When I was about eight, the guy down the street, Eddie, shot that season’s first big deer. I don’t remember how many points the buck was (for you city folk, that’s how many tips on its antlers), but it was big and beautiful. Everyone in the neighborhood congregated in Eddie’s garage to marvel at the animal’s majesty, and Eddie’s fine shootin’. The guys all stood around with their thumbs in their pockets talking about the biggest buck they ever got, how quickly in the season Eddie got it, the kind of gun he used, the kinds of guns others preferred, etc. I didn’t pay much attention because I was so entranced at being close to such a lovely, though dead, creature. When they opened it’s legs and showed us how they’d already gutted it and removed its heart, I almost threw up and decided it was time to go home. It was getting dark anyway.

Saturday night, I was out with BFE, Joe, two friends I haven’t yet asked if I can publish their names on my blog, and two of their friends from out of town. We started the evening at La Carta de Oaxaca (if you haven’t been there yet, RUN to Ballard as quickly as your little feet will carry you), and finished it, naturally, at the Tin Hat. The table at the Hat segregated itself along gender borders. When a Stooges song came wafting from the jukebox, one of the guys said, “I love this song! OK, what are your top five Iggy Pop songs?” The people at the women’s end of the table groaned, turned to each other, and gave each other looks as if to say “Here we go.”

The boys launched into a full-blown music conversation and I had this bright, blue epiphany: for the sensitive, smart, pop culture-driven boys I love and hang out with, this kind of conversation is exactly the same one the men were having about Eddie’s deer. It’s steeped in competition, but it’s really about comraderie. A guy might say something that implies “My truck is bigger than yours,” but behind all that is the understanding that you both own and drive big trucks, which makes you brothers in a small way. My boys, or the ones who are my friends or married to my friends, don’t drive trucks, or hunt deer, and they know that none of us care how big their penises are, so their conversations tend to be more sophisticated (I’m excluding, of course, the ones they have while playing video games). But at their heart, they are made up of the same stuff that cavemen talked about when they grutned “Me big.” Assuming that cavemen could talk.

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