I am amazed that I am still married. So are a lot of people. I was amazed when I realized that this past August marked 14 years of matrimony.

More particularly, I am amazed that I have survived the past 8.5 months. As many of you know, mom is set to domino with our third child in about two weeks. While I am amazed to have made it this far, I have no illusions of surviving the coming weeks.

My longtime friend and bookie Virgil gave me the odds via telephone last night. According to Virgil, odds are 2-1 that She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed will actually end my life in a fit of rage brought on by 40 new pounds, a too-tight pair of pants and enough estrogen to kill a healthy bull elephant.

Odds are 5-1 that I will be maimed in a similar scenario. Odds are 100-1 that I will spend at least one night outside during the coming two weeks (without a blanket). Odds are 50-50 that I will actually make it into the delivery room in one piece. I guess the fact that SWMBO might want a driver is helping me out there.

However, the odds of me walking out of the delivery room are so low that Virgil would not relate them to me unless I was willing to place some money on the issue. I anteed up. I put five dollars on myself living through the birth. According to Virg, I could win $4 million on my $5 bet if I actually step foot out of that room of fatherly boredom and wifely abuse after the baby is born.

“Why the long odds, Virg?” I had to ask. “Shoot, didn’t somebody bet I would make it?”

“Nope. Apparently a picture of your big, pickle-jar-shaped head is on the Internet, and they figure it’s a good chance your kid will have your head.”

“So?”

“So, toward the end, your wife is going to be trying to give birth and looking at your big square head and put 2 and 2 together and figure out why having your kids is like shoving a brick down a garden hose.”

“My head is not shaped like a pickle jar,” I replied.

“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, when your sweet wife is in agony and sees your big head – bingo, she is going to lose it and you are a dead man.”

“You got money riding on this, Virg?” I asked.

The line was silent. My own bookie was betting against me. Wow. So, basically I’m a walking dead man who goes home every night to a ticking bomb of a wife. The only real question is how I’ll go.

“Lots of bets to place there, Smoke,” Virg said. “But it’s 10-1 that she’ll use a blunt instrument over a knife and 15-1 that if she shoots you it will be after she clubbed you to the floor.”

“Give me $10 more on the gun angle,” I told him.

“You got inside scoop on this, man?” Virg’s voice was excited.

“Let’s just say I know where the guns are,” I said.

So, here I am, a walking dead man, but still a man determined to have some say in my fate. Being a manly man, I decided to try groveling the other night. SWMBO was sitting in her muumuu-tent thing that doubles as a nightgown, watching television, rubbing her own back, rocking back and forth, murmuring to the baby to stop kicking her, and sweating. It was a good day.“I would do this for you if I could,” I said sweetly.

“I’d let you,” SWMBO said in that cold emotionless voice only a woman can muster. She never took her eyes off the television.

Undeterred, I continued. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you need, sweetie?”

“Light yourself on fire,” she said as though she were sending me for a glass of water.

After a few minutes I slid off the couch like a mouse hiding from a cat and scurried to bed. Maybe the best I could hope for was to die in my sleep. Laying there, hoping the last sounds I ever heard were not the three, well-oiled clicks of my favorite revolver’s hammer being pulled back to full cock, I realized that life as a father at the end of pregnancy is no different than the life of a conservative in American politics.

Basically, you are doomed.

Think about it. For a conservative, voting Democrat is like trying to father a child with another man. It’s just icky and won’t work anyway.

Voting Republican is really no better. Sure, George W., a.k.a. the Stick-Horse-Cowboy, and his gang will tell you they’re conservatives. But as history now tells us, these guys lie more than a guy on prom night. So far they have made war like drunken Girl Scouts, spent like drunken Democrats, and appointed Supreme Court justices that make liberals want to get drunk and party. 

Right now conservatives have to feel like I do at home – sleeping on the porch just hoping to survive another day. Lucky for me, but bad for conservatives in general, all I have to do is survive. One day, my wife will not be pregnant, and in coming years I will be forgiven for my genetic propensity to father kids with big square heads.

Conservatives as a group have no such ray of hope to brighten their day.