Masculinity is necessity
What I learned from hauling wheelbarrows of sand
I’m in Tampa right now. Arrived Monday night. 7-hour drive from Charleston.
Central Florida is beautiful. A lot more beautiful than I’d have ever guessed.
I’m writing this in a cafe—I think it’s called Victory something or other. Cool little place. No AC. Decent coffee.
Having recently adjusted my “business strategy,” as some of you may know, I am excited for today, and for this week, and for the foreseeable future, because I see there lies before me a path, the path I’ve been wanting to walk for some time now, the path I’ve not been able to bring myself to embark upon . . .
Why, exactly, have I opted time and time again to not walk this path? To not do what I most deeply needed and wanted to do? Why, even though it’s been right there for me the entire time, did I mistakenly choose to keep looking around instead?
Because I was being a bitch.
I’ve learned recently, and am still learning in various ways, that masculinity is necessity. To be masculine, in other words, is to do what needs to get done, no matter how difficult, nor arduous . . . no matter the sacrifice.
This isn’t a man or woman thing. It’s simply that necessity itself is, by nature, a masculine trait.
Masculinity is the foundation upon which the feminine beauty can flourish. It’s not that beauty isn’t necessary. In fact, I’d say it’s more than necessary. It’s actually what makes life worth living.
Still, beauty proceeds from necessity—or it may be more properly said that necessity makes way for beauty, it serves beauty.
I should have learned this a long time ago, in the summer of, I don’t know, 2017?
My friend’s cousin had (and may still have) a pool installation company. They basically drove all around the Chicago area putting together above-ground pools. And I was blessed that summer with the opportunity to partake in his business . . .
You must understand that I am from the suburbs—nice suburbs, a place where getting punched in the face is a big deal—and that this job was, for me, a door into another world, a slightly rougher world.
Now, I didn’t get punched in the face or anything. But I did see, very quickly—from the second I got there—just how much of a bitch I was.
It was me, the owner, some guys who didn’t speak English, and some other guys (I think they were ex-military)—the teams varied by day.
As I’m attempting to recollect this experience right now, it’s apparent that I don’t really remember any particular job we did. Nor do I recall much about the first day. And I certainly don’t remember the last. All I remember are intermittent snippets and, more importantly, thinking to myself, especially in the beginning of it all, “How the fuck are we gonna get this done?”
Our task, at least twice a day (mind you, in different locations, sometimes up to 45ish minutes apart), was to cut open the earth, level it, layer it with sand (which was always deposited on the customer’s driveway when we got there), and proceed to erect this upright pool, with all its pieces, in what was never more than three or four hours.
There was no waltzin’ around. There was no chit-chat. It might have been all laughs on the ride there—one of us sitting in a lawn chair, another perched on a toolbox or something in the back of their utility van—but the second we arrived, it was game on.
I’m not sure how difficult you think it’d be to do this yourself with some friends, nor how long you think it’d take.
But these boys got it done. Every time. Multiple times a day. Five days a week.
If there was an inconvenience, they resolved it. If there was a problem, they overcame it. Shit was hard, but they did it. No inglés, hermano? No problemo.
Almost every second of the job felt like walking on a tightrope, approaching the edge of catastrophic collapse.
One task of mine, perhaps the most memorable, was to fill a wheelbarrow full of sand, so much that I could hardly pick it up, and then, by the grace of God, and thanks to that solitary wheel, heave it from the driveway to the site, sometimes down a hill, without letting it tip, on the jog if possible.
I am certain that I would have let those wheelbarrows tip in any other circumstances. And I’m certain, in any other setting, I would not have filled them as high as I did. But I filled them, nonetheless, each and every time as high as they could manage without spilling over. And I did not let them tip, not once (from what I remember), at all that summer. Partly thanks to determination, but mostly thanks to fear.
Jimbo, the owner, you see, was not to be fucked with. Because he had bigger problems, more pools to erect in a day than you’d think an 8-person team could do in a week.
I never had many conversations with the guy, but there was a good reason for that: he had shit to do. He wasn’t there to chit-chat. He was there to build pools and make money. And I respected him—I feared him—for it.
As teenage boys tend not to, I didn’t pick up on what I had learned—because nobody was there to explicitly tell me the value of my experiences . . . The lesson to be reaped. I thought it was just about making some extra money. And not getting shit on by Jimbo.
But it was more than that. It was a window into the world of what, I suppose, must be called the industry of “trades.” I guess it’s not like these guys were plumbers or electricians or anything. They were just doers.
Now, again, masculinity is not “exclusive” to men. Women must cultivate their masculine energy, and likewise, men must cultivate their feminine energy.
But it was from these men that I was lucky enough to witness, kind of for the first time in my life (I never really saw my father at his job because he worked downtown Chicago), what it looks like to do what’s necessary no matter what, to push through the seemingly impossible in the name of or else you’re fucked. Simple as that.
Most boys these days, often making their way into more computer-oriented white-collar jobs, don’t get to see and experience stuff like this. You simply don’t see grit in a classroom or an office like you do out there in the world.
We think simply, somehow, that the world just came to be. We don’t see that all these things around us, because we didn’t witness their making, are miraculous feats of effort, feats of overcoming the most impossibly challenging of obstacles.
And we don’t often see, therefore, that to be masculine is to continue pushing past these obstacles, and finding new ones, or else being found by them.
Fast forward to the past several years of my life . . .
I’ve been wanting to write online as a means of generating a full-time income since 2019. For the first several years, I failed altogether. (And really, I’ve failed to accomplish this goal even up to today.)
Even though I tried many things, nothing was really working. In part, as I’ve discussed multiple times now, because I wasn’t going all in. But also because I was being a bitch.
I wanted to make money writing online, but I wanted to do it my way. I wanted it to be perfect, I wanted it to align with my truest self. I wanted my words to be the greatest, most beautiful words ever witnessed by mankind. I wanted to solve the deepest, most profound and existentially pertinent problem.
Despite the fact that I spent a lot of time learning from others, from all these gurus who’d made millions writing online themselves, who had laid out for me the exact steps I needed to take to do what I needed to do to get where I wanted to go, I still dug my heels in. Because I wanted to do it my way. The fluffy way.
I’m not so sure I’d say that I had been overly influenced by the feminine, but I had undoubtedly lacked a masculine voice to tell me, listen bro, do you want to make this happen, or not?
The more time I spent writing, the more apparent this became (though I wasn’t outwardly aware of it). I saw that what I was doing wasn’t working, and I realized a little more each month, becoming increasingly frustrated by my lack of success, that what I needed was to sacrifice—to trim the fluff off—some of these things I most deeply wanted so that I could do what needed to get done.
But it’s only really clicked recently.
It’s not that I can’t write about the things that I want to write about. It’s just that I am not the world. I am just a part of it. The world isn’t going to cater to me. I’ve got to cater to it. I’ve got to serve it, to sacrifice myself a little bit for it if I am to reap what I desire.
I can write all I want, and that’s great, but I can’t expect the results I want if I don’t do my part. If I don’t do what I need to do.
And it is for this reason, this realization, that I am so excited, so relieved. Because I see that all I need to do is take action. Just like Jimbo and his boys.
All I’ve gotta do is get the wheelbarrow from the driveway to the site. I can create beautiful things, but I’ve first got to lay out the foundation upon which they can grow and flourish . . . I can do what I want to do, but I’ve first got to do what I need to do.
Thank you for reading!
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Until next time,
RB
I don't think they would read it that way either but I'm going to do it for my own enjoyment. Thanks for the idea haha
Interesting read.... Thank you for sharing. Would love for my brothers to see this but they don't speak English.