It's Good To Keep In Mind That Only About 103% Of Everything I Write Is True... The Rest Is All Fiction: Speculative, Wishful, Self-Destructive

4:30 PM, May 7, 2008, I find out that I have a modus operandi. Go figure.

Here’s how it goes (it has happened twice, which for me qualifies as habitual):
I frequent a coffee shop or laid-back restaurant in or in the vicinity of my neighborhood: a mellow place that doesn’t get too busy but is not totally ghetto. A place where the patrons have all of their teeth and can dress themselves, and bathe regularly, but without making it a show-off kind of thing. A kinda hip joint but modest and quiet, an environment that is conducive to chatting with your waitress for lengths of time and ending up on a first name basis, as traffic is slowish (not in a Chapter 11 sort of way) and the volume is quiet.
For me, as per this transmission, it is enough (twice and, coincidentally (but not really (nested parenthesis, TRIPLE nested, suckah!)) in the same restaurant/bar) for me to develop a crush of extra-ordinary magnitude on some tragically adorable waitress who happens to be incredibly easy to talk to. I become a regular for coffee or pints or a gin and tonic on a hot day or a burger or whatnot. One reason for the regularity is due to the fact that I haven’t cooked anything more formidable than an egg, over easy, and toast since early 2007. The other reason is that I end up with a crush and thinking, much to my bank account's chagrin, “Gee, could use a $9 burger and two pints tonight,” which is code for, “Gee, maybe I’ll see that girl tonight.” Tonight, for the record, is code for “every night.”
So I do this and keep doing it until, after an indefinable amount of time, I think, “Gee, two more visits and I am going to get up the bottle to ask her out.” This totally flies in the face of the fact that I have absolutely no idea as to how to ask someone out. Sure, as all guys do, I have some idiotic script in my head that is an amalgamated crib note culled from fifteen different movies and 20 years of pop radio bullshit, but it is rarely, as far as I know, ever actually conjured up from the depths of the brain and brought into the living, breathing world.
And then it happens, during conversation on that deciding visit, when I have vowed that two more $9 cheeseburgers (or that epic beet salad with pine nuts, gorgonzola cheese and a raspberry vinaigrette dressing) from now I am going to ask this girl with a billion dollar smile out somehow, she drops in one way or another that she has a boyfriend or a partner. Now, it’s not in a way that indicates that she is trying to head my impending boobery off at the proverbial pass. It just comes out in casual waitress-to-friendly-regular conversation.
And there is an internal and silent, and yet another, crack in the heart, a small fissure in a terminal fault line that will someday realize its full potential and just erupt and drop my heart into the Pacific Ocean as if it were the California that jealous people from other states fetishize in an apocalyptic wet dream that will never come to fruition (you, yeah you, will never, EVER, have coastal property in Arizona. You’ll just sweat and curse and become more and more like a sun-burnt piece of beef jerky until you die of old age at 35 or drop dead from a scorpion sting).
Now this is where things get absurd(er). I don’t know if it is a retroactive thing or if my heart and brain exist on two different planes of reality or if my heart has some fleshy Flux Capacitor that I am not aware of, but I suspect, so much so that I would testify against myself in court if it ever came down to it, that this whole “two more $9 burgers and then I am asking her out” plan/vow is never actually realized until AFTER I learn that said waitress is involved with someone.
I know, it hurts my head too. I can’t quite figure it out in any precise manner—it is more of a feeling. It’s as if I get some weird amnesia… no, that’s not it.
It’s as if my brain, upon hearing this new tidbit of information, goes back in time without my knowledge and erases any thing contrary, and plants a notion, post-revelation, that I was GOING to ask this woman out, when in reality, I was just waiting to hear what I already suspected, justifiably or not, which is that she was already taken by a man bolder and faster than me. If this is to any degree true, then it is a defense mechanism that is, pretty much every minute of every day, trying to keep me from crumbling under the knowledge that I am, for lack of a better word, a twat (let's use the British pronunciation, rhymes with “hat.”).
And I go through all of this, and the little fissure in the heart is totally, though unconsciously (but not really) premeditated and, depressingly, wholly welcomed with open arms. I knew all along that, short of said and adorable waitress up and tackling me, I was never ever ever ever ever ever going to say anything to her about the fact that I thought she had a million dollar smile, that I wanted to feel her arms around me, that I wanted to spend an evening somewhere other than her work where we could dedicate all of our attentions to one another… and thank Christ for that as she had a boyfriend or whatnot.
Whew.
And these are my days and nights. For better or for worse, one could say it builds character, and if that is true, then I am up to my nostrils in character.
At least I can stop subjecting myself to $9 burgers for the time being.