Three weeks into the new year and I can tell you that I am still grumpy from the old one. Still have too many bills to pay and too few options. Tired of listening to people say that Bush is responsible for all of our problems. Tired of listening to people say that Obama is going to fix all of them. Tired of listening to Sarah Palin whine about whatever it is she is whining about. I am ready to turn on the television, open a newspaper and or surf the net without seeing her name.

Talked to the boys and confirmed that I am not the only curmudgeon feeling this way. But even if I were, I wouldn’t care. It is how I feel. Spent more than a few hours talking about such things over the weekend. A few of us got together and held a state of the union and discovered a few things.

We’re all ready to give up on women. every last one of us. The wives have gone out of their way to drive us to drink. There is a reason why clumps of hair keep falling out and we have knots in our necks. But I suppose that is only fair to say that the wives are telling similar stories among themselves and truth is that none of us are going to give on women.

To quote my friend John. “Jack, I love hanging out with you and talking to you is real easy. But it is much more fun to sleep with Kelly.”

John hadn’t quite finished his sentence when he realized how he had left himself open to all sorts of fun replies. Being a gentleman I told him that I agreed with him, it is much more fun to sleep with Kelly because she doesn’t snore.

On a more serious note, I suspect that a few more of the boys really are going to hang up their spikes and seek greener pastures. I find these conversations about troubled marriages to be troubling. I don’t really want to have give my opinion on whether they should stay or go. I think that it is the sort of conversation that is rife with pitfalls that I don’t want to fall into.

Every relationship is different and everybody has their own ideas about what they have to have and what they are willing to compromise upon. I can’t really tell anyone what to do, only what I’d do. I don’t like straddling the fence, but sometimes it is safer there.

If you wanted a list of complaints about these marriages I can provide it without trying too hard:

Not enough sex
Too much sex
Money problems
Different ideas about child rearing

I suspect that those are relatively universal problems that can crop up. But if you ask me the thing that I don’t hear any of them say is that their wives are their best friends or even good friends. Mostly they refer to them in a way that sounds more like a business partner that they occasionally have sexual relations with.

If I have any real advice about marriage to offer anyone it is that you need to like your partner. That is different than love and different than lust. If you don’t like them I don’t know how you are going to make it for the long haul.

Enough about all that. Here we are less than two hours into the Obama presidency and I wonder what we are going to see happen over the next four years. I am curious for any number of reasons. I suppose that part of it is because President Obama holds the title of first president that I consider to be a contemporary. As far as I am concerned he and I are pretty much part of the same generation.

It is kind of different. Until now I had always thought of the president as being either a really old man or closer to my parent’s generation then anything else. Maybe I really am getting older, who knows.