• 1.
    I always wondered how the human race continued its existence after it became bored
    with itself. Everyone could see how predictable human behavior was through the news,
    school, television, music, and movies without actually looking directly at the source of all
    these situations, real people. You’d think that someone would look ahead like they
    always said they did and saw this coming like a car about to hit you in the middle of the
    street, but no one did.

    Everyone was talking a hundred years ago on how they were going to obliterate societies
    that still performed arranged marriages because they thought it was barbaric. Ironically,
    that is the very thing that is keeping us alive today.

    Love is for losers, everyone knows that. No one falls in love any more and for those that
    do, they find it to be short-lived or child-less. It’s weird, like nature wants us to extinguish
    ourselves.

    So when nature wants to kill us, we develop systems, like we have been since the
    beginning of time. So our new system is:

    If you want to get married to someone, get married to them and don’t complain when you
    can’t have children because divorce doesn’t exist anymore unless you are on a Timed
    Marriage.

    If you want to have children in the world and contribute to more human beings being on
    the Earth, you donate your sperm, your egg, or your womb.

    You pay taxes to support children like that. They don’t live with you, that’s what
    orphanages are for.

    If you want to be married but don’t care who it is, you go on to what used to be called a
    dating website or file paperwork at the local service office. Either way you’ll get paired up
    with someone.

    Once you are paired up, you are put on what is called a Timed Marriage which means
    exactly what it says, they set a number of years for you to be married to someone and
    after that number of years have passed, you’re not married anymore.

    Depending on how old you are, the Timed Marriage will expect things from you. Too
    young by their standards, you’re just set up for another marriage later and put on a short
    time period. Too old, they make you tend to the children in the orphanages and you are
    bound to each other for the rest of your life together, no matter how short it may be.
    Everyone who falls between those categories are expected to have children and they
    monitor your progress, ready to cut your marriage off as soon as it seems right.

    Any children you have will be split or fought over in court for custody. The parent with no
    addictions (not including food, reading, music, art, ect.) always wins and sometimes the
    option of them going to an orphanage is brought up. It is rare for a child to drift between
    two parents.

    Oh, and instead of keeping you where you are known or your spouse is known, they put
    you in the middle of both those places, even if it is in the middle of nowhere. If a house is
    near by but not exact, you go there but if there is no house for miles, they build you one in
    the middle of nowhere so you can stay there.

    Everyone else can live his or her life without you. Most people these days don’t sign up for
    marriage so when there is a shortage of people coming into the world and limited
    resources to keep it up, they draft people like they do in the military.

    Oh, and the “They” that does all this is an organization called The Priest. The individuals
    who carry out marriages are called priests even though the organization’s name isn’t
    plural. Weird.

    I was told that marriages were once conducted in a church with the bride in a white dress
    that poofed out from the waist down and the groom wore a hideously-tight-across-the-
    neck suit and didn’t stand out from the rest of the men in the church unless he was
    standing where he was supposed to be. They had a song for when the bride walked
    down the isle with her father or some other sappy guy in another suit who knew the
    couple and the groom would wait for her at the end with the priest, who would say the
    magic words and then they would be married, hours later.

    That’s where the name came from for the organization but what I don’t understand is why
    did the groom wait for the bride to come to him? Was it to show that he’d be willing to wait
    a lifetime for her or was he just too damn busy talking to the priest? Those guys seem
    really boring today so a priest back in a time where there was love must have been a little
    more interesting because the groom didn’t go get his bride. Another reason why love is
    for losers.

    Thank goodness they don’t do that anymore. Sure, the priest says the magic words but it
    only takes about ten seconds to say seven words, “You are now husband and wife.
    Amen.” I wonder if anyone knows what “Amen” means? I’m not religious so I wouldn’t
    know.

    So the good thing about these marriages is that the population is controlled. Fewer
    mouths to feed that are in need and all that jazz. When this first started happening, no
    one had children for ten years. I mean none, zip, zilch. My grandparents were born in the
    ten years to follow and were the first generation of children to be born by this system.
    They were married by that system and so were my parents after them. If I ever want to get
    married, I’ll follow the same pattern. But I don’t think that will happen.

    Life doesn’t seem too bad now, at least we won’t kill ourselves off or overproduce to
    where we suffocate the planet. That’s always good. But if there’s one thing I can say with
    certainty at this very point in time it’s:

    I have no plans on being married.