A man can’t be afraid to live. Our twenty-first-century rogue tells you how to connect with your inner honey badger and stop worrying about consequences.
Illustration by Celia Calle
Q:
I’ve been an actuary at an insurance company for several years. Basically, I spend my entire day crunching numbers and assessing risk to determine what people’s premiums should be. Sounds boring, I know, but it’s a sixfigure gig. The thing is, I’m obsessed with risk in my own life, from the odds that I’ll get the Big C to getting hit by a car. At first I stopped going through red lights on my bike; eventually I stopped riding my bike altogether. I switched from contact lenses to glasses because there’s less risk of pinkeye, and the girl I was dating broke up with me because I looked so dorky. The truth is, it’s not just that I look dorky. My job has turned me into a total dork! The girl I’m dating now is begging me for anal sex, and I keep turning her down because I’m worried about bacterial infection. I don’t want to quit my job because—let’s face it—I wouldn’t be getting any girls at all if I didn’t make six figures, so I ask you: How do I rid myself of the fear that danger lurks around every corner?
A:
Hemingway said, “Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth,” so it doesn’t surprise me that your cushy job has turned you into a pantywaist (and I’d bet you wear an athletic cup at all times under those panties—just to be safe). Granted, it’s ironic to quote life truths from a man who blasted his head off with a shotgun, but when he was a strapping young lad, Papa knew where it was at. In fact, you could follow his example and run with the bulls. That’ll put some hair on a man’s chest.
It sounds like you’ve completely forgotten the high of an adrenaline rush. You have to go someplace where you spend your vacation praying that you won’t be robbed by street urchins, or that the disco you’re partying down in won’t be blown up by political extremists—because how much would it suck to spend your last moments listening to Lady Gaga? You need a getaway that reminds you that in order to spell F-U-N, you have to start spelling F-U-C-K I-T.
Here’s my advice: Book a trip to a place that requires a connection on a puddle jumper or one of those commuter planes that are always biting it. When you hit the ground, rent a motorcycle, or at least a Vespa. Ride it to your hotel through the rough part of town (this does not apply to places where entering the “rough part of town” requires knowing secret hand signals). Book a skydiving or scuba-diving lesson. At night, go into at least one bar that has blacked-out windows—or, better yet, no windows at all and a buzzer and security camera at the door. Ask for the bottle with dust on it and some sort of creature inside—if not a Vietnamese snake, then at the very least a mescal worm. Do not leave until that creature is in your belly. Wander into the red-light district. At this point, you will have finally stopped crunching numbers and assessing risk in your head—except to calculate the likelihood that the streetwalker in the tube top has a penis. That’s okay.
