…which seems to involve locating someone whose appearance and manners are not immediately objectionable, securing said individual’s agreement and coordination to attend some kind of informal ceremonial function that typically involves the ingestion of food or beverage and occasionally some form of light exercise, making one’s self as agreeable in appearance and providing a suitable illusion of being unburdened by emotional issues, financial constraints, and and offensive lack of personal hygiene as possible, arriving at said meeting locale on or about the date of the scheduled meeting, awaiting the accession of the previously referenced individual in the same general proximity, identifying one another from grainy, ill-lighted images taken by a 1 megapixel cell phone camera, engaging in the above-mentioned ceremonial consumption without depositing more than a maximum acceptable level of detritus upon the inadvisably light-colored clothing that looked good in the bathroom mirror but now makes one appear to be a three week corpse under the mood lighting of the unexpectedly noisy and rancid smelling venue that appears to turn into a ska club in mid-dinner, making some form of vaguely coherent and non-somnolescent banter about subjects not to include politics, religion, driving habits, quantum mechanics, room-sized collections of obscure vinyl jazz records, and small pet animals that look like gremlins allowed to feast on s’mores after midnight, and finally, find some manner in which to terminate what has now become a painful but seemingly inextricable engagement in some fashion that is polite, respectful, non-felonious, and most importantly, doesn’t require gnawing off any appendages of your body that won’t grow back without the sort of gene therapy that typically results in a global zombie infestation.
The individual steps seem so almost trivial to accomplish, even by an emotional simpleton such as myself or Ernest Hemingway. However, putting them together, in correct order, in such a fashion as not to collapse like a San Francisco bridge, seems to be more complicated than assembling a multi-billion dollar orbiting space platform. And I write here from some experience. With the space platform thing, I mean; the dating process is more alien to me than a bug-eyed reptilian protagonist which swallowed a red LED keyfob light in order to become the next children’s toy holiday marketing success.
I exaggerate, of course, but only very, very slightly. I and my small crew of highly trained capuchin monkeys could have built half a dozen gamma ray laser-equipped space platforms and been poised to almost take over the world until foiled by a half-inebriated, foppish, hypersexed British SIS agent in the time it has taken me to utterly fail to achieve a third dating engagement.
But I’m certain others must have some voice external to my cranium on the topic at which they would be willing to share at tiresome length and in a voice that would make Sally Struthers wince in pain of acoustic overload. So, by all means, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of cheer.
Stranger