Yeah my list of hundreds of girlfriends was in fact mostly a list of girl friends.  I was famous for wasting my time talking to really beautiful girls that really only needed to talk to me about music and innocuous things but never to date.  What guy hasn’t gone through this experience?  I’d say half my list of girls were those that put me in the friend zone and I was too stupid to realize I was never breaking through.

In terms of male relationships, I had a few buddies.  I wasn’t blessed with wit and the lack of guy friends in my earlier youth meant I wasn’t entirely in the know of how to manage friendships.   For instance in my  Sophomore year of school I met Dana.  This guy was an oddball.  Everyone thought he was cool by his ability to make them laugh.  He had a charisma that made him excel at using people for his own gain. This took time to evolve so early on I was his sounding board.  So I thought I was lucky when we became a duo of sorts.  He latched onto my odd interests and I was glad to have a friend.  My kick was the spy lifestyle.  I was into spies and detectives.  Not  the hokey James Bond of the 70’s through 90’s but the throwback spy. 

For me spies and detectives were the ultimate in what men could be.  It required you to be utterly self-assured of whom you were because the world around you could never know who was on the inside. 

To say a spy is a man that lives a double life is too easy.  Sure a man such is this is a cool loner.  Sure he is alone too, but a spy lives an isolated life by choice; in order to be free of confusion.  Regardless of their setting they could be in a crowd but alone in their mind.  That isolated individuality allows them to focus on seeing the world around them on a deeper level.  They could be married and their wife wouldn’t even know them.  Every word uttered by a spy is meant to protect him, his double speak keeps him safe from harm while communicating.  The lexicon of a spy is fueled by shrewd  intellect.    

Hollywood rarely captures the true essence of a spy.  These men live the greatest life of sacrifice, they do what they do for money and their country and if they are caught behind enemy lines, they are lost in time because their own country will deny they exist.   Ultimately the cool loner lifestyle has little if any appeal outside of a movie or book.  The real men living these lives are stoic.  Somehow nature programmed them to be unfeeling and without the same need for human companionship they rest of us enjoy.  

While in my opinion the hardest job in the world is that of a spy, there is also the cold hearted view detectives take on the world.  Similarly to a spy, these men are no nonsense.  Of course they have seen it all; in fact they also see things everyone else overlooks.  Oh yes, they ‘see’ it all.  A detective won’t look at a woman, he’ll hear her words.  Not just the words she says but the force of those words.  He knows if she believes in her words.     Detectives will watch you cross the room and see the power in your step, your confidence or lack thereof. 

These are the men I admired at age 16 and Dana appreciated my perspective and began to share ...    more »