The weather really does make me want to crawl back into bed and call it a day. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Instead, with a mania partly fueled by caffeine, but significantly driven by some kind of raging insanity, I feel compelled to wander back out into the tangled mass of chrome and light precipitation that creeps outside my door.

It’s no joke. No one in Southern California knows how to drive in the rain. It’s really pathetic. I don’t understand it.

But on my excruciatingly long, slow commute from work, I got to thinking about this whole timing thing.

I’ve never been very good with timing, as most people who’ve known me for the past decade or so know. And it’s not like I have a knack for very bad timing, either. I just can’t get things right. I’m in dyssynchrony with the universe or something.

But somewhat surprisingly, this situation (or perhaps, more accurately, this non-situation) that I find myself skirting around the edges of and refusing to write about is the fortuitous result of coincidence. Things couldn’t’ve transpired any earlier (what with redacted being in a relationship and all) but any later and I probably wouldn’t have all this time to ruminate, ponder, and over-analyze everything.

I discovered an amusing blog post by Kahlee about why ‘nice guys’ finish last, and yeah, it’s true, most guys who think they’re nice guys aren’t really nice guys. They’re just unattractive shlubs who expect a woman to just dig their emo-ness and whining, and who have serious co-dependency issues. Because, come on. The pendulum swings both ways (so to speak), and just like it’s feminist dogma that a woman doesn’t need a man to be complete (the whole “fish and bicycle” thing), it’s also true that a man doesn’t really need a woman so long as he’s got at least one hand, some type of lubricant, and free access to porn.

Or, to summarize the one enlightening epiphany I’ve had in the last 15 years or so: I am going to live the rest of my life alone and unloved, and when I die, no one is going to miss me until they notice that the work is starting to pile up and I haven’t been pulling my weight at the office. If I’m extremely lucky, death will be swift and painless.

Oh well. It’s only life, after all.

I did try the whole hedonism thing for a while. No one cares what you look like if you wave around a bunch of benjamins (I’m’a tell you what Wu told me: cash rules everything around me) and while it’s kind of depressing to only be able to have sex with skanky hos with chipped teeth who charge by the hour, in smoke-filled motel rooms with busted-ass beds, sometimes the porn just doesn’t cut it, and it’s nice to have a warm body underneath you or on top of you for all of those 30 seconds. And, in reality, once you realize that sex is relatively easy to obtain no matter what you look like, it really sort of loses its charm and novelty.

In all seriousness, though, it was really just booze and drugs, the latter only rarely, and never with the use of needles.

OK, OK, perhaps I over-exaggerate things for effect, but you get the picture. Even the messy, vomit-smelling oblivion of drunkenness never really did much except drain my wallet. It was a decent way to kill time in the Midwest during Winter (otherwise known as all the months between October and May) but you couldn’t do it every day of the week (although we damn well tried our best!)

I was fucking doomed from the start. I’ve always dug this quote from Louis-Ferdinand Céline (translated from French):

Even I am shocked by the idea that I’ve somehow survived 15 years of this sort of despair.

The other thing that Kahlee’s post makes me finally, finally understand is what N was trying to tell me all those years ago when she cheated on my sad, emo, co-dependent ass by fucking some dude she knew for all of fifteen minutes: lust wins. Unconditional love is all well and good, but if she doesn’t think you’re hot, it’s just not going to happen. And it’s true. Even the nicest girls who aren’t superficial still want the hot guy, provided that he is a decent human being.

That last part, of course, is the kicker, and the only way I have an in with women of significant attractiveness. Given enough exposure and enough alcohol, I think I can manage to worm my way into any woman’s heart, and as long as I can keep her away from hot guys who are nicer than I am, I just might have a chance. It is therefore in my best interests to go around promulgating the notion that all hot guys are assholes. This is, of course, not true. (Any statement that claims ‘all’, ‘none’, ‘always’, or ‘never’ is false. Gödel would be proud of that one.) But the same story happens over and over again, much to my amusement. If you fall for that hot guy, be prepared to get shafted! (OK, that was probably low-hanging fruit. I’ll aim higher next time.)

My downfall is probably the fact that I can’t stand anyone feeling sorry for me. I mean, if it means having sex with me, I can probably stand it for at least 30 seconds, maybe even a full minute. But eventually it does get on the nerves. There’s something abysmal about being treated like some mentally-retarded and crippled pet rabbit. Eventually, even the most empathetic woman gets sick of that kind of patheticness anyway, no matter how cute it seemed at the time.

I suppose one could look at things from an extremely optimistic standpoint: at least most of the women whom I fell for, and who had no interest in me in That Way™ were decent human beings who didn’t lead me on, and who let me know the score fairly early. What’s a little suicidal depression among friends, right?

I am afraid that this conversation will eventually come up with redacted, like it usually does whenever I fall for someone who is way out of my league (which is essentially every time) and then what? Back to my personal existential hell, I guess.

What prompted all this soul-searching? I suppose it’s the fact that redacted has hooked up with someone, and for some reason, I feel like this is it. She found her One™. Whatever chance I had (and I realize the idea of me having a chance with redacted is an incredible assumption) is long gone and completely evaporated. To quote the Comic Book Guy: Oh, I’ve wasted my life.

The other thing is that another of my friends whom I’ve known for the longest time told me a little while ago that she was going to get married next year, and I realize that I probably squandered my opportunities with her as well (that is, if there was even any opportunities, which is always the big “if”)

I have essentially run out of single female friends with whom I might’ve had remote, perhaps infinitesimal—yet nonetheless finite—chances of hooking up with.

But, instead of aiming lower, I manage to fall for someone who is totally way out of my league. Extraordinarily beautiful. Wonderfully brilliant. Authentically caring. And magically creative. She could literally have any guy she wanted. There’s just no way in hell. I don’t know what the hell I’m thinking.

I am reminded by Bram that this is typical of my behavior. (Man, I really miss Bram and Ben. They always knew exactly when to kick me in the head so that I’d stop acting like a dumbass.) Go for something that you know you’re going to fail at spectacularly. Because it’s safe. If you know how it’s going to turn out, then you don’t have to deal with the messiness of uncertainty. If it doesn’t kill you, how bad could it be, right?

And I can tell you, I’m pretty damn good at failing miserably. It’s a wonder that I managed to survive life as long as I have.

Whoo. It was good to get that out of my system. I don’t know why I never learned to play this game the way it was supposed to be played. Maybe because I was never meant to be a player. Darwin decided early on that I shouldn’t be allowed to contribute to the gene pool, perhaps.