After the tryptomorphine wears off: The Battle of Algiers

The guy Miriam dated, briefly

Jamie is now back at Far Away University, and oh, there’s more to be said about that, but ohagain, the missing-of-him is too acute. So I’ll digress. Not entirely digress, as it involves online dating, and the previously-mentioned Miriam [the only friend who knows Jamie’s pater is a homo sapiens, but not much more. I mean: she knows not much more about Jamie's dad, not that Jamie's dad is not much more than a homo sapiens because, evolutionarily-speaking, how much more can there be?]. 

Thus this connects back in some fashion to my serial life although in ways not immediately apparent to me.

Miriam’s maiden name was Webster [true]  and she has a fraternal—albeit estranged-- twin named Noah [ditto true]. Her late parents were, not unexpectedly [litotes again! my favorite rhetorical device next to zeugma],  competitive Scrabble players, and intentionally gave the girl-half of the twins a name with a greater point value, lest she grow up deferential to the male-half of the twins. It worked.

Anyway, recently Miriam met a man online and has had a couple dates with let’s-call-him "Sal" [3  points]. She thought things went pretty well, a little mixed in the signals department, but she’s pretty shrewd when it comes to that stuff [which is why I’ll need to bring her on my first date, should it happen, with anyone].

She called Sal Thanksgiving night, around a time she figured he’d be back from the country club where he was talking his great aunt for dinner [he’s divorced, no kids].  He sounded phlegmatic, but who isn’t after all the tryptomorphine in turkey.

M[Miriam]:  You sound a little tired. Not a good time?

S[Sal]: S’okay. It’s just I’m watching a film right now. So. You know. Part way into it.

M: No problem. Talk later?

S: It’s kind of long, actually.

M: Alrighty. Um, signing off, then. But--gimme two secs here--just curious. What’s the flick?

S: Battle of Algiers

M: Wow, what TV station airs the   Battle of  fucking Algiers on Thanksgiving night?

Initially, Miriam regretted letting loose with the "fucking,” however well placed. She and Sal's level of social intimacy had not reached the point of her letting loose with “fuck” nor of her risking anything that might be construed as negative commentary on his taste in, well, everything.

S: It’s from Netflix.

M: You mean, it’s a DVD?

Here Miriam paused, largely out of surprise.

M: And right now it’s in one of those boxes that comes with a hand-held remote control?

Miriam paused a second time, largely out of hostility.

M:  You know, one of those devices with the fucking Pause buttons?

Then she told him how the movie ended and hung up.

I admire the gesture but I’m pretty sure that anybody who netflixes  The Battle of Algiers already knows it all ended badly.







Coming in on the Midnight Train; an irony-free posting [isolated, not the beginning of a trend] in honor of Thanksgiving

I'm the one in the white dress

Yeah, so My Son: The Teen Years have been not uncomplicated [note my use  of litotes]. It’s been hard, I’m sure, being raised a fatherless boy by a single mom like me who’s crafted a big secret about the man I’ve been referring to as his pater unfamilias.

[see: http://studionightshade.blogspot.com/2010/11/more-and-less-of-pater-unfamilias.html and its predecessor-post: http://studionightshade.blogspot.com/2010/10/three-kinds-of-lies-and-true-confession.html]

However, love and warmth and the bond of our family of two  have been present, too, and my son’s heading home for Thanksgiving, so I’ve been playing “Midnight Train to Georgia” all day, ‘cause that’s the song Jamie and I always sang in the car before his voice changed, before he got his driver’s license and I became irrelevant.

I sang Gladys; he did the Pips.

And back in 2008, one night when we’d called detente and sat watching  an episode of American Idol, this  [below] came on, and Jamie put his head my shoulder and said: “Those were fun times, mom.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj_BbsOp7wY

Last night I emailed Jamie that YouTube link, and he replied: “Can’t wait to see you tomorrow, Gladys!”

I know I’ve got a steamer trunk full of secrets and lies, and I can’t keep them locked up indefinitely. I know that.

But right now, I’m just feeling dumbass happy about Thanksgiving and the visit of my Pip.







My first hit-on

But maybe he has a great personality?

I got mail. Exclamation point.

Mail from Dale. The man pictured on the right. 

Okay, more jocosity.

Seriously, the image to the right does bear an unsettling resemblance to the “real” Dale [this is the first and last time I’ll put “real”[[and its variants]] in  quotation marks. We’ll assume that, like goodness and beauty, reality is relative.].

The note from Dale did have its charm. He got the literary allusion in my online dating moniker, Bathsheba Everdene [heroine of the Thomas Hardy novel and my languishing screenplay of that novel].

Then again, perhaps “charm” is too kind an adjective for his note. It did contain  words, I'll grant that.

Words that make him sound beyond dorky. And he looks like Mr. Potato Head. It’s the mustache. And the ears. And the apparent lack of a torso. I don’t think I could have sex with a man without a torso.

Which leads me to ask:

1. Is using the online screen name Bathsheba Everdene a good idea?

Answer: Too soon too tell. Four weeks isn’t so long a time—not in my timeline of deprivation.

2. Must I really post a photo with my profile?

Answer: Dale is my first hit in the 4 weeks I’ve been online.

3. Must it really be a picture of me?  

The first in a series of “Some major do’s” in Online Dating for Dummies is:  “Avoid even a hint of deception….We online daters are a highly suspicious lot. Our baloney meters are set to MAX”  [p. 124].

But why should I take the advice of a book that considers a “don’t” a “major do”? Or whose authors pride themselves on their “baloney meters.”

I like baloney.







More and less of the Pater Unfamilias

Concertina Man

Unlike the story I told my son Jamie, his The Pater Unfamilias [PU] did not come from a safety-deposit box in a sperm bank in St Augustine, Florida, a disappointing, geriatric city I've visited just once and not for purposes of spermination but rather to gather with my clan to perform an intervention on my late, then 82 year old great uncle, Corny [Cornelius], who'd started leaving $500 tips for bartenders at some of the town's sadder watering holes.

The real PU is the man you see pictured at right.

Kidding, just a bit of jocose lying [for the three kinds of Catholic lies: see http://tinyurl.com/4854nb5. It's an often useful prelude for lachrymose truth.

The real PU is a considerably more complicated man whereas the fellow to the right is an accurate representation of the YX chromosomal combination who formed my inchoate, early pubescent eroto-romantic fantasies, fantasies ignited by his show-stealing performance at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow's Spring Talent Contest ca. 1964. He played Herman's Hermits' "Something Tells Me I'm Into Something Good"on the concertina.

The real father doesn't play the concertina. He plays--he played-- the harpsichord.

I was writing a dissertation on the Pre-Raphaelites; he was a collector of Victorian prints and drawings in a city on another continent which would not be difficult to guess. He was not unmarried.

The price for my silence was a gentleman's promise to pay the college education of his filias unfamilias. And a Rossetti sketch  for me that I might retire way early and move to nyc. Eighteen months ago the emails stopped. A stroke. Not fatal, except to my plans and my pocket, now full of mumbles, such are promises.

I read about his stroke in The Guardian.