Falling is hard on your knees

It is typical of the luck I have with women. After months of sorting through my feelings for a co -worker, I decided to make an effort to insinuate myself into her life so I could better my chances to have the opportunity to date her. With impeccable timing, she announces her intent to move to Las Vegas once she finds a job as a dental assistant.

Poof! In an instance, my hopes are smashed into a million smithereens. Gone are the dreams of me cradling her in my arms watching some B movie or us sharing a ice cream cone at Dairy Queen. Forbidden are the hopes of staring deeply into her azure eyes ,gently caressing her soft skin, with our lips locked in a loving embrace.

Heartbroken is not an appropriate label for how I feel,for I had not even reached the stage of close friend. My current position is analogous to that of a pledge to a fraternity. I am in the midst of applying to be a member of her club.

Disappointment would be a more accurate description of my current mental state. I was just getting into her and now this. Typical

It has happened with every girl I have liked.Boy meets girl;boy becomes infatuated with girl; boy says nothing to girl for months; boy then overcomes his trepidation and starts slow paced pursuit of girl; by then girl has either met someone else or has dissipated from boy's life.

I deserve no sympathy. I have earned my "available" status with my passive and frankly,wimpy approach to women. I am a coward when it comes to garnering the affections of a woman.My timidity is owed to a lack of confidence and experience with the humans who bear the XX chromosome.

But that is not a legitimate excuse for my cravenly conduct.It is of no use to explain why I have not done something because it does not alter the fact that I am a coward.

There are and will be other women--the delectable brunette nurse on the 4th floor for one example--but the neophyte dental assistant has caught my fancy. A fancy I shall not lose very easily.A fancy I know I will have to purge from my mind so as to avoid the crushing sense of disappointment I will feel when she leaves for the City of The Meadows.

But feelings of regret, sadness, and disgust will remain as they always have after the conclusion of every infatuation/ non-relationship I have experienced since puberty.Regret for never having actually undertaken a determined pursuit through the years I have known her; Sadness at the elimination of the potential happiness I could have experienced;Disgust for my inability to overcome my neuroses.

I wish I could say that next time will be different.That next time I will be more aggressive in my pursuit;that I will pull out all the stops;that I will become more Superman than Clark Kent.

But I can't.That is why I will always be the meek, bespectacled guy who makes all laugh, yet who has no one to laugh with.

Interminable loneliness

I sit. I sit alone in mind, body, and soul in this world. I have no lover, no best friend, no soul mate.I sit alone.

Whilst these spring from my fingers, I see young couples in mutual thrall to the demands of romance, mothers cooing to their swaddled infants, and families taking in the climactic pleasures of a warm August day in the mitten.They are a flock of birds together, I a solitary crow flying solo across this land.

This loneliness is insufferable. It suffocates my soul, it permeates my being. It fouls my moods, threatening to tear asunder my spirit.It is the rain on a wedding day, it is a warm blanket turned wet.

What to do, what to do about this ferocious beast that shreds my spirit, that murders my happiness? What to do about the shadow of the monster that blackens my day? What shall I do?

Shall I venture to the local watering holes to satiate my thirst for female companionship? Shall the drinking of libations transform this meek scribe into a fearless gladiator who conquers the mighty lioness?Or will I be just another drunken fool foiled in his attempt to find carnal pleasures at a cheap rate?

Maybe dating websites are the the place to meet members of the fairer gender.Shall I venture into the mysterious realm of Internet dating?A world inhabited by the lonely, desperate, and those seeking to take advantage of them?

Perhaps work place romances are the way to go? Is it the dark haired Irish girl in the office the one? Or is it the pouty lipped brunette nurse? Perhaps it is a face yet discovered.

But with certainty I know this: the savage creature must be slayed.Unending, relentless, loneliness must be replaced by the unending, relentless, love of a Juliet.

An Angry Man

I am angry. Angry at the world, at my dead mother, at my boss, at my co-workers. I am angry at the world that I live in.

But the above are not the source of my discontent.Rather they are easy targets. It is much easier to direct my ire at the surrounding impersonal world, than to point the finger at who really is the cause of my unhappiness.

Who exactly is the culprit? Who is the person who is to blame for my misery? For my loneliness? For my anger?

To quote De La Soul, "It's just me, myself, and I". That is the infamous criminal who has stolen the smiles from my life, who has tortured my soul, who has maliciously snuffed out the joy in my life. It is I who is responsible for this personal tragedy.

What is a life without laughter, without joy, without happiness? One that hasn't the value of a single piece of Pez.

How shall I vanquish this terrible foe? How shall I slay the emotional dragon that terrorizes my soul?

I am Arthur seeking Excalibur. I am in a quest to seek the weapon that can smite that which oppresses my soul. I am Angryman no more.

Nowhere Man

He's a real nowhere man
Sitting in his Nowhere Land
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody. ---Nowhere Man, The Beatles

Nowhere:adjective(informal);being or leading nowhere;pointless;futile:to be stuck in a nowhere job.(courtesy of Dictionary.com)

I am the Nowhere Man. I am sitting in my Nowhere Land making my Nowhere Plans for Nobody.

At 33 years of age I find myself working a menial job, living in my best friend's house , with little prospect of a better job or a girlfriend on the horizon.

Meanwhile, my kid brother is making $60,000 two years out of school. I have several friends who make twice what I do with the same level of education as I do.

How did I, a college educated man equipped with an above average IQ, get to this place? How did I get myself stuck in a deeply unsatisfying job? More importantly, how do I get out of it?

Frankly, I know how I got here. Low self confidence, laziness, and a lack of direction are the three causes of my discontent. I am the Helmsman responsible for guiding my ship into the iceberg.

The issue now is how this Nowhere Man becomes a Somewhere Man. How do I achieve my goal of working an emotionally and financially satisfying job?

One option is going back to school to acquire a Master's Degree so I can teach. I love history and a Master's degree would give me more options than just a Teaching Certificate. I could teach at the high school and community college level or even become an archivist.

A second option is to continue to develop my writing skills and/or take some skill development classes UofM so I could find a better opportunity at UofM.This would be the cheaper of the two options I have before me.

Either way, I am confident I can find a better job if I actually put effort into it and believe in myself.

The end of Nowhere Man provides an good finish to this article and more importantly, wise words to remember in time of doubt:

Nowhere Man please listen
you don't know what you're missing
Nowhere Man, the world is at your command!

Thinking aloud to myself and the world

Boy, does she have beautiful blue eyes. And the dark hair. Ooh lala! Delicious is she.

But should he pursue her? Should he rid myself of the psychological restraints that have binded him since he was a youth? She is pretty and available after all.

5'3", black hair, and blue eyes. Gosh, what a combination! She isn't a dago, but that hardly matters. She is pretty and available after all.

She works in the same department as he. They are in contact almost everyday. He even friended her on Facebook. The opportunity for an amorous relationship lay in front of he.She is pretty and available after all.

Shall he undertake the chase? The chase that every heterosexual male has been genetically programmed to do.The chase that results as often in failure as it does success. The chase that can as easily smash a man's self esteem as it can send his confidence soaring. All this dependent on the decision of the arbitor--She.

How odd and cruel a chase this can be.

Those sensuous lips, those thinly coiffed eye brows...oh, how scrumptious of a morsel is she.

But is she right for he?.

This bird flies at a different altitude then most. His flight pattern in life has left him wounded in heart and soul. A bird borne of an egg, but hath no mother.A bird seeking to soar, but weighed down by the sore of yester-yore.

Can such an Eagle love a Swan? Can he take her under his wing and give her all that she needs?Can he be what she wants him to be? Can he be all that he wants himself to be?

He isn't certain of the answers, but this he knows: She is pretty and available after all.

When friends embrace irrationality

Last Sunday I watched a program on the National Geographic channel that debunked the highest profiled 9-11 conspiracy theories. The theorists clearly were not persons of high intellect who thought through their theories. They refused to accept the results of scientific tests that essentially destroyed their theories nor did the theorists provide an overarching reason for the alleged conspiracy other than the standard reference to some vague nefarious governmental scheme to control the people.

A frequent addendum to this is the belief among many of a "one world government". This theory holds that a powerful cartel is operating behind the scenes manipulating institutions, events, and people in order to create one government that governs the world.Ron Paul and other devotees of the Austrian School of Economics, believe fervently in this puppet master theory.It fits neatly in with their conception of fear of government--which is not coincidental.

I am not going to waste my time debating the merits of this paranoid delusion because frankly, it is just the updated version of the old "Jews are running the world" theory that has bounced around for centuries.The only things that one can learn from this crackpot theory is how ignorant people are of history and human nature as well as how readily people embrace such nonsensical ideas.

Normally, I don't give much thought to these theories, but the fact that a dear friend has come to believe in them disturbs me. This is a educated, intelligent, person who is as good of a human being as you will meet. But for some reason he has decided that these asinine ideas are believable.

I know HOW he has come to believe in these ideas. It is the influence of the paranoid minds he has come into contact with in the religious group he belongs to. These aren't bad people or fanatics, but persons of faith who know very little about history or human nature.

The devout--religious and political--are particularly susceptible to be entangled in the webs of conspiracy theories due to their reliance on others to think for them with the result that they are not used to applying ideas to tests of logic and rationality. They also define themselves by the belief in the irrational--that of a untouchable, invisible, entity.

le spend much of their time praying to and pondering the message of the God and not the paying much attention to the world of the tangible outside the news clips they see, read, or hear.

Thus, they are excellent potential believers in theories cast about by persons guided by paranoid visions of the world driven by prejudices and hatreds contracted in an atmosphere that encourages the formation of such beliefs.

Such people can be found in all walks of life at all levels of education. How and why people are so willing to embrace such absurd ideas is something best left to sociologists and psychologists. But it suffices to say that this is one area of human behavior that deserves more focus from the media.

Too many people have died as a result of conspiracy theories(see Blood Libel of the Middle Ages for an excellent example) for our society not to take these people seriously.

Life without Soldiers

I have just finished an article from the New York Times about U.S. Army soldiers marching in Moscow's Victory Parade--which makes the end of the Second World War in Europe-- when I made the dubious decision to read the comments section.



For the most part, the comments lauded the parade as a wonderful symbol of fraternity after the 50 bitter years of the Cold War.That is what one would expect from rational, clear minded, folks.



Alas, a few others decided to use that section to espouse their infantile understanding of man as well as to express their belief in their own moral superiority to the rest of man all the while FREELY sitting in their home or more likely, in some coffee house.


I really have no use for such people. Sitting in the comfort of their home, an office, or some other genteel setting, waxing moralistically about the iniquity of war and denouncing militaristic displays, all the while listening to blues and making their plans for their next outing to the local art museum or play.

While I too like visiting museums and other typically bourgeois activities, I also realize that the world is a mean, nasty, and ugly place. There are times when one has to meet the world with equal ferocity, brutality, and even cruelty, just to survive or protect what you love.

When I think of these people, I am reminded of a quote from the political theorist John Stuart Mill. It goes: "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety,is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

Could not have said it any better than myself.