I still haven't been to the lake. Things keep happening to prevent me from having to time to spend an afternoon alternating between submerging myself in water and lying about in the sun, which bothers me. I might be done with school for the summer session, but I still have a large, unpleasant pile of work going on, and it's really cutting into my drinking / novel-reading time.
I should be working right now. I should be practicing for that gig in Indianapolis later this month, and also practicing for tonight's show. I am not. Instead, I am sitting in the office hoping that those students I just taught are no longer hanging out in the hallway because I want to go get a diet Coke and some M and M's from the machine, but walking by them would mean having to stop and talk and pretend to be human. I am in no frame of mind for that.
I'm not actually crabby or angry or foul-tempered today, just tired. I hung out with Bruiser last night, eating pizza, drinking beer, and smoking cigarettes on his back deck until two am. Bruiser is the latest addition to Iphy's Dating Game, and is turning out to be quite interesting, actually. He is a little older than me, and unlike most of my gentleman callers, has even more baggage than I do, in the form of an ex-wife and two young children. I have never really had to negotiate the child factor before.
Baby-daddy has Red Rum, but we were only friends when I met that ungodly spawn, plus I was still married, so there wasn't really anything to worry about. Red Rum and I played trains and read Dr. Seuss for a few afternoons and got along swimmingly. He must be...yowser, almost six now? Man, I haven't hung out with BD in forever. I don't miss him casually bragging about all the festivals he goes to for free, but I do miss hanging out at the bar and laying around on his couch watching "Portlandia", eating pretzels.
But back to Bruiser...I know from books and TV (where I learn everything, ever) that the kids are always going to come first, and that's how it's supposed to be, and if it WASN'T like that, then there would be cause for concern. I know that the "so, do you want kids someday?" conversation no longer applies. I know that he probably isn't looking for something particularly serious (marriage will do that to a person). I know that he and his ex get along fairly well and she's also dating, so she's probably not going to accuse me of destroying her family and come after me with a buzz-saw or anything.
There are things I don't know, however. Is it OK to fool around with someone when their kids are asleep upstairs? Is it OK to ask a lot of questions about their kids, just because you like kids and you like talking about kids and all the weird shit they say and do? When are you supposed to meet those kids, if ever? How friendly are you meant to be, if and when that happens? Should you ask the ex's permission if it ever comes up that you might be spending time with those kids? I can see why some people just immediately write someone's date-ability off if they have kids. People with no encumbrances are much less difficult to work with.
However, I think it's worth the awkward dip into unchartered waters. A guy like Bruiser is something of a rarity, it seems. A guy who wants to hold your hand while walking in public, who makes reservations after studiously researching restaurants on Yelp, who buys you earrings at a street fair, who laughs at your jokes, who sends the right amount of hilarious and dirty text messages, who looks at you sometimes like he wants to eat you up, who is disturbingly smart in some areas and remarkably down-to-earth in others, who disturbingly resembles a certain celebrity you didn't even know you found attractive, who has the kind of body that makes you bite your lip and shake your head a little every time he takes off his shirt, who you can stay up all night chatting to over Parliaments and mid-range beer...well, it's probably worth it to make time with a guy like that.
Guitardbot is still intermittently about the place, although trying to find out how he actually feels about anything is like nailing water to a wall, so we'll see how long that lasts. I'm actually supposed to go and see his band tomorrow. I don't know how that'll go down. It's becoming quite apparent that we differ vastly in opinion when it comes to music. I don't care how influential and significant they were, Sonic Youth are, as Juno so aptly put it, just noise, and I am never going to enjoy listening to them.
I used to have a blog on MySpace. (Remember MySpace? Like Facebook, but not successful enough to make a movie about?) Since it was MySpace, everyone knew it was my blog, everyone knew it was all about me and my friends and my co-workers, and there were a lot of things I couldn't say on there. It wasn't really a place to specifically rant and vent, as I occasionally do on here. Weirdly enough, I think it reads more interestingly than this one does.
Holy fucking shit, I love M and M's.
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