This Is Not the Life I Ordered - The Coziness of Quiet Desperation

 In a world of romantic booby-traps, disconnection from the cultural Zeitgeist, abandonment of youthful aspirations in favor of midlife comfort -- the survivalist pragmatism of settling and selling out -- my job has become the most centering and validating part of my life. Which is not something I have ever felt before. Now I understand that 50something year-old man who lives and breathes for work. The friend's dad who drove us around but never really talked. The persnickety middle-manager who didn't have a life. The guy who pays for whores he may or may not be able to get it up for but who's always a good listener. The man at the end of the bar who reads his paper with bifocals, confronting daily on some soft, unspeakable level the astonishing realization that no matter how self-sabotaging or destructive he may be, he's probably not going anywhere anytime soon. The guy, at last, who looks at young people and their styles and ways with equal derision and disorientation and, thankfully, not one ounce of envy or empathy. And on Sunday as the sun goes down and shift back to accountability and duty is so embedded it's part of his circadian rhythm, he can't wait to get up and go to work on Monday.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered - Will you regular me?

 Something was bothering me about a recent "encounter" I had with someone but I couldn't put my finger on until now. This person, for whom there was a mutual attraction and a short history, asked me to be their "regular." Now, I have probably been this and others have been this to me before. But I had never been proposed such in a way that, in the excitement of imminent intimacy, sounded like a good idea. Well, it was a clumsy exchange ultimately and now I realize what bothered me about it all along. That being, a regular is someone you fuck until someone you really like comes along. And that regular will invariably end up being hurt -- unless it's an equal exchange, which these things rarely are. I will never be someone's "regular." We either go to Disneyland and go our separate ways after the trip or we get to know each other and develop a relationship of some kind. But in this age of hookup culture anti-romance fickleness in a notoriously shady lifestyle I already inhabit, I'm not signing on for an even more embedded no-accountability sex trade-off. A regular is a person who goes to the same bar after work every day. Not someone you make love to when you get lonely and tingly and no one better is around. I can't imagine anything less sexy or romantic than such an offering. "Will you be my...regular?" I'm glad I realized early what was jangling and rattling in the back of my mind about an encounter with someone I was genuinely excited about. I was dumped before it even began. #dodgedabullet