It's cold and dark outside, one of Winter's last freeze out parties. I heard daffodils are popping up, or at least I've seen pictures on Facebook. It is less than a month to St. Patrick's Day, which I like a bit more than Valentines Day since I can buy my true love a Guinness rather than a card and still look like a good guy. Oh, yes, that still a hypothetical true love, if you're talking significant other of an appropriate age for a middle aged man given to wandering. My true love forever, my daughter, will not be drinking her first St. Patrick's Day pint this year. She's on a roadtrip with her marching band to perform around the Magic Kingdom, and she admitted on Facebook to sipping a Monster Energy Drink. Where did she get the yearning to taste one of those. Well, I have shown up with three empties in my cupholder. Thank goodness they card kids trying to buy green beer, the color of Original Monster.
Isn't conception the best sex of all. It's like the come shot that keeps coming to your door for decades, and then outlives you.
Stupid me, once I also left a small bottle of Five Hour Energy in the cupholder too. While I'm listing cases of setting a bad parental example, let's recall when my daughter caught a chill and, as she knows is okay with me, put on my jacket and stuck her hand in the pocket. It was a fresh pack of Marlboro Silvers. Crushed really good under her heel. Great spirited girl who knows she can do stuff like that because, well, her dad, to a certain degree, not to say I'm not her father and her idol, is her bitch. And I only have the one, her, a phenomenal could-have-been big sister who could have ruled the roost of her younger brothers and sisters. When I was in the crease, the genetics good, I could have popped out one or two more before the marriage hit our court system.
Driving around in a car tonight, I could look for love in all the places, right and wrong. Surely, I've done it a million times before. Well, there's only been 11,000 days since I earned my driver's license and began wandering around in an automobile. And I've found love in many places, right and really, really wrong, and I haven't kept all of it. Let's just say you can park your car in front of a lot of strange buildings.
My former wife and I still talk amiably about my daughter when she brings our child by to start her time with me. While I was sitting in that lovely Starbucks on the Lynnhaven River near Virginia Beach, Virginia, a coffee house with an incredible view of the Lynnhaven Roads, ocean shallows where ships can easily anchor, I read an email from a college sweetheart, out of the blue, happily married, mothering three children, living in the California Wine Country and being tipped in cases of wine for business services rendered. Boy, do I ever now how to miss the good ones. The cases of wine came from a really good Napa Valley winery! She hadn't forgot our days together and didn't think I was an asshole. And we had a nice run of emails back and forth until I let the line go cold. I'm surprised I've kept this blog going longer than a few months, not leaving my readers out in the cold. I wonder if she's written a book of non-fiction because most of her material was well-researched.
I have lived twelve years since my divorce in 1999, the first business day of that year. I have lived. Doesn't that sound a bit freighted with drama. I had some days of wallowing in those years. I remember once calling my insurance company and having them explain the incontestability clause of a life insurance policy, which goes into effect after two years. Silly me, I have a nice homeless shelter picked out in Muskegon, Michigan, where I can walk to the beach and write Bukowski style poetry. Every year, during Poetry month, the city will dust me off, give me a suit from the good will and let me read to nice people, but not children. I still have that term insurance policy, and I hope I never trigger its provisions. I'm a lifer. I have a microblog to write.
Most men remarry within two years of divorce, and that could have been my happy fate three or four times. The woman with black hair from Chicago I had to email five times before she answered and then arranged business trips so we could be together. George Clooney starred in Up in The Air, and I just nodded my head in recognition. Alas, I never burritoed anybody. The woman from the Cabbage Patch section of Grosse Point Michigan who could have worked on my hands the way she worked on the hands of Yo Yo Ma or Chita Rivera's. The woman who lived in the cute house in Hamtramck where the Serbians sang upstairs, who knew to take charge of our theater tickets, who had a doctorate in Psychology and didn't look me up in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The woman who I suspect got her Vice President to hire me so I could be her boy toy and then arranged all the details of a business trip to New York City so we could spend time together in Soho, looking at the Twin Towers when we got lost? The lady with the mansion in the hills of Bloomfield who always called me after the third martini and always wanted to dance slowly to Andrea Bocelli before she wanted to dance something not unlike the Rumba. The woman I blew off a session of a course called Sex and Intimacy for because, well, we didn't need instruction or how-to that night. She broke it off with me because she didn't want to be a member of a harem. I guess that's what I get for dating highly literate women who know how to deliver an ultimatum, using ancient sociological terms. Tell me to shut up, stupid. Sorry. Tell me to shut up stupid.
Have you ever heard the phrase, goes something like this: "Allow me to write the love songs and you can have any body write the laws?" I'll take that one further. Allow me to schedule the religious holidays and I'll let any body write the love songs and write the laws. I sired my daughter during Christmas. The religious holidays give you an extra day or two around the household and well, what a difference a day makes. I think the Israelites in slavery had it right when they asked for an extra set of days from the Pharaoh and the Pharaoh agreed, knowing that love is impossible when one works from dusk to dawn for nothing. I hope my lack of knowledge hasn't angered anyone here, but the point is, the religious holidays certainly are a clue to what one should be doing when, and to whom.
So last December, Christmas Season, the Yuletide, I attended a nice dinner party at the Grand Rapids Women's Club over the holidays, a solstice party because even a bunch of atheists and heathens respect calendar holidays when it gets really dark out there all of a sudden. And I borrowed a man's wife. In the full view of civic society, goodness, what were you thinking? To clarify, the husband had duties running the audio-visual equipment for the program and he let his wife sit at my table. She sat by me and fussed over me, drew me into conversation, fetched cannolis for me, filled my glass with wine, even laughed at my jokes. Laugh at my jokes and I'm yours. The audio-visual man was lucky I weren't King David because by the end of that evening ... well, I refer you to the legend of Bathsheba. To be frank, when the legend of Bathsheba came to my mind, I knew I was crazy over another man's wife and in violation of at least two commandments. Good job, Mr. Audio-Visual man for manning up and diamonding up. Well played. He liked it and he put a ring on it. Being a veteran of psychotherapy, I knew it all meant I missed having a wife at my table for those lovely evenings at the dinner parties, round tables seating four couples, eight people, no more no less, as gender specific as a Gilbert and Sullivan musical.
So right now, women frighten and enchantment me. One of them could soon own me, with me signing the deed daily by thought, word and deed. Never quite though of a honeydoo list as a deed but it is a list of deeds to be done. Early January, I pretty much accosted this woman at the Theater Bar, Grand Haven, Michigan, perfect hair style and faded jeans not too tight and not too loose. I put it to her point blank. What is a perfect woman like you doing in a place like this, yes, pouring martinis into your girlfriend for a birthday celebration but without an entourage of men drooling over you. I'm an asshole and this proves it. Widow. But when I asked for her phone number, she pretty much conceded it was time to learn how it was done. So I showed her how to call my cell and skip the bar napkin. We've texted a few times and she's skiing a lot this winter, bless her heart. Your deserve the freedoms of Caberfae, Cadillac, Michigan. Maybe we'll catch up later and have that perfect dinner at Everyday People in Douglas, Michigan. Maybe not because surely you've made use of my cell phone trick.
And then there's this woman I met on the internet who gives me writing assignments. I've completed all of them. I await more. Shit a dominatrix and a lectrice, combined in a woman who attended both Jimmy Le's Red Party and Kev Coture's Little Black Dress Party without tapping the resources of her walk-in closet? I'm glad I don't live in Vegas where I marriage license can be executed after a night of cocktails and consummated quickly afterwards. I need counselling.
What happens if the @WanderingWilbo finds the perfect woman and settles down? Will this be the end of a perfectly good blog. Maybe that's what I'll do. Marry, be happy, kill the @WanderingWilbo blog, take up square-dancing and blog about that. Stay tuned, gentle reader.
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