It’s been on my mind a lot lately for various reasons. I’ve paid more attention to conversations from both sides of the gender mix. I hear these ridiculous generalities:

“He’s too controlling.”

“She nags me constantly for the stupidest little things. I feel like a beaten man.”

“He doesn’t care what I think.”

“My needs are not important to her.”

“We have sex twice a year - if that often.”

It makes me sick. Somehow these two people were once “in love” enough to buy the rings and exchange the vows - but now they could not hate each other more. They are bitter enemies. The last thing they would ever do is something for each other. An of course none of them walked down that aisle saying “5 years from now I will wish him/her dead and be in a bitter court battle over custody of our Bernese Mountain Dog.”

It’s just how it is sometimes. I am at a point in my life where I have already watched a dozen friends divorce, and I am hearing about more and more every day. Funny thing is to me - the new people I hear about getting divorced are people married 25+ years. These people waited that long to hate each other that much where a decision was warranted.

Now the one common thread amongst ALL the cases I keep hearing about is this:

THE MAN GETS FUCKED OVER THE MOST.

Situation 1: My buddy Steve got married way too young. He knocked a girl up when he was 19 and she was 20. They married five months later and lived together in a small apartment over his parents house. They had two more kids after the first. Finally, about 7 years in to this marriage, they had saved enough by both working to buy a house. A month before they bought the house officially, we went out for drinks to celebrate. Steve’s wife confided in me at that point that she was miserable, and as soon as Steven bought the house she would leave him. I passed the comment off as “drunken anger”. Sure enough, 4 months after they moved in, his wife kicked him out. Within the first month - a man in a white truck was parked at the house overnight. Turns out she had been cheating on him for a while. A restraining order was filed against Steve because he - as any rational man who just got dicked out of his savings, his new home, and his kids to some other asshole - got angry.

Now Steve was not the “Husband of the Year” - but Steve also never cheated on his wife despite their problems. His wife lived in the house for a year before the bank foreclosed. Steve sees his kids twice a month now on weekends. The kids are not doing real well because of the anger between their parents. While I could say the biggest victim in this case were the kids - Steve pays his wife almost half his paycheck every week because she didn’t want him anymore…..

CONCLUSION: STEVE GOT FUCKED.

Situation 2: Barry was a prominent dentist who, twenty-one years in to his practice had accumulated a good amount of wealth. This afforded his wife Beth to stay at home with their kids instead of working. The kids are now preparing to graduate high school and Beth has had too much time to watch fat cows like Rosie O’donnell on The View every morning. While Barry works, Beth watches television, then lunches for four hours with her girlfriends, spends $250 in an afternoon shopping for shoes - and then goes home to her middle-aged husband to complain about “nothing in particular” for whatever reason. Maybe she resented staying at home because she had no satisfaction from a career like her friend Nancy who works on Wall Street, never married, and vacations with her pool boy to Bora Bora so she can sleep with a twenty-five year old without feeling guilt.

Meanwhile - Barry is a great provider, but his wife has always been kind of a nag. He plays golf at the country club, and he has even been known to hire an escort now and then. But overall, he’s your average guy just trying to enjoy life and look forward to retirement and maybe selling his practice.

Well fuck that. Beth’s resentment has grown too much to stay with her husband, so after 26 years of marriage - she asks for a divorce. After trying to contest it, Barry gives up and gives in because she’s already rejected him and it’s not worth saving the marriage. They have equity in the house, plus Barry’s practice and investments that total almost 2 million dollars. Beth hired a wonderful lawyer and because of the laws in this country, she got half of everything Barry had earned in his lifetime. Why shouldn’t she? She stood by him long enough to be entitled to her share when SHE made the decision to end it. There is no benefit to staying married for Beth when she can have all that money. In fact, she has another friend who is a financial planner and put her in to an annuity that will pay all her fixed bills while she can go start the career she probably could have had anyway if she stayed married to Barry. Barry however, has much of his equity tied up in his practice and he needed to keep that going - so he now works twice as hard, lives in a one bedroom apartment instead of the 4400 square foot house he called home the last dozen years - and uses his free time to drink a lot because the bitch he called wife screwed him over.

CONCLUSION: BARRY GOT FUCKED

Situation 3: Cliff lives with Shannon. They have been married for 3 years. They have a 6 year old daughter and a 2 year old son. Cliff beats Shannon a good once or twice a week. He often does it right in the trailer park where they live - but every now and then he will do it in public when they go out for Sunday dinner at Denny’s or Howard Johnson’s. Shannon is too simple to know how to get out of this abusive relationship. But luckily, Shannon’s neighbor Pedro, the same pool boy who Nancy vacations to Bora Bora with - feels obliged to be there emotionally for Shannon while Cliff is working his sanitation job. One thing leads to another and they have sex. Cliff comes home for an unexpected lunch, sees the trailer rocking back and forth, grabs the shot gun out of the trunk of his 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, and blows them both away while the kids watch. The police show up three hours later and arrest Cliff. He’s sentenced to life in prison for a double homicide because he is white and can’t afford Johnny Cochrane (not to mention Mr. Cochrane is deceased at this time), but the judge says he’s lucky not to get the chair for his actions. The kids spend their lives in and out of foster homes and eventually Cliff’s son meets his dad in prison some 18 years after his mom’s murder because he got convicted of dealing crystal meth. Cliff’s daughter gains more success when she moves to Nevada and gets a job at the Bunny Ranch as a slightly-higher-profile-than-a-street-corner prostitute.

CONCLUSION: Now this one is more difficult. Obviously Shannon got fucked because she is dead. The kids definitely got screwed over - but in my opinion the person who suffered the most is Nancy who now has to vacation with a man she met on the train whose sexual stamina is like one tenth of Pedro’s….. so:

NANCY GOT FUCKED.

Ok, fine, I stray off subject for the sake of entertainment - but the fact is, situation 2 seems to happen the most in this country. They may not be rich dentists who use escorts, but a lot of average guys get taken to the bank by their wives who decide they want something different. So as a man, your role in the new world of marriage, is to accumulate as much as possible so that someday you can be your ex-wife’s funding source.

It’s a negative view - but it’s all too real. Single women out there will argue against me on this subject, but the numbers don’t lie. If 70% of marriages end in divorce - and the man gets fucked the majority of the time a pool boy’s death isn’t involved - then why would a man ever take the chance he will someday get to fund his ex-wife’s hatred of him?

Answer and ultimate conclusion: Don’t get married. Live together. Have kids. Treat each other right. Realize that you being a shithead of a guy or you being a bitch of a woman to each other has serious repercussions. Stop expecting everything and giving nothing. Love each other. Love your kids. Take away the stereotypes of what a wife should do or be like. Stop with the unrealistic expectations that he should read your mind. Treat each other like you would want to be treated yourself…. all the time…. not just when he/she isn’t pissing you off.

And laugh at all the dumb guys who continue to book banquet halls and ministers so they can someday be the girl in the white dress’s pension.

Let’s get something straight, I am not hear to draw attention to Cho’s actions or his life in a manner that will glorify the little cock. The fact is, you take a gun, car, electric razor…. whatever your weapon of choice is - and end 32 people’s lives - well you are going to get attention. That’s just a fact. Hitler got a lot of attention too. Good for him. Hell, every American knows who Osama Bin Laden is, (and coincidentally he was runner-up for the award about to be given this year after taking first place in the last 5 years running) and he’s a professional piece of shit well beyond the years of Cho. But sometimes pieces of shit get free press and publicity too, even if it’s often posthumously.

I have a magnet on my refrigerator that reads as such:

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. But when life gives you limes, make margaritas!”

I love that magnet. In my personal view, it basically means that life is hard. Sometimes life is harder than other times, but overall it can be a struggle. Certain things make life easier… good friends, family, alcohol and lots of sex definitely come to mind. But sometimes even those things are few and far between as to being with our grasp. Those are the times that test people the most and show what they are truly made of. They distinguish themselves amongst their peers, and when the going get’s tough - the ones who fight off the inner demons to ultimately succeed are the ones who achieve greatness.

Shakespeare was quoted as saying “Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

Unfortunately - not everyone can or is great. Shakespeare’s quote should have read the previous, but added the following addendum:

“But some people are afraid of greatness. So rather than try to achieve even mediocrity, they go the opposite direction. They are born pieces of shit, and they perpetuate the piece of shit status by thrusting it on everyone else around them until ultimately their legacy is being the biggest piece of shit ever.”

Somehow it’s easy to see how magnanimous Shakespeare was while my words will remain quoteless for time and eternity, but hopefully you get my point.

Cho was and is that piece of shit. He was the guy that when the going got tough, he blamed the people around him. He was the guy too dumb to talk to women, so instead of reading a good book like Neil Strauss’ “The Game: Penetrating the Underground Society of the Professional Pick-Up Artist” and learning how to talk to women, he instead stalked them, cursed them, and eventually shot them in the head. Cho was the guy who made himself friendless by being an anti-social vegetable in his apartment and classes, wearing sunglasses and keeping his head down to justify the fact people didn’t want to speak to him.

But Cho didn’t stop there. He couldn’t accept just being a piece of shit. He wanted eternal piece of shit status. He wanted to make sure everyone knew his name, all those friends he never did a thing for and then wondered why they weren’t his, all those girls he masturbated to in his closet and then wondered why they never slept with him, and all those teachers who called him crazy and didn’t see his true genius of being a piece of shit. So he went out, bought a gun, contrived a plan, took pictures, wrote a manifesto, interviewed himself on video, killed some people, went to the Post Office, and then ended 30 more lives before doing us the one favor we all now, in retrospect, wish he did first.

Maybe he didn’t realize that suicide would have left a legacy that at least his parents could live with. But now, Mr. Seung Hui, Sr. will be forced to take his own life to not bear the shame his son brought upon his family. Cho - you just killed your dad. Way to go asshole.