The Ironwood Collection of Alpha Moves (25 page)

T
wo weeks
after the Big Date
it
wa
s still paying dividends.

The weekend after, we ended up going to a semi-formal
PTA
auction, and reprised our outfits from the previous week.  We both looked hot, I in particular got some attention (we have more single mommies than single daddies at our elementary school) which added to my preselection buff, and it certainly helped Mrs. I's status with the other mommies by having me on her arm, and bragging about the previous week's date. 

This brought back a complete reprise of the feelings of the previous weekend, and we spent another post-date evening rutting like crazed weasels.  And this time it cost me about $15 in drinks and the purchase of a custom-made hula hoop.

But wait, there's
more . . .

Th
e
next
Saturday, we had yet another series of events.  First the Cub Scout Blue and Gold Banquet, and later that evening a friend's 40th birthday party.  Again we reprised the outfits, re-lived the date, and got all warm and fuzzy again.  Again I caught a lovely preselection and admiration buff.  And, yet again, there was a lot of sex involved, inspired by the date.

So as far as Hooker Math goes, after putting $500 into it, I essentially
quintupled
the value of my money. 
F
or an evening out I arguable got over $2500 worth of hot, steamy married-people sex and a wife who thinks the sun rises and sets in my ass. 

It wasn't the money -- hell, that was one of the points of this exercise, to do a date
without
worrying about money.  It was the
experience
.  I wanted to do it, I made it happen, and I reaped the consequential rewards -- and continue to do so.

Factoring that into the equation . .
. that was one of the best $500 I ever spent.

The
E
nd . . . see you in Volume 2!

Ian

BONUS ALPHA MOVES!

PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED
AND
AVAILABLE
EXCLUSIVELY
IN THIS BOOK!

.

One of the more daunting elements of Athol Kay’s MAP Is getting in shape.  It’s a no-brainer of basic attraction, but one of the hardest things for a man to commit to.  Part of that problem is the idea that “working out” implies an expensive gym membership, walking while watching television, uncomfortable glances in the showers, and a whole wardrobe of new work-out clothes.  With that level of cultural expectation attached to “working out”, anything less implies that you just aren’t serious.

The thing is, there’s a paleolithic workout that just about any dude not currently in an urban apartment can get away with: splitting wood.

My own introduction to the art was by the venerable Papa Ironwood.  And it wasn’t a matter of machismo – it was a matter of necessity.  Allow me to explain.

We Ironwoods are adept at finding unusual and interesting opportunities, and housing is no different.  When Papa Ironwood found out that a super mega-mall was going to blight the rural landscape off the local exit from the Interstate, he wasn’t one to miss an opportunity. 

We rented at the time, and we’d always managed to find good, stable housing at a reasonable price.  When a farmhouse in the development zone was destined for demolition, Papa found out that it would actually be years before the various Phases brought the inevitable destruction.   So for seven or eight years we lived in the place.  And it was old.

How old?  When we tore down the kitchen wall to run electric power (!) to that side, we found a carpenter’s pencil from when the place was built.  The phone number for the lumber yard was 7.

This place was old and it didn’t have central heat or air.  It was pure 19
th
century rural Southern farmhouse, three steps up from a shotgun shack, with a half-story loft where my brothers and I lived in glorious squalor. 

And the whole drafty place was heated by a solitary wood stove.

If you aren’t aware, heating an entire house, even a small farmhouse, by wood uses a whole lot of wood.  And it needs to be tended.  The only way to keep the house warm in the winter was to keep the stove blazing, which made the living room an oven and every other room slightly warm.  And every winter we’d go through a truly staggering amount of wood.

Papa Ironwood wasn’t dumb – the lot we rented came with 200 acres of overgrown farm, which meant that there was a sufficiency of trees.  Five big red oaks that had been clustered by the driveway had been helpfully felled by the surveyors and contractors, so we didn’t even have to go haul it.  We just had to split it.

Instead of merely hacking it apart with a chainsaw, letting it dry, and split it log by log like civilized men, Papa had a better idea.  Or a worse idea, depending on your perspective.  Papa wanted an old-fashioned split-rail fence in front of the house to complement its rustic charm.  That way the fence would dry all that would at once, and we could burn up the fence bit by bit, as needed.  Dry red oak makes good firewood.

Wet, freshly cut red oak, on the other hand, is a twisted nightmare of hellishly strong wood fibers.  Wet, it clings to your axe and wedge like glue, dulling the blade of your axe and binding up your maul like the spirit of the oak itself was struggling against you.   And that’s just splitting a log.

Splitting a rail makes splitting a log look like playing with tinker-toys.  Papa wanted ten-foot sections, so that’s what we split.  To split a rail, you start at one end of the log and drive a metal wedge into its core, using a large steel maul and every muscle in your body.  It usually takes a good half-dozen blows to get it fully seated into the log, creating an incredibly gratifying cracking sound and a strong, oaky aroma.

Then you’ve got your wedge stuck in the log.  If you want to get it out, you have to drive another wedge in next to it, until the combined angle of the two forces the massive wood fibers apart.  About six inches worth, along the log.  Then you go back and start driving the wedge into the edge of the crack and repeat the process all over again.  If your wedge gets hung up – and it does – your only recourse is to use your axe to act as a third wedge until you can free the other two.

Meanwhile, you’ve raised a ten-pound steel maul over your head a couple of dozen times and swung it with all the force you can muster.  The shock of it landing on steel – or accidently hitting the wood – jars your entire frame, contorts your muscles into knots, and sweat pours off of you in sheets like rain in the 100 degree, 90% humidity Southern heat.  Your chest wheezes like a busted muffler and the life of a pasty, tubby white-collar professional becomes unbelievably appealing. 

Once you hack your way painstakingly down the log, fighting for every inch of progress to the very end, the feeling of accomplishment you feel is Olympian – until you realize that you have to repeat the entire process all over again to split the (still depressingly massive) half-log into a quarter-log . . . and then an eighth.

Good times.

Papa split that first log – a good 12 incher – himself, just to show us it was possible.  He was a pretty well-built man, in his 40s, and he had a very active job.  I’ve never seen him look more exhausted outside of a hospital bed.  I thought he was going to have a heart-attack. 

Instead, he handed me the maul. 

“Your turn.”

Papa wasn’t dumb.  He had three strapping young men and plenty of their friends (who enjoyed the remote nature of the Ironwood Temporary Farm) at his disposal.  When you have that many perfectly good white boys standing around doing nothing, there are many ways to deal with it.  Papa handed them an axe.

It took two summers, but we collectively reduced those logs into rails and constructed a lovely fence . . . and then burned the fence.  It left me the absolute buffest I’ve ever been, before or since. 

I doesn’t matter if you, yourself don’t need the wood.  While the necessity of heating your home provides an additional layer of motivation, the point of the exercise is to take something problematic, like a big-ass log, and turn it into something useful, like firewood.  Not only does it give you an incredible sense of accomplishment to see the fruits of your labor stacked up in easy-to-count logs, your upper body strength will be fearsome.

There’s something innately masculine about splitting wood.  It’s pure, it’s useful, and it’s simple.  It’s just you, the steel, and the wood.  The smell, the sweat, the pain and the exhaustion of the exercise imprint on you after a while.  Every stroke of the axe adds to your strength, and every ache is proof of your labors.  Splitting wood is just about the most primal exercise a man can get.

Consider the axe, one of Man’s firs tools.  A sharp cutting edge around 15 degrees backed by a mass of sufficient size to provide an intense amount of force within the tiny area of the blade. F=ma.  Force Equals Mass Times Acceleration.  One of the most beautiful equations in the universe. 

Then there is the haft, which extends the arc of the swing and allows a tremendous increase in leverage, hence an increase in effective force.  The haft of the axe is an extension of the arm.  I guarantee after four hours of splitting, you and your arms will agree.

Put the haft and the head together and you have an elegant tool, the product of man’s mind and ingenuity.  With it he can split evil red oak apart, or bash in the head of a tiger or neighbor.  The axe is one of the most basic tools and weapons of war in all human cultures.  There’s a reason that it was a religious and spiritual symbol in most places.  Splitting wood was one of the first times that man, naked and unarmed, could change his environment and harvest resources at his will. 

Finding wood isn’t usually a problem – trees grow like everywhere.  There are always logs you can talk people out of.

It also gets you incredibly ripped.  The coordination necessary to swing that maul with force and accuracy over and over again develops quickly, and before you realize it you’re knocking logs apart with your mighty axe like Zeus, himself.  Best yet?

Chicks dig it.

Mrs. Ironwood rates watching me split wood as one of her all-time favorite voyeuristic thrills.  I can do a half-hour of swinging a stick and stacking logs, and it’s like she won a front-row seat at a Chippendale’s try-out.  By the time I come inside, she’s ready to hump my leg.

Of course, by the time I come inside, I’m ready to call the paramedics. 

So use with caution, but consider the utility, style, and thrift of investing in an axe, a maul, and a couple of wedges.  If you can manage to stay out of the hospital, and you stick with it, you, too, can emulate Paul Bunyan for as little as $50 and a trip to Lowe’s.  That’s about one to two months of a gym membership.  And it’s a hell of a lot manlier than a tailored workout with a tall, sweaty blond trainer named Lars.