More and more of my friends are hitting the age where they’re settling down to start their own families, and whenever we find a chance to catch up and chat about our lives, they inevitably ask when I’m going to start a family of my own. It tends to catch them off guard when I say I have no intention of doing so, but I’m a man of principles, and this is one issue on which my convictions are unshakeable: I refuse to bring children into a world where the lazy idiot Jughead exists.
Now to be clear, this isn’t to say that I simply don’t want children. I would love nothing more than to be a father, but part of fatherhood, in my eyes at least, is ensuring that one’s children must never suffer the slothful, arrogant ways of the perfidious burger simpleton known as Jughead. His mindless lust for all things greasy and deep-fried is no fault of my own, yet that would not absolve me of culpability for pretending as if his oafish ways simply do not exist at all. If the only way I can spare my children the pain of existing alongside this braindead french fry vacuum is for them to never be born at all, so be it. It’s better than watching them grow up in a world in which Jughead eats dozens of hamburgers before a burger-eating contest in a way that paradoxically helps him because he considers it a form of practice instead of something that will just make him full too early.
I’m always upfront during dates with prospective partners that I would sooner end my own life than force a child to spend theirs watching the imbecilic lout Jughead cavalierly shirk his duties in the blind pursuit of pies, hot dogs, and other such calorically dense meals. It rarely goes over well. They’ll usually try to make the same tired counterarguments about how a number of strips indicate that Jughead actually possesses a deep intellect that he merely obscures with a facade of stupidity, which I’ll explain only reaffirms my decision. That his beastly, vacant-eyed indolence is an act of human will rather than a fact of nature is an outrage too great for me to bear inflicting on another generation. This has so far kept me from finding love, but it’s a price I pay gladly if it means sparing my hypothetical children the misery of beholding Riverdale’s King Dunce.
How, after all, could I look my child in the eye and hear them ask me, “Why has the foul dullard Jughead been allowed to persist in his asinine, hamburger-coveting ways? Why do Archie and his friends not simply slay the graceless Jughead with a poisoned milkshake and end his shiftless inanity once and for all? Why would you, in your own full knowledge of the agony of coexisting with such a cretin, condemn me to the same, dreadful fate?” I don’t have answers to those questions. I imagine no one does, but I won’t make the mistake of thinking that this somehow justifies perpetuating the earthly cycle of Jughead-knowledge instead of doing my part to end it.
If one day I wake up and find Jughead has been purged from the earth, that uttering the name “Forsythe Pendleton Jones III” elicits only blank stares and uncertain shrugs, I’ll welcome the opportunity to raise children of my own. But until that day comes, I’ll never be so selfish and shortsighted as to think that life in a world where Jughead exists can be considered anything other than a curse.
