Mayhem’s 7 Man Laws
Jason “Mayhem” Miller tells you how to act like a man. (Getting arrested in church isn’t one of his laws, but should be.)
The former UFC fighter told us how to be a man, but he never said anything about church nudity. Yesterday Jason “Mayhem” Miller was arrested for breaking into a church, taking off his clothes, spraying a fire extinguisher and when arrested and asked for his name, he simply said, “Mayhem.” Say what you will about the eccentric fighter, but he’s one of the most entertaining people on the planet.
Take off your cape and put on your muscles. Jason “Mayhem” Miller tells you how to act like a man.
Photo Courtesy of Esther Lin | Licensed to Alpha Media Group 2012
The guys at Maxim asked me to write for them, and let me be the first to say, IT’S ABOUT GODDAMN TIME. I have been sitting here for damn near a decade with tornado of ideas spinning in around in my head of things men need to know.
Who am I? You might know me as the “bully show guy” or “Jason Ellis’ friend” or “the dude on Ultimate Fighter that can take a beating.” Or maybe you have no goddamn idea who I am.
Hello, my name is Mayhem. It’s nice to meet you.
I’m not that Mayhem from the goddamn Allstate commercials – the one played by Liz Lemon’s dummy boyfriend. I’m the actual Mayhem. I’ve been Mayhem for a long time. Even my mom calls me Mayhem.
I’ve been an MMA fighter for 12 years. My next bout is May 26th at UFC 146 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. I also have a special on Hulu, called A Day in The Life, so when you’re finished spanking it to girly pictures on Maxim.com you can go to Hulu.com and watch what I have to go through on a daily basis. Now that the boring ass introductions and shameless self promotion is over, let’s get down to bidness.
You need to act like man. I can help.
Here are a few Man Laws that I gathered over my years of adventuring. I hope you will find them helpful, or at least entertaining.
1. A man needs to learn something new every day.
I am not telling you to learn useless animal factoids from the bottom of Snapple caps, so that you can recite them in order to get girls to exchange numbers with you at Starbucks, but here are some just in case you need the help:
Turtles can breathe through their butts.
A snail can sleep for 3 years.
Most koalas have chlamydia.
I’m asking you to learn something that will improve your life. Something about your job, or something that will get you out of your mother’s basement. Take a business class. Apply to a technical college. Shadow someone who does what you wish you could do.
I spent many years being a beat-up-dummy for UFC champion Tito Ortiz…for free. But constantly being around him taught me how to slam someone off the side of the cage and elbow them in the face.
Maybe you know how to make a “Purple-Eye” (three shots of espresso into a cup of coffee). It means nothing unless you have the motivation to use that knowledge. For instance, maybe you should have a cup of coffee.
2. Men don’t smash their fellow man.
This should be pretty self-explanatory, but please allow me to elaborate for those of us who are oblivious, pathological ‘haterz.’ Run your own race. Worrying about what the guy in the next lane is doing will just get you tripping over your own tiny girl feet.
There will always be guys more handsome than you, with more money than you, and with a bigger, uh, feet than you. It won’t improve your position in life to chuck stones their direction, it’ll just decrease your foot-speed.
You can’t smash someone down to bring yourself up. That negative attitude just begets more negativity, sending you into a death spiral that keeps you from reaching your potential. Also, nobody wants to hang out with your whiny ass.
Don’t hate on your pals at the bar. Don’t hate on people you don’t know. (Yeah I’m talking to you, anonymous Twitter douche. It makes you look weak to your 16 followers.) Don’t even hate on your enemies. Keep your eye on your own prize, and try to build up the people around you. We all push one another up with that positive mental attitude, but remember….
3. It’s every man for himself.
Just because you have a support system, doesn’t mean you need to use it for every little stumble you have. I infamously lived in a van outside a California gym for a year (remember, Tito didn’t pay me). Sure, I could’ve called my daddy and got him to cosign on a lease on some cruddy apartment. But I refused to admit to him that maybe I should have went to computer school.
Relying only on yourself will forge you into a Hattori Hanzo blade that can chop the head off of any foe that stands before you. Sure you’ve got the chips stacked against you. Your name doesn’t begin with “Kim Jong” so you probably don’t have any clout, power, or two cents to rub together, but that just means you have nothing to lose.
I read some story in some old self-help book that I can’t even remember, and it contained a something I will basically plagiarize in honor of this being on the Internet:
The twins of a deranged serial murderer grew up. One got heavy into drinking, drugs and basically being a social miscreant, culminating in finally murdering a guy over some petty reason. The other twin made his way through school, earning a degree, and running a small business that flourished. Two guys. The same genetic make up. They asked both, one from his office desk, the other through the glass of a prison visiting room, “Why do you think you turned out the way you did?”
They both responded with basically the same answer,
“Look at my father, what else was I supposed to do?”
It’s all in your mindset, young Jedi.
4. A man takes chances.
Of course a man is courageous – I shouldn’t have to write it as a rule. No risk, no reward. But once you take the risk, there ain’t no half steppin’. Once you got the courage to commit to something you had better go balls out and take it to the limit.
5. A man is persistent.
I have everything in my life because I was unwilling to quit. I feel like in our increasingly sissified society, where everyone gets a participation trophy for showing up, we’ve become a bit soft on losing. You are supposed to lose sometimes.
You are supposed to be a sobbing mess, scream to the sky and wish you were never born. Feel that sting- the unmistakable pain of your own spirit repeatedly shanking you in the kidneys with a dagger of self doubt.
Now jump forward from that image as hard as you can into the future. You’ve lived life, you took the chance and if nothing else you got some life experience from it. Take that knowledge, it counts as the one thing you learned today. Build off of it–that takes a special kind of courage, which brings us to our next Man-Law…
6. A man is honest with himself.
The hardest thing for a man to do is face the truth about himself. We all are built with a mechanism inside of us that somehow lies and tells us we are way more badass than we truly are–some of us had mothers who fed our ego entirely too much, conversely some of us were raised in an environment that beat us over the head with insults until we are convinced that we are unworthy.
7. A man figures it out himself.
Let me share something personal with you. I learned a huge life lesson when meeting one of my heroes, Chuck Palahniuk. As someone who loves to read and write and fight, I was anxious to meet the author of one of the Gospels of Man: Fight Club.
Photo: Chema Moya / EPA / Landov | Licensed to Alpha Media Group 2012
I sat through a talk on his latest book, which I later read, but didn’t think it was as awesome as Survivor or Choke or Invisible Monsters. My focus was the book that made the movie that we all saw, and our GF’s saw because Brad Pitt was goddamn hot in it. Fight Club, while very short, was well researched, well written, and provide some social commentary on the State of our Union, plus a nice bonus, SPOILER ALERT: The main character was batshit.
All of his books are badass, and I want to write badass books too after I’m done risking my brain in the cage, so after the lecture I hopped in line to ask Chuck a question.I made sure to be the last one in line, so I could get some uninterrupted instruction on how to make my work stand out.
When I finally arrived, I came face to face with a short, tan, smart-looking man in a pink shirt. His demeanor was focused and he had an air of flamboyant awesomeness that probably comes when you write books that Hollywood makes into movies.
I introduced myself, and poured my heart out on how his book sent my life in a crazy right turn, inspiring me to channel my youthful aggression into fighting. After that, I stammered through some specific questions I wanted answered, and first he gave half-ass answers that said “I’m tired, beat it.” Then he deflected them, and focused on the fact I was a fighter. He gave me the advice, “Be careful, don’t get a detached retina.”
Yeah, thanks a lot for the tip pal. I didn’t come here to receive an ophthalmological exam.
Dejected, I walked back out to the busy L.A. street and yelled “CHUCK PALAHNIUK DIDN’T TEACH ME SHIT!!!!!”
On the way back to the car, I was thinking more and more about the meeting, then I realized something. Without words, Chuck was saying something much larger. He was saying, “Figure it out your fucking self. I didn’t work my ass off to be an awesome writer just to give out the knowledge for free to some mouth-breather with cauliflower ear!”
I got it, Chuck.
If you can’t learn from an experience, it’s because you haven’t thought about it hard enough. I thought about this one and figured out that it’s up to you to have the courage to risk your ass trying to make your dreams come true. If you quit shy of your goals, you’re the only one that has to live with it.
There are 7 Man Laws for you. The rest are for you to write – after you make my Americano.
Hit Mayhem up on Twitter, @MayhemMiller, for more knowledge. Plus, ask him questions and include the hashtag #MaximMayhem so we can make sure he’s not just answering the easy ones.And check out what happened when Mayhem visted the Maxim offices.