Table for One?

(Why we need a cost-of-living index for Single Guys)

A friend came to work this week with a tin of excellent homemade cookies. Cinnamon-topped, crunchy around the edges, chewy in the middle. I don't know if the entire batch was dependable, but the twenty-nine I ate were top-shelf.

I fondly filed the memory away as, well, cinnamon cookies. But it turned out that these cookies were a commonly shared confection, with a name well-known to parents and other humans who drive SAVs. ("Suburban Assault Vehicles" – you know, those two-story cars-on-steroids that sport warehouse-sized sliding doors, theatre seating, and a gas tank the size of Lake Mead.)

And it also turned out that I was the only guy in the room who didn't know that this tasty little cookie is called a "Snickerdoodle."

Snickerdoodle: the common name for the cinnamon cookie I was eating (and the one I was about to eat, and the three or four I ate already, and the half-dozen I'd hidden under paper towels, a legal pad and various opaque desk ornaments).

Now. For the record: at the time, earlier, when my friend had offered me a cookie, I do remember him saying something like, "yep, the wife makes excellent Snickerdoodles." But at the time, I shook that comment off as irrelevant. TMI. It was way early in the morning, I hadn't had any coffee, and I didn't really care to hear about anybody's sex life.

And so it goes for single guys. We're used to it, but so it goes. There's a whole sub-culture out there, privy to information to which single guys are rarely exposed. On the other hand, however, single guys have access to tons of handy little factoids that seem inexplicable to Great Dads Throughout History … iconic symbols of parenting, like Ward Cleaver. Homer Simpson. Ozzy Osbourne. Catherine the Great's horse.

Partly, I suppose, it's a matter of perspective. Single guys often see things differently, or miss things entirely, or sometimes see things that remain unseen to married bipeds and other humans who are, shall we say, less commitment-challenged.

Here's an example. Most of you family-types out there buy milk in enormous containers called "gallons." Single guys buy milk in small, manageable doses known as "pints," as if they were bringing home beer, or morals. It would never cross a single guy's mind to bring home an entire gallon of anything, much less some consumable breakfast liquid that can mutate into something that smells like downtown Detroit looks.

Here's another example of Single Guy perspective. I had been out of college for nearly a decade before I learned that shower curtains are replaceable. Single guys just assume that, as part of life's rich pageantry, we're given one shower curtain each, and that's our quota. Unless, of course, somebody steals it, or it gets used in any activity that involves Catherine the Great's horse.

Right about now, you may be thinking, "Well, that's just stupid. Of course you can replace a shower curtain! Otherwise, the thing just gets more and more disgusting, what with all the mildew, pizza stains, and hoof prints."

Pizza stains? Pizza stains? And you're questioning my commentary?

Of course, to be fair to the Single Guy Nation, not all single guys are as stupid as I. Or as stupid as me. Or equally unsmart like I or me am or are. I hope you get my point, because I forgot what I was talking about.

Oh, yeah. Cookies.

According to one recipe I found on the internet, you'll not get far as a Snickerdoodle Maven without having various accesses to various amounts of various products, including shortening, sugar, eggs, flour, cream of Tartar, baking soda, salt and cinnamon.

I checked my own pantry. (First, I had to ring up my wicked step-ex-girlfriend, Emasculata, to find out where it was.) You know how many of those Snickerdoodle-enabling ingredients I own?

Salt.

(Actually, I did find some cinnamon, but it was in a dust-creased jar bearing a cheesy "As seen on 'Bewitched!'" promo and a label that warned, "Best if used by the Tet Offensive.")

And should I ever run out of Tartar cream, I wouldn't even know where to start. What aisle at the grocery stocks pre-Mongol Turkic ethnic groups? Can I get just the cream, sold in a tube, or a jar, or a goatskin? Or do you have to buy the whole Tartar, get the guy home, and then employ some ancient Tartar-cream-separating Iranian farm implement? Do Tartars expire?

Eggs, for a single guy, fall into the same category as milk. Basically, the problem is this – the stuff spoils. It goes bad, and quickly, too, like Rod Stewart trying to sing "It Had To Be You."

(This short-term temporal window also holds true for bags of lettuce, very expensive cheese, and very cheap pork.)

Such grocer's purchases present an insurmountable container-to-consumer ratio. It's just math. The stuff simply can't be swallowed, by one person, prior to the expiration date. A single guy ends up dashing about, looking for stuff to throw milk on, or at, or in.

(Consumer Tip: There is no food item that, having been handed to you via a car window, will get better by being dipped in nearly expired milk. None. There just isn't.)

(Humane Tip: Leaving several unattended bowls of milk in one's front yard, in hopes of conscripting cats to consume the stuff, may lead to unexpected side-effects. Cats tend to view such largesse as the onset of a "trend." This is closely followed by a "social contract" and, ultimately, an "entitlement.")

Fortunately, eggs have alternative uses, including deliciously violent functions that involve safe, healthy playground concepts like arc, carpet-bombing, trajectory, splatability, and so on.

And shortening? I don't even know what shortening is, other than a dim childhood memory ("Mama's little baby loves shortenin' bread") from some song that I don't think we're supposed to sing anymore.

(Later on in the song, some single guy apparently does something stupid in the kitchen with the shortenin' bread lady, and it costs him a year in jail, where he learns many new vocabulary words, like "recidivism" and "shiv." Meanwhile, upstairs in this doomed household, some bed-sick kids smell the bread, get out of bed, and attack a pigeon, for some shortening-induced reason. The place was out of control.)

Come to think of it, maybe it's better if we don't sing that song anymore.