We caught up on Facebook one night in the dead of summer. The second to last time I saw her I was in a bar and the second she walked in I pulled my hat down over my eyes and let my friend know I had to leave. I didn’t want to see her. The last time I saw her it didn’t end well. We briefly dated years ago, stopped and then tried again a few years after that and now here it was about ten years later. We had a few things in common, some similar music tastes and ummm, I guess that’s it. She was beyond the partying type. Well actually, that’s all she really was. There was never really any way she could be your girlfriend as every time you saw her you ended up listening to her talk about getting fucked up, watched her getting fucked up or got fucked up yourself to avoid the fact that you were with her.

I have a lot of friends from different backgrounds. People I know from punk rock music, people I know from going to hippie shows, people I worked with, people I dated or my friends dated and people I know from the vast network of suburban marijuana dealers. These types were usually the type of people who you would never really want to spend much time with but often you found yourself sitting in some room surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles listening to a group of people half your age talking about deep things like “dude, mirrors are fucked up, like why does shit have to be backwards in them?”  This is how I knew Jessica. She was one of these people. Fun enough to spend some time with here and there, but not someone you want to take on a road trip (well, I would never take anyone on a road trip). We met because of marijuana and alcohol.

Jessica found me on Facebook years after we dated and we started talking and as it turns out things got a little…sexy. If you aren’t aware, a good amount of people on Facebook and social networking sites are chatting with old friends and old lover and sparks are flying. It doesn’t matter if they are currently married, were married or are about to be married, everyone does it. Your husband probably does it or did, as I’m sure your wife has. No big deal, they’re still going to make it home tonight and be with you. At the time Jessica and I were talking I was not working. It was the dead of summer we had been talking about a week and graduated from Facebook chats to text messages. We planned on meeting and hanging out on a Tuesday.

Tuesday rolled around and it was one of those disgusting hot-as-piss humid days we get here in New England. She was currently living in an apartment in Lynn, Massachusetts. The area of Lynn, Massachusetts was the area “down by 7-11”. If you know where that is, you know that you’re not seeing many Volvos parked around there if you catch my drift. If you do ever see a Volvo parked “down by 7-11” in Lynn, Massachusetts you should probably call the police as the car is probably stolen.

I arrive at Jessica’s house at about 1:00 PM and of course lock my car. Her apartment is in a two family house. These types of ugly complexes are everywhere in New England. They are truly gross looking buildings and hers was no slouch. Jessica greets me at the door and she is right, she lost a lot of weight. She is wearing a sleeveless t-shirt that is ripped way too low exposing her braless breasts. The back of the shirt has a series of holes ripped all the way from the bottom to the top, like gills. I imagine one would see this type of shirt at a 38 Special concert, biker bar or in a stripper’s closet. She also has a nice pair of jeans on.

Her apartment, which she shares with a 19-year old co-worker from the restaurant she works at, is a typical sad affair. Two mismatched couches, a reasonably sized HD flat screen. A shelf with all the Harry Potter books, all the Twilight books, a bunch of those books you see in bookstores that I assume goth chicks or chicks that shop in Hot Topic would read…and one Henry Miller book (binding intact). There’s a long wide hallway that leads to more rooms and a kitchen. The rug is filthy. There are no fans anywhere in the apartment. It is about 98 degrees here. We smoke some of my pot I brought over. She mentioned the night before we would “match, which basically means “you smoke yours and then we’ll smoke some of mine” She of course had none.

Jessica suggested we got for a drive and she would drive her car. This was good news as I was pretty much out of gas. We drove to her old town where she grew up and walked the beach. It was far too hot and she was still wearing that horrible shirt. We must have looked like some sort of fucked up biker/pimp and hooker duo walking the beach. She then mentioned her dad recently had the house done and we should drive by it. I was a little reluctant. Why would I care about your dad’s house? I hate houses. Fuck houses. We drive by and low and behold his car is there so she wants to stop in and visit him. She wants to go visit her dad while dressed in that shirt with a dude that looks like a biker. Great. I’m still pretty high from earlier and I look like the “creepy guy that’s gonna have sex with your daughter later cause she’s wearing that shirt and, well of course” I also grew up in the town we were in. I have family there who are pretty prominent around town so I decide to play that card with him. He is a pretty normal looking dad, looks like he just got in from playing golf. He offers me a beer but I take some lemonade. I mention my family and he of course knows them and I somehow make it known that Jessica and I are just friends with a lot of “yeah isn’t she crazy?” type comments. I somehow make it out of there unharmed.

I hadn’t really been smoking that much at the time, and with the addition of the weather I felt pretty gross. We went back to her place. Her roommate soon came home with a nice young lady and Jessica mentioned we were “looking for some weed” I had no idea we were. I had twenty bucks on me. It was now dinnertime so Jessica cooked us some “ziti with meat sauce” that was basically ground turkey sautéed with some jar tomato sauce. If I hadn’t been starving and high I probably would have judged it more than I did. I had two bowls.

If you’ve ever hung out with someone who works in a restaurant listening to him or her talk about working in a restaurant can be amusing and informative. You get inside tips, generally the same anecdotal stories from anyone in the business. If you’ve ever hung out with two people who work in the same restaurant it can be one of the most painful things you can endure. They’ll spend hours talking about what this one did and that one did. The remainder of my “date” was spent hanging around this apartment with Jessica, her roommate, his “date” while they talked about work and made various phone calls trying to find weed. I felt like I was seventeen again!  The whole scene was depressing and made me resent “fucked up” people more than I generally do. Sitting around a living room getting high and talking about different times when you were high and future times when you will get high is not for me I guess. I left Jessica’s place around midnight and have not seen her since.

Although this wasn’t necessarily an “online date” we did meet up again online. Jessica reminded me of the first date I wrote about in this blog, just a bit younger. A sad mess of a girl who still had the same tired “drive” in her that she had ten years previous, to get fucked up as many nights a week as possible. I can’t live this kind of lifestyle at this point, and I find it actually makes me a bit angry when people are like this. Life is awesome and should be experienced in full clarity in my opinion. Every time I’ve dated for long periods of time I have spent most of the time sober as I always tell women “I want to remember these moments with you” Why would I want anything less?

While I haven’t had any crazy dates to write about like my first two I wrote about, I do have a number of old ones like this I have looked back on and without embarrassing myself too much I guess I can talk about on here. I love meeting people, even if I have nothing in common with them and nothing is ever going to become of a friendship or relationship. I find the less I have in common with someone the more interesting the experience. I write just about every day so memories are always a bit easier to access, and well, I have made some pretty poor decisions when it comes to dating and women in general. The only thing I can do now is look back and laugh.