I've made the command decision to not work tomorrow, so I'm turning my federally mandated Indigenous Peoples' Day* holiday this upcoming Monday into a four-day extravaganza of Not Doing Very Much. I figure the best way I can do something for indigenous culture as a white man is to give my land back. I probably won't (fucking typical), but short of that: stay inside out of everyone's way. Plus it's supposed to be like mid-90s all weekend in a kind of... uh... recurrent... um... lingering... re-summering... summer... weather phenomenon... thing. See, I shouldn't be allowed around people.
It turns out, I've found in the last month or so, that there really is only so much Baldur's Gate III you can play (so far that means like one-and-two-thirds play-throughs) if hiding out from society is more or less what you've been aiming to do all along, even without admitting it to yourself. I've been outside, I've even gone on dates and met people, but I've arrived at a point without immediate outside prospects and I find the idea... kind of a relief? There are things I know I want in my life (security, companionship, a little more breathing room financially speaking, a decent pair of shorts with a stretchy waist that won't judge me for living my carbs-only diet dream. Normal stuff), but deactivating the profiles on the two dating apps I've been active on felt surprisingly liberating. To the single fortysomething and fiftysomething women of the Greater Los Angeles and Maybe Also San Diego Area Depending On How Cool You Are Area(s): you are welcome.
See, I haven't been my best self lately. I have a tremendous amount of barely managed social anxiety. I know you think you do too. You probably don't. All of GenX is self-diagnosing with social anxiety and ADHD and whatever else these days, but if you haven't had a literal panic attack in public because seven people in a room was too many, miss me with that shit. For whatever reason, one-on-one dating mediated by an app has always been a thing I could do, even as the weight of my stupid disorder waxes and wanes over the years. The setup was complete enough and the introductions were mitigated by text-based communication, a thing I find I can do. So by the time you actually meet up, a positive decision has been taken by both sides that this is a good idea, something we both want to do, with the same explicit goal: try not to say the word "motherfucker" when exchanging stories about your exes. And also see if you hit it off overall.
And I think I'm respectful and well-behaved in these interactions, when they lead past one date especially. I've made a lot of friends since I got divorced back in 2010 and most of the ones that have stuck have been people I dated at one point or another. I'm grateful for their forbearance and patience, but also lucky that I seem to draw a type gifted with self-awareness and emotional acuity that have made negotiating the exits with some clarity and residual good-feeling possible. It's not easy to stick the landing (if landing is what you want and not a tumbling pass of infinite roundoffs to the horizon line), but it's possible if everyone understands where everyone else is coming from.
The trickiest part is putting yourself out there without fully understanding where you yourself are coming from. Lately I've caused some sore feelings and (worse) wasted some earnest people's time with what I thought were good-faith efforts to see if a thing would work between us. The ennui and lack of urgency that hit pretty soon after one or two dates is possible to chalk up to lack of fully realized connection, but it's happened enough in the past few months to start to acknowledge the crescendo-ing voice in the back of my head that sounds exactly, intonation and inflection, like my therapist, but with first-person pronouns: I'm the problem, it's me.
How profound a crisis is it? Well, it's the first-time-ever-quoting-Taylor-Swift-lyrics-in-a-post-level. Basically whatever DEFCON level is just short of the first volley of ICBMs. Don't get me wrong, I don't have any hate in my heart for Taylor or her Swifties, I've just been very aware this whole time that I am not the target for her product, though as I understand it, the footprint will soon be global and demographically indifferent. She's come for the NFL already. I fear her power.
The right thing to do is to withdraw, regroup, assess, therapize, understand. Be around people I know I already like (and may have already dated, so that's nice and safely off the table). Maybe fight Jason Isaacs a few more times and keep my head down until maybe the grief lifts fully and the songs about love and loss stop being so goddamned meaningful. That last part has been an ironic and curious turn, but it's also just an excuse to cry in the car and really freak out the other people at stoplights.
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*I was going to say something nasty and dismissive about Christopher Columbus here, but instead I'll just say I know he was a religious man, so I hope the version of hell he was raised to believe in actually exists. Enjoy having your extremities ground into paté while still attached and then force-fed to you over and over again on little crackers, forever.
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