There had been the DWI’s, the drunken and disorderly charges, and the dabbling with AA, but never before has my habitual beer drinking been as threatened as when I recently realized that in order to sustain my daily intake, I would soon require children. Maybe some might think this is a peculiar, if not a selfish way to approach the subject of childbearing, but my old man didn’t have a problem with it; and as far as I could tell, he managed to drink pretty much 24-hours a day when I was a needy child, so the system must work.

But I didn’t get the idea from my old man. Actually, it was more of a realization than an idea, one of those things that hit you when you’re drinking beer, lots of beer, every day into the night.

I’ve always chosen my companions carefully. I enjoy folks who have a sense of humor, who are witty, who are open-minded, who are kind and considerate, and who have a history of alcoholism in their families. Strangely, most of these people drink loads of beer, even though I don’t know the connection between having a sense of humor and beer consumption.

I also don’t know the connection between having a sense of humor and underachievement or not having the ability to sustain meaningful, long-term relationships. But with us it had always been there…until something changed—all my friends had gotten married.

Luckily all the spouses (except for Tim’s tea-totaling monster-breasted Russian mail-order bride Marketa) in question fit the mold of a good friend: great sense of humor, witty, kind, with a history of alcoholism in the family. Luckily, we could still hang out and have fun together (excluding those times when Tim shows the waitress his dick and gets us kicked out of yet another bar). And none of them seemed to mind that I was still single and fancy-free. They never even harassed me by arranging blind dates with their boring colleagues—and not because I haven’t had a meaningful relationship since 1979 while in the sixth grade, but because they know I haven’t had a meaningful relationship since 1979 while in the sixth grade.

And everything had been just dandy—until four years ago, when they all started to have unprotected sex.

I don’t know what is the connection between marriage and unsafe sex, but there is one. After decades of safely avoiding unplanned pregnancies, after decades of learning about the pill, sponges, rubbers, diaphragms, and IUDs, my friends somehow got hit over the heads with dummy sticks and seemed to have thrown that hard-earned education out the window like bathwater—but they managed to grab the baby before it, too, was thrown out with that proverbial fluid.

It had not bothered me—their marriages or children or my singleness—until the other night when we were partying at Mike and Cathy’s. It was there that I realized my friends had collectively created a beer drinking paradise by having children, and I understood that if I didn’t act soon, I would be left standing at the gates of this paradise without a key.

There was Tim and Marketa’s little tyke Vlad teetering back from the fridge with a cold Budweiser, Mary and Jake’s little daughter inexpertly mixing her first Jack Daniels and coke for her parents, and Mike and Cathy’s son David crawling upstairs to look for his father’s pack of Marlboros. But this excellent service wasn’t the only perk. Since there is a troop of children, as soon as David returns with the cigarettes and then wants to bother his father by sitting on his lap, dad convinces him to find Vlad and show him some new toy. And off his lap the tot jumps—it’s as if Mike didn’t even have a child! And if Mary and Jake want to go on a binge over the weekend, they dump the kid off at Tim and Marketa’s. (Luckily, for Tim, if he wants to go on a binge, he just leaves because Marketa doesn’t drink, and she’s as submissive as a carrot.)

Sitting there single, childless, and with no prospects made me realize how problematic not having children as soon as possible could be. What if I had a child in 50 years? None of my friends’ children would play with it. It would be stuck on my lap and always be knocking over my beer, and I’d constantly be burning its tender little scalp with my cigarette or dumping ash into its eyes. Of course if I thought there’d be a wife around to tend the little whelp, I’d pawn the kid off on her, but I’m sure by the time she returned from the hospital we’d have a good reason to get divorced. And since I can only imagine how mentally unstable someone would have to be to marry me, I’d probably get stuck with the kid, since the court would never give a mother that messed up custody of another living being.

Well, after a long and careful deliberation, I knew there was only one thing for me to do—get a wife and have some kids quick. Luckily for me, Tim knows of a great little organization that matches young Russian women with American males based on their preference of getting a visa and your preference of huge tits. Sure, little Robert or Suzy might be a few years younger than the rest of our clan, but older kids always need someone to pick on, so I can be rest assured my son or daughters will be kept entertained for extended periods of time—away from me and my beer!