caffeineandcookies

Ah loneliness, there you are again, just in time for that time of year when you’re the biggest enemy in the world. I knew I would see you again; we are such great friends that I was surprised you were gone for so long. After all this time though, I realize we need to be best friends. The other choice has obviously proved to not be such a good friend. This weekend is Christmas; at this point a holiday I care less about each year. People ask what I am doing out here for the holiday as “nobody should be alone on Christmas” I don’t subscribe to this belief at all, especially nowadays. I am perfectly fine not dealing with the gift giving and taking. I’ll see some friends and eat amazing meals and that will be enough.

I went on quite a few dates this past year, mostly with women I wouldn’t be caught dead caring about. I wrote about most of them, some I left alone. If nothing that exciting or horrible happened I just didn’t need to talk about it. One date I never wrote about was the one I met at a chain restaurant near my place. Earlier in the day I discovered a hornet’s nest in the drivers side mirror. I decided to deal with this on the way to the date. Spraying it with a little bottle of perfume my mom had left in the car. It was about 90 degrees out and I had the windows closed up tight. The air conditioning in the car didn’t work and the hornet would have made their way inside the car had I left the window open. At red lights I would crack the window and spray the mirror with this perfume, closing it immediately after. I was sweating and now smelled of perfume. When I arrived to meet my date it was yet another “oh jeez” muttered to myself when she arrived not looking anything like her pictures on her profile.

After dinner, I asked my date if she would take me to a store to buy some hornet killer. There we were, this girl I wouldn’t have been caught dead with on a date anytime prior to this year doing “normal shit” Running an errand. After this, we went to a closed car dealership as I was in the market for a car and I wanted to look at some without having to deal with a dealer. After this she invited me to her place where we watched television and did what adults do when they are alone together.

Driving home thinking about the night, I don’t think I necessarily had a great time. Dinner was okay, taking this poor woman to a store to buy bug spray and spend time with my neurotic personality and me for a few more minutes than she needed to was funny (I know I can be an obnoxious handful if I am in a mood where I’m trying to impress or be funny). Empty sexual experiences are just that though: empty. Driving home is always a sad place to be. At least for me, I feel like a scumbag.

I had a few other non-eventful dates, even one I set up in California for when I was visiting here for a week that I think ended abruptly. It was so fast I hardly knew what happen. “Women out here are different” I thought to myself. Not really.

My best dates ever though, they happened out here. I met a woman on the website that I immediately hit it off with. We spent hours and hours talking about everything we had in common and had a number of dates after that. I was just about ready to let her know I wanted to move on to something more serious. A short time later, just this past week it ended. Out of the blue. Fuck, wait; I really liked this girl!

As it turns out, it doesn’t matter if I liked the girl. Right now, the way life is I apparently don’t get the girl at the end. I don’t want to go on dates anymore. I find them exhausting. They drain all of my energy and personality out in one sitting. At the end of the day I ask myself, is it better to have one thousand nights in a row falling asleep alone? Singing some sad hopeless melody in hopes that I lose my way and make it to dream land one verse in. Or is it better to sleep one thousand nights in a row with someone. Keeping them awake with my constant tossing and turning, waking up over and over. Sleeping a total of three hours. Well, three for me, probably more like two for them. I have no idea what the answer is, but the further and further I get away from the second  choice, I realize I am ready to deal with singing those made up songs in my head as I fall asleep in whatever state I decided I needed to be in that night.

Somehow I got myself into a situation where a woman was sitting across from me telling me about how her Halfling character killed some beast with one eye with an enchanted crossbow (that was also flaming). I can explain.

I recently stopped using the dating site I was using as I was hanging out with a nice young lady I met on there for a little bit. I briefly mentioned her after my second one as she wrote me the morning after that date. Of course I managed to fuck that up but I’m not going to talk about that. I’m an idiot like that.

I was still getting messages from “the Kid Rock lady” as recent as last week. Just weekly one word e-mails “Hi”, etc. and then I got an e-mail from a woman named Jessica. She apparently liked my profile and when I went to check hers out it mentioned she played Dungeons and Dragons. It didn’t even matter what she looked like, I obviously had to meet her.

I don’t play Dungeons and Dragons anymore, especially since I discovered orgasms and I don’t know, eating. I have two Dungeons and Dragons stories. The first one involves me breaking the law. In Dungeons and Dragons there is a person named the Dungeon Master, or “DM” (check my profile pic). He pretty much controls everything in the game aside from what the players do. He maps out the adventure for you and is responsible for keeping the game interesting and challenging. A good DM should obviously be smart and have a good imagination. The DM my friends and I first used was an older boy named Andrew. He lived two doors down from me and was the ultimate nerd. Granted I was playing Dungeons and Dragons, I still kept my hair long and feathered, and my heavy metal t-shirts nice and tight on my little chubby self. This was 1983. I was in between heavy metal and punk rock, I was 14 years old, confused, covered in acne and had an active imagination. D & D was right up my alley. Andrew though, he was just a nerd. Math team, glasses that made him uglier, greasy hair, probably making millions of dollars now doing something amazing while I go on shallow dates with women, you know. So Andrew was our DM and he always had particularly hard dungeons he set up. At one point in the middle of a month long “campaign” he went away to New Hampshire with his family. My friend and I decided it would be a good idea to break into Andrew’s house so we could find the maps. Of course after spending a few scared moments rifling through his room we realized he probably took them with him and left.

My second Dungeons and Dragons story involves a stripper. We had another DM named Chris. Chris was this big dude, tall and fat, big white dude afro. He was also older than us, not as good as Andrew was, but he was okay. At one point when he turned 18 and we were all still 16 or so his brother held a birthday party for him. He hired a stripper. So in the basement of Chris’ parents house was a group of six or seven of probably the nerdiest looking kids you’ve ever seen in your life, and a stripper. I had a girlfriend at the time, but was still awkward around women and I can only imagine what this scenario was like. I wish there was a video of this as it may be the saddest video you could ever see, like sadder than watching a video of an old woman falling down and breaking her hip.

Those are my two biggest memories of Dungeons and Dragons. I recently bought a bunch of the old books again just to see them thinking I might get back into it at some point. Yeah right.

I replied to this woman and mentioned to her how I used to play Dungeons and Dragons too! I just didn’t mention it was when Ronald Reagan was president. She wrote me back three minutes later telling me about her character in the game and we ended up chatting back and forth for most of the day. She suggested we meet sooner than later, like that night. She seemed a little more normal than my first date; we decided to meet at a Barnes and Noble in between where she lives and I live.

Again, on the Internet and dating sites in general, the photos people post are (obviously) the best possible pictures they can find. Sometimes the pictures posted are jaw dropping. A faded photo where a woman has teased hair and stone-washed jeans…and a beeper, sideways photos, photos of pets, children, landscapes from trips they took, etc. I understand people are insecure and want to look their best or hide but come on, try a little harder maybe. Jessica had two photos up and neither really told much of a story. I certainly was not talking to her because of her looks. I wanted to meet a woman who played Dungeons and Dragons! Even when I played as a teenager there were never any girls playing so this seemed like a good idea. Also, I was kind of bored and was having a low self esteem day.

We met outside the store and she went to shake my hand and I gave her a sort of half-hug thing that was awkward and weird right off the bat. My first thought upon seeing her in person was “yeah I would never have sex with this person”. She looked like someone but I couldn’t place who it was. This bugged me for the majority of the “date”…well, until I figured it out.

Jessica was a little pushy. She had a personality that I don’t think I would be able to hang with at all. We sat in the coffee shop at the bookstore and talked for a few hours. She was another person who didn’t get the music part of my profile. Maybe I should just write that I am extremely hip and a music snob on there. Then I wouldn’t have to have these kinds of exchanges with anyone:

“I saw Alter Bridge in concert and they were amazing!”

“Oh yeah, I bet”

“Yeah, Mark Tremonti is great”

“Oh yeah, Mark is fuckin’ sick” I replied

I have no idea who Mark Tremonti is. Well, now I do because I had to Google “Alter Bridge” so I could remember his name. As it turns out Mark Tremonti is a founding member of Creed! Wow, that is one thing I never wanted to know. I knew there was a guy named Scott Stapp that sang for Creed and that was it. I’ve never heard them and was trying to never hear them or know nothing about them aside from that guy’s name and there was a connection to Christian rock. I wonder if when I die I will get the time back I spent having that conversation with her about Alter Bridge (it went on a little longer. Apparently the singer can “really sing” and she got a thumb drive shaped like a guitar with a recording of the concert on it), the time I looked up information to get Mark Tremonti’s name and now writing this. I bet Mark Tremonti would know.

She then wanted to check out my tattoos, so after seeing the (two) dragons, wizard, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and various other dude bullshit I have on my arms she points one out.

“What’s that one?”

“The Mexican God of Death”

“No it isn’t, it’s Achmed the Dead Terrorist” she says in a horribly executed Middle Eastern accent

“What?”

“Jeff Dunham’s puppet, you know”

“Oh yeah, that guy”

“It’s Achmed the Dead Terrorist”

“No, it’s the Mexican God of Death”

“And look he’s sitting there with his arms crossed like a rapper…like Eminem!”

“Well, he is usually perched on top of you know, like a pillar”

“Or like one of those Aztec temple things that look like pyramids”

“Sure”

(help?)

I’ve never seen any of this Jeff Dunham person’s stand up, but I know the audience he caters to and a good friend of mine who generally has great taste in stuff completely despises him so I just assume he is awful. I can still hear her and her voice saying “ACHMED THE DEAD TERRORIST!” and it’s very upsetting to me. Not as upsetting as whom I finally realized the woman reminded me of physically: PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN. While sitting there, maybe an hour or so into hanging out it came to me and I have to say it sealed my decision to most likely not have a second date with her. Even if she had turned out to know all sorts of things about John Coltrane and been into Mick Taylor era Rolling Stones the Philip Seymour Hoffman thing was now in my head and it wouldn’t go away.

While this was a public date and I didn’t get to survey one of those depressing lonely apartments, she pretty much turned me off personality-wise and I can just assume her apartment is filled with stacks of horrible books on dragons and the smell of lonely. On our way out of the store she stopped us and kissed me on the lips for a second. A half hour later she texted me “I could get used to that kiss”. I didn’t reply and haven’t heard from her since.

In 1998 the Internet was an awful place. Well, in retrospect it was. I can’t recall what was on the Internet at the time but I kind of remember it like this:  Free e-mail, online forums where people gave their horrible opinion on everything, pornography, chat rooms, pornography, news, pornography, personal websites where people would put up links to places like “YAHOO.COM” among pictures of their car, some sort of horrible flash thing that played music, and a giant stat counter in comic sans (that usually read “044”). Somehow though, I managed to meet some women. I can’t remember the format of Yahoo Personals in 1998 or if that’s what I had, but I ended up meeting a girl from the South Shore named Ann.

Ann was from Florida; this should have been my first sign that this might not be the best idea; also she lived on the South Shore. I lived on the North Shore. I remember we exchanged pictures. I’m not sure how though. I didn’t have a digital camera at the time and who knows what picture I may have sent her. I do remember seeing a picture of her and thinking she was okay looking.

I was not really a bar person and the relationships I had been in up to this point were mostly via friends of friends and that kind of thing. The idea of dating women from the Internet sounded interesting to me. In my opinion you could at least spend some time getting to know each other. I don’t necessarily agree with this at this point. Tone in writing is hard to read in small grammatically challenged text messages and brief one and two line chat conversations at this point. I have experienced a number of let’s-call-them-disagreements because the tone of a message was read wrong. It truly is just better to talk to a human being face to face. I was kind of a pussy though. This seemed easy to me, less stressful.

Ann and I talked on the phone and she had an accent that was a dead ringer for Jodie Foster. Some of the things we had in common: we smoked marijuana, we smoked cigarettes, and we were single.

After a few conversations we decided to meet. I would drive down to her place on the South Shore, which frankly, is a pain in the fucking ass. At this point in my life, to drive to the South Shore for a date I would have to be put up in a hotel for the night, and the date would have to look like Marcia Brady, or Joyce DeWitt. Like most women I’ve ever dated, Ann lived in one of those ugly two story brick apartment buildings. This may have been my first visit to one of these “single woman with cat(s)” apartments that I would frequent for years after.  These apartments are all the same at this point. The same furniture in every one, no remnants of past men, a few cat toys strewn about on the floor, a number of CD’s that sit on a shelf writing a biography for your eyes.

Ann greeted me at the door and gave me a little hug. She was kind of dressed like a dude, or a lesbian. A flannel shirt with a tank top under it, jeans, you know. I met her cat and as it turns out the cat ended up being a little more interesting. I did not know the area so I had her direct us to places to eat and whatever other place of interest we needed to see. I went out with Ann four or five times. Each time we hung out a dinner was involved. Each time she ordered a chicken finger dinner. Four chicken finger dinners in what, a two-month period? A red flag went off after the first chicken finger dinner. I mean, really? Chicken fingers are great and all, but you should never eat a plate of chicken fingers in front of another person. If you are ever in a situation where you are eating a chicken finger plate in front of another human being you are probably on your way to a NASCAR race, or somewhere in New Hampshire.

On this first date we went to eat at some chain place where it was a long non-conversation about nothing at all. As it turned out we had all the conversations we would ever need to have over the phone. Ann was painfully shy and a pretty boring person. After dinner we drove around the South Shore, which was okay. It just looks and feels like the North Shore except you have no idea where you are going. The beaches seemed a little better. We made our way to a beach and walked and I had a one-sided conversation. She suggested we go back to her place to get high. We go back and end up playing with her cat for a little while. Her talking to her cat bums me out a little bit. She had recently moved to Massachusetts from Florida to deal with an ill grandmother and stayed. I don’t think she had many friends beyond that cat and “some of the folks at the call center” How many lonely chicken dinners on Friday nights with the cat, five hundred cigarettes and a sink full of an odd amount of dishes has Ann endured?

Ann suggested we play Yahtzee. For a minute I pinch myself and wonder if I just woke up at my aunts house in 1981, but no I’m here in the present on a date with this new girl, high as a kite on a couch…about to play Yahtzee. The Yahtzee ended up being a little more fun than I had remembered. I mean, not as fun as sexual intercourse, but it was a first date anyway.

We had a few more dates. She ended up being a little more talkative but us hanging out turned out to just be someone to get fucked up with and do some adult, non-Yahtzee type stuff…an hour away from where I lived. What tiny little spark we had kind of faded out before it even ignited really. At one point I went away for a week trip and when I came back I remember her telling me she really missed me and I made some sort of cold comment. Shortly after maybe the fifth time we hung out I broke it off with Ann…via e-mail.  The only way I guess I can justify this is it was early on in the life of the Internet so maybe I didn’t know this was a weak move? Yeah that’s it.

This would be my first of a number of “Internet dating” situations I’d get involved in. In retrospect most of them were good. The longest relationship I’ve ever been in (7 years) was with someone I met online and we are still good friends. The last real serious but brief relationship was also with someone I met online. The difference between these relationships and these random dates is that I met the long-term women without the dating stigma attached at first. It’s pretty impossible at this point, at least for me, to get thrown in the fire with a new person and adjust to their life and my life. It’s harder at this age as well since most folks are pretty much how they are going to be forever. Some of my close friends have suggested that I go on more “bad dates” like my first two I wrote about because they gave me material to write about. While this sounds enticing I don’t really have it in me to purposely seek out women I know I am not going to get along with just for something to write about. It’s obviously shallow and I’m not necessarily made of money to go on a bunch of bad dates. Well then, there are still more of these.

My second date began with a simple message from “Karen” that read “I keep coming back to your profile and you seem interesting” I looked at her profile: one kid, 50 years old, into outdoors shit, music… I had never dated anyone older than maybe three years older than me so 50 years old was a little out of my comfort zone. Dating itself is a little outside of my comfort zone though so why not? As with a number of profiles I have stumbled upon, Karen only had one photo, which leads me to believe…Well, I’m not that shallow. Or maybe I am. I think I might actually be kind of a jerk. I don’t think I did anything wrong with Karen. I don’t know if I deserved a passive aggressive final message from her that read “That’s ok. We just spent a long day together and then…silence. Good luck with your search” This in response to my “Sorry I didn’t feel anything romantic, sorry you thought I was hard to read”

So Karen and I wrote back and forth for a week or so. She seemed kind of boring, but nice. I’ve dated plenty of boring and nice women in my lifetime. I’ve also bored women to death throughout the years making them sit through concerts and films they didn’t want to, browsing bookstores and record stores but hey that one time I did go see the Sex in the City movie in the theater with my girlfriend. My life is pretty boring right now. I have a set routine that basically consists of me going to work on three or four hours of sleep, coming home and going out for a few hours to either write on my laptop in a chain coffee shop or grabbing dinner with a friend, going home and falling asleep ten minutes into a book/movie/tv show/donut. Adding dating into this mix is a little scary but it’s mixing things up for me and I like meeting people even if it’s only for one time, never to be heard from again.

Karen has a son who is 22, he lives in the living room of her apartment which is kind of a coincidence as I currently reside in the living room of my mother’s house as well, on a couch. Yes, I’ve resorted to that. It’s not really a long story, but it’s not very exciting and anyway it’s temporary. I told Karen this as well as my last date. Just in case it ever got to the point where we were going to “take it back to my place” they wouldn’t think I was married if I said “Oh, we cant do that” She mentions he has an actual bed set up in the living room and plays “his X Box”. For a brief moment I feel a little jealous of Karen’s son! I then remember I am practically twice his age and saw Kiss live in 1977, saw The Smiths live three times and was at the game when Nomar Garciaparra hit two Grand Slams and a home run (on his birthday) something he will never experience so fuck him and his bed and X-Box.

In trying to remember all the details of this date, which was way less eventful than my first one with the Kid Rock lady I have gone back to the text messages her and I were sending that week. On one particular evening she was on the deck at some bar and we had this brief exchange

“I am on the patio at Murphy’s listening to some acoustic music what are you up to! <Karen!>”

“I just bought a couple of Ozzy Osbourne CD’s, and a Twisted Sister one”

“Great! I am almost ready to leave. Waiting for a better song. Ugghh the doors. Used to like them. But then my ex listened to ONLY the Doors <Karen!>”

Normally this is where I would write something sarcastic like “wow, great story” but I didn’t. Over the week I noticed Karen would write “three days left”, “two days left”, etc. Also the last text message I have from her came at 1:26 PM, a half hour before I was supposed to meet her “Are you still coming? <Karen!>” I probably should have replied “not if you keep signing your fucking text messages like that!”

Karen lives in Manchester, NH and her name isn’t Karen. I was meeting her on Saturday at 2:00 PM, and again she wanted me to just come to her house, something I really think women should be more careful with.  Both women I’ve met said “I can tell you’re okay by talking to you on the phone” On Sunday I was going to meet some friends for an early lunch and walk in a nearby town in New Hampshire so I figured I’d make a day of it and book myself a room in Manchester. The older I get the less I like driving late at night and besides, any night I can get off the couch I take it. I love staying in motels and hotels.

I checked into my room early at 1:30 and called Karen. On my way to her place I took some mental notes of what was in the area for my inevitable late night disgusting meal. I briefly got lost on my way and when I called her and mentioned the rock I passed that read in bright orange spray paint ‘FLU SHOTS CAUSE AUTISM” she knew right where I was.

When I arrived at her place and she came outside my initial thought was “oh my”, but not a good “oh my” I shook her hand and we got in my car. I safely played the Rolling Stones (I don’t really like to play the Rolling Stones around women I am serious with or may get serious with just in case things go bad and I “ruin them” for me. I pretty much knew from the get go that this would be a friendship “date” so it was okay). She suggested we eat and said there was a good Chinese place down the street. We arrive at a strip mall and it looks like a ghost town, giant parking lot with a bunch of empty spaces, a Building 19 and this Chinese restaurant. I half expected tumbleweed to roll past us.

My first clue that this would not be a good Chinese restaurant was there were no Chinese people working here. My second was it was in a strip mall and my third was they brought us out a plate with two chicken wings when we sat down.  Who does this? If you ever want to feel awkward around a person you just met try eating chicken right off of the bone in front of them.  The food was disgusting and I have to say eating with a complete stranger less than an hour after meeting them is a little hard. She barely ate her food and I’m pretty sure she just ordered what she did to give to that little spoiled brat of hers in the living room with the bed and the X-Box. My fortune cookie asked “How can you have a beautiful ending  without making beautiful mistakes?”

We made our way down to a river and walked around an empty parking lot until I found a bench that wasn’t below a swarm of flies like the others. We talked for an hour or so and she treated me to some intense stories like the time her and her boyfriend at the time hitchhiked across country in 1980. While she was telling me some of these stories I was trying to do the math in my head of what a 50 year old person experienced: “could she have been at Woodstock?”, “was she a teenager during Vietnam?”, “Could black people vote when she was 20?” Apparently 50 years old isn’t that old, in fact it’s nine years older than me.

Her son works at a Dunkin Donuts and I suggested we stop and get a coffee and she said we should go to the one her son works at. She guided me to a drive through and after I made the transaction I asked if that was her son. It wasn’t. Apparently she was joking when she said we should visit him at work. Thank God as for the brief four-minute drive to Dunkin Donuts I thought I was going to have to meet the son of a woman I certainly wasn’t going to sleep with but who probably would have judged me somehow. “There’s mom bringing another bearded tattooed dude by the house again!”

Driving around New Hampshire (or New England in general) used to hold my attention for long stretches but lately it’s grown tired to me. We spent another couple hours or so driving around talking and I have to say I generally liked Karen but there was no attraction and her personality probably wouldn’t have worked in the long run. I need to feel like I can just be myself around someone before I can be myself in his or her presence. Holy shit, I think I just figured out how relationships work.

Karen suggested we go back to her place and figure out a plan for later. It was 7:30 PM and I was now thinking about how the Boston Bruins were about to play Game 2 of the Stanley Cup and I had a nice air-conditioned hotel room waiting for me up the road. Also, I was hungry.

The first thing I noticed when I walked in the apartment was the smell. It smelled like a bed, a bed with sheets that hadn’t been washed in months. There it was in all its glory, the bed. A single.  Unmade, facing a small 20 something inch television unusually high and at an odd angle. There are stacks of X-Box games on a shelf next to the bed. Tons of them! On the floor leaning against the bed was a giant framed Simpsons poster, the frame was too big for the poster and I wondered if that’s why it was on the floor. Perhaps it fell, or Karen took it down knowing I might be coming over and it looked “trashy”. In her haste to get all dolled up for me though she forgot to move it creating an even more trashy looking atmosphere! Karen sat on the couch and I decided to sit on the slightly small (for me) wicker rocking chair. She was sitting to my left at ten o’clock, directly in front of me was a computer desk or what I liked to imagine “where the magic happened”. There was a big uncomfortable iron outdoor chair they evidently used as a computer chair.

She created a playlist on her computer  (and went on Facebook for a minute!) which I should have expected since earlier when I asked her what her favorite concert ever was she replied “Tool”. 50 years old and Tool was your favorite concert? There weren’t enough red flags in the world that could have gone up at that moment. She must have seen like one awesome Yes show in the 70’s or something, come on. Tool. I hate Tool. Fuck Tool. So the playlist comes on and we hear some kind of modern hard rock type stuff and then that “It’s been a while…” song comes on. Staind. I need to get out of here and soon! It’s probably 2^nd period by now!  I wonder if there is a Taco Bell near the hotel, I certainly didn’t see one.

She informs me her son gets out of work at 10:00 PM and then rides his bike home; once we start getting over to the rock and roll side of 9:30 I start getting ready. At about 9:51 PM she suggests we go out to see an Allman Brothers cover band. I fucking love the Allman Brothers so this is tempting but then I remember it’s not the actual Allman Brothers so I say

“I should probably get back to my room as I am meeting my friends early tomorrow”

At exactly 10:00 PM just as Karen’s son is taking the last bag of trash out to the dumpster behind some random Dunkin Donuts in New Hampshire I stand up and let her know I’m going to leave. She walks me out to my car. She gives me a longer hug than I was ready for and then kind of stands waiting for a kiss. I walk away and say goodbye.

I’m again reminded, “flu shots cause autism”. I snake my slightly melancholy self back to the hotel through some dark winding roads I’ll most likely never see again. Karen was a nice woman but not for me.

Now, where the fuck is there a Taco Bell? I find a Dunkin Donuts and grab a cup of coffee. I pull up Google on my phone and find a Taco Bell, less than a mile away. I figure how much more depressing of a day can I have than eating Taco Bell in a hotel by myself on a Saturday night?

Well…I get back to my room just in time to discover the Bruins are about to go into overtime. I get settled at the little desk and open my first item of 8% meat wrapped in some sort of tortilla and game play begins!  Eleven seconds later the game is over. Ouch.

The next afternoon at my friends place I get a message from a new girl. It reads simply “You’re cute, how was your weekend?” I assume this is some sort of spam or joke but I write her anyway. We spend the rest of the day writing back and forth. Perhaps that fortune in the cookie was true.

I recently decided to try online dating for the first time. If you thought it was just cold in New England temperature wise, you should try meeting people here, they’re all just as cold.

I won’t name the site I used for this, but out of the few I checked it seemed the best. I assume they are all about the same. You can see who is viewing you, it’s free and you can send vague, brief messages to women similar to what I used to do when I was a teenager.

The mere thought of going on a date with a woman I chatted with online once or twice and maybe spoke on the phone for an hour with is a truly frightening thought, but I ended up diving head first into this…twice.

I put my profile up on a Thursday night. My profile is pretty generic, but to the point. I hate boring women, I love music, humor and travel. I have a few pictures up some of me smiling, some of me with a guitar. From what I understand chicks dig dudes with guitars. Since I’m kind of a creepy looking guy, the rare pictures of me smiling seemed to help.

I looked around and saw a few ads that seemed interesting and sent a brief message. Most responses I got were pretty generic and as I learned over the next couple of weeks, most women on there have no idea how to hold a conversation. At least with me, if I wasn’t interested in someone I just didn’t respond to message(s) they sent. One message I got out of the blue from “PatsFan122” read “Want to chat? You came up in mututal (sic) match” That’s all it said.  As it turns out, most people on here don’t read your profile. No surprise. I read the majority of the profiles unless they were too wordy or not wordy at all. I’m not going to lie though and say I just pass right by profiles of women I don’t find any physical attraction to. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. I think it was Bob Dylan who said “life is too short for ugly women” Or maybe it was Dylan McKay from Beverly Hills 90210.

A week or so later, on a Sunday afternoon at 2:07 PM, the day before a holiday I get a message from a 43 year old divorced mom “with kids”. We write back and forth for a good hour or so, there are a few grammatical errors in her brief replies. She then suggests we talk on the phone and just sends me her phone number.

She has a pretty thick Massachusetts accent, which is kind of a bummer, but I knew this was coming. We talked for about an hour, and then she invited me over to her place to “watch the Red Sox and drink some beers” So the minute this woman started writing me I pretty much knew there was nothing in common, she clearly did not read my profile too well and I wasn’t necessarily attracted to her but she wasn’t hideous or anything.  If anything this would give me some practice hanging with a complete stranger, even if said stranger was COMPLETELY FUCKING CRAZY.

Here is a complete rundown of my three or four hours with “Donna”

I arrive at her Section 8 apartment building about twenty-five minutes after talking to her, about five hours after receiving my first message from her in my inbox. There are two ways to get into the building and I call her on the phone a little confused as to where to go. She looks pretty much like she did in her photos. She is short, thick, dyed blonde. She opens the door and immediately says “oh I told you to go to the other door” These kinds of “bossy” comments happen throughout the night. Her 11 year old son is with her dad for the evening, her 22 year old son does not live here anymore. She has obviously been smoking and drinking for most of the day. There is an ashtray full of thin white cigarettes on a messy coffee table that also is covered in bills, three or four remote controls and three Bud Light cans. For whatever reason apartments of single women always have some sort of sad quality to them. She suggests we go get some beer. I don’t really drink beer that much, and although I’m far from a beer snob I’ll drink semi above average beers when I do. She says she will drive us to the liquor store. We get in the car and drive to the liquor store that is literally about 70 yards from her building. I could probably hit a golf ball with an aluminum softball bat further away than we just drove. She asks what kind of beer we should get and I of course immediately answer “Budweiser” I get us a 12 pack of Budweiser and pay for it on my debit card. I briefly think I should have paid for this with cash so there is no paper trail and then I remember I am not married. She buys herself a pack of cigarettes, some cheap brand called “Maverick Lights”

Upon arriving back at her place she suggests we play on her son’s Playstation. She wants to play her favorite game, Jeopardy. She is “awesome at it and never loses” Before this happens though she needs to make a phone call…I mean three phone calls. She first calls her son who apparently was out playing dodge ball with some kids while his mom was home with some man she met an hour ago. She then needs to call her mom for some reason. She puts her mom on speakerphone and talks to her for forty five minutes. They are shooting the shit about “Cathy” and “that new restaurant” and whatever other boring shit women in their thirties talk to their mothers about. Thankfully the Red Sox game is on and they are winning.  She then calls her best friend “John” and puts him on speakerphone and lets him know she is hanging with her “friend Chris” He sounds as bored as I am sitting there. He just returned from a day out fishing. He didn’t catch anything aside from a nap before she called.

My intense first date with Donna finally resumes and in an attempt to set a mood for us she decides to play some music.

“Do you like Kid Rock?”

“Are you fucking kidding me, of course I do!” is my answer. Me, the guy whose profile clearly states that I love The Clash, The Rolling Stones, Bad Brains, The Specials, Wilco and The Smiths.

Of course the Kid Rock is on the loudest volume possible about four feet from my left ear. In my life I’ve heard a few Kid Rock songs. They usually show up on a radio I have no control over. On this night I got to hear a whole hour or so of his music. I guess I still don’t consider myself a fan of his music after hearing a whole record. In fact I think I would rather listen to a drunk guy (with mittens on) try to play Blackbird by the Beatles on an out of tune acoustic guitar every day for the rest of my life than listen to a minute of Kid Rock again.

We then get our Jeopardy on. To say I beat her would be an understatement. I think the final score was something like $9100 to $250. At one point in the game there is a question in the “Art” category.

“ooh I hate aht, you into aht Chris?”

“Nah, aht is gay” I tell her

I realize I might be getting a slight buzz from the three Budweisers and four or five shots we have taken up to this point. I’m still able to beat her by correctly answering “What is Impressionism?” to the clue “ “19^th Century art movement in Paris….” She answered “Mona Lisa”

I think I’m in love.

Even if she’s smoked about eleven cigarettes by now and clearly has drank me under the table.

Donna now decides we should listen to more music seeing as I have beaten her at Jeopardy. She starts going through those music channels on her TV set and playing a minute of a song and then changes it. Lady Gaga. Bruno Mars. Cee-Lo. Justin Beiber (really).The volume is at a level where we can’t really have a conversation. She does this for about forty five minutes in this bizarre blur of attention deficit disorder and this weird regressive childlike manic episode. I begin to think of a way out.

“Donna, I should probably go home soon, it’s getting late”

The conversation before the music came on somehow turned to politics and she of course did not like Barack Obama because he was black and would “probably vote for Trump if he had run” There were a few pretty bad racist comments made as far back as our first phone call.

I guess the main reason I went on this “date” was out of curiosity and just because I pretty much knew how surreal it might be. Stepping into this world I normally wouldn’t ever go to; drinking Budweiser and blaring Kid Rock with my racist date.  I chalked it up to a funny experience I could write about and tell people about. I always talk to anyone who approaches me, sometimes much to the dismay of people I am with.

On my way out I told Donna that she really should be careful whom she invites to her place. It’s really none of my business, but obviously there are some sick people out there, but also I guess there are men out there who would have been perfectly comfortable on a date like this.

A week later I had another date. It went relatively better than this one did, but there was no click. Actually, it didn’t really go well either. I’ll get to that one next.