Talk about dodging a bullet. Still, don't go trying to get me fitted for a cape just yet, I ain't out of the woods. I'm still nearly as much in the hole as I have been to this point, generally speaking, I just managed to stay out of jail this round. So what's it going to require to do so for the foreseeable future? Saving. A lot of saving. Saving to a degree I doubt if a lot of women really understand. Never mind a job, it's about have money around or go to jail, real simple. And from the male perspective, frankly, what is frequently the feminine lust for mammon can be seen as positively predatory. As I kind of alluded to previously, Tolstoi , in The Kreutzer Sonata, offers up the idea that women, despite the inequity men have insistently flung at them in the workplace, and through other means of control, have still managed, inevitably, to be a goal in the lives of men. And through that, they wield a great deal of control, if not always openly. And, yes, I openly acknowledge that women responsible for raising a child or children when the father is in absentia often suffer the same fate as I, that of working their fingers to the bone for something that you can't quite visualize, even if you can see it plainly. So the real a*s-bust that we all go through in such circumstances is not so much predatory, but one done for the sake of our children. Albeit, it's harder to visualize when the custodial parent is the one making the spending decisions, and given that my ex-wife is sporting a tattoo and nose stud since the time of our divorce, it frankly makes me wonder about some of those decisions, but as regards other things, I know she's doing the right thing. God knows I'd probably be in violation of something by mentioning anything that occurred within the confines of the Coleman A. Young Municipal Building last week, but I don't think I've ever prayed so much outside of a church in my life. With the possible exception of when my daughters were born. Funny how that works. and I imagine that this kind of thinking can be really hard to visualize if you've never had children, or been through the childbirth experience. Openly, becoming a parent is not something that necessarily makes your relationship with the mother or father of your children better or worse, that whole part is the biggest crapshoot imaginable. But the responsibility of taking care of what you have brought into this world changes you completely from anything you have ever known yourself to be before. And that's a promise. In any event, you get the idea about those things we frequently learn to prize in the hardest ways imaginable; freedom, and the lives of our children. All wrapped up in a little thing known as non-custodial child support. I mean, hey, if Laura Bush's Yorkie, Barney, can be trained to sniff out members of the news media, (all part of a huge plot by the Republicans, if you ask me,) nothing is a secret.