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The First Rule of H.M.C - Don’t Talk About the H.M.C

What’s on Today’s Agenda:

🍹 Damn, That Looks Good

👕 The One Piece Every Man Should Already Own

🎧 New Albums

🏠 Enjoy The Time You Have With Your Kids At Home

🤣 Dad Joke

👀 ATypical

🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒 You've Never Created a Life. And It Might Be Killing People.

💪 He-Man Life Lessons

Look, the internet is full of knitwear right now. Loud patterns, oversized fits, grandpa-chic everything. Some of it's great. Most of it has a shelf life of about 18 months before it ends up in a donation bin.

The crewneck sweater doesn't do that.

It just sits there in your closet, quietly useful, never asking for anything. Throw it over a collared shirt for a work thing. Wear it with jeans on a Saturday when you're grabbing coffee and running errands. Layer it under a jacket when it gets cold. Drape it over your shoulders if you're feeling European and unbothered.

It works. Every time. Without you having to think about it.

That's actually the point. Most of us don't want to think that hard about what we're wearing. We want to look like we have it together without spending 20 minutes in front of a mirror. The crewneck is that shortcut. It's the piece that makes everything else in your closet look more intentional, even when you grabbed it off the floor.

There's also something to be said for owning things built to last. Not chasing every trend. Knowing what works for you and committing to it. That's not boring. That's called having a standard.

One good crewneck. Neutral color. Quality fabric. It'll outlast the zany stuff by a decade.

Why did the dad put his money in the blender?

He wanted to make some liquid assets.

What a TV Show About Autism Taught Me About Being a Better Dad

For most of television history, mental health was either a punchline or a plot device. Someone "went crazy," checked into a facility, and the story moved on. Nobody stuck around to show what it actually looked like to live with something, or to love someone who was.

That's started to change. And one of the better examples of that shift is a Netflix show called Atypical.

The series follows Sam, a teenager on the autism spectrum, as he pushes toward independence. Dating, college, the whole thing. But here's what makes it worth your time as a dad: the show isn't really just about Sam. It's about everyone around him trying to figure out how to love him well, and mostly getting it wrong before they get it right.

His dad, Doug, spends a big chunk of the early seasons checked out. Not cruel. Not absent in the dramatic TV sense. Just... unavailable. He doesn't know how to connect with a kid who experiences the world differently from him, so he defaults to distance. It's a coping mechanism dressed up as normalcy.

Sound familiar?

Most of us were never taught how to sit with something we don't understand. We were taught to fix it, minimize it, or quietly leave the room. So when our kids show up with something that doesn't fit the script, we freeze. We get busy. We tell ourselves we're giving them space when really we're just protecting ourselves from feeling inadequate.

Atypical doesn't let Doug off the hook, but it also doesn't make him a villain. It just shows the cost of emotional unavailability, and then it shows what's possible when a father decides to actually show up, even imperfectly.

That's the part that hits.

You don't have to have a kid on the spectrum for this to land. The mechanics are the same whether your child is neurodivergent, going through something hard, or just wired differently than you expected. The question the show keeps asking is: can you stay in the room when it's uncomfortable?

Most of us were raised by men who couldn't. Which means we're working without a blueprint.

That's not an excuse. It's just the starting point.

Go watch Atypical. Watch it with some patience for the first season while they found their footing. Then pay attention to Doug. Not to judge him. To recognize him.

I've been in the delivery room more than once. And I'll tell you something honestly -- I still don't have the words for what happens in there. Each time was different. Each time something shifted in me that I couldn't name on the way home, couldn't explain to my buddies, couldn't fully locate even when I sat alone with it later. It wasn't just love. It wasn't just fear. It was something older than both of those things. Something that reached into me and rearranged furniture I didn't even know was there.

I've thought about that feeling a lot since. Especially when I try to make sense of the world men have built.

Because here's something uncomfortable that I can't stop turning over: every major war in human history was started by men. The overwhelming majority of violent crime is committed by men. Mass shootings, battlefield decisions that wiped out entire generations, systems of domination that crushed millions of lives. Men. Almost exclusively.

We've spent centuries debating why. Testosterone. Power. Economics. Religion. Political ideology. It all gets thrown in, and none of it fully satisfies.

But here's the thread I keep coming back to: men have never had to create life. And maybe that distance is costing us more than we know.

Think about what pregnancy actually is. A woman carries another human being inside her body for nine months. She feels it move. She feels it hiccup. Her body changes, sometimes permanently, to make room for something that depends entirely on her. And then she pushes that life into the world through what is, by any honest measure, one of the most physically demanding things a human body can do. From the very first moment, she understands in her bones what it means to make something that breathes.

I watched that happen. Multiple times. And every single time, I was aware of how little I had contributed to what I was witnessing. I was a witness. An important one, I hope. But a witness.

That's not an insult to men. It's just biology. But biology has consequences.

When you've never physically created something, when you've never hosted a life inside you, when you've never felt the full cost of bringing a person into the world, it's easier to stay abstract about what a life is worth. Not because men are monsters. But because we've never been forced to be concrete about it.

A woman who has carried a child has a cellular understanding of what it means to lose one. It was never theoretical for her.

For a lot of men, death stays theoretical a lot longer. And theoretical is a dangerous place to make decisions from.

Look at the men who send other men to war. Most of them have never held a dying person. Never sat with grief that had no exit. They move pieces on a map. They talk about acceptable losses. They are, in the most literal sense, disconnected from the cost of what they're ordering.

That disconnection doesn't start in a war room. It starts way earlier.

It starts when we teach boys that their bodies are tools, not vessels. That strength is output, not care. That the goal is conquest, not creation. We raise boys to see the world as something to be dominated rather than something to be tended, and then we act surprised when they become men who are more comfortable destroying things than building them.

I catch echoes of this in myself. Times I bulldozed something because I didn't know how to tend it. A conversation that needed patience and got aggression instead. A moment with my kids I blew past because I was running on some version of competitive energy that had no business being in the room. I wasn't starting wars. But the root was the same. I was operating from a place that hadn't fully reckoned with what it costs to keep something alive.

Being in that delivery room didn't cure me of any of that. But it cracked something open. Each time. Differently each time.

There's something about watching a life arrive that makes you take the whole thing more seriously. Not in a sentimental way. In a weight-bearing way. Like your chest got heavier and you understood for the first time that it was supposed to be.

The invitation here isn't guilt. Guilt is useless.

The invitation is to get close to what creation costs. Be in the room and don't look away. Change the diapers at 3 am without keeping score. Plant something and tend it before it gives you anything back. Pour into a younger man without expecting a return. Get familiar with the kind of work that doesn't come with a scoreboard.

Because the men who understand what it means to nurture something, who have ever been genuinely responsible for keeping something alive, they carry that weight differently. Life becomes less abstract. And a man for whom life is no longer abstract is a lot less comfortable throwing it away.

I don't fully understand what shifted in me in that delivery room. But I know it was necessary. And I know most men never get close enough to anything being created to feel it happen.

That might be the whole problem right there.