Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Driven by hardship and a vision

As the poet said, reports of my death have been great. I know it is a dark day indeed when someone has more pressing needs than posting to his blog. That isn’t what America wanted. So, here I am.

I was on a date last night. Well, I don’t know if you’d call it a date. As Bill Clinton might say, it all depends on your definition of the word “jizz”. I’ve been on a lot of dates. I keep my spirits up. I don’t let them make me stop. I never dated before I got out of college. I just hung around with people and slept with them. The concept of dating is much more structured. It is event-oriented. It has rituals. I never had to do this stuff until somehow there was a kind of shift in the landscape of women I knew. I think this had something to do with the stock market’s crest in 1999-2000. “Take something off the table,” some warned. I tried dating.

The ultimate goal of dating, for too many women, is the receipt of a ring made from gold and diamonds. I was taking a more moment-to-moment approach. It was asymmetrical. Expectations were out of whack. Too often, she was dating to get the eventual ring, but it would be crass to admit it. And sleeping with someone for jewelry is called prostitution. So maybe they would prefer to sleep with you without expecting anything in return, and pretend they were empowered, self-determining, sexual beings. But then what about the ring? I tried drinking, also.

It began to be more apparent, as my more mature but not any older friends began to pair off, that marriage is what happens when the musical chairs music stops. Whoever you are with when the panic sets in, that’s your mate for life, chosen by God or Casualty. They have finally found the one. Who was there, to put it charitably, when they needed them.

So, we date, slogging through the murk of human kindness. Ask any adventurer. Why do we climb women? Because they are there!

by Jack, March 29, 2006 6:31 PM | More from Women

Within the Chronology

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