The National Academy of Sciences Should Sponsor Research into Assholia

Speaking of aging well, I have a friend who recently speculated about whether our longtime husbands had always been assholes or if they only evolved into assholes as they aged poorly. You know what they say about the A-word: everybody has one, some people are one. I could get into a whole essay on asshology and the great philosophical controversy about whether it’s nature or nurture.

So I will.

Most researchers have concluded that once and a-hole, always an a-hole. It's a latent trait that may or may not metastasize into the part of the brain where social skills, situational awareness, empathy and personal hygiene once resided. While there are young assholes, I’m talking here about men who become assholes sometime between 50 and 60. About the same age hair starts growing out of their ears. 

I concur with these professional asshologicians and certified assholeticians who insist that one day a guy can be a kind human being, funny, intelligent and clever, loving and sexy. Then, snap. Like women instantly become crones when they stop what the old school called “riding the cotton pony”, some men become asses overnight when they hit men-o-pause. I’ve spoken before about how a wise woman once taught that some men, when they are no longer sexually active, still miss the passion. If they can’t have sexual passion, some learn to incite anger and impatience in their partner just to have some passion spit into their shriveled souls. Being an asshole is the true path to generating passion.

The question that NAS should fund (and what my research will fund when I come into my rightful reward, i. e. a lot of money in consideration for the moderately bothersome trials and tribulations I’ve undergone in my over-privileged and narcissistic life) is: what activates the A-gene cluster in some men and not others? Which leads to other questions: can we recognize the warning signs and risk factors like we now can with say, stroke or early onset Alzheimer’s? 

(At some point, I suppose we might want to look into diagnosing and treating, possibly even curing or preventing late onset assholia. Sadly for me, the race to the cure is totally lost,. My only remaining treatment of choice is assisting at an assisted suicide.)

The science to date that I just made up for this post tells us that we’re talking about aging and whether you can do so with grace and grit and raging against that good night. Or whether as you age you shrivel, and whimper and whinge, and do nothing to maintain (let alone improve) your physical and mental health.

Breaking news: while further research is required, so far, my peer-reviewed research has identified some of the warning signs to look for in men 18-35 that put them at risk for having their operating systems downgraded to A.1.

1. Flirting with age-inappropriate other women while he’s with his lady
2.  Latent or overt homophobia
3. Finding sarcasm and jokes about his lady’s imperfections to be hilarious 
4.  “Humorously” chiding her for not getting/taking a “joke”
5. Not reciprocating wrt/ #3.
6. Watching and enjoying TV shows including but not limited to: Big Bang Theory, 2.5 Men, My Cat From Hell, and Bait Car. (OK listen, don’t ask about NASCAR. If you have to ask about NASCAR, you deserve each other.) (I have strong suspicions about professional sports and ESPN in general, but who am I to judge? My favorite TV show is Murder, She Wrote).
7.  Calling other men Bro while judging other guys who behave like pretentious hipsters. (Corollary: The older the guy tries to retain his hipsterism, the sadder. And the more - and more elaborate - his facial hair, the greater likelihood of a-holism.)
8. Dissing the younger generation/immigrants/political foes/religious foes, but liking Chuck Norris (If you have to ask about liking Steven Segal, don’t bother. If you have to ask that you wouldn’t know the difference between an asshole and an Asshole if you were kissing it/him.)
9.  Expecting you to own responsibility for making his medical, dental, barber, tax/accountant, auto maintenance or other appointments. And for reminding him. The very first time he asks is the only chance she gets. If his lady takes the bait, they’re both doomed.
10. Asking his lady on a date/vacation then expecting her to arrange for any baby-sitting or pet-sitting, or in-flight snacks.
11. Bragging to his grown sons and/or relative strangers about how he was such a stud and bad boy at the son’s age instead of teaching/showing other guys how to respect women: from opening doors to not performing GSM.
12. Preferring smooth peanut butter to extra crunchy peanut butter. Why? I’ll tell you why: if they can't chew tiny peanut chips, they don’t have good oral hygiene and they’re bound to have dentures by the time they’re 60. And no, a gummy blow job isn’t as much fun as they think. Sorry, but somebody had to say it.)

Maybe somebody can create one of those stupid multiple choice questions people post on FB “12 Warning Signs That Your Guy May Become and Asshole by Age 50”. Girls, if the guy gets a score over 50%, run! Don’t try to prevent or fix it. Because gentlemen it’s your problem. As a wise man once explained to me “Not my farm, not my pig.”  I’ve got enough problems of my own.  I could go into a long essay about that.

But I won’t.

A Good Day to Die Inside

So, I spent the day yesterday driving TOG and DYS to WalMart and then lunching at TOG’s favorite local café, where the food is boring, the help is always happy to be sexually harassed, and the other customers are polite enough to ignore TOG’s inappropriate behavior.

The day began when, as I drove up to the Vida Loco to pick up TOG and get his scooter attached to the lift, he handed me an empty paper coffee cup. Not satisfied with letting me do all the work of strapping the scooter to the lift while he simply stumbles into the air conditioned car to wait, he also had to hand me his trash to drop into the back seat to dispose of later. Which turned out to be rather undramatic foreshadowing.

At some point in the middle of the day, between telling me where I should have turned, TOG pointed out a car that was a very bright red. The, another one right after that! This single sample should suffice to symbolize the scintillating substance of the subjects of our discourse. I could feel the life force draining out of the tips of my fingers as the day progressed.

The day ended when I dropped DYS at her trailer and she was pulling her WalMart bags out of the back seat and there was a small box of “nice’n clean Lens Wipes” (with a cute blue drop of water as the apostrophe in the name) that remained on the back seat. When I asked isn’t this yours, she replied, no I don’t need it, thought you might want it.

Not only can these people not dispose of their own trash, the feel compelled to give it to others to do so.

The middle of the day went about as you’d expect given the start and finish. I went to the booze barn en route home in order salvage a shred of will to live. As I sat in my comfy chair drinking my gin and ginger ale, I cleaned my eyeglasses with a lens wipe and congratulated myself on surviving another day.

A Rough Day at the Not OK Corral

Text From DYS on Monday:  Hi  r u busy today    Tex came   had a little confr.  Called cops….. would u b able to take me to the police station    I need a restran.order tod

WISIMH:  Why not? The only other things I had to do today - the only day this week I don’t have appointments or other commitments - was to clean the house, do the laundry, repair a leak to the pond plumbing, and, wait for it, do some fucking sewing on my quilt. At least I know that you got a restraining order against your first husband (prior husband, anyway) so at least you know the drill Right? (Spoiler alert: wrong.)

Me.  Ok, I just saw this message. Can come and get you. I know turn from main road but pls provide directions from there.

DYS has been without a car since Sunday. So she’s been stranded at her trailer park less than 24 hours. And by trailer park, I don’t mean mobile home estates, or other pretentious place with white gravel landscaping and whimsically named streetlets. This place actually has Trailer Park in its name and lives up to the kinds of trailer parks I remember along Route 1 back in the 1950s where descendants of refugees from the Dust Bowl lived.

So I found the place despite her absolutely incorrect directions and lack of street signs, but rather than hop into the air conditioned car and be on our way, I was waved into the last remaining single-wide trailer in the park, so I could enjoy the un-air-conditioned ambience while I heard the whole story. The trailer was bought used circa 1985 – the last time I visited – and was not aging gracefully back then. So let me pause in my tale to describe the place:

The metal siding on the trailer was either bright aqua blue or a once bright algae-green color that was initially merely unfortunate; but has now passed into the realm of what a paint store color card might call Acid Flashback Bile Green, only faded and rust-streaked. The front and back entrances are so rotted and squishy they felt like walking on steps made of cheap foam mattress material. Inside, there is what you might optimistically call mostly-wall-to-almost-opposite-wall post-shag carpet of an indeterminate greyish color; foam ceiling panels falling down in places between the aluminum ribs and stained with brown that one only hopes is from leaking rain and not dried blood. The kitchen floor has antique linoleum whose pattern has been worn down to grey in places where it’s not actually down to the plywood subfloor. Sparse furnishings include a three-piece upholstered sofa with at least one broken spring, easy chair and rocking chair - all covered in what might have once been a colonial print that included tea pots, tobacco leaves and aborted fetuses, but now at least has the advantage of disguising coffee stains and other stains that coordinate beautifully with the ceiling stains.

Outside the back door is a two-car long (not wide) cement slab covered with a home-made wooden wall and tin sheet roof once painted a hopeful shade of eye-save green, now faded to a monochrome series of dirty streaks. The contents of this covered workspace included miscellaneous motorcycle parts, a clearly broken drill press, a red Sears Craftsman two-tiered wheeled tool chest, an air compressor without hoses, boxes and too many cartons stacked too high and deep and collapsed upon each like something Dali might have painted during an earthquake while he was high on crack; and dusty tarps covering mysterious other stuff that seem to murmur menacingly"Don't ask." The overall effect made my old pre-cleanup carport look like an “after” picture in one of those home organizer commercials.

WISIMH:  I’ve got a bad feeling about this Scooby. Something tells me this could take the rest of my day. That laundry isn’t going to wash itself.

DYS: Hi. I was making coffee and Tex came and was all belligerent and aggressive like and said he wanted his tool box and I said I don’t think so because my lawyer said I have to keep something he values for negotiation purposes and he already has all but one of his guns so then he says yes that’s all he wants is the tool box and I say I don't think so and if he wasn't being so mean I would have said he could have any of the stuff along this side of the shed but not the tool box and then he started to unlatch and open the front of the shed so he could roll the toolbox out and….

WISIMH: And thanks for coming! And yep, this is all one sentence, punctuated by gasps for breath and some strangely familiar familial dramatics that I’ve never seen performed by anyone but TOG so I’m kinda creeped out here. And of course Tex would want the toolbox because it’s clearly the most valuable thing in this shit pile. By all that’s holy, why don’t you just walk away from this and back to your daughter in Tickville, Mo?

DYS: …and so I tried to stop him and pushed him and he threatened me if I touched him again and I couldn’t get my phone to work so I could call 911 so I ran next door to the manager and asked her to call the cops and went back and the cops came and asked me if I have a restraining order and I said I have a lot of papers (about the pending divorce) and I went inside and couldn’t find the right papers and blah blah

WISIMH:  Yep, all day, if I’m lucky, and this isn't looking like my lucky day. There are no papers saying your legal spouse can’t remove some of his own personal property from the premises where he lives. As you mentioned last time I saw you, you have no signed court orders of any kind. Which I already knew so why don’t you? Rhetorical question: in my experience, people in the deep end of this gene pool don’t do well under pressure.

Me:  (When DYS finally ran down) Let’s get out of here. We’ll get a cup of coffee and calm down then go to the police station.

Well, after lunch (which of course I bought) we went to the police station where we were told we had to go to the courthouse for a TRO. I think it was about then that I began to suspect that DYS does not, in fact, have the slightest clue about how to get a restraining order. While I sat next to an overweight mother of several small children who moved too fast for me to get a precise count, DYS stood in line to get the forms. While waiting, I googled Domestic Violence Restraining Order and learned within 5 minutes that there was no way we were getting this done today. Eventually, when she got tot he front of the line, the clerk directed DYS to a shelf on the wall (by the entrance) where the forms are. Yes: we could have picked up the forms without waiting, but I would have missed getting sticky lollipop goo on my pants from one of the various loose children, not to mention learning all I needed to know to give free unlicensed legal advice about this process.

DYS:  (Taking the ½” thick packet from me because all she could do was stand in front of the shelf of forms and wait for me to find it for her) Let’s go to the cafeteria to fill this out.

WISIMH:  Yes, let’s do that. Because the blisters I mentioned getting on my feet at the beach the yesterday are about killing me and walking around some more will be thera-fucking-peutic. And, I might get to buy you more coffee.

DYS:  (Sitting coffee-less in the cafeteria working on page 2 of what I estimate is a 10 page form) I don’t know how I’m going to get this completed.

WISIMH:  I don’t know how you didn’t know you weren’t going to get this completed. Coincidence?

Me:  Should you complete it, we have to turn it in upstairs and wait for a judge to give us a TRO that’s only good for 5-7 days. Then you get a hearing date for a more extended Domestic Violence Restraining Order and you have to serve Tex in person, not by mail, about the hearing. And you told me you don’t have a physical address for him, just a PO number, and your (braindead) lawyer hasn’t called you back, and The Google says that if you complete the form, and include the report of the cop who came this morning, and if Tex returns and threatens you again, and you call the cops again, they can issue an Emergency Restraining Order that is as good as a TRO. Even better because we don’t have to wait for a judge.

DYS:  I don’t know, maybe by then my lawyer will be back from vacation.

WISIMH:  I don’t know, maybe by then I’ll be in a locked ward with my new best friends and all the drugs I need to forget how to dial 911 on my own phone.

Me: And I don’t recall that you said he threatened you, and in fact, you were the one that initiated physical contact by trying to push him away from the tool box. So, are you really in fear of physical harm? You know even if you get a restraining order, he could still manage to get the toolbox anyway. Toolbox beats paper.

WISIMH: And you’re keeping it to negotiate for what? A share of the broken drill press? The mysterious shape under the tarp in the corner that might be a pirate’s treasure chest? One of those dumbed-down senior cellphones where you just push a button to dial emergency numbers?

So I persuaded DYS to let me drive her home where she’ll complete the form and call the cop tomorrow and ask him to mail her a copy of the incident report. One of the funniest parts of the day what that shortly after I returned home, before the room AC had even brought the temperature down to a level where my blistered feet stopped throbbing, my crazy houseguest returned. She asked me how my day was. I told her I spent it limping around the courthouse trying to get a domestic violence restraining order for DYS. She replied, yeah, so my day was pretty rough. Here’s what happened…