Unsure Road

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Maybe I should join a monastary.

Clearly meeting women is not my forte. I either don't have the nerve to approach them, they're not in the places I go, or the ones I do find are psychotic.

I went down to Shore Road today to enjoy the last days of summer. It feels like autumn already, damn it. I saw the usual handful of babes in bikinis and I ran into--can you believe it?--Angelica (she of the black bikini and pierced navel), just finishing a run.

We chatted a little and I went my way, which happened to be the men's room. I remembered that this was the day I had planned to stake out the park so I could ask her for a date. But we know that she had actually shot me down yesterday, thus proving I was right to ask her out at the earliest possible opportunity.

Had a similar experience today with yet another bikini-clad lady. Similar in that I couldn't get up the nerve to speak to her. I still find the park approach difficult, being all exposed. I'm focusing on the rejection, not the actual meeting of someone new.

This woman was a bit older than I'd like, her belly was sagging and she turned out to be a smoker. And you know what? All of that is irrelevant. The fact is I wanted to talk to her and I didn't. What to do but to get back out there and try again? And banish the thought of failure, whatever that means.

I searched in vain for excuses to start up a conversation: the appearance of the Fuji Film blimp (He wants to take your picture!), a sighting of a brazen squirrel, or the sad scene of a young father losing his kite in a tree while his little boy weeped and wailed. (I thought the kite-eating tree was something in the Peanuts' comic strip.) Nothing worked. I couldn't get this woman's attention for squat. Damn paperbacks.

I had a similar thing happened last night when I made eye contact with a woman at the Bryant Park Grill. She was with a friend and here my excuse was a fear of approaching two women. Either they blow you off or gang up and mock you.

But men have done this and survived. So that's what I'll do. Approach two, three, whole herds of women if I have to and save myself that regret.

So it sucks to still be struggling with this. But I noticed something with that little boy who lost his kite. After a considerable amount of crying, I heard him say in a loud voice "that stupid tree!" Then his father put him up on his shoulders and he wiped the tears off his face with both hands, and went on with his life.

There's a lesson in this, and not just for kite flyers.

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