The American Jerk: Editorial - It's Sick and I'm in Hell...

My brother's wedding reception ten minutes after I asked my dad to have kill my enemies as a gift on the day of his son's wedding. He belted me. Turns out he's English. Go figure.

My younger brother had his wedding reception at my parents’ house last month. The actual wedding was in Canada back in June, but I couldn’t be there because it was like three thousand miles from here, I don’t speak French (Unless "Fuckez Vous" counts), and there was something good on TV that night.

My mom’s entire extended family was at the reception; four generations of Italians who have all been in the same Rhode Island town since they left the boat around the turn of the century. Because of that centricity, they have maintained very traditional, old-country values… which means they don’t quite know what to do when the older, unmarried, stand-up comedian brother of the groom spends the entire six-hour party orbiting the beer keg like the USS Enterprise, pausing only to give a jabbering, twisted toast that included a joke about pissing on himself.

Every cousin, aunt, uncle and great versions thereof asked me: "How much older than your brother are you… Jesus, when are you gonna meet a nice girl, settle down and get married?" Well, I’m glad you asked me that question, Uncle Vito; I’m 28, two years older than my brother, and I’ve already met a nice girl, but I would no more get married than I would eat a broken glass and jelly sandwich because, in my estimation, getting married sucks the life out of you faster than one of those sixty-pound mutant leeches from the fifties’ radiation-monster flicks, leaving you a broken and bloated loser of a man … and how’s Aunt Jane?

There are, of course, exceptions to that hard and fast rule. Paul’s been married a little over a year, and he’s still up for a good round of boozing, carousing and general misanthropy on about fifteen minutes notice… but I’m not allowed to crash on his new married-guy couch because of my predilection to sweat raw booze and fart in my sleep.

I’m an adult who pays his own bills in America, the land of the free. No one’s gonna tell me that I can’t stay up until 4:30 a.m. on a Tuesday choking back Romilar cough syrup and watching snuff films.

I can’t see myself ever getting married. As far as I’m concerned, marriage is an anachronism, no better than worshipping sun gods, the feudal economy, or Ted Kennedy. And please, don’t yammer at me about how traditional marriage is; traditionally, parents would set up your wedding with whichever potential spouse’s family had the most land. The original term for this was "arranged marriage," but it has evolved through time to the present word "pimp."

My married friends say that there’s no way to describe the intertwining of the lives of themselves and their spouses into one. Then they jump on the phone and ask for permission to stay out just one more hour… We’re just going to the Christian Science Reading Room, Honey… No, I’m not with Rob… Well, I won’t let him drive… No, he didn’t bring the gun tonight… I’ll ut-pay my outh-may on it, know what I mean… Please?

I’m sorry, but I’m an adult who pays his own bills in America, which is arguably the land of the free. No one’s gonna tell me that I can’t stay up until 4:30 a.m. on a Tuesday choking back Romilar cough syrup and watching snuff films. I can’t imagine wanting to do that, but nobody’s gonna stop me it I decide to. If I want to spend money I should be using to buy a new couch on twenty-seven pounds of that coffee they dig out of monkey shit ("And we save the passings on to you, folks…"), I’m not gonna seek permission, okay?

Of course, there’s always the spectre of divorce to worry about. Like I said before, I have met a nice girl. We’ve been dating a long time. But if I broke up with her tomorrow in a mutual hail of curses, rage and hatred, all I’d lose would be the "Medicate Me" T-shirt and the five Sam Adams’ Boston Ales I left at her apartment. The ugly fact of the matter is, I’ve met a lot of nice girls in my life, and do you know how many of those relationships have lasted forever? That’s right, none of them. Call me unromantic, but I’m just not willing to bet half my stuff on something in which I have a one hundred percent failure rate.

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And let’s face it, kids follow marriage the way drug addiction follows the cast of Diff’rent Strokes. Kids would be an even worse hammerlock on my present lifestyle than marriage. One broken condom is the only difference between "fun-loving drunk" and "felonious child neglect." I got into comedy because I wanted to be on TV, but I have no urge to do so as the star of a ninety-second local news report titled "A Real-Life Case of Home Alone."

I don’t like kids. You wouldn’t invite someone into your home if they were gonna shriek incoherently and piss and shit all over your house; why would you want to own someone who was gonna do that? And don’t give me that crap about "The Miracle of Childbirth," okay? Surgical breast enhancement is a miracle; childbirth is nothing but Alien with a different exit vector.

So, in a nutshell, good luck to my brother, but better him than me, okay? He may have voluntarily placed himself into quasi-servitude, but I try to look on the bright side: when he has the final vestiges of freedom stripped from him by fatherhood, my parents will have a grandkid, and I can finally get the vasectomy with no guilt.