Breaking the barrier!!!

"If a man doesn't have the right stuff, he can still wear the right suit." (BMcC[18-11-46-503])

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I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) was watching a Smithsonian Channel program about the aeronautics challenge after World War II to break the sound barrier. And I saw the light:

The crap they fed us in perp school about that dude who was wealthy enough to experiment with voluntary poverty at Walden Pond (Henry David Thoreau), about him saying that "most men live lives of quiet desperation" has to be mostly wrong, because most men probably don't have what it takes to do that. I think it was to make us kids feel that our meaningless lives were meaningful because we could strive for a good grade on a test about: "most men lead lives of quiet desperation....", or whatever else the teach cooked up to inspire us with tests about.... Furthermore! Our school's team won varsity and junior varsity lacrosse and tackle football games, too, which solved the problem for good.

[As for men leading lives of quiet desperation, I recently came across one: My 88 year old upper-middle class French lady neighbor's father had been a rising star officer in the French army before World War II, but his family made him leave the service to run the family business. This for him was quiet desperation: he hated it, but he had to spend the rest of his life doing it instead of maybe rising to General in the work he loved and was good at: the military. He assuaged his sorrows (which were compounded by a shift to businesses buying direct form manufacturers instead of thru wholesale distributor middlemen and so the business went downhill, too), with ethanol.]

Now it seems obvious: Most men lead lives of cooked up bite-sized challenges which they can usually overcome with manageable effort to win metaphorical merit badges, i.e., they act out social customs: sacraments, religious and merely secular-banal.

Chuck Yeager famously broke the sound barrier in aeronautics. It had been impossible; many brave test pilots had died trying, but he finally succeeded. He had the right stuff! He was a hero! And, truly, he was. But the name he gave to his airplane (see above) may be telling: "Glamorous Glennis". That was his wife's name! On February 26, 1945, Yeager married Glennis Dickhouse, and the couple had four children. (Wikipedia) He had successfully wooed his true love! Before breaking the sound barrier, Chuck Yeager had broken the hymen barrier!

Most beer bellies to-be will never break the sound barrier (especially in 2022, long after Concorde flights have ended...), but by society artificially erecting an adamantine wall of social custom to block satisfaction of every young male's hormonal teleology (gotta "woo" the bitch...), it has provided each of them with an exciting barrier to break: something to keep them occupied: busting their ass to get the young lady of his dreams to let him copulate with her!^[1] Once either the sound barrier (which is real) or the hymen barrier (which latter is a social custom, i.e.: per Wilfred Bion: a social psychosis) is penetrated, it's downhill on the other side. The air turbulence dies down above Mach 1. On the other side of the virginity barrier, the hormonal turbulence dies down, too: (1) Look don't touch which became (2) hard to get, which became (3) blood on the wedding nite sheets, becomes (4) kids and a lawn to mow, which even maybe becomes (5) alimony....

The XX outputs children and does housework after her virtue is gone^[2] (and soon enough her come-hither looks, too). So new adventures need to cooked up. But one victory at a time. Test pilots soon went up to Mach 3, and even into orbit. Mary Hartmann would learn about the waxy yellow buildup on her kitchen floor. The XY in her life would strive to earn a promotion from cubicle to office, in the office. At Harvard, my perp school classmate, Marty Cain, would win immortal fame far beyond Captain Yeager's merely stratospheric achievement, by beating Princeton in lacrosse for the first time in 43 years (1967)!

(Boredom? Gotta get the wife a gift for Mother's day💗! Then for Christmas💗! Then for Valentine's Day💗! And her goddamned birthday💗! ...💗💗💗... And kids' presents, and even: birthday parties! for their birthdays! And presents for the kids for Christmas! And then it starts all over again, each new year! Happy New Year! ... There's not enough hours in a day to act out all the socially conditioned meaning-giving social customs I need to do, over and over ever yet again (will they ever end?)^[3]...

...Excelsior, my friend!^[4])