inherently different

Archive for the ‘not a love song’ Category

“How Deep Is Your Love?” – The Bee Gees

There comes a time in every new relationship when you take stock. For women, it’s usually after the first or second date. They talk to their buffalo-assed girlfriends and use a complicated math formula similar to the one used by physicists to measure the atomic weight of a black hole.

Before you think me a misogynist, I should say I have a great respect for the intellect of women. The thing is, a group of women together tends to bring out the worst in them as individuals. Unfortunately for me, Dana’s friends were a group of women with the collective IQ of a box of Krispy Kremes. That was bad enough, and bode ill for any relationship I could have with Dana, but lest you think I was under the misconception that my friends were rocket scientist, and in an effort to offer full disclosure, my friends are considered by many to be a compelling argument for extinction of the species.

My buddies are good guys, don’t get me wrong. The thing of it is that they aren’t really known for deep thoughts, at least not publically. They have priorities and those priorities tend to influence their interest in any given subject.

“So, was she good in the sack?”

That’s the guys main criteria. I’d be lying if that was the worst part. The worst part is that most guys would still take a bad lay from an attractive woman than a great lay from an ugly one. The reason can be found in the figurative reality. You can easily make your friends believe an attractive woman is a good lay, but there is no way you can convince them that a woman who isn’t attractive was capable of making you blow your baby batter across the room like Peter North getting his prostate milked.

The motivation to enter mutually exclusive relationships are quite different for men than they are for women. For women it is the first step toward a safe, happy, nest to raise young and waddle happily toward the golden years. For men the allure of a mutually exclusive relationship is getting laid in the next 20 minutes and anything beyond that is too complicated to bother thinking about. The fact that the two goals are diametrically opposed tends to get lost on both parties. I mean, women give it up to catch a husband for long term happiness and men try to get women to give it up for short term relief.

If I said sex with Dana was unsatisfying, none of my friends would believe me. She had the kind of physical attributes that clouded a man’s mind, not completely unlike the the 40s radio serial hero, The Shadow. I once spent an afternoon at a pub listening to her ex-boyfriend explain why he sold his grandmother’s priceless engagement ring to pay for two tickets for Dana to see The Boss in New Jersey. The fact that Dana took her best friend instead of the guy who just sold the family jewels for the tickets was not lost on me. Personally, I wouldn’t sell my grandmother’s used underwear to see Springsteen, but that’s me. Clearly this guy had issues, but would I be able to resist whatever full-court press she’d throw at me when the time came?

I recall spending a month’s salary on a trip to Fiji and any legs I had to stand on in this argument are broken like the promises i constantly made to my bookie. If getting what she wanted was relatively within reason, all it took was three minutes of her trying on bikinis at Wet Seal for me to realize I couldn’t fight someone sporting 44 caliber tits. The problem was in that figurative reality I was talking about. I didn’t much care that she was possibly the worse lay I’d had since I figured out what to do with a penis. What mattered was all my friends were envious of me and they believed the sex was as awe inspiring as her tits.

Of course, truth be told, Dana wasn’t the first human accessory I invested in. Looking back at the car wreck that was my romantic life brought to mind one mistake after another. The idea that women could cause one man so much misery might explain why some men begin finding other men attractive. Of course, switching teams isn’t a remedy for male stupidity. I have gay friends who explain that the same issues that permeate heterosexual relationships plague homosexual ones as well. The only difference is that you can beat the shit out of your gay male lover and have amazing makeup sex, where attempting the same thing with the opposite sex will yield an indictment for battery and rape. Solving male/female relationship problems requires a more deft hand… one that apparently socially crippled people such as myself don’t possess.

The question is how to change? Finding better partners is one way of having better relationships. Are these women in bars? Libraries? Churches? Hell, one of my friends met the love of his life in a laundromat. Of course, that particular relationship is more rinse cycle than fluff and fold, but I digress.

At this point in my reverie, just minutes after watching another girlfriend abscond to greener pastures, I made a commitment to change my luck with the opposite sex and to do that I would need to take drastic action.

“You got to let love rule!” Lenny Kravitz
In a short story, I’d be hit with an epiphany and admit all my mistakes while watching Dana’s taxi fight the traffic on the way out of my life. Unfortunately, man is imperfect and it takes time — sometimes weeks, sometimes months — before we’re ready to admit we’ve done anything wrong. Philosophers have written tomes exploring the nature of man and his inability to get it right no matter how many times he repeats his mistakes. I’d like to go on record as saying that I am not a great philosopher. I’m more like Forrest Gump. When I’m hungry, I eat. When I’m sleepy, I sleep. When faced with incontrovertible proof that I’m a jackass, I point fingers at everyone and everything within a zip code of the problem. If I had more friends, I’d borrow their fingers and point them too. Of course, I’ve known for years why I am the way I am.

When I was born, my mother was still reasonably interested in being a mother. Until I was five, she did all the necessary things mothers do in the pursuit of raising a child. I was changed, fed, and protected from strangers. At five years old, you don’t have the gift of experience and I believed my mother was among the best at what she did. Of course, as time progressed and my younger brother was born, I was relegated to the back burner and my reign as the undisputed favorite was over. I was a hasbeen at the tender age of 5.
Love is the oldest motivator in existence. Seriously. Who can possibly say with any real certainty that a shortage of females wasn’t what pushed the first creature up from the depths of the sea onto land. Love is an instinct that cannot be denied. It rules all of us whether we’re willing to admit it or not. Everything we do is done in the name of love or in the pursuit of it. If not for this primordial instinct to love, the species would die off. Simply put, without a piece of ass dangling seductively before our eyes like a carrot before a donkey, humans would have little motivation to succeed.

I am human. I know this because the moment I discovered girls I realized that unlike many of my other hobbies, this one required some considerable investment. I got a job to pay for my pursuit of excellence. After I realized that my earnings were falling miserably short of the necessary funds required to pursue the bombshells that most often caught my eye, I decided that college was in my immediate future. With a college degree in hand better salaries were guaranteed and conversely, better women. I blame this error in judgement on inexperience and raging hormones, the combination that is the bane of youth. My father, much later in life, once said, “The cheaper the woman, the higher the price!” What I wouldn’t give to have learned that much sooner.

Women, for their part, have high expectations and push their suitors to considerable lengths to prove their worth and commitment. This is the modern equivalent to natural selection. Women choose the man most likely to provide for them and their offspring. While prehistoric man was expected to drop a mammoth with a blow gun, modern man is asked to support a wife, three kids, a house, two cars, any number of pets, after school programs, sports teams and still have enough energy to bang his wife like a six inch spike through a two by four. Millions of men do this everyday! Is it any wonder that males live seven years less than females? Women may own original sin, but men are still paying the bill.
There is a group of women I like to call The Cellulite Militia and their queen, Oprah Winfrey, once suggested, “You’ve got to have a J-O-B, if you wanna be with me!” Somehow that became the rallying cry for these women to expect their prospective mates to shower them with more than an occasional dinner at the Golden Arches. While some women chose paths of education and professional careers in order to do for themselves, the Cellulite Militia said, “Let a man do it!”

Lest you think once again that I’m a bitter, spitefull man, let me say that I am not without fault here. I was raised by a man who believed women should be placed on pedestals at least as high as your head. The fact that this is the perfect height from which to kick us in the teeth when the mood strikes is a happy accident women have taken advantage of for years. I have placed more than my fair share of women in places of high regard. I’ve wined, dined and accepted behavior from them that would make sailors blush. I freely changed my initials to ATM in order to keep them happy.

Dana was the latest in a long line of women who benefitted from my upbringing. As far as Dana was concerned, our regular pizza guy and I were the same since “who” we were and “what” we stood for were less important than what we could deliver and how quickly we could do it. The real sad part of this arrangement is that unlike the pizza delivery guy, I wasn’t getting tips.

As Dana’s taxi disappeared over the hill, I wasn’t too upset since I knew that she was also disappearing from my life.

TO BE CONTINUED…

“Love is a battlefield” – Pat Benatar

No matter what anyone says, love is a mystery that will never be solved. You could throw a billion dollars and thousands of researchers at the problem of male/female relationships and you’d be no closer to solving the mystery than you would be to putting a Starbucks on the planet Mercury.

While I’ve known this for almost my entire adult life, it wasn’t until Dana began putting her clothes into a suitcase that I understood it.

Sure we’ve had our share of horrible rows, possibly more than our fair share. The one that prompted Dana to pack started out as many of them did, which is to say that she was asking questions and I wasn’t doing a very good job answering them. Women are like lawyers in so much as they never ask a question that they don’t already know the answer to. This concept may be outside of your understanding, but believe me, it doesn’t make it any less true.

Men are simple creatures. After we exit the womb we spend the rest of our lives eating, shitting, fucking, fighting, drinking, and sleeping. At any given time you can bet that we are engaged in one or more of these activities. You can rest easy with the idea that just about every man you know is doing one of these things right now. Some men might be doing more than one at the same time because, well let’s face it, we invented multitasking.

Women on the other hand are not simple. Contrary to what you might be thinking upon reading that statement, that isn’t to say that women are complex. In fact, I would like put it into the public record to suggest that they’re rather less complex than men. The difference is that women go out of their way to project an image of complexity to hide the fact that they’re after the same, banal things men are after. I’m really not sure whether they do this for their benefit or ours but they do it and we men pretend not to notice. Women are suckers for illusions and men are great at creating them. Which explains what Claudia Schiffer saw in David Copperfield, but I digress.

Women try to make things difficult in just about every facet of their lives. For instance, women will sometimes speak in a register that men can’t hear. I don’t know if this ability is natural or passed on from mother to daughter. How else can you explain the standard female complaint that goes something like, “He just doesn’t listen to me!”

Making a long story short, Dana asked me a very complex question in the guise of a simple one.

“We’ve been dating for exactly 12 months. Where is this?” she stopped.
For the first time since I had met her at a volleyball tournament she was at a loss for words.

“Whatever this is,” she waved her hands in the air, vaguely pointing at my apartment, then herself and finally me. This wasn’t looking good and like a fly caught in a web, I knew death was close at hand.

“I want to know!” she finished.

I could hear her speaking but I was damned if I could figure out what she was saying. She was doing that thing where her lips moved but nothing was coming out. For a moment, just a moment, I considered doing what my male instincts told me I should do in this situation, which was to ignore her. After staring at her blankly for a few moments, I made what could be considered the second biggest mistake any man could make.

“Know what?” I asked.

Dana’s face darkened not so much like a cloud passing before the sun but like a black hole opening up and swallowing the sun and spitting out watermelon seeds.

“I want to know where you see this relationship going.”

She stood before me, looking more like a defensive back on fourth down and forty than the sweet innocent girl who asked me to be gentle before we made love for the first time.

At this point I could have easily gone one of two ways. I could have answered her question with another question. For instance, I could have asked, “Well, where do you think it’s going?”

Of course doing that would just postpone the inevitable. According to some of the relationship quizzes in the magazines she constantly left in my bathroom, this would be wrong.

The other course of action would be to answer her truthfully. Which, as you can probably already guess, is the biggest mistake any man could make in this situation.

“I think it’s perfect the way it is.”

I have to admit that she took that information better than a great many women before her. She gave me a comforting nod and began packing. Immediately.

Wiser men than I have discovered that women don’t always know what they want until they get it. The speed with which she was packing told me that this was not only what she expected, but also what she really wanted.

For my part, I’m not sure how I felt. Like wounds acquired in battle, it takes time for the damage to register. The feeling would be similar to the emotions elicited when you stay in a hotel and you ask for a wake up call, only it doesn?t happen and you?re late to your own wedding. It sucks to be you yet again.

She was leaving and all I could do was watch, unsure whether or not helping her would make the situation better or worse. I’m the kind of guy that likes being helpful, but something told me that helping her pack her things at this point would just verify her suspicions about my loyalty to the relationship.

I think that the slam of the door was what finally got me moving. Unfortunately, by the time my feet delivered me to the front door, I was only able to catch her climb into the back of a cab. The last thing I saw of her was her smile. It was one of those sad but knowing smiles that songwriters are always writing about in their songs. Of course, those are country songs and I listen to a mix of alternative and punk. The poignancy of the moment, like the celebrity of Paris Hilton, was lost on me.

To Be Continued…