Training Max: Chapter 7

 

She remembered when her mother had died, and the resultant buffoonery his father made of his eulogy, ultimately making it about himself and his obviously megalomaniac desires, rendering everything flat and beheading everyone.

Her sister, on the other hand, cried throughout her prepared eulogy, in the same way that she cried when she found their mother's corpse in the morning, in the same way that she demanded of Chris, when she then joined her: “Cry. Goddamnit, you cry.” After four years, she has yet to grieve.

She remembered her own eulogy for losing the stoic and cold mother that she had had: in it she told the story of her favorite time with her, when she was about seven years old. Proving that her writing is indeed fast becoming full of white blood cells, she published part of the eulogy in her blog:

As a child, the fondest memory I have of my mother was when I was about eight or nine years old. She took me to her workplace one day, and we passed by a tree that was overgrown with bougainvillea vines in full bloom along Teacher’s Camp road. We were poor, poorer than we are now, and hence were able to spot the tree, because we had walked the four kilometers from our house to her workplace.

That day, the wind picked up, and the flowers of the vine were carried by the wind, and they started to dance around the air before falling to the ground. I stopped, mesmerized, and looked up at the sky. She let me watch the flowers fall, and I looked at her, standing tall (or perhaps it was me who was small) amidst all the flowers dancing through the air. After a few moments, she held her hand out and we continued to walk, careful not to step on the flowers that are now on the ground.

It was the softest she ever saw her mother, apart from the time when she asked, “We’re alright, aren’t we, just the three of us?” when her father had left them for yet another woman. Who he took home to their house. Who then proceeded to terrorize her sister and her mother with claims that he is now indeed hers. Having inherited her father’s temper (which she then has long rendered tame), she shouted at both of them, “Putangina niyong dalawa.” [“Both of you are sons of whores.”]

She forgot the incident and focused instead on days when she saw the sight of falling leaves, or flowers being blown by the wind from shedding trees. She can never capture the still majesty of them on her phone, however, deciding instead to blink her eyes as shutters of a camera, desperate to hammer the memory to her brain. Her favorite flower was the moon dandelion, her favorite thing to see on long bus rides the rippling of the wind across fields of rice or white reeds. She always was fascinated with ephemera.

Telling the story of her father’s eulogy to Max one day, Chris laughed at the whole thing. “Bastard,” she pronounced judgment.

“Man, you can’t buy trauma like that anywhere,” he replied, appreciating her father more and more, to her disdain.

Her mind, though, was somewhere else, some simile parallel to the time of the flowers. She remembered one scene in the movie American Beauty (easily one of her top three favorite movies of all time) and how the main male character had managed to capture a video of a plastic bag dancing in the wind, ever rising in circles. “This was when I knew that everything will be alright, witnessing the careful and awful grace of God.”

“I love Rambo and Terminator,” he replied to her probing query as to what movies he liked. “I hate Saw, every last bit of it. Its gore is too unsophisticated, reasons for vengeance on their victims ultimately pointless.” 

He was happy she hated the Neil deGrasse Tyson also. There was this primal hatred informing this final judgment of this sort of soft men: Andrew Tate, therefore, was anathema, and Neil deGrasse Tyson more so.

He added, “That is not strength; that is the ultimate weakness.” He remembered with distaste a certain Matt, who was still texting Chris after six years, constantly complaining: “Lack of Chris. Always time for her harem. Always making me jealous. I don’t know what to do. PS. When are we sleeping together?” In less than thirty words Matt has reduced himself to nothing. He remembered Justin, the Andrew Tate fan, and how he had responded to her question as to his height: “Over nine thousand.” And, if weren’t clear enough, he added, “Oh, absolutely,” to Chris’ proclamation, “You’re one vain piece of shit," laughing her special laugh, delighted then.

Max was, in many ways, as Chris has long come to recognize, the antithesis to Justin. Justin’s masculinity is guided by the most misguided fool of a Romanian who dared antagonize the darling of the Swedish masses and the whole world over, Greta Thunberg. It was through a tweet thirty-five words long, which she demolished with a reply half that length. Max was amused. These men do not understand their own reasons for things. It’s almost as if his exes combined grew a penis.

As such, these men were disgusting to him. Not to mention Protestants and pretend scientists who do nothing but popularize science, next to Canadian psychologists who declare both that masculinity is natural, and that the brain is nothing but a geometric pattern. He hated with a different though no less passion, however, transgenders who, with no wills of their own, succumb to gender narratives most of all, buffeted by pressure outside themselves to conform to what turns out to be the moral imperative of those narratives.

Not wanting to be boring and define himself by what he hates, he finished off the list: He hated feminist men, who would dare even enumerate the conceptual differences between its four waves. His masculinity, after all, is of the absolutely medieval kind. He applied this to Chris as well: proclaiming that in those times she would be sainted or burned at the stake, no in between.

All these men pretending to be men and ending up like willing sissies only for sex at the end of the day. At least Foucault was himself until he died, he thought, though, after careful consideration and his own eternal delight, said to Chris as advice:

"Have fun, but never go full Foucault, baby."