I want you in that dress, and in that sweater.

I want the wash of your dark hair falling across your eyes, hazy and unfocused, lost in thought. I come home and catch you sneaking a cigarette out the kitchen window. I watch in silence, the exhaled smoke catching the evening light, as a narrow bar of luminous dust dancing above the table. I clear my throat, and you start.

You look back, throwing the cigarette out the window. You’ve just had a hard day, you explain. You try to palm the pack. You’re scrabbling for excuses when my hand grabs your neck and pulls your face close to mine. Your fear makes me hesitate, just for a moment. You look surprised, in the short moment before my lips are on yours.

Teeth part, tension replaced by anticipation, and I can feel the heat as blood rushes into your cheeks. My tongue snakes between your teeth and meets yours, still smoky, tender. As our lips part, you look into my eyes with understanding. I stare back, the only sound our ragged breath, grinding my desire into you.

I unzip your dress, and then I step back: you look down, breaking eye contact, as the dress pools around your feet. You unfasten your bra, and let it slide down to join the skirt. You look at me asking if that is enough. It’s not enough, dear. It’s never enough. And you push your panties down, one bit at a time, until they hit your knees and slide to the floor. And now in the still, warm air of the kitchen, you are exposed. Vulnerable.

And when I pull you toward me again, there is no hesitation.

She was the perfect girl for just a moment, her spiky hair, the striped sock, the entire picture sent a vibration through my brain which was beautiful and warm and I think I may have dreamed her.

But when I turned around, she was gone. Disappeared into some house or another, and I drove on home, trying to shake that vision of her, on the bounce of an uneven gait.

Looking like she knew the secret.

I’m paraphrasing here, but this has been said to me, in a couple of forms, over the years. And oddly, it’s not always about the same event. The reality is, I feel like a blind man in a strange house when it comes to sex and romance. I’m constantly stumbling and hurting myself and others in my flailing meander. It’s much easier and much less painful to just sit still.

And that’s the problem.

Many times now, in multiple different forums, I’ve been in a nice starting position with someone I find appealing. We’re past idle chitchat, moved to substantive discussion, and in normal situations, would be making the plunge toward more personal questions, but instead, I idle on the curb. The other person usually interprets this incorrectly as me being uninterested and moves on. And while I continue to make the same ineffective discussion, they are drifting further and further away. And typically, by the time I realize this and make one of my patently ridiculous and ineffective overtures, they’ve found a new applicant with less confusing signals to play the game with. In extreme cases, this overture may be years too late, causing consternation and drunken confusion and awkwardness, all of which only serve to reiterate that the best plan is to stand still and not even make the initial approach.

But each time, as I stare down a holiday or birthday or even a long weekend… I wish, and I think, and I fret, and eventually my loneliness overrides my brain and I make that first step. And then I sit, terrified to make the next one.

The real point here being that there’s a potential relationship I can feel running through my fingers right now, and I just can’t figure out how to make that next step naturally. I don’t know how. In all reality, I should probably take my dad’s advice from when I was a kid. “Son. Don’t worry about being cool. Just say it. I’d rather be the guy who ran up and said ‘You’re Pretty!’ than the cool guy who was too afraid to say hello.”

But something has changed. I don’t know what it was, but 100 more questions have passed, and I think we’ve grown apart.

You no longer show up on my first ten results, you’re back on page SEVEN! We are now only an 80% match, with 1% enemy! How did this happen? I blame myself. We never talked about it, I never made a point to find out why you hate me now. Was it my stance on polyamory? Is it that I mandate that gay marriage should be legal? I suppose now… I’ll never know.

You should go with your perennial runner up, Meliora84 (2% enemy, that bitch always hated me) and try to find a new life, together, reading crime fiction and having discussions about Rolling Stone. Try to find happiness, as you sink further away from my top 100 matches, and I will try to forget the purity, the power of our unrealized potential love.

You see, like most times when I post an personals ad, I got replies. Sure, I got the requisite random-letter-sequence@randomnumbers.ru Brunglish replies, but I also got a couple of genuine people. One didn’t respond after the first volley. One responded with “I LOVE TO LAUGH”, and was disregarded out of hand. Another responded and included a Myspace link that didn’t inspire a lot of interest. Another? Well… Let’s just say my interest was piqued.

So I mentioned that. And I mentioned that I might be interested in getting a cup of coffee (I have no idea what people “do” on dates, so this is the best idea I could come up with). I also included a picture of me.

And she responded with the sort of unguarded enthusiasm that is normally reserved for dental visits when you’re asked whether you’ll be paying by cash or check. There was a lot of heavily implied reluctance, along with plainly stated reluctance (the perfecta). But she also included a picture of herself, and indicated that it was I that had a choice to make, for some ill defined reason vaguely related to her age (Fargo and I both looked at the picture for a while, to see if I was missing something, she looks to be about my age to me).

Now, my natural response when someone does this is to run, not walk, in the other direction. I had a magnificently bad set-up with someone that started with this sort of – I’ll be generous and call it – lukewarm reaction. Nothing sets a date off right like showing up and having your date turn to her roommates to say, “Hopefully this won’t take long”. And that is the same gut reaction I had to this email.

Ladies, here is a free tip: If you aren’t interested, just fucking say it! And don’t think that I want to take out out to dinner for the pure unadulterated pleasure of buying you shit. Don’t make mealy mouth excuses about wanting to meet “all kinds of people” and “trying anything once”. If you have to make excuses to go on the date, you should really just man up and say “Hey. I’m not interested in you. Let’s both save an uncomfortable evening and not do this.”

I responded that I was still interested in going out, because I am holding out hope that this isn’t just some delightful game that translates to “Whoa, you’re not what I imagined you’d look like but I’m too ‘nice’ to just say no”.

What is with all the chicks talking about Fantasy Football? Where are the women who could give a crap about a bunch of drug-inflated semiliterate “professional” game-playing-adults? Honestly. Read a book, or something. Obsessing over spreadsheets of average-yards-per-jockstrap-ruined of some millionaire manchild between bouts of snorting designer caviar and shopping for larger rims for his refrigerator is about as pointless as reading one of their diaries.

I’m 28. I wouldn’t know Brent Favreau if he rushed a sack into my tacklebox. I have a job that sucks. I love Deadwood and William Gibson. As a child I drank an Orange Crush that had a layer of hot chili oil on the lip and I just cried from the pain and cried and drank more and cried. I have a dogs. One pair. I ate cereal for breakfast. I like my bicycle. I like the sunshine, and I hate that we’ve given up freedom in the name of safety. I have a Myspace but it’s really just so I can look at other people’s stuff. I don’t like polyamory.

You should probably be around my age. You should maybe have read a book in the past couple months. You can like sports, but you should understand that when you talk about how many runs batted in someone has I am going to get that faraway look and will probably be replaying old episodes of Duck Tales in my head.

I’m just curious if there are people out there who don’t love to laugh. Like they just really don’t like it. They are going out after work and when the idea of watching a comedy comes up, they just go “Boy, this is embarassing, because everyone is just gonna be laughing and that will be horrible.”

I haven’t met any of them. I’ve met quite a few people. I don’t think a single one didn’t, on one level or another, love to laugh. But you pointed out that you specifically do love to laugh, so I’m just wondering if maybe you met someone who didn’t love to laugh.

So did you?

I have a dog that is fat and a dog that is skinny. They are looking up at me right now like I’m some kind of food-magic deity. They get used to my schedule. Up in the AM, off to work, back in the PM, food for us both, some TV, some reading, and then off to bed. It’s tempting to be worshipped, watch them bark at the door to bring up the sun, but frankly mankind made it’s best leaps being disappointed by God and I think maybe they should have to stay up late worried about me too.

In short, I want someone to help me disappoint my dogs.

I don’t smoke anymore, I don’t drink every day. I think I think too much and maybe you should too.

Most depressing ad – “Married, looking for a boyfriend – 45″. I don’t even know where to start on this one. I have a suggestion here: Vibrator. Go ahead and invest in one. Maybe stop with the constant dick and get another hobby. You’re 45, I know that it’s late to have developed any sort of taste in art or higher intellectual goals, but you could at least develop a vague interest in television or some entertainment a step up from fucking constantly. I know nobody ever died with the last words “I wish I had less sex”, but this borders on pathetic.

I think the ads that please me the most are the ones that follow this format.

1. State own physical statistics. For example “5 feet 8 inches, 175 pounds.”
2. Indicate you’re looking for “more personality than physical appearance”
3. State the physical appearance you’re looking for.
4. Restate that you are only in this for intellectual compatibility.
5. State some more physical characteristics you’re looking for.
6. Finish with a recap of physical characteristics you find attractive.

Back to the grind, the pee-tease is telling me my break is over.

It will likely be on Friday. TAKE THAT SPAM AGGREGATOR. I AM NOT DESPERATELY ANYTHING ASSFACE HOLES.

Enter the no-reply zone.

This is not the first time such a thing has happened to me. A certain level of friendliness is extended, and through what I can only assume is witchcraft, the person on the other end decides it’s too difficult to simply say “no thanks” and continue what was a very enjoyable email relationship, and instead stops talking to me altogether. This is followed by me feeling sort of bad about the whole thing, like I ruined some fun by trying to convert an online relationship to an offline one, regardless of seriousness, and then inevitably I stop talking to everyone for six or nine months and that, as they say, is that. Then I’ll try again.

I’m not saying this is certainly the case now, but it seems very likely. A lack of response for a week isn’t exactly glowing praise of the attractiveness of an offer. If you were eating someone’s cooking and they asked if you wanted seconds and you decided not to answer them for an hour, it probably doesn’t mean you liked it a lot.

Meanwhile, I keep having inexplicable dreams about pregnant girls and long-since-exes and waking up with that cold calculating brain stripping away the fake-love I felt in sleep. Like swallowing a length of cold chain.

I believe he may be in league with the reporter.

Riding the max anywhere near it guarantees you will be packed into a car with gyrating, constantly yelling, undecipherable language spewing, R-Kelly-peeing-on-aged girls, and a bunch of guys who look like they’re trying out for “hard ass mofugger number 4″ in the new “Murda Masta BlaXX” video. But not this day, this day, the car was pretty empty. It had only me, three other downtowny-types coming back from the office, a cyclist, and… The Whore. Not just any whore, no, this was the die from which all of hookerdom was struck. Just sitting there, talking on her phone, half-shade purple tint glasses, bare midriff shirt, lowrider jeans.

Let me take that back a step. These weren’t low jeans, they weren’t sag jeans, these were custom units, had to have been, so low, in fact, that three quarters of an inch of perfectly-trimmed pubic hair peeked over the belt. She had to have known they were this low. This was “why is my clit cold, it’s kind of drafty in my pants” low. She had her hand in her pocket, thumb resting on her hip just above the beltline, so she had to know, had to. There was no way not to know that these jeans were that low. So, I did what everyone else on the car did, tried to find a way to stare at her chonch discretely.

I chose the off-the-window method, which offers less detail than a behind-a-book gambit (as the cyclist and one of the other downtownies was opting for), but more continuous viewing. Left without a book, one of the others had decided on trying to hide his gaze behind a route map, which may or may not have been just held upside down in the hand, and a less adventurous gentlemen next to me was using the “look and then look away at random intervals” to fair success. Everyone was fairly happy, because muff shots is muff shots, no matter where they comes from. For three stops we pushed on like this, everyone getting their fill of downy, red-blonde locks, until That Guy got on.

Everyone shifts when That Guy gets on, because their views have been blocked. Cyclist guy shifts first right, and then left, I start looking for maybe a double-reflection shot that’ll work in the short term, the look-and-avoid guy moves to the other side of the car trying for a new angle. Nothing is working, this shit just isn’t right, That Guy isn’t following the rules, he’s moving for _optimum_viewing_, not for shared viewing. I look over to Book guy, see if he’s got a lock on it, and he’s just staring up. So is Look-and-avoid. Cyclist guy and I both look up at the same time. Time seems to slow, and the light coming in from the windows is somehow changed. Golden. We’re all looking at That Guy, agape. I didn’t believe it at first, it took a full 30 seconds to take it in.

He was staring at her crotch. Just straight at it, no obfuscation. No distance-vectoring, no reflections, no book. He didn’t even have headphones in so he could fake zoning out to the music. Nope, he just walked in, homed in on the pubes like a guided missle, parked himself two feet in front of her, and _started_staring_.

Ladies and gentlemen, the game has changed. Like the introduction of the slam-dunk for basketball and the end of the dead-ball era for baseball, the demolition of a paradigm. This was amazing. The guy just stood there, staring at her vag! I cannot impress this upon you enough, he just walked in like Aaaahnold in The Terminator, like he had some kind of headsup display that said “Coochie 2.0000135 M NNW” and had grid overlays and stuff, he just stomped over, no words, and bam, started staring at it. As I looked around to take in the awe of my fellow riders, I again was struck by the sweetness of the air, the purity of the light in the car. It wasn’t the same as the air was before. It wasn’t the same light. It was somehow better, cleaner.

And I realized that I was feeling the same thing that people must have felt on that fateful December day in 1955, upon watching a colored woman refuse a request from the driver to vacate her seat and let some white folks sit down. This was my Rosa Parks.

After my supplies are secured, I get back on my bike and ride up the hill towards home. I let my mind wander and let the legs do the work for a while. A woman wanders out of one of those rent-by-the-week motels and grins a painthuffing grin at me. If it weren’t for my headphones I’m sure I’d have heard some of the chaos in her head spill out through her mouth. A passing police cruiser gets a quick upraised middle finger from her as she retreats from the sun into her den. Potent chemical reek pours out of the stormdrain grates; the smell of easy money being made one tubfull at a time. I push on as best I can, swerving to avoid the broken coffee mugs, broken liquor bottles, and dirty diapers. No time to worry about the downfall of civilization.