The General Enters, And -

“Network of nerve endings, tangle of narratives – ‘is this my heart or my hard drive’?’ I asked her. She glared without eyes at the gamut of tiny lights below. I knew then that I was mortal”

-Wayne Rooney-

Doesn’t it excite you when a man makes a woman cry?

Of course it does, but for the hardcore among us that just isn’t enough. Our needs demand more than the scented tears of a streaming harlot’s eyes. No, for us; gratification lies in the successful navigation of maps that point to the raw wounds, a firsthand taste of the source’s pain. That’s what’s nice about the following clip. It’s only four seconds long but that’s all it takes.

Taken from Ninja Squad, we see a man with an impeccable sense of timing enter the room to the pitiful scene of a woman already in tears. And it gets better from there. He has no desire for the emotional contents of her hysterical inventory, nor the understanding one might associate with that of a sensitive faced man of good family.

His is a void that swallows her whole in waves of well-scripted meaning that could’ve come from any film with waves of well-scripted meaning.

Marvellous, eh?

What really impressed me in all of that is the use of human body parts; he walks in on his legs, points with his fingers (that are, themselves connected to some kind of baguette-shaped tool, an ‘arm’, if you will), while she sobs into small hands that don’t change size like some hands do. It’s wonderfully human and i challenge you to deny that it didn’t prompt in you a desire to enter the rooms of distraught women all over and set a few things straight. And, you know, those things could’ve been anything: those hurtful rumours with regards the allegations of the kid next door; the unpublishable -and thus- deeply shitty memoirs of a dead parent; anything.

I think frequently about what this scene means to me and it always points back to one thing: a need to watch it again and figure out what it means to me. And when caught without alcohol or friends it may just be this: I’ll never be that man, nor will that woman ever meet than man I’ll never be.

It’s a timed battle. Are you for Action or Ideas? How about  both? It’s not like there’s any going back to the womb. Not anymore; not now your Father said she wasn’t even your Mum to begin with. Grandma disagrees but she’s the biggest slut of all.

Where, you ask, is the hope?

You need only look at the man in the clip.  There stood a man dressed in vaguely army-themed attire, seemingly without cause or purpose. When he  used to ask  people about his purpose,  they couldn’t help but grin inward, turning their eyes to the ground. But now look at him, he’s managed to harness the power of Bootcamp Romance; one of the last surviving practices of the Old Country: the art of reducing already tearful women to shaking husks of womanhood. He’s a winner, a winner with (as far as I can tell) human arms.

Be That Man