“Oh yeah? What about your uncle Clark? Last time I checked, nuns’ habits were, well…for nuns.”
If you’re behind in the fight, don’t hesitate to bring up an unemployed brother or sister with six kids. But remember, once you use these your mom’s prison record is fair game.
Lots of times fights happen on the way to family functions. “Oh, jeez, your dad’s going to be there. I don’t know why we have to do this every year. Your aunt May’s gonna be plastered and I bet Aunt June hasn’t learned how to chew with her mouth shut yet. The woman’s eighty-six years old for goodness sakes. We’re going to have to draw straws to see who sits across from her. Last year I got her food all over my face!”
Bringing family into a fight increases the duration by at least eight days. God created the world in less time than it will take for you to kiss and make up. Plus, you’re no longer arguing about the topic at hand, you have gone off down an entirely emotional road. This is toughest for the man, who is usually the logical one. (Hey, want to make something of it?) But it’s no wonder that taking scatter shots at family hurts. These days most families are the product of divorces and remarriages. It always seems like every time you split the tree, the branch gets a little thinner. For some reason I get the feeling that the Foxworthy tree is suffering from dry rot.
The worst thing a woman can do to a man is nag him in front of his friends. I’m less afraid of slandering someone’s family than I am of arguing in public. My wife can pin me to the floor with a butcher knife, but I just want her to wait until we get home. It’s even more embarrassing being around a couple when they’re fighting.
“Yeah, Tina, why don’t you tell them about the time you pushed my mom down the basement stairs.”
“They don’t want to hear about that.”
“Yeah, we would!”
Or say you’re on a double date, and they’re going at it in the backseat. You don’t want to interfere, but after a while something happens that forces you to voice your opinion.
“Jerry, you should have asked me to stop the car before you made Dolores get out. At the least I could have slowed down. You just had to ask.”
Too bad we get too old to hit people with a dirt clod when we get mad at them.
Here’s something to always remember: When fighting with your wife, never get so mad that you walk out without your keys. I’ve got a theory that 98 percent of the homeless are people who walked out without their keys and couldn’t convince the other party to let them back in.
If fighting persists, divorce, however previously unthinkable, might become an option. But I wonder at how effective a solution dissolution is. After all, isn’t divorce when you pay a lawyer a lot of money to arrange it so you can move out and leave everything you own with someone you hate? On the other hand, we can also regard divorce as the legal alternative to murder. In most cases.
It’s better just to learn how to avoid arguments. Lots of time women ask questions guys should not answer honestly. My wife always asks me, “Honey, please tell me if my butt starts getting fat.”
Yeah, right. I don’t care if she’s knocking lamps off the table, I’m saying, “You got a really nice butt there, Tundra, I swear you do.”
When in public, women should also avoid pointing out other women to their men and asking, “Honey, do you think she’s pretty?” She will not get the answer she’s looking for. When Gregg does that I always say, “Lord no! Oh, I hate blondes with big firm breasts. I feel lunch coming up. I’m sick as a dog here.”
We know better. You’d think she knew better.
Do women really want men to be honest with them on subjects like their hair, clothes, butt, and women on the street? I don’t know. But loyalty is a valued quality. For instance, I’ve never strayed on my wife. No sense in it for lots of good reasons, from my respect and love for Gregg to not wanting to suffocate suddenly in my sleep.
If you’re single and dating someone new, you have no idea if the sex game can be won easily or at all. Marriage is more complicated and becomes increasingly so the longer you’re together. However, as a married man, your one advantage is knowing that you’ve won the game before and you’ve always got a chance to win it again.
Once, I was on the road and I read in USA Today that the problem with most men sexually is that they do not spend enough time with their women. We’re too wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, the story said, and women need more than that. Then, unlike most articles that just bash men and leave us to pick up the pieces, this one offered suggestions. Most prominent was to try giving your woman a hot oil massage that lasts an hour. Sounded great until I got to the part that said the whole idea was never to touch her in an intimate place. I could go right up to the place but I couldn’t touch it until the time was up. According to the story, after an hour with the hot oil any woman would be a quivering volcano of passion, ready to erupt.
The night after I got home I told Gregg to just relax. I put the kids to bed. Then, in the privacy of our bedroom, I set up the frying pan and the Coleman stove right by the bed, and warmed up the oil. I put on a romantic CD. I think it was Mating Dance of the Timberwolf.
“We’re going camping,” I said. “You lay back, listen to the music, Daddy’s home.” Then I did the massage exactly according to instructions. Toes, feet, calves, thighs…hey, I’m not going to draw you a picture. Let’s just call it all the semimagic spots. I also watched the clock, trying to time things just right. I didn’t want to go over the hour mark because the magazine story warned not to try it for longer without supervision. When the hour turned, I looked down hopefully at Gregg. She had her head back and her mouth open. A little drool ran from the corner of her mouth down her cheek. She was fast asleep.
Suddenly the “don’t wake me up” rule was in effect.
Damn.
I decided just that once to try and override it. I shook her gently and said, “Hon? You want to…?”
“Oh, I feel too good to do it,” she mumbled, somehow knowing what I had in mind even though I hadn’t actually mentioned that I was a quivering volcano of passion, ready to erupt. “I couldn’t do it. Ohhh, thank you so much. Ohhh, I’ll just go to sleep.”
She knew I wanted to do it and she just left me hanging.
Maybe she was just concerned about getting oil all over the bed. I didn’t care if it was 10-W-40. Besides, I knew it wouldn’t go through the paint-covered plastic tarp that I had strategically placed over the mattress. But I had to bite my tongue and not press my no-longer-ulterior motives. So I just put my good deed in the “bank” and said, “Just wanted to make you happy. Didn’t care if we did it.” Of course, the idea with banking is to be certain to let her know there’s something on deposit. All the next day I hinted, “Did you enjoy that hot oil massage? You looked like you enjoyed it. Yeah, I did it for like an hour. Yeah, I could have been doing other things. I don’t know, I just love you so much I wanted to do something to make you feel good.”
Inside, I couldn’t help but wonder how she could say no, particularly when she felt so wonderful. I’ve never said no to my wife. Actually, there was the time I had kidney surgery and was on intravenous morphine. She said I passed on sex—but being semiconscious, it’s her word against mine.
One surefire way to tell if a woman feels romantic is if she suddenly starts cleaning the house. I like it when my wife wears the high heels and the little apron. Years ago a woman who liked me sent flowers to get me in a romantic mood. They were nice, but I told her that if she really wanted to push my thrill button she should wash my car.
If a woman wants romance, what might help turn on her man is a visit to the trashy lingerie shop. Or she can just leave her Victoria’s Secret catalog lying around. Now, that’s never been a big deal with me. I prefer a woman in a T-shirt, white panties, and old Levi’s that really fit. I don’t need garter belts, corsets, and fishnet stockings. I don’t even fit in most garter belts, corsets, and fishnet stockings. I have to think about these things, since I sometimes p
lay dress up when Gregg is out for the afternoon. What man wouldn’t? I’ve just never gotten the hang of all those buttons and snaps.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t like looking at the pictures in free, home-delivered catalogs of women in their underwear. God bless America. Think about it: We never saw anything like that when we were growing up and needed it. All we ever got was the Sears catalog full of high-waisted granny panties. You could measure first downs with those. “Bring that bra in here, Pete, we gotta take a measurement. First down!”
But that underwear they make now, it’s so skimpy that Victoria doesn’t have a whole lot of secrets left, does she? You give a couple of guys one of those catalogs and they can entertain themselves all weekend.
“Oh my God, Mike, look at this. That’s gotta hurt like hell right there. Just that string going right up your butt like that. Seems like every time you bowled it’d just cut you right in two.”
I’ll be honest with you: I’d rather look at the catalog than go in their stores. If you’re a man, you always feel like a pervert when you’re in Victoria’s Secret. You do! You feel like the girls behind the counter have the sex offender directory and are just trying to find your picture.
“Sally, look at the guy with the panties on his head. That is the same guy.” It’s gotten so that just because I’m not really a pervert doesn’t mean I can’t act like one. So every time I go in among the panties and the teddies and the push-up bras, I pick up a body stocking, sashay to the counter, and go, “Where are your dressing rooms.” They have to let you try it on. It’s the law. Got one on right now, in fact. Little tight in the shoulders, makes it hard to reach all the keys on this keyboard, but it’s not really too bad.
There’s one question I’ve never been able to answer: What do women do in the bathroom that takes so long? My wife can be in there six hours, easy. Okay, forty-five minutes, but that’s still a long time when there’s no shower or bath involved. I go in, shave, brush my teeth, use the facilities, and I’m done in five to seven minutes, tops. The same goes for women and their closets. A man walks into his closet, sees a shirt he likes, smells the pit. Hey, it’s okay, and we’re out of there. A woman must spin a cocoon.
I suppose one clue to this mystery is a woman’s purse. For all her talk of cleanliness, there is nothing a guy has—garage, junk room, fishing box, lint collection—that is more disorganized than a woman’s purse. A purse is a dumpster with a shoulder strap. They put garbage in it. They put used Kleenex in there. The put in half-sticks of gum. They put pens that don’t write back into the purse. (Buddy Hammond’s mom has ants in her purse. Wonder why?) The typical purse bottom is so full of spare change it always sets off the metal detectors at airports but not the theft sensors at department stores. Normally having that much metal on one’s person would mean a customer must be stealing something, but these are women selling to women. They know better.
If my wife dropped her keys in her purse, finding them would make the search for the Holy Grail look like an Easter egg hunt. She thinks she’s protected because she’s got a can of mace in the purse. That’s like protecting your home by keeping a gun somewhere in the attic.
Not a guy in the world has a wallet as disorganized as a woman’s purse. Men don’t have purses because we’d always lose them, even if they were the size of cars.
As we know, men like things that women don’t, like stuffed dead animals on the walls. You never see deer heads in beauty parlors. A sport, to women, is shopping. It really gets them worked up. Here’s how I know: “multiple orgasm” and “mall opening” begin with the same letters. Prove it to yourself. Go find a mall under construction and see if at lunchtime there aren’t women shouting at the builders to quit eating and get back to work.
Men hate to shop. I guarantee it. Just stop any man you can find and say, “Would you rather spend the whole day shopping for clothes or having exploratory rectal surgery?” Most men would answer quickly: “Now if I had the surgery, how long would I be out of work?”
Clearly there’s a world of difference between women and men. Even words mean different things.
When a woman says, “I’m almost ready,” a man interprets that to mean “by the year 2000.” If you’re reading this and that year is already behind us, that still doesn’t mean she’s ready yet.
Women are always late.
Last year I played for the president at the White House. Sure enough, I looked at my watch, realized we were not ready, and yelled, “Gregg, we’re going to be late to meet the president.”
“Oh, my hair’s not flipping right.”
“Nobody will care. Nobody will know.”
“I’ll know. Where’s my other earring?”
“This is the White House! Why couldn’t this be the one day you were ready twenty minutes early! It’s not against the law to sit in the hotel room and watch TV for twenty minutes before we leave.”
“Now that I have it on, I don’t like this dress.”
“Change it.”
“Or these shoes.” And that’s when she starts the flamingo posing, with different shoes on each foot.
“These or these?”
“Let me see it again.”
“These or these?”
“Again.”
You never see a man with a hunting boot on one foot and a tennis shoe on the other asking which looks better.
“These or these?”
“Let’s see that again, Bob.”
Sometimes it seems like my whole life with Gregg has been spent running out the door. The problem is that helping my wife get ready also makes me late.
“You got my tie?”
“Yeah, it’s in my purse.”
“Where’s my pants?”
“I don’t know. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”
We always arrive fifteen minutes after everyone else does. Or fifteen minutes after closing time. I was afraid that by the time we got to the White House there’d be a new administration.
Some women in my family will probably be late for their own funerals. The chapel will be full and for some reason the bodies won’t be prepped well enough, and we’ll all be waiting on them again.
Part of the problem for most women is that they don’t know how to calculate driving times. However long it takes to drive somewhere at midnight, with no traffic, going fast, and green lights all the way, is the time they figure it takes to get to the same destination at noon. The fact that it’s bumper-to-bumper traffic doesn’t come into play. It’s still twelve, right? Numbers look the same, why shouldn’t the driving time be the same? It should always take nineteen minutes to get across town.
Even if a woman can do the math, her sense of time is still screwed up. Time is pretty much whatever works for them. Gregg can talk to her mother on the phone for an hour and a half. But if I say, “You’ve been on the phone for an hour and a half,” she’ll go, “It’s only been half an hour and besides, you talked to your brother last night for forty-five minutes!” Well, I talked to my brother for eleven, but it’s not going to help my argument to say so.
Of course, when we’re in bed, she goes the other way.
“That was only five minutes.”
“No, honey, that was a half an hour.”
“No, I looked when we started. It was 11:07, it’s 11:12 now and you’re finished and smoking.”
“No, it was 10:31 when we started.”
I suppose in the end, none of this really matters. All I know is that now that I’m married, I always realize right in the middle of sex, “Wow, this is really nice. How could I have forgotten?” This perception is even more intense when you have kids and you have to make an appointment to be intimate. No longer can I think, “Well, if it’s not so good tonight, it will be different tomorrow.”
Now tomorrow is next week.
So I work really hard at being good in the sack. I want everything to last. But then one of us will move the wrong way and it’s over.
“Oh my, I’m sorry, I’m so sorr
y.”
You know it was great sex when you end up apologizing.
Men and women. Husbands and wives. We need each other. Without my wife I wouldn’t know what clothes I want to wear or what movies I want to see. I wouldn’t have anyone to ask “Where are my socks?” Without me, my wife would have a hard time opening a jar of pickles. She’d also have to buy a bug zapper. “Get it, oooh! It’s gross! Smash it, but don’t kill it.”
With any luck we eventually reach an understanding with each other that allows us to coexist. I don’t flush the toilet while she’s taking a shower, and she doesn’t use the blender while I’m watching Bass Fishing with Uncle Bullsheets.
We’ve lived happily ever after.
The Patter of Little Hooves
A few years ago I became a father. A couple years later the miracle happened again. Now Gregg and I have two young daughters. I thought I knew what I was getting into—at least the second time—but you can’t prepare for being a father any more than you can practice loading the entire contents of a four-bedroom house into the trunk of a Buick LeSabre. Believe me, I’ve tried.
Before Gregg and I got married, she said, “If you want kids, I’m not the person you should marry.” I’d wanted kids my whole life. But I was so crazy about her, I was willing not to have kids to be with her.
One morning six years later, Gregg heard a strange ticking. Actually not so strange. We’d had a wild night and she was sleeping on my wristwatch. But later at breakfast she suddenly said, “I want kids.” As you can imagine, I was surprised, but Gregg said she was sure, so we immediately began to try—and I do mean immediately. For months nothing happened. So we tried and tried and tried some more. To be perfectly honest, at times I felt I was trying harder than she, but we still kept at it. It’s a good thing God made “trying” so much fun.
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