If there's one really good argument for staying married, it is this: dating. On my own priority scale, dating falls somewhere between doing taxes and chewing glass.

You've got to get dressed up and bring your résumé...

"Yes, I was with Cynthia from May to August. My main duties were to pay for dinner and hold the door ... Why did we separate? I'm afraid she was downsizing. Since then I've just been a temp."

Older singles tend to process you in terms of market value. With a Robocop scan, they determine your age and weight, then match you with a car in the parking lot.

"Are those real diamonds? Mind if I use my jeweler's loop?"

I'm not cut out for dating anyway. I was married so long that now I'm like an animal raised in captivity -- unfit for the wild. Do you still show up with a corsage?

When I first started out, I was looking for a certain type. She'd be 5'6" and have blonde hair, cute dimples. She'd be a Capricorn.

As time went on, I adjusted. "Okay, she doesn't have to be Capricorn so long as she's friendly ... She doesn't have to be friendly, per se, but I'd rather she not drag her knuckles ... So long as she wears pink. So long as he or she wears pink."

Now all I notice is whether or not they're wearing a ring, and that's my type: available.

The ring finger tells people you're married. At times so does the middle finger. Some women fear that men won't notice their barren ring finger, so they hedge with low-cut blouses. I've dated women who can swipe credit cards with their cleavage. You get a migraine just trying to maintain eye contact.

What we need are cleavage blinders: They'd work like horse blinders, only the flaps go beneath your eyes.

I tried speed-dating, where you get five minutes per woman, and that might not seem like a long time ... but it is. How long does it take to know that someone is psycho? One minute? Two? That leaves a lot of time to sit there thinking, Yeah, I could be celibate. I've got an X-Box.

Even if you do find a match while speed-dating, where do you go from there? Can you see that relationship in two years?

Her: "Every time we make love anymore, it's only a quickie."

Him: "You knew I was in a hurry from the beginning!"

I'm not saying that all the good ones are taken, but the smart ones seem to be scarce. It was so refreshing to finally meet a woman who reads.

"That's a nice collection of books you have. Which are your favorite?"

"Oh, I like the blue ones."

So it goes.

I wish that friends would save me before I leave the bar: "No! Jason! It's a booby trap!"

On the Web I get steamy with women in chat rooms, but then we meet for dinner and have nothing to say. We might as well pass notes back and forth across the table.

Men fantasize about dating younger women, but it takes a lot of Bengay. One girl walked into my home, kicked off her shoes, and started stretching. I felt like Roy Scheider when he first saw the shark in Jaws: "We're gonna need a bigger boat."

My real fear is catching STDs. My buddy Dave goes to bed with women from whom I wouldn't be caught downwind. I'm afraid that one day he's going to get lucky and die.

It's not necessarily sex that I'm after; sometimes I just want to sleep with a woman. Can you see the hookers down on Sunset and Vine...

"You just want to hug?! All right, sicko, but that'll cost extra."

Of course, it's illegal for women to charge a man for sex. Unless it's pornography, but then you have to film it and make it available to everyone.

I don't ask for perfection; like Bob Dylan, I'm just "lookin' for a girl with hair messed up like mine." She's out there somewhere. I only hope she's not swiping credit cards with her cleavage.

My mom has always been creative. A long time ago -- back when "Saturday Night Live" was funny -- she'd decorate cakes to look like soccer fields, pyramids, women endowed with Hostess Sno-Balls.

You lost your innocence early in my home.

Mom works for the bank -- THE bank -- so her creative urges surface through cracks in the sidewalk. She mostly takes it out on the holidays.

At Christmas her tree is so burdened with ornaments that it leans to one side like Joe Cocker and children place the star on top without even stretching.

"Remember that star?" says Mom in her blinking Santa hat. "It's solid lead."

In the living room Mom keeps a perennial tree, decorated, beside the TV. My step-dad Mark, who comes from the south side of Chicago (motto: "Whadda YOU looking at?), lives with her condition full-time.

"I've lost all love for Christmas," he says.

This woman, Linda Baker, my dear mother, has Christmas flamingos, which all through December stand in her yard. The front yard. The one other people see.

On Thanksgiving we sit down to pumpkin-shaped name cards and a brick of homemade fudge. When Mom says it's from scratch, she means growing the flour, churning the butter, personally laying the eggs...

Thanksgiving dishes are laid on chargers -- plates that hold other plates. And why do we call them chargers when they don't go anywhere? Next to coasters designed not to slide? On strips of cloth that WE CALL RUNNERS.

The Super Bowl is a bonus holiday to fill the void between New Year's and Valentine's. Mom serves football-shaped cookies and provides foam bricks to throw at the referees.

During the game she walks in every ten minutes wearing her commemorative Super Bowl T-shirt to say, "What a buncha friggen bums." Then she storms out. The score doesn't matter; she's just cursing to be festive. So it goes.

Mom sends out greeting cards for every occasion, including Groundhog Day (which the bank probably takes off).

"A groundhog's not so scary, except once every February. Then his little shadow holds an early spring or lots more cold!"

Normally you associate wreaths with Christmas (keyword: normally), but Mom has wreaths for Easter, Valentine's, St. Patty's. On her door now is a garland of cinnamon-scented pine cones. I fear that one day she'll bump into Martha Stewart and there will be a World Extreme Cage Fight, only the cage will be decorated with velvet bows ... by live blue jays.

Last Sunday I brought laundry, because that's the kind of son I am. When they say to use protection -- I'm what you're protecting against. Mom washed the clothes, folded them into their manufacture-original squares, and placed them in plastic bags to keep the cold off. Then she sent me away with a fruit roll-up.

Later I found her in the garden "giving her babies their nutrients." She wouldn't stop about the poppies.

"I can't believe how the poppies came in. Can you believe it? It's unbelievable."

Mom also makes jewelry. Her business card, "Bling-Bling by Linda," is covered in glitter. Maybe it's pixie dust, which would explain her fascination with Tinkerbell. She has Tink figurines, magnets, throw pillows, diary-with-lock. She also has a Tinkerbell tattoo, but you have to believe that it's there.

I'm starting to fixate on Tinkerbell myself, and just when I had beaten my addiction to Sno-Balls.

Seriously, Mom has done a noble job controlling her craftilepsy. There's only one thing left to concern me: August. A month with no holidays, no birthdays, no national championships. I'm afraid that her urges will pressurize until she finally explodes in a puff of pixie dust. She's only five feet tall, so we spend a lot of time looking for her anyway.

Don't get me wrong: I'm lucky to have a mom who stashes Downey sheets in my glove compartment; it's just that there's something not quite right about the woman, and that's what I love most about her.