Thanks for the Refresher, Mr. Donne

So here I am at 33, and there's lots of things I should be thinking about. When am I going to settle down? When am I going to raise a family? When am I going to get some responsibilty? There's probably a lot of good answers to those questions, but I've only got one: "Screw you." Everyone might want the UN to run the world, but they don't run me. I'm a Canadian man. I have a God given, red-and-white right to live the way I want to live.

Can somebody tell me what the hell I was thinking with that last article? And not one of you wrote to stop me.

Here's what went down. I was feeling high and mighty when I wrote that. Top of the world, ma, and all the rest of it. I posted the article, then went down and cracked a beer. I ended up playing an all night game of Texas Hold 'Em poker. Yes sir, just me and boys on my birthday. Beer, poker, and rock 'n roll on the box. Absolute perfection for an independent tough guy like me, huh?

Well, the fates love that kind of of talk. They wait in the wings and cackle and laugh, and they fall all over themselves while we tempt them ever closer to the stage, until they say, "This must be our cue. I mean, how long can we let the fool go on?"

The poker game broke up, and I ended evens. I hit the sack and went to sleep feeling like a man's man. I got up and went to the computer to check the mails. And wouldn't you know it, an email from the first love of my life. University sweetheart. I hadn't heard from her in a long, long time. When I think of her, I still get a smile on my face.

So I open the mail and there it is in the first couple of lines. It's a happy birthday note. Yup, the ladies still like to write me on my birthday. Damn, I'm good.

Then she gives me some news. She's had a baby. A little girl. And I'm happy as hell for her...and then it turns bitter-sweet...and then I start thinking about life. You know, like all of the family and responsibility stuff I said "Screw you" to about eight hours before.

So I saunter down the hall, mulling it over. I'm thinking to myself, "I must be right. I couldn't have written all that unless I was right. Right?"

I bump into my buddy Chris. He was at the poker game the night before. He's another man's man. Complains when there are no hot girls around, doesn't let anyone get too close, enjoys telling a dirty joke over a double shot on the rocks, has shoulders like a linebacker.

We go get a cup of coffee. I lay out my story for him, how the fates have done me in just as I was thinking what a cool cat I was. I thought Chris would be the perfect pick-me-up. He'd set me straight. He'd tell me another one of his awful jokes, and then he'd say, "Chicks suck," and punch me in the arm and I'd feel all better.

"Me and my buddy promised that neither one of us would get married till we were 32," he says. "Then my friend went and got married at 28. I'm 31. I've been thinking for three years, 'Did he outgrow me? And when am going to grow up? And what's this all for, anyway?'"

So we sat there for a half-hour, two men's men, and talked like sissies.

Thanks for cheering me up, Chris. Way to go.

I know what happened. I dropped too many names in that article. Nietchze, Hemingway, MacDonald. You'll think I'm crazy, but one of them heard me. They were up there in one of the exclusive literary pubs, the kind of place where Dan Brown would get his ass kicked if he walked in.

They were all sitting around a table and MacDonald says, "Hey, get this. There's a guy down there who thinks he's got it all figured out."

"Idiot," Nietchze says. "I figured it out, but I went insane to do it."

"Well," MacDonald says, "he thinks he's got it licked. And get this, he calls himself 'independent.' Wears it like a badge right on his sleeve. And he quotes us to prove it."

That draws a bunch of laughs from the whole pub. Shakespeare sighs, and Twain spits.

"Huh," goes Hemingway. And he leans his chair back and calls out, "Hey, Donne. Guess this guy didn't read your piece on no man being an island. You know, 'in and of himself,' and all that crap."

And John Donne wanders over, looks way down at me holding my pair of jacks, and says, "Oh, he's read it. Shall I send him a reminder?"

I got it, Johnnie, I got it.