“You got to let love rule!” Lenny Kravitz
In a short story, I’d be hit with an epiphany and admit all my mistakes while watching Dana’s taxi fight the traffic on the way out of my life. Unfortunately, man is imperfect and it takes time — sometimes weeks, sometimes months — before we’re ready to admit we’ve done anything wrong. Philosophers have written tomes exploring the nature of man and his inability to get it right no matter how many times he repeats his mistakes. I’d like to go on record as saying that I am not a great philosopher. I’m more like Forrest Gump. When I’m hungry, I eat. When I’m sleepy, I sleep. When faced with incontrovertible proof that I’m a jackass, I point fingers at everyone and everything within a zip code of the problem. If I had more friends, I’d borrow their fingers and point them too. Of course, I’ve known for years why I am the way I am.
When I was born, my mother was still reasonably interested in being a mother. Until I was five, she did all the necessary things mothers do in the pursuit of raising a child. I was changed, fed, and protected from strangers. At five years old, you don’t have the gift of experience and I believed my mother was among the best at what she did. Of course, as time progressed and my younger brother was born, I was relegated to the back burner and my reign as the undisputed favorite was over. I was a hasbeen at the tender age of 5.
Love is the oldest motivator in existence. Seriously. Who can possibly say with any real certainty that a shortage of females wasn’t what pushed the first creature up from the depths of the sea onto land. Love is an instinct that cannot be denied. It rules all of us whether we’re willing to admit it or not. Everything we do is done in the name of love or in the pursuit of it. If not for this primordial instinct to love, the species would die off. Simply put, without a piece of ass dangling seductively before our eyes like a carrot before a donkey, humans would have little motivation to succeed.
I am human. I know this because the moment I discovered girls I realized that unlike many of my other hobbies, this one required some considerable investment. I got a job to pay for my pursuit of excellence. After I realized that my earnings were falling miserably short of the necessary funds required to pursue the bombshells that most often caught my eye, I decided that college was in my immediate future. With a college degree in hand better salaries were guaranteed and conversely, better women. I blame this error in judgement on inexperience and raging hormones, the combination that is the bane of youth. My father, much later in life, once said, “The cheaper the woman, the higher the price!” What I wouldn’t give to have learned that much sooner.
Women, for their part, have high expectations and push their suitors to considerable lengths to prove their worth and commitment. This is the modern equivalent to natural selection. Women choose the man most likely to provide for them and their offspring. While prehistoric man was expected to drop a mammoth with a blow gun, modern man is asked to support a wife, three kids, a house, two cars, any number of pets, after school programs, sports teams and still have enough energy to bang his wife like a six inch spike through a two by four. Millions of men do this everyday! Is it any wonder that males live seven years less than females? Women may own original sin, but men are still paying the bill.
There is a group of women I like to call The Cellulite Militia and their queen, Oprah Winfrey, once suggested, “You’ve got to have a J-O-B, if you wanna be with me!” Somehow that became the rallying cry for these women to expect their prospective mates to shower them with more than an occasional dinner at the Golden Arches. While some women chose paths of education and professional careers in order to do for themselves, the Cellulite Militia said, “Let a man do it!”
Lest you think once again that I’m a bitter, spitefull man, let me say that I am not without fault here. I was raised by a man who believed women should be placed on pedestals at least as high as your head. The fact that this is the perfect height from which to kick us in the teeth when the mood strikes is a happy accident women have taken advantage of for years. I have placed more than my fair share of women in places of high regard. I’ve wined, dined and accepted behavior from them that would make sailors blush. I freely changed my initials to ATM in order to keep them happy.
Dana was the latest in a long line of women who benefitted from my upbringing. As far as Dana was concerned, our regular pizza guy and I were the same since “who” we were and “what” we stood for were less important than what we could deliver and how quickly we could do it. The real sad part of this arrangement is that unlike the pizza delivery guy, I wasn’t getting tips.
As Dana’s taxi disappeared over the hill, I wasn’t too upset since I knew that she was also disappearing from my life.
TO BE CONTINUED…