ask a creepy curmudgeon

In today's column, CC offers marriage advice.

Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--

My husband and I are both "Church people", and don't use drugs or alcohol. I'm a stay at home mom and my kids love my husband very much. How would the judge determine who is the better parent for the children to live with?

--Betty Sheets


Dear Betty--

What gender are your children? A boy should be raised by the father, a girl by her mother. If the children are boys or a mix you therefore have three choices: a) allow custody to be granted to the father; b) change genders, win custody, and require the children to call you daddy and treat you as they did their father; or c) end the biological father's life and enlist a taxidermist to preserve the body. This will both maintain your maternal role and give your children the consistency that only a paternal presence can bring.

If the dinner table is rectangular, mount the father atop the head of it. For all other shapes of table, you shall mount the father in the center. The length shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth fifty cubits, the height thirty cubits. The father shall be presented daily with burnt offerings. During meals, dinner in particular, the conversation shall be kept light and airy -- he has had a difficult day and this is his time to unwind. Keep the father in a warm, dry place; dust regularly.

Sometimes when it’s late and my mind feels occupied by a kind of a shadow mind, a cat mind that I know I should avoid but instead always to (the kind of mind that tells me I should get to bed with haste but instead I pour a drink) I think of my second wife, of the way I always thought we would excel at parenting together when we had the opportunity. But time is cruel and we were crueler still and one night the moon set flaming below the treetops and when I awoke she was gone. She left a note that I couldn’t bring myself to read, which I instead folded carefully on itself and shredded in the garbage disposal. At night when I think of her now, I torture myself with the thought that I might not have understood the meaning of that note. That perhaps it might have left hope for us and the children we never had, that perhaps it begged me to follow her, that perhaps it even told me where to go.

Hold on to your love! And look me up sometime if you're ever in Monmouth County, kiddo.

--CC

Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--

My ex and I share custody of our 9 year old son. My son has told me that his Dad has drinking 2 bottles of Crown Royal a day. My ex was ordered not to drink when we first divorced, and I'm going to try and get full custody of my son because of the alcoholism that's going on now. I'm worried that if my son testifies about his Dad's drinking, that his Dad will blame him and get mad. What can I do?

--Daisy Curfews


Dear Daisy--

How much do you drink yourself? I ask because a key aspect of joint custody is balance. It's important to respect ground rules established by the other parent, and that they respect yours as well. If you drink 3 bottles of Jim Beam each day, it's important to ask your partner to model the same behavior, no more, no less.

My first wife and I were always at each other's throats. Things got out of hand before we realized the importance of the balance I described. For us, balance ultimately involved the witness protection program, a fake catering business, and the Thirty Years' War. It also (and perhaps most importantly) involved keeping tanks of nitrous oxide on each side of our bed. But in the end those were all just accessories. In love we were like reactive elements, like molecules of heat and cold that had to be nearer, had to bring the other toward some fleeting stasis. To say that we hurt each other those nights was to ignore the clean stinging feeling of air on an open wound, the redemptive nervous joking of the early-morning emergency room, the extra little ziplock bag of nitrous we shared to take the edge off before heading in for our respective days in the classroom.

By the way, do you know anyone looking for five or more lightly-used pine coffins at a reasonable rate? PayPal and MasterCard accepted. Stop in if you're ever in my neck of the woods, hon.

--CC


Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--

Can I sue the woman who my husband had an affair with that led to our divorce?

-Susan Maiman


Dear Sue--

Typically, you can't, at least not as it relates to your divorce. Speaking as a common law lawyer and five-time husband, however, you could sue her if she broke into your house and left a boa constrictor in your john, or poisoned your medication, or blew up your car with you in it, or defrauded your grandmother of her public assistance, or ran over your parents with a cement mixer, or left you for dead with a bullet in your spine in the Gobi Desert. I should stress that these are just examples from my own personal history, this list isn’t meant to be prescriptive. The only limits are those we place upon ourselves, on our imaginations.

In some states (Hawaii, Illinois, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Dakota, Utah) you can sue the third party for alienation of affection. You need to realize though that this is an expensive endeavor that requires a lot of time. A better option is to kill your husband and have his body stuffed by a taxidermist, then set his body at the head of the table, etc.

Sometimes at night I walk the fringes of this town alone. On a moonless night I can pretend that I am a walker in another age or species, in a forest pathway only vaguely known. I realize in the darkness that we are never alone, that each age of humankind is lived parallel with the others, that generations are a stacked sequence of parallel segments, packed densely line by line to wrap around a cylinder or sphere. I feel the decaying dreams and won hopes of other ages channeling in real time through me, a man aging and lost on the periphery of his own consciousness. An owl shifts in a tree, a man stands alone at a far off fence in the dark. I shiver and realize that she and I were born to love each other, even if only for 25 minutes in the bathroom of a Greyhound coach in a pornographic tangle of cheap lipstick and septic metal and screams muted fast against shoulder blades, to have and to hold, promises that she and I could only ever be relied upon to keep on E in an honest-to-god uncomfortable Greyhound coach bathroom in the Nebraska night. That our lives were only for that, that it's well possible our lives were just for that.

Look me up sometime if you're ever in Monmouth County, sweetie, I know this great dim sum place.

--CC