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It’s okay to hit on another guy’s wife in a bar, so long as you don’t know she’s his wife. If you know she’s his wife, you shouldn’t go over there. If you don’t know she’s his wife, and you start talking to her and someone tells you she’s married, you stop what you’re doing and leave her alone.

If she doesn’t tell you she’s with someone, I feel sorry for her husband because his life is hell.

What you can’t do is give anyone shit when they tell you you’ve drifted into the middle of something where you don’t belong. If the husband says, “Stop,” and he tells you why, you have to stop. It doesn’t matter how much of a dick he is, or how uppity he gets when he’s in your face and he wants to fight. You throw your hands up and walk away.

I don’t want to get involved in these things, but people fight because kids under the age of twenty-five need to be treated a certain way because they don’t understand the code of things, and the code of things says that when a guy tells you you’re talking to his wife, you can’t complain after that. When you complain after that, the husband will fight, even if he’s the littlest prick you’ve ever seen who hasn’t been in a fight since middle school.

So now you’re fighting the littlest prick you’ve ever seen, and you’re punching hell out of him in front of his wife, and it’s all because you can’t take no for an answer or because you’re so delicate that you need to make a federal case out of things even though everyone’s out of work and eating macaroni and cheese three meals a day.

And now me, who’s budgeting down to the damned penny and using spreadsheets to track what I’m spending on sticks of butter – I have to sit and listen to you tell me why this other guy’s wrong for letting you know it was his wife you were hitting on, and how you’re so delicate that you can’t take it and have to hit.

There’s no place for normal people these days because everybody’s so tough.