People say I’m pretty smart. Okay, I can’t name names of such people at the moment but I have been in school a long time … like my whole life. That must count for something.

Yet, like virtually all other males, I am clueless when it comes to those of the female persuasion. Let’s get past their obsessions with relationships and feelings and other emotional nonesense when they might focus more profitably on sports and sex or, more promising, sex and sports. What is with this processing of the minutiae of one’s life. At the end of each day, my poor Mary would ask me how things went. I had the same response every day … ‘fine.’ It mattered not whether I made an earth shattering discovery (which I never did) or whether we lost all our research funding (which never happened either but there were some close calls). Each day was ‘fine.’

Of course, I would get an earful of what went on in her day (she was deputy director of the Wisconsin Court System). I recall when she went back to Law School. I would pick her up in back of the school and she would talk non stop all the way home about the cases being discussed in class. Like I could care. Perhaps that was the origins of the glomus tumor that grew in my ear and which took over 5 hours for the surgeon to remove.

Bottom line, what do women see in men? Why do they freaking bother? We don’t listen. If by chance we do, we want to fix things and not just listen to them express their frustrations. And if we try to listen, we often can’t figure out what’s going on. Face it, we are not the brightest bulbs on the marquee, the sharpest knives in the drawer, the fastest arrows in the quiver. Okay, you get the picture.

Then there are household chores. I was always getting fired by Mary (my long-suffering spouse). I know what all the females out there are saying. You think I tanked my responsibilities on purpose in order to get fired. You would think so, but no. It was all incompetence, plain and simple. I thank the good lord that he created universities where those without any skills whatsoever might go and toil away on meaningless things without bothering real people doing meaningful tasks like cleaning toilets.

There is sex of course. Even though it strikes me that female orgasms are more powerful than their male parnters, some seven decades of observation suggests women are just not that interested, and never have been. Mostly, for them, it is a transactional activity useful to achieve other ends … security, money and things money can buy, social status, and (god knows why) male companionship (see paragraph 1).

We males always suspected such even though our sparring partners from the other gender can, as we know, fake important things with considerable aplomb. This leads to a conundrum for us. If you watch female behavior closely, you realize they look upon us as dangerous predators (no eye contact, always checking us out on google, carrying pepper spray, and so forth). I didn’t have to get used to the social distancing during the Covid pandemic since women ALWAYS practiced social distancing around me … staying six feet away. So, when I was in the game, so to speak, life was difficult. I would worry that some friendly female was really thinking “oh no, this Corbett character is going to make a pass. Better I be bitten by a rabid dog.” Sigh!

But now, finally, I am the perfect male. I’m so freaking old that everthing has fallen into place. I’m pretty deaf so that I just nod while the females in my life are chattering away while blessedly not hearing a damn thing. I still can’t do anything practical but I have plenty of money and can hire people too do real work. And most importantly, I have virtually no testosterone left. Women can be around me without seeing me drool uncontrollably or fear I will make some clumsy pass.

This is nirvana for me and those on the other side of the gender divide. I have no freaking idea why Providence made two sexes so different as to be compleely incompatible, but He did permit us a few years at the end of life where we might get along and enjoy one another’s company.

You can send all hate mail to corbettirp@aol.com