The Brotherhood of the Leaf

Posted By The Cigar Soldier on September 7, 2012

I have never claimed to be “cool”.  I know that in fact I am, but I don’t like to brag about it in front of you guys.  Have you ever been in a situation where you almost felt like you were looking at yourself from the outside and thought, what the hell am I doing?  Yeah, me neither.  Actually it happened to me the other day and I had a revelation about myself.  Okay, it may not have been a revelation but I did notice something I was doing and it got me to thinking.  It may have been the few beers I had in me but I was chatting it up with a musician I met and apparently to seem more cool, I was saying ‘man’ a lot.  For example: That was a killer guitar riff man.

How does saying ‘man’ make you cool?  It’s because when I was growing up that’s all we had.  All the cool guys said ‘man’ so if you wanted to be like them, you said it to.  So for years that has apparently been my go to saying when I am putting out the cool vibe.  But ‘man’ was never going to last because soon ‘dude’ came out.  How could I be cool with dude?  I grew up with ‘man’ and now I wasn’t young enough to just change my entire vocabulary at this point in my life.  People would notice the change and they already knew me as a ‘man’ guy.  Have you ever heard someone say, “Man, I’m lost dude?”  They are trapped in between the man-dude canyon and are not sure which side they belong on so they try to use both.  They are typically 38 years old.

Now it was easy for someone to know how uncool you are because your slag called out your age every time.  If You said ‘man’ now, you’d instantly get that you’re an old guy look.  But we all knew that dude wasn’t going to stick around forever because ‘bro’ showed up.  WHAT THE F#CK?

‘Bro’ is way cooler than just being a ‘man’.  Now I knew I was really screwed when it came to my feeble attempts at sounding cool.  I wasn’t even sure where to use it in my sentences so I kinda stuck with saying ‘man’ thinking there is nothing wrong with the classics.  Well shit, now I sounded like a hippy and everyone knows hippies are old very uncool cats.  Thousands of lost guys were trying to figure out where they rate on the coolness meter.  Can you use ‘bro’ once you’re that far past the cut off point?  How can it get more awesome than calling people your bro?  The answer, call em ‘Dog’.

So wait, we’ve transgressed from man to dog in that short period of time?  I figure now I’m just out of the game and coolness is nothing I’ll ever see again since I’m not lowering myself to calling people ‘dog’.  So as I’m having this out of body experience watching myself try to sound cool in front of this guitar player, I realized that I was at a crossroads where my age was preventing me from using the catch phases of today in an effort to make me seem cool to this guy.  So I stuck with, “That was a killer guitar riff man”.  He replied with “Thanks man, I learned it from one of my bros.”
That’s when I realized coolness was lost on anyone basically over the age of thirty.  And I’m totally cool with that man.

Don’t forget that Cigar Night is on September 11th at The Little Drummer Boy’s (Darrell Johnson) place.  His address is 2929 Sagewood Way in Green Bay.  Hopefully we’ll have a bon-fire so bring extra lawn chairs, your own drinks and maybe some snacks to share.  You guys really have been great lately about bringing and sharing munchies so I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate it.  I’ll say it again, cigar smokers are the nicest guys you’ll ever meet and you prove it each and every Cigar Night by opening up your home or bringing food for the group.  It makes me so proud to be your supreme exalted leader.  Have a great weekend my boys and I’ll see you all on Tuesday.

The Cigar Soldier

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