I was in the hot tub at the YMCA. My wife was there with me. We wanted to relax and talk about our day—but a couple of studs had other ideas.One of them was 87 years old. I know his age because he’s in the hot tub every I’m at the YMCA. If a stud wants to live a long time he’s got to be hot. Someone told me, one time when I was there, that this guy was 87. Maybe now he’s 88. When we’re both there at the same time he stares at me constantly. It’s what a stud does, when he sees a lesser stud. He’s got to stare him down, put him in his place. Sometimes you’ve got to show a guy what’s what.This time, though, he started talking to my wife, who is also known as Incrediwife. He asked how many kids she has.While he was busy taking my woman away from me—and doing it effortlessly—another man turned to me and struck up a conversation. It was like a game of cat-and-mouse in there. And I was the mouse. This other man wasn’t 87, he was 45 or 40, and for probably ten minutes he explained his life plans to me in great detail. I didn’t ask about his plans for life. I asked him no questions at all. He explained that he works for immigration enforcement. He has over a decade of experience there, and soon he will attend law school. His ultimate goal is to be a federal judge, which is why the tattoos he has are not on his neck. You can’t have a judge with neck tattoos. Right? He will be a federal bankruptcy judge, and by the time he gets to that stage in his plans he will have been with immigration enforcement long enough to have earned a pension. He will also own two businesses. He has already started one of them. He’ll be able to retire, eventually, something like four times. Four times! But then, he’ll probably only retire three times, because why would would any sane person retire from the federal judiciary? Why not keep being a judge, when you’ve got a whole staff to do most of the work for you?A few days ago, I started writing about this hot tub double-stud man and wife experience, where I learned so much about that guy I’ll never see again and didn’t want to know anything about. But then I took a breath and thought, Okay, Rob. Calm down. Maybe you’re the one who’s the problem here. Maybe you’re too sensitive to how men talk to you. Maybe the way they seem to only ever want to deliver monologues about their plans and lives, rather than have conversations, is due to your failure to be a tub stud. Maybe you should man up. Have you considered that, dear Robert?I had not considered that. I was going to press delete on this whole freaking newsletter-in-progress, but then, a day later, my daughter wanted me to take her and her friend back to the scene of the crime—not to the hot tub, but to the pool that the hot tub is next to. And I knew when I agreed to take her there that I’d end up in that boiling tub. I knew what would happen once I was in it. It took no more than one minute in that hot tub for another old man to strike up a so-called conversation. This encounter actually went okay for a minute. The guy told me he used to come to the YMCA five times a week. But he had been coming in less often, recently, because he had to have a couple of surgeries. I was like, Here we go again.But then something unexpected happened. He asked me a question. He asked what I did for a living. I knew my answer wouldn’t satisfy this man. No one over the age of 50 is ever glad to find out about my life. I said some version of, “I used to have a career, but I gave it up and have been freelancing while Incrediwife is the breadwinner and I do freelance work and raise the kids—but then the kids don’t need all that much attention anymore, so I’d like to restart full-time work again in some capacity if the kids will let me”—which I’m not sure they will, you know? Because someone has to be the one to drive kids to swimming pools and then to lunch at fast food restaurants. Sometimes you have to do that at eleven a.m. on a Friday. The man endured my fifteen-second explanation, and I was starting to think maybe this was it. Maybe I had found a man who knows how to have a conversation, in which two people ask each other questions, in which there is mutual sharing and listening. No suck luck! After my quarter-minute filibuster, he spent ten minutes talking my ear off about his career. It took him all over the world! He was a missionary of some kind. There’s not a state in the union he hasn’t been to, and he’s lived all over the world.More recently, though, this man’s wife wrote a book. He gave her some criticism, when she asked for it, and that was a bad idea, because then he had to help her out by writing two chapters of the book. And he didn’t get any credit for all of his work. You know how it is. He said he completely changed the state of things for homeless people in Seattle, and added that they’ve let the situation get completely out of hand. They let guys pitch tents ...
