My brother Gerard and I chat periodically. He usually calls during his drive home from work. If he calls at any other time, it typically means he has family news to share. If he leaves a voicemail that says, “Call me,” it’s usually not good news. A week after his last call me message, I was on a flight to New York.
Marriage is an educational institution, one where graduation is impossible and dropping out or expulsion is the only escape. I should know; I flunked out on my first attempt, but it wasn't my fault. My primary instructor was distracted tutoring other students. Now I'm enrolled in another institution of higher learning, the School Of Kellie, and while there's still no hope of receiving a diploma, there's little risk that my tutelage will be interrupted because Kellie's campus is closed to new admissions. She has all she can handle with her one transfer student who is on perpetual academic probation. Thanks to my sustained lackluster performance, frequent remediation is required, and I regularly get schooled. This week's lesson, conducted aboard the Celebrity Century while cruising along the California Coast, explored the limitations of inductive inference in marital relations.
I have not been very conscientious about protecting Mr. Winky over the years. Throughout a lifetime of carelessness I have subjected him to multiple chemical burns and countless assaults from an endless variety of projectiles. Today I wacked him on his head; he never saw coming. It was an accident. I apologized profusely. Just to be clear, Mr. Winky is a euphemism for the centerpiece of my family jewels, the royal staff, if you will.
When the alarm went off at six-thirty on Valentine’s Day morning, Kellie jumped out of bed and started packing. I smothered my head with a pillow and ignored her until she started rattling around next to the bed. She dropped my Valentine’s gift on the nightstand: a 2009 Beaulieu Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon and bag of barkTHINSTM snacking chocolate. I didn't know what the hell barkTHINSTM were, but at $15.99 a bottle she plunked down about four times what she normally spends on my wine. She's clearly guilt ridden about abandoning me on Valentine's Day.
I tried finding my wife’s condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but Kellieness is not a generally accepted diagnosis. Dissociative identity disorder, more commonly known as multiple personality disorder, was the closest match I could find after ruling out the only other likely candidates, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
Kellie claims that marriage extends a man's life expectancy but reduces a woman's. I didn’t believe her and needed only minutes to prover her wrong, again. Studies show that married women outlive their single counterparts too. I'm tired of always being right.
A University of California, Santa Barbara, study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that some men have an enlarged pelvic splanchnic ganglion, just big enough to be classified as a second, albeit much smaller, brain.
Valentine's Day is approaching. By this time I'm usually obsessing over what gift to buy or where to celebrate, but not this year. Kellie is leaving me—for another woman—two other women to be precise. She and a couple of girlfriends are planning a trip to Sedona, Arizona, for a long weekend of hiking, hot tubs, and happy hour specials. Back home, the other abandoned men and I will have to console ourselves with hot wings at Hooters.
What do extraterrestrials, cross dressing, (not to be confused with cross dressing extraterrestrials), antigravity, The Gulf oil spill, free energy, 9/11, Fukushima, a messiah complex, and the Bermuda Triangle all have in common? If you guessed my anti-radiation ray gun wielding neighbors, the Hutchisons, then give yourself a pat on the back; you’re a loyal reader of Living in Kellie’s World.
It’s bad enough when your vacation home sits next door to a man who believes he invented a combination ray gun and sound system that neutralizes radioactivity from the reactor accident in Fukushima, Japan. It's an entirely different problem when his wife claims that she and her husband are the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. I’ve written about my neighbor John Hutchison and his ray guns before; you can read about it here, here, and here, but I recently discovered this biblical gem by his wife Nancy on a message board at the Cosmic Token:
