Dear Hunter Girley Brown, Why does my fiance’s voice sound reasonable even when he’s saying stupid shit?                              Signed, Male-Pattern BS

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Dear Male-Pattern BS, 

I was shacked up pretty tight with Gail Farrell and Dick Dale [← Play me!] outside Amarillo testing Clinique moisturizers on armadillos in the vicinity, shooting the empty bottles and waiting to see if there were any noticeable decreases in fine lines and wrinkles, refreshing myself periodically with a scant paper-bagful of Super-Hold AquaNet. A couple hours, maybe three weeks later the results were in and yeah those poor bastards were slow-roasted. A reminder to all not to baste your test-lizards in emollient-rich beauty products outside during the hotter months. 

Yeah, so your relationship used to be all Enjoli and mescaline. Your condition sounds chronic — indicating that Snoop Dog AM&PM may provide relief.

That doesn’t mean you start listening to the world through BS-colored earphones. 

It means you start not listening.

As the saying goes:

“Butt-plugs for courtship, ear-plugs for marriage.”

Whenever you have to listen — like if your fiance’s asking whether you want the 3-piece spicy or the Family Box — there has to be a good, solid reason for it.

Let’s say you’re kickin’ it with your hydroponics and crooning some Dean Martin to make their little buds grow even more mellow and your dip-shit intended says it’s time for you to give him some dip-shit spawn you can sing to instead.

This is how you respond:

Him:  [STUPID SHIT ABOUT WOMEN]

You:  I want you to know that I don’t hear that.

Him:  [WHATEVER, IT DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT LISTENING]

You:  I could not listen to you all night, baby.

Me, I’ve been through it.  One day Gail and Dick come home all excited from the railway station where they’d been hanging out trying to score and they’ve got this new guy with them and all he’s carrying is a guitar. He’d just been in some kind of [Play me! →] bus accident on his way to Mexico and he’d been digging graves all day. 

I admit I found this intriguing and not just because the pairing of a bus headed to Mexico and roadside grave digging suggested our lean stranger might be holding more than a story. I said we could gladly provide him with a dried legume-rich meal and the use of a toilet for the night, hoping he’d be moved to leave me a little something for my hospitality.

There was holding going on that night all right. The next morning over stewed prunes and burnt coffee (I’d not yet received my hosting gift), voices were raised and I noted a significant finding regarding masculine BS.

Dick had apparently been particularly dick-ish the night before when he found our death-ditch bard’s plucking so intoxicating that he forgot to clear his take off with Gail. Given our throuple status, I should have been outraged myself but string players are notoriously free with their affections.

I was distracted by Gail, who even I would agree had been wronged, yet who was annoying me more then the other two specimens. More specifically, it was Gail’s voice. The other two’s deeper registers somehow made their puling sound more reasonable than her fully justified screeching.

I tell you all this because this was when I just stopped listening to them. Especially after Dick was begging Gail to take him back again and you-know-who had whipped out a notebook and started taking down what they’re yelling at each other. I’ve got a stuffed beaver in our breakfast nook – which may well be a long-term hallucination – that I swear heard this hullabaloo. It looked me dead in the eye and I said, “I told you so,” [←Play me!] and it said, “You have to go.”

You’re welcome.

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Hunter Girley Brown is the editor of Gonzopolitan and the celebrated author of There’s Not Enough Room in S-P-A-C-E for U and I and Back Off, Baby: Love in the Time of Low-Residency.