Misanthropy Today

One of my best friends, Jeremy, got engaged yesterday.

Stop by his site Mongo Nation and say congratulations.

Jeremy, sorry to use this as blog fodder– really i’m just sorting it out in my own mind.

When he first told me, it was a shock. I was like “Wait my friends don’t do that”. Then it occurred to me that maybe I’m just retarded. I asked around and everyone was like “Oh thats great..” but then had some caveat to add to it.

It’s funny how cynical people have become about marriage nowadays, and how I—more cynical then all of them– don’t feel cynical about it at all.

When people get engaged or married in their 20’s others say, “Wow they’re so young”. Then there’s the whole Al Bundy party line that marriage will ruin your life– I guess I can see that, but I also see how being perpetually single can be a life ruiner too.

Here in Los Angeles, those who get married in their 20’s or early 30’s are practically considered Mormons. But why listen to Los Angeles? This city should offer no sensible person any model for efficiency or easy happiness:

The BMW 3 series is the Honda Civic of Los Angeles, and everyone drives high performance cars here.

Everyone in Los Angeles seems to be preparing for some massive Cannonball Run style race that never materializes. The freeways are so clogged you’d be better suited to drive a Hyundai Excel, which is small in size and is virtually performanceless (1.5 liter engine and no power-steering).

Do you really need dual overhead cams and rack and pinion steering to drive 20-35 mph to and from work Monday through Friday?

No.

Audis, Benzes, Beamers– these are all high performance cars first and luxury cars second. They became luxury cars, necessarily, because of how expensive they had to be to continue pushing the envelope performance-wise.

They’re expensive and for the little good they do here (appearance, style, etc) sure cost a lot, and because of their size and emissions, clog up the freeway and the air.

People in Los Angeles are very similar to their cars.

Every Friday and Saturday night the entire city gets dressed up in their church best to go to bars and clubs just to ignore each other. All the good looking people are– by and large– poorly employed and all the well-employed people are, by LA standards, pretty unattractive.

What you end up with is a sort of romantic Mexican stand-off, unless you’re either really, really good looking or really, really successful, or both– in which case you probably ride around in a wheelchair during the day to save the energy you’ll need for how much poontang you’re getting at night.

Next:

With the amount of good looks we have here you’d think this would be the best gene pool ever for procreating, but few people have children–it’s not stylish unless you’re a celebrity.

You’d think everyone would be happy to be at this big party but everyone is more self-conscious, insecure and dissatisfied than anything. We want too much.

The metaphor here is the attitude in Los Angeles, that there is always something better and that relinquishing your singleness is ridiculously stupid when there are so many good looking and successful people here.

Why would you ever want the Hyundai Excel of relationships when you can have the stylish and sexy life of a bachelor or bachelorette— the BMW 3 series let’s say?

Well, mostly because that life, and it’s accompanying cynicism (BMW 3 series owners think that Honda Civic drivers are poor morons) might be fun on a winter night next to a fireplace at some downtown bar, drinking wine with an ex-girlfriend or someone you met on a dating site, talking about how you dislike the notions of family, settling down and love your single-ness— but doesn’t do much in a day in and day out quality-of-life sort of way.

In other words, your cynicism about marriage and committed relationships won’t keep you warm at night.

Having a BMW 525 won’t make you affluent— and besides that, you won’t get much use out of it in LA.

The single life in LA isn’t really all that fun— in the same way that a lot is lost driving a Porsche on the 405 at 9am. (not that i’d know)

I see so many people here for whom marriage or a serious relationship is just not in the cards for them anymore. They probably were at one time. This city has turned them into a monster that nobody would ever consider marriage material.

You see them over here in Santa Monica, in their late 30’s and 40’s living in One-Bedroom apartments, wearing too much makeup and dressing too young; obsessed with fitness, their careers or more trappings of “success”: cars, clothes, ugly purebred dogs. Their expectations for marriage far exceed their grasp of someone possessing those qualities who’d actually marry them.

I hope i’m not one of them.

I’m gonna try to not be one of them.

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Congratulations Jeremy and Lauren.

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