Grill seeker: how George Foreman, Ted Nugent, and Bobby Flay taught me to be a real suburban man.

• Author: Green, Joshua

One Of the false promises of adulthood is that once you grow up, all the competitive torments of adolescence will magically disappear. As someone who has only recently done that (hitting the adult trifecta of a new job, new wife; and new house), I have discovered that's not the case; in fact, the assorted humiliations I remember so vividly from my teenage years have suddenly reemerged, only in slightly different form.

Let me give you an example. One evening not long ago I stood on my patio, flip-flopped and contentedly sipped a beer in the manner I imagine common to suburban men. pausing occasionally to wipe my brow as I tended earnestly to the brats on my hulking Char-Broil gas grill. The newly initiated male homeowner in my neighborhood quickly comes to understand that despite whatever life has taught them status really revolves around only three things: home improvement, lawn care, and barbecuing. The pressure is such that I found myself reading David Brooks's latest book not for his humorous dissection of suburbanites but as Cliffs Notes from which I might pick up brand recommendations.

As a longtime apartment-dweller, I hadn't initially understood that the queer looks I received shortly after moving into my house were due to the nearly waist-high grass that, it turns out, rapidly appears when there is no superintendent to care for it. But I'd quickly fallen in line, and after a single pass from my fearsome, all-terrain Craftsman mower, I was beaming at my freshly manicured expanse of lawn when he first caught my eye: There, in the corner of the yard, was an enormous raccoon. And he was digging furiously. In my lawn!

Only later did I pause to reflect on how quickly and deeply feelings of pride and homeownership had taken root and sparked my vendetta against this mortal enemy. At the time, confronted by an adversary, my fight-or-flight instincts took hold, and I simply reached for the nearest weapon at hand, a garden trowel (a very expensive garden trowel, I later found out), which I hurled at the invader like it was a ninja throwing star. The trowel sailed harmlessly past him, though it removed a sizeable chunk from the fence. As I stood there, impotently shaking nay fist and cursing the damage to my lawn, it dawned on me how quickly I was shuttling along life's continuum from Dennis the Menace to Mr. Wilson.

Meat up

I take a measure of comfort in knowing" that difficulties like mine aren't all that uncommon--they can't, be, or there Wouldn't exist such a sizeable body of literature aimed at improving the ambitious suburban male, For while, as a species, we project an image of being kings of our castle, eager to show off the recently landscaped yard or hold forth to visitors on the...