Several years ago, I realized that I was At That Age. While I always knew it chronologically, it occurred to me that more of the people I knew were getting married and having kids than were staying single and childless, and that most people didn’t consider it rude to approach me and ask “Are you married?”

“No.”

“Do you have kids?”

“No.”

“Oh…well…nice seeing you.”

I still consider this to be rude and a lot presumptuous, but at least I now understand how some people think this is normal, or at least, I understand how they think it’s abnormal that I can answer in the negative on both counts. The thing is, most people want to get married and/or have kids. They’re societally and biologically driven, and that’s fine.

For the most part, most of the people I know who have gotten married and had kids are doing okay with it. So far. Which sounds shitty, but come on, let’s all look at the statistics together and get on the same page as far as likelihoods are concerned. And at least their kids aren’t like our neighbors’ kids, who I’m beginning to think are sort of challenged, either mentally or just because they have idiots as parents.

Earlier today, I opened the front door to see a kid with no pants on in our yard. It was about 30 degrees out, by the way, and although he was wearing a coat, hat, and shoes, his pants were around his ankles and he was staring at our front door.

“Um,” I said to Graham, “There’s a kid without pants on in the yard.”

“A kid without pants on in the yard?”

“Yep,” I said, pointing at the kid without pants on. “Look.”

We didn’t want to walk towards the kid without pants on because we live in a world where that kind of behavior is suspect (bizarrely more so than a kid being outside without pants on), but we had to walk that way because that’s the only way to leave the house. As we passed the kid, his mother appeared with her other child on her hip and laughed.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “He had to go to the bathroom.”

“Um,” I said, realizing that I had to be polite because I have to live next to this woman.

“He used to just go on the sidewalk,” the mother explained,” but we’ve been teaching him that he needs to go in our own yard.”

“Yeah, I thought it was kind of weird to open the door and see a kid without pants on in our yard,” I said, trying to impress upon her that we share the yard that is so far half-full of her kids’ toys and, apparently, the other half-full of her kids’ pee.

“I just hope you guys can understand that boys will be boys,” she said, and giggled her way up the stairs to her house, collecting her just-finished-urinating son on the way to their actual bathroom, which, like the rest of their residence, is located literally four feet away from where her child had been peeing outdoors.

See, I may be At That Age but I’m also not a parent and therefore I’m probably unqualified to give parenting advice. But in the interest of not acting like a bunch of forest animals, people, could you maybe get your kids to pee in YOUR OWN GODDAMN HOUSES? Could you maybe teach them that not everything they see is a toilet, and that the human body is usually capable of holding its pee until you find an actual receptacle for it, especially when the body holding the pee is old enough to manage the open-and-close of his own clothing? Could you maybe stop being such daft hippie morons who aggressively park their Subaru horizontally in the shared driveway, and maybe realize that thinking “boys will be boys” in relation to children peeing in someone’s front yard is a lazy, fucktarded way to parent?

What kind of people are these? What kind of people will their children grow up to be? What kind of response should I have had, and what should I have said to let her know that this is not okay? And most importantly, what do I do when the weather gets warmer and the yard smells like pee all the time?