The Last American Bachelor

I'm a Hero

I recently discovered that I am truly a hero. And it feels great.

Did I rescue an infant from a burning building? No. Can I fly? Nope. Am I a major league ball player? A movie star? Do I fight criminals on the streets of New York? No, nope, and no again. What makes me a hero then? Well, what exactly makes me a hero is a bit hard to define, but the fact that I am a hero is indisputable. I know that I’m a hero because my son showed me his new underwear – and it’s just like mine.

I picked him up from school the other day and he was in the back seat of the car as we were riding home. It being Friday, I asked him how school had been that week.

“Okay,” he said as we stopped at a red light, and then he added, “I’ve got new underwear. They’re boxer-briefs. I told Mom I wanted boxer shorts like yours, but she said they don’t make those for kids, so she got me boxer briefs. See?” I turned around in my seat to look at him and then he pulled his shorts leg up to reveal the black boxer-brief-clad thigh underneath, and I knew then that I was someone’s hero.

I have no idea what the connection is between underwear and superheroes, but the connection is unmistakable and undeniable. So important is this connection that many superheroes even deem to wear their underwear proudly on the outside of their uniforms. When I was younger, we had Underoos. I’m not sure if they still make that particular brand, but I’m quite certain kids can still purchase underwear that features their heroes, be they Sponge Bob, Dora the Explorer, or Spider-Man. A five-year-old boy can’t always go to school dressed like Superman, but he can still walk with confidence, knowing that Superman is protecting his most delicate body parts. On the outside, a little girl is just like any other little girl, but beneath it all, she has the wrappings of pretty, pretty princesses that will remind her that her dreams just may one day come true.

So when his mom took him shopping for new school clothes, and they reached that underwear isle, my hero status became suddenly undeniable. He could have chosen to decorate his loins with Superman, Batman, Spider-man, the Hulk, Transformers, Sponge Bob Square Pants, Scooby Doo, The Incredibles, or even Lightning McQueen – but he wanted to be like his biggest hero. He wanted to wear underwear like his Dad.

“Mom said you wear boxer shorts and I said I wanted those, but they didn’t have them, so she got me these. They’re called ‘boxer-briefs’,” he explained with a slight tone of disappointment.

“That’s, okay,” I responded into the mirror as the traffic began moving again. “I have boxer-briefs too, just like those.” And I saw in my review mirror the smile of an eight-year-old boy who was filled with pride and joy, and the confidence to take on the Third Grade’s most evilest of villains without fear.

Every now and again as we attempt to make our way through Life, God, in all his infinite wisdom and glory, decides to press the Reset button on our lives. It’s not like hard-booting a computer, though. You don’t actually start your life over anew. It’s more like having just one program in your life crash and you forgot to save what you’d been working on for so long. You lose your job, you get divorced, a loved one dies suddenly and unexpectedly, you’re in a car collision and you lose the use of your legs. We all know the experience in one form or another, and we must all endure it more than once in our lives.

Back when I first began writing The Last American Bachelor series, back before blogs and Twitter and Facebook, before MySpace and YouTube, before everyone on the planet believed their own life was worth sharing with the world and had the means to easily do so, I had recently had a major Reset in my life. It was a multi-system Reset, in fact. I lost my house, my income, my vehicles, and even my wife and what I knew to be “family”. I had even lost my mind and, for a time, was homeless, penniless and senseless. I had nearly died, nearly committed suicide, and nearly did not make it through that Reset at all.

But, as you can tell, I did eventually make it through the entire ordeal, but not without a lot of work and a lot of personal sacrifice. In my recovery, once I believed I was at least mostly human again, mostly able to share my life with another human being again, mostly able to withstand the shattering emotional abuse that comes with the search for a partner who will help us make it through this life in one piece (or at least in many tiny pieces that somehow stick together), I began sharing, via email, my experiences about my attempts at mating, and those few people found reading about those experiences to be amusing, entertaining, and occasionally heartwarming. They encouraged me to share these stories with others. So I did, and I began publishing them as a series of essays on jeremypierson.com. Today, this would (and is) obviously called a “personal blog“, but back then it was merely a series of personal essays. And the format is somewhat above what “blogging” mostly is today. I used literary devices like similes and metaphors and long mind-blowing descriptions. “Sex and the City” it was not, for I avoid puns like the plague (simile). I felt it was worthy of syndication, and possibly it was, if I had ever made any attempts at getting it published. But I didn’t. I thought only that it might entertain a few friends and whatever strangers on the Web who happened to stumble across it.

There were no such things as “RSS feeds” and no way for people to “subscribe” to these stories. I simply relied on people chancing to visit my website and chancing to read my writings. People also began to find these writing via Google. I was long ago receiving new readers from around the world as they searched Google for things like “orgasmic tremors” (how I described my attendance at a Prince concert one evening) and found themselves in one of my essays. They were probably looking for porn, but stayed for a laugh. And sometimes they even sent me a message of praise or appreciation, which was always very flattering.

But the series was short-lived, as I relatively quickly found someone new, someone amazing, someone who was as enraptured and captivated by me as I was by her. My series, I must confess, was particularly good at the self-deprecating humor that came with my social ineptitude and failures in impressing women. It was, after all, quite easy to talk about an experience with a woman I was almost certain never to come in contact with again. It was altogether different to publicly expose those inner thoughts at play in a relationship which I actually hoped would progress. I found it easy to expose my sexual misencounters, but nearly impossible to relate – and thereby sabotage – any of the small successes. I found true love again, and my Bachelor series suffered an unceremonious demise.

It’s been nearly four years since the last of The Last American Bachelor articles appeared on jeremypierson.com, and I have written very little at all in that time. I recently shared with a friend how I missed writing those articles, how it was such an amazing creative outlet for myself, and that person surprised me with her response that she too had missed reading my articles and essays. So I began to ponder how I could possibly resuscitate the series. How could I, I wondered, bring back The Last American Bachelor, when I was, emotionally speaking, no longer a bachelor? And then it occurred to me, I am still, technically speaking, a bachelor. That is, I am not yet married, nor do I expect to be anytime soon. (The reasons for that will become evident in future articles.) So, by pure definition, I am still (sort of) a bachelor. So I get to keep the name, and that makes me happy.

The other thing I soon realized was that my series of articles really had very little to do with dating anyway, as I was not very successful at “picking up women”. What the series was really about was coping with that last pressing of my Reset button. It was about trying to understand life and human behavior and relationships, trying to readjust my ways of thinking and understanding. And I don’t have to be trying to get a waitress to sleep with me in order to continue to tackle those subjects. So I decided that I in fact could and would revive the series, breath new life into, and, in effect, press the Reset button on The Last American Bachelor, by giving it a new chance to inform and entertain a new audience. And this new audience, I have noticed, is growing by the minute.

It seems to me that lately there are quite a few people in America and around the world who are having their Reset button pushed. They’ve lost their homes due to a daft mortgage system that’s been in place for the past decade or so. They’ve lost their jobs due to the massive layoffs resulting from the economic depression. They’re going through divorce. They’re entering retirement. They’ve lost a child. Whatever your specific circumstances, you’re either going through your own Reset at this moment, or you’ve recently been through one. Either way, you don’t have to be single or dating in order to relate to what these articles are about, because that’s not what they’re about. They’re about life and love and living and learning and sharing with those we encounter every day. So I hope you come back, and I hope you share these stories with a friend.

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This article was originally published online at http://www.jeremypierson.com/bachelor by The Last American Bachelor.