Another New Year. Holidays get harder to enjoy as you get older. I still can’t figure out how to shop for my family. Man what do you get for your parents that 1) they don’t already have after some 40 years or so 2) they will actually USE  and 3) you won’t eventually wind up with someday. How about children? When I was a kid A/FX cars, Hot Wheels and Bicycles were pretty much it. Now most Regular Guys have to take loans on their credit cards just to pay for an IPOD or cell phone that texts. And if that isn’t bad enough, next year that IPOD just got updated and it isn’t good enough anymore. So it starts all over again.

I see friends of mine agonizing over buying for their kids and then they think they didn’t buy enough.  I stopped by Walmart 6 times in hopes of securing a Wii for my daughter, who by the way, told me she wanted it on Black Friday. Did you ever try buying a video console for Christmas? It’s madness. Luckily, my wife happened to be there when a delivery truck arrived on her ONE visit. Go figure.

What happened to the Holidays? Everything is all about what you get and even worse, what you have to buy for others. I miss the times when our whole family would meet at my Grandma’s, squeeze some 15 people around a table for 6, ate until all the men fell asleep watching football while the women sang songs doing the dishes. My daughter will never experience that. I have to say, I never realized just how nice it was while it was happening, but I sure do miss it now.

Everyone is so spread out now. Families no longer live in the same state let alone the same town. Used to be that everyone grew up, lived and worked in the same place their whole life. The family has changed and so with it did the old Holiday traditions. It always seems to be such a big deal now trying to get everyone in the same place. With kids and  traveling, and sometimes up to four families to visit due to divorces ( see Vince Vaughn/ Four Christmas’) its  always a nightmare. Then you get the guilt factor from your Mom. Oh its so subtle but you know it when it rears its ugly head. “Oh I guess you’ll be spending Christmas with ( fill in ) this year. Its okay. Your father and I are getting used to being alone”. Wow, that doesn’t sting!!

I like the way some of my Regular Guy friends and their families handle Holidays. They have a plan to be in the same place for the same Holiday every year, with one family taking turns to host. It’s so simple yet so elusive to most. I been trying to get my family to do this for years but always another excuse why we can’t make it happen.

And so the agony continues…Overall this years Holiday seemed to work out pretty good. I can’t wait until next year. NOT!!!

Just one man’s opinion…

The Regular Guy

Eve…isn’t that where it all started? Tempted in the Garden of Eden by the forbidden fruit!

I think I was five. Maybe six. Six years old when I first noticed an attractive woman. I have to say woman because she was a woman. I guess I started out liking them older. My first was someone who was married to a Regular Guy who’s family we rented an apartment from.  I didn’t know much back then but I did know this.

Louis was a tough guy. He was a bad ass. At least I thought that from my very small perspective. He built motorcycles and painted them in his garage. He had bad ass biker friends and metal flake paint jobs. He smoked, with the cigarette always just hanging from the corner of his mouth. Jeans and ripped or no shirt. Tattoo’s and a drinker. All this but always treated me so nice. He was the first Regular Guy I know. No glitter, no bullshit just what a lot of people call a Man’s Man.

Louis had a girlfriend ( I can’t remember if he was married to her at the time), Eileen. From memory Eileen was beautiful. She had dark hair, kind of on the long side and a big smile. The smile is what I remember most about her. She had a slight overbite that to this day I find attractive in women. Just like Farrah. Remember Farrah’s smile she had in her very famous and super groovy poster from the 70′s? At the time I would never had known that Eileen would be the model from which all women in my life would be compared to.

That picture above spells it out quite clearly. Written on the girls’ stomach is the letters SEX. If your the Regular Guy and you see this picture, I don’t have to tell you what your thinking. ON my ABOUT THE REGULAR GUY page,  I mentioned the “Extra Chip” that men get at birth that women don’t. I can’t explain it in any other way. It’s the thing that makes us talk about sex all the time when we hang out, just the guys.  It’s the reason beer commercials have women pop up every time a guy opens a bottle. It’s why that crappy eatery named Hooter’s is so popular. It’s the thing that makes us want sex from our wife when she just wakes up, just works out, during an argument, or any other time ( probably 20 or 30 instances a day), she doesn’t expect it or even remotely think about it.

I’ll give you an example. I can sit on the couch with my wife and she can kiss me for hours and then get up brush her teeth, wash her face and lay in bed and fall asleep. I can bet that this has happened in one way or another to many a Regular Guy. I would say that from the second kiss I was thinking about SEX. After hours of kissing, I already had SEX in a few different positions, watched her orgasm, cleaned up and started again, in my mind that is. How the heck does she do it? Now, I am not going to say that if I don’t make a move she won’t play along but if I sit idle, she can do just what I laid out for you earlier.

That’s where the “Extra Chip” comes in. That “Chip” would have made her pants fall off at the second kiss, just like I imagined. That “Chip” is why women call us pigs, dogs or just “Dirty Old Men”. Hey it’s not our fault we’re this way. And why is that so hard to accept anyway. Don’t we have to accept that they don’t think about it or want it as much as we do. Hey we go through years  of fighting the urges everyday just because its what we have to do to stay in  a committed relationship. So if we have to lay awake at night in bed staring at the ceiling wondering when the next opportunity will present itself, then they should be more sensitive to our situation.

You know, most of us talk a good talk but never do anything to hurt the one we love. Sure its tempting and sometimes so hard to resist. It’s really not an excuse and we don’t know why it is this way but baby its true. My guess is that the Porn industry is so big because we really can’t get enough SEX to ever satisfy us. It is probably a major relief valve for a lot of guys.

So what’s my point? I have been talking about this “Extra Chip” for years with a good friend. He thinks I am a little nuts about my  blaming it on the “Chip “idea, but he does agree that we as Regular Guys have to deal with it all the time. He loves his Porn and does and says some pretty off the wall shit. His wife is the complete opposite and as far as I know accepts him for the whack job that he is. You see, even though he uses Porn for an outlet, he never crosses the line. He’s faithful beyond belief to his wife. He never speaks to me about cheating on her, although he will share a fantasy or two with me about some shiny woman in a picture. I guess that is my point right there. We all know how hard it is wanting SEX all the time, but most of us know that although the thoughts and urges will always be there, it would never take the place of the woman we love.The best of the Regular Guys know that although SEX is always present in our head, it isn’t the thing that counts in the end. If your woman is the right one, you know that there are far more important things in your relationship than SEX.

The Regular Guy