I am no fan of parades.

It’s an admitted shortcoming on my part, and I suspect it is because I’m not allowed to be in them.

Still, being allergic to parades as we know them is an obvious handicap for a weekly newspaper hack.

Especially nowadays, because it seems every time you turn around someone is putting on a parade and/or winter festival. There’s just no way around them.

This is especially so during certain holidays.

And so it is not only are we poor downtrodden weekly editorial hacks hung up in ever worsening traffic for much of the week, now we have to spend weekends getting hung up in dumb traffic to go watch other people who are purposely hung up in traffic to the point a lot of them get out and walk to wherever it is they’re going.

Seems a bit much. Parades, of course, have been around forever. There was even one in the classic movie Animal House. I’d Google to find out how they got started (probably had something to do with war and bringing home captives to cut their heads off) but our internet is down and I’m on a deadline and that’s all water under the bridge anyhow.

For one thing, parades aren’t going anywhere (though it might be fun to see a rogue parade veer off course and try to escape).

If anything, they’re only increasing. For another, what we’re faced with now is a proliferation of events attached to parades. Festivals and such.

And that’s when it hit me. Us men are purposely being evented to death and we’re too dumb to realize it.

For starters, many if not most of these events are planned and executed by women, some of whom are natural busybodies and do not like to see us men sitting around in our natural state of not doing anything we don’t have to.

Editor’s note: Us men know we do that in order to conserve energy in case we’re needed for an emergency or to go out and hunt and gather, or win a college football game.

Anyway, not doing anything in the meantime makes these naturally suspicious sort of women wonder what we’re up too. And that means they’re forever out there dreaming up things to keep us busy and out of our natural habitat, which in a perfect world would consist mainly of fishing boats and pool halls.

I know some will scoff. Scoff away. But I have proof that parades are by and large run by women, and here it is: Pembroke and Richmond Hill have Christmas parades and winter festivals. Bryan County doesn’t.

Why? Because women have considerable power in the two municipalities, either as elected or appointed officials. By contrast, look at the Bryan County Commission. It’s all men.

Sure, there are women in seats of power at the county level, but when it comes to the power to throw a parade, well – nope.

Now some of us men might decide to participate in a parade if someone asks us nicely to be grand marshal and throws in a couple cold ones along the way, or a voucher for later, but that’s not the same thing as having to actually watch a parade, much less throwing one.

Besides, if us men decided we wanted to put on a parade, we’d do it on a work day so as not to screw up the weekend. You want to have a parade, do it on a Monday or Thursday and then take the rest of the week off.

And if we were in charge of holding a parade, we’d try to get an Abrams tank in it or something, just for some shock and awe value. And maybe the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, and some sumo wrestlers to keep spectators in line, and a couple cows or mules. And some baton twirlers. You need baton twirlers.

Oh, and lots of bagpipes. For my money you can’t go wrong with bagpipes.

In fact, if I were in charge of a parade it would be all bagpipes and cows and wrestlers and Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and baton twirlers riding mules, and there would be no set parade route or staging time or convoy interval or any of that nonsense.

The parade will instead commence when ready, go where it dares and end when the last bagpipe runs out of air and all the Visigoths and Ostrogoths are repelled back to Ohio.