An Exhaustive Exercise In Digression

Ken has the near-perfect marriage.

Not because of the honesty, compassion, trust, understanding, communication, blah blah blah blah that make for poetic rhetoric during the exchange of vows, leaving grandma and all of the future ex-in-laws dabbing at tear-swollen eyes. That crap is good for entertainment purposes and it provides filler for the style show masquerading as a wedding. But it completely ignores the geographical component of marital bliss, and it sidesteps the one simple solution to the crisis in marriage longevity.

A moat. Limber up and stick with me on this one.

Ken lives a stone’s throw from me, here on the barren, lunar-like landscape we call the Midwest. I don’t know why the word Midwest is supposed to be capitalized, but Microsoft Word spell-check tells me it is, and who am I to argue with Bill Gates?

I don’t even know why the Midwest is called the Midwest. I don’t recall much about my junior high school geography course, but I do recall that I was an honor-roll student throughout, so I must have done well in geography. I may not have retained much specific geographical knowledge, but I learned to learn, which is what formal education is all about, isn’t it? Never mind that we test for specific memorized knowledge when we are categorizing and rating human beings on the scholastic scale. For example, if you were to hand in your ACT test after having scrawled "I can find the answers to all of this shit" across the test booklet, you may, indeed, be the brightest student attending that particular testing session, but you won’t gain entrance to the college of your parents’ choice. You will have to make a go of it without benefit of Econ 101 or Comparative Literature, and prove yourself worthy by inventing Windows or the Pet Rock.

I, however, have derived the benefits bestowed upon me via completion of Econ 101 and Comparative Literature courses at a highly esteemed Midwestern university, the name of which figuratively jumps off the page of a resume, eliciting a gasp of recognition from the reader. But, more importantly, I learned to learn. Subsequent to all of my formal education, I learned that the geographical center of the continental United States lies somewhere in the vicinity of Sturgis, South Dakota. Given that I, and Ken, live in Illinois, my aptitude for learning to learn leads me to conclude that we live in the Mideast. Therefore my degree is actually from a highly esteemed Mideastern university. Apparently the lack of suicide bombers on campus, and the student body’s dearth of any semblance of the commitment required to forsake our lives for anything we believe in, preempted us from deeming ourselves a Mideastern university. As a matter of fact, here in the Midwest, we don’t really believe in anything other than values, and we are smugly arrogant about our value system. Don’t ask us for details about our value system, or we will simply answer that "we can find the answers to that shit." Suffice it to say that we have them, both the values and the answers, and the rest of you people don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t be foolish enough to buy into the notion that Illinois lies in the Midwest. We’re not going to try to explain our values to fools.

So Ken has the near-perfect marriage. He lives here in the land that fools deem the Midwest. And his wife lives in Canada. Ken has no intention of moving to Canada, and his wife hasn’t the slightest interest in moving to the Midwest. That is, as far as Ken and I know. Perhaps she has tried to move to the Midwest, but wound up in Utah looking for Ken. Canadians are devotees of the metric system, and they can’t be expected to understand our sense of geography.

The only obstacle that prevents Ken’s near-perfect marriage from qualifying for unequivocal perfection is the fact that Ken and his wife are physically separated by land mass alone. Marital perfection can only be achieved if the geographical separation includes a large body of water that limits the modes of transportation available to traverse the void. And not just any large body of water. It must be a large body of water that is susceptible to horrendous meteorological events that further limit the availability and advisability of those few modes of transportation.

Within the confines of his near-perfect marriage, Ken is still allowed to spend time with his friends, since his wife has no idea what Ken is doing at any given time. He can text message her and tell her that he is ironing shirts, and she is none the wiser. The truth is that he is spending time with his friends, a cardinal sin for any married man. Our Midwestern values allow for lying about the commission of this sin, because the sin is committed for the sake of preserving the sacred bond known as marriage. We have values here, and we value the sanctity of marriage. We Midwesterners are known for holding together the shredded remnants of a gut-wrenching marriage until one spouse expires naturally or suffers an unfortunate accident. We can out-misery anyone, but we still fall short of the Mideastern commitment. We won’t enter the room containing our spouse wearing a vest full of explosives and hit the trigger mechanism. We have been known, however, to hire a marksman to pull the trigger from afar. It’s all part of the value system that you people don’t understand.

As long as Ken has come this close to achieving the perfect marriage, I have become his cheerleader and trusted counselor in his quest to raise the bar and go for the ultimate in marital bliss. Actually it’s not Ken’s quest. It’s mine. I can’t stand to see a guy get this close and not make a grab for the highest rung. While Ken is ironing shirts, as far as you or anyone else knows, I have advised Ken on the merits of moving his wife. If you were to drill a hole from the Midwest through the earth’s core, sharpen the bit and keep drilling, you would hit sunshine somewhere in the vicinity of Guam or New Zealand. Fill the hole to prevent any unauthorized access, and you have effectively found the point on the globe that is the furthest geographical distance from the Midwest. Better yet, the distance is not just separated by a large body of water; it is separated by every body of water on earth. I don’t know Ken’s wife, but even if she is dedicatedly persistent in closing the geographical gap between her and her soulmate, there’s always the chance that a flooded Mighty Mississippi or an oil-slick blaze on the Wabash River will thwart her effort to reach Ken and open that Pandora’s Box of honesty, compassion, trust, understanding, communication, blah blah blah blah. That can only lead to an unfortunate accident.

In the meantime, Canada’s pretty good. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and in an imperfect world it serves as an acceptable substitute for total elimination.