I'm On My Way

When you're post-divorce and Born Again Single, there are times when the biggest obstacle you face is the gap of unplanned-for quietude between the periods of buzzing, fuzzy, giddy newness. Unbroken-home family life is often a sequence of predictable and repetitive task-mastering, the challenge being not so much in the creation of the plan as the execution. In a lot of ways, married family living is like being welded shut inside a 55-gallon steel drum and then rolled down a steepish hill. You know exactly where you're going and, because gravity is what gravity is, you're fairly certain you're going to get there; the mode of transport can be a little stultifying, dark, suffocating, restrictive of all movement or creative thought, hot, noisy and an immediate hazard to both your spiritual and physical self at all times all times all times.

You know what, I forgot what my point was.

Anyway, we'll pivot to this: there's only so much porn you can watch. Flap A fits into Slot B, no matter which angle you shoot it from. You can mix and match the ratio of flaps to slots, experiment with the esoterica and the body fluid happenings to whatever capacity your Bucket of Personal Shame will hold, but in pursuit of distraction, it always, always overflows eventually. I sometimes think this is what lesbian clown porn was invented for specifically. It's out there to say: "What, really? No, just... just go back. Stop it now."

Plus eventually some asshat porn actor gets HIV* and now every time I see human copulation pixellated on my computer screen, all I can think about is how much Paul Rodgers sucks. Masturbate to that, I defy you.

This is where online dating becomes both welcome and effective. Not to masturbate to (at least not specifically), but as a filler of time. I've been on several sites, paid and free, and in every case it's a neatly closed system: men send out dozens of inquiries, a tiny fraction of which are returned by women receiving dozens of unsolicited inquiries from increasingly desperate and bitter men.

It always starts out so simply: you fill out a profile and you cobble together lists of both desirable traits (bachelors degree or better! must love sushi! hiking is a plus!) and dealbreakers (smoking is so gross! no kids under 10! anal is not welcome!) and then the search begins. When the first messages go out and come back either not at all (90%) or with polite refusals (8%), you start by widening your physical search parameters (county-sizes are relative anyway), maybe broadening the age rage (Susan Sarandon is still hot, right?). Still nothing, or at least nothing promising, so then the desirables soften (I guess an associate's degree is OK if they have a stable job) and ultimately crumble completely (do you know someone who has a GED?) and you're left with just the dealbreakers, the edges of which begin to blunt as well from taking such a beating (OK, I'll consider it, but the lights have to be off and you go when I say go and not beforeISAIDNOTBEFORE!).

So maybe, in retrospect, the first couplings aren't perfect. You don't know what you want, you've been out of the game for a good long time and you can't seem to get anyone to notice you in Online Dating World. So you take what you can get and hope there's some value in the experience. Which is strangely like every other human endeavor that ever there was.

But good or ill, happy or sad, anal virgin or no, look up and it's been hours, days, weeks, months... The time has been filled. And even better, when the Chilean miners are rescued from entombment for something like 70 days, you can weep in genuine human empathy instead of eating your own liver out of bitterness when you consider that, sure, even stuck underground THEY had someone to argue about the latest episode of Mad Men with. Or whatever. I don't know if they got AMC down there.


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* This is virtually guaranteed if one performs asshat without adequate protection. And by that I mean a sturdy chair, shoulder pads, some kind of pulley system and, just for the look of the thing, a condom.