When I was a kid, I once heard my mom say to her friend that she shouldn’t lift a heavy item. Your thinking “that doesn’t sound so bad “, but, aha, there’s more. She followed that with a scary suggestion that this woman’s “uterus will fall out!”

Wow! What the hell is that? I don’t think I was more than 10 yrs old but that sure sounded bad to me. What the hell is a uterus? Did I have one of those? I lifted some heavy things. Was I going to lose something through my ass? Next time I saw my friends, I had to ask if any of them knew what the heck a uterus is. Well as it turned out we weren’t so up on the female anatomy as we thought we were. Sure we knew the important parts breast, butt, the female flower….you know all the stuff that mattered to us, but a uterus? And the fact that it might just “fall out”. I remember thinking that I was glad I was a guy cause it didn’t seem like much more than a good bowel movement was coming out of me.

So fast forward to the present. I find myself laughing today when I tell women at work not to lift heavy things because their uterus might fall out. They laugh and say that won’t happen, but I tell them I don’t want to be the one present to witness the event if it does! After all, am I the one that s going to have to have to pick it up, bag it and carry it to the hospital so they can put it back in? Hell I don’t think I have it in me toss it in my car and bring it with us. Its not like a finger that you can throw in a bag of ice and put it on the dashboard. If you witnessed your child’s birth than you know just how messy those things can be! Seriously, does it really “fall out”? I recently heard a story about a guy who pushed so hard during a visit to the john, that his intestine fell out. Really, a friend of mine drove him to the hospital and watched the doctor push it back in. Holy crap man!

So for future reference, don’t let your woman pick up heavy items.  Unless you have a pooper scooper or something else handy to pick up that uterus when it falls out you better carry those grocery bags from now on!

Just one man’s opinion!

The Regular Guy

The Jersey shore is a great place to listen to outdoor concerts during our beautiful summer nights.

Listening to music when combined with the cool breeze off the bay water and the warm summer night, makes for a great way to spend an evening. Grab a cooler, some beach chairs and a couple of sandwiches and head out to boogie to some of the local talent while enjoying the outdoors.

I can’t get enough of these concerts but sadly we only get to experience them for a couple of short months here at the shore. It is hard to imagine why we don’t have these from May through October, because the weather here is great during this time of year. I figure that local politicians cant find the money to fund this series longer  or they haven’t got a clue as to how enjoyable it is for the community. Either way, our town should be able to take advantage of this for at least two seasons a year.

Recently we listened to  Jimmy and the Parrots, who are a local cover band that plays a lot of Jimmy Buffet and easy listening classics. Although I have seen them in years past and thought they were pretty entertaining, this evenings vocal performance was terrible. I cant remember their singing being so off key. Not surprisingly and even with the bad vocals coming from the stage, the audience cheered and sang along with the band until the very end.

Summer has now moved into its last leg with autumn being a few cool nights away. That’s too bad, because it’s a sign that the best of the summer music will be fading away even sooner. For those who are lucky enough, it’s almost time to head to warmer weather down south, grab a chair or two, get outside and pick up on where the music has left off.

The Regular Guy

Carson
Thanks for checking out my site.
It has always been my belief that men cheat because they are weak. Period!. We all get tested at some point and we all know that once we pull the trigger, there is no going back. I think that down deep most of the cheats don’t care if they get caught, because I would say they believe they have good reason. Not so much the one time cheat, but the flagrant ones like Tiger and now Arnold. Those men knew exactly what they were doing and in their mind they were okay with it. I can’t see how any man who cheats and feels remorse, can go back over and over and sometimes even lead a double life. Let’s face it, if we all thought we would never get caught, a very high percentage of us would do it. WE have never really lost that “caveman” in us, but have seemingly learned how to control it. After all, being in a civilized society makes us. As for why we seem to “affair down”, which clearly is the case with Arnold (even though Maria isn’t really that good looking), I can’t figure it out. You would think that we would “make it count ” so at least if we were caught, our spouse could understand the temptation behind it. But what does a spouse think when she sees the other woman is a “double bagger”! That must really freak them out. Anyway, as a man I can always understand why a guy cheats, but I can’t always condone it. Yes I did write that. Only because I understand how frustrating it is to have a partner that won’t meet you at least half way to satisfy your sexual desires. When a woman hears you asking for more of her and she gives you less or even worse, ignores your pleas, then yes I can condone it. It always befuddles me when a woman turns a deaf ear to her partner then acts all surprised and hurt when he strays. Maybe leaving the relationship is the best way but most men are afraid to do that, more so when children are involved. So they stray to find the missing intimacy or sex but still want to keep the family they have intact.

Just one man’s opinion….
The Regular Guy

Hey Regular Guy

I stumbled upon your blog while Googling why so many men “affair down” – meaning, of course, the majority of men who cheat do so with women who are not nearly as attractive as their wives or girlfriends. There are TONS of hits about this on Google.(As evidenced by Jesse James, Tiger Woods, the Governator to just name a few.) I have read your posts about men and the “Chip”, which I do agree with. Do you believe then that it is because of the ever-prevalent notion of sex in the male brain that leads most (not all, of course, but most) men to cheat on their wives or girlfriends with less attractive women? Logically, one would think if you’re going to risk your relationship, you’d do it with someone who would be a “trade up”. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Carson

Some one once said” Life is what happens while your busy planning for it.” Maybe it wasn’t exactly that but close enough.

So how is it that we get so involved in planning our lives that we miss most of it as it jettisons right by us. I have been trying to change the way I live my life for years, and it’s a slow process at best, trying to undo the mess that I have created.

Last year, I went to see “Eat, Pray, Love ” and I walked away from the film with a reinforcement of what I always believed. You can not change your life unless you change where you live your life. Nothing really changes if your environment doesn’t

The main character in the movie came to a crossroad when she realized that she wasn’t living a life by choice but one that she couldn’t relate to because she became lost in all the things that life threw at her on a daily basis. She didn’t know who she was and what truly made her happy, so she embarked on a mission to find her true self.

If you think about it we build our lives in steps which seems to end in retirement. We are born, we grow, we learn, we work, we marry, we have kids, we buy a house, we create massive expenses and responsibilities, and we hope for a comfortable retirement. We are led to believe that this is a way to a happy life. We don’t live life, we work it. Sure we all get little bits and pieces of it but do we ever really live the life we would if we could?

I have spent my life working just to enjoy a few off weeks a year to do things that make me happy while all the time wishing I could work less and live more. I am not talking about traveling the world but just taking the time to “smell the roses”.  I, like most men, are driven to make money with the hope that at some point I can enjoy the rewards of my lifelong efforts. But unless you happen to make a killing very quickly, you will find that basically you work your whole life to live, and not much more.

Maybe we are all just missing life the way it was intended to be. “SIMPLE.” We have all become products of our environment. So caught up in our work that it becomes our life. Think about how upside down we have made our lives. We spend most of our day working and the rest sleeping. When we aren’t sleeping we are on our phones or computers probably either working or wasting time.  I have been told by my parents that some of the best times of their life were before all this technology set in. It seems that living before the 1960′s was great. Could it be because life was much simpler and less cluttered with technology. People actually had conversations in their living rooms with neighbors on Saturday nights. It was called “having company”. Today, we don’t even want to talk to each other so we just text.

If you are young and reading this here’s some advice. Start early and save as much money as possible by avoiding what everyone else is doing with theirs, because later in life you will need it more than earlier. Travel as soon as possible and see how others live in difference to where you were raised. Take a job or jobs that don’t tie you down ( this is the difficult one) but allow you to leave if necessary and start up somewhere else. Remember, its not how much you earn its how much you spend that makes life difficult, and with this in mind, stay debt free. And last, you will  learn later in life that it is shorter than you think so be prepared to say yes now to all the things you truly want to do and not make excuses as to why you can’t. Don’t let your “career” become who you are. Keep your life “simple” because at some point you will look back on it and wonder how it got so complicated and stressful and not know how to fix it. It becomes like the hamster on a wheel. Repetition over and over, the same everyday.

Life as we know it happens because we allow it to. Someday, hopefully sooner than later, I’ll get this life right!

Just one man’s opinion

The Regular Guy

I had dinner with my friend Sara recently and as we reminisced about years of working together, the conversation turned to relationships. She and her husband had recently celebrated their 25^th wedding anniversary. It was her husband’s second marriage, but Sara’s first. I asked her the secret of their success.

She had a twinkle her in eye as she told me about Tom.

“He made me feel comfortable right from the start,” she said. “I knew I could be myself and he would accept me for who I am – both the good and the not-so-good. It seems to work for us. He’s easy-going and I’m a little intense, but he just lets that roll.”

I’ve watched them together. They kid each other often. They laugh and show respect for each other. Sara is somewhat of a caretaker and Tom likes this. Yet he knows how to make her feel loved and cared for, too.

And he’s a big flirt! Though I don’t see them often, a few other mutual friends and I have observed that Tom is generally focused on women and freely expresses his appreciation of their beauty, bodies, sex appeal, etc. Sometimes we think it’s icky. But Sara has never once complained or expressed discomfort with it.

So why do some people become jealous of every tiny bit of attention a partner pays to someone else, while others don’t mind this a bit?

I think it depends on the strength of the intimate relationship — a strong loving relationship, shared mutually, leaves no room for jealousy. If each partner is truly being kind to the other (as the Regular Guy purports) and if they often are doing little things to enrich the relationship, then a little flirting shouldn’t rock their world. It might even enhance it! It’s nice to see that other people appreciate your date/mate.

Self-confidence helps, too. Insecurity breeds disinterest. And trouble can follow.

What happens outside the relationship can only become significant if nothing is happening inside the relationship. (A topic for another post.) It takes a committed pair to turn a budding romance into a 25-year marriage. Cheers to all those who take it seriously and succeed, and especially to Sara and Tom!

Being a kid, I always looked forward to snow days off from school. When my friends and I heard that snow was coming we couldn’t help but plan whose house we would wind up at to build a fort and have a war with neighboring kids.

There is something really wonderful about being snowbound in your home as an adult. Time stands still.

When everyone in town is snowbound, nobody gets the edge on anyone because we are all in the same boat. There are no worries about lost business to another company or making an interview for a job. There is no getting the kids ready for school while you text on your Blackberry to a client. Time stands still.

You sleep in and when you awake you hurry to the window to see just how much snow your going to have to shovel to get that car out of the driveway. Your not worried so you go back to bed and catch up on sleep you wouldn’t normally get. If your real lucky, your laying next to someone who is feeling a little frisky. Hell you have all day. Time stands still.

You finally get your butt out of bed and you eat a really big breakfast because your going to need those calories for all that shoveling. You dress like its 20 below outside and your armed with shovels, salt and ice scrappers. All this doesn’t seem so bad because you have all day and nowhere to be, just like everyone else.Time stands still.

As you shovel that snow you begin to remember when you were younger and your dad made you go outside to clear a path so he could go to the store for the milk and bread he forgot to get in preparation of the great storm. As he slides and stumbles to his car, you can hear him mumble under his breathe how your mom is a pain in the ass and won’t stoop reminding him how she “told him so”, about the milk and bread!  As the cold air brings you back to reality, you look around and marvel at how breathtaking the snow and ice on the trees look. What a great day to be alive and you remember that you have all day to enjoy it.

Yes, when a snowstorm hits your town, its truly a magical moment. It brings you back to a simpler time in life when you had nothing but time..no worries, no responsibilities, no cares in the world, just time. Time that was so endless because you never knew just how fast it would pass in your lifetime. For me, being snowbound stops time just long enough for me to remember what it was like, when I had nothing but time, to enjoy my life.

Hey, that's just not a safe riding style....

For those of you who never saw the movie “Wild Hogs”, you should if you want a good start to understanding why men ride motorcycles.

I can remember being a child and what my first impressions of motorcycling were. The thing I most remember is my moms cousins and their “motorcycle garage” behind their house. Back in the sixties cut up choppers were the thing to have and at any given time you would see a large variety of them at their garage.

As a child, you can not help to feel awe at the sight of tattooed men with all that iron and noise around them.  Even at this age I still find myself in awe, at times, when I am surrounded by motorcycles. It’s like being in the wild west without the guns.

But even though I have always had a love of motorcycles, it wasn’t until I reached forty or so that I truly appreciated what it does to enhance my life.

Having a motorcycle in itself doesn’t necessarily bring excitement and adventure. It is with whom and what you do with it, that makes motorcycling a great thing. Nothing else exemplifies this more than owning and riding a Harley Davidson. It is like belonging to a club with out walls and rules. It’s a fraternity with out the hazing.

The absolute best reason for riding is the people you meet and become friends with. Someone tagged it “male bonding” but I think that’s a load of commercial crap. Yeah we all get along, but I always think of bonding like a bunch of men sitting around singing Kum Ba Yah. That just isn’t happening. What happens is that the motorcycle becomes the common denominator that brings together men of all backgrounds. Doctors, lawyers, chefs, Realtors, electricians and so on, just wanting to do one thing. Experience life through simple transportation and being able to share that with someone else who can understand it.

A lot of people always ask me why we get together to take a trip and ride for hundreds of miles a day.  They think its boring because you have no one to talk to, like you would in a car. They can’t understand what reason we would have to go to Ohio, for instance. What could possibly be a reason to ride there. This is the one thing people don’t really understand about motorcycling unless they ride one. The trips aren’t about the ride itself but the friendships that come from them. The best part of the ride is always at night when you pull into a new town, and go out for a steak, some drinks, and laugh your ass off about the events that took place that day. There aren’t any phone calls from work, no bills to pay today, no kids to drive to soccer, nothing but you and that bike and your friends.

I just spent the better part of four days on a ride that rolled up 1200 miles. On that trip I got to spend time with my uncle, that I probably would never have done with out our motorcycles. We were all drenched in rain that was so heavy, we had to dry our boots on the heaters in the hotel rooms. I smelled the aroma of at least 12 different things that I would have missed if I were in a car. I got to act like a college kid again, when we all did shots of Vodka in a small cafe in State College Pa. I experienced roller coaster excitement on rte 322, where roads were cut out of the sides of mountains that were so steep that trucks had to ride their brakes just not to crash.

There’s a saying bikers have, “Ride to Live, Live to Ride.” which just about sums it all up. At no point in my life have I ever felt as alive or as free as I do when I ride.

So here’s to my friends “The Mild Hogs” and to another safe and successful trip…

The Regular Guy

One minute things are as they always are. Happy, easy going and with no real thoughts about anything. Then in an instant, it changes.

Now you both aren’t talking. Well you talk but the words aren’t the same. They are short and given without intent to provide honest conversation. Even touching each other is awkward when it used to be natural. Almost as if you both forgot how its done.

Saying I love you now, is like giving in, when at a time like this, it is when it’s needed most. It’s been written that love meant never having to say you were sorry. Well men, that is not true.

Saying your sorry, especially when you feel that your side of the rift is the correct one, is the only way out of this mess. The problem is that it is always you that has to be the one to do it, in order for things to be normal again.

As hard as it is to always have to be the one to say “I’m sorry”, its even harder to live with the fact that you always give up what  you believe in just to keep the peace.

Maybe its just part of being a man. Maybe because our feelings can be hurt or we can be upset and then just move on. Start over when things are said and done like nothing happened. After all most men argue and then have a beer and its all forgotten. I guess it just isn’t that easy for women.

So now it’s just a matter of how long you decide to let this linger before you break the ice and clear the air, because you know she’s not going to do it. It’s really unfortunate that it has to come to this especially when you both know that the what caused this wasn’t even serious.

So with mop in hand, it’s time to clean up the mess you helped create.

Funny thing is that once its all cleaned up, it’s like it never happened. Back to hugs, back to kisses, back to meaningful conversation…..

Just one man’s opinion

The Regular Guy