Raleigh Review 7.1 (Spring 2017)

Page 49

BEN FELDMAN

Jed, Get With It Jedidiah has a lot to do. Including, but not limited to, keeping busy. First, there’s the matter of finding love. Jed is forty and unmarried. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, lover, or friend providing benefits. No house or child, let alone two or three. Without a child, he can’t know the true meaning of life. Or busyness. He currently goes on .7 dates per month. Perhaps spiritual/emotional improvement should be a higher priority for Jedidiah than finding love because you can’t love others till you love yourself, right? Jed goes to church on Sundays when he has the energy (which isn’t often), and as Jesus said, What does it profit a man if in gaining the whole world he loses his own soul? Jed might meet his future wife at church. At the very least, he’d benefit from a stress reduction program; he spends too much time pondering the things he should be doing. BUT the thing is, if in spite of his spiritual (also physical, financial, social, mostly indescribable) shortcomings, Jed were somehow to succeed in obtaining a wife, a girlfriend, or even a friend who provides and demands benefits, which would then require him to spend ever greater quantities of time with his beloved, especially if they have a child, which they’d want within two years or the woman might become infertile, or he, at his advanced age, might fire off the sperm that creates a deficient kid, maybe just one of those nerdy loners, like he was, who prefers Mom and Dad to peers way too long after hitting puberty, which would become the biggest time suck of all, he’d almost certainly

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