A WEEK IN THE BACHELOR 'HOOD

As I write this, my desk is strewn with empty Pepsi cans and what is quite likely the remnants of a Cadbury Cream Egg. Further down the hall, similar chaos reigns in the living room. This can only mean one thing: Julie is out of town on business, and it’s a bachelor week at the Workman compound.

I was a bachelor for about 30 years, and I got to be pretty good at it. (Although, in all fairness, the first 20 or so years were spent in very un-bachelor activities like attending public school and—very early on—being an infant.) While at college, I lived in a bachelor palace called the House of Fun. It was like a frat house, except there was no beer, partying, or wanton sexual activity. We were at a Mormon school, after all. But we did have the squalor thing down cold.

The House of Fun was crumbling at the foundation, and often smelled of stale clam chowder (a favorite of one roommate--hi Scott!). Its floors were covered with notebooks, boxes, paper towels, musical instruments, random items of clothing (alas, no women’s underwear), and—oddly enough—wigs. The walls were plastered with giant posters snatched from the Paris subway (that was the story, anyhow) and discarded art picked up at thrift stores. It was dank, it was loud, it was smelly. It was heaven… for a bachelor, anyway.

What causes bachelors to seek out such an environment is a mystery to me, but after I left school, I moved to LA and lived in a garage my friends affectionately dubbed the Tuff Shed. There was a futon on one corner, a television in another, and the rest was filled with storage boxes from the house. I lived there almost 4 years and might still live there today if I hadn’t met Julie.

But I did meet her and soon I moved into a place more closely resembling an apartment, and a few years later we were married and we were living in a very respectable one-bedroom apartment with furniture and lamps and even a picture or two on the wall.

It all seems like a very logical, linear journey that starts in Prolonged-Adolescence Bachelor Land and ends in Normal Adult Person Land. But the road trip model really doesn’t work in this case, instead, it’s more like frontier homesteading.

Being a bachelor is something like living as a trapper in frontier America. You roam from place to place making your living, you stay in conditions not always considered “civilized,” and you wear leather pants.

Then comes married life, and that’s like clearing a plot of land out in the wilderness and building a little stucco tract home. It takes some time to pull the rocks out of the ground and plant a garden or two, but soon you’ve got something that resembles civilization.

But something strange happens when Julie goes away on business, the forest begins creeping back in, and before you know it, the whole plot is clogged in strange undergrowth.

It happens quickly. I’ll come home from dropping off Julie at the airport, and there will already be an empty pizza box on the living room table. Soon dirty socks materialize, seemingly out of nowhere. Within a few hours, I’m passed out face-first in a bowl of brownie batter.

The chaos spreads until I realize Julie will be coming home in an hour or two. Then I spring to action in a furious whirlwind of cleaning and sanitizing that would not have looked out of place in those John Hugues films in the 80s where there’s some big party at a rich guy’s house and they trash the place and then they have to clean it up before the parents come home. (note to self: learn more concise pop culture references)

It’s an odd ritual, but I’ve always seen it as a symbol of the rejuvenation that overtakes me when Julie comes home. But it’s a ritual that may be coming to an end. Julie is getting “bigger” and more “pregnant” and won’t be traveling much after she returns home this week.

Indeed, the ol’ homesteading plot may well be cleared for good, and my days of brownie batter-fueled debauchery behind me completely.

Now that my days of lingering-bachelorhood chaos are nearly through, I can look forward to the calm that comes from having twin boys.

They don’t cause much chaos, right?