Statusability?

[from 8/4/10]

Ordinarily I don’t like to talk about my personal life in this column. I try to think of something that concerns everyone. Then I start to talk about it, and realize that in order to squeeze 666 words about that subject, I’d need to make up too many facts and examples. So I give in and write what I know about. Me.

This time it’s different. The Personal and the Universal collide, as it were. They get close and sweat all over each other, as it were. Then, 13 years later, they get hitched, as it were.

Anitra “On Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept, She Of Many Associations, She Who Erotically Stimulates Tomato Plants, She Who Needs No Last Name” Freeman, and I, will be getting “more married” this week.

We are expecting to be married, or mix-married, by 8 or more officiators, representing 6 or more faiths, depending on how you cut them.

“How is that Universal, Wes?” -- you might well ask. Not everyone is marrying my Ducky. My Ducky! Not your Ducky!

True, but other people marry. And, more to the point, still other people mess with other people’s marriages and mess with other people on the basis of their marital statuses and non-statuses, and they mess with other peoples’ statusability even, through support and/or lack thereof of public policies concerning such, through their lawfully elected public officials.

For instance, I was looking forward to Anitra or I being able to collect the other’s Social Security after I or Anitra, respectively, were dead. I was just now horrified to learn that to do that, Anitra or I would have to wait a whole ten years to kick the bucket. No fair, we’re both 61! That law discriminates in favor of whippersnappers! Goddamn whippersnappers! Get off my lawn!

Where was I? Oh, yeah, and get this: Anitra just told me I can’t collect even if she lasts ten years and then I push her off a cliff. This totally flies in the face of reason. I mean, dead’s dead, right? Shouldn’t that be all that matters? But no, it’s against the rules.

Here’s another example of irrational rules regarding married people. I wasn’t thinking of applying for Food Stamps for us, but I decided to look up the rules anyway, just to find something stupid there to write about now, and as usual I wasn’t disappointed!

A single person making $400.15 per week or less can get food stamps. For every additional person in your household, starting with the spouse, the cut-off income goes up not $400 a week per person, but only $138.46 a week per person, give or take a penny.

So the law assumes that there are no additional living costs at all except the additional cost in food. You wouldn’t need maybe a larger apartment to put all those bodies. What about the live-in mother-in-law? The new kids from the previous marriage? What if I don’t have enough closets to stuff them all in?

Fortunately, Anitra and I won’t have a live-in mother-in-law, as they’re both already dead, but I worry for others who aren’t as fortunate as we are.

Likewise, Anitra and I are of almost the opposite sexes. (I cook and do the dishes.) I wish everybody could be of the opposite sexes, but alas, that would require nearly 7 billion sexes, all of which would have to be totally opposite.

Were it always so, internet porn could never have come into being, and, as a result, the tools that made Facebook and all other life as we know it today would not have been possible.

Indeed, God, in Her infinite Wisdom, made us two sexes in order to enable the marketing of porn, and so stimulate media innovation.

Therefore we have only approximately two opposite sexes, and so there are not enough to go around, and some people are caught without.

That isn’t right. Let’s make marriage more Universal than ever, now!