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.