Living the Dream. For Now.

Well, somehow I've wound up with yet another woman who for some reason believes that I'm dateable. I don't know what women see in me. For one thing, the restaurants I take them to are so low-class that Ethiopians refuse to eat there.

I suppose I should back up a bit. Last fall I broke up with someone I had been in love with for more than three years but who, it turns out, didn't feel the same way about me. This isn't surprising, because all women I become involved with like me only for a little while. Once the roofie wears off they find flaws in me that they never noticed before. There are two things in particular that they all criticize: everything I say, and everything I do. To them, my entire existence is just one big exercise in wrongness. And they're right, you know. For example, in my last relationship I committed the heinous crime of pulling my socks up when I wore shorts. If you can imagine.

So after having my heart broken so badly that even the economy pitied me, I spent most of the winter and spring crying. And that was just because the Ravens lost to the Steelers in the playoffs. I'm kidding! I don't even watch baseball.

Anyhoo, women are like a drug to me: I can't resist them, and when they're gone they leave me empty, depressed and wanting more. So I went through months of detox while busying myself with useless activities such as cleaning my house. Now, if you ever find me with a mop or a dust rag in my hand, you know that my life is not going quite the way I want it to. When I'm happy, I do zero cleaning because I'm too busy having fun, which results in my floors and carpets being strewn with dirt, pebbles, lint, and dog hair tumbleweeds the size of cantaloupes. And don't get me started on that red stuff growing in my shower.

Eventually I started dating again, which I don't have to tell you is about as much fun as anal warts. The dating pool is basically a cesspool: full of crap, but occasionally someone accidentally flushes a ring down the toilet, and it is your job to find it. I did online dating and got approached by the usual collection of whack jobs, liars, gold diggers and weirdos. One woman was living under an address protection program. Another was in her 60s and confined to a wheelchair. Several of them lived out of state, telling me that they were willing to relocate, and when I responded that I wasn't ready to have anyone move in, they hurled some nasty epithets at me for assuming that they wanted to live with me. Yeah, that was soooooo my fault. Anyway, I filtered out the nutcases to the best of my ability, but I still managed to go on dates with several loonies and psychos. One, who I met on a Wednesday, said she'd get together with me again on Sunday. Then, after standing me up, she said that she didn't mean *that* Sunday. Another one, who I dated for five weeks, broke up with me by spending a half hour telling me everything that's wrong with me, my friends, and my mother (whom she never met). But it wasn't all bad. Some of the women I met were nice, honest and sane. Some were quite attractive too: fitness instructors, triathletes, runners, and former Playboy bunnies. All in all I dated 16 women in four months, which is more than the total number of women I had dated in the first 36 years of my life, which just goes to show how pathetic I used to be. Not that I'm a bargain now.

Well, a few months ago I met a great lady who took to me right away. I'm still trying to figure out why. Maybe it was the seven beers she drank. Whatever it was, we became intimately involved within a week. I stopped dating other women, and she stopped turning tricks for crack. I'm kidding! It was heroin.

I am constantly amazed that she has chosen me, because I am not the most manly man. One time she witnessed me injure myself with a fortune cookie. I kid you not. We were finishing a Chinese buffet. Our fortune cookies arrived with the bill (which, at $9.49 per person, was one of the most expensive places I had taken her to). She eagerly took hers out of the plastic wrapper, broke it open and read it. I tried to do the same, but I couldn't get the wrapper off. It was one of the most emasculating episodes of my life, second only to my marriage. In an effort to cover up my obvious weakness, I put the fortune cookie on the table and smashed it with my fist, which failed to open the wrapper but caused a shard of broken pastry to poke through the wrapper and dig into my flesh. So now I'm sitting there, still unable to get to my fortune, bleeding. She laughed, but it was the laugh that all men who have ever been in a relationship have heard, the one that says: "Wow, I can't believe I'm going out with you." This was quite understandable because although we live in a society where the only thing a man will ever have to protect his woman from is the occasional spider, she wants a manly man because the female brain evolved during an era when women were under constant threat from mastodons, which required strong, hairy men to fend them off. My woman, because she has me for a partner, could be overtaken by a rogue hedgehog, which would easily knock me down and then have its way with her as I lay face down, moaning, in the poison ivy.

So now I'm living a perfect life with an incredible, beautiful, physically fit woman who enjoys my sense of humor and good beer and the outdoors and romantic walks, and who for some reason adores me. I am not taking this for granted because if my track record is any indication, it won't last. I figure that it's just a matter of weeks before I forget myself and pull up my socks.