Naked advice on marital discord

The best marital advice I was ever given is the one I’ve most ignored:

“Always argue naked.”

I only wish I could convey this sentiment to Will and Kate.

Like any married couple, they are bound to fight and thoughts more martial than marital are impossible when one is nude.

Alas, I’ve never once begun a nasty joust with my wife by suggesting we both remove all our armor. We’re both too businesslike for that. If we’re fighting, the last thing on our minds is getting naked and if we’re naked we certainly aren’t thinking about fighting.

It’s the way we’re wired.

It’s too bad. Clearly, we’ve surrendered to conventional thinking.

I think our fights would end instantly if at the first harsh words, we’d lock eyes and start undressing each other.

Instead we both sort of sulk. We approach a sort of marital demilitarized zone, reconnoiter the fortifications and back off like they’ve done at the 38th parallel between North and South Korea since 1953.

I think this is fairly common behavior for married couples who fight without resorting to an exchange of gunfire.

I wonder how Will and Kate will resolve their differences.

Kate seems like a shopper so she’ll probably cool off by going with her friends for what I’ve heard called retail therapy. It’s a perfectly harmless way for a princess to blow off steam, especially when British taxpayers seem so at ease with funding the silliness that goes along with hosting a royal family on the national teet.

Will’s another matter. Sure, he could dash off to a distant castle to cool down or split to a friendly country and engage in some good will tour among former subjects.

But, in this case, being Good Will seems unlikely to ease tension. In fact, always being Good Will is apt to increase it.

He’s not like the rest of us. He can’t storm out of the house and down to the pub to unload on marital difficulties as so many commoners do. Really, a little distance with some friends puts everything in perspective.

If it’s tense at home, I often like to head to the bar, have a pint and engage in distracting arguments with my buddies about pointless things like why the Pirates stink.

The pressure Will and Kate are enduring already seem crushing. I never cease to be amazed at the pressures young couples bestow on themselves by hosting enormous weddings -- and by enormous I mean ones involving about 200 guests -- not guests from 200 countries, as is being reported will attend.

But they have their silly protocols. It’s a national event, one that’s swept around the world in an appalling hype tsunami.

I have vain recollections about our 1996 wedding. It was perfect.

We had a small family wedding in our little church, then a quiet dinner with family at one of our favorite restaurants.

Then the next day we had an “All Honest Strangers Welcome” pig roast at a local picnic park.

Anyone was welcome who would by attending pledge to at least try not to steal our stuff. We found that people, even outlaws, are generally respectful if you tell them they’re welcome to party, get pie-eyed, and eat for free if they agree to not steal towels, envelopes or glassware from the gift table.

I guess about 250 friends and honest strangers showed up.

That’s where one of my old friends pulled me aside and told me to always argue naked.

While I’ve never applied the wisdom to my own marriage, I have without fail passed it on to every bride and groom I’ve met since that splendid September day.

One of these days I really ought to try it with Val. But it’s a nerve-rattling proposition for a shy sort of guy like me.

Maybe I ought to test drive it elsewhere first.

I wonder how it would go over in the bar if the next time I started arguing about why the Pirates stink, I just started to shuck my duds.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Like any earth-conscious soul, I’ve been troubled ever since learning of the existence of massive floating islands of plastic garbage sprawling across the planet’s oceans.

One, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is, according to Save My Oceans, twice the size of Texas.

That comparison seems unfair -- to garbage dumps. The Texas Hill country is splendid, but much of vast west Texas is so desolate even native troubadour Joe Ely says it only holds scenic appeal to men just released from long stretches in the pen.

But what to do about continent-sized masses of plastic garbage floating in our once-pristine oceans, most of which could probably have been recycled.

Clean it up? That sounds utterly futile. It’s just too massive.

And where would you put that much garbage? I guess even west Texans would oppose it being dumped all over them -- although all that shiny plastic would certainly add welcome sparkle to the landscape’s bleakness.

I say the solution is to colonize it.

But with whom? Should its purpose be penal or pleasure?

I thought long and hard about an idea that seemed to make perfect ironic sense: a Garbageological Guantanamo.

I thought it should be a penal colony for anyone who’s ever been busted tossing a Coke bottle or McDonald’s cup out the window.

But I had to discard that idea because I realized that over-population would soon sink the plastic island. There are just too many people who just don’t give a damn. They toss plastic bottles and trash-filled grocery bags out the windows of their cars all over my quaint little town.

I’d understand this if, say, their cars were about to be used in the royal wedding parade for Will and Kate. But that’s usually not the case.

Their cars are crap, too. And they dress like bums to boot.

It’s a pity because most of the really trashy people on the planet can’t be shamed into not littering and they are so pervasive that I’ve never heard of a single person getting busted for littering in a world that is literally awash in trash.

So until we change the laws and allow for vigilante homicide of petty litterers, there’s nothing we can do about it.

Then I thought maybe we could skip the common white trash trashers and go after the big guys. You know, the corporate big shots who are polluting our streams and air with careless business practices that earn them millions while poisoning the planet.

I know, I know. It was just a joke. We don’t punish people who do that. We offer them tax breaks. It’s stunning the multi-million dollar give-aways Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett is showering on fat cat donors from the Marcellus Shale gas industry at the same time his budget is forcing teacher layoffs all across the state.

So how about this? Instead of disparaging the massive plastic islands that are killing our marine life, we promote it as posh island living.

Yes, island living, the epitome of modern chic. People dream of hitting the lottery and picking up and moving to St. Barts or Virgin Gorda.

It would be an easy sell, I think, to pitch condos on an island that can pick up and move so residents wouldn’t have to.

Either way, something must be done. This is a very depressing problem on levels ranging from intellectual to just plain icky.

Researchers say more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds die each year from ingesting or becoming entangled in plastic.

So the fish eat the plastic and then we eat the fish. It’s a dreadful cycle destined to end, I guess, with the food chain becoming a real chain like the kind hardy mountain folks put on their tires to negotiate deep snow.

Fish are attracted to the the shiny bits of plastic for the same reason deceptive Rapala lures work so well.

If it keeps going like this, the fresh sushi I so enjoy will differ little in content from the little plastic replicas they put in the windows of the restaurants to lure in guys like me.

It’ll be a sad day for anyone hooked on sushi.

As if planetary matters could get any more sad.