He Shames Men Everywhere

I just got off the phone with The Brit. That man needs to be retrained. He's making the rest of us look like unsympathetic, lazy, self-absorbed fools. Now he's a good mate of mine, and he's even been kind enough to bestow upon me the honour of joining his wedding party, but his perpetual over-achievement is making the rest of his gender look ugly.

Exhibit A for the prosecution: The Wedding Proposal. Read the thing, the whole thing. It's worth it. Discover the lengths a man will go to in order to demonstrate to the rest of his brethren that his notion of romance is 6.79×10⁶ times more epic and significant than anything that the rest of us can concoct. I mean, he flew the woman to Hawaii. Think about it. He orchestrated a chain of ultra-charming, spare-no-expense-because-you're-worth-so-much-to me, heart flutter-inducing events in the hopes—who thinks the outcome was ever in doubt?—of securing the life-long partnership of his favourite Cubana Gringa. It's just like the genre-killing 1991 release of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album. With the release of one record the whole shoegazer music movement collapsed now that its pinnacle had been realised. The same goes with The Brit. Now none of us can ever propose to our respective significant others without receiving some remark about the lengths that stinkin' Brit went when the time came for him to pop the question.

And it gets worse. Between jetting around the globe for work, he lends himself to extensive charity work, preparing food for the local homeless shelters in San Francisco and constructing homes for Habitat for Humanity. And he maintains an active social life. Me? I think about doing these sorts of things and then kid myself that my life's already overloaded. But The Brit? Shit, that fucker slides straight off a plane, puts in a full day's work and then races into Costco to purchase the food for the homeless shelter's soup kitchen. Meanwhile I'm contemplating whether or not I should have a wank.

And oh yeah, he's marvellous photographer and an excellent chef. In fact the whole chef thing nearly backfired on him. A couple of years ago The Brit was desperately single and seeking ways to improve his chances with the ladies. Quite sensibly, he settled on two specific areas in which to improve and refine himself that might widen the scoring goal posts a little: cooking and dancing. While I haven't seen The Brit turn on his dance moves in a while, I have had the pleasure of eating a lot of his food. So had a number of ladies. He's good. Too good. He's so good that it was intimidating—both to me and to his female prospects at the time. Except of course for La Cubana Gringa. I'm not sure if anything or anyone intimidates her.

So men at large, get to work. We've got a lot of pastries to bake, tiramisus to construct and a pile of elaborate proposals to plan. Ah fuck it, I think I'll just kill myself now and avoid the hassle.