Freemasonry, X-Box, Burnout 2, and the New Man

I was doing laundry today when I looked around and realized that this housewife thing ain’t exactly brain surgery.
It can get hard. It can be overwhelming. And, yes, I do have a maid service every two weeks and that seriously helps. For you poor folk out there who don’t live the upscale two-car garage lifestyle I’m becoming accustomed to . . . uh, I use my dead dad’s meager melothemioma suit-winnings to pay for the maids. Otherwise I’d be hip deep in wet towels and dirty dishes. But with the help of my three Slavic cleaners, I get by.

I had been worried I’d never get the laundry completely done, that I’d never scale the Everest of skid marked skivvies that had grown in my basement laundry room, my own private Smatterhorn.

I hate laundry because it’s so ridiculously inefficient. Why do we undress on the third floor but wash our clothes in the basement? That’s like taking a bath but keeping the towels in the kitchen. I want my dresser to have a wash drawer. I throw in what I wore today, open it in the morning—Dockers dried and folded, s’il vous plais.

Sometime in the next two years, we’re redoing our second floor and I’m having an over/under machine put in up there. Screw the basement. The basement is where I grow pot.

Or. Maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way. Maybe the Smatterhorn is a good thing. Maybe the basement is my new office. IT would beat the hell out of my old office, which was in, the . . . on the . . . actually I don’t have an office.

But in the basement, I have Xbox, Playstation 2, Gamecube, three TVs, a stereo, a bar, wireless, a phone, two couches, my golf clubs and the bookcases. My god, my basement is like a Dot Com dream office! I’ve been spending all my time sitting in the living room walking up and down stairs when I could’ve been kicked back with a cold one shooting Nazis with my wireless controller, surfing the net, doing some actual work—and getting the laundry done. I think I feel a new Euphemism coming on. Dude, wanna come over and do a couple loads?

I was doing some stats the other day and found out that there are over 2 million men staying home in the role traditionally reserved for women. 2 million.

X-box is marketing to the wrong people. For that matter, so are the dying fraternities that once funded all the parades—the Rotary, the Lions Club, and the Freemasons.

When they aren’t busy taking over the world and hiding the Holy Grail, the Freemasons spend a lot of time talking about Freemasonry. A website devoted to the fraternity recently posted an article saying that this breeding ground fro Shriners, Illuminati, and Alien Death Ray mechanics has watched its membership dwindle from a strong 4 million around the mid 50s to only about 2.5 million today. The reason for the drop in numbers has a lot to with the disconnect in the 60s, but really, more so with the fact that those 4 million guys in the mid 50s are all dead or dying now and the Masons and all those other clubs where you grandfather used to go practice secret handshakes and wear a fez, well they don’t exactly advertise. In fact, they do the exact opposite. You have to go to them. That’s kind of like having a sports store in an unmarked building. But that’s their way. I think they ought to quietly take a long look into the new crop of daddy-bloggers. Because I don’t want all these old clubs to disappear. We need guys to wear funny hats and drive miniature Caddilacs in parades. We need secret handshakes.

And imagine the boon to these clubs when they get 2 million members who all have no real job? The Christmas party committee is gonna rock! We’ll never miss a meeting (unless there’s a little-league game, basketball, chess club, band, football, theatre, AP classes, or a special episode of Lost. Otherwise we’ll be there.

I’m putting a call out to the Daddy Bloggers out there: join a fraternity today. Get your funny hat. Get your secret handshake. Drive that tiny car. You deserve it!