Got up, got dressed, and trudged to Telegraph Ave. I did not bring the illegal Darwin fish, and did not bring the illegal fish display, because I am a law-abiding vendor, and I wondered what might be illegal today.
Perhaps the city inspector will decide there's more than the allowable amount of lint between my toes?
♦ ♦ ♦
The city's inspector schmuck never came 'round, but Andrea happened by the fisherama, and said hello, and loitered and checked out some of our new fish designs.
She's the nice woman I almost met on the subway, the day I couldn't find the words to introduce myself. Today I found the words, said "I'm Doug," and we talked, and I did not make a fool of myself.
She's a school teacher, she told me, twice divorced, and she says she'll never marry again. She has a 9-year-old kid who wasn't with her today, but she told me about the kid, and about teaching, and even a little about her second husband, though I hadn't asked. She asked questions about me, too, and it was like a conversation ordinary people might have.
She stayed at the fish stand for twenty minutes, talking with me. Nobody talks to me that long, and when they do I hate it, but... I didn't hate it.
Andrea is attractive and black — ablacktive — and she likes me, though of course she hardly knows me. She may have been flirting with me, but nah, I only imagined it, right? She was only being friendly, I'm sure. She couldn't be interested in me. Could she?
I'm so introverted it takes me two tries on two days to even say, "I'm Doug," so nothing's going to happen. Phone numbers were not asked for. A get-together was not arranged. We'll probably never see each other again, but I'm hoping we do.
A few hours later, the question in the back of my mind and the front of my pants is, would I sleep with Andrea if the opportunity arose? It absolutely won't, and even if it did my penis probably wouldn't, but yeah, I'd love to at least try.
♦ ♦ ♦
When I'm thinking of the astronomically unlikely impossibility of sex with another woman, Sarah-Katherine isn't part of the daydream. She wants an open relationship, so she'd be more concerned if I didn't boink other women.
'Friends with benefits', Sarah-Kath calls this. It's supposed to keep things uncomplicated, she says, but in my head it makes things more complicated.
Usually there are no women in my life, but there have been a few unlucky ladies. It's always been just one at a time, though. One woman takes a great deal of effort, so one is enough.
Boinking one woman one night and then another woman the next night? That's not a turn-on for me. It just sounds like so much work.
Gotta find some woman I'm willing to spend time with, which eliminates 99% of female humanity. And she's gotta be willing to spend time with someone fat smell and ugly like me. Long odds already.
Then I gotta ask her out, and she needs to say yes.
We gotta get all gussied up and go places and do things, and you know, I hate going places and doing things.
Then I have to be nice enough that this hypothetical lady might consider kissing me, even though I have rotten teeth that give me perpetually bad breath.
Then there's all the additional effort needed to make her maybe want to do more than kissing.
After all that, if she somehow does want to get horizontal and knock knees with me, that's the greatest thing in the gosh darn universe. Why would I want to go through all that again, almost immediately, with another woman?
I don't. I want to do it again with that hypothetical woman who just hypothetically fucked me. It's made me happy, and I want to make her happy too, and keep making her happy, so's we can keep fucking.
See, in that sense I'm a very traditional fella, but Sarah-Katherine's idea of happiness is sex with me on Tuesday, and sex with someone else on Wednesday.
That's what she wants so I'd never try to stop it, but I'm not sure it's what I want. Maybe that means I'm not sure about things with Sarah-Katherine. And maybe she's not sure about me.
She's still in Seattle, and we still exchange letters, talking about our maybe-move to New York together, but the lag between letters used to be two or three days, and now it's a week. Our letters are shorter, too. Perhaps winter is approaching, meaning more than the weather.
Ah, pthth. Such doubts are probably all in my mind, probably. Where else would doubts be? Things are a mess in there, and thinking about things like this just makes the mental mess messier.
Heck, I should be ecstatic at the possibility of boinking a beautiful woman on Tuesdays, without all the work boinking usually entails. I've spend a great many Tuesdays alone, you know, and every other night of the week.
♦ ♦ ♦
Sometimes after thinking something far enough through to write it, I understand myself better. That's is a big part of why I write the zine. It helps me figure things out.
But now it's bedtime, and I'm tired of all this thinking and honesty and crap. I'm too tired to think any more, let alone write.
Maybe tomorrow I'll edit all of this away.
From Pathetic Life #16
Sunday, September 24, 1995
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