Single people--especially young single people--think marriage is awesome. People can't wait to get married. They go places where they think they're likely to meet people, they practically kill themselves trying to stay attractive, and sometimes they even take out personal ads just to meet people. They're like lemmings running off a cliff.

I know all this because I see it every day, but also because I used to be one of them. The desperate, lonely, pathetic, and tired. You can try to warn them. You can tell them it's not like dating, where you moon over one another all the time and then go home at night. It's hard work. And the mooning over each other doesn't last.

But of course no one listens. Why should they? Most people hear "hard work" and they picture a lumberjack splitting logs with a big old axe. Obviously it's nowhere near like that. Lumberjacks have it easy. And, besides, at the end of the day, a lumberjack at least has a pile of logs in front of him to show that he's gotten something done. In marriage you just have a foreboding sense that no matter how much you think you've gotten done, there's just going to be that much more to do the next day.

Single people think marriage is 50/50. At least that's what they always say. Now, there may be marriages out there that work that way, but if there are they're mutants like the X-Men with an extra gene or something. Or maybe it's like that episode of the X-Files where Scully finds this DNA sample and it has some weird alien stuff in it that she's never seen before. Because most of the time, marriage is more like 80/20.

I'm not going to say it's like prison, because that would be unfair. At least in prison, there's a chance you could go into solitary confinement. The difference is, in prison, that would be considered a punishment.

And yet, people can't wait to get married. They dream about it and rush headlong into it. If you're married, it's like you've accomplished something and have a reason to live.

I blame Hollywood for that. Well, Hollywood and fairy tales. You never hear a fairy tale about marriage and how to make it work. In fairy tales people always got married at the end of the story, and all the conflict and hard times happened before the wedding. I reckon it's just as well, because there would only have been some little elf or magic beans to set things right. And in Hollywood, you very seldom see any conflict at all in marriage, and if you do it's always resolved in a musical montage or something.

Now, at times marriage can be great and you get down on your knees and thank God you're not doing the dating thing anymore. And it can be wonderful and uplifting and whatever...it's just that its not most of the time. I can totally see someone getting married because it seems like the thing to do, I just think single people have the wrong idea about it. I mean, people sign up for the army not because they want to go to war, they just think its the right thing to do. The soldiers get to die a lot younger though.

Next of course is kids. That's the next step. When you're single everyone asks when you are getting married, and when you get married everyone asks when are you having kids. This is like THE major life accomplishment, especially for women. Your whole life is divided between the time you didn't have kids and the time you did.

Because people worry about their kids, and what they teach them and what they eat and how fast they develop and it just goes on and on and on. I pinched my two-year-old's cheeks together and yelled "fish face!", which he was infinitely amused by; but my wife seems to worry that when he's 30 he'll do that during a job interview. It's like she thinks that everything he learns will affect the rest of his life and in turn will impact civilizations thousands of years from now.

Kids are messy. They run everywhere. They scream and cry. They never listen. They never want to sleep; well, unless they are asleep, then they never want to get up. It just goes on and on.

It just comes down to everyone wanting they don't have. Single people want to get married. Married people want to have kids. Kids want to be grown-ups. When kids are teenagers, parents can't wait til they move out. Then they get Empty Nest Syndrome and want them to come visit. Teenagers want to drink and vote and drive.

But it goes for more than just marriage and kids. When you go to work all the bean-counters dream of being managers and bossing people around. They think if they get that promotion its like reaching a mountaintop and they can rest easy. Then they find out that when you get to be a manager you have to answer to someone higher up who is a bajillion times worse than the guy you worked for before, and now you're responsible not just for your own work but for everyone else's, and everyone above you is on your case and everyone below you wants to argue with you, and you have to keep all those crybabies happy.

Nobody's happy with what they have, and everyone wants to rush everything. Why is that? People always say "Life is short, live it to the fullest" and yet they continue to rush right through it. Everything needs to be bigger, better, faster. Race cars and rollercoasters, express check-outs and 7-11s and DSLs. Does no one like where they are or what they have? I'm not just talking about high-powered executives, either: You drive through rural Georgia and you see so many satellite dishes you'd think it was the state flower.

The only people taking things slow are the elderly. This is so totally the opposite of how it should be. I mean, young people have all the time in the world; old people are so much closer to the end you'd think they'd want to cram in as much living as they could. If I get to be 80, I swear, my electric scooter is going to do at least 80, and I don't know if I will even have brakes for it.

But for now I'm taking it easy.