Bermuda Triangle

She might move here, I might move there to New York. I dunno yet.

So I was thinking about the first day I met this girl and all the ways it coulda gone. Then it gets too much and I have to think about my friends with the girls who had their number. Some of them are still with them, some aren't. Some might never find better. Some might not bother to look for better. Some had ones where they could feel it slipping away and others had it where it felt like a hit and run. I think about this stuff all the time. It's backdrop for me about all the people I care about. Way more than their job or their childhood or their parents or stuff we've done together. Girls have dibs on your life, probably more so when you pretend they don't. I never met a player who hadn't had his heart broke and wasn't trying to get even for it.

Okay, but that first day you had with them. Imagine if it went all the ways it COULD'VE gone. All those poor little Brins out there moping in parallel dimensions on a day like today with all those colored autumn leaves on the ground not looking pretty but more like different species of butterflies poisoned---tennis ball green, cinnamon, scraped knee blood red, honey in sunlight.

Every week or two we talk about it. Go over it. The set up, stakes, implications, subtext, rules, expectations, results, consequences.

On the downside, when you line this shit up from a different place before you've even met you've got a tense, precarious situation. At a certain point when meeting becomes imminent---everything intensifies. First off, whose gonna fly to see who? Central issue: whose turf? What does that say to be the one to fly out? Are YOU the desperate one? Are YOU the sucker?

I've done it both ways. Mixed results. I don't know that you're better off one way over the other. Maybe. If money's a concern you are. Girls are always really nervous about it. WHAT IF HE'S A RAPIST! is what they SAY. It's the knee jerk reaction, but I don't believe it for a second. For starters, it presupposes as if being a rapist wasn't bad enough, apparently you're the kind so demented by a twisted long-range fetish that instead of lurching around a park or an alley, you spend 30 hours on the phone with your prey and successfully seduce them and THEN drop the gauntlet.

The nasty thing about the internet, in terms of dating, is how much in favor it is for women. Which puts the advantage heavily in the guy's camp.

How does meeting somebody on the internet from a new place coincide with what women want? If the sales of romance novels are any indication, quite a lot. Romance novels are all about OBSTACLES. You've delivered plenty right off the bat. Apart from that bowled over by a truck, fuckability, immediacy-factor, anything you're doing with communication that's exciting her starts a domino effect. Right after talking to you, as a stranger, they're violating prohibition. They tell ANYBODY they got off to some STRANGER on the internet their friends give them shit about the dangers of it and the overall tackiness and so on. But that violation is exciting. And their in charge of throwing gasoline on it with their fantasies whenever they want to in private. AND all the dull ass shit and left overs most guys they've encountered works as the best publicity department money could buy for you. Then there's the distance, which brings on an immediate ambivalence. Overcoming ambivalence in these initial stages stokes the fire for years. COULD I LIVE WHERE HE IS? WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT HERE? DO I LIKE WHERE I LIVE? DO I LIKE MY LIFE? WHAT ABOUT A NEW LIFE? I DON'T EVEN KNOW THIS PERSON. WHY AM I EVEN THINKING ABOUT THIS? And if they got turned on by your exchange that distance harmonizes with their longing about what it would be like if there WEREN'T any distance.

But this is just the sexual psychology side of their equation. It's not really addressed directly. Not really.

Which is the next thing: look at nearly every girl on facebook and whether or not they have a boyfriend their profile is set up as a marketing tool at shaping and forming the most desirable template possible for attracting a mate. Once that template attracts a guy (let's say me, for arguments sake) they then get to explore their data with you listening. This dynamic essentially operates like a diary that writes BACK. Even if you've become entirely uninterested by the guy, he might have some useful tips about what's dull or engaging or tantalizing about you that you should emphasize.

Okay, so all that's clicked and you've decided YOU'RE gonna fly over to meet him (me). The trouble here is that the main reasons you've decided to go you're embarrassed telling anybody but him and NOW when you actually meet him everything, in a fashion, has to start all over. A huge list of shit has to be met first: smell, movement, appearance, touch, voice, manner, nerves. I'm not really sure if it's a shopping list in the first place that allows people to fuck or fall in love---but the pressure's on when at least through communication you feel the need to explore NEW methods of communication.

After I picked her up from the airport and drove her to a little clearing near the ocean to have a cigarette, my girl took nearly two hours to even LOOK at me. The entire drive she stared straight ahead so I was naturally forced to switch the radio to 96.1, the Asian station, pulverizing us with Gatling gun Cantonese sprinkled with English slogans, "Brain Freeze at 7-Eleven", "Janet Jackson eeez BACK!". Nothing could make her look over or laugh and break the tension. The whole while I'm sitting there flooring it wondering if everything about this experience is a completely wrong for her.

It's an aggressive set-up because there's no middle ground. It has to succeed big or become a nightmare. Nobody goes for such a rigged set-up unless they're really unhinged in the first place.

So you bring her back and say some bullshit about finding a wine from Burgandy that for some reason smells like girl-smell. You load up the fireplace. You get used to her voice again even though it's not coming through a phone but bouncing off walls. You see her looking around at stuff you tried to describe. You shouldn't have let her read your book. She still hasn't mentioned whether or not she liked it. This is not likely an oversight. Big question, has she already decided whether or not she's into kissing you. What about fucking you? I'm not twelve here. It's far too awful to contemplate making out with her and NOT fucking her for the implications. Cause you're gonna have to qualify it. In all the tedious trivial ways she's keeping score but in all big ways nobodies keeping score on this shit---BUT EVERYTHING STILL COUNTS. Everything. Right now. In the pauses when she's looking at, rather than through, that window. What the hell's she thinking about? Probably how strange THIS is. But the fireplace is impressive. The comment about what a gypsy tarot reader mother and a lawyer dad produce in the psyche of their child was not a wise thing to give her. She didn't need to know THEY are responsible for your wiring.

What can we determine by the manner in which she's sipping? Is she afraid to get drunk? Is she examining the fluid for cloudiness implying I've slipped something in it? Does she even remotely agree that it tastes like woman-smell?

Eye contact: WONK.

Spotlights.