Hey, ladies! Do you ever wonder why . . . well, why men seem so stupid? Why men seem to crave taking dumb risks? Why men go sky-diving, and bungee jumping, and engage in X Games sports when they could be curled up in cozy pajamas, drinking warm cocoa with marshmallows in it and having long deeply meaningful conversations with you about their innermost feelings?
Get serious, ladies! The real answer is — they’re men!
But there is a deeper answer. Any guy who grew up in America probably has been forever influenced by Jonny Quest. Jonny Quest was a ’60s cartoon, shown in reruns forever, that featured the teenaged hero, his mystical, turban-topped friend Hadji, his father Dr. Benton Quest, Race Bannon, a combination bodyguard and tutor, and the irritating dog Bandit. Every week they had amazing adventures and barely avoided certain death. They rode in hovercrafts. They made it into sleek planes just before spears thrown by Zulu warriors clinked harmlessly against closed hatches. They escaped pterodactyls and swamp creatures. The YouTube video below of the show’s opening and closing gives you a sense of what the show was like.
The red-blooded American boys who watched that show thought: boy, that is so cool! And a lust for adventure, impossible to resist, was implanted deep in our simple male souls.
Every middle-aged guy will face a point where they will decide whether to do something risky that they’ve never done before, and they will feel that inner Jonny Quest saying: do it! I had my moment years ago when some experienced snowmobilers invited me to join them. It was about 15 below zero in western Wyoming and I’d never been snowmobiling before — but I said “sure!” An hour later I was struggling to keep up with them as they zipped along at about 50 mph across the frozen landscape, the snow they kicked up icing over my face shield. When we passed over a bridge and I saw that another novice snowmobiler had somehow driven off the bridge and was in the creek below, apparently injured, I thought: “What the hell am I doing here?” I was grateful when I made it back safely, and I haven’t been snowmobiling since.
We’d all be better off if Jonny had taken a spear to the shoulder now and then.
Webner House 