’s worth of happiness and sadness and general angst of residence on this physical plane.

My successful and failed attempts to find the one thing in life that I wanted, a loving relationship with a woman, were the source of most of this turmoil. This all caused me, as it has with a lot of you, untold sleepless nights and not a few tears.

Oh, that’s right, a man should not cry, especially over love. Think again, dear reader, that is just another of those myths that are told to children on dark rainy nights. Most people, men and women alike either have no idea what a man feels, or wants to know.

I decided that if I were to free myself from some of the baggage generated by all of this, I would have to write it down in some form. Therefore, a few years ago I completed my first novel entitled Potter’s Wheel. In it I discussed a lot of what I had learned, shared some of my own experiences, blended it with views and vistas of other lives, and concocted a story of one man’s search for love and truth.

After a lot of effort, not completed wasted, in trying to get my novel published, I decided to self-publish. I attended the L.A. Book Expo last May and was thoroughly amazed to discover the future of publishing is here already. Vanity press of the past was paying someone to print a few hundred books that would probably gather dust in the garage. Not now. I have decided to go with a POD (Print on Demand) publisher and use my knowledge as a businessman to sell it myself.

This Blog will be devoted to two pursuits:
1) The discussion of man-woman relationships from a man’s perspective.
2) Keeping a journal of my experience in self-publishing my first novel.

I hope you will come along for the ride. Feel free to toss in an opinion here and there as the mood moves you. As long as the opinions are relevant, fairly socially acceptable, and not too crass, I will not edit or delete them, as you will find out I am…, well I just am.