Cannibal Trolled

 

Wherein  I attempt being an asshole and only partially succeed.

 

More Fresh Meet.

So, there I was, waiting at the vacant ass-end of the bar area of Lia's Italian restaurant in Chevy Chase, MD .

The bar proper, with its shelf of pristine and back-lit decorative bottles that never held any liquid, ever, ran along a wall to my right. Sitting on a high stool around a high manhole cover-sized table, I looked forward over my own shoulder, between more virgin bottles shelved before a  recessed wall-length mirror, like Wild Bill Hickock should have done when he was holding aces and eights.

Unlike Hickock, after a few of these meets I sort of welcome a  bullet right in the back of the fucking head.  Sartre once wrote in No Exit that "Hell is other people". Of course, he was talking about women but, remember, if he wrote that, when he got home from the cafe Simone de Beauvoir would have cut off his dick with a letter opener.

When I first walked past the decorative and totally ersatz glass-enclosed gas fireplace set in rough-hewn stone in the entrance, only a few patrons were scattered around on this Wednesday night: A couple of wrong-side-of-twenty women sat at the bar laughing a little too conspicuously with -- or at -- some schlub apparently subsidizing their drinks. A commuter type in a respectable $400 gray suit sat hunched over his fruity little drink, alone, doing a pretty good cover of  young Willie Loman.  In addition,  a few groups with their wine and cilantro-laced appetizers cluttered up various too-small four-top tables, each forming their own little self-conscious conspiracy of fun.

Now, in a truly fair and just universe, at this point a fugitive motorcycle gang would ride through the glass and brass doors, break a bottle of Jack over the bartender's head, and simply rape the fuck out of the place. As that didn't happen, you can form your own opinion about what kind of universe we live in and just how your God is no fun.

Disappointed,  I headed for the back away from the fun and chatter. Past a black woman in bootilicious purple stretch pants and short, dyed-blond hair the color of Easter basket straw, jabbing at her iPhone, head tilted back in a way that suggested she was either myopic,  just torturing the device or, more likely, whoever was on the other end of that text conversation.

My reason for heading to the back  isn't just my general misanthropy although, yeah, this is me we're talking about.

See, the sticking point in meeting people, and for me that means women, is facing the depressing job interview that supposedly decides my worth as a human being as seen through her eyes. Of course, the last thing that would ever occur to most of these women is that I would rather scrape together pocket change giving behind-the-dumpster blowjobs than apply for a position at Her, Inc.

 

 

Yeah, I already had a wife too

These meets are not romantic. Not in any sense of the word fun. None of it involves any Sleepless in Seattle soul-mates connecting. Mostly it's just confrontational bullshit dressed up to be sociable.

Well, OK, maybe the last part is kind of fun. My kind of fun. Because, let's face it: The number of people you can completely piss off is one rough measure of one's efficacy as a human being. Jesus Christ, do I love confrontation, even if it isn't the sort of confrontation that ever leads to hot, angry badger sex.

Still, this setting, this kind of Italian restaurant, was disconcerting exactly because it wasn't confrontational enough. Frankly, first meets should be held in places with piss in the corners just to set the mood. In fact, the whole feel of the place radiated the the snotty "whatever" of smug little 20-something fuckers with perfect little catalog-shopped lives full of sleek appliances which are positively pristine as they are too God-awful stupid to figure out how to use them.

Now, ostensibly Lia's is an Italian Restaurant, but nothing about it was reminiscent of my impression of Italian restaurants growing up within striking distance of all things New York Italian. For all I knew, Lia's could be "fusion" Italian, a culinary incantations that would make my grandmother Enunciata to rise from the grave and go all stabby on some pretentious little shit-packer of a chef for fucking around with perfectly good Risotto.

The decor of those restaurants, as I remember them, were apparently themed around a series of unsuccessful yard sales. The tablecloths were the faded pink of red and white checkering. The candles stuck in straw fiasco-wrapped Chianti bottle drizzled wax down the side like a horse's giant cumshot frozen in time. The waiters all surly. They wore a sample of the day's special on their aprons and fairly radiated the threat that suspected stiffers and potential smart-asses would be beaten in the side alley before they ever saw any demitasse.

For those seriously bitter as escarole, there were the Italian "Social Clubs" in Brooklyn. In those places you could almost tell which of the grey, shifty-eyed and combed-over aging dago patrons were contemplating retirement into the Federal Witness Protection program and/or dreading a forcible dirt nap in a construction site, whichever came first.

Then, after a day of thumbing soup, you could see those waiters sitting the one right-side-up cane-backed chair among a barren forest of chairs stacked upside down on tables while a low-totem busboy mopped. A glass of red in front of them, a Lucky curling up a plume of instant cancer from between their fingers, with nothing left to do but go home and be eviscerated by their wives, whose transformation into  a large nagging hairy melanoma in a daily-wear black mourning sack the day after their 30th birthday was predicted by every other Italian woman they had ever seen in their lives.

Of course, I exaggerate, but not a whole hell of a lot.

The only advice on women my father ever gave me was "No Italians". Advice that I've not only heeded, I've lived it, aided by first-hand experience with the special kind of mean-spirited crazy that runs through the X chromosome in the Italian side of my family.

Lia's lacked the weight of the skull-bashing cast-iron cookware that clanged from the back of those places and in my gran's tiny kitchen in an equally tiny apartment over her family's florist shop.

That's to say, it completely lacked the ambiance of rich food and menace that I had come to associate with fine Italian dining. The decor was in the upscale honey-glow and amber-walled Ikea-Starbucks style that cleverly lacked just enough character to ever go the way of dark faux-pine paneling and avacado upholstry. One can hope for a gritty dystopian future age of retro-fitted steam-punk that displaces that ubiquitous crap-happy ÅSSHÄTT-style furniture. In that respect Lia's light fixtures cobbled out of empty, upended wine bottles was a good step in that direction.

The staff was young, chirpy, decidedly non-Italian, and overtly insincere. Say what you will about those old-school waiters with bad attitudes: At least when they despised you they meant it and were totally upfront about it.

Me, it's not as though I have to go out of my way to make people hate me. More like it's a gift.  The way I figure it, I'm just grating off the thin veneer of bullshit between people's half-hearted "happy to serve you" act and what they really think. Otherwise all people do is dangle blank-eyed party masks in front of their faces.

Such was  the waiter who came up to me to do initial recon. Not only was he a couple generations and seemingly a head full of Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors from the dour, dumpy waiters threatening both murder and suicide with their mere presence, but he also was the product of relaxed intermarrying that would have been unthinkable in the days when Canal Street formed an impenetrable DMZ between Little Italy and Chinatown.

A DMZ which I myself had penetrated with my marriage to Xiaopeng (heh-heh). My grandmother on my father's side was quite the specimen of insular New Utrecht Avenue Italian-American bigotry. The only thing that bothered her more than blacks, Asians and the memory of some Jew who shorted her a nickel in 1930, were people unfortunate enough to mistake her for Sicilian. To her, Sicilians were Italians, but only in the same sense that Neanderthals got to hang from the human family tree.  Naples was the pinnacle of human civilization, what little she knew of it, and wouldn't let you forget it.

You can imagine what she would have thought of Xiao. Luckily, she was about four years into Alzheimer's by the time I was married couldn't give a fuck even if she wanted to. That and she thought John F. Kennedy was still president. She didn't like that, because although he was Catholic, he was the wrong kind of Catholic.

So, when the waiter asked me if I would like anything, I stuffed down my sense of impending inter-personal disaster and more or less cheerfully asked him to give me a minute as I was (obviously) waiting for someone. My Motorola Droid sat on the table between text messages, the conversation poised in mid-motion, and I wondered how many times he had seen this exact scene of bullshit marching on played out, and whether he also noted how it all ended badly.

Trust me: It all ends badly. The only time that's not true, when it all doesn't end badly, is when it starts off bad and goes downhill from there.

Experience trumps optimism.

You see,  these meetings are invariably not only from online interactions, but through ass crack-of-the-internet sites such as Craig's List which, at least recently, was notable for it being a one-stop shop for acquiring hookers a half step from the streets and the psychotic med students who love 'em and kill 'em.

Admittedly, Craig's List or any online dating site, is shit useless when it comes to finding that special someone, establishing a relationship and living happily ever after. Or simply getting laid. The women posting and replying to posts are either too ugly, old, or generally dysfunctional to get attention from men in any other way.

However, as a petri dish to examine women's expectations and behavior, it's a dream come true for true for guys, like me, who find this sort of thing both entertaining and instructive. Especially if you completely ignore any idea that the entire exercise tell you at least as much about me as it does about them.

 

Trolling: A Personal History

Let me put to rest an unexplained mystery from a tiny little footprint of the Southwest that has gone unsolved all these years.

Before the internet made jerking people's chains easy and light-speed fast, a minor flap occurred  in the early 90s around Needles, CA and Fort Mojave, AZ. Some clever little proto-troll dick crafted the most unlikely-looking, muppet-eyed and tri-tentacled bogus specimen of squid out of modeling clay, stuck a ruler next to stuck a ruler next to it all science-like for scale, and shot some pictures of it.  Then, after some legwork, a semi-implausible flyer with the picture appeared in businesses and post offices warning people of the "Yucatan Mud Squid" encroaching on the waters of  the Colorado River.

Apparently the potential for a toe-nibbling, undocumented beaner squid causing panic among waders was such that the Kingman Daily Miner did a piece debunking the burgeoning hoax.

Yeah, that was me.

I would like to take this opportunity to belatedly apologize to numerous freaked out Colorado River tube-rafting tourists; to the tourist-dependent shit-hole tri-state economy; to biologist Sally Stefferud of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department for making her chase after chimera and to Miner staff reporter Eric Pulsifer for forcing him to be the guy who "busted the squid thing wide open".

OK, maybe I don't feel guilty about that as much as I should.

And over the years, just as an escape from being completely earnest all of the time, occasionally (if, by "occasionally" you mean "a lot of the time") I would pop into an online forum and jerk people around some.

 

A Brief Philosophical Digression Designed To Make Being a Cynical Jerk Seem Like a Quest for the Truth.

Here's the thing: Lots of things are possible, but of those things that are possible a much, much smaller set of things are real and, of those things that are real, an even smaller set can be found, observed and put in a bell jar.

And the number of things that simply don't exist at all or are impossible is infinite. So, if you look at it that way, reality itself is basically outnumbered.

People like to think in terms of what's possible and then conflate those things that are possible with those things that are real.

Like this:

The thinking, delusional by definition, that because one can imagine something then therefore it must in some sense exist, that belief, wants and expectations can will something into being,  is the underpinning of religion, pseudoscience, fairy tales and human males seen through the prism of women's expectations.

Although I like to think of what many women do online, which really just comes down to online shopping for men, as something like this:

 

The philosopher Larry Laudan, in his book Science and Values -- which begins from the premise of critiquing the subjectivist premise of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions -- postulated that all disagreements occur in a hierarchy of fact, method and values. More importantly, almost no arguments are resolved at the level of fact.

That is to say, the mere fact that something does or does not exist has little bearing on whether people will argue over the damn thing. People are more than capable of leaping right over the most basic ontological standards to get to what is either important to them, or allows them to posture in such a way to show themselves taking a stand for something or other which has value to them.

We live in the age where people make careers and fortunes out of taking brave stands against things that are either non-issues or invented out of whole cloth.

Think of it: Are discussions of the supposed Pay Gap between men and women, Global Warming or anything to do with politics and religion ever resolved by simply presenting a list of facts? Of course not. If someone doesn't like them as presented, and unable to find their own counter-factuals, they will appeal to methodology, either deriving new "facts" or dismissing the means by which the facts they didn't like were derived. Method is just a way-station of course, with the real destination being values.

All arguments are about values. Not really about the way things are, but about the way people want things to be, the way they should be.

Now and then I would post in the comment section of some online magazine consciously tweaking people to drop the pretense that they were arguing about fact and get them to reveal the values behind it. No Creationist, for example, really has a problem with the facts of Evolution, as such. What they have a problem with are what they see as the consequences of the Theory of Evolution, which ridiculously runs the gamut from eugenics, fascism and abortion to heavy-metal music, kids shooting smack and kids shooting themselves.

Arguments against pornography, for another example, rarely focus on the artistic and scientific merit of the reverse cowgirl and instead attempt to tie pornography to a series of slippery slopes where pornography is linked to violence against women, child abuse, sex trafficking and whatever social ills it can be tenuously tied to. The real immediate harm cause by pornography, which is painful penile shaft chaffing, is almost never addressed.

Once you realize that all arguments are about values, it makes it easier not to be turned to sputtering, dumbfounded amazement over people who are incapable of simply grasping what is right in from of their face.

Which sounds irrelevant to this entire post, except when you think of the perennial complain of women that there are "no good men" because their values are such that they've rejected or overlooked all those men who actually exist.

 

Fishing for Dysfunction

Nor do I feel particularly guilty about posting some of the most cynical mind-fucking I ever devised to Craig's List so I could harvest an embarrassment of riches in dysfunction.

I know this isn't a valid statistical sample. I know, due to the quirk of my gender and orientation I'm not applying this to men as well. I'm also not applying it to gay men, lesbians, the trans-gendered, most mammals, flat-worms and prokaryotes.

Go do your own.

Also, I know this isn't finding me love or in any way cleaning my pipes. That's not going to happen anyway, not with my piss-poor attitude anyway, but it does demonstrate the yawning gap between expectations and reality that makes life a living hell.

From adventures in Craig's List, I discovered a strange sub-culture of women who never seemed to be able to move things out of email and chat. Or just made me for an ax murderer. It was just letter after letter, another person popping up in my chat program to tell me how their day was. Any suggestion to get a cup of coffee was met with a deferral, a deflection, an assertion that it was "too soon" two weeks into it, or a simple declaration that I had not yet proved myself.

That fed into further posts and I began referencing this set of women, and imposing caveats and limitations.

An excerpt from a typical missive of mine:

So, tell you what: We aren't going to meet. We aren't even going to pretend to and we realize that none of this shit translates into the real world. Email me and I'll make a few jokes, validate you, and provide easily replaceable short-term entertainment and then you can move onto the next one. No expectations, no one gets hurt and I won't get the shocking revelation in a meat-space meeting that you are older than you claim, far heavier, dumb as a fucking post and have three kids from a pool of a dozen potential fathers that you forgot to mention.

Let's not have that happen. Say, a dozen or so emails and then you can move on.

Now, really, the tone and content is just so assholish and insulting, obviously written by such a jerk, that some women just had to respond. They just couldn't help themselves. They had to tell me off.

Some responded just to denigrate the size of my penis (which is, of course, tiny), inform me that I had a very bad attitude (ya think?), inform me how nice the man they had was (while they perused Craig's ads) or give me a little bit of both and, on top of it, announce they were from a completely different planet:

Undecided as to weather [sic] I think you are funny or you just have a bad attitude?  I can see how meeting a few times may be frustrating for you....usually it is the man that steers the situation that way for whatever reason.

Bzzzt! Thank you for playing! Johnny, what do we have for the nice lady from the ammonia seas of Neptune?

What also emerged, simply by limiting the possibility of further emails or a meeting were another subset of women who had no greater purpose than to be exempt from whatever limitation I imposed. Now the time-table for meets and the number of emails, which I carefully counted, began to accelerate.

Too easy, really.

 

Taking My Asshole Self Out in the Real World

I began to see the influence of values played out on personal ads, such as those posted on the faltering Craig's List. I assume though, the same tendencies get played out in Match.com or Plenty of Fish, as they did in the old-school newspaper personal ads and, to some degree, in real life.

Personal ads posted by men, the ones that aren't merely ham-fisted trolling for sex written by idiots, are mostly about who the men posting are, what they do and what they bring to the table. Or, at least they are what men imagine themselves to be or are willing to lie about being. Men are the sellers in a buyer's market.

Women's ads, on the other hand -- examples of taking values, the possible imagined as probable, the probable as attainable and then the attainable as mandatory -- are all about what they want. Often it seemed as if women took the energy they expended as little girls on a world of unicorns and glitter and applied it to finding another human being who would put up with their shit.

Women can take this to such lengths that their posts become veritable laundry lists of requirements that are either completely contradictory quests for a "successful, driven and financially independent man who has lots of time to travel", or just-so fine calibrations of characteristics where the woman is "looking for man who is funny, but not too funny and who only I will get his jokes" or simply such a string of permutations that the odds or any real set of persons having those characteristics are vanishingly small. There aren't many "Six foot three, red-haired, investment banker and semi-professional water polo forwards" out there.

Once you recognize this sick tendency, then the answer to age-old questions such as "Why are women so fucked up?" begins to fall into place.

Of course there's value in demanding what doesn't exist or, at least, is exceedingly unlikely. By demanding men meet the standard of some grotesque of unlikely contradictions and razor-thin conditionals that probably can't exist in the real world, it serves to devalue those men who actually do exist in the real world. Which is exactly the same argument made when women claim they have to meet the unrealistic standards of fashion models which, given photo-shopping, even the models themselves can't meet.

However, the argument that women have unrealistic standards imposed on them is so often repeated as to be conventional wisdom while women imposing unrealistic, even delusional standards on men, is considered, well, having standards.

What was even more fucked up was that women's posts sometimes contained nothing but a list of requirements for what kind of man they felt they deserved while revealing nothing concrete about themselves. Certainly nothing that would inspire the just-so man of their imagination, the affirmation of everything they valued in themselves, to bother answering the damned thing. These women's complete indifference to even paying lip-service to the idea of reciprocity showed their idea of a relationship was simply consisted of calling up the universe for take-out.

Very often this was the case even when they revealed that they had no real reason to value themselves so highly and were, in fact, dowdy middle-aged bitches, single mothers who considered their inadvertent pregnancy right up there with the Virgin Birth, or were just plain fat.

Now, the first and most obvious objection, is "men have requirements too".

This happens to be true, but it isn't the requirement that all women be Victoria's Secrets models, as some women claim.

Men's requirements can be boiled down to more or less three.

That is,  a woman:

1. Should have a pulse
2. Not be completely bat-shit crazy, and
3. Not be fat.

Not only are these fairly low standards, but the  first and third aren't  hard and fast rules due to the perverse nature of fetishism and even the second is pretty negotiable due to limited availability of women who can fit that particular criteria.

Still, I wouldn't have known this unless I started answering these posts. Which I did.

The reason is I didn't want to date these women. I didn't want to understand them. I didn't want to be the shoulder they cry on.

I want to be the one they complain about.

And, up to a point,  I was very successful.

 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Summary

Some of the meets and near meets as a result of my trollish Craig's List postings included

• A woman I met for coffee whose entire conversation consisted of how we can't know anything. I of, course, wondered how she could know that. Now, when I say that was her conversation, I mean exactly that. She circled that one idea endlessly, through my drinking three cups of coffee, until she practically disappeared up her own asshole.

• Another woman, in the same diner months later, who announced she was looking for a NSA (No Strings Attached) relationship, gave a running critique of all the men currently fucking her and her frustration that none of them met her just-so standards for dildos with a pulse. The punch line: The woman was a middle-aged, fat, dumpy, straw-haired and literally a librarian. My single comment at the end of her half hour monologue of discontent, was "Do you own or have access to a mirror?" For some inexplicable reason she just wasn't "feeling it" between us. Thank Christ.

• A 50-year old self-described "classy" woman who, when arranging for the obligatory coffee, said she would call the next day at noon. She called at 4:20 the next day, apparently thinking she had the power to make men be at her beck and call still, and was all ticked off that I had made other plans. Then she lied about calling and leaving a voice-mail at noon, something disputed by my own phone's log, then followed it up with a voice-mail in which she treated the whole thing as something I did to her, assured me she wouldn't call me ever again, and then left another, even longer voice-mail within the hour. Then some emails. She was confused. She just didn't understand me. Obviously. Unfortunately, I didn't get to ask her something I was curious about, which was her vagina. Specifically, ripping off Gilber Gottfried, how big was it, how dry was it and how many men's lives did it claim?

• A woman who responded to my post all chipper and slowly revealed that she was a soon-to-be-single mother whose three year-old child came first. To which I say "Good for you. Go away". That she was divorcing her alcoholic husband and sent me photos in which her appearance was so drastically different that they had to encompass a ten year period, at least. Finally she revealed that pregnancy had "destroyed her body". The pregnancy, mind you, not enough Ben and Jerry's to feed a Trident sub crew, which would have been my first guess. None of which disqualified her from getting a free dinner. What did was her insistence on time, places and the Four Seasons Restaurant which, I suspect, appeals to self-described "classy" women. Her general humorlessness and insistance that wooing her was very serious business finally lead me to cancel, after which she sent a glowing account of some other guy who took her to dinner, all of which transpired with amazing speed.

And that, kids, are the highlights. Obviously all caveats that this is Craig's List, where bottom-feeders go to die, are to be acknowledged.

What I found though, is that a sizable number of women, for whatever reason, never make it to any stage where a meeting takes place. Either the conversations peters out, or are resigned to just chat and email. A whole sub-set of women seem to exist who only want, or can only maintain, on-line pseudo-relationships.

The problem: Chat gets old fast. Letter writing is a dead art, but mostly because it was killed by  women who don't realize one writes letter after letter to people one already knows.

 

One Man's Mundane and Desperate Existence is Another Woman's Technicolor.

The thing about one woman's response was that she was up my ass almost immediately. Not to tell me I was a jerk, not to make dire predictions about my fuckless future. She immediately realized I was just fucking with people for the sake of fucking with people and decided to play me like a fucking fiddle.

I don't mind, really. The only think I mind about being played like a fiddle is when, like real fiddles, they are played badly. When it's done well it's music.

Brutal ad ;) couldn't help responding.
Anyways let's do it- a dozen e-mails.
Where should we start?

Translation: I am so onto you. So I reply, digging in with the dickishness.

We can start with the last book you've read, how many pounds you have to lose, or less-than-subtle digging into my net worth.

This goes on back and forth, approaching the dozen email limit when I get this in response to my total lie that I don't post to Craigslist a lot:

You're on enough to know the type of woman you're going to hate is 99% of the population. Perhaps you are a hopeless romantic waiting for that 1%? Maybe you love to hate. You just love arguments and women that piss you off.

But I can't imagine many women respond to an ad like that. So you must be looking for someone that caters to a certain part of you that needs the instability around.

So intriguing!

Busted. Seriously, it's not a dig, it's not lording it over, she's not really outraged, it's simply an acknowledgement of my motivations and that she knows exactly what I'm up to.

Holy shit: She's variant of the  Cannibal Troll. Practically, anyway. Not a troll, per se, but that rare and specilized predator (if that) who has the acumen to swoop down and snap a meal right out of other predator's mouths.

Not only that, but in the process I bit my tongue.

The Cannibal Troll is not to be taken lightly. The Cannibal Troll is to be respected. You can see where this is going.

Here:

Melissa: I get out of pilates at 9:30. Meet you at 10ish?
Apr.06.11-08.14.42PM

Me: 10 at Lias. Parking permitting
Apr.06.11-08.15.38PM

...

Me: Here
Apr.06.11-10.17.04PM

Melissa: What are you wearing?
Apr.06.11-10.20.19PM

Me: Red short sleeve.  Jeans. In the bar area at the round table in the back
Apr.06.11-10.20.55PM

Meliss: K. I'll be there in a few minutes. Why didn't you ask for a pic?
Apr.06.11-10.24.14PM

Me: Uh, because it's unnecessary and/or you might be scary?
Apr.06.11-10.24.55PM

Melissa: Ha wouldn't you want to know before?
Apr.06.11-10.26.06PM

Not really, it's necessary because if life is a series of disappointment, which it is, why in fuck break the chain?

That and most women's pictures online are about as credible as the Patterson-Gimlin film.

Before the next text message, Melissa did a sort of sweep into the booth side of the table.

Now, if you were to closed caption my brain at that very moment, all you would get was a text abbreviation.

OMFG.

She was pretty. Well, actually, stunningly, darkly beautiful, really, like the anti-blonde eclipse: Long, straight dark brown, almost black,  hair that arched around the oval of her face to her shoulders. Deep semi-precious black onyx eyes that were so dark as to give the impression being much larger than they should. A wide, full-lipped mouth that almost threatened to split open horizontally into something impossibly needle-toothed like a Bunraku maiden-to-demon puppet but never did.

No, actually the piranha-mouthed thing,  that's just me and expectation.

Strike that.

Anyway: She has features universally Latin, that is, both Roman and Iberian.

Women like to ask guys what their "type" is. Which, like questions regarding whether a particular pair of jeans make their ass look fat, any guy with any sense of self-preservation or, at least, dying with dignity, should stall until he can find a convenient window and defenestrate himself. Answering it, even if he has an answer, contains no benefit whatsoever.

Besides, I have absolutely no consistency in women. My relationships include a rather dumb girl of Cyprian descent, a Filipina Valedictorian, a "full-figured" and relentlessly Irish-looking woman nine years older than me, my People's Liberation Army ex-wife and a psychotic human stick-insect of Ukrainian ancestry.

But, now sitting across that table should you mention it, I would have to say that.

Please.

She looked like what you would get from doing a mash-up of a computer-generated Latina pop singer, a woman resurrected from the pyroclastic flows of Herculaneum and, although she was apparently not Jewish, the cover of Hot Chicks of the Israeli Defense Forces.

And so, I thought "Ah, fuck".

Right there my invincible shield of assholishness was rendered completely fucking useless.

This, of course, would have major consequences. Seriously, it was all almost  enough to convince me there is a God, and He hates me.

Because, after so much assholish trolling, turning myself into a human hedgehog to keep the pain and hurt and disappointment at bay, somehow I ended up with this, with her sitting across from me. Even worse, as the conversation progressed, it was clear that she got it.

The Italian restaurant seemed oddly appropriate, as incongruent as it was to the Godfather films.

I knew how Michael Corleone felt.

"Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in".

Now, just before you think there's a happy ending (heh-heh) here I wish to dissuade you from that idea, pumpkin.

The music swells, "The End" appears, the lights come up and you go out the aisle  into the fresh, crisp air and to the parking lot.

Where you get mugged.

I fucked it up. Not that I dropped the asshole facade, but I just couldn't do it. And, of course my being an asshole was 99% of the attraction in the first place. In fact, I was so disarmed that later my new friend (grrr..sonuvabitch) Melissa described me as "nice", "kind" and "sweet". Game over, man, game over.

Place stake over sternum, strike with wooden mallet. Repeat as needed.

You know what this means, don't you? I get to be the guy friend. Which, come to think of it, is the bull-pen where I've been winding up throwing strikes at nothing most of my adult life. It means I get to hear about her dates, what a jerk some guy is and, ultimately, how some guy taller, richer, younger, better looking and less annoying than me bangs her until she has a vision of Jesus smoking a gold bong and spraying  jelly beans from his asshole.

So, this is my punishment.

I know: No "Game". Whatever you do, don't tell Roissy.

When that happens, when I get tagged as "nice", people make the assumption that the asshole who writes this kind of stuff is the persona and the nice guy is actually me. By the time enough time passes for the reverse to become obvious, that the nice guy is, in fact, the persona I have to adopt for day-to-day-living or spend my free time sitting in the back of a patrol car trying to gag up a secreted handcuff key, it's already too late.

Exhibit A: The following text I received just the other day:

Me: Manicures and pedicures? Apparently I have been unsuccessful in convincing you I'm not gay.

Oh, yeah, this should be good.