Seeking...

I resorted to the Yahoo Personals lately, and have had a tremendous response from, you guessed it, older men. Frequently, these older men's living situations will be listed as "Living with parents." At what point will they realize that being 55 and still at Mom and Dad's house renders you undatable? Amongst the vast flood of the old and scary (like the Russian who refused to tell me where he was and used atrocious grammar..."He's in prison" my friend said, reading his emails.), there have been a few people who have sparked my interest. One of them is a bit of a stretch for me because his first contact with me was an email that said "Are you really as much of a wild child as your profile says?" Typically, that would be a red flag for me, but he's so...chiseled. His profile picture(s) show a darkly handsome man with a cleft in his chin that you could open a beer bottle with, so I will excuse the wretchedness of his introduction. And I will ignore the fact that his hobbies and interests are "sports, playing pool and hanging out with my buddies." Why will I ignore this? Because I'm the asshole who ignored someone's goddamn ARREST RECORD and ANGER ISSUES before. Let's not fool ourselves...I make poor decisions.

Last evening, I met up with another guy from the personals. We have been obsessively emailing each other because we have similarly sick senses of humor and I suspect we both like the idea of corresponding with someone whose views are so similar to our own. It's very masturbatory and who, besides the Catholic church, doesn't like masturbation? In person, he was fairly attractive, kind of tall, and had a disarming smile. The downside? He bore a slight resemblance, in accent and manner and smile, to an ex of mine. I spent the whole conversation trying to plow through the presumptions I'd made about him based on the random coincidences of genetics and geography and I still don't know if I was successful in separating the man that is from the man that was. We talked, we showed off our tattoos, we drank a couple of beers, and then it was time to go. Outside of the bar, we stood stiffly, waiting for the other to decide what the appropriate course of action for the next few moments would be. Finally, after much shifting of weight from one foot to the next, combined with utterances of "Well!" and "So!", he leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. It was very near my mouth, and expertly placed. Too far up on the actual cheek itself would have been too friendly, too benign. Too close to the mouth and it would have appeared that he had aimed for my mouth and missed. It was just right, and I said "Thank you!" out of genuine delight. Then, he thrust out his hand and shook my hand with a force likely brought about by the profound relief of navigating an awkward situation successfully. "See you again?" I said. "Yes. Definitely." he said.