Darwin and Dating

I want to write you stories.  I do.  But today I slept late.  Really late, which feels great, but which puts me behind the eight ball for other things.  I have a meeting in an hour at the factory for which I can't be late, and I live half an hour from where it will occur.  I still have to clean up and dress.  And I must straighten up so that the maids can clean while I'm gone.  So there can be no story today.  But I will return to story telling again.  I will, though it scares me since they are true stories with only the names changed, and they are my stories, not theirs which would sound completely different from mine, of course.  I wouldn't end up the schlemiel in every one of theirs, I'm sure.  I'd have to come out wise once in a while.

What I do have time to recount, though, is a vignette about age appropriate dating.  I was seated with my ex-friend Brando one night at a bar for architects and lawyers and doctors and other various assholes.  I mean different from the kind that Brando and I were.  We had membership cards, too, but they were a different color.  A friend of Brando's, a pediatrician, sat down with her husband and they began to chat.  I knew them tangentially through Brando, and thus was a minor part of the conversation.  Somehow, though, we began talking about the girl I was dating and she felt free to comment on the relationship.

"What could you possibly have in common," she asked.  It was the dumbest of questions, of course.

"What do you mean?" I queried back.

"What do you have to talk about?" she said like a nun cursing Satan.

"Well, last night while she was practicing a violin piece to the metronome, I started opining about the difference between classical music and jazz.  It was about the metronome, I said.  She was learning to play the written music precisely, exactly as it was written.  I said that jazz was all improvisational.  She stopped playing and said that Beethoven was actually the greatest improvisational musicians of all time.  Well, I was over my head and so sat through a very long and complicated music lesson."

Then I looked at her husband.

"What did you all talk about last night?  401Ks and how best to position yourselves for retirement?"

He looked at me and gave a sideways grin.  I think I'd hit it square on the head.  The pediatrician said nothing.

"I'm not a bottom feeder.  The women I date are bright.  They don't need me.  Not for anything.  I don't have money.  I drive a shit beater car.  I don't have a lot of disposable income.  But I'm well read and a fine cook and I don't spend a lot of time talking about golf or country clubs.  Most single women, women who do not have children, women who are happy and bright and fun--well the pool of women my age who meet those criteria is very, very small.  They've gotten married and had children long ago.  So what do you propose, that I sit on my ass and twiddle my thumbs because I waited too long?  Fuck that.  I'm going fishing in the big pond.  I want to be happy, too."

As always, of course, I'd gone too far for the social situation.  Fortunately for me, though, Brando got more of a kick out of such things than most even though the woman was a paying client.

There is something Darwinian about courting.  It isn't as static as some would have it be.  I haven't figured it out, I just know the consequences.  But I've spent too much time with this and now will be late for my meeting.  Shit, shit, shit.