By objects
in wedding picture may be fatter than they appear, Tom "aluminum
anniversary" Waters
February
1 , 2004
As near
as I can figure, my brother has been married for six years. And, like
any successful marriage (I suppose), I can't tell where his personality
ends and hers begins. Since I tore
into him last, he's gotten a great new job, a better house, and
a dog, which is the closest thing I'm getting to a nephew. He's getting
soft and comfortable in his old age, as well as around the waist line.
What scares me beyond the point of sanity is the fact that this will
all happen to me some day. Every time I visit it's like looking into
a crystal ball.
Most weekends Joe sits around
the house swilling cheap beer and putting another notch into the couch
in front of his gargantuan TV set watching informative television. I've
seen him watch hysterectomy operations while eating elbow noodles with
spaghetti sauce. Why people try to watch anything educational in television
is incomprehensible to me. Television isn't made for the dissemination
of useful knowledge, it's there to turn your brain off and let the world
tell you what to think. But with Joe, f it's not the surgical malpractice
station, it's the history channel, or the weather channel, or the news
stations, or the stock report. The kind of programming that would put
even Quentin Tarantino to sleep for a few hours. It's a disgrace to
his beautiful television set - it's got home theater settings, cathedral
settings, stadium settings, and five million other complicated programs
designed to get you to sit on your ass watching television, and he rarely
raises the volume above the church mouse setting lest he upset the Mrs.
What is the point of getting three thousand dollars worth of television
set if you're not going to shatter the eardrums of your entire neighborhood
watching Clint Eastwood-style blood baths and raucous, saucy comedies
with scantily clad women prancing around in their underthings during
adult situations? It boggles the mind.
I can't have a decent conversation
with him anymore because his brain has been sucked out of his head and
replaced with house and garden magazines. If approached with politics,
religion, or popular culture, he's apt to prognosticate the finer points
of stained wood decks versus, say, other decks. I don't know from decks!
I don't have a goddamned deck! What sane person sits around talking
about decks?! When he's allowed out of his house without supervision
he comments on architecture, lawn upkeep, and color schemes. If he wasn't
married, I'd swear he was gay. Again, who sits around and compares drape
texture, color and fashion placement within the context of the rest
of the house? I know people who obsess on their houses, I just never
thought it would hit me where I live. He wears pastel sweaters that
Mr.Rogers would either burn or hide in his garage as a trick shammy.
Nothing in my life matches and that's the way it's going to stay. If
my shirt matches with my pants, it's a minor miracle. I don't have motifs
or rooms designated in a Sahara desert fashion or a jungle room or any
of that other shit. This leads us to what the dream he refers to as
'Man Town'. 'Man Town' is like Babylon, Zanzibar, and the Bermuda triangle
all in one. It's Joe's imaginary paradise which is going up in his basement.
It's a place where men are allowed to be men without delayed punishment
or the suspension of sexual privileges. 'Man Town' will have comfortable
couches, large tvs, pool tables, cigars, and a built in ventilator fan.
'Man Town' is basically what Joe's entire house would look like if he
were allowed to retain the use of his genitals. 'Man Town' is a paradise
that one will have to navigate through the kitchen and past the tea
cozies and well groomed spider plants to reach.
Nowadays, he's 'eating right'
and doing things for his 'cholesterol'. If you know what cholesterol
is, don't tell me, because I don't wanna know. It has something to do
with eating sodium free cottage cheese and baby carrots. He's purchased
a treadmill. We got more exercise lugging the damned thing upstairs
than he will probably ever get using it. If he exercised a little bit
more moderation in the past, he wouldn't need to worry about this so-called
'cholesterol' business. Joe has a uniform for the weekends that showcases
his cholesterol. Baggy gray sweatpants and a button down flannel shirt.
Now I'm no fashion maven, this much has been established, but I'm pretty
sure that flannels don't match with pants that feature an elastic waistband.
He gets this from my father, who wears flannels with baggy fluorescent
green sweat pants, which he refers to as 'snuggies'. I vow that as long
as I live, I will never employ or equip sweatpants, and that this is
the only time you will hear me call sweatpants 'snuggies'. Please pause
while I shudder.
He and my father can talk
finance and grocery coupons until the end of the known universe and
beyond. It's agonizing, exhausting, excruciating small talk that I'd
rather not be in the same room for, but what family gathering conversations
aren't, now that I think about it? Stocks, options, retirement funds,
living wills, bonds, and so forth. When it's not that, it's where you
can find the cheapest ground chuck, the freshest produce, or the most
reasonable steamed clams. If there wasn't a meal in the works during
these little point/counterpoints, I would find a ladder, climb up onto
the roof, and jump off. This is one thing that my sister-in-law Jill
and I have in common. We don't roll pennies for fun and we don't talk
about groceries and mutual funds. We talk about cartoons and how good
we are at ordering people around at our respective jobs.
There was a time when I
blamed what happened to my brother on his wife. I can't make that claim
anymore, and find it unfair that I ever did. He is on permanent auto-whip,
and the other settings on his instrument panel are so corroded with
the passage of time that I'm not sure if he has any other functional
settings. I like my sister in law a lot. She's fantastic, and I can
see why they're such a great match. She rescues him from being a square
every day of the week. It's not her fault that his nut sac fell off
through some evolutionary process, she just happened to be around at
the time.
Marriage is a tricky prospect.
Few people take it s eriously and even few hang in there through the
tough bits. My working theory is that a woman looks at a man and thinks,
"This guy is a total mess, but I can work with that. I'll turn
him into something that can stand upright and swallow his food before
yelling." In turn, guys look at girls and think, "I'm not
ashamed to show this girl off to my friends and family. Plus she lets
me do stuff to her. I'm a happy camper." Jill's done a great job
with my brother. Not only can he walk on his hind legs, but he can pick
out a tile scheme from a book full of color swatches or swathes or whatever
in god's name their called and somehow tie his whole kitchen together
to match with the Easter decorations. As well as his sweatpants.
