It’s a dirty job but, someone has to do it.

It takes a lot of practice to be a dick. I mean you have to spend veritable years deconstructing your personality to the point where you are so incredibly obnoxious and insensitive to the people around you that you can even be considered worthy of the title.

So, when you run across someone who is a genuine dick, you should show a little reverence for all the effort they’ve have put in to their art.

I’ve tried to tone down my the aspects of dickdom in my own personality through the years but, it still comes through from time to time. Maybe it will surface when I’m driving and there is a particularly oblivious clown in and around me, or maybe it will manifest in some other public setting. Thinking about it now, I realize it’s almost impossible to be a dick when you are by yourself. Can you truly be a dick when there is nobody about to be a dick to?

As a man, being called a dick doesn’t bother me the way it would bother a women when she is characterized by being called an offensive name for her privates. I don’t know too many men who have the violent, almost militant reaction women display when they are called the "c" word. Thinking about it, George Carlin used to go on at length about it - I think he was the one who observed the hard constanant sound of the "c" word is what gets your attention.

The ceeee word - roll that one over for a second if you will. It’s not like we call dick the "d" word.

Anyway, I have been pretty lucky of late because it seems my dick exposure these days has been incredibly low. Of course, I have spent much of the last few weeks enmeshed in a project where I have little time to spare and consequently am not out in public all that often.

New York can sometimes be the “dick” capital of the world. A lot of movies characterize the city that way, The Out of Towners immediately comes to mind but, the truth is really far different from that. Last week a guy threw himself down on the tracks in front of a moving subway train in order to save another persons’ life. Simply amazing.

A lot of people took notice of it and I was impressed as well. Then again, it’s really not a surprise. If you had been in New York in the months after September 11th, you would have seen the character of the people of this city. Even in the days immediately afterward, people where so amazingly polite to each other, so very considerate. It was beautiful. It makes me think of the place the world could be.

But then, my inner dick comes out.