Monday, March 02, 2009

My Pot Rack Story

Let me tell you my pot rack story and then I’m heading out to teach dance class for the day.

I was about 24 or 25, I can’t remember which. I was a younger guy and had met this older guy, all of 29, who was also into finance and economics. I looked up to him as he was also conservative, much more successful than I was and kind of tolerated my younger, cocky ass.

Through the course of the next year we became good friends. We’d all go out swing dancing, we talk shop, he was a runner and so was I, all in all a great guy and everybody loved his company.

Then he found himself a girl.

She was a neurotic grad student, getting her doctorate in psychology not to go into practice, of course, but to go and re-teach what she learned 2 years previous to presumably girls in her exact same situation. Obsessed with her looks she was constantly working out, eating sticks and twigs, forcing my buddy to do the same and basically sank her teeth into this guy immediately. He lasted about a whopping 3 months before she moved into his house and then the metamorphosis began.

I saw my friend go from a carefree bachelor guy, to a guy who was otherwise spoken for, to a guy who was committed, to a guy who was condemned. And whereas previously I could call him up and say,

“Hey, John, let’s go for a run.”

Or

“Hey, John, let’s all go out dancing and scope out some chicks.”

Or

“Hey, John, let’s get the crew together and go see a movie.”

I found myself progressively running into “scheduling conflicts” he had that prevented him from going out with his old chums.

The end came on a Saturday evening. It wasn’t late. It wasn’t too early and I called him up. I said, “Hey, John, let’s go down to the Dubliner and get a beer.”

The Dubliner being an Irish joint literally 3 blocks from his house.

Over the phone he said, “I don’t know, it’s Saturday night and I’m pretty busy.”

“Busy!?” I said, “What do you mean busy?! Come on, it’s 3 blocks from your house, it’ll take all of 30 minutes to have a beer. Let’s go.”

“Hang on, let me ask my fiancé (he liked to call her his fiancé)”

So in the background I hear his lower toned male voice mumbling, asking his beloved if he could go out and get a beer, “Murmur murmur murmur murmur?”

And in return I heard her Beaker-eqsue (from the Muppets) high pitch voice respond;

“Neener neerner neener neneer neen?”

Then I heard my friend say,

“The Captain.”

And then in vehement response the girl saying;

“THE CAPTAIN! NEENER NEENER NEENER NEENER NEERNER NEEEEEEE!!!!”

Soon he came back on the phone and said, “I’m sorry, we’re hanging a pot rack tonight.”

I sat there thinking to myself, “Woooooow. This guy is completely 100% castrated.”

I said, “Pot rack? A pot rack? Can you postpone the great hanging of the pot rack?”

“No, we’ve been meaning to hang this for a while, and you know how long these projects take.”

I decided it was futile to try to get him to go and get a beer. I also concluded it was pointless to even try to maintain a friendship anymore.

I never knew what happened to them thereafter. They moved somewhere and that was the last I heard of them, but this taught me a very valuable lesson;

Friends are not there to bide the time away until you find somebody to marry, by which you dispose of your friends like you do used toilet paper. Your friends are arguably more important than your spouse as they hang out with you for you and all your faults and don’t give a damn what you do or how much money you make and never lay aim or have ulterior motives in hanging out with you. They are the most pure and decent people you will ever run into which can only be rivaled by the loyalty and friendship provided by dogs. And to shed them like you would an old skin once a cute piece of tail walks by is a testament not to their disposability but to your personal caliber.

Now I know that women are just as prone to do this as men, my story is only about a guy, but regardless of sex, it angers me how people just drop their friends once they find, not even somebody they’re going to marry, but somebody they just become romantically involved with. And sure as Obama destroying the US economy, once they dump your sorry ass, who do you go crawling back to? Your friends.

Ergo, I think a “repatriation of friends” tax should be in order. Not necessarily some kind of monetary tax, but like a celebrity roasting or hazing where you make the traitor beg and plead for re-acceptance back into the fold of friends. Where you make your buddy profess to the guys why you and the guys were infinitely better than the girl he ran off with who took him for half, left him with a kid that wasn’t his and made off with his house. Or the girlfriends make the girl admit that dating the loser who took her money to buy drugs, ended up getting another girl pregnant and racked up $40,000 in credit card debt was indeed the most boneheaded move she could have ever possibly made. I would also go so far as to enforce a level of “indentured servitude” upon them where they have to go and buy the beer, they have to be sober cab and they have to help friends move for a period of a year to earn their way back into the system.

Of course, this is all dreaming and poppycock, but when I am king. Ohhhhhhh, when I am king. There are going to be some really new and weird laws being made.

10 comments:

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Anonymous said...

You're soundung kind of needy, Captain. Maybe you should have slept with him.

Captain Capitalism said...

Anon,

HAR! You will want to stay anonymous. I can see the women gathering pitch forks and torches!

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Anonymous said...

Captain that was a good read. I know exactly what you mean.

Most of my friends became utterly boring once they got married. Their wives tied them down in just the manner you described.

Thankfully my wife is quite the opposite. She practically boots me out of the house when I get a call to go for beer, because in her words, "You are entitled to have a bit of fun."

Most of my friends can't believe how lucky I am to have the wife I have.

I have learned, by observation, that is is very fashionable these days to have a husband who is on a tight leash. It's considered a bit of a status symbol amongst the female classes. The tighter the leash, and the wimpier the husband, the more important a woman feels.

Weird world.

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Anonymous said...

I come for the capitalism and stay for the social commentary. This is one of best stories I've read on the internet in a while. I had a very similar experience. I've got two best friends, known each other since the 6th grade, they are like brothers to me. One has the good fortune of finding what seems like a really good girl (we are all 18 at this time). So we encourage him and are happy for him. So he and her get more serious till they are half jokingly referred to as the married couple (at age 20). Girl feels so comfortable with the situation that she gains the weight most women wait to gain after the wedding. He panics but we encourage him especially in light of how much better she is compared to the girls the other friend finds (but in retrospect it would be as bad as comparing political candidates),(age 21). Keep in mind that we're all in different states for collage so our time together is brief and infrequent. Also being young, and isolated within a military engineering school, I was only then beginning to realize the implications of females studying psychology. The last time I was able to see him was for a week during New Years. She had complete control over his schedule for the week and apparently booked his time in advance. Our other friend had negotiated with her ahead of time for time slots. Apparently I was out of line for wanting a LAN night without scheduling it ahead of time with her first. Why does it have to be like this? To quote her exact words "Because I have a vagina". We're 22-23 now and he's shopping for a ring. If it were not for the fact that she normally hangs out with our group even when he isn't around I doubt I would be able to see him at all.

Anonymous said...

Bravo!!! Excellent post!!! And if you think it sucks being a pre-existing platonic male friend of the newly-castrated guy, trying being a pre-existing platonic female friend.

However, I disagree with the scale of your "repatriation-of-friends tax" idea. If someone who has been a friend decides I'm not worth being friends with because it's easier to jerk me around than to rediscover the existence of their own spine, then if they later get burned by Mr./Ms. Insecure&Controlling and decide my friendship was worth something after all, the former friend had better start busting their ass to regain my trust. I mean one hell of a lot more than buying a couple rounds of drinks and making a half-hearted mea culpa.

Otherwise, why should I believe they're actually interested in being friends again, and not merely passing the time until the next Mr./Ms. Needy&Controlling comes along? And why should I spend my own finite time and energy listening to their irritating non-apology half-apologies, when I could be spending that time and energy on friends who are more than fair-weather friends?

On a side note, I hope your dance class went well.



Anonymous wrote: 'I have learned, by observation, that it is very fashionable these days to have a husband who is on a tight leash. It's considered a bit of a status symbol amongst the female classes. The tighter the leash, and the wimpier the husband, the more important a woman feels.'

Yes, I've observed that too, but not for all women. Just most of them (unfortunately). Usually those are the same women who seem to have learned all their social manners and mannerisms from drama-fests like "Sex and the City" or "Desperate Housewives". I personally loathe them and the shows they model their lives on, but that's just me.



AeroGuy said: 'Why does it have to be like this? To quote her exact words "Because I have a vagina".'

THERE IS NO PART OF HER BEHAVIOR THAT IS JUSTIFIED BY HER HAVING A VAGINA. I read an author once who said he wished they would bring dueling back, it would solve a lot of society's problems. At times like this I really agree, because I think the threat of physical violence is the only thing that would get through such complete jackassery as that.

Captain Capitalism said...

Anon 215,

Yes, I've noticed those women too. I think you will find those women that like to have husbands as a status symbol are also the same women who want children as a status symbol but outsource their upbringing to a day care center.

Of course in both cases they don't really want a REAL husband or a REAL child. If they did then they would have a MAN as a husband who would declare, "I'm going out with the guys tonight" and would stand up for himself. The child would poop and cry and the mother would have to deal with it.

In both cases the woman just wants to go to her spa treatment while telling other "faux" wives/mothers about her family she left at home.

Anonymous said...

For those among you who are Christians, you may find Paul's writing on the dangers of marriage for men and women illuminating.

Check out 1 Corinthians 7 and 2 Tim 2:1-4.