So, my former best friend and his brother both knocked up two really trashy, overweight girls. The both got swept up in working low-paying jobs after high school and somehow, one after another, knocked up two trashy girls from around the neighborhood. The kicker? These two girls are cousins and both brothers are now paying each of their baby mommas a very meager amount of child support.

I remember about five years ago, while my friend was not yet a father, I had been urging him to start community college, to set a foundation up for his future. Even when his brother got a girl pregnant I remember urging my friend to wrap up. He just laughed it off. Of course he wouldn't be a father any time soon.

So you could imagine my surprise when all the baby pics started popping up on facebook, all the congratulations from all the women in his life, all the happy posturing. I didn't say shit. They broke up not even a year later.

It turned out that even more of my old friends had gotten women pregnant than I thought. Of the dozen or so kids I used to hang out with from the neighborhood, eight of them are now fathers. Only one of them is still with his kid's mom.

It feels like there are so many pitfalls in a man's life that can just completely fuck him up along the way. Being raised without a father, getting a girl pregnant, getting caught up and then normalized into shitty jobs. After I got into college I found myself surrounded by people with better backgrounds, more or less. It just shocked the hell out of me to look back at my childhood friends and realized, damn, maybe less men 'make it' in life than we think.

I almost see them as casualties of their own physical and emotional needs. My former best friend was a good looking white dude in his teen years, a total serial monogamist who always had a girlfriend. Now he put on about 50 lbs, is a dad, works barely above minimum wage (which he's really proud of, too), and looks like a trucker.

It makes me wonder if there are way more male casualties out there than we think. Like, they're just existing like complete worker drones because their life hit a major bump along the way. Becoming that way myself terrifies me. Nobody grows up expecting to become a drone.

At least TRP is, by its nature, a countermeasure to such a fate.