One of the lessons from my dad that really stuck was the one about finding your thinking spot. He said that there's no spot more important in a man's life than where he does his best thinking. I tried dozens of spots over the years, and most of them were total crap. It had to be so quiet for me to get into my proper thinking brain. I was very easily distracted. If I heard the slightest sound it would break my chain of thought, and I'd lose that idea for the rest of time and I'd never get it back again.

It was my grandpa on my mum's side, Grandpa Charlie, who revealed to me the single greatest secret in recorded history.

"Think in the bathroom, sweet William," was all he'd said.

It was probably more along the lines of 'think on the crapper,' but I'd prettied it up for my memory banks.

It was my memory, and I did what I wanted with it.

I tried it the next time I had to go.

It was glorious.

I'd never known that clarity of thought could actually be achieved. My world, my horizons, my mind all expanded during that one episode. Since that fateful day, my potty breaks had increased in both frequency and duration. It wasn't like I was going the whole time. I'd be dead if that was the case. Most of it was pure thinking time.

I got home after ditching out of school and found the house blissfully empty. Even our cat Dutch Oven was off on some adventure. I used to think that cats were the coolest animals in the entire animal kingdom, but then I discovered the hagfish. It had the most disgusting defence mechanism in the world. If you put a hagfish in a bucket, it would produce snot from its glands until it filled the bucket and poured over the sides. Cats just scratched and bit. Not very original.

I ducked into Madeline's room and grabbed one of her Archie comics. I never went into the business room empty handed. I couldn't just start thinking from a dead stop, I needed some sweet Archie to warm up.

I tiptoed over to the toilet, dropped my shorts, and sat down. Archie's first adventure involved him and Jughead accidentally breaking one of Mr. Lodge's garden gnomes, and the chaos and hijinks that ensued were out of control. Archie wasn't a very good example of how to be a man. He wasn't likely going to teach me anything about the proper treatment of women, or how to stand up for yourself when someone's walking all over you. I'd been reading Archie since I was six. Even if he was just a cartoon, Archie and his friends had taught me a good deal about the ways of the world, but those were the ways of the world for a much younger boy. Archie didn't have much in the way of man education. I put the comic book down on the bath ledge and reached over to grab some toilet paper. As I stretched my right hand over my body, I saw it.

The Bathroom Digest.

It was a fat little volume, well read by everyone in the family including myself. Down at the bottom of each page, there was a little factoid blurb. The factoids were little more than a stupid chunk of trivia, or some true or false question about whether or not this certain celebrity was actually named a. this or b. that? I hadn't read through the factoids, mostly because they pissed me off. They were the only part of the book I hadn't read. I decided that men read the whole book, no matter how stupid certain parts may have seemed. I turned all the way back to page one, and started reading the blurbs. Page one's blurb was all about peanut butter, and how it took the inner guts of over 800,000 peanuts to make one jar. Page two was how Canada got its name, and page three was a recipe for toast.

I turned to page four expecting more silliness and completely trivial stuff that would enter and exit my brain just as quickly. What I actually read blew my mind.

'Ernest Hemingway had four tasks for entering into manhood...'

I dropped the book to the floor. It hit the ground with a loud smack and made me jump, even though I was the one who'd dropped it. I couldn't believe what I'd just read. I reached down, picked up the book and flipped it to where I'd left off.

'Plant a tree...'

Okay.

'Write a book...‟

I'll get to that.

'Fight a bull...'

Mild concern.

'Have a son...' 

There they were. Ernest Hemingway's four simple rules to being a man were plant a tree, write a book, fight a bull and have a son. It wasn't impossible. I just had to break the list down into its separate parts. If I tried to do the whole thing at once, I'd lose my mind and stab a fork through my eye. I read the list over and over again, burning it into my memory. Was this the answer to my plight? If I did these four things, would I be a man? Could I take care of my family? I didn't know. I was willing to try anything. I didn't know of a class or a seminar I could sign up for that would help me on my quest, but these four rules were as big a hint as I'd gotten. Was it this simple?

Someone knocked on the front door. I finished my business, and shut the Bathroom Digest. The list of four was scratched into my soul. I wasn't about to forget it.

It was Viktor knocking. I ushered him in and sat him down in the living room. He wanted some Coke, but we didn't have any. I told him we only had orange juice or coffee, but my mum didn't want us drinking the coffee. He said that men drink coffee, and I had to agree, so I made us some coffee. It was stupendously strong coffee, and made us both cough. We didn't tell each other that we thought it was too strong, but I knew we were both thinking it.

"Viktor," I said as I took my third scalding sip of black death. "I think I found something."

He put his coffee down, pretending that he was so excited by my news that he couldn't possibly be so rude as to drink another sip. I knew that he was just letting it cool, and putting on a show for my benefit. I didn't let on that I knew, even though I'd have to be pretty stupid to not know.

"What?" he asked. "Something for your man quest?"

"Yes. The key to the mystery. And you'll never guess who my man guru is."

Viktor's eyes opened wide.

"Ernest Hemingway," he whispered.

I nodded, and he leapt from his chair like it had bit him on the ass. A wasp had stung me once on the right bumcheek, right in the middle, and I had been stupid enough to reach around to see what it was that was making my ass hurt. My finger and ass hurt for a week afterwards. I thought it was pretty funny that the wasp had stabbed me in the ass with its ass. Humans would be even worse to each other if they all had stingers. We'd all walk around ass first trying to stab each other.

"According to Ernest Hemingway, there are four steps to becoming a real man," I said.

"What's a fake man?" Viktor asked.

I thought about it for a second.

"Everyone that doesn't follow Ernest Hemingway's recipe."

"Fair enough. What are the steps?"

"One: plant a tree."

Viktor nodded. "Easy. Next."

"Write a book."

"Sounds easy enough. Just start keeping a journal."

"Good one, man! Does it have to be published?"

"Worry about that later. What's three?"

"This is where it could get a little sticky."

"Hit me. I'll help you with whatever I can."

"Three: Fight a bull."

"That could present a problem. Spanish matador or Farmer Ted?"

"We'll figure that out when we get to it. As manly as possible, I think."

"Good call. Spanish matador."

"Guess I'll have to get to Spain."

"You'll have to get a job."

"Why?"

"How else are you going to afford a ticket to Spain?"

"Right."

"Four."

"This is the crazy one. This is where it could all fall apart."

"I've got your back."

"I might not want your help on this one."

"We're a team, man."

"You might feel differently once you've heard what it is."

"Help me help you."

"What?"

"Help me help you? I heard it in a movie once."

"It's good."

"I know. That's why I still use it."

"You want to know four?"

Viktor nodded. He had an intense expression on his face, as if what I was about to say was the most important thing he was ever going to hear.

"Four: have a son," I said.

The coffee flew from Viktor's mouth and sprayed across the room in a glorious brown arc that hit the wall behind my head. He stared at it as it ran down the wall, his hand clamped firmly over his mouth.

"Sorry," he said from behind his hand.

"Don't worry about it," I said.

"Really?"

"Yeah, it's just coffee. My dad used to spill his all over the place. I think there's a rug in the front hall that's only there to cover up one of his huge coffee stains."

Viktor wiped his chin with the back of his hand. "Have a son," he said.

I nodded. "Have a son."

"Yeah." Viktor squirmed awkwardly in his seat. "You do know that I can't actually..."

"Don't be an idiot. I understand the concepts of basic biology. Besides, you're not even my type. If I end up exploring my latent homosexual tendencies, you're not on my list."

Viktor looked hurt. "Really?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Why not?"

"Are you serious? You seriously want to know?"

"Yeah, I do."

"You're too good for me. I'd end up hurting you."

Viktor nodded. "You're probably right."

"I know I'm right. Can we get back to work? I'm trying to be a man here."

"Right, sorry. Where were we?"

"Having a son."

"Ah."

We sat in silence for a while, the quiet only broken by the odd sipping of coffee. Coffee really did taste awful, but there was something soothing about it that kept me going back. I once had the theory that coffee was the juice from dog poo squeezed through loose-leaf paper and then boiled until all the bacteria in the dog poo juice was dead. That was after I tried coffee for the first time, back when I was on a field trip with my drama nine class to the local theatre. We'd watched The Glass Menagerie, which I thought was a little heavy for a bunch of 14 year olds, but we'd just finished reading Lord of the Flies in English a week before, so I guessed the educational powers-that-be apparently thought we could handle anything. I wondered why they let us read intense books about kids being killed by one another, but if a picture of a boob was shown in biology, some parent lost their mind and got a gigantic petition signed to have that teacher fired. Murder good, boob bad was the general message all us kids received. I didn't care. I would have definitely taken a boob over being murdered any day.

"We've got a lot of work to do," he said.

"Yes, we do,"I replied.

I started my journal that night.

Death sounds boring.

The Egyptians buried their friends with all of their stuff. Even their slaves and cats got embalmed so the dead person could have their comforts with them in the afterlife. They had their organs stored in little jars called canopic jars that would stay with their body for all time. The idea was to make the transition to death as easy as possible.

Wouldn't they get bored of having the same stuff for all of eternity? Fluffy would get pretty cranky stuck in that tiny little burial chamber for the rest of time. She would piss everywhere, and barf in their canopic shoes.

The two body disposal techniques commonly practiced in the west are cremation and burial. Burn the body or turn it into fertilizer. Or burn the body AND turn it into fertilizer. It all depends on where the ashes get scattered. Some old guy that goes tits up and asks to be scattered in his garden will probably help germinate something in the next season. Just don't eat the potatoes in that garden. They might taste like old guy.

Actually being dead. Flatlined. Muerte. Deceased. No more. No longer with us. Passed on. Tits up. Pushing up daisies. Bought the farm. The farm has to have been bought already. It's pretty poor form to say that someone with terminal cancer is in the slow and painful process of 'buying the farm.'

What even happens? There are a lot of theories. A lot of people believe there is an afterlife. I like that one. This stupid earth cannot be the end. 90 or so years of farting and sleeping, and then done. Rotting away or blowing on the wind because the dead person's relatives were too cheap to buy a burial plot.

Shakespeare wrote a line about 'shuffling off this mortal coil.' I think the mortal coil means the body. The bag of cells and water that the spirit lives in. The thing that atheists believe is it. A chunk of ugly, squishy meat. Atheists say they don't believe in anything. They believe in meat.

A vegan atheist must be so confused. God people are scary too. Every religion has its own set of intense rules and prerequisites for getting into their respective heavens. Accept Christ, and if you don't, you'll go to hell. Confess your sins, and if you don't, you'll go to hell. If you kill yourself while killing enemies of your god, you'll go to heaven. Be born a woman, you go to hell. Or live in hell. Or just exist in hell for all time. Maybe there is no place; no heaven, no hell.

No purgatory where the soul is judged until it is deemed worthy by a panel of gods and assorted other deities. The spirit is free. Free to go where it wants, do what it wants, be what it wants. Come back if it wants. Disappear. 

It can't just be nothing.