Saturday, May 10, 2014

G.C., my lovely.


Okay, so you know how one of your favorite things is when I post on here after having a couple of drinks? Well then tonight is going to be the bee’s knees for you. Let’s be clear and delimit our conversation right now:

This is a rumination on (subjects which will be addressed but will be specifically sideswiped):

1) Singlehood
2) George Clooney
3) Trailers



Okay, so here’s the deal, in summation. A few years ago I went through a breakup that left me raw and ragged. Just torn up. Broken. The kind of breakup that is the personal version of active plate tectonics. I had some good friends who nursed me through it. My then-roommate Eggplant  was a little bit of a revelation in that she reminded me to do things other than sulk (sulking, it turns out, is my default position). I had a weird, intermittent, brief-ish relationship with a charming and delightful girl who I adored immensely, but it turns out that the things which attract me to women are also the things which make it impossible to have healthy, functional relationships with them. Such is life. Since then I have been bone-starved single (NOT a euphemism, though I realize that by pausing here, I am basically creating a euphemism.), with the occasionally ill-advised, morally ambiguous dalliance thrown in here or there. So ...

Q): Why do I mention this?
A) Well, honestly, because I have a blog to write and that demands content. You try writing a blog and see how far you get without fumbling into this kinda territory.

Q): Yeah, but why really?

A) Okay, fine. I went to a reading tonight with a friend of mine whose company I enjoy greatly. She is happily in a relationship, which is fine with me, but it was the first time in a while now that I have shown up to an event not-stag. I have been showing up to things alone for so long now that I had to take stock of the room in a way that I had forgotten about having to do. See, when you show up with somebody it makes everything so much more massively complicated. If I was in a relationship right now, I would explicate it, but I’m not so I won’t. The point is that - after having spent the majority of my adult life in relationships - I am still - somehow still - weirded out by being just an individual. And it has been a couple of years now!


To be clear though: I am not on the market. I don’t have a Plenty of Fish account or a Match.com acount or even a Fetlife account. I am not looking, I am not hoping. Right now I am in grad school and I want to be good at it. I know me, I know me & relationships, and I kinda feel right now that I would not be a very good partner. I did my undergrad while working 40+ hours a week and I realize now that I probably shouldn’t have. So, in lieu of making the same mistakes. I am opting to make only strange new mistakes.

All this life-reflection has a point.

The point is that I live in my apartment. Next to my apartment is a construction site where they have been building a 5 or 6 story apartment complex for nearly a year. Well, because people like me exist - and I can’t walk past it without wanting to hurl a Molotov Cocktail into it, you know, on general principles - they have a security guard who lives out of a very small trailer.

As a fan of the small-house movement, I was initially very interested in this trailer (from a design standpoint) so I paid attention to it. In paying attention, what I discovered was that the young graveyard shift security guard who lived in it was having kind of the best life ever!

Or at least the best life one can have when one is a graveyard shift security guard.

He is a young and objectively attractive African-American man and he has a daisy-chain of young women running in and out of his trailer, which smells massively of a pot field set ablaze.

Now to be clear, I am not envious. I do not want to change places with this person in some sort of Ryan Reynolds/Jason Bateman change-up. I do however imagine that for a young man such as this, there is a situation in which the following statement will actually work: “You wanta come back to my trailer? I have some pot.”

From beginning to end, I have been genuinely lucky enough to only have amazing women in my life, so I have never even contemplated lines like these. But these lines must happen in the world, right? I have too many bartender friends to believe that nothing but love is happening out there on a nightly basis. As someone who has no idea how the come-back-to-my-trainer world works, I am fascinated. I am constantly fascinated by the world and this happens to be what fascinated me tonight. If I was a night shift security guard, would I be able to lure women back to my honey trap trailer so efficiently? Most likely not! I hate hate hate making small talk - though I am a winner of the Dale Carnegie Sales Talk Challenge - but small talk is probably the manner in which to engage. As opposed to what I do which - because I’m passive aggressive - is basically just a series of unhappy facial expressions.

What is weirding me out about all of this, I suppose, is nothing new. If you want to graph my 20s on - you know - a graph, it would be pretty silly looking. I’m a little bit of a reprobate in that way. I guess my problem is that we do not get a membership card and so the young man living in a trailer outside my apartment has no idea that I am on his side. I am happy if he is getting pot-laid in his trailer (Though I have always felt that was lazy).

I am not trying to get pot-laid in a trailer. In fact, I’m not entirely certain I would enjoy getting pot-laid in a trailer (though I am from a very small town and so who the fuck knows?)

But George Clooney got engaged. I think we all kind of knew that would happen one day. A confirmed bachelor is just a man who has not met the right woman yet. That’s my entirely true platitude, BTW.


Anyway, I hope that GC and that amazing woman he’s marrying have a very happy life together. The  rest of us though are likely to continue to commiserate quietly. Quiet commiseration is better that Plenty of Fish.

Also - in case it was unclear - I am desperate to avoid having to go on a date, but I am not G.C.
  

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