A Prayer for Joe Bob
Joe Bob searches his home for a place to store a box of baseball cards he‘s collected since childhood. Everywhere he looks is already packed to the edges with something else. The bedroom closets, all four of them, are choked with enough clothing and shoes to start an EBay business. The ones in the hallway are equally spoken for, stacked chin level with cardboard boxes much like the one he‘s holding, except they haven’t been opened in a generation.
With a sigh he lumbers to the garage and wedges the box in a corner, feeling the sides buckle a little as he forces it between his fishing gear and some power tools. Back inside, something starts to claw at him somewhere in the pit of his stomach, like talons sinking into a small animal. It was the trip to the garage. It was a little too…familiar.
There were two things that all his closets had in common. One, as you know, they were all full. Two, almost none of that stuff was Joe Bob’s. Between wife and kids his home was fully occupied. And it wasn’t just the closets. Everything from bathroom counters to bookshelves to basement was the terrain of others. What remained for him was trying to squeeze in what little he had around the property of those considered to actually live there.
Joe Bob’s heart sank with an intractable sense of the walls closing in around him. It was as though he had become the baseball cards, stuffed into a cardboard coffin and shoved in the corner with no room to breathe. It wasn’t just a shortage of square feet. It was something much more personal; more important.
He thought about the fishing gear. If he were to actually use it again he’d have to replace all the line. By now it was brittle with age and neglect. Somewhere along the way, exactly when long forgotten, the fishing trips just ended. They had been shelved with other childish things that interfered with his duties to provide for a family. His wife was instrumental in helping this along. Any mention he made of fishing, or any personal enjoyment, was met with cold disapproval and not so subtle questioning of his priorities. The few times he didn’t cave in to that he paid for with guilt being tied around his neck like a noose. Eventually he got the point. He might go fishing, but he wasn’t going to be allowed to enjoy it.
As time passed by, so did life in a way. Friends slipped away, personal interests and hobbies became memories. The lack of personal space became a lack of personal identity. Somewhere between the early days and where he stood now his life had morphed into something defined only by automated compliance with the needs, and frequently whims, of others. Eventually he reached a place where he could barely remember that he liked fishing to begin with. He wasn’t sure he could remember liking anything at all.
Not that there wasn’t an abundance of rewards from taking care of his family. He loved his family; would lay down in traffic for them. In the end, though, robotic care taking leaves a lot to be desired. Ask any woman. Rebelling from it is inviting a firestorm into your home. Ask any man.
As you probably know, Joe Bob is an imaginary friend. Rather he is a composite of a lot of men I have known. And while the character is fictional, his story is not. It’s a story not often told, much less in mixed company.
Contrary to popular worldview, men feel. They feel as deeply and profoundly as any woman. If you peel back a mans skin, you find flesh and blood, not gears and wires. Men have wants, needs, desires and dreams outside their role as protectors and providers. They are not whole without these things and yet they all too often surrender them without so much as a struggle. And in that, so many become machines; appliances for the use of others.
Many men are Joe Bob; working to provide, complaining little about their lot in life and sacrificing much for the sake of those they love. But sooner or later something gives. It always does.
Joe Bob is average as far as men go. Likely as not he can’t really identify and articulate why the world seems like it is closing in around him. It just is. He doesn’t know that standing up to his wife and insisting she support his taking time for his own interests might solve the problem, or at least lessen it. If he thinks of it at all, he knows such an effort would only result in heated conflict and fishing gear gathering more dust in the corner of his garage.
So he reaches for stuff. He does it without exactly knowing why. A bottle, drugs, violence, even another woman. Anything to feel alive again. He is reaching for the wrong things for the right reasons.
I am not excusing Joe Bob, or trying to say that this explains the worst to be found in some men. I am saying is that it might indeed explain some of it. And it surely needs explanation. For when all the things Joe Bob reaches for ultimately fail him, he sometimes reaches for a gun. This isn’t a blanket explanation of suicide. Nor would any one thing explain it so simply. But I do know this: People who take their own lives often feel like they are alone.
Joe Bob doesn’t feel like he is alone, he is unshakably certain of it.
Paul Elam is the Editor-in-Chief of MensNewsDaily.com and publisher of A Voice for Men
Bio available at my website | More from Paul Elam
Stumble It!
August 27th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
Reading your words often leaves me both moved and exhausted. Their insight and clarity is a light almost too bright to look at. For me what you say is a truth beyond fact, and as I write these words I feel deeply silent within myself like the first time I heard Sibelius’s fifth symphony.
Your words doubly penetrated as you mapped my own emotional landscape as though you had lived it yourself. All what you write is my resume.
But having made this journey the problem remains of how does one live at all?
August 28th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Paul Elam,
After reading your ” A Prayer for Joe Bob” I was trying to think something profound to comment. But “paul’s” comment says it all.
Sometime one can be deeply mooved by music like Sibelius’, but I don’t know their numbers. Also, R.F. doyle “Requiem” for Prof, Amneus belongs among the immortals. Composer after Sibelius wrote a symphony “Requiem” but I’ve only read the the Title.
Sometimes an ordinary article hits at home. But the Ode to Joe Bob, allegorical as it may be ,remainds”There but for fortune go you and I”.
August 28th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
“Contrary to popular worldview, men feel.”
Contrary to a deliberate calumny generated from the Feminist AgitProp machine, you mean. Foisted into the minds of women and rammed down the throats of small boys and girls in primary school, males of all ages are told to deny their own feelings and are thrust into the nighmare world of Feminist psychosis.
August 28th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Actually, sir Amfortas, I meant contrary to popular worldview. It is the culture that denies men’s feelings, and has since before feminism.
Chivalry and the rigid programming and expectation to protect and provide are as much or more at the root of this calamity than feminism.
August 28th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
“But I do know this: People who take their own lives often feel like they are alone.”
I founded Shattered Men almost ten years ago. In the first month or two, our website was finally on the major search engines and one of the first e-mails I got was from a man who said he was just about to take his own life and had a gun in his hand to do so when he felt he wanted to search the Internet one last time. He stated he found…Shattered Men and said…finally someone will believe ME! He put the gun away. I knew then that Shattered Men had to continue and since then over three dozen men and women have been saved from suicide.
Over the last ten years, I have found that many men have felt they were alone in what was happening to them. Healing started when they found they were not alone but the typical domestic violence industry does not want them to know this nor do they want women to know men are abused too. This is why they tell us we cannot have abused men and women together but Shattered Men has been doing it for ten years with very good results.
Many of the men and women in SM have verified everything you have said here Paul. Although there are a few men who are selfish and which the feminist use for poster boys, most men and especially fathers will give up much for their families. We have heard that men do not go to the doctors. I believe the main reason for this is that these men have limited health care dollars and they spend the money they do have for health care on their children and their wives.
I have seen many men who have who have had to work long hours of overtime to pay for the goodies their families insist upon only to be condemned by these same families for not spending more time with them.
Paul you have only hit the tip of the iceberg on the isolation many men feel but it is not only the isolation that takes its toll upon men, it is the feeling that no one really appreciates them. This is very evident in the way society treat men in general as evident by the constant male and father bashing in all areas of society. We have gone from “Father Knows Best” to “Dad is an Idiot”
It is far too easy to blame gender feminist for much of this but I contend that the gender feminist are being used by the real powers also and that there is a real hidden agenda that we see rapidly coming to fulfillment now.
http://shatterdmen.com/Bitter.htm
August 30th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
I can say as a Joe Bob remarried for 20 years that men married to cooperative non-feminist women actively engaged is a working peer-level marriage are far less likely to reach for imaginary fixes outside the marriage. Guys, there are good women out there, who can be found in the most unexpected places.
I can also say that the most dangerous time in Joe Bob’s life is when everything from his baseball cards to his family, children, earnings, social position are taken away in an undeserved no-fault divorce.
This is when men are most likely to fall apart and reach for drugs, alcohol, suicide, guns, and all the other sad consequences that happen when we treat Joe Bob with less respect and fairness than we give an old tattered couch.
I spent 12 years preventing bedlam doing divorce support work and never missed an opportunity to turn all that anger into at least some level of healing.
Time can heal these wounds, but they never go away completely even if Joe Bob is lucky enough to find a partner in life that won’t make him hide his baseball cards in the corner of the garage.