A Man We'll Call Ted

I know a man. Let’s say his name is Ted. And he works for a big multi-national conglomerate like Microsoft, or IBM. Let’s say his salary is a nice simple number like $300,000.00 , plus bonuses, stock options, commissions, and a great retirement and benefits package. He owns his own home, and it was paid for twenty years ago. He drives a nice conservative, understated little silver sports car. According to Ted, he’s played the Market since he was in his teens, at an average annual rate of overall return on investment at 22%. But he hates to spend money that won’t have a tangible, predictable, advantageous (preferably monetary) rate of exchange. He is both so cheap and fussy, he takes his laundry to a Laundromat and irons his own shirts, which despite the fact that they are clean and well pressed are hopelessly outdated.

He wants what he fantasizes the love of a good, pretty woman with long hair, of child bearing age, will bring to his cold, emotionally impoverished and affection starved life. He’ll never get what he craves, because he places no value on those very things that will transform his life--the labor and love of a good, pretty woman with long hair, of child bearing age. And Ted, while we’re talking here, take a look in the mirror. You may be a nanosecond under fifty, but you’re bald and gray and wrinkled, honey. If I were you, I’d be using a good (and therefore expensive) exfollient daily and consulting with a good plastic surgeon for those dark bags under your eyes, and that incipient double chin. And as long as you’ve undergone the risk of general anesthesia, why not get the small pot-belly and that spare tire you call “love handles” liposuctioned. He needs an image consultant, and if I were Ted, I’d pay a top notch interior decorator to make the college-guy-apartment-style house of his into something inviting.

So Ted, please, pull your bloated wallet from your sagging back pocket and stop asking your good, pretty, women-friends with short-hair, who are over child-bearing age, and have too much to do already, to re-decorate your fucking house for free. Grow up fellows. Get a clue. If you aren’t as pretty as the women you want to date, offer something else of equal value. This is capitalism! This is America! Why the hell shouldn’t she prosper? Buy her a car! Set her up in an condo! Buy her big-carat diamonds set in platinum. This isn’t Rumania, and it isn’t 1950 for Christ sake.