It’s been a while. I’m not sure where to begin this post. I’ve been stuck here at home plate for a while now. You make a stupid mistake, you pay for it. Such is life.

I’m starting to get cabin fever. At least the view from the deck is nice, and I’ve been working on the tan and the bod. P90X is fucking intense. Anyhoo…

The human mind is a warped Pandora’s box of dumb ideas and half baked truths. The Intarwebs certainly don’t help one bit at all. No, seriously. It doesn’t. What? You knew that? I’m always the last to know.

The jury is still out on the online dating. I’ve met a few crazies. I’ve met some really nice people and I’ve seen profiles for women that make me think, “You look like THAT and you’re on HERE? You must be a spam bot or a psychopath!”
I did meet someone sane and successful, smart and sassy, cute and funny. We spent the prerequisite time trading mails and IM.

There is a definite pattern in this. One wonders if this was how Victorian romances were conducted, only faster. The anticipation of seeing those words “XYZ123 is typing” leaves a metallic taste in my mouth.

So far I’m really digging this woman’s chilli.

So we meet, and it’s cool. We have fun.
We meet again, and it’s still fun.
We kiss and it’s nice.

It remains nice. It’s not awkward, or funny. It’s not passionate or mind blowing. It’s nice.
Another night, and it’s still nice. What’s missing?

Me. I’m missing. I’m not there. I’m not in this.

Don’t get me wrong, nice is… nice. There are certain demons that have been banished from my mind. I could stay here and enjoy nice for a while.

When I look at who I’m with I would rather say, “I love you even though you drive me fucking NUTS” than “I’m here because you are nice.”

Am I more interested in being liked or perhaps enamored with being associated with someone than I am about actually clicking with the person?

Sure, I could exploit the situation. Degrade it to a booty call. Deface the other person’s emotions to nothing. But that’s not me.

And this brings up another problem. I’ve always been a geek. My first serious relationship was Her. I’ve never had to tell someone, “Thanks, but no thanks”. I’m not sure which scares me more. I’ve recently been told that I’m not good enough anymore. The thought of telling another human that which ripped my heart asunder, rips my heart asunder.

What’s the conclusion? The tragic Greek story prop in my head tells me I’m ready. The rest of my being says, “Ready, Steady, Not So Much.”

See you on the flip side…

I’ve had a roller coaster of a time these past few days. I got back to Home Plate on Saturday. She was waiting for me to get home so She could go to work. I still like to see Her, If nothing else we were best friends for ten years. It is hard to be around Her. Although the wounds are beginning to heal, She is the salt and vinegar that make them sting.

I continue to work. I’ve really managed to channel a lot of energy into my work. If I didn’t, I’m afraid it would have begun to eat me up inside. To be honest, I never really stop working. Everything is an idea I can turn to a marketing advantage. Even my own life.

When She gets home She tells me that she is moving out at the end of the month.

I knew this was coming. Not the actual date, but the event. I thought I had prepared myself. I thought the wounds had closed a little more.

I was wrong.

It was gut wrenching. I felt that familiar feeling of having my heart ripped out. It will be a long time before I let anyone in there again. I may have a brusque exterior. Beneath that I am very emotional. There is a reason “Tracks of my tears” is one of my favorite songs. I once wore my heart on my sleeve, but my crust is a little thicker now.

Thus began the turbulent ride my emotions would take over the next few days. I was verging on schizophrenic. It was as if every step I took changed the mood I was in.

Have you ever felt as if you wanted to crawl out of your skin because right now you didn’t want to be? I get this feeling under my nails like my soul is trying to escape, to smash the window and run from the asylum.

We are funny animals, us humans. We convince ourselves of our reality. When we least expect it, our reality is realigned and focused to the true reality. The wind is knocked out of you and the readjustment takes a while.

On the flip side of this, it didn’t take very long to get over it. And that is both a good and bad thing. Part of me still hopes that this distance may change things. That part doesn’t want to move on. It would almost love to wallow in a perpetual pity party. The rest of me knows this is false. I am John’s eternal optimism gland.

What does all this mean for me? I have no idea. But there is a raven at my chamber door. And he’s quoting Edgar Allen Poe to me. I think it’s a hint.

It’s been a while, OK? I’d get up on the crack of an egg. Seriously. As it turned out it was a couple of days before my mate from home, D, was coming over to hang out. Looking on the site I saw a simple, “Who wants to chat”.

Chat? I can do that. I am after all a formidable wordsmith. What? You’re reading this, are you not?

Mail the super secret  identity hiding address on craigslist. Well fuck me sideways with a typewriter, a real person answered. I seem to be getting the hang of this digital bar room scene. Multiple mails fly back and forward. She apparently thinks I’m funny. In a “haha” way, not the usual “strange” way. I think I might be in lust!

D is convinced it’s a tranny. Always the optimist him.

Finally pictures. Janey mack. A real person, who may actually be a woman, and seems to be reasonably attractive.

Too good to be true?

I supply my terrible iPhone shots in return. Which makes me feel really cheap. Like shiny suit and bad tequila cheap. I’m cute. OK. See back home, cute was the easy brush off. Girls didn’t want cute. But over here, cute seems to be a good thing. Go figure.

So IM’s are exchanged and a long chat ensues.
And more IM’s over the next few days. I’m starting to think this online stuff might work! I give her my phone number and she actually calls. She called me. First. And yes I said she. It’s really a woman. Take that D, HAH!

Let us have a little recap right here.
I seem to have met an attractive woman on the Interwebs who seems to think I’m funny and not a ravenous male hose beast.

There HAS to be something wrong with this picture.

So D arrives into town and I give S a call and say, “Hey S! My buddy D is in town for a few days, let’s hang out!”. S is totaly on for this.

Alright. Calm down.  Lets recap. Cute girl from the Internets who laughs at my jokes, and who actually wants to meet me. The spider sense is all a tingle.

We eventually tie down a date and place. There we are playing foozeball and having a beer when the woman from the picture walks in. Breathe deeply. It’ll be ok. And there are some three dimensional traits that cannot be transmitted in a two dimensional image. I’m the consummate gentleman and try my hardest not to stare down the front of her blouse. That is until D says, “She didn’t wear a low cut top by accident, you know”. The man has a point. So I let gravity do it’s job and my eyes fall. And I get caught red handed. Great, I think. She looks me straight in the eye, giggles and winks. I’m not sure what this is, but it might be flirting. In some dark recess of my alcoholically abused brain, under a mound of cob webs and old Playboy magazines, a few rusted cogs begin to squeak to life.

Many games of foozeball later, we decide to move on to somewhere else. That’s several hours after meeting me and she’s not running for the hills. She seems to want to spend MOAR time with me, and D too.

Actually, D is a shit wingman, but anyway. After driving all over creation to find an open bar (Fucking yanks) we end up at a generic bar. And we sit there for another few hours. Now to the outside world it seems to look like D and S are getting on great and I’m the third wheel sitting between them. However, unbeknownst to anyone one else there’s a fair bit of footsy going on. Little brushes, hands resting on leg briefly.

Scared the bejeebus out of me. I’m thinking, “This is flirting, right? How do I do this again?”. The cogs are beginning to pick up speed.

So D goes to the bathroom. S diverts her attention directly to me. Lots of lingering eye contact.
My mind is going 90. Seriously, how the hell do I do this? Tell a bit of a joke, get a laugh. D returns.

Eventually we get kicked out of the bar. I’m totally sober, no seriously I am. D is buckled and S is fairly well on. Drive S home, and on the way out of the truck, she plants a ferocious one on my lips. A hard lingering forcefull smackeroo.
I am floored.
It took a millisecond for me to respond. But I did. D moves around to the passenger seat looking all smug at me. I’m speechless. Seriously. I was not expecting ANYTHING of the sort.

Time for a recap.
Cute chick from the Internets, who thinks I’m funny, actually had a good time with me and now she’d kissed me.

Where’s the bombshell?

The drive home is totally surreal. D falls asleep almost immediately, and I’m left on my own with classic rock on the radio trying to get my head around what just happened. This kind of thing does not happen to me. It never happened to me. It’s not supposed to happen to me. There’s a footnote in the book of creation to this effect. I’m sure of it.

Almost a week more of texting and calls follows.  I’m really getting along with this girl. She’s funny, smart, cute, sarcastic. I’m having a hard time holding off on the texting and calling. D is like, “Slow down dude, you’re gonna seem desperate!”. AP in work is saying, “Be like Hitch, 90-10″. She relates a lot of stuff to movies. It’s funny. What’s really funny is I’ve not seen half of them. So while the joke may be hillarious, it is totally lost on me.

Time to plan the next meeting. Lunch? D thinks that puts you in the friend category, yet another reference to a pop culture movie. So I call S and say, “Hey, lets do Mexican next Tuesday”. She’s down with it. As it turns out, lunch suits both schedules.

My little heart was all a pitter patter. This seems to be working. By now this has become almost a group project. I’ve got D, F, AP and AJ all giving me advice. Most of it the same. Don’t call S till Sunday.

Ok, so I don’t. That was pretty hard to do. So I finish up soccer and have to drive to the Dancing Den from Home Plate. Good time for a call, I think.

Voicemail and it’s full.

Maybe she’ll see the missed call. Either way I’ll wait 24 hours.

Two texts, an email and another call later nada, nothing , fucking tumbleweed. I AM a male hosebeast.

Craigslist. Shoulda learned…

Never let it be said that I don’t commit to things once I decide on a course of action. So in this spirit I decided to kick my search up a notch, both in arena and in intentions. It’s time to look for a few dates. I have a particularly small group of friends here. They are all married with kids. And don’t know any single women. In essence they are useless to me. If nothing else I will meet new people. I decided to try plentyoffish.com

Let me jump off on a side note here.

Has this guy never heard of a graphic designer? I mean, seriously. It’s like the anti-design. If it were an international spy it would be about as far from James Bond as I am. And that’s not even taking into consideration the fact that the thumbnails are all deformed. Everybody ends up looking like they’re at a carnival in the mirror room. This guy makes a FORTUNE off this site. Lets look at some of the stats here

“Every day over 30,000 nurses and doctors, 27,000 educators, 25,000 business owners, 5,000 chefs, 2,000 pilots and 800 Architects use Plentyoffish to find love, and they are joined by nearly 1,000,000 others just like YOU!”

I’m no mathematician, but if you take all those numbers and use one of those new fangled calculating devices, I think you’ll find a that he gets roughly, in the ball park of, a HOJILLION page impressions a second. The site is littered with ads, placed in the most annoying places. Given the laws of stupidity, enough people have to click on those ads to sum up a decent amount of green backs for our man Markus.

HIRE A DESIGNER!

Anywhere, where was I? Yes, so while navigating the infuriating rows of warped images I was surprised to find some normal looking people. And quite a few hot ladies too.

So you register and start to fill out your profile. And here is possibly the most annoying part of this online dating experience. How do I reduce my obviously fantastic character down into a few lines of text on a website? All joking aside, it’s not really a good indication of a person, is it? I spent some time thinking about how best to describe myself, through multiple iterations. The result of each try falls into one of three categories. I’m either an arrogant twit, overly self deprecating or emo.

I eventually settle on a few witty and erudite phrases that should have them eating out of my hands. I try to find a few photos of myself which ends up being harder than I thought, being significantly slimmer than my most recent photographic capture. I snap a few awful shots with my iPhone and upload.

Finally I have completed the course of hoops and I’m ready to begin. Dr. Watson, the game is afoot!

There are an amazingly small number of people in my area. I’ve been keeping an eye on it. I’ve been checked out by all the women in town on plentyoffish. It’s a little oxymoronic.

So you send a mail to a few and you wait. And wait.

And wait.

There’s nothing like being ignored on a website. It’s worse than getting the brush off in a bar. Geeks are the kings of the Internet? Maybe on an Anime site, or a Battlestar Galactica one. On a dating site? Yeah the jocks beat us hands down.

Is nothing sacred?

I miss the physical intimacy with Her. The moments of complete oneness, of giving and taking of the deepest, most personal emotions. For us men it’s how we show love. I love you, therefore I want to sleep with you. This, though, only comes after some time of course. Men still are men after all and while there is need for true intimacy, some times it’s nice to have pointless sex.

With this in mind I turned to the first place I thought of. Craigslist. As the Relationship had been spiraling, I was eyeing the “casual encounters” section. My mind, I think, was trying to prepare for the inevitable.

Now call me naïve, but I thought there were lots of real women on the Internet. Some of these women had to be looking for pointless animal release. Alas I was wrong. If it can be automated, it will be. Tons of bots that try to get you to sign up to a plethora of paid sites. Oh and here’s a tip. Even if they say they aren’t a bot, they probably are. They’re tricky like that.

Now, that’s not to say I didn’t meet real people. If by real we actually mean the caricatures of reality that seem to inhabit clichés. I posted an ad in the M4W (Men for women) section. I thought I extolled my virtues rather well. So I clicked submit and sat back to wait.

Firstly there was the larger couple that wanted me to join them in a threesome. I’m not sure the concrete floor of the Dancing Den could support the combined weight. The Dancing Den is on  the ground floor. I am as shallow as the next guy, but I have known beautiful women who could certainly not be called waifs. As a friend of mine back home would say, “You’d have fun sweating it off her”. This lady was not one of them. Christ, she even had a monobrow.

Next came the woman who actually turned up at the Dancing Den. Her ad on craigslist was (and I’m paraphrasing only slightly)

“I need a ride tonight, who is interested?”

Why do you think I’m trawling the site? So I initiate contact and she answers. There is a quick flurry of emails and I send her the directions to the Dancing Den. One hour later, the doorbell rings. There’s a woman standing at the door. “Hi I’m D.” Nothing spectacular, but this is not about long term fulfillment.

Being that I am a gentleman, I offer her a glass of wine. I was quite nervous. I’ve only slept with one woman for ten years.

We start to kiss and I’m quite amazed that it’s the same. The fear of doing it wrong is quite real.

Just as we started getting really frisky. D gets up and walks out. Too freaked out. I was a little confused, but I opened the door and walked her to her car. Perhaps it’s my Y chromosome but I would look at it like a game of poker. You drive to a strangers house with the express intention of bumping uglies.
I’d call that “all in”

Well, perhaps she folded. Was it me? That question rocks my confidence to it’s foundation daily.

In this situation, I’ll never know.

I’m sitting here in the Dancing Den. She is out with Him right now. Doing all the things that She used to do with me. The lilting laugh, the furtive glances. The knowledge of interest and the ego boost that goes along with it. It brings into sharp focus the loss I feel.

I will always have holes in my heart and soul that are shaped in Her image. That will never disappear. I can only hope the the longing to fill that gap will lessen. Intellectually I know it will, emotionally I can’t see when that will happen. Part of me doesn’t want it to happen. The rest wishes it had happened already.

We men are simple creatures. I know this is no surprise to any of us. We can be dumb animals bashing our way through life blindly. We are blinkered by our drive to succeed in all things and our propensity to need to fix problems. Being a geek makes this even more difficult. My job is to find the elegant solution to a set of problems. Some problems are apparantly unfixable.

When I am back at Home Plate and I see Her, I find it very difficult. She was everything I ever wanted. She was with me through my journey to becoming a man. Unfortunatly during that time I made too many mistakes, and took too much for granted. Never again. Josh Turner’s lyrics come to mind, “Next time I’ll hold on for dear life, If love ever gives me another try”.

Things begin to mean more when you are this raw. Lyrics to songs, people walking down the street holding hands. The fear of being alone is terrifying. And I mean terrifying. Can I ever find something similar again?

Man, as a species, is a social beast. We have a visceral need for intimacy. And men as a gender need this to stroke our egos. To lose that is devastating.

I have never before gotten down on my knees, had tears streaming down my face and pounded the floor, screaming at God “Why me?”.  This last year I lost two people very close to me, to lose a third to stupidity rather than death is indescribable. I am John’s raw emotions.

Part of doing this blog is to talk about how I feel. There is a chance that by putting my feelings out there and distilling them into posts will help me deal with them, rather than internalizing.

There will be good days, and there will be bad days. There will be days that I almost hate Her, and days I shall be ambivilent.

I will always love Her. I still believe She is my soulmate.

I just wish I was still Hers.

So it happened. The “Dear John” moment. The “I don’t feel it anymore”, “I don’t love you” moment. Ten years. Most of them good. Some of them bad, a few brilliant.

What do you do? Spend the next few months chasing her hard? Check. Cry your eyes out? Check. Scream at God, “Why Me?” Check. Hate her, ehh kinda check, I’m not that kind of person. Resign yourself to the fact that there is nothing that you can do? Check. Come to the realization that you have to move on? Check.

So here I am. Standing on the brink of what is looking like the scariest journey of my life. Crossing the Atlantic, piss easy compared to this. Last time I even contemplated chatting a bird up anywhere I was barely out of my teens. How the fuck does this shit work again? And to be quite honest, I wasn’t very good at it then either. Being a Geek and being lucky in love tend to be mutually exclusive. So in the best tradition of nerddom I’ve decided to blog about it.

I’m 30 something. Good career in hand, reasonably good looking, fit.
I love good food and good wine and the company that goes with it. I like my steak rare and my coffee dark. I’d rather eat chips than chocolate. I like my eggs over easy and my chilli spicy. I read avidly, but lately it’s all related to my industry. I like to sit on the deck and soak up the sun. I like getting up early but also sleeping in. I am loyal and caring, sometimes soft hearted, sometimes strong. I love photography and carry my camera in my truck wherever I go. I’m sometimes a geek, sometimes a nerd. If your computer breaks I can fix it, but don’t ask me to fix your water heater. That would end in disaster. And just in case you haven’t noticed, I could talk the hind end off a donkey.

What could possibly go wrong?