Men's Journal

Jim Wright Photo credit: Jim Wright

Pick up the April issue of Men’s Journal to see the many sides of Gerard Butler, get the better of your back pains, and read about special ops airman Andy Kubik’s battle with PTSD after his return from Iraq.

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From Erik Hedegaard’s profile Gerry the Sinner / Gerry the Saint:

“That I got through all that I got through to be where I am, it doesn’t make sense — this kind of lost soul studying law in Scotland and then moving to London with no experience as an actor, and with his morals not about him, who couldn’t keep his shit together, who couldn’t even feed himself properly, and to get ahead in a career like this, which is probably one of it not the most difficult professions to get ahead in — nothing else makes sense except to think that I was being guided and all this was meant to be, the same way you see the crooked smile as a blemish or imperfection, or being fired as a lawyer horrific, when those are the very things that end up helping you. My thing now is to appreciate the cosmic beauty of everything that’s happened. But then again, do I spend a lot of time in my own head judging myself? Absolutely. Have I ever thought I was a fraud? Maybe 18 hours a day. Do I spend more time damning myself than promoting myself? Absolutely. In the last five years since coming out here, I’ve had two relationships. I’m not a big relationship guy. One of my vices is, I’m too wrapped up in myself and not always in a good way. It’s not like I walk around going, ‘Hey, I’m amazing; I’m Gerry Butler!’ But I am too caught up in my own shit, good and bad. The whole banging-the-bottle-against-my-head thing that I did as a kid — it’s a metaphor for how I’ve loved to cause myself pain. I’ve spent a lot of time taking the path of most resistance instead of least. Maybe I have an important meeting. I don’t consciously turn up late, but I will find that I subconsciously create circumstances that’ll make me so late that on the way I’m going, ‘Why would you do this? This is so fucked!’ And by the time you’re in the meeting, you’re in negative land and you have to try to fight yourself into positive land. I’m always battling that.”

From Catherine Price’s The Complete Guide To Your Back:

No other common injury affects your quality of life like a bad back. But because it bears so much of the weight of everyday life, the back is one of the easiest parts of your body to injure. With more than 140 individual muscles and 33 individual bones — not to mention the most important nerves in your anatomy — it’s complex, making injuries frustratingly hard to diagnose and treat. Thus, 80 percent of all adults experience back pain of some kind or another during their lives, causing 6 million people to see a doctor each year for back issues in the U.S.

But here’s the good news: More than 90 percent of back problems can be resolved without surgery. In most cases, you can care for the pain on your own by using anti-inflammatories, icing the affected area, and taking a short break from normal activity. But you do need to know what’s ailing you.

From Matthew Teague’s What the War Did to Andy:

We should have seen the demons in Andy about the time he pulled out his night-vision monocular and crawled under my house. Instead we just stood around in the dark.

That was seven years ago. Andy Kubik had recently returned from Iraq and dropped by for lunch because a mutual friend thought we might get along. Stationed at an Air Force base nearby, he rumbled into my small Alabama town on an enormous black Harley, like Thor returning from war. Even before everything that followed, even before the cracks started to show, Andy seemed like a man formed from two conflicting types of clay: the heroic and the vulnerable. The godlike and the human. He removed his helmet and goggles, revealing his curled blond hair, and transformed into something smaller and quieter, apologizing for the noise before he dismounted.

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