See Part I, Part II, Part III
Rejected from a Date I Never Asked For
While I appreciate the good intentions of family and friends who try to fix me up on dates, I resent the notion that I can’t meet women on my own. Not to sound cocky, but I meet women all the time. We just rarely connect on any meaningful level.
I’ve agreed to blind dates in the past, trusting the matchmakers' judgment, only to discover that absolutely no thought had gone into finding me a suitable partner. The only thing my dates and I had in common was being single. Disappointed one too many times, I naturally began declining offers to be fixed up.
So, the other night, when I was invited to dinner at a friend’s house and discovered that the only other guest was a woman I had never met, the situation was obvious. Dinner was a ruse to get me to meet their friend.
Feigning ignorance, I genuinely enjoyed the evening. After she said goodnight and hopped into her Uber, I don’t think the car had even pulled away before my friend’s wife began grilling me about what I thought.
Trying to be polite, I said a lot of nice things without committing to anything.
Needless to say, I was genuinely surprised when the dinner guest called me a day later out of the blue. She wasn’t calling to arrange a date, but to “let me down gently.” Apparently, she hadn’t wanted to be fixed up either.
That part I understood. What I didn’t understand was why she felt the need to call and turn me down for a date I had never asked her on.
Wanton Women and a Naïve Fool
Walking to the subway the other day, my friend glanced at a group of young Asian women we were passing and said, “Look at all these hookers.”
“They’re not hookers,” I replied. “That’s just how young ladies dress nowadays.” In my defense, I see a lot of scantily clad women around the city.
Right on cue, one of them skipped over to me. Looking as though she had stepped straight out of a hentai magazine, she wore a tiny miniskirt, garters, go-go boots, garish makeup, and ribbons in her hair. Without saying a word, she handed me a card advertising a 24-hour “massage” parlor.
I still don’t know what hurt me more: my friend laughing at my naivety or the realization that this girl had taken one look at me and decided I was the sort of guy who might frequent such an establishment.
A Cramp in No Man’s Land
I’ve been having a lot of strange dreams lately, but last night’s may have been the strangest.
I was fighting in a war sometime in the future, though the battlefield looked like something out of the First World War. It was a strange, retrofuturistic world of trenches, mud, smoke, and unfamiliar machinery, where whatever advances mankind had made had somehow brought us back to killing one another in the old ways.
At some point, I climbed out of my trench and crawled across no man’s land toward the enemy line. Like the Arditi of old, I crossed the desolate battlefield with a dagger clenched between my teeth and a trench mace in hand.
Somehow I reached the enemy trench unnoticed. Dropping into it, I began my assault with knife and mace.
At first, the enemy seemed completely oblivious to my presence. Then, as I moved down the trench, they simply froze. One after another, they stood staring at me while I charged forward, swinging the mace and slashing with the knife. There was something strangely mechanical about it all. No one fought back. I simply kept advancing.
Then, suddenly, I stopped. A terrible cramp seized my right calf. In the middle of my charge, surrounded by the enemy, I found myself completely unable to move. The soldiers who moments before had been frozen in terror now stared at me in bewilderment as I stood there helpless, my leg locked in agony. And then I woke up. The trenches, the smoke, and the enemy had all vanished. But the cramp in my right calf was very real.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, September 22nd, Feast of St. Maurice and Companions