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“I’ll be down in a just a minute, honey. I need to finish this. It’s important.”

Important is a slide rule.*

*Only Gen X and above have any idea what I’m talking about when I say “slide rule.”

A Bell Curve. A Sliding Scale. Common core math may not have taught the concept. Sorry. Maybe I can explain it better.

What we value as important is often dependent upon the situation we are in.

That call from work about the TPS reports is important.
But not as important as your kid is in the ER.

Moments of crisis, moments of trial, and heartache, sometimes leave us shaken.
Imagine going back to work and listening to someone drone on about profits and production when your dad is on life support….

Imagine missing your child’s entrance into the world because you had to work overnights.

Paying your bills on time, getting out of debt, being fiscally responsible is important.

But if my kid needed an emergency surgery, and the family deductible isn’t met, I’d not think twice about the cost needed.

Our priorities are all screwed up.

I can’t tell you what YOUR priorities need to be, or which order they need to be. Heck, sometimes they bounce a little. Sometimes you gotta work a little extra. Sometimes you gotta shuffle and juggle to get things in place. That’s life. There is no such things as balance. At least not in the MOMENT. I think we find balance over long periods of time.

But your kid doesn’t care about your work/life balance when you miss their ball game.

Honestly, I struggle. Taking care of myself has not been a high enough priority. Especially this past year. I think I’ve happily settled into stroking my conspiracy and fear-porn glands a bit and allowed myself to camp out in the dark and seedy underbelly too much.

WAIT? IS JOSH A Q-ANON?
No.  But I’ll admit – there’s a draw for me to try to see behind the curtain of corruption. The former journalist in me is always connecting dots and seeing deception. I like listening to the news. I like scrolling on instagram. I LIKE reading declassified files on the CIA and FBI website, or scrolling through data dumps on WikiLeaks. There’s a side of me that is VERY interested in these things. That doesn’t mean I believe any of it. But I like to look for the truth under the surface that seems to get ignored. 

It’s my dark side.

I can’t tell you how many blog posts I’ve written in my head that expose the actual true things that I’ve learned (cutting through the hyperbole of the extremist websites, and the smoke and mirrors of the main stream press) – but I realize that going down that rabbit hole is not IMPORTANT.


I just went a whole weekend with Instagram deleted from my phone— with all of my notifications turned off. Not checking newsfeeds. It was hard. Digital Cocaine Withdrawal. I was itchy. LITERALLY ITCHY all weekend. I could feel my phone vibrating in my pocket when my phone wasn’t even within a mile of me. 

There was some other stuff going on that required my attention, and my emotional involvement. My wife asked for our family to have a retreat, to focus on God, to focus on each other, and to cut everything else out.

I scrolled a couple times. I feel a bit dirty admitting it. I needed a little hit.  Wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to be leaving the green pastures and going home to a full blown apocalypse. ( I didn’t. The world is still here. )

On the last night, I started to break down. All of the pressures we had been facing came crashing at me. I felt PAIN. Deep personal emotional pain. Not just from the current situations, hell…. Some of it was four decades old.  I’ll get into that another time…. But I basically collapsed on the bed and sobbed quietly for twenty minutes.

My point is, THAT crap is important. The fact that I have some deep personal woundedness that I need to work through that I’ve been numbing and fuzzing out for 40 years… that’s IMPORTANT.

I keep ignoring the fact that my health is important. Well, Last October’s heart attack should have gotten my attention, right? Gawsh. I’m about as stubborn as a mule.

I think most of us don’t even THINK about our priorities. We MAY think about our values – though we live our values whether we think about them or not… but our values and our priorities are not the same thing.

To prioritize is to actively get your hands dirty and organize the crap into piles so you can deal with it.

I can’t answer it for you. I can’t tell you what should be important to YOU. But I can tell you – if you don’t take the time to really evaluate what things are important, you’ll find yourself spinning your wheels in a flinging sludge field full of cow crap, and wondering why you aren’t getting anywhere. Trust me. I know this from experience. I’m working on it. Work on it with me.

WHAT IS IMPORTANT?

RAW

I’m RAW right now.

Not like Eddie Murphy Raw – on the edge and unrefined – full of curse words and a fancy leather getup.

More like, there’s a rash under my belly where my waistband rubs, and I’ve been scratching it too much, and now the skin is flaking off and bleeding, and no matter what I do it stings.

Except it’s not just my underbelly. It’s the underbelly of my whole life.

I’m coming back from a weekend away dealing with a personal family crisis. And NO – it’s none of your business.*

*If you know, it’s because I trust you to keep your yap shut and protect my family’s pain. If you don’t know – it shouldn’t be on your lips.

The past year and a half have been like a crisp denim waistband rubbing against my rash.
Major life changes. (Even good changes can be hard changes.) Stupid viruses and lockdowns and non-stop fear-porn and engineered outrage. If anyone had any kind of mental weakness or infirmary, this past year has rubbed it RAW.

Not that long ago, I lost a dear friend. He was a man of God, a city councilman. He caught the cursed virus and it went south. He died the same way my dad did over two years ago, as his lungs gave out.

And then, I lost another dear friend and Manlihood contributor, Louis Costa. 38 years old. Young wife and new baby. Brain Aneurysm. Dead in a flash.

After he died, I pulled up the RiseXUp campaign we worked on together…. I watched the unreleased videos we shot, I read all of the blog posts we wrote.

There was a poignancy, an authenticity to all of it in the wake of his death. We dealt with death… and redemption, struggle, pain, and purpose.

Now here I am, with the smell of death all around me.

I opened my fridge after a weekend away. Something dead had started to smell.

I think of the fact that the best beef is aged – sometimes a month after slaughter.

There are two choices for aging beef, wet and dry aging. Let’s explore the two methods.

WET AGING

Wet aging includes storing meat in sealed airtight bags under refrigeration (32°F to 34°F) up to 3 weeks. Wet aging results in traditional beef flavor and is the most common aging method.

DRY AGING

Dry aging is less common than wet aging due to the complexity and cost. Beef is stored uncovered in a refrigerated room (32°F to 34°F) under controlled humidity and air flow for up to 4 weeks. Dry aging results in distinctive brown-roasted beefy flavor.

From “Beefitswhatsfordinner.com”

When I think about raw meat aging, it’s hard to think about it being good.

I’ve thought a lot about what I do here at Manlihood.

There is a lot of pressure to make this all search engine perfect, so that the the artificial intelligence that governs what things are good for us and what things are bad for us know if Manlihood is good for us or bad for us. I could write a lot of blog posts like:

• 5 Things you need to know about being a good man!
• The Truth about manhood
• Masculinity Under Fire: How to preserve and protect manhood
• 4 Things To Make You a Better Father

And don’t misunderstand me, I may write some like that. They can be helpful, even if they are formulaic.

But maybe what we really need isn’t a steak that’s well done – it’s a steak that’s rare.

Interesting that we use “rare” to describe meat that is cooked just enough to kill the germs and worms. 

Rare.

Different. Unique. Special. Treasured.

Raw. 

Uncooked. Pristine. Original. Irritated.

As I get ready to launch a new season of the Manlihood ManCast, and as I build Manlihood into a bigger and better community to help men be better men, I’m reminded that my role in it is not necessarily to “polish it” or “cook it to death”

It’s better if it’s pink in the middle, and a little bloody, or a little uncomfortable.