Dirge

Hey kids, greetings from the happy corner. I wish I had an exciting story or two, but the thing about being in a new relationship is that I think it pretty much makes for boring blogging. Things are going well with The Girl. I actually quit smoking cold turkey, and had my last cigarette on August 7th. For a decent run-down of my life lately, check out Frankie's rant here. And the following excerpt from an e-mail chain between my co-worker Walt and Frankie:

Frankie: The sooner you are able to reconcile that you need to say goodbye to the Jack you knew in April, the sooner you'll be able to move on. Then again, there's an outside chance that Meg figures out in the next few weeks that the real Jack is not the same guy she's been dating for the last two months and dumps him. That result is a long-shot though, because she sounds like the kind of girl who will convince herself that she can "change" him, and Jack has shown a propensity to actually give up all kinds of things for this woman.

So I'm guessing this is how it plays out over the next year or two: 1) Jack continues down the path of spending more time with Meg and her family and less time with his friends; 2) Your time with Jack continues to decline until it settles into a happy hour every third Thursday or so; 3) you get over it, because that's what guys do; 4) in about 18 months, after a particularly nasty fight during his first year of marriage to Meg, Jack realizes that he's marginalized all of this guy friends and asks you to have a few drinks so that he can apologize to you and vow to be a better friend; 5) Jack makes up with Meg and you go back to seeing him about once a month for 3 hours, yet now it's on the sly because Meg thinks you're undermining her.

Then again, if you fall in love and get married to a woman Meg likes to spend time with, you'll have more time with Jack, but only when you're together with your significant others.

Good luck.

Quick Update

• I went to Mexico City with The Girl for a week. Stayed with her cousin and had a marvelous time. We've been together a month now, and this was our first travel experience. Good travel companion all-around. Also, I ate grasshoppers while in Mexico City.
• Zeke had been working on a one-year dry-spell, and went to Israel to meet a nice Jewish girl, and ended up doing his part for Arab/Israeli relations by having relations with an Arab chick while there. Shout-out to Z for breaking the spell with style.

Inevitability

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer, Interview about the Trinity explosion, 1965.

If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.
-Japanese Proverb

Closed a three-month long, frustration-laden siege courtship on Saturday. I’ve tried to write out the story a few times and just can’t do it justice. Remember the Fulbright Scholar? Remember how she had lived in Mexico with the sister of one of my college buddies? Well that girl has a cousin named Meg, who it turns out lives about two miles from me. I met Meg at this function. I thought she was pretty and classy at the time. I didn’t see her again until this meet-up. After that we started hanging out somewhat regularly, albeit not romantically. I’d been working to change that slowly and steadily. And I finally cast the proverbial die at the Jefferson, the place we first met, in a cliché-laden WAWA (“where are we at?”) speech fueled by the liquid courage wrought by five hours of solid drinking.

That is all for now.

Schrödinger's Cat

Last night, every woman between the ages of 25 and 35 that I know was at the Sex and the City premiere, narrowing my night-life options a bit. I was in jeans and a tee-shirt and looking for something chill to do, so I called Frankie and told him to meet me at Tres Generaciones, or “3-G’s”, which is one of those faux Mexican beach bars with a nice, big patio.

I got to 3-G’s first, ordered a Dos Equis lager, and sat to wait for Frank. It was about 8:30 and the crowd was sparse. As expected, there was a bit of chorizo there. Frankie showed up, got a Corona, and we caught up a bit. Directly across the bar from us at the bar was what appeared to be a happy-hour crowd that had gone long. I pointed a girl in the group out to Frankie, as she was a real good-looker, with more than a passing resemblance to Jennifer Connelly, including the dark hair, nice rack, and radiant smile.

Have I mentioned why Frankie and I work well together when we’re out? It’s because we compliment each other’s weaknesses in “game.” To wit, I can open and close, but I really have no middle. Frank is all middle.

The way the 3-G bar is set up, Jennifer Connelly was within earshot of us. I scoped for an opening. I saw she was smoking Parliament Lights, and she was with two guys, one in a Denver Broncos jersey and a ball-cap (douchebag indicators, both), and a fat dude in a polo-shirt and cargo shorts. It was clear she wasn’t there “with” either of them. So I made eye-contact with her, smiled, and started the silly small talk. I asked what she was drinking – Bacardi and diet-Pepsi – and ordered her another. Within a half-hour, Frankie and I had secured a four-top table and she was drinking with us. Now, as I said, I have no middle. I sometimes think I have ADD; I was really flitting in and out of the conversation that Frankie was having with the chick. She’s a marketing director for a local restaurant chain. She visited London once. Her family was Sicilian (that one threw me, since I’d pegged her for a Jew when I saw the Parliament Lights). In contrast, Frankie’s middle-game was on fire. I admit, I was a little mesmerized by the girl’s mannerisms, to the point that I didn’t say much.

At about 10:30 I got a text message from Missy asking where we were. She showed up about 15 minutes later. I was happy to have her there, because Jennifer Connelly wasn’t giving me much flavor, and Frankie needed a reason to engage in one-on-one conversation. I’ll hand it to Missy, she was a great wing-man for him. She had two beers, and then left, but not before she invited Jennifer Connelly out to a birthday party we’re going to tonight. Plus, Missy was looking pretty good, which never hurts. As for myself, my wing-man skill set entailed ensuring that there was never an empty Bacardi and diet-Pepsi in front of Jennifer Connelly, and smiling and nodding when she said something that I figured she thought was clever. At 1:00, I decided to call it a night. Fact: Frankie needs to learn a closing move and I need to learn some middle. That’s all there is to it, so I took my leave and left him with Jennifer Connelly. Sink or swim, motherfucker. I’ll see him this evening, but for now, I like to think that he didn’t drop that ball.

Viernes

There's really got to be an easier way of courtship than this stupid thing Americans call dating. My buddy Jason married his high-school sweetheart/first girlfriend. I missed that boat.

Typical guy thing

Text message conversation starting at 8:11 p.m. last night, below. Identifying the female right now would be too much backstory for the message of the post. Stay tuned, though.

Drink?
Drink. What do you think? Where are you?
My house and watch brothers and sisters? Or do u hate that show?
Never even heard of it. U have booze?
I have beer and a bit of tequila. Bring ur own if u want.
Ok.

There is not a single heterosexual man out there that's ever watched this show of his own volition. Those who said they did were just hoping to score. I've been here before. I watched two whole seasons of the Gilmore Girls with the ex and pretended to care about Rory's trials and tribulations. So I showed up at the girl's house with a bottle of Smirnoff blueberry vodka and a bottle of soda. She had opened a bottle of white wine, so the vodka was all me, although I donated it to her hopelessly empty liquor cabinet. If I'd have been selfish I'd have brought a bottle of whiskey; don't ever accuse me of being inconsiderate.

random kicks in the nuts

I was at a sweet patio bar with Frankie and Sam last night, enjoying what must have been my fourth Maker's Mark and soda. We were having a good time when around 10:00 I looked up and caught sight of Keri. She was at the bar with a new guy (the doctor went kaput after Paris) who looked like he failed the casting call for a live version of a Tim Burton claymation feature. It kind of sucked. Truth be told, it really sucked. Even though we've been broken up for a long ass time now, I'd never actually seen her with one of the guys that followed me.

Apropos of Valentine's Day

A public service announcement:

I've been looking for an excuse to post this classic WWII poster, directed at our men in uniform back then, but the message rings true to this day. I have a buddy whose uncle once told me that he had been to whorehouses all over Asia when he was in the military, but it wasn't until he came back to the hometown that he got a dose of the clap. I'm not sure what a "pick-up" is, or how she differs from a "good time" girl, but I have an idea. Syphilis and gonorrhea, while no cakewalk I'm sure, are nothing compared to the other diseases folks of my generation have to deal with.

51 First Dates

Got another e-mail from the Fulbright scholar yesterday. Despite my feelings about her, I have to give credit where credit is due: she sets shit up, and I look forward to it.

It's time for another great gathering featuring good people and DRINK. For completely non-interesting reasons, I have to skip the hosting honors this month but let's get together and enjoy a drink at The Jefferson (4440 W. Twelfth St.) this Wednesday at 7:30 ish.

Thanks to all those that brought new faces to the mix last month--keep them and others coming!!

-elisa

I have to say, her distribution list always includes a very promising girl-to-guy ratio.

21st Century Drunken Snafus

So Frankie and I went to Tahoe with four women: Missy, Sam, and two of Missy’s friends – Veronica (“Ronnie”) and Therese (“Teri”). I’m telling you, it was like having backstage passes to chickapalooza. I didn’t realize that women in their thirties were just as neurotic as they were in their twenties (or their teens). I wish I could say that I learned more about women from the experience, but I don’t think I did.

Here’s a classic “woman” moment from our first night there. Sam got a text message from some dude that she’s sort of dating. We call him “Meat Head” since his claim to fame is that he’s a cage fighter. Not my nickname, and I’ve never met him, but if the shoe fits and all . . . anyway, the text message read: “do you miss me?” And all four women in our group spent what must have been half an hour discussing what that meant and what Sam should text back. As all four were seriously soused when they were doing this, it was extremely comical. I didn’t read the final product, but I swear, they ruminated over including the word “the” for a good three minutes. The Declaration of Independence was written in less time than this response text.

A few days later, Sam and I were laughing about how funny it must have looked to us when they did this. And I tried to explain to her that guys don’t really think that much about what they text, and that while it took a full half hour and input from four females for her to respond to it, Meat Head had probably sent the initial message as part of a mass text. I was a little drunk myself during this conversation, so to prove my point, I told her I would demonstrate. The first female in my phone’s contacts list is Allie Roth. So I texted Allie: “do you miss me?” No response.

A touch of self-loathing

Der schlechte Affe haßt seinen eigenen Geruch.

I’ve been around long enough to understand that often people are most offended by the moral failings that mirror their own. This is, for example, why there’s a delicious irony in the Larry Craig airport bathroom fiasco, given, for example, his push for severe punishment of Barney Frank for his involvement in a gay prostitution scandal back in 1990.

Anyways, when I was talking with Keri (the ex) the other night, and she was telling me about her doctor boyfriend, I couldn’t help but think about what a sucker the guy was, dropping so much ducat on her and expending himself emotionally, when she clearly didn’t feel about him the way he apparently feels about her. And even though I’ve never met him, I viscerally hated him, not necessarily because he’s with Keri now, but more because of the fact that he is now her beast of burden, as I was for so long, and I hated myself when I was in that situation. And on Wednesday, even though I had never suspected anything of the sort, I couldn’t help but wonder if she had similarly cuckolded me in the past, when I was the boyfriend taking her to fun and exotic locales and trying to make things work with her. And for some reason that made me hate him even more for being the cuckold, rather than her for cuckolding him.

The more things change . . .

I had to give Frankie a ride home from the airport when we got back from Reno around 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday. After I dropped him off, I checked my phone to see who I had to call to wish a happy 2008. Turns out the ex had left me a message wishing me the best. I figured it was a new year, and a time for new beginnings, so I should put aside any resentment and bitterness and call her to return the wishes. After all, I’d just gone to Tahoe with a whole new group of friends, and I’ve been getting out there, and I’m pretty sure I’ve moved on after a whole year and some months have passed.

So I called her as I was driving home, and it turned out that she was reading at a Starbucks that was literally on my way home. I told her I’d drop by – I hadn’t seen her in a while. I got to the Starbucks, and it was pretty full of the usual Starbucks bar-fly types. I saw the ex, and gave her a hug. We sat down, and she asked what I had done for New Year’s Eve, and I had a good response to that (as opposed to last year). I had my digital camera in my jacket pocket, and I showed her the photos. She had spent New Year’s Eve with her family, and it sounded like she’d had a good time of it as well.

I was starving and asked her if she’d already eaten. She hadn’t, so I suggested we go across the street to Houston’s for dinner. Houston’s has never been one of “our” places. In fact, prior to that evening, I can’t recall ever having gone there with her. We sat at the bar, rather than a booth or table. The bartender, Tom, knows me because I’ve been there a few times for work happy hours, so he greeted me and asked what we were drinking. I opted for a greyhound, and Keri (the ex) asked for a Sapphire and tonic. We split an entrée that consisted of barbecue ribs, Brussels sprouts, and butternut squash. We had another drink with dinner, and a postprandial cocktail as well. She’s still seeing the doctor that she’s been seeing for a while now, and he’s taking her to Paris later this month. I’m not going to lie, that hurt a little to hear. We talked some more, reminisced, and one thing led to another. She asked if she could come over to my place and I acquiesced.

She awoke and left my place at around 5:00 a.m. on Wednesday, and I couldn’t help but think back to this post, and I said to myself: “She’s someone else’s problem now. . . .”

Aftermath and Consequences

Our old friend Leño used to joke that Frankie’s e-mail address was igotgame@buticantclose.com, because on several occasions over the years, Frankie has talked to a girl to the point where she basically threw herself at him, but he hasn’t closed the deal. Friday night, Melissa’s friend Jenna was just the latest in a long line of girls that Frankie didn’t close under eerily similar circumstances. Our friends have already joked about how the old Frankie is making a comeback. I have to say, Frankie’s got much more control over his libido than I do, but that’s not a bad thing. Just because one can do something doesn’t mean one should do something. Truth be told, I don’t know that I would have shown the same restraint that he did.

I spoke with Missy on Sunday, and she told me that Jenna had been distraught, and had broken down in a drunken-crying “why didn’t he want me” episode after we dropped them off at Missy’s house. After Melissa consoled her, Jenna promptly drove home, and Missy let her . . . leading me to question both their judgment in general, but that’s another story. Melissa also told me that Frankie actually made “the right decision,” since Jenna had a tendency to be “clingy.” And then she told me that Jenna was also trying to get over the guy from the Tropi-Christmas party that she hooked up with (stealing him away from our good friend Samantha in the process). Evidently he never called Jenna after that night. Now, ladies, here’s a lesson that they must have left out of the book they gave you in middle school, but I’m happy to impart: the random guy that you blow in the spare bedroom of your friend’s house while the party’s going on after having met him about a half-hour before is probably not going to call you, and you shouldn’t be expecting any sort of love connection out of the encounter. I’m not saying don’t blow the guy at the party – all I’m saying is that you should know what you’re getting into. At 35, Jenna’s still not gotten the hang of that principle, I guess.

Patience.

Frankie keeps pressing me to e-mail the Fulbright scholar from Saturday’s party. He’s always been an overeager type – to a fault sometimes. I’ll do it, I just need to hold off a little, given her initial coldness. Apropos of Frankie’s haste, however, I shared this classic anecdote with him:

Two bulls are standing on a hill. Off in the distance, they see a group of cows. The young bull excitedly nudges the old bull and says, “Hey! Hey! I know! Let’s run over there and fuck one of those cows!” The old bull looks at the young bull, then turns and takes a long look at the cows. He turns back to the young bull and says, “I’ve got a better idea, son, let’s walk over there and fuck ‘em all.”

I know the games we have to play suck. Hell, you think I like those games? But I’ve blown more opportunities than a lot of guys will ever have by trying to pretend that there weren’t a set of “rules” that women play by. As I’ve said before, I have a sneaking suspicion that in middle school, when they separate the boys from the girls for sex-ed, they give the girls a little book (complete with concordance and FAQ section) that explains exactly how to deal with and respond to men. What do guys have? Bawdy anecdotes passed via oral tradition. It’s just not fair.

Reflections upon a Bust of Mao

Back when I was still in school, my buddy Laz went on vacation to China with his family. When he came back, he brought me a little alabaster bust of Mao Zedong as a souvenir. It was a little dirty, about two inches tall, and had a real quaint “Red China” aura to it. I was still living in a dorm at the time, and I put the little stone bust on my bookshelf. I had a small menagerie of communist paraphernalia from a trip to Cuba that I had made, and the Chairman fit right in among it. I lived on the 9th floor of a high-rise dormatory, and shortly after acquiring the bust, I was at a function at the bar and grill on the second floor of the dorm. I was enjoying my drink, and I found myself talking to an attractive med student. Her name escapes me now, but I recall that she was very involved in that “doctors without borders” bringing medicine to the third-world scene. And somehow we ended up talking about communism. And I said to her: “You know, I’ve got a Bust of Mao in my room.” And she said she’d like to see it. And I said OK, and we went up to my room, and from Mao, the conversation drifted to my CD collection, and I put on some music, yada yada, and we ended up hooking up. It all happened so fast, and was so serendipitous; I thought something like that would never happen again. And then it did. A couple of more times. And it got so that the “Bust of Mao” achieved talismanic status in my head. At the time, I didn’t understand why it worked – in fact, I sort of thought it might be a lot like Dumbo’s Magic Feather, and maybe I could do the same thing without the reference to the dead Chinese Chairman. I was only partly right.

Once I got out of school, and got my own place, the “Bust of Mao” reference never helped again. I still have the little statue, but by and large women in their thirties don’t talk about communism and idealism and crap like that.

In 2001, right after September 11th, my friend Webster was visiting me from out of town, and we were at the tavern next door to my apartment complex at the time. We were drinking at the bar and we noticed two passably-cute girls at a booth eating dinner. We wanted to send them a drink, and debated doing so, made eye contact with them two or three times, and finally approached. Web is smoother than I am, I guess, because after a couple of minutes of chit-chat he tells the two girls that I have a bottle of absinthe at my place and asks would they like to try it. That night merits a whole blog entry, but both girls – complete strangers to us before that night – came back to my apartment with us.

In September 2003, I flew to Vegas for Frankie’s birthday party. On the flight I sat next to a pretty girl, and we ended up exchanging numbers. About three weeks later, we met up at an Applebee’s for drinks on a Monday night. In passing I mentioned that the day before I had made a candle out of an old stone inkpot and some liquid paraffin. She said that sounded interesting, and I said I lived less than half a mile away if she wanted to see it, and she came over, and literally, within 15 minutes of walking into my place she was topless on my couch. Life is good sometimes.

It wasn’t until I was nearly thirty years old that it dawned on me how the Bust of Mao principle worked, and I realized that my Bust of Mao was no more magical than a bottle of exotic liquor or a homemade candle. The magic in all three was in what wasn’t said during the discussion about them.

In March of 2006, I was in Puerto Vallarta for a conference at the Westin resort there. The last night of the conference, I found myself drinking and talking with a pretty young lady from Chicago who was there to check folks in and oversee logistics, etc. We were drinking mai tai after mai tai, and were both drunk enough to make some bad decisions when the bar closed. There was definitely a spark, and sufficient nonverbal communication to signal the green light. But when they announced last call, and it was clearly the end of the night, I wished I had brought my Bust of Mao with me. Asking her straight to my room seemed so gauche, and we bade each other an awkward good night, as our rooms were in different directions from the bar. As I lay awake in my bed that night alone in such a romantic locale, with the sound of the ocean in the background, I kicked myself for being such a fumbling fool. On the flight back, I had one of those “What I should have said” moments, and it all made sense to me.

The magic of the Bust of Mao is that it gives an excuse for cutting away from the herd, so to speak. I’ve never met a woman who would respond positively to “Hey, do you want to go back to my place and fuck?” I’m sure she exists out there, but even if she does, she is definitely in a very small minority of women. Society just frowns too much on that sort of openness and honesty. Likewise, pretty much anybody, male or female, would follow you home if you said: “Hey, I’ve got two lottery tickets at my place, and one is guaranteed to win a million dollars; I’ll let you have your choice of the two if you want.” The Bust of Mao passes the “laugh out loud” test for why you’d be coming back to someone’s place, but is just banal enough to convey the message that “I’ve got a bit more than a stupid little statue there.” I remember my friend Jacob asking a girl in our dorm (now his wife) “do you want to come listen to me play my harmonica?” In reality, nobody wants to hear a dude play a harmonica, and a homemade candle is interesting for like one minute, maybe.

That night in Puerto Vallarta, I didn’t need the Bust of Mao; I needed a Bust of Mao: “the night view out my window is spectacular; you’ve got to come see it,” or something like that. I live and learn.

Greatest Misses - 2007

I was just reading through my entries from the past month or so, and realized that my life’s been pretty uneventful lately. Peter Piper Pizza? A story about my parents? Beef stew and Brylcreem? Reading Frankie’s first entry made me nostalgic for the days when I couldn’t blog fast enough to keep up with our stories. The majority of them remain in the ether, and eventually I’ll get to telling them, but there are no current “good” stories being generated. After Frankie’s waitress experience and my ubersaga, we both sort of self-imposed celibacy on ourselves to gather our thoughts. So I haven’t woken up next to a crazy chick since early October. I was going to put one of those “sobriety counter” widgets up here, but instead of sobriety, it would count days of chastity, but I think in the long run that would be depressing if I were to hit a real dry spell. Instead, I’ve spent the last month in introspection. When all is said and done, all I really want is a woman who’s faithful and kind at suppertime. Who would think that’s so hard to find?

I was at the mall on Sunday, killing time before a movie, and I ran into the girl from my very first entry. She was friendly and we chatted. She’s cute, and fun, but she shot me down at a time when rejection hurt more than usual. Whatever. I recalled the Milan Kundera line: “Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory,” and I wondered what happens at the point when a woman receives a blog entry dedicated to her? And I thought about the “misses” of 2007. I was sure, after the breakup, that I would find someone else, and when I applied myself, it wasn’t really that hard to find a warm body. But there were a number of women that I thought of as “good leads” in that I really did find them cool, and could have seen myself dating for a while, if only to see where the pursuit took me, but for various reasons, things did not pan out. In no real order, Jack Gordon’s Five Greatest Misses – 2007:

1. Allie Roth – An attractive, successful divorcee who also happens to have dated my friend Dan seriously, and Frankie not so seriously, along with a couple of acquaintances of mine. One Sunday I ran into her at the local mall and she invited me to join her at a wine bar across the street. That was around 2:00 in the afternoon, and we drank and talked and ended up at a sushi bar for dinner around 7:30. We made out first at the sushi bar, then in her Acura like adolescents. I didn’t try to take it any further assuming that there would be a second “date.” There wasn’t.
   ...
2. Sandy Quinn – A stunning flight attendant, with whom I had a series of long phone conversations that were smooth and enjoyable. I had high hopes until we went on our first date and I learned that (a) she was an evangelical born-again Christian who had just gotten back from a three day Christian rock festival; and (b) she did not consume alcohol. I can’t handle bible thumpers or teetotalers. I suspect that “functioning alcoholic papist” was not high on the list of what she was looking for, either.
   ...
3. The headshop girl – Weird choice, I know, but I was really, really drawn to her. I can’t imagine what we’d have had in common, but she just made me happy for the 20 minutes or so that we spoke. She was clearly more of a realist than I.
   ...
4. Teresa Lindstrom – I was in Baltimore for a conference, and we met first at a happy hour following the conference, then ran into each other later in the hotel bar. We had an awesome conversation, and I thought she was beautiful. My line on her was “I have a lot of Neil Young on my iPod, if you want to come up and listen to it.” She did. I knew things would never work out with us due to the distance between us, and that, more than anything, made my heart ache the next day.
   ...
5. The neo-pagan elf – When you expect nothing, and you get something, that’s destiny. When that something disappears as easy as it came, well, that’s just God having a sense of humor. My buddy Jason makes amateur films as a hobby, and he was picking up some props from one of his actresses at a bar across the street from where I work. He called and invited me to join in a drink, and I ended up hitting it off with the actress. She is a sculptor by trade, but an aspiring actress/writer the remainder of the time. We closed down the bar, and then relocated to a local resort designed by one of her favorite architects. We fooled around on the resort lawn like teenagers. We made plans to go on an actual date that coming Saturday. Saturday morning I called her and went straight to voicemail. I got a text from her later that day saying “sorry jack i am not interested in u in that way. i am in love with someone.” So it goes.

And so, like Gatsby, I beat on, boat against the current . . . or better yet, like Sam from Quantum Leap, I find myself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that my next leap . . . will be the leap home.

Restless thoughts

Back at what turned out to be the low point of the breakup with the ex, when she called me specifically to tell me that she was seeing someone else – a doctor – my pal Meno gave me what turned out to be a mantra. I repeated it to myself without believing at the time: “She’s someone else’s problem now . . . she’s someone else’s problem now . . . she’s someone else’s problem now.” Last night I suffered from a bout of insomnia, and of course, my thoughts turned to her and to us, and I thought about certain things that she had done, and lies she had told me, and remembered a talk that we had at a sushi bar one time and all the bullshit she said which turned out to be bullshit, but I bought into it. Like plans for the future and crap like that. And I started to get all pissed off, even though I haven’t spoken to her for close to two months now. And then I thought: “She’s someone else’s problem now,” and I looked forward rather than backward, and I was able to put her out of my mind for the moment.

Femme Fatales

Today in history, October 15, 1917, the Frogs executed Mata Hari by firing squad for spying for Germany. According to Wiki: "The idea of an exotic dancer working as a lethal double agent, using her powers of seduction to extract military secrets from her many lovers fired popular imagination, set the legend and made Mata Hari an enduring archetype of the femme fatale."

Just last week, I was e-mailing back and forth with my former co-worker, Robb, and we were discussing of all things, the Middle East, and I remembered the story of Mordechai Vanunu, back in the '80s. Most people have forgotten about him by now, but the Mossad totally caught his ass by sending an operative named "Cindy" to convince the guy to fly to Rome with her for the weekend. Poor dude got to Rome and "Once in Rome, Mossad agents captured him, drugged him and smuggled him to Israel on a freighter, beginning what was to be more than a decade of solitary confinement in Israeli prisons."

So I asked Robb: "I wonder if 'Cindy' was hot or if Vanunu was just hard-up?"

And he answered: "I'm guessing she was not hot by today's standards, but she was probably the best looking woman who had ever paid attention to Vanunu. Poor guy. That's freaking dirty pool."

And you look at Mata Hari, and she's not all that hot by today's standards. Probably wasn't all that hot by 1917 standards either. . . But that's the thing: most guys are pretty much retarded when femenine wiles are properly used. Tale as old as time. Which is why the Circe story fascinates me so.

The part where Frankie starts to worry

Ask any guy, and he’ll inevitably tell you that “all women are crazy.” And I have to agree, although there’s a definite difference in the types of “crazy” that afflicts the gender. The first, unavoidable, and generally tolerable, is the estrogenical craziness that punctuates even the most rational, healthy relationships. By and large, we men can deal with that craziness.

More than a few women out there, though, are of the “make little race-cars out of their feces” crazy persuasion. I won’t describe the type – you know the ones I’m talking about. Ubermom likely falls into this category; time will tell. By and large, I seem to be in touch with the circadian rhythms of the type, and my dating history bears a series of hilarious stories as a result.

Here’s the thing, though: as guys, we too often can’t distinguish between the two types of craziness until it’s too late. Especially when the woman in question is attractive. Case in point: around 5:00 a.m. yesterday, Frankie got a series of cryptic text messages from his Waitress. Then, as he left his complex to go to the gym at 6:00 a.m., he noticed a car that looked suspiciously like hers parked across the street. She lives nowhere near his neighborhood. As he drove past the car, he saw her sitting in the driver’s seat. He did a double take, and then called her cell phone.

“Was that you, parked on [his street]?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I got tired of driving back and forth.”

“No, I mean why are you even in this neighborhood?”

“Because I had insomnia.”

He called me to ask my opinion. I really didn’t know what to tell him about the whole situation – aside from that he should cut off all contact with her. And maybe keep alert. Our friend Samantha had an awesome suggestion: “Nothing says we're done like a TRO.”

Unintended dating advice

"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. "

— T.S. Eliot

Or as I like to put it, it's better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission. After all, he who risks nothing, gets nothing, right?