THE BORN LESAR
You may want to be careful who you meet
(This is from 2015. If you remember it, I not only commend you, but strongly suggest you find more things to occupy your mind.)
'You don't have to be lonely ...' goes the catchy jingo for the popular dating site that matches single farm folks with one another. Well, no, really, you don't, not if you have a chicken, 'cuz, as companions go, chickens are faithful, they're good listeners, they don't seem to mind if you watch a lot of football, and the coup de grace, they taste ssssoooo yummy with Alfredo sauce. As it turns out, 'You don't have to be hungry ...' either.
Of course, if you try to take a chicken to a Friday night movie, or if you so much as think about putting lipstick on one, then right away your neighbors are sayin' you're breaking your probation restrictions again, and we all know how insensitive local police officers can be when responding to calls for, 'He's gettin weird with the poultry again.' Yeah, I know, they have a difficult job, but is it really hurtin' the dang bird if you just put a little frilly dress on it and call it 'Honey' for an evening?
Oh, hey, sorry, I'm gettin' off track already. What I set out to talk about is dating sites, like 'farmersonly.com,' the one that's advertised on TV a lot, seeking to draw together single 'country folks' who might like to share their love for cows, hay fields, and corny Joe Diffie songs about green tractors. By the way, if you search the farmersonly. com site, and some lady posts a picture of a horse instead of a photograph of herself, well, don't expect her past to include any beauty pageant titles. Just sayin.' The intrusion of the Internet into everyone's lives, combined with an American divorce rate that's higher than Mother Theresa's approval rating, has led to the proliferation of online dating services in recent years. The days of actually having to go out in public to meet a significant other disappeared with cassette tapes, mullets and TV variety shows (Sonny & Cher, anyone?), and all people have to do now to find a date is give their credit card information and let the love begin. Yeah, that's right, for just $24.99 a month, you, too, can meet a 47-year-old man from Minneapolis, Minn., who has four kids, two of them who still live at home, who likes dogs, baseball games, and rope burns on his ankles and wrists. True, he won't be out of the state pen until 2028, so, you know, there's no reason to rush in sending him that first wink.
As with most other things on the Internet, dating sites started out pretty vanilla, just men looking for women, and vice versa, maybe your occasional man seeking kangaroo (you know, to each his own). When those sites became too boring and, therefore, no longer profitable, the sites started to specialize for population subgroups, such as farmers. Now, thanks to the magic of the worldwide web, you can not just find a woman, but a woman who, like you, loves to play Checkers. Yeah, imagine that. She loves Checkers, and nobody has snapped her up yet. Whodda' thunk?
Some of the dating sites are for obvious demographics, such as the ones matching senior citizens with like-aged potential companions, or those putting Christians in touch with other Christians (people with names such as Abdullah, Chaim and Lucifer probably won't get their $24.99's worth here). There is a site where single parents can meet one another to talk about head lice nits, and another spot for those 35 and older to meet similarly-driven professional partners, with whom they can talk about head lice nits. I mean, only if they want to. According to one source I found online, there are more than 1,500 such sites now operating, with more than 40 million American single people (127 of them women who use the tag 'luscious lips') spending their hard-earned dollars to try to find a date who will take them out for dinner at someplace other than Burger King. Which I find questionable, 'cuz The Whopper really is a very good burger. Me, I prefer KFC for a first date, but it's probably just that chicken thing again.
Many of the more popular dating websites use 'algorithms' to match people. After subscribers fill out their information, powerful computers analyze and synthesize the raw data, and then tell matches they are '83% compatible' with the person on the other end of the potential connection. It might have even been 84 percent, but the woman has no teeth and the man is a dentist, so, you know, that might make for an awkward first meeting conversation. But, the algorithms are good at separating smokers from non-smokers, conservatives from liberals, cat lovers from normal people, that sort of thing. Really, I suspect the dating services boast far too much about their matching techniques, and just throw everybody into one large pot and hope a woman who likes to take long walks on the beach doesn't end up with a man who's deathly allergic to sand.
That's why the emergence of lifestyle-specific dating sites is a good thing, as it should only serve to unite people who stand a better chance of staying together than Marilyn Monroe and Joe Dimaggio (c'mon, everybody knew he was too dopeylookin' for her). I mean, it only make sense, if there are lonely farmers out there, that they should all congregate on one site. Seems only logical that there should be a site just for classical music enthusiasts, another one for NASCAR fans, and maybe one for chubby, middle-aged white people with enough emotional baggage to weigh down a railroad car. Where do I sign up?
Of course, even on a site like farmersonly.com, one has to be careful. Just because a person who posts a profile on such a site with a picture of himself wearing a cowboy hat does not mean he is what he claims to be, and, in fact, he could be an escaped homicidal maniac who's only wearing a cowboy hat so nobody recognizes him from 'America's Most Wanted.' Of course, you probably could figure that out when he puts 'strangling homeless people' under his hobbies, next to reading, shooting pool, and snuggling. By the way, just a hint, if a man lists 'snuggling' as something he enjoys, he's lying. Or really weird.
I have to say I might be interested in checking out a distinct dating site, maybe something like deerhuntersonly.com, or meatloverspizzafans. com. It would take some of the guesswork out of meeting new people, and maybe eliminate the need for annoying stuff such as dating, talking on the phone, exchanging greeting cards, holding hands, acknowledging each others' presence in public, and probably my least favorite, listening to each others' music even though hers makes my eardrums bleed.
And who says I don't have to be lonely?
