HUMOR

Shaking Hands With Manhood

My fate would be decided quickly

Daniel Williams
Human Parts
Published in
6 min readJun 4, 2022

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by author

My wife and I recently visited a technical high school with our son, and in the Construction and Building Trades area, we ran into masculinity trouble.

The moment we stepped into the vast and noisy workshop, we were met by the workshop’s ruler: a big man sporting a big plaid shirt tucked aggressively into prophylactically tight jeans, a man born with two big pencils, one stuffed behind each shapely ear, a man barely keeping within the lines of himself, standing ramrod straight up out of ten-gallon boots, and the brunt of him was held back from erupting into huge nudity by a belt as big as a tool belt, because it was a tool belt.

I want to call him Mr. Zeppelin Penis Johnson, but that wasn’t his name.

His name was Mr. Manful.

by author

He introduced himself to my son: “I am Mr. Manful.” Then he reached out to shake hands.

My son shook his hand, which prompted Mr. Manful to say,

“No.”

He immediately broke out of the handshake, held out his hand again, and said, “When you…

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Daniel Williams
Human Parts

A poverty-stricken, soft Batman by night. Illustrator and writing teacher by day. Previously: McSweeney’s, Slackjaw.