Impeccable Johnson and the Melancholy Dane

            Of all of the influences in my life one person sticks out like Yao Ming in a scrum of hunchbacks. This man taught me everything I know about the manly art of satisfying women so slick were his methods that for 30 years he was a consultant for the company that manufactured WD40. He dressed with the aplomb of a Saville road confidence man and used his well-healed personality to take down some of the most alluring high-end skirts in the world.

            Born J. Fitzhugh Johnson in 1948, he was given the sobriquet “Impeccable” on his 18^th birthday by his classmates at Princeton after masterminding a seamless raid on the under things of the female freshman class. This was a man who became upon graduation the Willie Mosconi of the bedroom by pioneering the use of billiard chalk. Johnson was the first to require his conquests to double cut and roll and was the first to measure the speed on a Stimpmeter.

            Why I exalt over this man’s mentoring is obvious. I worshipped at the hem of his garment took his advice and used it to parlay a modest middleclass existence into one that has 12 entries on Dirty Sanchez.com.

            But his domination over the ladies is the point of all this. As great as Impeccable was when it came to understanding the physical and emotional properties of piercing the feminine veil he thoroughly neglected the other side of his humanity, the introspective side and finished up life a desiccated husk panhandling for reach-arounds in front of a Monte Carlo casino.

            Life is a two fisted trip. One fist is to somehow pound out a living, the kind that allows you the ability to pursue the other with the second fist. This is the life that really matters, the one that is never advertised, that inner life with all of the majestic peaks that never get scaled. This is the life that most people neglect invariably getting caught up and buying into the life at the surface, the glue that keeps society on its axis, the traditions, the mores and the folkways. This life foments cheerfully optimistic indifference, the kind that allows society to go down gambling on the notion that all is done for the common good. However, it is with the second fist, the one that represents the god above the commercial one where man has the ability to land a haymaker and extricate himself from the opaque concerns of the rabble.

            Kierkegaard had the opposite problem. His was all about the inside, a man who was so far ahead of the curve that his philosophic worldview wouldn’t avail itself for another 100 years. As insightful as he was Kierkegaard was a failure at the surface game and lived a very inchoate life. Hardly a satisfying romantic relationship can be found during his lifetime as he lived mostly alone on the highest peak of his inner topography.

            The truly dimensional man needs to have both, but is he to be found anywhere in today’s modern culture as the white noise of daily life becomes louder and louder and “gettin’ some” is the vanity plate of our times?