Radish moment isn't tasty enough

I finished reading a book not too long ago.  The main concept is that my dad's friend wants to have extramarital sex.  With ladies.

Let me back up.

So His Lordship of the Undead (and, coincidentally, my father) has discovered that paranoia leads to losing friends and alienating people (well, more people.  The people who were cool with the undead thing).  This has lead him to latch on to the few remaining friends he has.  There's Serge A, who's in the closet to Chileans (and my dad) but not to our (my?) delicate Bay Area sensibilities, and Serge B, whose wife MOMY is also a friend, thanks mostly to her patience.  Oh, there's also Petey Whales, who's so in the mob, but he's a topic for another time.  Serge B is a dear friend, so when I was late to his house for dinner on account of getting lost and having to leave an actual social get-together with people under 50 (procrastination comes in small doses as well), he decided to give me a book for my birthday.

Philip Roth is apparently one of the Great American Writers of Our Day.  Or something.  Anyway, Everyman is about how Philip Roth believes it's ok to cheat on your wives (plural but in series) if life gives you a bum rap, and that everyone should understand like your unfailingly loving daughter does even though she's a victim of society.  I'm sure it's also deep and touching and shit.  Whatever.

Three years later, I actually read the book.  On account of shame, I read it a few hours before the social event I had to attend before I had to go for another dinner at MOMY's hands (which have an excellent way with food).  Characteristically late, I arrived with one question on the mind.

What the fuck?



Long story shorter, the rest of the evening was about justifications for cheating.  Now, I spent this morning contributing to a list of people on whom it was OK to cheat (justified by some aspect of their personality), but at no point did we believe that cheating is OK on its own.  Or even justified.  Even for the people on the list, it's just that they have no right to get mad, not that the people cheating would be somehow exonerated or some shit.  I have theories as to why.

Serge B told a story that makes him think that he is justified in porking the first woman he finds so hot that he just needs to pork her.  Basically, this one guy who was purportedly in love with a woman found himself infatuated with another woman.  He broke off his first relationship to "pursue"(porkporkpork) this second relationship, and realized in about a year that it was a stupid idea.  Hella stupid, since he had to go ahead and re-establish all those compromises and that "love" shit he had with the first one.  Thus, he went back to the first relationship and said some shit about love and stuff and got her back.  Then he found out that she basically had a nervous breakdown while he was gone and took a sabbatical to get over it, and finally felt bad ("oh, man, you felt that bad about it?  Jeez, I had no idea...").  B's basic premise is the question: "Should he have just cheated instead?"

No, you shithead, he should have manned up and not gone for the Chocolate Chip Cookies!  Jesus!

Our society values self control.  Establishing a relationship is basically saying that you have the self-control to be a partner in crime, to be trusted: following an infatuation is a textbook example of fail on that front.  We all have our Chocolate Chip Cookie Moments, where something that seems so delicious is off-limits, and we either go for the snacks and take the consequences or ignore the baked goods and go on our ways.  Specifically, not having sex with other people is defined as the standard test for seeing if your significant other has the self-control you're looking for.  You can't try to stay in the system and avoid the test (or the consequences for failure), because you agreed to it in the first place.  What exactly were you expecting when you joined this society?  Cake?  I mean, seriously, the man lives in a Catholic country: they have a goddamn manual you can pick up at your local goddamn library (well, not actually damned by God, per se, but still).

Of course, all I said was, "I think your premise is wrong, but that's an interesting question."  Part of going to these stupid dinners is not flaying the hosts alive because you feel you've found a logical flaw in their argument, since that would go against the club that I decided to join: the one where the undead hordes are not sent after me for destroying the few remaining gossamer threads of friendship left to a paranoid dictator (not that other one: I don't believe in the Intellectual Humility Organization on account of principle).  Also because it's possible that I might be wrong, and bundles of neuroses demand I make sure that this is not the case, this time.

The trouble with arguing with crazy people is that I keep believing that I should hear them out to make sure I'm not wrong about something.  They see that as a sign of weakness.