Friday, January 13, 2006

A Fatal Misstep

The date herself was not bad. Conditions beyond my control and outside my sphere of influence conspired to destroy any hope of enjoyment for myself and my date. It had been a year, over a year since an important relationship fell through, and I was just beginning to come out of hiding and start looking at women again. I was trying online dating, which many assume immediately lends itself to certain doom, but it was an idea I could grasp at the time, and something I had enjoyed trying previously. After a few weeks of tweaking my online profile, I was in contact with a lovely lady and emailed for about a week. Our first date rolled up and she seemed very nice, attractive, and creative. Carless as I was, she picked me up and we proceeded to the Laurelhurst Theater to see Bubba Ho Tep. Everything seemed great, I was finally "out there" again, my date and I definitely clicked, and we were about to watch an elderly Elvis beat the snot out of a cowboy/mummy. She parks the car. It was dark. I open the door. I swing a leg out onto the grassy knoll. My favorite boots, steel-toed vegan waffle-stompers, slide across a viscously solid heap of canine dung, detritus, animal waste, DOG SHIT. "Shit," I says. I tell her and she laughs good-naturedly, assuring me it doesn't matter and telling me it's more funny than anything. I do what I can by scrubbing my deep soles on mounds of grass, eyes keenly scanning the darkness for more treacherous mounds, but to no avail. I spend the 15 minutes before the movie desperately trying to clean out the waffle with my key in the stall of the bathroom, rinsing shit into the sink when no one else is in the john. The entire movie, every shift of my feet brings fresh clouds of shitstink wafting up from below, and I detect my nearby fellow movie patrons lifting their noses to the breeze at the detection of some foul presence in the air. I sweated like Rodney Dangerfield the duration of that film, certain that I would be thrown out and beaten by a cabal of angry moviegoers. How can one really appreciate Bruce Campbell when the smell of dogshit hangs static in a warm movie auditorium? She was cool. We went out a few more times, but that was it. Despite my love for wild and domesticated beasts, Portland dogs and their owners, whether responsible or not, were viciously and unapologetically cursed under my breath for many months to come. That is all.

"No problem. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-Samuel Beckett

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Shit happens.

Anonymous said...

So I imagine you regard yourself as a good writer yet this is still A BLOCK OF TEXT. ARGHHH!