Friday, March 20, 2009

Back to a time when life was simple


This is a very bizarre personal ad response I found on Craigslist. But hidden between the lines is the angst that seems to get communicated in the personals by men who feel unable in the current world to satisfy the archaic desire that women still have for a white picket fence, monogamy and family.

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I wish I could move. I would move backwards in time. Back to a time when life was simple. When The Beach Boys with Pendleton shirts sang songs about cars & girls. I want to live in the 50's. Back in the 50's, all housewives had those tattoos on their lower back! That being said....

Back when I was a kid, they didn't have stuff like synthetic oil. All that we had was old fashioned dinosaur juice, pop rocks, and 7-Up. Does having Brady Bunch & CHiPs flashbacks make me old? Sometimes it feels like I'm suffering Post Traumatic Stress from all that Disco.

The B&W TV era was an age of innocence, wasn't it? Didn't we all grow up with Leave It To Beaver? I loved how the Beaver could get into all kinds of mischief, and get out of it all, in 22 minutes with a few commercials thrown in. And who could forget how American Graffiti, Grease, and Happy Days painted a picture of the 50's that we all wish we could visit?

How I would love to live in a era where a man on a single income could afford a house, wife, 2.5 kids, white picket fence, & two cars in the driveway. What was gas back then? A nickel a gallon? Wasn't that back when "till death do us part" actually meant something? There was no divorce back then. You had to stick to your commitment, or commit suicide to get out of it.

Like other boys and girls, having negotiated through the minefields of dating and mating, I'm sure that both of us have a few battle scars. I've made it through all of my tours of duty, and came through seemingly unscathed. Guess what? No ex-wives, no ex-kids, no alimony, no child support, no divorce, no bankruptcy. I should get at least a Congressional Medal, if not a Purple Heart.

I'm now at the phase in my "career" where I don't come out of the corner swinging anymore. I'd rather jab away the first few rounds, measure my distance, develop my timing, get into my rhythm, and conserve my energy for the later rounds.
So now I'm just a regular boy, wearing Levi's & Pendletons, driving a big old pick-em-up truck, in a small city, with narrow streets & no parking. I'm still stuck with the kind of girls who show off their breast implants & lower back tattoos, with bare midriff tank tops & low cut jeans; and think that dancing on a speaker box at a nightclub can lead to bigger things in life - like being picked to dance in the cage suspended over the dance floor. I can only hope for and dream about those rich girls from Marin, who live on a trust fund, and want to save the world from hunger, war, malaria in third world countries, and the Republicans. Can you feel my pain?

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