Thursday, February 11, 2010

Prudie...gets with the program?

Cousin Jackal woke up this morning to a major shock.  No, not the prospect of yet another day of cabin fever, as the snow piled up outside has made scavenging a tad impossible; rather, the realization upon reading today's Dear Prudence that Prudie has, mirable dictu, managed to pull her head from her nether regions this week.  Methinks she has been reading Dan Savage.  Which is good, because in Cousin Jackal's opinion, if the world operated the way Mr. Savage thinks it should, we'd all be much calmer and happier.  However, as per usual, my cup o'rage runneth over, so I'll take out what I can on these letter writers:

First letter:
A long, long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and all that Disney/Norman Rockwell stuff was actually true (really!), I met a lovely girl.  We held hands, shared malts with two straws, took long walks in the park, and little birds and forest creatures would gather around us and sigh at the pure, pure love we shared.  Then dark clouds gathered, and I was called away to war, and she waved her hanky as I trooped off to go beat back the bloody Hun.  I never saw her again...until a few weeks ago, when we met again in a supermarket checkout line reaching for the same copy of Martha Stewart's Guide to Homemade Vegetable Sex Toys.  O, she told me a woeful tale, wherein the man she married never came to her bed but to do his duty whilst thinking of England, and now in his later years his brain is turning more to mush with the passing of each day.  Our love still springs eternal, but we are godly upstanding folk, so we daren't do more than share long doe-eyed glances and pregnant pauses.  But, uhh, we got needs, y'know?  So, yeah, um, hypothetically, can we ditch her husband and have some crazy monkey sex?  We don't mind if the birds and forest creatures watch.


Huh?  Oh, sorry, I was vomiting.  Look, dude, you've got a little cognitive dissonance going on.  On the one hand you and your lady love seem to think you're honorable sorts who would never break that whole "in sickness and in health" portion of the Standard Marriage Vows(TM)...but on the other hand, dammit, hubby's got the cognition and sex drive of your average eggplant and it's Just Not Fai-hai-hair that you shouldn't be able to do the nasty when you want to.  Now personally I think traditional marriage vows are crap because they don't take into account the myriad of ways Life has of telling us, one and all, to bend over and take the fire hose.  Unpleasant things happen.  Catastrophes happen.  Things that no one on their bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked wedding day could imagine ever sundering the perfection of their relationship.  But Alzheimer's is certainly such a thing, and if this woman's husband isn't already not the man she married, then soon enough he won't be.  If you and she want permission to cheat, fucking talk to each other about whether you want to cheat.  Because that's what it is when one spouse fucks someone else when the other spouse isn't aware of it.  Either be okay with it, and be prepared to hide it from hubby to keep him from experiencing acute sadness and/or anger in addition to the daily panic of slowly forgetting all that made his life...or wait 'til he's dead.  Your call.  Just don't fucking kid yourself about your intentions.

Video Letter:
I'm in my forties and going through a pretty standard Mid-Life Crisis(TM), assuring myself that I still have some juice left in my balls by behaving like a fratboy with a twenty-year-career-professional's salary.  Long story short, I've got two fuckpuppets.  I woo them and ply them and promise undying affection to each of them...but it's not like I told them they were my one and only, or anything.  I mean, why would I do that? That would be stupid, because I know they'd stop giving me vagina access privileges.  So do I have to tell them?  'Cause it would totally wreck shit.


Oh, you.  I know you.  You're one of Those Guys.  Yeah, the ones with the red convertibles, the beer pong tables in the basement man-caves, and the crow's feet.  So, if I can sum up, you basically want permission to keep being an overgrown, manipulative horny teenager because it makes you happy and you don't really care what your beeyatches want so long as they keep their traps shut and let you climb in the saddle whenever you feel like it.  Oh, but they're totally cool with things now--right?  Sure about that, are ya?  I bet they're cool with it--since neither knows of the other's existence.  I believe you when you say that they don't have marriage on the brain (a.k.a. Picket Fence Syndrome), but even YOU are smart enough to realize that the only reason you have two pieces of arm candy is that you haven't flat-out told them, "No, honey, you actually don't mean anything to me, I'm just having fun riding your snatch."  See, while it may be that they don't each actually want a relationship with you, it's equally probable that they don't want your low opinion of them as walking orifices rubbed in their faces.  So go ahead, buddy, don't tell them.  Let them find out on their own and dump your ass.  But I'm sure you're fine with that--I bet you think you can still pick up college chicks.  Good luck with that.  Even college chicks can smell the whiff of fear that comes off a guy desperate to keep from aging.

Letter Two:
I, like, like a girl, and stuff, and I kinda, y'know, want to ask her out, but I'm like, too shy, so, should I, like, send her an anonymous note or something?

Yes.  I suggest you slip it in her locker between classes and decorate it with little hearts and arrows in the margins.  Or maybe you could go stand outside her bedroom window and pelt it with gravel until she opens it, whereupon you can serenade her with a boom box.  Seriously--how old are you?  Here, have a towel, you need to dry off behind the ears a bit.  It's great that you like this girl, but frankly if you're not brave enough to even make yourself ask her out using YOUR OWN REAL FUCKING NAME, chances are she isn't going to think you're worth dating.  Chances are, she may think you're a stalker.  Look, the worst she can do is say no.  Actually, the worst she can do is make fun of you on Facebook.  So there you go.  Hike up your Underoos and risk being The Biggest Joke On The Internet.  Ask her out, chickenshit.

Letter Three:
My mother's friend has been dating a wonderful man for just under two months, and he proposed.  She is ecstatic.  He's a Super Secret Agent and he told her that that was all he could say, because if he told her what he REALLY did every day then he would have to kill her, otherwise the fate of the world would be in jeopardy.  He invented cold fusion, found the Golden Fleece, and kicked Chuck Norris in the balls and lived to tell the tale.  He used to run a diamond mine and got really really rich but didn't want to lose touch with the common man so he got a job stocking nails at a local hardware store.  I looked him up on Teh Interwebs and was shocked, shocked to discover that he couldn't possibly have done all this.  Should I tell her, or should I just sit back and watch the hilarity ensue?

Train wrecks are an awful lot of fun to watch--when they happen to your enemies.  So yes, if you have some particular grudge against your mother's friend, by all means watch her sham engagement turn into a sham wedding and then you can cackle like a hyena while she tries to pick up the shattered remains of her emotional health.  Or, y'know, you could bring some facts to her attention and avert tragedy like a decent human being.  Sheesh, you people actually have crises of conscience over this shit? 

Letter Four:
I'm a senior in college and I've been putting together a plan to create a model that will plot the course of my boyfriend's and my life together after graduation.  Thing is, I was brought up my entire life to understand that men don't like women, only tolerate them, because women, y'know, have normal human emotions and don't particularly like being treated like fuckpuppets.  I swore when I met my boyfriend that I would be the perfect woman, the woman all men want, the woman who was rational and logical like a man and was perfectly able to see why a man as special as my boyfriend couldn't possibly keep from getting some strange every time he felt like it.  Lately I've been getting the weirdest twinge in my gut.  Jealousy?  No, impossible.  That's an emotion.  But I can't help but notice that I'm doing all the future planning here, and my boyfriend...isn't.  I don't understand.  Should I write up a brief outlining my completely rational reasons why I think I'm getting the short end of the stick?  How about a PowerPoint presentation?

Are you by chance majoring in business?  Yeah, real life don't work that way.  Jesus H. Christ on a polka-dotted circus pony, I actually feel sorry for you.  You're Sad Open Relationship Girl.  I know you.  Hell, I've been the fuckpuppet of the guy dating you; I've witnessed you firsthand.  You fell in love with a guy who, at some point during his college career, discovered that if he used words like "romantically monogamous" and "open relationship" he could have all the security of a regular booty call (I mean, girlfriend) while simultaneously being free to hook up with anyone else he wanted.  If you didn't want the same thing, hey, not his fault, he was totally cool with you dating other people, so long as he didn't see it or know about it and you were always there when he wanted access to your orifices, and if you didn't take advantage of the situation and fuck your way through the football team, well, that was your decision.  Not his.  At all.  So I'm guessing you dated a little...and felt kind of like you were cheating...so you slowly stopped dating anyone else...and now YOU are monogamous but HE isn't.  Meanwhile you're busily planning your post-graduation merger and he's...so completely not on board it's frickin' obvious to a total stranger.  YOU are not in an open relationship. YOU have bought hook, line, and sinker the misogynistic claptrap spewed by all entertainment media that the only sort of women men want to be around is the sort that doesn't talk, doesn't think, and never, ever has an emotion (but preferably makes enough money to lend a guy some, and of course puts out on request).  Horsepucky.  Rationality is wonderful.  Logic is wonderful.  Logic to the point of rationalizing the bullshit "relationship" you find yourself in, huh-uh.  Does Not Compute.  You're not happy.  He doesn't want to marry you.  You got used.  In the words of the eminent Mr. Savage, Dump The Motherfucker Already.  I guarantee that in twenty years, he's going to be the Video Letter Writer.  If your boyfriend truly wants a logical, rational partner who never lets an emotion get in the way of him having a good time, perhaps he should buy one of those new Japanese Sex Robots that Cousin Jackal has read about.

3 comments:

  1. Out-fucking-standing, Jackal! Just right for being snowed in and needing to warm the place with a little vented rage. Bravo! :-)

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  2. P.S. I caught the Dr. Cox reference, too, by the way. That's one web Oscar for you! :-)

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  3. Good snark Jackal!

    Just be nice to the woman married to the Alzheimer guy. She definitely needs some distraction because a caretaker's life can be hell.... while an Alzheimer patient might be benefitting from a happily unmarried amnesia.

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