Okay. I’m only going to get into this briefly because it’s a shitstorm waiting to happen and I don’t feel like wearing out my delete key when the email starts flooding in, but here goes.

For those of you who have previously insisted that life is somehow more “interesting” without gender roles, and that to ignore them is a sign of maturity or enlightenment, I’d just like to say: Give it hell! Whatever you feel like you want to do to be happy, I am 100% in support of, as long as it doesn’t damage or retard my persuit of a freshly toasted bagel or a cup of coffee.

However, to say that gender roles such as they are are purely based on societal pressures and not on any biological wiring is pure hogwash.

Follow me along one example, just for giggles:

I think we can all accept as fact that the primary goal of any species is to replicate itself, to continue its “way of life”. In the case of humans, that means eating bagels and wearing watches. In the case of giraffes, that means walking around and eating leaves. There are many viable means of replication of a species which mother nature has invented, but one of the most successful involves the notion of gender.

Now, in the case of mammals, this replication procedure is carried out by two different genders, which we will call male and female for the purposes of discussion. The male mammal injects a fertilizing agent into the female, and her innards use that agent to turn the eggs they have lying about into the beginnings of a child mammal. This process of making a child takes time, however, and means that the mother of the future mammal has to endure what is known as a “gestation period”. During this period, the “mother” (or female) has to carry inside her body the gestating child.

From the standpoint of replication and propagation of the species, this is wasted time. The mother can not be impregnated again until after she has had the child she is currently carrying. This presents a problem, but thankfully mother nature has had the benefit of millions of years to roll the dice on coming up with a solution, and one has been found!

The male of the species is able to impregnate as many women as he can get his hands and/or genitals on! Thusly, it is possible for every potential mother to be impregnated at any given time with only one fertile male on hand (within reason, of course. There’s only so much time in a day, ladies.)

So, here we have the beginnings of the acceptibility for promiscuousness on the part of a male. I think you guys can interpolate from here, but I would like to point out that I think pretty much all of our social picadillos have a biological root. Feel free to cite anthropological studies to the contrary, though!

Am I making sense here, girls?

Okay, theres another question.

Why would anyone want to get past gender?

I think that in large part, stereo types are stereotypes because they contain a grain of truth. Whether it’s a flattering truth or not is another matter, but they are probably at least some true to some degree or it wouldn’t be any fun for people to make fun of you over it.

Point being, for the most part people have needs that are hardwired into them by eons of biological programming. Most men like to see lots of girls. Most women would rather just have one good guy. Why should we want to get past that?

One thing I really like to do is yell “BEAT IT” at people.

A girl asked me for a light as I was cleaning up my gear after I got done playing.

“Beat it!” I said, but I gave her a light anyway.

Then I repeatedly yelled “BEAT IT” at the bar in general because people were hanging around and not allowing hte staff to clean up.

Then some foolish girls asked me for a cigarette each. I handed them each one and said “Here, now beat it”

Then I was driving and eating a banana, and I decided I didnt want to finish the last little bit of it, so I threw it out the window and said “Beat it!”.

Hahaha, I love saying that.

Frog and I had been at it all day.

When I got home at about 6am, he was elbows deep in the Chevy 350 powerplant of Walter’s 1980 Suburban which had overheated the night before. It was one of the three cars which had failed me on the way to work.

We got a new water pump for it, and got it all back together over the course of the next couple of hours, then used it to drive to the other two fucked up cars on the side of the interstate.

I had been up for 20 hours, I was covered in grease, grime, and brake dust, it was raining, and car number two was just about done. Its battery had shit, apparently.

What a terrible day it was for this sort of activity. It was grey and drizzling a wet, cold rain. I felt like french fried dog ass, and must have looked the part by this time.

Alice and Becky showed up in Alice’s firebird. Frog had called them to come up and drive the subaru (who had just gotten a new lease on life thanks to a battery with some juice) back to the house while we concentrated on car number three, my volvo.

Alice and Becky climbed out of Alice’s car. They were clean and well rested. The cold, grey wind blew my dirty hair around on my tired and grimy forehead like it blows trash around an alley, but it pushed Alice’s hair back from her face and made her look like an angel just landing from heaven.

She put her little arms around my right arm and stood next to me, smiling.

“Jim fuzz… ” she said. That’s her nickname for me. I don’t really know why, since my nickname for her is Shit Bird.

I just looked at her, too stupid and tired and ugly to talk to her.

She smiled at me.

“She looks like she was made from sunshine” my brain said, and the words clattered around in my dirty head.

Tonight I left the house to go to work. I was driving along, happy as could be. I had the stereo up, windows down, singing along at the top of my lungs.

So I’m driving on the interstate through the north end of town there, and there’s a big slowdown on the interstate. Some poor driver has had a wreck up ahead and everyone’s slowed down.

So as I am slowing down, my car is acting funny, like I have put it in the wrong gear. I shuffle the gears around a bit, but that doesnt help, and eventually the car goes dead. I try to start it, no deal.

So, dead car, middle of 6 lanes of traffic, Atlanta rush hour. Super.

I push the thing off the road, make a few phone calls, and grab a tire iron out of the back. I pop the hood to wait for my friends to come get me and start banging on the internals of the car.

I hope this will get it started again, but mostly I just want to teach it a lesson.

“Why won’t you start?” I yell into the engine compartment. A guy in a convertible BMW is parked next to me with a cellphone to his head waiting for the wreck to clear.

“I can’t catch a break!” I yell at him.

“One of those days, huh?” he says, moving off with the slow pace of traffic.

So Madison and Alice come pick me up and take me home where I jump into Walter’s Suburban.

“Careful,” he says, “I think the coolant is low.”

So he and I pour some coolant in the thing and I head off to work. A mile or so down the road the coolant light comes on. I pull over for the second time, and call him to tell him what’s happening.

I end up driving his Suburban home and hopping in his Subaru since I will be home from work before he needs it. I pull it out of hte driveway and get 2 blocks down the street before I notice that all his dash indicator lights are on.

I call him and ask him if that’s normal. He says “Well, no that’s not normal, but nothing’s wrong with it. Just drive it. Give it hell.”

So, I head to work for the third time. I am bopping along, windows down, stereo up, when guess what.

THE THIRD CAR IN ONE DAY BREAKS DOWN ON ME.

I call Walter yet again, and he comes to get me with J-rock and Jrock’s car. They drop me off at work, and I call my insurance company through whom I have roadside assistance.

The nice lady at Progressive tells me they can’t send anyone to tow it because I won’t be there with the car when they get there, so they don’t want to move it! Hah!

Jeez. I think I need to get a job closer to home and just bike to it.