Dear Mr. Man Points,
I am hoping you can help my three sons or at least explain what has happened to them. Many years ago they were driving from their homes in Bakersfield to attend a Los Angeles Dodgers game. As they were riding over the steepest ascent of the Grapevine, they saw on the side of a road a smoldering, overheated vintage Volkswagen van of a pale orange color. Standing outside of the van were four beautiful women, all Grateful Dead followers, “Dead Heads.” Even though their orange rusted van was near ruin, the sun-darkened hippies were still hyper from a Grateful Dead concert and they greeted my handsome young boys by waving their tie-dye bikinis and spaghetti-strap tank tops in the air like glorious semaphores. My three sons stopped with an exclamatory screech, helped cool off the ladies’ steaming engine and spent the next hour making the van road-ready. The women were grateful for my sons’ help and invited the young men to accompany them to Santa Barbara for its annual Summer Solstice Festival. These were attractive women, my boys have repeatedly told me, earthy women who, not wearing perfume, wafted the natural-producing odors of musk and desire. But my boys had already bought their Dodgers tickets and were determined to catch the game, so after thanking the women for their kind offer, my sons rode off to Los Angeles, leaving the glowing, irrepressible pixies behind.
Years later my boys do not remember the Dodgers game, but they are still haunted by all the “what ifs?” that accompany their stupid refusal to go with the harvest maidens to the Solstice Festival. Whenever they tell the story during family get-togethers, they argue with one another over who was at fault for insisting that they abandon these luscious ladies in order to see some stupid, low-scoring baseball contest. Their demeanors change during these accusations. They become beastly, red-faced, and seem to be foaming at the mouth. Even many years later, the mere discussion of their lost opportunity with the hippy goddesses reduces them to snarling, contentious animals. Bitter and resentful, my boys are still possessed by all the unfulfilled possibilities that excite their imagination and prevent them from sleeping in the deep of the night. They complain of insomnia, night flashes, half-conscious visions of splendorous encounters with those gorgeous young women. Chained to the memory of an unfulfilled opportunity, my sons can not live in the present and as such they treat their wives, quite attractive in their own right, with flagrant disregard. It seems their hearts are still trapped in a time warp—that fateful day they encountered the van of sun-drenched sirens and repelled their invitation to ecstasy. To this day my boys cannot forgive themselves for their stupidity. They still hurl accusations toward one another. Each is to blame for declining the invitation and going to some stupid baseball game. In short, my sons are eternally miserable. Is there any hope for them?
The short answer is no, for they have committed one of the worst taboos against the Male Code, what is called the Squandered Opportunity. Here’s how it works: Every man gets a once in a lifetime chance with Super Babe and if he blows it he shall be forever cursed in part because he is fated to replay his squandered opportunities with the babe who invited him to paradise. Endlessly hashing over their blown chances, your sons torture themselves with fantasies of how glorious it would have been had they only seized what was rightfully theirs. Because they never actually lived out the romantic encounter, they feel compelled, masochistically perhaps, to imagine it over and over again, and in imagining it they elevate the squandered romantic experience into a myth that, most likely, is far grander and far more spectacular than what the real experience would have been. How can they live with themselves while carrying such knowledge? How can they go on with their adult life when they’re stuck in the past, haunted by memories of squandered opportunities? Truth be told, they have committed a taboo for which there is no remedy. They will never be able to live in the present because their minds and souls shall remain fixated on that hot summer day when tie-die bikini tops fluttered in the wind like the undulating gleam of a paradise now forever out of their reach.
In his 30's, in the middle of an illustrious baseball career, Ted Williams got recalled as a Marine pilot in Korea, and his F9F Panther got shot up and damaged during a raid.
He eventually found a safe landing at a USAF base.
Naturally, this second tour meant that his career totals were lower than they would have been, but he never complained. He considered what he did to be his duty to his country, and kept his mouth shut.
I think we can assume that he did not have lady's underwear on during any of this.
Don't ever let anyone tell you we're not declining as a civilization.