Masculinity is a terrible problem, as we construe it and shape it.

My father learned his disinterest under the guise of masculinity. Boys don’t cry. There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial.
Science is such a category. The torture and death that Heinrich Himmler found disturbing to witness became acceptable to him when it fell under this rubric. He liked to watch the scientific experiments in the concentration camps

He's in terrible shape, but that's to be expected. This is like training camp for him.

The AOL business has been in terrible shape the last year and a half,

The riverbank is in terrible shape this year. Golly, it's trashy. Typically if it weren't so bad we could clean 5 to 10 miles, but it's so bad I bet we spend the bulk of our day over the span of only a couple of miles.

I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.