What Am I Missing?

Most of the guys I work with are single or are at least the-equivalent-of-single (ie. guys with kids they don't take care of, separated guys, guys that spend more time at the strip club than at home).

Every time I hear them talk it is a constant reminder that I am not missing anything by being married. I already mentioned how Seth and Robbie spend all of their money on cars and their ultimate goal is to drive around in aimlessly in a pack of dudes with fast cars.

The other day, I was working with Chad. We were in the middle of a conversation about Bela Fleck and the Flecktones when this nerdy guy pulls up and starts going into great detail about how he just got "Mortal Kombat: Armageddon" and how he spent a lot of time "creating" characters from "Street Fighter." He is one of those guys that has been pretending to talk like a black guy for so long that he starts to believe he is a black guy: "I went in and got the karate suit and the red bandana for Ryu and got the camo clothes and flat top for Guile. It's awesome. You really need to come check it out. No seriously. Like this weekend. For real."

Chad kept saying he would and tried to get the guy to go away. I think he was embarrassed to be associated with the video game nerd. But I like Mortal Kombat. I just can't spend my weekends rotting in front of the TV playing games.

Once, I was privy to a conversation with that guy that looks like my friend Gordon. The captain of the football team dude. All the bosses look up to him like he must have the absolute best life and I'm sure they sit around dreaming they were him.

Anyhow, the conversation went something like this:

Captain Stud: "You should have been at that party on Friday. Someone brought a case of Michelob."

Mofo#1: "Ah man. Why do they always do that at the parties I miss? We're there any hot girls there?"

Captain Stud: "Yeah. I made out with one... Well... it's that same girl I make out with at all the parties I go to... she's married."


Make out with a married girl? I can do that at home. Maybe it's just the guys that I'm around, but nothing seems to make me feel like I'm missing out by not being at the party, or not being in the car club, or not mastering Mortal Kombat.

There is this one guy at work. Everyone told me he is retarded. He is not allowed to drive the lifts or run the guns or anything like that. He always has to work with someone. The mofos are jealous of him because they don't keep stats on him and they never pester him about working faster. The mofos say that he cannot be fired from the job.

Yesterday, I worked with him. He isn't retarded. Come to find out, he's just had some brain damage. He crashed his car and was in a coma for three weeks. When he woke up, he couldn't remember his own name. It took him a year to be able to walk again. He doesn't seem stupid or slow. He just doesn't always register everything you say to him or he forgets a few things really quickly. He's kind of like Dory on Finding Nemo.

He comes from a very devout mormon family. He talked all night, ALL NIGHT, about girls. He could not stop talking about girls. About what he wants and how he can't find it and how he isn't perfect himself. He is 30 years old. He looks like a california surfer. He told me he doesn't want to date heavy girls but all the girls his age get heavy. It's something all girls do, he says. He still likes the skinny high school girls but he has trouble relating to them, considering he is 30 with partial brain damage. He tries to avoid telling girls his age because they automatically think he is creepy and that something must be wrong with him if he is that old and still single.

I felt bad for the guy. His mother takes it upon herself to drive Christ's message into his head at every opportunity: Single people pollute society.

Those are the words she uses and, oh, how he wants to make his mother happy.