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No thanks.

I hate this feeling, and yet every Christmas I slowly allow myself to sink into it. I can’t fight it. It envelops me like some melancholy marshmallow. It’s more comfortable than thinking about the steps that have brought me to this moment in time. Quite simply, I’ve given up a real life for a career in show business. What the fuck is the matter with me? My friends have careers. They have children. They are wives and husbands. They have LIVES! I have no wife, no kids, no backyard, no minivan—but I have two bathrooms, by God. And they are fucking mechanical marvels of design and efficiency. (What more could a single man ask for than a bathroom to shower in and a bathroom to take a bath in?)

My friends were no more prepared for parenthood than I was. They’re not any brighter or dumber than me. They’re not nicer—well, maybe a little nicer. God knows their sperm isn’t in better shape. In all honesty, I thought every one of their kids would be born with a helmet. Which says more about my friends’ younger days than it does about the terrific kids they sired.

(The last line, for those of you who immediately got upset by such a reference to the mentally challenged, should realize, or at least try to fathom, that this is a joke about my friends’ sperm. You can be upset about a sperm joke. I can understand that. But people have got to cease and desist from judging jokes when they don’t get the joke just because they are worried about the etiquette of the joke. This joke has “etiquette” written all over it. If you are reading this book and have gotten to this page and this joke has upset you, there is something deeply wrong with you. Just because it ends with the image of a helmet doesn’t mean that’s what the joke is about. SO GET WITH THE PROGRAM! Okay, let’s move on.)

Wait a minute. Good God, I am divorced. Isn’t there a statute of limitations on divorce? Especially if it was granted more than twenty years ago. For crying out loud, if you’re divorced and you get remarried, you don’t have to check both the married and divorced boxes, so why shouldn’t I be able to just check the single box, rather than confront the ashes of my mistake?

Single at sixty-one. Do people think I’m gay? Am I?

Uh . . . no.

I do not wake up on Christmas morning and lie around in bed and question my sexuality. I’ve always known I am straight. Probably too straight. That’s probably how you end up single at my age. You worship women, as in making them so important to you that you forget about yourself and so you devote your life to finding just the right one for yourself, and when you do, because you’ve been so blind in your worship, you end up marrying a woman who is having another man’s baby.

(TIME OUT! My editor thinks what I have here is “too discursive.” Well, Christmas makes me fucking discursive. It starts me thinking about stuff Christians don’t think about at Christmas, ’cause it’s fucking Christmas for them.)

And while we’re on the subject of straight: How is it that so many straight people who are so absolutely certain of their straightness cannot comprehend that someone can be absolutely sure they are gay? In a world awash in heterosexual pornography, a part of our population remains unmoved by it. And there’s a reason. They are not heterosexual. That doesn’t make them scary. It just makes them gay.

And enough already with the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” happy horseshit. Gays didn’t need to ask if they were gay. God told them. And if God told them, that’s all you need to know, ’cause He’s God and He wouldn’t have made people gay unless He thought it was right. How do I know this? Because He’s God and He’s smarter than you. He also figured He didn’t need to write more than two books because He thought since we were made in His own image, that we would be smarter. So in a way, you let Him down. But what else is new?

And if you don’t like what I just said, tough. That’s the God I believe in and that’s the way He thinks. Maybe your God will have some thoughts someday.

But what do I know? I don’t have a family, so who