(Writing on empty)
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If you’ve ever admitted out loud to trying to be a writer, you’ve been told at least once that you should be guided by this advice: “write what you know.” If you dance, then write about dancing. If you fish, then write about fishing, though you might end up standing on a street corner holding out your hat for grocery money. If you dance with fish, them seek some help.

“Write what you know,” they say. This is why politicians shouldn’t write…they know very little, and lie about the rest.

Not their fault, to be fair: lying comes with the job. It takes a special kind of chutzpah to claim that you will cure homelessness forever if I will just donate $50 to your re-election campaign.

Lots of career choices demand less-than-savory activities. Take, for example, underwater photographers who work for “Shark Week.” You might hate your job at the fast food joint, but very rarely will you get bitten in half at the drive-thru window. Or think about circus acrobats. You may be sick of helping customers find just the right nails at Home Depot, but the chances of you plummeting to your death are fairly slim.

If you want to be a farmer, you learn to work with manure, and you sweat. If you want to sell used cars, you learn to work with odometers, yell on television while wearing bad suits, and talk to the man while looking at the woman. If you want to sell yourself (aka, “go into politics”), you learn how to refer to increased spending as “decreased spending” because your actual increased spending was less than you intended to spend, and you invest in after-market teeth.

Careers, like elections, have consequences.

So this week when I thought about trying to write a humor column about being “married with children,” I had to remind myself that I’ve never visited that planet. I have no point of reference. Sure, I know parents with kids, and I have parents, and I think I was once was a kid (back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and before any the members of the Rolling Stones had yet submitted to follow-up colonoscopies.)

Sure, I’d dated a bit, but that was back before genders were things you could don or discard, like socks, or personal responsibility. Back in the day, childhood literature taught me that all guys were named Dick, all girls were named Jane, and all dogs were named Spot. (This was before Google, which now lets a kid search for the lyric “nine ladies dancing” and, as a result, have to submit himself to intense behavioral therapy.)

Historical sidebar: as archetypes, Dick, Jane, & Spot were benched in 1965. Ultimately, as society ground forward, they were replaced with a girl named Juan, a transitioning harassment victim going by Bella, and an emotional support ferret named Winston.

Basically, I’m a simple man. I enjoy reading. I enjoy watching stuff that’s funny, like old Saturday Night Live shows, all Seinfeld episodes, and Congress planning budgets. I enjoy music, except for some of those country music flavors where everything is furious twang, or where every lyric rhymes with ‘twang,’ like ‘thang’ and ‘brang’ and ‘wrang,’ or ‘railroad.’ I enjoy reading. I used to enjoy sex, but then somebody pointed out that Moses had told me I wasn’t supposed to have sex. That’s when I knew I wasn’t going to be Jewish for very long.

From marriage, I knew nothing. From kids, I knew next to nothing … I knew not to feed them too much sugar when they visited, or to at least deny it when taking them home. From married friends (and Moses), I knew that there was no sex before or after marriage.

I could certainly not offer any parent any parental advice, given that my available wisdom could be summed up as, “Junior, don’t do what I did.”

I admit it. In the post-Baby Boomer days of dating, parenting, and kids, I’m a foreigner.

And the world’s not always cooperative, either.

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A man walks up to the checkout with a banana, an apple, and two eggs. The cashier says: “You must be single.”
The man replies: “Wow. How did you know that?”
Cashier: “Because you’re not very good-looking.”

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I don’t shop there anymore.