Guide to Settling Down.

What is it? I mean, whenever somebody says “settling down,” you get the idea of like buying a house or condo and getting married to somebody and having a couple of kids. It’s like this specific thing you’ve got in mind like that weird imaginary house from Little Shop of Horrors where Rick Moranis is smiling his ass off. Or when you go and visit your parents in the suburbs and think “this isn’t so bad.”

Actually, it’s more like the parents in the suburbs thing. Settling down means that you’re going to stop giving a shit about who said what and what people are wearing, and you’re going to stop fighting so hard for your life to be some kind of undefined iconoclastic voyage to greatness, and you’re just going to play the hand you’ve been dealt and stop trying to constantly upgrade from the bird in your hand to the birds in the bushes.

Whenever I ask my Dad for any pearls of wisdom (usually this is after like five beers), he first leads with his “now that I’m older I’m starting to see that the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about” gag, which is classic Dad funny, which is to say not funny even a little bit, and then he tell me “it gets easier, but not as much easier as you’d think, and what makes everything easier is you lose the energy and will to fight against everything.”

So I guess that’s what settling down is. Sort of a divine laziness or virtuous resignation.

The fact is, it’s easy to get caught up in shit. But instead of letting it freak you out, it’s good to always take a step back and ask yourself if all this ridiculous shit you’re caught up in is helping you long term. Like say you kind of like your job except for this one lady who’s a “total bitch.” What do you do? Quit and get a new job? Try to get that “total bitch” lady fired for something? Hold on and stand pat for as long as it takes because even though there’s a total bitch lady making your life way less fun, you know it can’t last forever, and you’re learning things about how to live your life while there’s a “total bitch” that you work with?

Well, yeah. That last one is the settling down option. It’s an underrated option, really. Also you can always fart in her office whenever she’s in the bathroom if it gets really bad. You don’t have to totally grow up. And also, maybe, get to know her a little. Maybe she’s just a “total bitch” because she hates her job as much as you do. You probably have a lot in common, in that you are also a total bitch.

Settling down at work is exactly the same thing as settling down in a relationship. Exactly. Let’s say sex is money, affection is the satisfaction of a job well done, and the emotional support you get from knowing somebody’s there for you is your ability to buy things and do stuff you like with the money you get. Let’s also say that putting up with Carla is putting up with Carla. Settling down is the same thing no matter what facet of your life we’re talking about.

There are reasons why settling down is hard in any area of your life. I’m going to take the scenic route on this. Bear with me.

I think there was some sort of recent scientific study that said all kinds of stuff is wrong with modern life. I forget. But the gist I hazily remember from whatever thing I read on the internet or in a magazine at the airport newsstand is: people all have anxiety orders and depression which may or may not technically exist way more now (in the era of diagnosing the fuck out of people) than they ever have. And there are all these theories about why all the anxiety and depression, like some people think we’re eating “panic meat” because the slaughterhouses are not particularly concerned with not freaking out the cows and chickens, and right before they die they are afraid as hell, and that fills them with fear hormones, and that’s what you’re eating when you chomp into an Angry Whopper with Chicken Fries, and that’s why you act like an asshole and lay on the horn for five minutes when somebody ahead of you doesn’t immediately go when the light turns green. I think that’s a pretty ridiculous but not entirely implausible theory. There are others.

Of course there’s no way of proving that people are more nervous and neurotic now than they’ve ever been, but anecdotally, people sure do seem pretty freaked out all the time. I see people screaming at each other over parking spaces and ID badge requirements almost every day. I myself get frantic and desperate whenever I’m inconvenienced for more than one second by an inexperienced traveler in the airport security line. You have to take off your hat and your shoes and your jacket. And your belt wouldn’t hurt either, guy. These phrases run through my head, mixed with curse words and the latent assumption that HE is doing this TO ME. ON PURPOSE.

I find myself getting furious over things like this, and it’s all because I don’t want to wait in this line that’s essentially a pre-line for the right to sit down and do nothing while waiting for the plane to leave. But for some reason I need those 5 seconds more than I’ve ever needed anything in my life. And that’s me. I think of myself as being maybe only a little more high strung than normal. Like I can tell myself I’m being a moron in those situations and it calms me down and I don’t usually do anything about my feelings of desperation, not even a verbal “come ON.” But even if I’m outwardly calm, lines stress me out because they’re generally for things that aren’t even worth doing.

I’ve heard that my one Grandfather who I never met notoriously hated lines and would avoid them and their related activities on a near psychotic level. I inherited this gene. Generally speaking, I would rather wait in the car for the entirety of my adult life. I don’t know if things are worse now than they were then, like maybe there are more and longer lines now because there are more people and everybody’s more worried about a terrorist than they used to be. But still. I get crazy when I’m in line. But that’s just me. And I’m one of millions.

So there’s no debating that neurotic anxiety and depression do seem fairly rampant.

There’s some general philosophy-type pondering of why there’s this “modern” phenomenon of ubiquitous anxiety. I’ve read this type of pondering in magazine articles and internet things. A lot of the ponderances point towards the flooding of every marketplace with an overabundance of similar options as a culprit for why everybody’s kind of on edge. I think this makes a lot of sense. Like in that deleted scene on the Borat DVD where he’s at a Winn Dixie and he asks the guy if all of the bags of cheese are cheese and the only reason it didn’t make it into the movie is because Sacha Baron Cohen totally cracks during it, which is a shame because it would have been the most amazing part of the movie. But if you haven’t seen it, there’s basically like 50 different varieties of pre-bagged shredded cheese available for sale at the Winn Dixie.

Right. So. What does this have to do with settling down and why it’s hard?

I won’t get too far into “modes of alienation” and the “corporate oligopoly’s divide-and-conquer strategy for maximizing profits” or all that, because that would turn me into the most boring guy at the bar. Let me say that if everybody’s neurotic all the time, it makes sense that it’d be more difficult to find somebody whose self-obsessed neuroses match up well enough with yours for the both of you to ever want to be in the same room. And also you’re in an environment where you’re more or less used to being bombarded with choices all the time, so you’re never quite sure that your neuroses couldn’t match better with somebody else’s in another situation.

Let me return to the Borat shredded cheese scenario for a moment. Basically, if you replace “varieties of pre-bagged shredded cheese” with “nice smart pretty women with vaginas” and “available for sale at the Winn Dixie” with “that a regular dude will be able to put his penis into during the course of his lifetime,” then yeah, there’s basically like 50 different varieties of pre-bagged shredded cheese available for sale at the Winn Dixie. That’s what you’re dealing with in 2009.

It’s really hard for a dude to settle down because you can put your 50-gig LifeTouch iPenis on shuffle these days and just jam out until you’re well into your 50’s. You do not have to settle down. Ever.

Until you sort of redefine the term “settling down” for your purposes. Instead of thinking of it as something daunting that you have to do all at once, like moving into Rick Moranis’s house, just think of it as a gradual process of maturity that will happen naturally with subtle guidance from your brain. Who’s to say Rick Moranis isn’t renting that dream house? I mean, how’s he going to afford a mortgage on a Little Shop of Horrors clerk’s pay? And it’s not all that great. It’s clearly on a Hollywood soundstage, and that’s no kind of neighborhood to raise kids in. Look what happened to the girl from Diff’rent Strokes. Rick Moranis has it all wrong in that movie.

If you want to romanticize the whole idea of “settling down” into this ridiculous thing that you’ll never be able to do in order to justify your current selfish behavior, or if you want to make a martyr of yourself for never being able to successfully “settle down” under these guidelines in order to justify being like “fuck it” instead of trying to grow up a little, then you’ll have nobody but yourself to blame when your iPenis runs out of batteries and your warranty is over and you look in the mirror and realize your face looks like a gigantic albino prune and you’ve got to still be alive for probably another 30 years so you can be the mayor of Bummerville.

Settling down really isn’t that hard or that complicated. You’re doing it already. You’re doing it. Your body won’t let you do all the stupid shit you used to do. You can still rev it up once in a while, but it takes longer to recover, and you’re always less sure that you want to do it the next time. Conditions have to be pretty goddamned favorable these days to keep you up partying past 4. It used to happen on a Wednesday just for the hell of it. Now it’s gotta be a special occasion. So you’re settling down. Good job. It’s nothing to fight against. Not with your diminished liver. Settle down.

Apparently, from the articles I dimly remember reading that one time, “settling down” in the Rick Moranis sense used to be way fucking easier. Like settling down wasn’t even really an option because there was no such thing as reliable birth control and you’d just knock somebody up and then have a real live shotgun wedding with somebody’s Dad standing there with a shotgun and then when it was over you went to work for your father in law at the ice plant and the whole rest of your life was laid out for you and you’d have no time to deal with an existential crisis. You’d be too busy with bills and being a functional alcoholic and sending your two kids to state college so they’ll be better off than you and then buying a retirement condo in some shitty place like Panama City, Florida. And you were fine with it because one time in Korean you saw a guy’s face get blown off and mowing the lawn for the rest of your life sounds like the best possible way to spend your time.

Now everything is “complicated,” but not actually complicated, just complicated in a “50 different varieties of pre-bagged shredded cheese available for sale at the Winn Dixie” kind of a way. In other words, all your perceived troubles are self-created and all you need is to knock somebody up and then get a job at the ice plant (or modern ice plant equivalent) and you can say goodbye to your will to fight against everything all the time.

It seems like there’s been a rash of babies like this recently. I’m not saying babies make you grow up or anything, like you should run out and put a baby in somebody just so you don’t have to worry about your crossroads-like late 20’s crisis, but if you’ve got somebody in your life that doesn’t always drive you crazy and you knock her up, you could do a lot worse than to marry her and settle down and work your ass off for the kid’s benefit. Right? There are a lot of people I know who’ve done this recently, and most of them are doing fine. Ish. In theory. Actually, they’re struggling just as much as ever. But at least they’re not worrying about this stupid “settling down” crap.

You could do worse than a shotgun wedding. It’s sure a lot easier to figure out than it is to be standing in the pre-bagged shredded cheese aisle at the Winn Dixie staring out into space with “pre-bagged shredded cheese” on your laundry list and a tick developing in your eyebrow because you’ve convinced yourself that the stakes are really really high (because you’re worth it? I don’t know), and you’re sitting there hoping that a bag of shredded cheese will just leap into your shopping cart, but you’re also kind of worried about that because one time you accidentally bought a bag of cheese that just leapt into your cart and then later when you tried it the accidental bag of cheese ruined your tacos. And also there are no price tags. And the cheese bags are women.

So in this analogy you’ve got no choice but to just pick a bag of cheese and cross your fingers. Then you take it home and put it on your tacos, and if you don’t like it, you’re going to have to either throw out the cheese that you bought for however much, or teach yourself to love the flavor of those tacos with the weird cheese on them. After a while you’re going to get really fucking tired of going to the Winn Dixie to try a new variety of pre-bagged shredded cheese for your tacos. You just stick with one, and you go and get it and you get the hell out of there, and you’re glad you can rely on that one specific kind of pre-bagged shredded cheese.

I’m going to stick to this analogy because tacos are great.

Then if you find your ideal pre-bagged shredded cheese, you go to the CostCo and get a ten pound bag of it and then, lucky you, never worry about what cheese you’re putting on your tacos ever again. Like you might see some pretty fancy expensive cheese later at a taco restaurant, but you’ll feel like a huge dickhead for trying it because you’ve got fucking ten pounds of pre-bagged shredded cheese at home that you’ve already paid for, and you know for a fact that it’s good.

That’s basically how it works, right?

Anyway. Settle down. You are already. You might as well continue with it because nothing is ever going to be easy and then one day you’re going to die. That and the hokey pokey are what it's all about.